I read that the Germans attempted using this in WWII as they were developing countermeasures to the Allied bombing offensive.
How did this work?
Was it a successful technique?
Most importantly: If they missed, weren’t they helping the Allies bomb targets in Germany???
Baffling…
Just a few educated guesses having a little experience in aviatinon munitions.
This sounds pretty far fetched and experimental at best. The germans did not have heavy bombers and it would have taken some big ones to be effective. Something like a monster flak burst dropped into a bomber formation would work. Problem is you have to get significantly higher than those bombers to avoid their guns and fighter escorts.
Fuzing bombs to explode at altitude is child’s play. That would have been the simple part.
I’ve seen film footage of bombs dropped from a B-17 that smashed through the wing of a second B-17 below it, which then spun out of control and crashed. Of course, that was our guys bombing our guys by mistake, so it would probably be hard to do if you were a German pilot trying to do it intentionally. Perhaps someone saw this footage and jumped to the wrong conclusion?
I dont have the books handy right now to look it up, but the germans did experiment with air to air bombing for use against allied bomber formations. I think some of it had to do with lack of skilled pilots in the latter parts of the war.
My searching skills are apparently not up to the task of locating specifics tonight, but I have read of this more than once. Suffice to say that, yes, they tried it and, no, it didn’t work very well.
Also, there were experiments with rockets that fired upward from an attacking aircraft into the bomber formation. I seem to remember them even trying to make those work with photosensors so that the rockets would fire when the fighter passed intoe bomber’s shadow.
Can anyone clarify all this? Im working from memory here…
This isn’t about the air to air bombing but it is about the vertical firing rockets I mentioned. Sounds cool to me.
The big problem with A-A bombing would be getting a loaded bomber to an altitude higher than the target bombers in time. Rate of climb on a loaded bomber would be pretty poor compared with a fighter interceptor. If the intercepting bomber did find itself at altitude, it would still have to get to where its targets are, and again loaded bombers aren’t the fastest things in the world.
Of course, escort fighters like the P-51 would also make mincemeat of such intercepting bombers. A fellow doper can supply the date —sometime in 1944— when for some reason much of the “heavy” twin engine interceptors of the Luftwaffe night fighter squadrons were sent up against the US bombers and thier escort fighters. Even though they had no bombs, they were easy targets for the fighters and probably also the bomber gunners as well.
No, no, they didn’t use bombers, they used fighters carrying bombs. Practically every WW2 fighter could carry SOME type of bomb(s)
Due to the rather lethal nature of attacking a full formation of bombers (lethal to both the bombers and the attackers, but we had more bombers than they had attackers) Germany sought many, many ways to engage fighters outside effective range of their defensive guns.
Rockets were one seemingly sure-fire method, they could carry lots of explosive, and thus didn’t need a direct hit to work. However, the Germans were about twenty years ahead of the technology with the idea – in WW2, rockets were not accurate weapons and there was no decent way to fuse them to explode when desired.
There was experimentation with very early wire-guided missiles, but that never got anywhere. Also ahead of their time.
Large-caliber cannon could work and were more accurate than rockets, but they needed a skilled pilot to hit with at long ranges, since they needed a direct hit.
Enter Wacky Idea #5923: air-to-air bombing. Since a fighter, after getting up there, knows what altitude the bombers are at, they could get bombs fused to go off at a certain time (eg- after a certain amount of drop) and get to the right altitude above the bombers, and let 'er rip.
There’s two problems with this:
It’s horribly, woefully inaccurate. All aircraft have poor visibility beneath them, but WW2 aircraft seriously so thanks to cockpit placement. You’re basically just blindly chucking this hunk of explosive into the bomber formation and hoping it goes off in a good spot, which doesn’t make it much better than flak.
Fighters can’t carry much in the way of bombs. One 500kg (~1000lbs) or 2-3 smaller bombs was about the best the typical German fighter aircraft could ever hope for. Couple this with the inaccuracy, and you’ve got a pretty fat chance of taking down anything. To make this effective, you’d really need bigger bombs and more of them, but for the reasons already mentioned, using your own bombers to do this was out of the question (even if Germany had that many, which for heavy bombers, they didn’t)
So, in general, it was another one of those neato German ideas born of inventiveness and desperation, that never really worked well, but makes for interesting history. I believe one of the aces came up with this one and toyed with it for a bit, but it never got widespread.
I’d love if someone had a real cite on the topic, though.
I’ve gotta go dig around my library. I have a book buried in there that cites the Air-to-Air bombs, and, IIRC, it was an experiment that proved too marginal for even the the Nazi war machine to persue. It did work a little, and one pilot managed to place one of his timed fragmantation bombs squarely in the middle of a bomber ‘box’, killing all four bombers. That was a one-off, though, and the project was dropped when it was found that ‘air bombing’ fighters were completely defenseless against Allied fighters when lining up for their bomb runs.
Thanks for the info…
The way it came up was that I was reading Clash of Wings by Walter Boyne, and on p. 326 I saw this:
This is a passage about Schweinfurt that doesn’t further mention the air-to-air bombing, so I was curious.