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Aviation History
1941
1941 - 1219.PDF
MAY 29TH, 1941. THE PLACE OF THE DIVE-BOMBER Functions 0/ the New Weapon in Modern Warfare By MAJOR F. A. de V. ROBERTSON, V.D. IT has been announcedthat the Americani^0r Vultee Vengeance is Deing developed as adive-bomber for use by the Royal Air Force.The Vengeance is a vari- ant of the Vultee Van-guard, a single-seater fighter armed with tenmachine guns, one of the main differencesbeing that the Ven- geance is driven by anAllison liquid-cooled en- gine in place of the air-cooled engine in the Vanguard. With thismotor it is believed that its top speed will be get-ting on for 400 m.p.h. The German campaignin Poland first brought the dive - bomber intoprominence as a weapon for use with an army. Before that it had been regarded chiefly as a navalweapon. The first type of this class on record was the Curtiss Helldiver which was produced for the U.S. NavalAir Service. The idea attracted attention in Britain, and some squadrons of Hart light bombers were chosen to workout the technique and tactics of dive-bombing. The idea was to use the manoeuvre against enemy warships. Inthose days there was a pretty general ambition, at least among the junior commissioned ranks of the R.A.F., toprove that fleets had been made obsolete by aircraft, and to persuade the Government to stop building battleships,inverting the sums saved to the purchase of thousands of NAVY OVER THE LANDangle of about 70 degrees. T.V. LIMITER : All dive-bombers built on the modernmonoplane specification require air brakes to limit their terminal velocity. The sketch shows the Junkers Ju 88 airbrake. A Blackburn Skua dive-bomber of the Fleet Air Arm attacking at anThe diving brakes are at right angles to the under surface of the wing. Harts. R.A.F. men professed to believe that bombsdropped from an altitude would drive navies off or under the seas. Certainly in practices against wireless-controlledships the bombs did not always score hits; but then the devotees of the bomb fell back on the case of the Germanbattleship Ostfriesland which was holed and sunk by the U.S. Army Air Service by means of a near miss. But if precision bombing was not altogether reliable,the invention of dive-bombing, it was urged, would cer- tainly secure bull's-eyes. The bombs which a Hart coulddrop were certainly not heavy enough to sink a ship with deck armour, but they would account for lighter craft andmerchantmen. At any rate, the principle of dive-bombing had been established, and it was only necessary to developit. Ground Strafing The Germans developed it, and used the dive-bomber asa weapon of their Army rather than as one to be used by or against warships. This development showed brains,and to those brains were largely due the conquests of Poland and France, and perhaps of the smaller countriesas well. The use of aircraft to attack ground troops has not beenneglected in Britain. In the latter years of the last war "ground-strafing" was a regular thing, but it was a jobalways entrusted to the fighters. In opposing the great German advance in March, 1918, the R.A.F. fightersquadrons lost heavily while flying low to machine-gun the German troops. About that time the Sopwith Salamanderwas produced as a " trench-strafer," and the pilot's seat was armoured to protect him against small-arms fire fromthe ground. The idea was not so much diving as flying low above the line of trenches. Gradually, however, it was realised that the machine gun
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