British 250 lb Bombs Sought

[Deleted]

Oh, wow...that's awesome Ando!!

[Dave Homewood]

A couple of questions.

Did the RNZAF Operational Training Units P-40's use the British-style bombs like the one in my first post? Or were US bombs brought to New Zealand?

Also were bombs like this produced here by the NZ war industry? I know we had munitions factories building grenades and .303 rounds, but were aerial bombs ever built here? Or did all NZ's bombs have to get shipped from the UK or USA? Or maybe Aussie? I think perhaps we would not have had adequate steelworks in WWII to produce the bomb casings?

[kiwi285]

Here are a couple of photos of the 500lb bomb I produced for the Avenger. Unfortunately the mould was destroyed and so for the B-17 I am in the process of making a new plug to take a mould from and then we can make as many as we need.
When starting on this project for the Avenger I was trying to find out whether they were British or US bombs used in the Pacific. In the absence of any definite info I assumed that they were US items on the basis that the aircraft was American and it made sense to me that they would use bombs from US stocks up in the Islands. I found some photos of RNZAF aircraft being bombed up in the Islands and based my plug on these.
I am not 100% certain that they are the correct shape but they look good enough for us. I found a document somewhere with details of US bombs from WW II and that is what I used to get the dimensions. I will get this scanned tomorrow and post it on here then.

P1630425 by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

P1630427 by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

P1630426 by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

191120 (5) by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

191120 (3) by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

191120 (1) by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

Bomb 500lb M64 20 by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

230322 (1) by Mike Feisst, on Flickr

[Dave Homewood]

Good stuff Mike.

[davidd]

Although the RNZAF relied on British bombs from late 1930s, and into early years of WW2, by the time we were getting TBFs, SBDs, PBYs, F4Us, etc, it was pretty well all American (except for practice bombs in NZ, and 250 pounders on Hudsons, Vincents, etc). Don't think there was any bomb dropping from OTU aircraft Dave, to best of my knowledge, but once on squadrons at Ardmore, bombing was the thing, and as suspected, it seems that they would have used American bombs on American racks/carriers. Hudsons and Singapore IIIs used British-type bombs up till 1943, and former were possibly converted to American carriers thereafter, at least from Fiji, although I have no particular confirmation of that. Ansons in NZ were occasionally seen fitted with British-style bombs on Universal carriers (only in emergencies such as the March 1944 submarine sighting scare). In 1944 and 1945, RNZAF aircraft were sometimes using obsolete US bombs (300 pounders) as the combined Allied air forces could by this late date drop bombs faster than they could manufacture them.

[kiwi285]

May 16, 2022 20:04:37 GMT 12 davidd said:

Although the RNZAF relied on British bombs from late 1930s, and into early years of WW2, by the time we were getting TBFs, SBDs, PBYs, F4Us, etc, it was pretty well all American (except for practice bombs in NZ, and 250 pounders on Hudsons, Vincents, etc). Don't think there was any bomb dropping from OTU aircraft Dave, to best of my knowledge, but once on squadrons at Ardmore, bombing was the thing, and as suspected, it seems that they would have used American bombs on American racks/carriers. Hudsons and Singapore IIIs used British-type bombs up till 1943, and former were possibly converted to American carriers thereafter, at least from Fiji, although I have no particular confirmation of that. Ansons in NZ were occasionally seen fitted with British-style bombs on Universal carriers (only in emergencies such as the March 1944 submarine sighting scare). In 1944 and 1945, RNZAF aircraft were sometimes using obsolete US bombs (300 pounders) as the combined Allied air forces could by this late date drop bombs faster than they could manufacture them.

Excellent information thank you David. I found some pages from an online site that gave all of the main dimensions for US bombs and I used those from making the plug for the Avenger 500lb bombs. I will get them scanned as an article and will post in here tomorrow evening.

[Mustang51]

kiwi285, Where did the detail for the stencils come from for the three 500lb?