Wellington BJ895

Hi all

I have contributed before on the subject of dams related aircraft, as I have been researching them for almost 30 years.

The (single) Wellington concerned was a Mk III, BJ895, built by Vickers Armstrongs at Chester, and taken on charge by the company on August 12th 1942. It carried standard night camouflage but no codes. The weapons carried by it, and dropped at Chesil Beach and later Reculver were trial spheres only, to test the characteristics of the design, and were not explosive filled. They were mid-sized between the small Highball later carried by Mosquito and the larger Upkeep carried by Lancaster. Having been designed (to test the theory) before both Highball and Upkeep, there weapons were neither of those.

Iain Murray, in his book ‘Bouncing Bomb Man’ quotes John Sweetman’s dams book in that BJ895 flew with four spheres on December 2nd 1942, with Mutt Summers as pilot and Barnes Wallis as observer, being modified in a day to reduce the number carried to two, before flying again on the 4th. There is no record at all of the 2nd December flight in Summers own log, and with the short time between flights, I am very sceptical the four sphere flight ever took place. With the spheres at 4ft 6 in across, and around a foot in between each, I dont think the bomb bay was long enough to take four anyway. Upkeep was too wide to fit a wellington bomb bay.