This WW2 'Earthquake Bomb' Was Designed To Miss Its Target. Here's Why If you've seen the 1955 film, "The Dam Busters," then you might be familiar with Barnes Wallis, an English engineer and inventor best known for building an assortment of peculiar explosives used effectively during World War II. The movie focused on the very real 1943 mission codenamed Operation Chastise, where the British Royal Air Force (RAF) used Wallis' "bouncing" bombs to blow dams along the Ruhr Valley — a central Nazi industrial region. These bombs were designed to essentially skip across the water — avoiding torpedo net countermeasures....