Post by Dave Homewood on Feb 12, 2023 11:56:18 GMT 12
OUT WITH THE BOMBERS
How Modern Royal Air Force Warplanes "Lay Their Eggs"
AMAZING ACCURACY OF LATEST DEVICES
By C. PATRICK. THOMPSON (World Copyright Reserved).
BY special permission of the British Air Ministry the author has just completed a tour of the new aerodromes in England and Scotland. In this article he describes a mimic raid by one of the latest giant bombers in which, acting as one of the crew, he was allowed to "go through the motions" of releasing the bombs.
I WAS sitting in the glass-capped nose of the big Royal Air Force bomber, taking an occasional peep through the bomb sight, when the earth-picture ahead and under my feet dimmed and vanished in a swirl of white smoke. Moving at over 200 miles an hour, the huge machine had headed into cloud.
"It's only a patch." The pilot's voice came through the earphones in my radio telephone helmet. He sat at the controls in the glasshooded main cockpit behind and above where I sat on a narrow padded stool, in the bombing cockpit in the nose-tip. Back of him, the wireless operator sat at his box of tricks. On his right was the navigator, who is also the assistant pilot.
From that cockpit, looking left and right, one had a sense of great security. On either side stretched the gigantic wings. Imbedded in each wing a mighty engine whirled its propeller. Knock out one engine and the other would keep the machine flying.
We came out on top of a billowy ocean of white cloud. Between this and the blue we flew for fifteen minutes — in distance terms, around sixty miles, in a following wind. I saw a break ahead, and the earth picture came in sight through a wide gap.
Nearing the Target
Cloud thinned, and once again we were moving over sunlit country across which cloud masses drifted. We were now up 18,000 feet. The navigator left his chair, climbed down into my cockpit, and, kneeling behind me, opened a trapdoor in the metal floor and pushed out a tube like a telescope. He was checking on drift and wind velocity. We were coming up to the target.
"The enemy's machines would be buzzing round us now if this were the real thing," the pilot apprised me cheerfully.
Back in the centre and tail of the big warplane's fuselage the gunners were at their posts. One got back there, or came forward, along a narrow corridor with a ribbed floor. Racks, for flares and etceteras were on the fuselage wall.
The gunner amidships turned a crank letting down an armoured turret and ensconced himself therein. He was then in a sort of flying pill-box: a nice field of fire all round. The tail gunner also had a turret to shoot from.
Running Fight
We were soon in a running fight with a combat 'plane swooping and diving at us, aiming machine-guns operated by an electric press-button. The bomber flew steadily on while the gunners, peering out, swinging their hydraulically-operated guns, tried to get the darting dragon-fly as he flashed past.
Looking down and ahead through the glass—tough, unbreakable glass—nose of the bomber, I saw the target—an aerodrome. The massive red-brick hangars with their concrete surroundings made a nice, squarish bull's-eye amid the general lay-out of outbuildings and living quarters.
It was about four miles below. Anti-aircraft guns would be blasting at us. But at 20,000 feet what did we present?--a speck. A gunner could not tell whether his shells were bursting a thousand feet above or below us. Though a friend who had been in Spain told me that Franco has a German gun with a range of 25,000 feet and a remarkable record of hits up to 12.000 feet.
"Let Go Bombs"
I got a hangar block in the bomb sight. Set on the navigator's calculations, it took care of height, speed and wind velocity factors. We were still miles from the target, but the bombs, swinging out, would hit — if my aim was all right. I let go the bombs.
We had none in the racks really, but went through the motions. The pilot has the master switch, which releases the bomb switches for use. You can drop your bombs singly, or in one lot. If you have time you can drop one, come back drop another, ranging, trying to a direct hit with at least one bomb. But in war a bomber is scarcely likely to find any important target so unprotected from the ground or in the air that he can afford to stick around, leisurely aiming bomb after bomb.
Bomb sites to-day make bombing accurate as rifle-fire —if you can see the target and the machine is steady. But good visibility is two-edged. If it gives the bomber a better chance at the target it also gives the fighter a better chance of spotting you from afar and moving in, with the advantages of speed and manoeuvrability.
The men in the bomber squadrons are not like the men of the fighter squadrons. They pick them out during the six months' course at the Flying Training School - for —"you for the fighters, you for the Army co-operation, you for the bombers."
With heavy bombers — intended primarily for long-range night work — the distinction is marked. If a pilot comes to them with fighter training and habits, he has to be educated out of both.
Back "home" at a Hampshire station from the practice flight, I got a line on that from a squadron-leader. On the grass just clear of the concrete was a new twin-engined machine, bright yellow. By contrast with the giant bombers squatted around on their huge tyred wheels, and daubed with dull camouflage paint, she looked like a pleasure yacht among battle cruisers.
"A new training machine," said the squadron-commander. "I'm glad to get her. Most of the fellows who come here from the Fighter Training School have been taught on single-engine machines. This is a good machine to get 'em twin-engine-minded."
He shouted the last words, and I cupped an car close to his mouth. One of the near-by "big boys" was getting ready to go up, and the roar of the engine at full power drowned speech. We moved out of the gale. The 'plane trundled slowly down the low slope of the aerodrome field and on the other side. I commented on the long run.
Forced Landing
"He's a pilot officer—new." said the squadron-commander. "We make them run the whole length. Some want to use their own judgment in take-offs when they come fresh to these ships, and sometimes they misjudge—and," he added grimly, "these machines are expensive."
He indicated the wind-braking device (without it the big machine might over-run on landing), and explained that if the pilot has to make a forced landing, and thinks he's for it, he will keep his retractable under-carriage tucked up, and land on the 'plane's belly instead of the wheels of the undercarriage.
The slight wheel profusion from the belly buffers the shock, and the crew are likely to get away with a bump and a bruise, while a day or two in workshops will fix the damage to the fuselage. If the pilot crashes out of control, and with his under-carriage down, the big machine is liable to get end-over on its nose and break up—with corresponding damage to the crew inside it.
The bomber taxied round at the far end of the immense, smooth field, and moved into the wind. Its pace quickened, but it seemed still to be moving slowly when it left ground and rose leisurely into the air. A thousand feet from ground the wheels began to rise into the body of the machine, as the pilot pulled the lever which drew up the retractable under-carriage. Left down, it prunes 20-30 miles an hour off your speed through wind resistance.
"You can't flip these buses about as though they were single-seater fighters," remarked the squadron leader. "They handle like ships. Take your time and do nothing in a hurry—that's the motto. The pilots have to remember they are responsible for four other men, and a big ship, too. It is team work, and they have to develop that psychology."
Laying the explosive eggs is a relatively minor part of the bomber's job. If the pilot gets his aeroplane to the spot, the gunners fighting off any combat aeroplanes en route, the bombsight and the bombs will do the rest.
Bombs! I was looking over a neat selection in a store. They ranged from handy little fellows half the size of a Ruggar ball to enormous pears bigger than the shell of a 16in. naval gun. They are the "shells" of the "sky artillery" —man's latest device for killing at a distance.
New Problems
Discussing the gentle art of bombing from the air with Royal Air Force specialists, I discovered that the new speeds of aircraft are providing new and strange problems. Science and the engineers are moving us toward speeds where the bomber may have to aim and release his bombs before he sights the target. That is because bombs swing out as you let them go from their holders.
It will be harder to hit a strictly "military objective" with a load of bombs from a long-range heavy bomber. The commander of a bomber unit showed me a chart of estimated results on bombing by "dead reckoning" to the target. That machine had gone out, flying blind on a course and to calculations set in the squadron office, and the bombs had been dropped at an invisible target. The results were remarkably accurate.
There will probably be a lot of that in the next war—if one comes. Bombs will drop out of the night, out of fog belts, and out of thick cloud. The fighter squadrons will be kept very busy then.
Living Quarters
I probed this aspect of aerial bombing over a peaceful cup of tea in married quarters. The squadron was resting by day and bombing by night; and I was talking to the squadron commander in his station home, a small new red brick house.
Incidentally, the quarters of most of the Royal Air Force stations I have visited look new, and some of those which are expanding fast suggest a garden-city development project in course of construction. One commander of a Yorkshire station told me he would have his house in about six months, when the building programme was through. Meantime, rather than rent a house 10 miles off he had invested in a caravan.
"Very comfortable, no rent, canned gas. Two single bunks and one double. I have it pitched in a field near the aerodrome—the farmer is very friendly —and from my window as I have breakfast I can see that people are on the job at the aerodrome."
Later, on the dark aerodrome, waiting for the night bombers to taxi over to the take-off point, I wondered about this family—a 42-year-old air warrior, his wife, two sons—and how war might come to them.
"Somewhere In Europe"
It might strike in advance of a "state of tension" necessitating a stand-by at war stations. A radio flash, and our squadron leader might be kissing his wife good-bye at his own front door and running down the gravel path between the shaven lawns like any City man hurrying to catch the 8.15.
Not many minutes later his wife would look up from that garden and see the dark shapes of the bombers rushing up, and out —the striking force, hitting back. They might be back in four or five hours, having laid their eggs on a target "somewhere in Europe"; or, some might never return to the home nest again.
The balloon barrage we hear so much about in connection with London's defence against aerial bombardment is intended to drive the raiders up, lessen the area of search for the fighters going after them, and put the attacking machines where searchlights and guns can reach them.
I was watching dive bombing from the observation tower of a bomber station the other day. I thought of seeing it from the observer's seat in the aeroplane, but the flight-lieutenant said: "Don't. You'll be sick. It often happens, when you are not used to power diving—especially if you are sitting in the orthodox observer position, back to the pilot, and so are caught unprepared, both on the dive and the pull-out."
Mounting to 5000 ft., the pilot turned his machine, a light two-seater bomber, nose down. He dived with the engine full on, aiming at a target marked by a red flag at the far end of the aerodrome.
Dive Bombing
Follow him in this dive.
First, he swallowed. You do that to fix the air pressure in the eustachian tube in your ear. if you forget the precaution you get a headache at best and a burst ear-drum at worst.
He snapped down the bomb master switch, and No. 1 bomb switch, preparing the bomb for release. In metal holders on the wing underside he carried eight bombs, four aside. As the earth rushed up to meet him at the target point he pressed a pushbutton, releasing the catch holding No. 1 bomb in its metal clip. The bomb dropped, its detonator nose down, wind vane steadying it in flight. Simultaneously the pilot pulled his stick and soared up. A spurt of white smoke darted from the ground near the red flag. "He's doing better," said the sergeant.
At the end of the bombing he showed me the chart. The bomber had dropped five bombs, in five separate dives, all around the target. Average error, 27 yards; but two were inside 20 yards. Not bad for a beginner. He would have damaged troop concentrations, roads, bridges, railway sidings, munition works.
When I went out on a bombing exercise with another squadron we laid eggs from 10,000 ft. The squadron was in "V formation. In the leading machine the observer-gunner, as the double fan of machines came up to the target, was stretched on the floor of the narrow cockpit. In that cramped position his head was beneath the pilot's feet on the rudder bar.
He opened a door flap, took aim through the bomb sight. A cloud of bombs hurtled earthwards.
It would not be pleasant to be under a squadron of light bombers when they released all their bombs together. It would be even less pleasant to be under several squadrons of heavy five-man-crew bombers, with each squadron throwing all its switches at once.
What, chance of stopping them? In daylight, a possible chance. Night is another matter. Almost everything depends on the searchlights.—U.F.S.
NEW ZEALAND HERALD, 2 JULY 1938
How Modern Royal Air Force Warplanes "Lay Their Eggs"
AMAZING ACCURACY OF LATEST DEVICES
By C. PATRICK. THOMPSON (World Copyright Reserved).
BY special permission of the British Air Ministry the author has just completed a tour of the new aerodromes in England and Scotland. In this article he describes a mimic raid by one of the latest giant bombers in which, acting as one of the crew, he was allowed to "go through the motions" of releasing the bombs.
I WAS sitting in the glass-capped nose of the big Royal Air Force bomber, taking an occasional peep through the bomb sight, when the earth-picture ahead and under my feet dimmed and vanished in a swirl of white smoke. Moving at over 200 miles an hour, the huge machine had headed into cloud.
"It's only a patch." The pilot's voice came through the earphones in my radio telephone helmet. He sat at the controls in the glasshooded main cockpit behind and above where I sat on a narrow padded stool, in the bombing cockpit in the nose-tip. Back of him, the wireless operator sat at his box of tricks. On his right was the navigator, who is also the assistant pilot.
From that cockpit, looking left and right, one had a sense of great security. On either side stretched the gigantic wings. Imbedded in each wing a mighty engine whirled its propeller. Knock out one engine and the other would keep the machine flying.
We came out on top of a billowy ocean of white cloud. Between this and the blue we flew for fifteen minutes — in distance terms, around sixty miles, in a following wind. I saw a break ahead, and the earth picture came in sight through a wide gap.
Nearing the Target
Cloud thinned, and once again we were moving over sunlit country across which cloud masses drifted. We were now up 18,000 feet. The navigator left his chair, climbed down into my cockpit, and, kneeling behind me, opened a trapdoor in the metal floor and pushed out a tube like a telescope. He was checking on drift and wind velocity. We were coming up to the target.
"The enemy's machines would be buzzing round us now if this were the real thing," the pilot apprised me cheerfully.
Back in the centre and tail of the big warplane's fuselage the gunners were at their posts. One got back there, or came forward, along a narrow corridor with a ribbed floor. Racks, for flares and etceteras were on the fuselage wall.
The gunner amidships turned a crank letting down an armoured turret and ensconced himself therein. He was then in a sort of flying pill-box: a nice field of fire all round. The tail gunner also had a turret to shoot from.
Running Fight
We were soon in a running fight with a combat 'plane swooping and diving at us, aiming machine-guns operated by an electric press-button. The bomber flew steadily on while the gunners, peering out, swinging their hydraulically-operated guns, tried to get the darting dragon-fly as he flashed past.
Looking down and ahead through the glass—tough, unbreakable glass—nose of the bomber, I saw the target—an aerodrome. The massive red-brick hangars with their concrete surroundings made a nice, squarish bull's-eye amid the general lay-out of outbuildings and living quarters.
It was about four miles below. Anti-aircraft guns would be blasting at us. But at 20,000 feet what did we present?--a speck. A gunner could not tell whether his shells were bursting a thousand feet above or below us. Though a friend who had been in Spain told me that Franco has a German gun with a range of 25,000 feet and a remarkable record of hits up to 12.000 feet.
"Let Go Bombs"
I got a hangar block in the bomb sight. Set on the navigator's calculations, it took care of height, speed and wind velocity factors. We were still miles from the target, but the bombs, swinging out, would hit — if my aim was all right. I let go the bombs.
We had none in the racks really, but went through the motions. The pilot has the master switch, which releases the bomb switches for use. You can drop your bombs singly, or in one lot. If you have time you can drop one, come back drop another, ranging, trying to a direct hit with at least one bomb. But in war a bomber is scarcely likely to find any important target so unprotected from the ground or in the air that he can afford to stick around, leisurely aiming bomb after bomb.
Bomb sites to-day make bombing accurate as rifle-fire —if you can see the target and the machine is steady. But good visibility is two-edged. If it gives the bomber a better chance at the target it also gives the fighter a better chance of spotting you from afar and moving in, with the advantages of speed and manoeuvrability.
The men in the bomber squadrons are not like the men of the fighter squadrons. They pick them out during the six months' course at the Flying Training School - for —"you for the fighters, you for the Army co-operation, you for the bombers."
With heavy bombers — intended primarily for long-range night work — the distinction is marked. If a pilot comes to them with fighter training and habits, he has to be educated out of both.
Back "home" at a Hampshire station from the practice flight, I got a line on that from a squadron-leader. On the grass just clear of the concrete was a new twin-engined machine, bright yellow. By contrast with the giant bombers squatted around on their huge tyred wheels, and daubed with dull camouflage paint, she looked like a pleasure yacht among battle cruisers.
"A new training machine," said the squadron-commander. "I'm glad to get her. Most of the fellows who come here from the Fighter Training School have been taught on single-engine machines. This is a good machine to get 'em twin-engine-minded."
He shouted the last words, and I cupped an car close to his mouth. One of the near-by "big boys" was getting ready to go up, and the roar of the engine at full power drowned speech. We moved out of the gale. The 'plane trundled slowly down the low slope of the aerodrome field and on the other side. I commented on the long run.
Forced Landing
"He's a pilot officer—new." said the squadron-commander. "We make them run the whole length. Some want to use their own judgment in take-offs when they come fresh to these ships, and sometimes they misjudge—and," he added grimly, "these machines are expensive."
He indicated the wind-braking device (without it the big machine might over-run on landing), and explained that if the pilot has to make a forced landing, and thinks he's for it, he will keep his retractable under-carriage tucked up, and land on the 'plane's belly instead of the wheels of the undercarriage.
The slight wheel profusion from the belly buffers the shock, and the crew are likely to get away with a bump and a bruise, while a day or two in workshops will fix the damage to the fuselage. If the pilot crashes out of control, and with his under-carriage down, the big machine is liable to get end-over on its nose and break up—with corresponding damage to the crew inside it.
The bomber taxied round at the far end of the immense, smooth field, and moved into the wind. Its pace quickened, but it seemed still to be moving slowly when it left ground and rose leisurely into the air. A thousand feet from ground the wheels began to rise into the body of the machine, as the pilot pulled the lever which drew up the retractable under-carriage. Left down, it prunes 20-30 miles an hour off your speed through wind resistance.
"You can't flip these buses about as though they were single-seater fighters," remarked the squadron leader. "They handle like ships. Take your time and do nothing in a hurry—that's the motto. The pilots have to remember they are responsible for four other men, and a big ship, too. It is team work, and they have to develop that psychology."
Laying the explosive eggs is a relatively minor part of the bomber's job. If the pilot gets his aeroplane to the spot, the gunners fighting off any combat aeroplanes en route, the bombsight and the bombs will do the rest.
Bombs! I was looking over a neat selection in a store. They ranged from handy little fellows half the size of a Ruggar ball to enormous pears bigger than the shell of a 16in. naval gun. They are the "shells" of the "sky artillery" —man's latest device for killing at a distance.
New Problems
Discussing the gentle art of bombing from the air with Royal Air Force specialists, I discovered that the new speeds of aircraft are providing new and strange problems. Science and the engineers are moving us toward speeds where the bomber may have to aim and release his bombs before he sights the target. That is because bombs swing out as you let them go from their holders.
It will be harder to hit a strictly "military objective" with a load of bombs from a long-range heavy bomber. The commander of a bomber unit showed me a chart of estimated results on bombing by "dead reckoning" to the target. That machine had gone out, flying blind on a course and to calculations set in the squadron office, and the bombs had been dropped at an invisible target. The results were remarkably accurate.
There will probably be a lot of that in the next war—if one comes. Bombs will drop out of the night, out of fog belts, and out of thick cloud. The fighter squadrons will be kept very busy then.
Living Quarters
I probed this aspect of aerial bombing over a peaceful cup of tea in married quarters. The squadron was resting by day and bombing by night; and I was talking to the squadron commander in his station home, a small new red brick house.
Incidentally, the quarters of most of the Royal Air Force stations I have visited look new, and some of those which are expanding fast suggest a garden-city development project in course of construction. One commander of a Yorkshire station told me he would have his house in about six months, when the building programme was through. Meantime, rather than rent a house 10 miles off he had invested in a caravan.
"Very comfortable, no rent, canned gas. Two single bunks and one double. I have it pitched in a field near the aerodrome—the farmer is very friendly —and from my window as I have breakfast I can see that people are on the job at the aerodrome."
Later, on the dark aerodrome, waiting for the night bombers to taxi over to the take-off point, I wondered about this family—a 42-year-old air warrior, his wife, two sons—and how war might come to them.
"Somewhere In Europe"
It might strike in advance of a "state of tension" necessitating a stand-by at war stations. A radio flash, and our squadron leader might be kissing his wife good-bye at his own front door and running down the gravel path between the shaven lawns like any City man hurrying to catch the 8.15.
Not many minutes later his wife would look up from that garden and see the dark shapes of the bombers rushing up, and out —the striking force, hitting back. They might be back in four or five hours, having laid their eggs on a target "somewhere in Europe"; or, some might never return to the home nest again.
The balloon barrage we hear so much about in connection with London's defence against aerial bombardment is intended to drive the raiders up, lessen the area of search for the fighters going after them, and put the attacking machines where searchlights and guns can reach them.
I was watching dive bombing from the observation tower of a bomber station the other day. I thought of seeing it from the observer's seat in the aeroplane, but the flight-lieutenant said: "Don't. You'll be sick. It often happens, when you are not used to power diving—especially if you are sitting in the orthodox observer position, back to the pilot, and so are caught unprepared, both on the dive and the pull-out."
Mounting to 5000 ft., the pilot turned his machine, a light two-seater bomber, nose down. He dived with the engine full on, aiming at a target marked by a red flag at the far end of the aerodrome.
Dive Bombing
Follow him in this dive.
First, he swallowed. You do that to fix the air pressure in the eustachian tube in your ear. if you forget the precaution you get a headache at best and a burst ear-drum at worst.
He snapped down the bomb master switch, and No. 1 bomb switch, preparing the bomb for release. In metal holders on the wing underside he carried eight bombs, four aside. As the earth rushed up to meet him at the target point he pressed a pushbutton, releasing the catch holding No. 1 bomb in its metal clip. The bomb dropped, its detonator nose down, wind vane steadying it in flight. Simultaneously the pilot pulled his stick and soared up. A spurt of white smoke darted from the ground near the red flag. "He's doing better," said the sergeant.
At the end of the bombing he showed me the chart. The bomber had dropped five bombs, in five separate dives, all around the target. Average error, 27 yards; but two were inside 20 yards. Not bad for a beginner. He would have damaged troop concentrations, roads, bridges, railway sidings, munition works.
When I went out on a bombing exercise with another squadron we laid eggs from 10,000 ft. The squadron was in "V formation. In the leading machine the observer-gunner, as the double fan of machines came up to the target, was stretched on the floor of the narrow cockpit. In that cramped position his head was beneath the pilot's feet on the rudder bar.
He opened a door flap, took aim through the bomb sight. A cloud of bombs hurtled earthwards.
It would not be pleasant to be under a squadron of light bombers when they released all their bombs together. It would be even less pleasant to be under several squadrons of heavy five-man-crew bombers, with each squadron throwing all its switches at once.
What, chance of stopping them? In daylight, a possible chance. Night is another matter. Almost everything depends on the searchlights.—U.F.S.
NEW ZEALAND HERALD, 2 JULY 1938
