Dive bomber
[1] After World War II, the rise of precision-guided munitions and improved anti-aircraft defences—both fixed gunnery positions and fighter interception—led to a fundamental change in dive bombing.
The German battleship Tirpitz was subjected to countless attacks, many while in dock and immobile, but was not sunk until the British brought in enormous 12,000 lb (5,400 kg) Tallboy bombs to ensure that even a near miss would be effective.
At higher levels, this was less of a problem, as larger AA (anti-aircraft) shells were fused to explode at specific altitudes, which is impossible to determine while the plane is diving.
During World War I, the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) found its biplane two-seat bombers insufficiently accurate in operations on the Western Front.
Commanders urged pilots to dive from their cruising altitude to under 500 ft (150 m) to have a better chance of hitting small targets, such as gun emplacements and trenches.
[11] Beginning on 18 June 1918, the Royal Air Force (RAF), successor to the RFC, ordered large numbers of the Sopwith TF.2 Salamander, a single-seat biplane.
Heavy casualties resulting from air-to-ground attack on trenches set the minds of senior officers in the newly formed RAF against dive bombing.
The American and Japanese navies and the Luftwaffe chose vertical dive bombers whose low speed had dire consequences when they encountered modern fighters.
[12] The Royal Naval Air Service developed dive bombing as a tactic against Zeppelin hangars and formed and trained a squadron at Manchester for this task.
On 27 November 1915, Lieutenant Duncan Grinnell-Milne arrived in his Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2c over railway marshalling yards near Lys in Northern France, to find the target already crowded by other bombers.
At the Battle of Cambrai on 20 November 1917, 320 Mark IV tanks and 300 aircraft, mostly Sopwith Camels and Airco DH 5s with 20 lb (9.1 kg) bombs, were used to suppress artillery and machine guns.
[16] Second Lieutenant William Henry Brown, a Canadian from British Columbia serving with the RFC and flying a Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5a, made the first attack on a vessel on 14 March 1918, destroying an ammunition barge on a canal at Bernot near St Quentin, diving to 500 ft (150 m) to release his bombs.
[21] In 1919, United States Marine Corps (USMC) pilot Lt. L. H. Sanderson mounted a rifle in front of the windshield of his Curtiss JN-4 (a training aircraft) as an improvised bomb sight, loaded a bomb in a canvas bag attached to the aircraft's underside, and made a solo attack in support of USMC troops trapped by Haitians during the United States occupation of Haiti.
[21] Ernst Udet, a German First World War ace, persuaded Hermann Göring to buy two Curtiss Hawk IIs for the newly reformed Luftwaffe.
[24] Several early Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers, which first flew on 13 September 1935, were shipped secretly from Germany to Spain to assist General Francisco Franco's Nationalist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.
Several problems appeared, including the tendency of the fixed undercarriage to sink into soft ground and an inability to take-off with a full bomb load.
Lack of a sufficiently powerful, reliable powerplant fatally compromised its utility, it never performed in the dive bomber role, and the requirement was eventually dropped.
Fifty ex-US Navy examples were flown to Halifax, Nova Scotia, by Curtiss pilots and embarked on the French aircraft carrier Béarn in a belated attempt to help France, which surrendered while they were mid-Atlantic.
The writings of Britain's Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, a staff officer, and Basil Liddell-Hart (a military journalist) propounded the concept of mobile tank forces supported by ground-attack aircraft creating a breakthrough.
These were eagerly studied by the German army officer Heinz Guderian, who created the combination of Panzers and dive bombers that later proved so potent in Poland and France.
The British Expeditionary Force had set up strong defensive positions on the west bank of the Oise River to block rapidly advancing German armour.
[26] The skies over Sedan also showed the Stuka's weakness when met with fighter opposition; six French Curtiss H-75s attacked a formation of unescorted Ju 87s and shot down 11 out of 12 without loss.
[36] The Stuka was even more vulnerable to the Hawker Hurricane with its 100 mph (160 km/h) speed edge and eight machine guns, which it first met over France and then in larger numbers in the Battle of Britain (July to October 1940).
In the Soviet counter-offensive, Operation Kutuzov (July to August 1943), which concluded Kursk, the Luftwaffe claimed 35 tanks destroyed in a single day.
[39] When Italy joined the war (10 June 1940) on the Axis side, the Regia Aeronautica shipped Breda Ba.65s to North Africa for use against the British but they also proved vulnerable.
The Combat Air Patrol of formidable Mitsubishi A6M Zeros had been drawn away, chasing torpedo bombers and escorting fighters, leaving a clear sky.
To maximise speed and range, the Japanese had dispensed with armour protection and self-sealing fuel tanks, which proved to be very costly when the US Navy deployed the new Essex-class aircraft carriers, which each carried 36 of the faster Grumman F6F Hellcats.
[54] On 23 May 1943, a Fairey Swordfish destroyed U-752 in the Atlantic, and five days later, a Lockheed Hudson of RAF Coastal Command sank U-755 in the Mediterranean, using specialised rockets fitted with iron spikes which were fired at a shallow angle into the sea.
[56] By January 1943, American pilots who had been flying in RAF Eagle Squadrons before the US entered the war, converted from Supermarine Spitfires to Republic P-47 Thunderbolts to form the USAAF 4th Air Fighter Group.
The Tallboy was developed by Vickers designer Barnes Wallis who followed it up with the even larger 10-long-ton (10 t) Grand Slam earthquake bomb which was used to destroy railway viaducts and bridges, targets that could previously only be damaged in diving attacks.
