Good evening and hello to all!! Tonights look at World War II focuses on an aspect that rarely gets the treatment it probably deserves, considering this IS a style of warfare that has passed the state of the art by, but some of the war's most accurate missions, some with consequences that were front and theater wide were from divebombing....I'm going to give you a look at how these pilots themselves saw their missions and the unusual method of delivery.....read on with me....Allied as well as Axis, as the dive bomber pilots themselves tell you in their own words, with a little background from me.........On with the Show! (my comments prefixed and/or suffixed with ***) "IMPACT!.:mad111:...........:indexCA7C9VES:THE DIVEBOMBER PILOTS SPEAK.".........excerpts from the book by Peter C. Smith,,,(***expansions to text by Christos.) No-one quite knows for sure WHO made the first divebombing attack. There are candidates, however......... Perhaps the best account of the early experiments is this one from 46 Squadron pilot Arthur Gould Lee, Royal Air Force, based at Izel-le-Hameau to the west of Arras, France, on 30th of November, 1917.......Flying an SE.5a and armed with four 20 pound 'Cooper' bombs and ordered to attack a specific village at the village of Bourlon.......Gould Lee started his dive from 4,000 feet; "We dived steeply and I let go at 200 feet. It must certainly have been an important target, for a devil of a lot of machine gun fire came up at us. As I pulled out of the dive in a climbing turn, I glimpsed Dusgate, also climbing, but then I lost him. I saw the smoke of our bombs bursting- mine was a miss, but Dusgate's were quite near....but the house had not been hit....I had to try again. I honestly felt quite sick at the prospect. I felt I just hadn't the guts to dive down three more times into that nest of machine guns, now all alert and waiting for me.....I had to do it, but I told myself once, "only once". And I did it, with a sort of numb indifference. If they got me, they got me...... I dived down, to 100 feet and released all three bombs. Bullets were cracking around me. I swerved violently to the right, and skidded away at twenty feet, where they couldn't follow me................................... Whether I hit the damned house, I don't know. I wasn't interested anymore.......Marvellously, they hadn't hit me, but one bullet had broken the handle of the throttle control, and another had smashed into the Very pistol cartridges, which ought to have exploded and set me alight, but they didn't..." Peter C. Smith claims the first actual and historic dive bombing mission was carried out by 84 Squadron in France, also using the SE.5a and by a pilot chosen for this mission "because he was the lightest pilot in the squadron at the time!" With just a few days to practice before the actual first combat test, one morning 2nd Lieutenent William Harry Brown climbed into his 'crate' fitted with.... "....a makeshift bomb-rack that we loaded four 20 pound bombs to. My fellow officers had drawn a circle 100 feet in diameter near the field. I was told to fly at 1,000 feet and drop the bombs one at a time....with no mechanical devices and only the use of my eyes for a bombsight, I missed with all four bombs.." ***The suggestion was made by a fellow officer, who put the question forward, saying, "We dive to strafe, so why not drop a bomb at the end of a dive?":indexCAREDCJH: Why not indeed!..... Brown got the next four bombs all on target. His assigned mission target was one of 'opportunity', to take off and hit whatever he could find.....he sank a barge with the one bomb of 4 dropped that managed to hit, splitting the craft in two with an explosion....... Thus.........Modern Divebombing was born!..........nearly.... I will list the different types of aircraft used by various nations at the end of the article. For now, just brief 'snapshots' of the divebomber in the inter-war period leading up to 1939.......a time of experimentation for all. BRITAIN- Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm, 1939. When re-equpping with Blackburn SKUAS, it was the Navy's first monoplane fighter/dive bomber! (Which shows us the British Army and RAFs attitude to divebomber, period! The Air ministry spent most of the pre-war period convincing themselves that divebombers were "useless" and that 'glide' attack from a much shallower angle was the 'way'). Too heavy and unmanoeuverable for a fighter role, the Skua in it's role as a dive bomber was well designed and steady in a dive. Visibility for both bombing and deck landing was good. Major R.T. Partridge, FAA 800 Squadron was at Worthy Down using Skuas,......... "There was a target in the middle of a grass airfield and quadrant positions on the perimeter. We used to do a good deal of practice with small practice bombs which we also used when embarked to bomb a target towed by the carrier or her attendant destroyer. The bomb for use in earnest which we have cause to remember was called the 'Cooper'. For all that it was worth it could well have originated from a marmalade factory in Dundee. Most of it's 'puff' went upwards to the undoing, I believe, of Thurston and Griffiths, two Skua pilots of 803 Squadron who attacked a U-boat at Scapa Flow in early September 1939 and, and, damaged by their own bombs, force landed in the sea." "The Skua had a characteristic in long steep dive that, as the speed built up, the aircraft tended to rotate around it's axis. This was easily controlled and was caused by the setting of the ailerons being adjusted for normal flight conditions. One countered this by laying one's sighting to let a natural 'creep' take place. The old girl also had a bomb throwing 'crutch' which took the main bomb on the belly clear of the propellor, an essential for a steep dive. As a fighter it was sadly speed deficient, and it's rate of climb too, but as a divebomber it had large, strong flaps, and when these were down it could be put into a beautiful 65-70 degree controlled dive....a well trained pilot could bomb with great accuracy" This then, was the Royal Navy's principal aircraft type for outbreak of war. ..................What of her principal competitor? GERMANY: 'DER ADLER' ***The Lufwaffe magazine 'Der Adler' carried as many stories as Goebbels could possibly think of centred around their principal divebomber, the Junkers Ju-87 STUKA (in it's various marks and different weapons 'packs' that were fitted). To most students of World War II, this famous aircraft, or infamous depending on your outlook, needs little introduction. It was instrumental in Poland, kept the 'blitzkreig' well and truly moving in France and managed to shut down the English Channel to British shipping in daylight, something the German's called the 'Kanalkampfen', just before losing 54 of their number to British fighters, and withdrawn as a service unit wholesale just 9 days into the Battle of Britain. Their handiness for pinpoint attacks never really disappeared, and as we shall see further down, Stuka attacks enabled Rommel to break free from Gazala and used them both to besiege and to conquer Tobruk. Only once before the Battle of Britain did the Stuka's operational concept recieve a little 'shake-up'. It happened in 1939. Three Stafflen were to take part in a demonstration for assembled Luftwaffe leaders at the training ground of Nuehammer....... "On this occasion apart from the Grazer Gruppe of Hauptman Sigel, I/StG2, 'Immelman' also took part, in which I was flying as the left Kettenfleiger with Hauptman Hitschold. We flew from Cottbus and the weather was cloudless . Our view was very good. Between Cottbus and Nuehammer the ground fog started and our group recognized it. The white fog cloud with a slightly woolly appearence was in beautiful sunshine right to the eastern horizon. in front of us, two to three kilometers to the right, was another Gruppe about 3,000 meters high. On account of the ground fog I expected the Verbandfuhrung to call the flight off. When I looked round again, I saw to my horror, huge dark columns of smoke pouring from the target area. I knew straight away that something terrible had happened......." The ill fated Stukas had been instructed to approach the target from about 12,000 feet, dive through the cloud layer, reported to have been identified between 2,500 and 6,000 feet, although Lanfg has doubts that this information was ever transmitted, and to release their bombs at 1,000 feet. The official version is the doomed Gruppe of StG76 failed to realize that the ground mist was that which they were diving into....and not the higher cloud layer present over the target area. Consequently, the whole formation tore straight into the earth at full speed, only a few aircraft from the second flight realizing the error and pulling up, and many of these failed to clear the surrounding trees. In Seconds, the testing ground was littered with the exploding debris of 13 Stukas as they hurtled to their destruction....... Undoubtedly the most advanced twin-engined attack bomber at the outbreak of war was the Junkers 88, dubbed the 'wunder Bomben' by Goering. It was far in advance of it's rivals in both Germany and abroad and great things were expected of it, proving itself adaptable in the extreme and an enormous number of spin-off derivations from the basic air-frame (***including an exotic night-fighter variant with an awesome punch of mixed 20 AND 30 mm cannon with 7.92mm mgs!***). It was as a dive bomber that it first made it mark, and in this role in which it excelled. THE UNITED STATES : Navy Cutting edge.:marine8point: Rear Admiral Paul A. Holmberg,....... "The SBD (**'Slow But Deadly' DAUNTLESS..actually it means 'Scott Bomber Douglas' **) was a monoplane with trailing edge dive flaps (brakes) which limited the speed of the dive (vertically) to about 250 knots. The aircraft flying in this attude was neutrally stable and controllable allowing the pilot to adjust his path of flight for wind variations and target ship motions. (able to hit a 50 foot bulls-eye repeatedly). The initial training taught the pilot how to fly in the vertical dive, and to become acustomed to a "near zero" gravity force on the body while accelerating to terminal speed in the dive and the 'six-times-gravity' force during the pullout. During my training there were some instances where pilots crashed because of their inability to determine (until too late) when to commence their 'pull-out'. I observed that it was easy to become engrossed in, and transfixed by what one sees of the earth or sea as they are approaching in this manner. Those pilots whose practice bombing scores were best, and were most often the ones who were well coordinated physically (baseball players, golfers etc.) who could throw or strike a baseball with a bat......Dive bombing then, was mostly an art." "Starting their attack dives from 15,000 feet, the Dauntless unbraked could pick up a speed of 425mph but the brakes held this to a norm of about 276mph in practice. The aircraft was stressed to take up to 4g but was rarely called upon to do so. In war, however, caution often went by the board. The normal angle of a dive was 70 degrees, although the standard quote from USN flyers was..... "When we say down, we mean straight down." JAPANESE Naval Planners placed much faith in the Aichi B7A 'Ryusei' (Shooting Star), dubbed 'Grace' by the allies....their 'Vals' and'Judys' were outmoded already....but the 'Grace' was no more than a distant dream in 1939. the 'Vals' service life was stretched by fitting a Kinsei 54 engine and larger fuel tanks, which in turn was a responce to the non-appearence of the 'Judy', so the tried and tested 'VAL' became the IJNs principal divebomber......their techniques certainly left not much more to be desired in the way of performance.... And that was what was expected now by every Navy..... Every Army in the World did not give much time effort or money to divebomber development.... Every Army, that is, except for one.....Germany WARTIME IMPACT: Early war Missions, Tactics, Myths.... No doubting it....the Stuka dive bomber paved the way for the swift victory in Poland.....It was possible due to the surprise nature of the air assault, concentrating as it did on the Polish Air-Force. That all of these opening attacks did not go as planned is a matter of record. What did go to plan were the movements of the Army, and the divebomber opened the door, smashing fresh concentrations of troops before they got into serious action, gumming up communications routes of road and rail, and chiefly, supporting the Army in a direct manner that, though experimental, was highly DANGEROUS to Polish forces, or any other force of the period.......Stuka Pilot Helmut Mahlke explains; "Of course, for targeting for close-support attacks very near or immediately in front of our own troops in order to break the enemy resistence, the main problem was to make it EFFECTIVE. The means to solve this problem were pretty poor at the beginning of the war but steadily improved. First of all the aircraft staff co-operating with the Army staff in a battle were located as close together as possible at all times. Before a ground operation wa begun all Stukas available flew a massed attack, each unit against a specific target in a small area were the breakthrough was planned. Choice of target was sometimes based on photos reconnaissance with EXACT timing, so that ground troops could actually launch their assault directly that the last aircraft turned for home. This aspect of planning was rather simple." But the assault from the divebombers was also aimed at shipping, another role these aircraft would excel in. Dive bombing attacks sank 10 ships of the Polish navy, mainly in harbors. Bringing us to our first myth..............:Nessie: "During one of the attacks on Hela Harbor, "a Ju-87 was returning to base minus it's WHEELS and main undercarriage members. A photograph was reproduced which allegedly showed this aircraft on it's way back to base. The story went that this aircraft had dived too low in making attacks against Polish warships and had hit the water at the end of it's dive, snapping off both wheels. Notwithstanding, the aircraft had been pulled up and had returned to base.(***I have a copy of this photograph, published in "Der Adler" the Lufwaffe magazine as part of an article called "Nachtflug gegen England" which shows other aircraft that have returned with damage, the caption reads "One of the dive bombers came too close to the water when pulling out during an attack on coastal fortifications whereby, it lost the whole undercarriage and the airscrew was slightly bent. In that condition the machine returned to formation to the base airdrome more than 120km off and landed smoothly on the underside of the fuselage"........caption presented in German below***) In actual fact the aircraft had been slightly damaged by FLAK during it's attack and the pilot, anticipating a 'splashdown' in Hela, had fired the explosive bolts built in for just that purpose to jettison the main undercarriage members for an emergency water landing. But after doing so, the aircraft was gotten under control and brought back to base to make a belly landing. The photo was used by Goebbels to lend weight to a campaign upholding the structural integrity of the Stuka, but was in fact a fake. Hanfreid Schleiphake, a friend of the authors and a former worker in the Propaganda Ministry confirmed this by producing the original photo, and the doctored fake..... It should not be assumed that the Ju-87 series needed to have evidence faked in it's favour; acknowledged by friend and foe alike to be a tough, sturdy little aircraft..... Stuka Pilot Freiderich Lang; "The body of the Ju-87 was very tough. It was not rare that branches of trees were on the wings after too low a target shooting in peacetime. In Feruary 1942, one of the Ju-87's brought home a 1and1/2 metre long and 20cm thick beam, from an attack on a wooden bridge in Msta (north of Ilmen Lake, Russia). It was thrown up by a bomb from the aircraft in front of it and was embedded in the wing of the following aircraft." General Albert Kesselring paid glowing tribute after inspecting returned Stukas from a raid on Warsaw in 1939...He thought it a miracle that some had come back at all..."so riddled were they with holes- halves of wings were ripped off, bottom planes torn away, and fuselages disembowelled with their control organs hanging by the thinnest threads.." ***BRITISH divebombing started off with a bang! Navy Skuas sank the German light cruiser 'Konigsberg" in a brilliantly executed attack that turned her over.....but from there, the element of surprise was absent from further attempts at hampering the German navy, and nothing further was acheived.......in fact, Kreigsmarine losses in Norway to other causes were so bad that the Navy seriously doubted it's capacity to support the upcoming campaign in France, let alone any attempt at a 'cross-channel' operation.... It was the only way the Allies could strike back in those early months of the war....Daylight raids over Germany brought whole flights and squadrons, sent in in ones and twos, spinning down in flames... "The Royal Navy had learnt the hard way that divebombing was effective if surprise, the right choice of target and determination were all combined in the right quantities."..The Germans had just demonstrated the efficiency of close support airpower, in a manner with much impact...One Air Ministry Inquiry after another sought to cover the basic British assumption that Army support divebombing was a losing 'wicket'.... The story in France was no different in the summer of 1940...... So we've come to another myth about divebombing, and about the Stuka in France and Poland in particular........:Nessie:................ "SIRENS were fitted to Stukas...they produced a paralyzing sound, and were effective against unseasoned troops or those not trained and experianced in this type of attack....it was a very personal form of assault....Freidrich Lang recalls, "We started the war without sirens in our Group. in April 1940 we were with gruppe 'Immelmann' at Cologne-Ostheim airfield. There we made from a home made whistle and a siren, but they did not work well until the small special shaped wooden propellor was fitted ....They turned in the wind of the dive and created a noise that became louder with speed....the howling sound distracted and up-set not only the enemy but also our crews as well...it became better when you could turn it off." Called the "Trumpets of Jericho" by Stuka crews, protests forced the abandonment of the infernal noise machine..........propaganda played no part. PART TWO: ZENITH- ...............:indexCA7C9VES::medalofhonor:The Brief Dynasty of the Divebomber.*** ***The state of the 'art' in air-ground attack passed the divebomber over in a relatively short space of time. True, it was still used in Korea and Vietnam, but not as 'standard issue' tactics, only when all else had failed or diving was the only way to get a hit using what we now know as "dumb" weapons...... But during it's short but stormy reign, the German Army used it's superiority in this type of aircraft to thrust deep into Soviet territory...while the weather lasted the divebombers had the skies to themselves in mid-late 1941....Equally in the Mediterranean they dominated while the air superiority lasted. Big warships in Mediterranean shipping traffic were limited for two years to zones created by the Admiralty referred to as "Stuka Santuaries". Greece and Crete had only driven home the lesson. ......but, already, cracks were beginning to appear......................... Before Russia there was TOBRUK................The Australian garrison, and particularly the AAA crews were in a unique position that no other force at that time had noticed in such a wide and well recorded fashion. They suffered many attacks attacks by Ju-87s and Ju-88s, the cream of the Luftwaffe bombers at the time, and had first hand experiance at what just did and did not work against these attacks. The very nature of a siege and the importance of Tobruk as a harbor to the Western Desert fighting was paramount. The Aussies were in the 'hot-seat', and what they learnt from those attacks of the period 11 April- 24th June 1941 was passed on to other allied units far and wide***...... " No less than 46 different Stuka attacks were mounted against the Tobruk defences. The number of air-craft in each varied considerably, 3 to 6 on some dates, as many as 40-50 on others, with a peak of 60 Ju-87s on 29th of May AND second of June 1941; a total of 959 dive bomber sorties during which the defences claim to have destroyed no less than 54 aircraft. The AA gunners were becoming seasoned at standing up to dive bombing after such an ordeal, but more important, the dive-bomber was now being taken seriously by the British Army and special training was given so that even fresh, un-tried gunners stood a chance if they did not PANIC" Ashore in Tobruk, the feeling was intence.....Lieutenent Colonel Alan Apsley, 29th June, 1941.... "I really must protest against the constant advertisement given to the RAF by the BBC. It is doing immense harm among the troops out here where they are in a position to know that the claims are not true......because it makes them wonder whether other claims are slightly exaggerated. Here, while I sit in the desert with an Me-110 circling overhead, the wireless broadcast of 0915 hours is telling us that the great feature of our recent operations here was that the RAF held COMPLETE mastery of the air by the simple procedure of preventing enemy air-craft leaving the ground. This is completely untrue. In this regiment alone we had 30 casualties from air attack alone...." ***And in Russia, there was still a victory or two to be won for the divebomber. HANS ULRICH RUDEL, the most widely known Stuka and/or divebomber pilot of them all, with over 1,500 sorties at the cockpit 'stick' and, amongst others by his own count from his book "Stuka Pilot", 539 Russian tanks and two WARSHIPS. One of them the Russian pre-revolutionary dreadnought, MARAT, in Leningrad Harbor. The powerful 12 inch guns of the Marat and her twin ship "Oktobrescaja Revolutia" commanded the coastline to a depth of sixteen miles inland. It was realised that normal dive bomber payloads would be unable to pierce the armoured decks, but it was hoped that repeated attacks would demolish their upperworks and make them untenable. Special; deliveries of the new 2,200 pound armour-piercing bombs were brought up in preparation. On the 16th of September an attack planted a 1,100 pound bomb on target. On the 23rd she was spotted repairing this damage, by that time the heavy bombs were ready....approaching from 9,000 feet through a storm of flak, some of the most concentrated anti-aircraft fire of the war, were every single place for an AA gun had been taken up, including concrete floats for netting in the middle of the harbor. Rudel followed gruppe leader Steern down with no dive-brakes, and released his bomb from below 3,000 feet despite warnings not to do so. He describes this classic attack................... "My Ju-87 keeps perfectly steady as I dive. I have the feeling that to miss is now impossible. Then I see the MARAT, large as life in front of me. Sailors are running across the deck, carrying ammunition. NOW I press the bomb release, switch on my stick and pull with all my strength. Can I still manage to pull out? I doubt it, for I am diving without brakes and the hieght at which I released the bomb is not more than 900 feet. The skipper has said when briefing us that the two thousand pounder must not be dropped from lower than 3,000 feet as the fragmentation effect of this bomb reaches 3,000 feet and to drop it at a lower altitude is to severly RISK ones aircraft! But I have forgotten that! I am intent on hitting the 'Marat'. I tug at my stick, without feeling, merely exerting all my strength. My acceleration is too great. I see nothing, my sight is blurred in a momentary blackout, a new experience for me. But if it can be managed at all I must pull out! My head has not yet cleared when I hear Scharnovski's voice "She is blowing up, sir!". NOW I look out. We are skimming the water at a level of ten or twelve feet and I bank around a little. Yonder lies the Marat below a cloud of smoke rising to 1,200 feet...apparently the magazine had exploded." ***Rudel watched as the 'Marat' sank, in shallow water with her fore section almost torn away. Although later some of her guns were got into action for a time, she was finished as a fighting unit. As the war dragged on in Russia, more and more cracks became evident in the divebomber's rule as the arm of decision...the limits of the munitions carried, for instance...... "One nasty surprise for the Germans was the size and number of Russian tanks which had been vastly underestimated on both counts before the war began. This was demonstrated early on, as was the difficulty of divebombers actually knocking out tanks with bombs. On the 26th of June for example, the whole of StG2 had attacked a large concentration of Russian tanks to the south of Grodno, using bombs. But it was later found that only 1 tank had been completely knocked out, and that by machine gun fire! New measures would obviously have to be found to deal with this problem, for no matter how many tanks the dive bombers destroyed, the Russians eventually began to replace them five-fold. At once, research began. For the first six months of the Russian campaign, the perfection of the Stuka/Panzer/air superiority combination had reaching its peak...". .***now however, a new generation of aircraft emerged......DUAL role......the fighter bomber/divebomber capable aircraft had been born....... But in the PACIFIC.....the US Navy gave the divebomber one last lease on life at the top.....an opportunty to TURN the war, around the Central Pacific Island of MIDWAY........ Midway was about as decisive a naval battle as the US Navy ever fought, or anyone else for that matter.........but as an arm of decision it was the last time the divebomber intervened to tip the scales........and in this case, it meant FOUR Japanese carriers gone for good.....and the Pacific war and a 'Pacific war First" scenario that Japan had always hoped would split the Allies, both watching their own sectors of the world war and not co-operating as they did for victory.....the Allies would have been defeated in detail, rather than the as the Axis were...... And Wade Mcluskeys SBD Dauntless's delivered the blow....torpedo planes would not have done quite the same damage as bomb after bomb into wooden flight decks, penetrating below to the stored aviation gasoline............ ***RADIO TRANSMISSIONs FROM US NAVY DIVEBOMBER PILOTS AT MIDWAY;***................................................ "Entering Dive, our objective is the rear ship...Step on it, are we going to attack or not?" "They're all BURNING!" THAT scared the hell out of me! I thought we weren't going to pull out!" "Your bomb really hit them on the fantail. Boy, that's SWELL!" "These Japs are as easy as shooting ducks in a rain barrel."B) "Gee, I wish I had just one more bomb!" ***Lt ROBIN M. LINDSAY.........Landing signals Officer, USS Enterprise. "I knew the Hornet planes were just about out of gas, and I couldn't see any reason for not landing them and taking a chance.....I brought six more in before they screamed down and said "Thats all, knock it OFF, brother!"..... I disobeyed orders and continued landing planes even when no.2 elevator was down...I heard later that finally the air officer just said, "Leave the kid alone, he's hot." ****And Finally, a US Navy man that the battle of Midway just passed by...the words of Admiral FRANK JACK FLETCHER, on being lowered by rope from the sinking USS Lexington.... "I am too DAMNED OLD for this anymore......" **** EPILOGUE........................... The divebomber had it's it's finest moment at Midway, along with Nimitz and Ice Cool Ray Spruance...and Wade McClusky....they could argue for evermore, specifically about WHAT IF McClusky's divebombers had run out of fuel before his formation, low on fuel and looking for the fleet in the wrong direction spotted the IJN destroyer ARASHI steaming as fast as her boilers would carry her ( after checking on a US Sub in the area and now trying to catch up with the remainder of the fleet..... and guiding them like a beacon to the "Kudo Butai" (IJN Combined Fleet Carriers).... ......oh yes,they could laugh about that one now...:p After 1945, and a brief revival in Korea and Vietnam,:Nessie: the last 'official' divebomber attack by the US Air force was in a "Douglas Skyraider" Only the accounts remain, the written ones, that once again allow us to hear the Divebomber Pilots.....SPEAK. :group2: I will post the list of all aircraft types used as divebombers, as well as a little more amusing trivia.......thanks for watching and Goodnight!
Lot of work Christos. I'm just on the last chapter of War and Peace at the moment mate. I'm going to read yours next.
wasn't it Elaine from Seinfeld that said that Tolstoy originally titled his master work of "War and Peace" as "War...What is it Good For?"....had to laugh at Elaine's philistinism!
Yes...and Stalin....cynical man that he was brought up the Ghosts of 1812 for his own prpaganda....trouble is, the Russian people LOVED it....so it didn't sound like a propaganda campaign after a while... It sounded like a voice of the people in the end...hardly what you would expect in the way of results from ANY wartime propaganda....."The Maximum Leader" has not been called 'Wiley' for nothing.....
