During Operation Chastise, an attack on German dams carried out on the night of May 16th-17th 1943 by 617 Squadron RAF Bomber Command (later called the Dam Busters) a Lancaster bomber commanded by Flt Lt Barlow struck high tension cables at Haldern, near Rees, Germany, and crashed.

An "Upkeep" bouncing bomb was found intact in the wreckage of the Lancaster. The bomb had not been released and the aircraft had crashed on land, so none of the detonation devices had been set off. Subsequently, a 385 kg version of "Upkeep", code-named "Kurt" or "Emil", was built at the Luftwaffe's Erprobungsstelle, or "test site", on Germany's Baltic coast at Travemünde, one in a network of four such establishments in Nazi Germany.

The importance of back-spin was not understood and trials by a Focke-Wulf Fw 190 proved to be dangerous to the aircraft, because the bomb matched the speed at which it was dropped. Attempts to rectify that with booster rockets failed and the project was cancelled in 1944.

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