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Title (Dublin Core)
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U.S. Dive Bombers and its pilots
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Article Title and/or Image Caption (Dublin Core)
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Title: Diving Artillery
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extracted text (Extract Text)
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MOST of us probably have wondered,
as we follow the war news, what it
is like to be a dive bomber. Only a
hero can know, of course, how it feels to
hurl one’s self into the cannon’s mouth. But
I recently undertook to find out what a dive
bomber’s job involves, during the training
period, and I ran into a number of surprises.
A dive bomber, for instance, is a keen
young fellow who eats his greens even more
religiously than Popeye the Sailor. He keeps
close tab on his weight, but he eats butter
in big chunks. Not only is he a perfect
physical and mental specimen, but a doctor
lives with him in his squadron, as alert to
his least symptom as is a mother watching
her first baby for a sign of sniffles.
The “blacking out,” the violent pull of
gravity, and most of the other melodra-
matic terrors we have been told about diving,
do not concern the dive pilot very much as
he hurtles toward the ground. He is too
intent on various wayward faults his plane
can develop in its falconlike course. And
until he meets a German or a Jap, his great-
est enemy is the common cold.
‘When I arrived at the air field and pre-
sented my credentials, Lieut. R. E. Strick-
land was hurrying out of his tent, buttoning
his flying jacket.
“You're just in time, come on,” he said.
“We've got a mission to bomb a motorized
column.”
Five minutes later, trussed into a para-
chute and strapped tightly into the machine-
gunner’s seat behind Bob Strickland, I was
flying at the head of the first dive-bombing
squadron to be activated by the United
States Army. We were six ships, low-wing
Douglas monoplanes from the Sth Squadron,
3rd Bombardment Group (Light). It had
taken up its new specialty last summer. As
its squadron commander, I suppose Lieuten-
ant Strickland might be called our Army's
first dive bomber.
‘We had flown for a half hour, high over
a jigsaw, contour-plowed landscape, when
an abrupt lurch of the airplane brought me
up sharply to attention. Strickland was
looking back at me over his shoulder. He
made a quick overhand, downward motion
with his hand. Now we were going to dive.
Ever since the Battle of France I had been
‘wondering a lot of things about dive bomb-
ing. Now at last I was going to find out the
answers. Hurriedly I looked over the side,
trying to see our target, but my inexperi-
enced eye was quite unable to identify it in
the finely etched panorama 9,000 feet below.
The plane's lurch had been a wobbling
signal for the squadron to move into string
formation. They were swinging over behind
us now, into echelon right.
Suddenly our plane seemed to stop in mid-
air. It felt as though a speeding driver had
slammed on his brakes. Indeed, that was
what had happened. Our diving flaps had
opened, pulled us up abruptly almost to
stalling speed.
This dive-bombing plane, known as the
A-24, has one point which especially dis-
tinguishes it from other military ships, and
that is the trailing edge of its wings. The
inner half comprises two hinged metal sur-
faces, about a foot and a half wide, which
in normal flight are clamped close together.
Now some tremendous inner leverage had
swung them out, to a sharp angle from the
faces of the wing, one above and one below,
presenting firm resistance to the slip stream.
They acted as brakes, to cut our diving
speed to the point of human tolerance and
control. The flaps were perforated, col-
ander-fashion, with three rows of holes
about three inches in diameter, through
which the crowded air could rush. The in-
ner surfaces were painted red and against
the black-green of the plane's back they had
a living look, as though they might be the
distended gills of a hammerhead shark lash-
ing in for the kill.
I got ready to hang on. I rested my fore-
arms on a convenient metal hoop in front
of me and leaned forward. I planted my feet
wide apart, well away from the dual-control
pedals which moved between them. Back-
seat driving would hardly be appreciated
now.
We nosed over, then pulled up sharply and
ran forward again for an instant. Now we
nosed over again, straight downward, like
a canoe going over a waterfall.
There was a confused sensation of not
weighing anything. Pressure pounded in my
ears, and I swallowed hard to relieve it. I
was surprised not to feel that yawning un-
pleasantness in the abdomen which always
comes when an elevator drops too fast. I
glanced at the racing needle of my altimeter,
and we had dived 3,000 feet before the glance
was finished.
Looking ahead to see the target, I found
myself staring merely at a bulkhead and
Strickland’s head and shoulders. We had
dropped a mile before I realized the place |
to look was over his head, out through the
top canopy, where the sky should be. The
solid earth was close looming, rushing up
upon us. !
Our nose began to pull up. Now every-
thing was pushing upward against my sag-
ging muscles. My pillowed parachute be- |
came hard. Arms and feet were straining
under a suddenly terrific load. Some in-
exorable force was pushing my head down,
downward, chin into chest. My radio head- |
set fell off heavily, and a rushing roar en- |
gulfed me. It was about a four-G pull-out,
they told me later. That is, centrifugal
force and momentum had multiplied the
usual pull of gravity by four times. For an
instant I had weighed 660 pounds.
It was over quickly. The plane was slant-
ing downward gently and back over the side
our target could be seen. It was a train of
personnel carriers, armored cars parked
along a roadside. Soldiers were standing up
in them, unprotected, rubber-necking at the
planes. Theoretically the carnage was
terrific.
But it was a sight worth staring at. The
second plane was just pulling out at 1,500
feet, the third was half way down, while a
fourth was poised to strike. Down they came
like rockets in reverse.
Just how fast they were coming I don’t
know. Maybe it had taken 20 seconds to
dive a mile and a half. That would be about
250 miles an hour. It had seemed a lot
quicker.
Flaps closed and speeding, our planes
were skimming the tree tops now, pulling
into formation. Hedge-hopping, grass-cut- |
ting, skipping through the dew, hardly 20
feet above the foliage. Down close to the
ground was the safest place to be for an
escape. |
Dive bombing was invented by the U. S.
Navy, back in the 1920's, and was developed
secretly for some years. In 1932 somebody
let the cat out of the bag, and the idea was
seized by the German Luftwaffe, to be used |
with devastating effect in the land offensive |
of May, 1940.
‘To most of us dive bombing was then a
new and terrifying thought, but it was noth-
ing new to our Army airmen and they re-
mained convinced that for ground strafing
against troops their own method of light
bombardment was better. They had de-
veloped a low-flying, twin-engine ship, now
known as the A-20A (called the Boston by
the R.A.F.), especially adapted to appear
surprisingly over a clump of trees or a ridge
of land, sprinkle a large load of cream-puffs
from an altitude as low as 75 feet, and dis-
appear while the enemy was still surprised.
In another heavily armed form, known as
the Havoc, this same ship has become the
most effective night interceptor the British
have.
Developments supported this American
judgment to a great extent. While low fly-
ing soon demonstrated its value, the Ger-
man Stukas proved relatively ineffective
‘where local air superiority had not been ob-
tained. They had been so successful in
France because no strong pursuit forces
were against them. Also they were vulner-
able to antiaircraft fire.
But still diving had its definite usefulness,
against moving targets, and especially for
carrier-based craft against warships. Our
Navy developed it to the utmost. Meanwhile
the Stukas continued to prove their value
in attacks on British vessels in the Mediter-
ranean. Last year our Army began using
dive-bombing squadrons, borrowed from the
Navy, in all its maneuvers. A part of that
development was this pioneer squadron,
equipped with Navy-type planes, with which
I had now been flying.
Those few seconds of diving had demon-
strated a lot. For instance, without our own
fighters to protect us, we would have been
easy prey for enemy pursuit ships as we
came in and poised for the
dive. And a cool machine-
gunner directly below would
have had a very good
chance to knock us off. The
Stukas have found that out.
But of course if there had
been more of us, diving
from various directions, the
odds on our side would have
been improved.
Certainly there is no need
to minimize the velocity and
tension of such a dive as
this, but a good many melo-
dramatic notions had fallen by the wayside
too. For instance there was the matter
of centrifugal force. From what I had heard
of this kind of flying I had half expected to
black out as we pulled up from the dive, but
that proved to be an exaggerated notion.
The black-out is a common thing in some
types of aviation. When a plane makes a
sharp turn at high speed, the centrifugal
force is such that the blood is drawn away
from the pilot's brain and everything goes
black. He becomes blind for the moment
and if the strain continues he goes uncon-
scious temporarily. A pursuit pilot expects
to black out several times in an ordinary
day's rat race, but a dive-bombing pilot
doesn't black out unless he is in bad physical
condition. It is not so bad to go unconscious
in a bank at 15,000 feet, but it's a different
matter altogether if you are at less than
1,500 and roaring straight for the ground.
Probably the greatest prob-
lem of flying nowadays is
that machines have developed
beyond the ability of human
beings to endure them. This
is typified by the ability of en-
gines to operate efficiently at
an altitude where humans al-
most instantly die without an
oxygen mask and are oxygen-
starved even when breathing
the gas in pure form. So also
an airplane’s wings can stand
more G's of centrifugal force
than can its pilot. A healthy young man can
generally stand up to about five G's for two
or three seconds without blacking out. The
braking flaps of the diving plane have slowed
it down so that, at four G's, the black-out
danger is averted and also the ship can be
precisely controlled by a young man so well
in tune that his reactions are almost in-
stantaneous.
At luncheon after our bombing expedition
the pilots told some of the things they had
been doing during those tense seconds of the
dive. :
The most difficult thing was to trim ship.
The whirling propeller, driving an airplane,
develops torque, a twisting reaction which
tends to turn the ship to the left. For normal
flight the stabilizer is set permanently at an
angle to counteract this. But in a dive the
propeller no longer is driving the plane and
the torque is abated. So the off-center
stabilizer throws the ship into a skid. That
is, the tail slips off to one side.
Now, the whole principle of dive bombing
is that the plane itself is aimed at the tar-
get, with a telescope sight which runs paral-
lel to the longitudinal axis of the ship. If the
ship is moving in one direction and pointing
in another, aim is thrown completely off.
“In a dive you're practically standing on
your left rudder,” said the youngster sit-
ting next to me. “That corrects the stabi-
lizer and stops the skid. You've got to keep
the ball centered. You see, the bank indi-
cator on your instrument board has a ball
in a curved tube, and if the plane is skidding
that ball rolls off center.”
‘While thus trimming ship to avoid a skid,
the pilot must also select the proper angle
of dive. The sight is set to work with reason-
able accuracy at an angle between 70 and 80
degrees. Remember this is degrees and not
a percentage. An 80-degree dive is about 89
percent of a true vertical angle. Coming on
his target, the flyer picks his moment and
noses downward. Probably his angle is now
a bit shallow, so he pulls up and runs for-
ward a bit. He may perform this trial-and-
error process several times in the first 1,000
feet of descent, before he attains the proper
steepness and lets loose the
all-out plunge.
The dive is likely to begin
around 70 degrees and wind
up at 80. But if his angle gets
much steeper the pilot is in
trouble. The wings lose their
hold on the atmosphere and
the ship begins to rotate.
Corkscrewing, they call it.
The whole earth seems to
whirl, and in a crazy eccen-
tric fashion, for the pilot's
sight is of course not at the
axis of his rotation. Aim is lost, and in pull-
ing out of the dive the pilot has also lost his
sense of direction, which may be embarrass-
ing in a battle.
Diving is easier into the wind than with it,
because a tail wind may carry the plane
into too steep an angle. It may even carry
the ship beyond the target, so the wing load
is reversed. But a good pilot has to learn
to dive from any direction.
Having trimmed ship and got the proper
angle, the pilot's next job is to look through
his sight and hold his cross hairs right on
the target until, at about 1,500 feet, he is
ready to release the three bombs suspended
under his wings and fuselage. One hazard
developing at this moment, sometimes called
target fascination, is that the pilot finds
himself glued so fast to the target he can
hardly force himself to pull off. Those re-
porting this difficulty, however, have always
been able to master it.
In lunching with these pilots, I noticed
how much colorful foud there was on the
table. Servings of butter were several times
the usual size, and it was very yellow butter.
There were raw carrots, green vegetables,
lots of salad.
“TI don't like
this stuff worth a hoot, but Doc says eat it,
and so I do,” said the flyer across the table,
attacking a large plate of salad greens.
“We call it duty food.”
“Doc” was the squadron flight surgeon,
one of the most important men in this or any
other military-aviation outfit. He was filling
his flyers full of vitamins, especially vitamin
A, which is found in the carotene of butter-
fat, carrots, and greens. Carotene has some
mysterious chemical connection with the
adaptation of the eyes for night vision; and
these pilots were flying by night as well
as by day.
Dive bombing, as military flying goes, is a
simple operation; but, even more than some
other types of piloting, it requires split-
second reaction. The dietary care was but
one example of the strict regimen which it
was necessary for the pilots to follow in
order to maintain efficient operation.
‘The flight surgeon's job, as applied to this
or any other squadron, is another story.
But with the diving outfit there is one aspect
of his work which has to have special
emphasis. That is the watch he must keep
on the upper respiratory organs of the fly-
ers. The change of atmospheric pressure in
an 8,000-foot dive is so violent and sudden
that anything wrong with the nose or throat
is likely to give the pilot great trouble with
his ears.
I had an example of this myself, the
second time I tried a dive, forgetting that
I had a slight nasal irritation. Watching
the ground rushing up at us, I also forgot
to swallow and thus ventilate my middle
ear. Half way down, there came a sudden
sharp jab of pain in my left ear, which
increased with each foot of dive until by
the time we reached the ground the pressure
on the eardrum was agonizing. It was a
half hour before the pain was relieved, three
weeks before that ear felt normal again.
They explained to me what had happened.
The eardrum separates the outer and inner
ears. The outer ear is connected directly to
the atmosphere, but the inner ear is thus
connected only by the small Eustachian
tube, which runs into the throat at the nasal
pharynx. The pressure in these two cham-
bers should be equal. When we climb in an
airplane, atmospheric pressure decreases,
and the compressed air in the inner ear
easily escapes through the Eustachian tube.
But when the process is reversed, the air
has a much harder time getting back. Swal-
lowing helps it. That's the reason for the
chewing gum they give you in an airliner.
When descent is gradual, there is usually
no special problem.
But in a diving descent, the pressure in-
creases very suddenly, by more than one
third within a few seconds. At 9,000 feet the
barometric pressure is 21.38 inches of mer-
cury, while at 1,000 feet it is up to 28.86
inches. Under this sudden change the soft
mouth of the Eustachian tube is likely to
collapse, like a rubber tube which is sucked.
Then the increasing pressure seals it against
the entrance of air and the eardrum has to
absorb the pressure by bulging inward.
The least cold in the head or sore throat,
by swelling the opening of the tube or
clogging it, exaggerates these difficulties.
In addition, any throat infection is likely to
be carried into the ear by the inrush of air.
At the least sign of such trouble, the flight
surgeon puts the dive bomber down for duty
not involving flying.
This Sth Bombardment Squadron is a
venerable outfit, with traditions going back
to World War days. It had a great deal to
do with developing the Army's technique
of low-level attack bombing. But except for
the commander, its veterans were trans-
ferred when it took up its new specialty.
These dive bombers were youngsters fresh
out of flying school, hot With enthusiasm
for the development of what was for the
Army a new type of flying.
They had learned it quickly, for as
military flying goes it is a very simple thing.
It involves none of the intricate teamwork
between pilot and bombardier in using a
bomb sight, none of the elaborate correc-
tions required by level-flight marksmanship.
Dive bombing is basically just another
maneuver in the flying of an airplane, and
after a few principles are explained to the
fiyer, the rest is practice. Of course there
are tricks to it, just as there are tricks
about making a basketball go through the
hoop, but those are within the realm of
military secrecy.
Up to now we have heard of dive bombing
mainly during the German offensives in
Europe. The next time it breaks into the
news may well be when the American Fleet
engages the Japanese. All our naval pilots
are dive bombers, along with their other
skills, and the art is one of our main naval
weapons. With our war now centering in
the Malay Archipelago, a combination of
sea and air campaigning, dive bombing may
well assume an importance greater than
has ever been anticipated.
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Contributor (Dublin Core)
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Hickman Powell (Article Writer)
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Language (Dublin Core)
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eng
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Date Issued (Dublin Core)
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1942-04
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pages (Bibliographic Ontology)
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90-96, 220, 222
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Rights (Dublin Core)
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Public Domain (Google Digitized)
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Archived by (Dublin Core)
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Roberto Meneghetti
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Marco Bortolami (editor)
Popular Science Monthly, v. 140, n. 4, 1942
