War Planes of the Second World War 7.- Bombers and reconnaissance aircraft [antikvár]

I^'i'i'li ^ T, ' , i '' !I ' ! . : ' i ' ^ , y II ^ ' I i'-f'< I :'rr: il •y I'li' i;*^ > i-r INTRODUCTION In the three years immediately preceding the Second World War the normal metamorphosis in combat aircraft design was accelerated to an unprecedented degree. Lessons being gleaned from the Spanish Civil War, coupled with a markedly increased tempo in technical evolution engendered by the approaching clouds of a more widespread conflict, radically changed the war plane in every category, both in appearance and capability, and none more so than the bomber in its multifarious forms. Widely divergent schools of thought existed, of course, concerning both the role and the form that the bomber should take. The conventionalists insisted that the bomber should rely on heavy defensive armament to protect it from the opposing interceptor; the visionaries protested that given suflScient speed the bomber could elude the interceptor entirely. There was hesitancy between carrying a small load quickly and a large load far; the proponents of strategic bombing vied with those of tactical bombing for priority in development funds. But large or small, the bombers that began to emerge in the late 'thirties bore little resemblance to their predecessors of a few short years earlier. In no major aircraft-manufacturing country was this change more marked than in France, whose war plane progeny occupy more than half of this volume. French aircraft designers had displayed a quite astonishing propensity towards angularly ugly monstrosities of bombers; ponderous war planes making few concessions to the demands of aerodynamic cleanliness. Yet, by the late 'thirties, these un-gmnly creations were giving place to bombers which, by standards of the day, offered the very quintessence of aerodynamic elegance. Unfortunately for France's Armée de l'Air, these new bombers, although to be compared with the finest extant, attained quantity production too late to affect to any marked degree the issue when Germany began her offensive in May 1940, and the bulk of that service's first-line combat elements found themselves either immersed in conversion programmes or equipped with bombers so obsolete as to possess little chance of survival in the skies over France. But the Armée de l'Air was by no means alone in possessing a preponderance of obsolete or, at least, obsolescent bombers during the opening phases of the conflict. The smaller air arms that were soon to become involved were, of course, ill-equipped for the type of aerial warfare by which they were to be faced, their bombing elements having enjoyed less than their share of their countries' budgets. But some of the bombers entering service with the larger air arms when hostilities began possessed a measure of built-in obsolescence resulting from the short-sightedness of those responsible for framing the specifications to which they had been evolved. Much the same may be said for reconnaissance and army co-operation aircraft which share with bombers the pages of this volume. Neglected for so many years—years in which such war planes were invariably aircraft designed at the outset for roles far removed from that of observing terrestrial activity—they only began to come into their own shortly before the Second World War when the vital importance of aerial reconnaissance began final y to be appreciated. But the Second World War had many fronts, and conditions existed over some of these that permitted, for a time at least, the operation of bombers and reconnaissance aircraft that would have been hard put to survive a single sortie elsewhere. Thus, the aircraft described