Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

CHAPTER SIX
Air-to-Air Weapons
While the adoption of the machine gun made air-to-air combat feasible, by the midyears
of World War II, it had come close to causing a stand-off: machine gun- (and
even cannon-) armed aircraft dared not approach each other: it was too dangerous.
The alternative, it was clear to German researchers, was to develop small rocketpropelled
flying bombs which could be directed to their targets via either wire-borne
or radio signals from a chase plane which stayed outside the lethal area.
During his post-war interrogation, Generalleutnant
Adolf Gal land described the many and various
weapons the Luftwaffe had used - or had contemplated
using - against the tightly packed formations of
Allied daylight bombers with their heavy defensive
firepower. He described how attacking the formations
from the rear immediately resulted in heavy casualties,
and how the German interceptors then switched
over to attacking them head-on, hoping to break up
the formation and then go after consequently vulnerable
individual aircraft. This worked up to a point, but
only until the bombers began taking concerted evasive
action, and from then - some time in the winter of
1942-43 - the Luftwaffe began looking at alternatives
Above: Henschel developed the Hs 293 for use against
shipping, but an air-to-air variant was also produced.
Left: Germany desperately needed an antidote to massed
formations of Allied bombers like these B-17s.
to the simple cannon and machine gun to arm their
aircraft, to allow them to attack either from unexpected
directions or from outside the effective range of the
Fortress's and Liberator's .5 inch Brownings. Because
the bombers flew so close together, much consideration
was given to bombing them, and a variety of
methods were tested, including dive-bombing individual
aircraft; towing command-detonated 10kg
(221b) fragmentation bombs on long cables (tested in
combat, with two unconfirmed successes, despite the
physical difficulty of actually delivering the weapon,
which trailed out behind the towing aircraft); and
dropping blast and fragmentation bombs on
parachutes ahead of the formation to form an aerial
minefield (this latter method was promising, but
development of a satisfactory weapon came too late).
Other methods included using forward-firing heavy
cannon - essentially, light anti-aircraft and anti-tank
guns - to shoot at them from a great distance, but this
was to prove only marginally effective; and using