![]() ![]() In 1935, the Northrop company had introduced the BT-1, a mono-wing dive bomber with automatic dive brakes, retractable landing gear, and a big 700-horsepower radial engine. In the area of naval air attacks on enemy ships, however, the need for pinpoint accuracy remained. For the most part, both the UK and the US gave up the idea of dive-bombing land targets in favor of the four-engined heavy bomber, which did not need precise aiming but simply obliterated the target with a massive bomb load. Instead, the British turned the idea of a “bomber-fighter” into the “fighter-bomber”, by equipping very capable fighters with supplementary ground-attack weapons like rockets or bombs. As a result, the Skua did neither very well, and it was soon quietly dropped. In Britain the concept was somewhat different: the RAF attempted to use the Blackburn Skua in multiple roles: it was designed to carry and deliver a bomb by diving, and then use its multiple front and rear machine guns as a fighter. The Japanese also adopted most of this outlook, and the Imperial Navy developed the Aichi D3A carrier-based dive bomber, known to the Allies by the codename “Val”. Even the Junkers Ju88 medium bomber was built with a dive-bombing ability. The Junkers Ju87 Stuka dive bomber encapsulated all of these approaches. In strategic bombing, the dive bomber was not very useful, but Germany did not consider this to be a factor since they expected their air arm to serve as a tactical force supporting the troops on the ground, not as a long-term strategic force. Small single-engine dive bombers were also much cheaper than multi-engine heavies and could be deployed in greater numbers at lower cost. Bombsights of the time were crude and were not capable of hitting pinpoint targets (and this remained true throughout the war, despite the claims made by the Americans for their Norden bombsight). Dive-bombers appealed to them for several reasons: first, they were more accurate than high-level heavy bombers. The most in-depth work was done in Nazi Germany, who was rebuilding its Luftwaffe. But the wooden-frame biplanes of that time were unable to withstand the massive g-forces and stresses that resulted from pulling out of a steep dive, and so the proposal was of limited practicality.īy the mid-1930s, metal-tube mono-wing airframes were becoming strong enough to withstand the necessary g-forces, and the invention of the automatic dive brake (which pulled the plane out of a dive even if the pilot passed out) finally made the idea of dive-bombing useful. In experiments with naval bombers from aircraft carriers, this was found to be particularly useful against small moving targets such as ships. It was found that the most accurate way to hit a pinpoint target on the ground was to dive on it, using the nose of the airplane to aim and releasing the bomb at low altitude before pulling away. By 1918, the Entente had developed the Sopwith Salamander, a specialized ground-attack plane with heavy armor to protect the pilot from enemy fire. Like so many of the basic concepts of air warfare, the idea of “dive bombing” appeared during the First World War. SBD Dauntless on display at the US Naval Aviation Museum ![]() The “dive bomber” was still a relatively new development in air warfare during World War Two, but it quickly demonstrated its usefulness in the Pacific War. ![]()
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