Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/534

 Dropping Death from the Skies

The bomb dropper and his murderous winged weapons which deal quick and ghastly death

Bv Carl Dienstbach

��Kadel and Herbert

��HARDLY had the airplane been adopted as a military weapon some four years before the outbreak of the great European war, when the pos- sibilities of bomb dropping began to be considered. To the general public at least, it seemed easy to wipe out a fort, to demolish a bridge, or to blow up a battleship by the simple expedient of dropping on it a hundred pounds of high explosive. Engineers knew better. Long before the first Zeppelin flew over London, it was pointed out that it was hard to hit a target on the ground from an elevated platform moving at fifty miles an hour and more, because al- lowances had to be made for deflecting winds for the horizontal motion acquired by the bomb from the airplane. To hit a target the plane's height and speed over ground had to be known with almost impossible ac- curacy, and even if known, an in- finitesimal hesita-

��far-seeing than military engineers. It reckoned with moral effects in its own unreasoning way rather than with phy- sical principles. Bomb-dropping has be- come an indispensable mode of attack. The civilians of all the warring powers protest against it in vain. Germans de- nounce the "baby killing" tactics of the Allied aviators as hotly as England de- nounces the German slaughter of defense- less woman and children. Whether or not fortified places

���Modern "fletched" airplane bomb. Note streamline form, size, and weight, as shown

��tion in releasing the bomb would spoil the aim. A truly super-human sense of time was demanded. The difficulty, only vastly exaggerated, is the same as that which a hunter experiences in hitting running or flying gamj by aiming ahead of the target. Whether the target moves .swiftly or the gun and the missile have a fast motion of their own, aiming ahead causes all the trouble.

On the whole, the public has been more

��are bombed, civil- ians invariably suf- fer. A dozen bombs may be aimed at a muni- tions factory. One, perhaps, finds its mark. The rest are scattered over a residential quarter with an effect too ghastly to be described. Aim at a powder mill and you hit a hospital.

As the war pro- gressed, bombing became more ac- curate, although the misses still far outnumbered the hits. The reason for this increased accuracy is re- vealed in the truly remarkable pnotographs of French bombs which we publish herewith and which have been permitted to reach this coun- try by a lenient censor.

The bombs pictured have been called "aerial torpedoes." They do bear an outward resemblance to the naval tor- pedo. For all that, the designation is incorrect. The internal construction

bears little resemblance to that of a naval torpedo. The bomb shown is provided

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