Skip Bombing Illustrated
 

Here's a well illustrated Nov. 15, 1943 "How-To" from the U.S.Army on skip bombing ... in Life Magazine of all places! Whole issue is good, as usual, but cruise on down to page 93 for the skip bombing.


http://oldlifemagazines.com/the-1940...-magazine.html


:D

lol.. who knew... finding stuff like this in Life Magazine :D
good find... thnx!

Excellent find :P

Nice! :cool:

A P-38 skip bombed at an altitude of 10 ft.

The "How-To" provides a taught altitude of 50 ft. 50 ft = 15.24 m

Good-bye 2 second arming time on bombs?

A great find, thx.

As far as the two second arming "requirement", it was common for armorers to adjust the arming timing before a low level mission by spinning the fuses in a predetermined number of turns. As far as safety goes, the Eighth Air Force had a couple of bad accidents before D-Day due to dropping fused bombs while loading so it was decided to not install the fuses until the bombs were loaded. They had one explosion the following spring so bombs could still go off without fuses installed.

Nothing wrong with two sec arming fuse. The differece is that actually in IL2 is considered the time the case hits the water, not when the detonator hits the ship. You have to consider the time of drop plus the time the bomb skips over the water.

Thus there is something wrong with the two second fuse, yes?

Of course the 2 sec. arming time is not perfect, it's just less wrong then before!

The arming delay was adjustable by screwing in the fuse a bit which was done quite often in the field. The practice of pulling up at bomb release wasn't to put a ballistic arc on the flight of the bomb, it was to keep the bomb from bouncing up and striking the plane, which did, rarely, happen.

One thing I noted in the read is our inability in IL-2 to suppress defensive fire from the target.

About the only thing our escort fighters can do is help distract the AAA gunners rather than strafe and put a couple of MG's out for a short time

At the moment when attacking I generaly fire on my attack run using my convergence to guage the distance to target.

It would be good if we could direct our fire on the defensive guns or even the bridge to remove a coordinated defence.

Thanks for the link it's really good!