Sword of Shiva - Страница 21

The concept met with initial resistance among senior Luftwaffe leadership, but the ReichluftMinisterium ultimately authorized project Beethoven, to build a composite flying bomb under the codename Mistel (mistletoe).

The first operational test of a Mistel occurred in July of 1943. The control plane was a Messerschmitt Mf-109E fighter, mounted to the top of an unmanned Ju-88A bomber, and wired directly into the larger aircraft’s throttles and flight controls. The fighter pilot made a smooth takeoff, and flew the composite aircraft directly toward the target area. At the appropriate range, he detached his Messerschmitt from the bomber, allowing the Ju-88A to make its final approach on autopilot. The accuracy of the attack could not have been better, and the explosives aboard the bomber utterly destroyed the target.

The Mistel did not much resemble the Sperry Aerial Torpedo, or the Kettering Bug of the previous world war, but this new German design was the direct descendent of those earlier flying weapons. In the space of a single test flight, the Mistel had proven that the concept of an unmanned aerial bomb was both valid, and deadly.

The officers of the Luftwaffe high command forgot their reservations, and became instantly enthusiastic about the Mistel. They quickly began planning ways to improve the Mistel design, and push the weapon into production and use.

The Mistel went into operation in June of 1944, almost exactly a year after the first test flight. The final configuration utilized a Focke-Wulf Fw-190A fighter atop a Junkers Ju-88A-4. The nose and crew cabin of the bomber were removed, and replaced by a 7,720 pound hollow-charge warhead.

Tests demonstrated that the enormous Mistel warhead could penetrate virtually any thickness of reinforced concrete. A trial attack against an old French battleship wrought astonishing damage to the target vessel, revealing the Mistel’s potential as an anti-ship weapon. This potential was to be tested quickly, as several Mistels were used to conduct attacks against Allied ships during the weapon’s first month of operational service.

The Nazi high command began planning a massive coordinated Mistel campaign against the Allies, codenamed Operation Eisenhammer (Iron Hammer). Over 250 Mistels were built, but Operation Eisenhammer never took place. The accumulated Mistels were expended in numerous smaller attacks, mostly directed against bridges in the path of the Allied advance.

The Luftwaffe developed a number of minor variants to the Mistel, incorporating modifications and/or aircraft substitutions to accommodate various mission profiles. A jet-powered model was considered, to be built around the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter, but the concept was never implemented. Still more variants were proposed, some of which were far-fetched, even by the standards of the Mistel program. Most of the more drastic ideas did not ever progress beyond the drawing board.

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While Germany was developing and deploying its new pilotless killing machine, on the far side of the Atlantic, the United States was once again pursuing the idea of the aerial torpedo.

During a visit to England in 1936, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William H. Standley witnessed a live firing exercise against a British Queen Bee training aircraft (a radio-controlled version of the de Havilland Tiger Moth biplane, configured as an unmanned flying target). Impressed by the Queen Bee’s performance, the CNO contacted Rear Admiral Ernest J. King, the head of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and directed him to research options for developing remote-controlled aircraft for the U.S. Navy.

At the CNO’s suggestion, Rear Admiral King chose Lieutenant Commander Delmar S. Fahrney to lead the project. A veteran pilot with a masters degree in aeronautical engineering, Fahrney was experienced and technically skilled. He was also a visionary.

Working in cooperation with the Naval Aircraft Factory, Fahrney supervised the modification of two Curtiss biplanes and two Stearman biplanes into “drones.” (It’s fairly certain that Fahrney was the first person to use the term “drone” in the context of unmanned aircraft. This was probably intended as a friendly acknowledgement of the British Queen Bee from which the U.S. Navy program had taken its inspiration.)

By 1937, Fahrney’s team was conducting flight tests of these unmanned drones. A year later, the team’s drones were utilized for anti-aircraft firing tests against gun crews aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. The drones turned out to be difficult targets, surviving barrage after barrage during simulated attack runs against the warship.

The success of the drones, and the ship’s failure to knock them out of the sky, forced a sweeping reevaluation of anti-aircraft capabilities throughout the fleet. The tests with USS Ranger also convinced Fahrney that radio-controlled aircraft could be used as offensive weapons, conducting direct bomb or torpedo attacks against enemy ships.

Fahrney quickly arranged an operational test, sending an “assault drone” armed with a dummy warhead against the battleship USS Utah. Unfortunately for Fahrney, the gunners aboard the Utah were better shots than their shipmates on the Ranger. As the drone was commencing its dive bombing run, a burst of flak made a direct hit on the unmanned aircraft. The drone crashed into the sea, ending the simulated attack.

Fahrney was not discouraged. His demonstration had been cut short by a lucky shot, but he had no doubt that the underlying concept was both practical and achievable. A remote-controlled drone could attack an enemy warship, without risking the life of a pilot.

While investigating options for improving his assault drone, Fahrney encountered Dr. Vladimir Zworykin, a brilliant immigrant from Russia who had become the chief scientist for the Radio Corporation of America (better known as RCA). Zworykin, who would eventually hold key patents for the technology behind both the television and the electron microscope, had been trying for years to interest the U.S. Navy in the idea of a flying torpedo guided by an electric eye. Navy leaders had regarded Dr. Zworykin’s concept as unnecessary, expensive, and — in all likelihood — impossible.

Fahrney took one look at the proposal, and disregarded all previous evaluations of its potential. He quickly arranged a contract with RCA to develop a series of experimental television systems for use aboard Navy aircraft.

Because Zworykin had been tinkering with the idea for years, he had a functional prototype ready in only a few months. The first model weighed 340 pounds, far too heavy for a relatively small drone, but light enough for testing aboard a manned aircraft. The initial tests were successful, proving that video signals from one airplane could be seen and interpreted from another plane up to 20 miles away.

While the prototype tests were underway, Zworykin’s team at RCA was working on a new and smaller model. Dubbed ‘Block-1’ because of its rectangular shape, the new model weighed only 97 pounds, and fit into an 8x8x24 inch box (i.e. the block).

Before the Block-1 prototype could be installed on an airframe for testing, the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted its now infamous bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, inflicting unprecedented damage on the U.S. Pacific fleet. The American aircraft carriers and some light escort ships emerged unscathed, because they were absent from Pearl Harbor during the raid, but the majority of the fleet was devastated.

The U.S. Navy was thrown into chaos. The battleships, the primary might of the fleet at that time, had been mauled. Some of the damaged hulls would be salvaged and returned to service, but — with the Japanese Imperial Navy rampaging through the Pacific — the United States could not sit idle and wait for the battleships to be repaired. The American Navy needed to be combat-ready immediately.

The aircraft carriers were a major part of the solution. They represented a radical departure from the big guns and heavy armor of dreadnought warfare. In the coming months, the carriers would clearly establish themselves as the future of naval power projection, but in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, their reliability and capability had not yet been proven. In this climate of uncertainty, Fahrney’s television-guided assault drone suddenly seemed like a very promising idea.

In February of 1942, the Navy issued a top secret directive known as Project Option, making the assault drone a national defense priority. Fahrney and Zworykin didn’t even have a functional prototype ready, when they abruptly found themselves with a full-scale development program under the leadership of Commodore Oscar Smith.

Only two months after the program’s inception, the Project Option team launched a successful test attack against the USS Aaron Ward, a destroyer moving at 15 knots with full evasive maneuvering. The unmanned assault drone, which had been converted from an existing torpedo plane, was guided from remote control by the pilot of a plane circling 8 miles away — completely out of sight of the destroyer under attack.

Watching the remote video feed from a television camera in the nose of the assault drone, the pilot had no trouble guiding the drone into a perfect attack run. The torpedo ran straight under the hull of the wildly evading destroyer. If the weapon had been armed with a live warhead, USS Aaron Ward would have been blasted out of the water.