Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

CHAPTER SEVEN
Air-to-Surface
Missiles
Hitting a target on the ground with a bomb dropped from an aircraft was never easy;
as soon as effective anti-aircraft artillery and fighter aircraft were added to the
equation, it became very costly, too, particularly in human lives. By the end of the
twentieth century, stand-off bombing using remote guidance was to become
commonplace, but at the time of World War II this was pure fantasy - until German
During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939, the
Luftwaffe discovered that the only really effective
way to deliver bombs on to a point target was in
a near-vertical dive. This procedure they repeated in
1939 in Poland and in 1940 in the Low Countries and
France. Over Britain, later in the year, the Luftwaffe
came across the basic flaw in this principle: dive
bombers were uncomfortably vulnerable to effective
Above: The Henschel Hs 294 guided aerial torpedo's tail
and wings were designed to break off on hitting the water.
Left: An early air-to-surface missile was the Blohm & Voss
Bv 143, mounted here on a Heinkel He 111H.
scientists took up the task.
fighter aircraft and concentrated anti-aircraft artillery.
As an alternative, there was always area bombing
from high altitude, but it was very wasteful and of little
use against isolated high-value targets. Warships at
sea were particularly difficult to hit, and the Luftwaffe
frequently found itself mounting costly raids on
important maritime targets which achieved little or
nothing. Quite early on, thoughts turned to the development
of a bomb which could be guided in flight.
THE RUHRSTAHL X-1
Ruhrstahl's X-4 air-to-air missile showed promise,
but it never lived up to it. Much more useful was the
guided bomb they produced as the X-1. It had a