Nowadays they call this “Flying Nap of the Earth”, using the terrain, and to a lesser extent, the curvature of the earth, to prevent you from being spotted by radar. Also makes you a harder target for AA guns, missiles, and interceptors. The teacher I had who used to fly bombers said that even B-52s would do this on occasion. The British Mosquito bombers used this strategy too, hauling ass at altitudes low enough to leave sea salt on their windsheilds flying over the English channel, and at speeds high enough to prevent most Luftwaffe fighters from persuing.
Random intersting note, many medium bombers in WWII (ie: the B-25 Mitchell and the B-26 Marauder) were equpped with fixed foward-firing machine guns, usually mounted on the sides of the airplane. Some planes included as many as 12 .50 calibre forward firing machine guns mounted on the sides and nose of the plane.
Some Lancs had a pair of .50 cals, most (I think) had four .303s - that’s certainly the configuration I’ve more often read about.
Note that the enormous cluster of .50 cals in the nose of the modified B25J and others were mostly for ground attack, tho’ if any enemy plane did blunder into the line of fire they’d have been chutney. :eek:
Whereas the B25H had a mere four or so… and a 75mm cannon (sic).
I think it was a bit trickier in real life. The 8 Air Force had problems forming up in daylight. Bomber Command didn’t even bother.
This (hedge-hopping) was only ever done by light/medium bombers or on very specialist raids, for some reason. I’m not sure if the reason was that ground fire was too dangerous or that the RAF had a bad experience with their only attempt at it (the Augsburg raid).
For fighters, yes. For bomber crews they never did much. A one-on-one shootout between a small, manouevrable fighter with 6-8 guns and a turret with two guns on a big slow bomber at a combined closing speed of 600mph or so rarely resulted in anything other than a bunch of cannon shells and bullets flying the entire length of the bomber. This was a favoured tactic of the Luftwaffe against the B17 formations, hence the number of tail gunners hit in the back by gunfire coming through the nose. Even the B17G didn’t helpt. The only effective protection against fighters was evasion (as practiced by the Mosquitoes, or by night bombing) or escorts such as P-51s
Which is one of my pet peeves because according to my Civ2 skills I should be EMPEROR OF THE WORLD!!! [maniacal laughter]
Yep. Very specialist raid indeed, that one. Also check out the Amiens prison raid and the Copenhagen Gestapo raid for similar efforts, although these were done in much smaller aircraft.
Mosquito raids (especially in fighter-bombers) were often done at such low levels that it was common for them to come back with branches and other junk stuck in the radiators or air intakes (which sometimes also lead to the loss of the aircraft). Lancasters and other heavy aircraft, hardly ever, despite the fact that even a B52 can go low and fast without difficulty. As I said, I have never seen an explanation for this other than the bad result of the Augsburg raid and the dogmatic attitude of the command levels.
My teacher said that the B-52 could do this due to an interesting quirk in aerodynamic physics known as “Ground Effect”. Basically, when a plane is flying faster than a certain speed, the airflow from the wings forms a thick cushion of air under the plane that extends to about half the plane’s wingspan beneath the plane. A B-52, with it’s ginormously wide wingspan, could cruise along at 500 knots at treetop level without fear of hitting swells in the terrain, as any such swell would just push the plane up and over on it’s air cushion. If any jet fighters tried to chase the bomber, they could easily find themselves flying into the ground (fighter planes have a much shorter wingspan, so ground effect doesn’t do anything for them until they’re flying THROUGH the trees, rather than above them)
The downside to this was that if you pushed the plane down too low, you would kick up a 50 foot tall cloud of dust behind you called a “Rooster Tail” which would pretty effectively announce your position to anyone who happens to be interested.
If the pilot’s good, I mean if he’s reeeally sharp, he can barrel that thing in so low, oh it’s a sight to see. You wouldn’t expect it with a big ol’ plane like a '52, but varrrooom! The jet exhaust… frying chickens in the barnyard!
I always thought the idea was formation in and individuals out. There was a radar for night flying that told a Lancaster pilot another one was in front, the Luftwaffe were initially able to use it to guide them to the tail of a Lancaster.
anyone read about the a-26? It was a b-26 frame, to which the army welded a longer wing, and over-powered the engines, and super-charged them. The end result was a light bomber that had a turn radius that was smaller than some of the german mesherschmits (?SP.) The army did other things with them also, like mount a lot of machineguns on them for strafing ground targets. Very interesting what they did with these planes.
I thought the A-26 was an entirely different aircraft. The models I built as a kid sure looked different. If I had more bandwidth, I’d do a google picture search.
It would appear that they are different planes, built by different companies, that looked similar and had confusingly similar designations. To make things even more confusing, during the Korean War, the B-26 Maurauder was retired, and the A-26 Invader was renamed the B-26.
Then, in Vietnam, they apparantly renamed them to A-26’s again for political reasons. :smack:
I think you may be thinking of Monica or Fishpond - these were for air attack warning, not stationkeeping. As far as I know the only navigational radar carried was terrain-reading (H2S), although they also used radio navigation. wiki has some info but it’s certainly not comprehensive, given that people have written huge books about the Lancaster.
That’s kinda :eek: . I was impressed with the Mosquito variant that had a 6-pounder anti-tank gun in the nose, but that’s only 57mm.
carnivorousplant - does your dad know if there were any problems with the recoil stalling the plane? I can imagine it would have been pretty exciting firing that thing off at low speed close to the ground.
I’m surprised that the above link doesn’t mention the Henschel Hs-129B3, which (although only 32ft long) used the same 75mm gun as the German Panzer Mk IV tank:
He never said, and unfortunately he is no longer living. My opinon was “but you should see the other guy!”.
Apparently there was no way to repair a bent airframe in New Guinea, and the B-25 didn’t fly very well afterwards, so they simply never fired it. Must have sucked to fly that much weight around and not use it.
One of the many things I should have asked him.
From various historical accounts I’ve read, the 75mm gun in the B-25 was apparantly not terribly useful for very much. The muzzle velocity was so slow it was nearly impossible to accurately aim even at stuff on the surface while flying the plane around.
It was, actually very, very useful in the South West Pacific Area. B-25G and -H’s in the Fifth Air Force found the cannon excellent for anti-shipping patrols. The Japanese used junks, barges, and other small craft in coastal shipping to supply their scattered island forces. These were very vulnerable to the 75mm cannon, and it didn’t take many rounds to sink one. I’ve got a picture around here somewhere of a small freighter under fire and sinking in a strafing run from a B-25G.
Dad was in the 5th USAAF. You sure that picture isn’t the ridiculous number of .50s they had firing forward?
(It was US Army Air Force BTW, not Air Force.)
Yeah, the 12 .50’s seems like a more likely culprit, as from what I understood, even ships were pretty tough to hit with the 75mm gun. Supposedly the 12 .50 cal machine guns, packed close the way they were, could blast holes through some of the smaller destroyers the Japanese had.
And a nitpick of your nitpick, it would be the 5th Air Force, not the 5th Army Air Force. The Army Air Force was the branch, while an Air Force would be a subdivision of that branch. 8th Air Force flew from England, 12th and 15th flew out of Northern Africa and Italy, 5th Air Force in the Pacific. There were other Air Forces, I’m sure, but I can’t think of what any of them were.
