Robert Lochner (engineer)
Robert Lochner MBE (1904–1965) was an engineer and inventor who created the Bombardon breakwater, a key part of the Mulberry harbour used in the Normandy invasion in June 1944.
Before the war, he spent 14 years at Crompton Parkinson in design, production and sales, and then became sales manager at Laurence, Scott & Electromotors. He was an avid sailor and owned a boat named Odette; he completed the 208-mile Royal Ocean Racing Club race in 1939.
As war loomed, he volunteered to the Admiralty on 30 August 1939 and was commissioned within 18 days. He began at sea but was reassigned to research after being spotted wearing glasses on board.
The Royal Navy feared magnetic mines. Lochner and a team developed the degaussing girdle, a hull device energized to counter the mines’ effects, helping protect Atlantic convoys.
In 1943 Lochner led a team called The Wheezers And Dodgers to solve the breakwater problem for D-Day. An idea came from a bath experiment using a flannel and a lilo to create a keel that calmed waves near the shore. A mathematical theory followed, and by August 1943 tests began in Portsmouth.
The floating breakwaters were about 200 feet long, 25 feet high and 25 feet wide, built from large air-filled bags inside canvas walls. The project went to Canada for the Quebec Conference to brief Churchill and Roosevelt; the decision to proceed was made and full-scale trials began in April 1944. In rough seas, Lochner’s breakwaters calmed the waves enough to assemble two Mulberry harbours starting on 7 June 1944.
By D-Day plus 12, most breakwaters were in place. These were temporary floating structures, not the heavy concrete Phoenix breakwaters still visible at Arromanches. Churchill visited the harbours on 23 July and called them miraculous and crucial to Europe’s liberation. Lochner received £5,000 for his work.
After the war he trained as a patent and trademark barrister and was set to become a Queen’s Counsel at the time of his death.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 09:32 (CET).