Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

Above: The simplest of all air-to-air missiles was the
unguided rocket, fired in a salvo. This Ba 349 was armed
with 24 R4M rockets with 250g (8.8oz) warheads.
obliquely firing cannon to attack them from below.
This approach was to prove devastatingly effective
against RAF night bombers, but less so against the
USAAF, whose aircraft had belly and waist gunners.
One of the reasons that heavy forward-firing guns
were ineffective was the amount of recoil they produced:
it slowed the aircraft perceptibly if more than
a few rounds were fired. The effect should not be
underestimated. One trainee in an Me 262, who found
himself committed to landing on too short a strip, let
go with the four 30mm MK 108 in the aircraft's nose
and brought his aircraft up short of the end of the runway,
thanks to the additional braking effect. Another
reason was the extra drag these usually externally
mounted guns created, reducing the aircraft's performance
considerably. For the Germans, the employment
of relatively heavy calibre guns in aircraft seems
to have had a lasting fascination. Other nations' air
forces tried it too; the ultimate in that line, according
to one source, seems to have been the fitting of a
32pdr (94mm) anti-tank gun into a Mosquito. For the
Germans, the programme to adapt light anti-aircraft
guns and anti-tank guns - notably in 3.7cm and 5cm
calibres, though 7.5cm was tested, too - continued to
the war's end. Some of the last German aircraft left in
combat were a pair of Me 262A-la/U4s with the 5cm
Mauser MK 214 mounted in the nose. One of these
aircraft, nicknamed 'Wilma Jeanne' was captured
intact by US forces, but was destroyed after it suffered
engine failure during a flight to Cherbourg, where it
was to have been loaded aboard a ship for the USA.
There was an alternative: the so-called 'recoilless
rifle', invented during World War I by an American
naval officer named Davis. A variety of recoilless
rifles were mounted on aircraft and tested, but though
the type worked well enough in principle - and one, it
is reported, was used successfully in combat - this
was a single-shot weapon, with all the problems
thereof. In fact we may bear in mind that the only reason
air-to-air combat had ever been even possible was
thanks to the machine gun, with its unique ability to
keep on throwing bullets into a target area until something
ran into one or more of them. The weapons in
question were of two basic types. The simpler type
worked on the counter-shot principle and was almost
two guns in one. The 'ordinary' barrel contained the
projectile; a subsidiary barrel behind the breech, precisely
aligned with the regular barrel, contained a
counter-shot of the same weight, usually composed of
wax or grease and lead shot in a paper cartridge. In
between them lay the chamber containing the propellant
cartridge. When the gun was fired, both projectile
and counter-shot left their respective barrels with the
same energy, and their recoils thus cancelled each
other out. In the more refined (and more complex)
version of the weapon, the cartridge case became the