Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 6 - Bomber - full transcript
In eight decades man went from the invention of powered flight to the awesome B2 Stealth bomber. From bombs thrown from the cockpit to laser-guided bunker busters, these birds carry the fight to the enemy, destroying everything in...
You're watching the Military Channel.
Go behind the lines.
Bombers pounding the earth from the skies.
They can take out tanks, flits bunkers, annihilate armies and flatten cities.
Bombs away.
Spearheading assaults and covering retreats, airstrikes have become the ultimate
application of firepower.
This is war. This is total war. And total war means you destroy the enemy.
Get ready for takeoff as we go back through generations of technology to find
out how bombs and bombers became the best of the best.
It's time to go ballistic.
The small diameter bomb is the hardest and smartest bomb in the world.
The SDB combines the latest in precision guidance technology with awesome
kinetic and explosive energy.
No one is safe. No where is safe.
And if that little target is a tank, bang! You lose the tank.
The mainstay of the Air Force arsenal, the small diameter bomb is compact enough
to be carried in huge numbers and destructive enough to kill the hardest
targets.
It really is the bomb.
Now weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology to reveal how heavy bombers, stealth science and precision guidance
have come together to ensure that the most advanced bomb on the planet always
gets its man.
In eight decades, man went from the first powered flight to the awesome B-2
stealth bomber.
From wood and wire airframes to the most deadly weapon on the modern
battlefield, all in a single lifetime.
Almost from the minute that the airplane was built, people conceptualized
dropping bombs from it.
It was World War I that gave the bomber clearance for takeoff.
Military strategists were desperate to break the bloody stalemate of trench
warfare.
So they took to the air.
There was a desperate desire to find a way around the dominance of the
defensive.
In order to get past the deadlock in the First World War, especially in the
Western Front, you had to leap off the ground and up into the air.
The specialized bombing aircraft capable of carrying a reasonable payload, say
several hundred pounds of bombs, that really only emerges in the First World
War.
It emerges largely because of the work of an individual whose name we associate
primarily with helicopters, Igor Sikorsky.
And he developed a whole family of bombers called the Ilya Muromets, which flew
during the First World War.
The work of Sikorsky and the Russians was picked up by the British.
The Hanley Page Company fathered the highly successful Model O family in 1915.
The First World War bomber was not exactly devastating.
Later models could carry barely 15 lightweight 100-pound bombs.
And top speed was a wheezing, panting 90 miles an hour.
The bombs were small because the performance of the aircraft was limited and
bombs added to the weight of the aircraft.
In reality, the strategic bombing was more of a nuisance and an aggravation than
had any real impact on the military outcome of the war.
But it was the beginning of the notion that you could carry the war to the
enemy.
The Germans had a different idea, Zeppelins.
Now Germany had placed a great deal of effort in using the airship as a long-
range bombing system
and had undertaken bombing raids over England, for example, and other target
areas as well, even Russia.
But the airship was a highly vulnerable weapon.
Zeppelins were full of tens of thousands of cubic meters of hydrogen.
This could be a problem.
And a Zeppelin is a really efficient way to move a heavy load in the air unless
somebody's shooting at you.
Or you catch fire.
The extreme vulnerability of airships meant that the airplane was the future.
Airframes were still being built of wood and canvas.
Wood was light and really did grow on trees.
But despite resistance, some visionaries made planes out of metal.
People have said it's counterintuitive.
That if you take a look at kites and you take a look at light flying materials,
you know, balsa wood, things like that,
wood is so much lighter and metal is so much heavier.
But if we think of the skills that you have to have to work in wood very
effectively,
it requires a great deal of skill and a great deal of training,
something that is not necessarily a requirement if you're trying to mass produce
things very rapidly using a mechanized industrial process.
By the outbreak of World War II, bombers were multi-engined metal beasts.
They had banks of powerful engines to generate enough power to lift 50 tons of
steel into the air.
The future of bomber design was set.
From World War II heavies to the B-2 stealth bomber, metal was the way forward.
But in 1942, the de Havilland Company turned back the clock
and developed a wooden bomber that was the fastest plane in the world, the
Mosquito.
The British Royal Air Force didn't immediately fall in love with the new speed
stinger.
Wooden airframes were the past.
Aircraft of the future would be made of metal. Everybody knew that.
At the time, all the strategic materials were metal, but there was no call for
timber.
But chief designer Geoffrey de Havilland was determined to prove the doubters
wrong.
When they went down to the Air Ministry to sell this as a bomber, I thought they
were going to lock him up,
because who's going to make a wooden aircraft as a bomber?
But with Britain's stocks of metal running out, it made sense to try other
materials and expertise.
There was an idea that the Mosquito could take advantage of some excess capacity
in the British furniture-making industry.
The people that were employed to make it were furniture cabinet makers,
carpenters, all unemployed at the time,
the finest piece of furniture this country has ever built.
The RAF skepticism didn't last. They were knocked out by the wooden wonder's
stunning trial results.
The lightweight Balsa and Spruce airframe was propelled at over 400 miles an
hour by the two Rolls-Royce V-12 engines.
That's four times as fast as the lumbering Handley Page.
It proved itself when the Air Ministry representatives came to have a
demonstration of the prototype.
They were completely shocked and taken over, and production orders were given
straight away.
Cool aircraft.
The Mosquito was fast because of its light wooden airframe, but the quest for
speed changed with the invention of the first jet engine aircraft.
The wooden airframe revival was over, and the all-metal supersonic bomber was
just around the corner.
The arrival of the jet engine made the globe-spanning intercontinental bomber a
reality for the first time.
Bombers are built to carry the fight to the enemy.
In an age of long-range, super-fast jet bombers, war knows no boundaries.
Jet-powered strike aircraft like the B-2 stealth bomber and the B-1 Lancer can
sprint to targets anywhere in the world and be back in time for lunch.
It's the bomber's job to penetrate far behind enemy lines to strategic targets,
really anywhere on the globe.
But rewind to the Second World War, and bombers were powered by piston engines
and propellers.
The prop was being pushed harder and harder.
In a new era of intercontinental warfare, you needed a bomber with
intercontinental range.
Even before Pearl Harbor, we were already contemplating bombers that could
operate from the continental United States, across the Atlantic, or across the
Pacific, to hit far-flung targets.
The B-29 was the first bomber born to cruise at high altitude.
Its 8,800 horsepower took it to over 30,000 feet, where it could evade fighters
and anti-aircraft fire.
The altitude tested the Boeing designers to the max.
The B-29 was the first bomber to be pressurized, allowing the crew to survive
the thin air and endure the 15-hour missions.
Breathing apparatus and heated suits no longer needed.
You didn't have to wear the bulky flight clothing, the big heavy leather
clothing, or the oxygen mask.
The B-36 Peacemaker dramatically raised the bar.
Finally getting off the ground in 1947, it was capable of flying 10,000 miles in
a single mission.
Six 3,800 horsepower engines made the B-36 the world's largest ever piston-
driven propeller aircraft. A true monster.
The B-36 had six of these engines.
It was first designed during the early part of the Second World War, when it
looked like we were going to have to fight Germany from bases in the U.S.
It was 28 cylinders and set in seven banks, air-cooled, and it was probably one
of the most complex and powerful engines ever built.
Despite its complexity, the piston engine uses technology that would be familiar
to an auto mechanic.
The term piston engine comes from the fact that you have inside each of these
cylinders a piston that moves up and down.
And this is where the power is actually produced for the engine.
Air is mixed with gasoline.
Once the air mixture is in, the piston comes up, compresses the mixture, then at
the top a spark ignites the mixture and pushes the piston down.
And that's what produces the power. Much the same as an automobile. Same
principle.
The piston engine had poor power-to-weight ratio.
The B-29 and the B-36 Peacemaker were slow, barely getting past 350 miles an
hour.
The birth of jet engine aircraft in 1944 changed everything.
German aviation genius Willy Messerschmitt launched the lethal ME-262 fighter
and a world race to catch up.
In 1947, Boeing launched the B-47 prototype, their first jet bomber.
Instead of relying on the rotating wings of the propeller, the jet engine
generated awesome thrust through the expulsion of high-speed exhaust gases.
This engine is an Allison J-33. This was one of the first operational jet
engines used by the U.S.
It's a centrifugal flow engine. What that means, the air will enter through the
intakes here,
and it is distributed by a circular compressor to a series of combustion
chambers around the outside of the engine,
where the fuel-air mixture is ignited and then produces thrust that comes out of
the tailpipe.
This was a quantum leap in aviation technology, and the next generation of
bombers could match their pursuers.
As jet bombers are developed, we start to see bomber aircraft that are as fast
as the fighter aircraft that are trying to shoot them down.
There is no longer a requirement to have an escort for a bomber because the
bomber itself can outrun its pursuit.
Supersonic bombers such as the XP-70 Valkyrie and the B-1 even look like
fighters.
The Valkyrie could top an eye-watering 2,300 miles an hour. That's almost six
times as fast as the B-36.
The image of the lumbering bomber being buzzed by super-fast fighters was
consigned to the history books.
The new jet technology also extended the reach and range of Cold War bombers.
The U.S. could now strike Soviet Russia with bombers based on home soil.
Reach enables you to hold the opponent hostage at a distance.
David didn't grapple with Goliath, so to speak. He hit him with a rock at a
distance.
Continental superpowers need continental super-bombers.
In 1952, the iconic intercontinental jet-powered bomber was launched.
The B-52's eight engines carry 70,000 pounds of bombs on 8,000-mile missions at
nearly 250 miles an hour faster than the lumbering B-36.
A giant of aviation history, its power, range and payload make it an
extraordinary aircraft with a distinguished past and a big future.
One of the B-52's biggest technological innovations was simply its sheer power
and range.
Its early engines gave it a top cruising speed of somewhere above 600 miles per
hour, which was tremendously fast for any bomber.
That gave it the ability to elude some of the fighters and to have a real chance
of getting through.
The incredible range of B-52 bombers became infinite with the invention of mid-
air refueling.
Boeing launched the KC-135 Stratotanker in 1956, and bombing would never be the
same again.
Large tail stabilizers allowed the KC to be held steady.
The bomber could attach to the flying boom with surprising ease.
Missions could go on as long as the crews could cope.
24 hours continuous flying was the new benchmark.
When you think about Strategic Air Command in the Cold War, you think about the
B-52, you also have to think about the KC-135 tankers that gave them the
extended range to reach their targets deep inside the Soviet Union.
It's the tanker that gives the bomber its global range.
This amazing range made the B-52 a crucial cog in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
In an operation codenamed Chromedome, a dozen B-52s based in Greenland were on
permanent 24-hour alert.
They're briefed to patrol the edge of Soviet airspace.
If the USSR launched a surprise nuclear attack, the U.S. could and would strike
right back.
For many years, Chromedome aircraft are flying up into the sky 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, prepared to fight World War III, independent of those poor
guys on the ground who have already been turned into radioactive glass.
The Boeing B-52 is the Air Force's heavyweight champion. Big, ugly and suited to
any mission, the B-52 thrives on delivering heavy hits far from home.
Right now, today, the B-52 alternates with the B-1 in providing air support to
NATO forces as they conduct their foot patrols in some of the roughest areas of
Afghanistan.
Originally tooled for a nuclear strike on Soviet Russia, the B-52 looks set to
spearhead U.S. airstrikes for decades to come.
We have this aircraft actually now projected for service up to the year possibly
2040. This airplane may well become an almost 90-year airplane by the time it's
actually retired.
In less than a lifetime, the bomber developed from wooden biplanes lumbering
towards their targets to metal beasts capable of sprinting at the speed of
sound.
But you can fly as far and as fast as you like. It's all about what you do when
you get there. Bombers are only as effective as the bombs they drop.
In order to get a bomb through 10 meters of reinforced concrete, you've got to
drive through it with a special bomb.
Since their birth, bombers have been designed for one single purpose, getting
bombs to their target.
And 21st century bombers pack bunker busters that can seek out targets deep
underground. But bombs weren't always so sophisticated.
In the Second World War, the Allies simply pounded the Axis powers with three
and a half million tons of conventional bombs primed to detonate on impact.
Well, when World War II broke out, the typical bombs are like you see here,
anywhere from 100 to 1,000 pounds.
The bomb is a free fall. It was literally just dropped from the aircraft. The
impact fuse caused the bomb to explode when it actually hit the target.
For a special job, sometimes you need to design a special tool.
The British Dam Busters raid of 1942 targeted the giant Ruhr industrial
heartland in western Germany.
The RAF faced two problems, how to get a bomb close enough to the Ruhr dam walls
and how to make sure the dams were smashed, flooding the factories below.
Legendary explosives guru Barnes Wallace came up with the extraordinary bouncing
bomb.
In order to get the bomb load in just the right place, you've got to have a bomb
that's going to skip across the water like a stone that a kid chucks across the
water.
Getting the 9,000 pound bombs in the right place was half the battle.
Then Barnes Wallace used the physical properties of water to bust the dams.
The shock waves created by the dam busting bomb exploding in air would quickly
dissipate.
But the molecular structure of water means it cannot be compressed. The shock
waves are transmitted to the dam wall.
Explosives expert Sydney Alford will show that if a bomb explodes in midair next
to an empty dam, the wall will not be breached.
Let's see what that does to the brick.
There we are. The only damage to the brick is superficial. It's like blackening
from an explosion, that's all.
But if the same charge explodes in the water, the shock wave is enough to easily
devastate the dam.
I'm pleased with that.
Like this experiment, the raid was a huge success.
Fourteen Lancasters under Wing Commander Guy Gibson had to fly in under radar
and drop their bombs at exactly 60 feet.
Two of the six dams were destroyed and the other four were badly damaged.
The Ruhr Valley Industrial Hub was washed away in a giant tsunami.
When it comes to bangs, big is beautiful.
Faced by the relentless Allied assault, the Germans defended key assets with
extra tough fortifications.
As Germany retreated into the heartland of the Third Reich, all of their
installations, all of their major production facilities, their headquarters
moved underground.
Ordinary bombs, ordinary high-explosive bombs were not going to be sufficient.
Legendary bomb designer Barnes Wallace spawned two new super bombs.
Tallboy weighed in at a man with five tons and his big brother the Grand Slam
had an unbelievable ten tons.
The biggest bomb that the Lancaster carried was the Grand Slam, a 22,000 pound
bomb.
They carried just one bomb and the bomb bays had to be adjusted. That was the
largest bomb.
The Grand Slam was so humongous, engineers at Avro had to remove the doors
completely.
You'd see the bombs fall in and they seemed to fall very slowly and then clash.
They would be able to go most of the way through the concrete and burst there.
In the first Gulf War, the Liberators also discovered Iraqi forces dug in under
tons of concrete and sand.
Weaponologists wanted to attack the bunkers with fighter bombers, quick and
slick enough to elude Iraqi air defenses.
They needed to design bunker busters at the other end of the scale from Grand
Slam.
In mid-January of 1991, the Air Armament Center received a request to develop a
deep penetrating bomb designed specifically to hit these deeply buried bunkers.
And so in a six week period, we took the concept, developed and operationally
deployed what we called the bunker buster.
A different approach was needed to design a small but penetrative bomb.
So they modified an artillery piece.
The 650 pound high explosive charge was fired into the bunker.
The bunker buster works like a giant nail gun.
The explosive casing was taken from an 8 inch U.S. Army howitzer.
The barrel was drilled out and filled with explosives and then a hardened nose
cone was put on the front of it so it would penetrate so many yards of earth and
then the hardened concrete bunker.
The streamlined shape of the new breed of bunker busters makes sure the bombs
penetrate at the right angle and depth.
They can then fire their charge in the right direction, straight down.
The GBU-28 was capable of penetrating a staggering 100 feet of earth or 20 feet
of solid concrete.
Short, fat conventional bombs on the other hand are built to explode on impact.
Three, two, one.
That bomb was designed not to penetrate and penetrated hasn't.
But thinner, heavier bunker busters such as this small diameter bomb are
designed to bury themselves before exploding.
Small diameter, high density.
That's designed for the greatest penetration and there you have it. By far
deeper penetration than the others.
The smaller surface area combined with great density gives them the kinetic
energy for even greater penetration of even deeper targets.
A B-52 can pack an amazing 200 SDBs.
But when a single bomb can do this much damage, one is usually enough.
Bombs can get through the toughest defenses.
But throughout history, strategies for stopping the bombers themselves got more
complex.
Fighters, radar and ground missiles stood in the way.
Sometimes the bomber had to fight its way into enemy territory.
It was not uncommon to have 100 holes through the bottom of the airplane.
Bombers are battle winners. Left unchallenged, they can destroy men, machines
and morale.
The carnage they cause makes them a prime target for enemy forces, anti-aircraft
guns, missiles, enemy fighters.
Being in a bomber is no easy ride.
Faced by this kind of danger, there are two choices. Flight or fight.
This is a B-17 that had 12 or more 50 caliber machine guns that are really
deadly.
The big breakthrough was the marriage of heavy machine guns with rotating gun
positions.
The first 360 degree turrets were developed in 1933.
50 cal machine guns are the most lethal on the planet.
A B-17 carried 9,000 rounds and a direct hit will pierce almost anything,
including the engine block of a Messerschmitt fighter.
A new breed of heavily armed bomber was born.
Beasts of the era like the B-24 Liberator, the British Avro Lancaster and the
classic B-17.
The B-17G had 13 50 caliber machine guns on it.
This forward one we call the chin turret is actually run by the bombardier.
This would be his sight here, which is coupled into the turret.
So whichever way you turn the turret up, down, left or right, the sight is going
to follow you.
You also have your two cheat guns. You get your left one here and then your
right one is over here.
So this is actually what's protecting the front of the ship.
We have two waist gunners. You can actually turn them however you need to go in
order to shoot the fighter.
You just got to be careful you don't shoot your wing off because they flew such
a tight formation.
Sometimes you'd have one of your airplanes right next to you and just in the
heat of battle, you'd zip a couple bullets across from them.
So you got to pay attention to what they were doing.
The most technologically advanced of all the gun positions was the ball turret.
This is how he's sitting. You see you got the stirrups and hand control and like
I said, the head's looking right through the sight there.
Built by the Sperry Corporation of Arizona, the complex combination of electrics
and hydraulics defended the vulnerable underbelly of the B-24 and B-17.
But the most frightening and exposed position on heavy bombers like the B-17 and
Lancaster was the tail gun.
Not much protection back here. He had one piece of armor that was in front of
him and that was it.
So this was one of the first positions they tried to take out because once they
do that, they've got open rain on the entire backside of the airplane.
Exposed to enemy fighters and the elements, tail gunners were hanging it out.
Well I was what they called Tail End Charlie, which was a rear gunner and my
role was to protect the rear of the aircraft.
Even though you had an oxygen mask on, your exhaling would create icicles to
form down below your chin which you had to break off from time to time to enable
you to use your intercom.
There was twice as many rear gunners lost during the Second World War than any
other position on the airplane because they were so vulnerable.
The life expectancy of a rear gunner was only four trips, four ops and that was
it.
Despite all the Allied bombers' heavy guns, the fight was unequal. German
Messerschmitt fighters usually came out on top.
Bomber squads tried to even up the odds by sticking together.
54 B-17s flew in four groups of 18 planes, an awesome formation a mile wide and
a half a mile deep.
Packed mentality, safety in numbers became the doctrine from the moment that the
US entered the European Air War in 1942.
Anyone separated from the herd would be picked off by predatory fighters.
The closer the formation was, the more resistant you were to the fighters. You
could get more firepower compacted on the fighters if you had a good close
formation.
If they broke up the formation and you were on your own loose, you were almost a
dead end.
Thousands of B-17s did get bounced. Many went to the ground in fireballs.
But plenty also survived. Like Ali in the jungle, it could absorb punch after
punch and still come out of its corner fighting.
It was not uncommon to have a hundred holes through the bottom of the airplane.
She wasn't built for comfort, she was built to fight. They could take a brutal
beating, take a lot to knock her out of the air.
Some came back with part of the tail wing gone, big holes in them all over the
place.
She was the queen. There was no bomber that was as good as this one.
But defending a slow heavy airframe packed with bombs was always a struggle.
The 8th Air Force lost 4,000 B-17s to the Luftwaffe. For the Air Force, it was
too much to take. The bombers needed a hand.
It becomes rapidly apparent in the Second World War that even though the B-17 is
bristling with machine guns all over it,
it still needs an escort to help it get to its target.
In the early years of the war, fighters lacked the range to escort the bombers
over hostile territory.
That changed when the P-51 Mustang was fitted with the Rolls Royce Merlin engine
and extra fuel tanks.
The P-51 could fly 2,000 miles. That's a glance at Los Angeles without
refueling.
The most important development for the bomber was actually a fighter.
The B-17s and B-24s could be escorted all the way to their targets in eastern
Germany by one single engine fighter type, the P-51 Mustang.
The long range fighters, particularly the P-51 Mustang, could tangle with the
German fighter pilots and keep them away from the bomber formations.
When the Mustang came along and everything, we were able to have that tiny
little friend, you know, escort us all the way.
She could fly clear into Berlin, clear into Dresden. We called them little
buddies and give them guys anything they wanted.
The Mustang was seen as a war winner, and escorted bombers spelled the end for
Germany.
But in the 1950s, bombers faced a new and far deadlier threat to their
existence, the marriage of radar and ground missiles.
Weaponologists had to come up with something fast, something that would make
airframes invisible. The race for stealth was on.
Stealth was developed as a way to win the radar game once and for all.
In the Second World War, the Mosquito flew under radar, but pilots also noticed
that its aerodynamic shape deflected radar returns.
The Mosquito had stealth capabilities.
After the war, the Lockheed Elite Skunk Works designers, headed by the legendary
Kelly Johnson, started to build on this effect.
Stealth works in two ways. First, with radar absorbing materials, and second,
and most important, with the design of an aircraft that sends radar beams off in
the wrong direction instead of returning them to the receiver.
The first stealth prototype, Have Blue, was built in 1977. It was followed in
1983 by the first operational combat aircraft, the F-117.
The project cost billions of dollars, but if it worked, the American Air Force
would be able to breach Soviet airspace without detection.
Soviet air defenses were very good. Soviet radars were good, Soviet missiles
were good, and they were capable of hitting aircraft at a very high altitude.
The way to get past all of that was with stealth. Stealth is designed to make
radar returns inaccurate.
A stealth aircraft will give you a radar return like a hummingbird or like a bee
or something even smaller.
In 1989, news of a new generation of stealth aircraft was steadily leaked to the
world.
The B-2 Bomber, an awesome plane with an equally awesome two billion dollar
price tag.
As of today, there are no effective countermeasures that take away the value of
stealth.
With stealth, a single unarmed bomber will always get through undetected. The
Air Force no longer needs waves of bombers bristling with guns.
But it doesn't mean a thing unless you get your bombs dead on target.
That's why in the 20th century, weaponologists threw their money, their weight,
and their brains into accurate targeting.
Perhaps the most significant technological advance in the bomber aircraft has
been the accuracy, the precision of the weapons.
A B-2 stealth bomber will always get through. Loaded with bunker busting small
diameter bombs, no target is safe.
And the latest in laser guidance and GPS delivers surgical strikes.
But precision bombing developed from humble roots. Most World War I bombing was
done by hand.
Most of the bombs dropped in the first World War were not aimed. As the pilot
approached the target, he took a guess, dropped it over the side.
Most of them missed their targets.
Dive bombers of the 1930s and 40s used the plane itself to aim the bomb.
Simple, but devastating. One plane, one bomb, deadly accurate.
It's really hard to aim a little bomb at a tiny little ship thousands of feet
below.
So the U.S. Navy develops a technique called dive bombing. They did what was
called the dive bombing study.
And they discovered that if you aim a plane with a bomb on it at the ship and
you dive down on the ship and then you let go of the bomb, the bomb continues on
the same path and it hits the ship, blows it up and sinks it.
Their technique was to use the plane as part of the bomb aiming system. They
entered an incredibly steep dive, released the bombs very precisely and then
pulled up, hopefully before they blacked out.
But this report wasn't kept secret for long.
Germany obtained copies and legendary designer Hugo Junkers began development on
the ultimate dive bomber.
The Junkers 87, better known as the Stuka.
The German Luftwaffe, when it is reconstructed in the early 1930s, they've got
the dive bombing study on the table in front of them.
And good old Junkers has been building a dive bomber, the Stuka, which is an
aircraft optimized for dropping a big fat bomb on a little target far below.
And if that little target is a tank, bang, you lose the tank.
The dive bomber had an impact far beyond the physical damage that it could
inflict. It truly was a terror weapon.
Even the sound of its approach was capable of striking fear into the hearts of
the enemy.
The Germans built upon this with the Stuka by fitting it with sirens so that
during the dive, the already distinctive noise of the aircraft was heard.
As it approached the earth, it was enhanced by the shrieking whale. It was quite
clearly effective as a psychological tool.
High altitude bombing was more hit and miss.
British studies in 1941 found that only one in nine planes dropped their bombs
even five miles from the target.
So the RAF bombed entire cities by night.
But the US Army Air Force developed precision aiming for the bombing of specific
military and industrial targets.
For this, they needed a tool with which to find their targets. Carl Norden's
bombsite was designed to be that tool.
Carl Norden was a Dutchman who in the early 20th century starts to work in the
United States and what Norden builds is a computer made with wheels and gears
and moving parts, an analog computer.
This is the Norden bombsite. This was the standard high altitude precision
bombsite used by the US during the Second World War.
Some of the factors he could compute was the aircraft's speed, its altitude, the
wind speed and the wind direction.
The claims made about the accuracy of the Norden bombsite remained
controversial.
The initial claim for the Norden bombsite was that it could hit a pickle barrel
from 20,000 feet.
The reality was it could probably place its bomb within a hundred foot circle
from 20,000 feet. That was still pretty good.
So as a result, the Americans, like the British, had to drop large bomb loads on
big targets like cities in order to have a chance of hitting anything.
But at the time, the Norden was seen as a war-winning weapon.
It was fitted in all the US heavy bombers from the B-17 and B-24 to the B-29
that dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan.
The Norden bombsite wasn't the only way that the Air Force tried to guide their
bombs onto their target.
Project Aphrodite was to be the ultimate precision bomber raid.
Unmanned B-17s packed with 20,000 pounds of high explosives were flown by remote
control into German U-boat pens.
Unfortunately, the guidance was just too difficult. So it wasn't possible to
make unmanned aerial vehicles out of these World War II bombers. The technology
just wasn't there.
The Aphrodite project wasn't a success.
Joseph P. Kennedy, brother of future president JFK, was killed when his deadly
cargo that he was flying was detonated before he had time to bail out.
Norden and Aphrodite still hadn't ensured the destruction of critical targets.
Studies into the bombing campaign after the war prompted a change in thinking.
Massive resources had gone into Allied strategic bombing, but precision
targeting had proved ineffective.
In Vietnam, it was very clear that if the targets were going to be hit
successfully, there had to be a new form of guidance.
The Americans developed the laser-guided bomb, the Paveway family. They're still
in service today. They're still highly effective.
The first Paveway laser-guided bomb mission was a huge success.
The Paul Du Maire Bridge in North Vietnam was proving a tough nut to crack. B-52
bombers dropped tons of bombs with little success.
We sent raid after raid against the bridge, and basically the bridge still
stood.
We never destroyed the bridge, and we lost numbers of aircraft and air crews to
the North Vietnamese air force.
It was the kind of small target that the Paveway had been designed to hit.
F-4 fighter bombers with a single Paveway bomb each had less problems.
They sent in four aircraft, each armed with a Paveway, dropped four bombs, and
dropped the bridge.
The bombers carried two elements, a designator pod and a bomb launcher.
The pod illuminated the target with a laser beam, and the seeker in the bomb
nose would lock on.
The bomb's on-board computer controlled the fins to fly it like a miniature
plane onto the target.
This was the designator. Inside was a laser. There's a mirror that rocks back
and forth that adjusts the beam up and down.
And the turret will rotate, so the airplane could actually be breaking away from
the target, going away, and still keep the laser beam on it.
The laser bomb is released, and its seeker follows that laser spot down to
impact.
And through these fins fitted here, it can actually change the direction of the
bomb to maneuver closer and closer to actually impact the target.
Laser-guided systems opened up a new era in precision bombing.
Laser-guided munitions achieved a long-standing promise of technology.
After years of imprecise bombing, we can now take a tremendously expensive but
very expensive weapon.
After years of imprecise bombing, we can now take a tremendously expensive but
very accurate bomb and drop it right where we want it.
This was reliable accuracy such as the World War II bombers could only have
dreamed of.
You can hit the military headquarters and miss the hospital next door.
The most significant technological advance in the bomber aircraft has been the
accuracy, the precision of the weapons.
Today, we expect bombs to be something like 90 to 95 percent accurate, and
that's due to the development of the paveway.
A stealth bomber armed with a pack of SDBs is the pinnacle of air strike
technology.
A plane almost invisible to air defenses can surgically deliver a single bomb,
and that single bomb can punch a hole through the strongest fortifications.
Drawn together, the branches on its family tree reflect the SDB's unique
genesis.
Heavy bombers capable of beating the toughest air defenses, Carl Norton's belief
in precision delivery, Barnes-Wallace giant bunker busters, and the Skunk Works
stealth breakthroughs.
The end result? The small diameter bomb. Weaponologically, it's top of the tree.
Go behind the lines.
Bombers pounding the earth from the skies.
They can take out tanks, flits bunkers, annihilate armies and flatten cities.
Bombs away.
Spearheading assaults and covering retreats, airstrikes have become the ultimate
application of firepower.
This is war. This is total war. And total war means you destroy the enemy.
Get ready for takeoff as we go back through generations of technology to find
out how bombs and bombers became the best of the best.
It's time to go ballistic.
The small diameter bomb is the hardest and smartest bomb in the world.
The SDB combines the latest in precision guidance technology with awesome
kinetic and explosive energy.
No one is safe. No where is safe.
And if that little target is a tank, bang! You lose the tank.
The mainstay of the Air Force arsenal, the small diameter bomb is compact enough
to be carried in huge numbers and destructive enough to kill the hardest
targets.
It really is the bomb.
Now weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology to reveal how heavy bombers, stealth science and precision guidance
have come together to ensure that the most advanced bomb on the planet always
gets its man.
In eight decades, man went from the first powered flight to the awesome B-2
stealth bomber.
From wood and wire airframes to the most deadly weapon on the modern
battlefield, all in a single lifetime.
Almost from the minute that the airplane was built, people conceptualized
dropping bombs from it.
It was World War I that gave the bomber clearance for takeoff.
Military strategists were desperate to break the bloody stalemate of trench
warfare.
So they took to the air.
There was a desperate desire to find a way around the dominance of the
defensive.
In order to get past the deadlock in the First World War, especially in the
Western Front, you had to leap off the ground and up into the air.
The specialized bombing aircraft capable of carrying a reasonable payload, say
several hundred pounds of bombs, that really only emerges in the First World
War.
It emerges largely because of the work of an individual whose name we associate
primarily with helicopters, Igor Sikorsky.
And he developed a whole family of bombers called the Ilya Muromets, which flew
during the First World War.
The work of Sikorsky and the Russians was picked up by the British.
The Hanley Page Company fathered the highly successful Model O family in 1915.
The First World War bomber was not exactly devastating.
Later models could carry barely 15 lightweight 100-pound bombs.
And top speed was a wheezing, panting 90 miles an hour.
The bombs were small because the performance of the aircraft was limited and
bombs added to the weight of the aircraft.
In reality, the strategic bombing was more of a nuisance and an aggravation than
had any real impact on the military outcome of the war.
But it was the beginning of the notion that you could carry the war to the
enemy.
The Germans had a different idea, Zeppelins.
Now Germany had placed a great deal of effort in using the airship as a long-
range bombing system
and had undertaken bombing raids over England, for example, and other target
areas as well, even Russia.
But the airship was a highly vulnerable weapon.
Zeppelins were full of tens of thousands of cubic meters of hydrogen.
This could be a problem.
And a Zeppelin is a really efficient way to move a heavy load in the air unless
somebody's shooting at you.
Or you catch fire.
The extreme vulnerability of airships meant that the airplane was the future.
Airframes were still being built of wood and canvas.
Wood was light and really did grow on trees.
But despite resistance, some visionaries made planes out of metal.
People have said it's counterintuitive.
That if you take a look at kites and you take a look at light flying materials,
you know, balsa wood, things like that,
wood is so much lighter and metal is so much heavier.
But if we think of the skills that you have to have to work in wood very
effectively,
it requires a great deal of skill and a great deal of training,
something that is not necessarily a requirement if you're trying to mass produce
things very rapidly using a mechanized industrial process.
By the outbreak of World War II, bombers were multi-engined metal beasts.
They had banks of powerful engines to generate enough power to lift 50 tons of
steel into the air.
The future of bomber design was set.
From World War II heavies to the B-2 stealth bomber, metal was the way forward.
But in 1942, the de Havilland Company turned back the clock
and developed a wooden bomber that was the fastest plane in the world, the
Mosquito.
The British Royal Air Force didn't immediately fall in love with the new speed
stinger.
Wooden airframes were the past.
Aircraft of the future would be made of metal. Everybody knew that.
At the time, all the strategic materials were metal, but there was no call for
timber.
But chief designer Geoffrey de Havilland was determined to prove the doubters
wrong.
When they went down to the Air Ministry to sell this as a bomber, I thought they
were going to lock him up,
because who's going to make a wooden aircraft as a bomber?
But with Britain's stocks of metal running out, it made sense to try other
materials and expertise.
There was an idea that the Mosquito could take advantage of some excess capacity
in the British furniture-making industry.
The people that were employed to make it were furniture cabinet makers,
carpenters, all unemployed at the time,
the finest piece of furniture this country has ever built.
The RAF skepticism didn't last. They were knocked out by the wooden wonder's
stunning trial results.
The lightweight Balsa and Spruce airframe was propelled at over 400 miles an
hour by the two Rolls-Royce V-12 engines.
That's four times as fast as the lumbering Handley Page.
It proved itself when the Air Ministry representatives came to have a
demonstration of the prototype.
They were completely shocked and taken over, and production orders were given
straight away.
Cool aircraft.
The Mosquito was fast because of its light wooden airframe, but the quest for
speed changed with the invention of the first jet engine aircraft.
The wooden airframe revival was over, and the all-metal supersonic bomber was
just around the corner.
The arrival of the jet engine made the globe-spanning intercontinental bomber a
reality for the first time.
Bombers are built to carry the fight to the enemy.
In an age of long-range, super-fast jet bombers, war knows no boundaries.
Jet-powered strike aircraft like the B-2 stealth bomber and the B-1 Lancer can
sprint to targets anywhere in the world and be back in time for lunch.
It's the bomber's job to penetrate far behind enemy lines to strategic targets,
really anywhere on the globe.
But rewind to the Second World War, and bombers were powered by piston engines
and propellers.
The prop was being pushed harder and harder.
In a new era of intercontinental warfare, you needed a bomber with
intercontinental range.
Even before Pearl Harbor, we were already contemplating bombers that could
operate from the continental United States, across the Atlantic, or across the
Pacific, to hit far-flung targets.
The B-29 was the first bomber born to cruise at high altitude.
Its 8,800 horsepower took it to over 30,000 feet, where it could evade fighters
and anti-aircraft fire.
The altitude tested the Boeing designers to the max.
The B-29 was the first bomber to be pressurized, allowing the crew to survive
the thin air and endure the 15-hour missions.
Breathing apparatus and heated suits no longer needed.
You didn't have to wear the bulky flight clothing, the big heavy leather
clothing, or the oxygen mask.
The B-36 Peacemaker dramatically raised the bar.
Finally getting off the ground in 1947, it was capable of flying 10,000 miles in
a single mission.
Six 3,800 horsepower engines made the B-36 the world's largest ever piston-
driven propeller aircraft. A true monster.
The B-36 had six of these engines.
It was first designed during the early part of the Second World War, when it
looked like we were going to have to fight Germany from bases in the U.S.
It was 28 cylinders and set in seven banks, air-cooled, and it was probably one
of the most complex and powerful engines ever built.
Despite its complexity, the piston engine uses technology that would be familiar
to an auto mechanic.
The term piston engine comes from the fact that you have inside each of these
cylinders a piston that moves up and down.
And this is where the power is actually produced for the engine.
Air is mixed with gasoline.
Once the air mixture is in, the piston comes up, compresses the mixture, then at
the top a spark ignites the mixture and pushes the piston down.
And that's what produces the power. Much the same as an automobile. Same
principle.
The piston engine had poor power-to-weight ratio.
The B-29 and the B-36 Peacemaker were slow, barely getting past 350 miles an
hour.
The birth of jet engine aircraft in 1944 changed everything.
German aviation genius Willy Messerschmitt launched the lethal ME-262 fighter
and a world race to catch up.
In 1947, Boeing launched the B-47 prototype, their first jet bomber.
Instead of relying on the rotating wings of the propeller, the jet engine
generated awesome thrust through the expulsion of high-speed exhaust gases.
This engine is an Allison J-33. This was one of the first operational jet
engines used by the U.S.
It's a centrifugal flow engine. What that means, the air will enter through the
intakes here,
and it is distributed by a circular compressor to a series of combustion
chambers around the outside of the engine,
where the fuel-air mixture is ignited and then produces thrust that comes out of
the tailpipe.
This was a quantum leap in aviation technology, and the next generation of
bombers could match their pursuers.
As jet bombers are developed, we start to see bomber aircraft that are as fast
as the fighter aircraft that are trying to shoot them down.
There is no longer a requirement to have an escort for a bomber because the
bomber itself can outrun its pursuit.
Supersonic bombers such as the XP-70 Valkyrie and the B-1 even look like
fighters.
The Valkyrie could top an eye-watering 2,300 miles an hour. That's almost six
times as fast as the B-36.
The image of the lumbering bomber being buzzed by super-fast fighters was
consigned to the history books.
The new jet technology also extended the reach and range of Cold War bombers.
The U.S. could now strike Soviet Russia with bombers based on home soil.
Reach enables you to hold the opponent hostage at a distance.
David didn't grapple with Goliath, so to speak. He hit him with a rock at a
distance.
Continental superpowers need continental super-bombers.
In 1952, the iconic intercontinental jet-powered bomber was launched.
The B-52's eight engines carry 70,000 pounds of bombs on 8,000-mile missions at
nearly 250 miles an hour faster than the lumbering B-36.
A giant of aviation history, its power, range and payload make it an
extraordinary aircraft with a distinguished past and a big future.
One of the B-52's biggest technological innovations was simply its sheer power
and range.
Its early engines gave it a top cruising speed of somewhere above 600 miles per
hour, which was tremendously fast for any bomber.
That gave it the ability to elude some of the fighters and to have a real chance
of getting through.
The incredible range of B-52 bombers became infinite with the invention of mid-
air refueling.
Boeing launched the KC-135 Stratotanker in 1956, and bombing would never be the
same again.
Large tail stabilizers allowed the KC to be held steady.
The bomber could attach to the flying boom with surprising ease.
Missions could go on as long as the crews could cope.
24 hours continuous flying was the new benchmark.
When you think about Strategic Air Command in the Cold War, you think about the
B-52, you also have to think about the KC-135 tankers that gave them the
extended range to reach their targets deep inside the Soviet Union.
It's the tanker that gives the bomber its global range.
This amazing range made the B-52 a crucial cog in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
In an operation codenamed Chromedome, a dozen B-52s based in Greenland were on
permanent 24-hour alert.
They're briefed to patrol the edge of Soviet airspace.
If the USSR launched a surprise nuclear attack, the U.S. could and would strike
right back.
For many years, Chromedome aircraft are flying up into the sky 24 hours a day,
seven days a week, prepared to fight World War III, independent of those poor
guys on the ground who have already been turned into radioactive glass.
The Boeing B-52 is the Air Force's heavyweight champion. Big, ugly and suited to
any mission, the B-52 thrives on delivering heavy hits far from home.
Right now, today, the B-52 alternates with the B-1 in providing air support to
NATO forces as they conduct their foot patrols in some of the roughest areas of
Afghanistan.
Originally tooled for a nuclear strike on Soviet Russia, the B-52 looks set to
spearhead U.S. airstrikes for decades to come.
We have this aircraft actually now projected for service up to the year possibly
2040. This airplane may well become an almost 90-year airplane by the time it's
actually retired.
In less than a lifetime, the bomber developed from wooden biplanes lumbering
towards their targets to metal beasts capable of sprinting at the speed of
sound.
But you can fly as far and as fast as you like. It's all about what you do when
you get there. Bombers are only as effective as the bombs they drop.
In order to get a bomb through 10 meters of reinforced concrete, you've got to
drive through it with a special bomb.
Since their birth, bombers have been designed for one single purpose, getting
bombs to their target.
And 21st century bombers pack bunker busters that can seek out targets deep
underground. But bombs weren't always so sophisticated.
In the Second World War, the Allies simply pounded the Axis powers with three
and a half million tons of conventional bombs primed to detonate on impact.
Well, when World War II broke out, the typical bombs are like you see here,
anywhere from 100 to 1,000 pounds.
The bomb is a free fall. It was literally just dropped from the aircraft. The
impact fuse caused the bomb to explode when it actually hit the target.
For a special job, sometimes you need to design a special tool.
The British Dam Busters raid of 1942 targeted the giant Ruhr industrial
heartland in western Germany.
The RAF faced two problems, how to get a bomb close enough to the Ruhr dam walls
and how to make sure the dams were smashed, flooding the factories below.
Legendary explosives guru Barnes Wallace came up with the extraordinary bouncing
bomb.
In order to get the bomb load in just the right place, you've got to have a bomb
that's going to skip across the water like a stone that a kid chucks across the
water.
Getting the 9,000 pound bombs in the right place was half the battle.
Then Barnes Wallace used the physical properties of water to bust the dams.
The shock waves created by the dam busting bomb exploding in air would quickly
dissipate.
But the molecular structure of water means it cannot be compressed. The shock
waves are transmitted to the dam wall.
Explosives expert Sydney Alford will show that if a bomb explodes in midair next
to an empty dam, the wall will not be breached.
Let's see what that does to the brick.
There we are. The only damage to the brick is superficial. It's like blackening
from an explosion, that's all.
But if the same charge explodes in the water, the shock wave is enough to easily
devastate the dam.
I'm pleased with that.
Like this experiment, the raid was a huge success.
Fourteen Lancasters under Wing Commander Guy Gibson had to fly in under radar
and drop their bombs at exactly 60 feet.
Two of the six dams were destroyed and the other four were badly damaged.
The Ruhr Valley Industrial Hub was washed away in a giant tsunami.
When it comes to bangs, big is beautiful.
Faced by the relentless Allied assault, the Germans defended key assets with
extra tough fortifications.
As Germany retreated into the heartland of the Third Reich, all of their
installations, all of their major production facilities, their headquarters
moved underground.
Ordinary bombs, ordinary high-explosive bombs were not going to be sufficient.
Legendary bomb designer Barnes Wallace spawned two new super bombs.
Tallboy weighed in at a man with five tons and his big brother the Grand Slam
had an unbelievable ten tons.
The biggest bomb that the Lancaster carried was the Grand Slam, a 22,000 pound
bomb.
They carried just one bomb and the bomb bays had to be adjusted. That was the
largest bomb.
The Grand Slam was so humongous, engineers at Avro had to remove the doors
completely.
You'd see the bombs fall in and they seemed to fall very slowly and then clash.
They would be able to go most of the way through the concrete and burst there.
In the first Gulf War, the Liberators also discovered Iraqi forces dug in under
tons of concrete and sand.
Weaponologists wanted to attack the bunkers with fighter bombers, quick and
slick enough to elude Iraqi air defenses.
They needed to design bunker busters at the other end of the scale from Grand
Slam.
In mid-January of 1991, the Air Armament Center received a request to develop a
deep penetrating bomb designed specifically to hit these deeply buried bunkers.
And so in a six week period, we took the concept, developed and operationally
deployed what we called the bunker buster.
A different approach was needed to design a small but penetrative bomb.
So they modified an artillery piece.
The 650 pound high explosive charge was fired into the bunker.
The bunker buster works like a giant nail gun.
The explosive casing was taken from an 8 inch U.S. Army howitzer.
The barrel was drilled out and filled with explosives and then a hardened nose
cone was put on the front of it so it would penetrate so many yards of earth and
then the hardened concrete bunker.
The streamlined shape of the new breed of bunker busters makes sure the bombs
penetrate at the right angle and depth.
They can then fire their charge in the right direction, straight down.
The GBU-28 was capable of penetrating a staggering 100 feet of earth or 20 feet
of solid concrete.
Short, fat conventional bombs on the other hand are built to explode on impact.
Three, two, one.
That bomb was designed not to penetrate and penetrated hasn't.
But thinner, heavier bunker busters such as this small diameter bomb are
designed to bury themselves before exploding.
Small diameter, high density.
That's designed for the greatest penetration and there you have it. By far
deeper penetration than the others.
The smaller surface area combined with great density gives them the kinetic
energy for even greater penetration of even deeper targets.
A B-52 can pack an amazing 200 SDBs.
But when a single bomb can do this much damage, one is usually enough.
Bombs can get through the toughest defenses.
But throughout history, strategies for stopping the bombers themselves got more
complex.
Fighters, radar and ground missiles stood in the way.
Sometimes the bomber had to fight its way into enemy territory.
It was not uncommon to have 100 holes through the bottom of the airplane.
Bombers are battle winners. Left unchallenged, they can destroy men, machines
and morale.
The carnage they cause makes them a prime target for enemy forces, anti-aircraft
guns, missiles, enemy fighters.
Being in a bomber is no easy ride.
Faced by this kind of danger, there are two choices. Flight or fight.
This is a B-17 that had 12 or more 50 caliber machine guns that are really
deadly.
The big breakthrough was the marriage of heavy machine guns with rotating gun
positions.
The first 360 degree turrets were developed in 1933.
50 cal machine guns are the most lethal on the planet.
A B-17 carried 9,000 rounds and a direct hit will pierce almost anything,
including the engine block of a Messerschmitt fighter.
A new breed of heavily armed bomber was born.
Beasts of the era like the B-24 Liberator, the British Avro Lancaster and the
classic B-17.
The B-17G had 13 50 caliber machine guns on it.
This forward one we call the chin turret is actually run by the bombardier.
This would be his sight here, which is coupled into the turret.
So whichever way you turn the turret up, down, left or right, the sight is going
to follow you.
You also have your two cheat guns. You get your left one here and then your
right one is over here.
So this is actually what's protecting the front of the ship.
We have two waist gunners. You can actually turn them however you need to go in
order to shoot the fighter.
You just got to be careful you don't shoot your wing off because they flew such
a tight formation.
Sometimes you'd have one of your airplanes right next to you and just in the
heat of battle, you'd zip a couple bullets across from them.
So you got to pay attention to what they were doing.
The most technologically advanced of all the gun positions was the ball turret.
This is how he's sitting. You see you got the stirrups and hand control and like
I said, the head's looking right through the sight there.
Built by the Sperry Corporation of Arizona, the complex combination of electrics
and hydraulics defended the vulnerable underbelly of the B-24 and B-17.
But the most frightening and exposed position on heavy bombers like the B-17 and
Lancaster was the tail gun.
Not much protection back here. He had one piece of armor that was in front of
him and that was it.
So this was one of the first positions they tried to take out because once they
do that, they've got open rain on the entire backside of the airplane.
Exposed to enemy fighters and the elements, tail gunners were hanging it out.
Well I was what they called Tail End Charlie, which was a rear gunner and my
role was to protect the rear of the aircraft.
Even though you had an oxygen mask on, your exhaling would create icicles to
form down below your chin which you had to break off from time to time to enable
you to use your intercom.
There was twice as many rear gunners lost during the Second World War than any
other position on the airplane because they were so vulnerable.
The life expectancy of a rear gunner was only four trips, four ops and that was
it.
Despite all the Allied bombers' heavy guns, the fight was unequal. German
Messerschmitt fighters usually came out on top.
Bomber squads tried to even up the odds by sticking together.
54 B-17s flew in four groups of 18 planes, an awesome formation a mile wide and
a half a mile deep.
Packed mentality, safety in numbers became the doctrine from the moment that the
US entered the European Air War in 1942.
Anyone separated from the herd would be picked off by predatory fighters.
The closer the formation was, the more resistant you were to the fighters. You
could get more firepower compacted on the fighters if you had a good close
formation.
If they broke up the formation and you were on your own loose, you were almost a
dead end.
Thousands of B-17s did get bounced. Many went to the ground in fireballs.
But plenty also survived. Like Ali in the jungle, it could absorb punch after
punch and still come out of its corner fighting.
It was not uncommon to have a hundred holes through the bottom of the airplane.
She wasn't built for comfort, she was built to fight. They could take a brutal
beating, take a lot to knock her out of the air.
Some came back with part of the tail wing gone, big holes in them all over the
place.
She was the queen. There was no bomber that was as good as this one.
But defending a slow heavy airframe packed with bombs was always a struggle.
The 8th Air Force lost 4,000 B-17s to the Luftwaffe. For the Air Force, it was
too much to take. The bombers needed a hand.
It becomes rapidly apparent in the Second World War that even though the B-17 is
bristling with machine guns all over it,
it still needs an escort to help it get to its target.
In the early years of the war, fighters lacked the range to escort the bombers
over hostile territory.
That changed when the P-51 Mustang was fitted with the Rolls Royce Merlin engine
and extra fuel tanks.
The P-51 could fly 2,000 miles. That's a glance at Los Angeles without
refueling.
The most important development for the bomber was actually a fighter.
The B-17s and B-24s could be escorted all the way to their targets in eastern
Germany by one single engine fighter type, the P-51 Mustang.
The long range fighters, particularly the P-51 Mustang, could tangle with the
German fighter pilots and keep them away from the bomber formations.
When the Mustang came along and everything, we were able to have that tiny
little friend, you know, escort us all the way.
She could fly clear into Berlin, clear into Dresden. We called them little
buddies and give them guys anything they wanted.
The Mustang was seen as a war winner, and escorted bombers spelled the end for
Germany.
But in the 1950s, bombers faced a new and far deadlier threat to their
existence, the marriage of radar and ground missiles.
Weaponologists had to come up with something fast, something that would make
airframes invisible. The race for stealth was on.
Stealth was developed as a way to win the radar game once and for all.
In the Second World War, the Mosquito flew under radar, but pilots also noticed
that its aerodynamic shape deflected radar returns.
The Mosquito had stealth capabilities.
After the war, the Lockheed Elite Skunk Works designers, headed by the legendary
Kelly Johnson, started to build on this effect.
Stealth works in two ways. First, with radar absorbing materials, and second,
and most important, with the design of an aircraft that sends radar beams off in
the wrong direction instead of returning them to the receiver.
The first stealth prototype, Have Blue, was built in 1977. It was followed in
1983 by the first operational combat aircraft, the F-117.
The project cost billions of dollars, but if it worked, the American Air Force
would be able to breach Soviet airspace without detection.
Soviet air defenses were very good. Soviet radars were good, Soviet missiles
were good, and they were capable of hitting aircraft at a very high altitude.
The way to get past all of that was with stealth. Stealth is designed to make
radar returns inaccurate.
A stealth aircraft will give you a radar return like a hummingbird or like a bee
or something even smaller.
In 1989, news of a new generation of stealth aircraft was steadily leaked to the
world.
The B-2 Bomber, an awesome plane with an equally awesome two billion dollar
price tag.
As of today, there are no effective countermeasures that take away the value of
stealth.
With stealth, a single unarmed bomber will always get through undetected. The
Air Force no longer needs waves of bombers bristling with guns.
But it doesn't mean a thing unless you get your bombs dead on target.
That's why in the 20th century, weaponologists threw their money, their weight,
and their brains into accurate targeting.
Perhaps the most significant technological advance in the bomber aircraft has
been the accuracy, the precision of the weapons.
A B-2 stealth bomber will always get through. Loaded with bunker busting small
diameter bombs, no target is safe.
And the latest in laser guidance and GPS delivers surgical strikes.
But precision bombing developed from humble roots. Most World War I bombing was
done by hand.
Most of the bombs dropped in the first World War were not aimed. As the pilot
approached the target, he took a guess, dropped it over the side.
Most of them missed their targets.
Dive bombers of the 1930s and 40s used the plane itself to aim the bomb.
Simple, but devastating. One plane, one bomb, deadly accurate.
It's really hard to aim a little bomb at a tiny little ship thousands of feet
below.
So the U.S. Navy develops a technique called dive bombing. They did what was
called the dive bombing study.
And they discovered that if you aim a plane with a bomb on it at the ship and
you dive down on the ship and then you let go of the bomb, the bomb continues on
the same path and it hits the ship, blows it up and sinks it.
Their technique was to use the plane as part of the bomb aiming system. They
entered an incredibly steep dive, released the bombs very precisely and then
pulled up, hopefully before they blacked out.
But this report wasn't kept secret for long.
Germany obtained copies and legendary designer Hugo Junkers began development on
the ultimate dive bomber.
The Junkers 87, better known as the Stuka.
The German Luftwaffe, when it is reconstructed in the early 1930s, they've got
the dive bombing study on the table in front of them.
And good old Junkers has been building a dive bomber, the Stuka, which is an
aircraft optimized for dropping a big fat bomb on a little target far below.
And if that little target is a tank, bang, you lose the tank.
The dive bomber had an impact far beyond the physical damage that it could
inflict. It truly was a terror weapon.
Even the sound of its approach was capable of striking fear into the hearts of
the enemy.
The Germans built upon this with the Stuka by fitting it with sirens so that
during the dive, the already distinctive noise of the aircraft was heard.
As it approached the earth, it was enhanced by the shrieking whale. It was quite
clearly effective as a psychological tool.
High altitude bombing was more hit and miss.
British studies in 1941 found that only one in nine planes dropped their bombs
even five miles from the target.
So the RAF bombed entire cities by night.
But the US Army Air Force developed precision aiming for the bombing of specific
military and industrial targets.
For this, they needed a tool with which to find their targets. Carl Norden's
bombsite was designed to be that tool.
Carl Norden was a Dutchman who in the early 20th century starts to work in the
United States and what Norden builds is a computer made with wheels and gears
and moving parts, an analog computer.
This is the Norden bombsite. This was the standard high altitude precision
bombsite used by the US during the Second World War.
Some of the factors he could compute was the aircraft's speed, its altitude, the
wind speed and the wind direction.
The claims made about the accuracy of the Norden bombsite remained
controversial.
The initial claim for the Norden bombsite was that it could hit a pickle barrel
from 20,000 feet.
The reality was it could probably place its bomb within a hundred foot circle
from 20,000 feet. That was still pretty good.
So as a result, the Americans, like the British, had to drop large bomb loads on
big targets like cities in order to have a chance of hitting anything.
But at the time, the Norden was seen as a war-winning weapon.
It was fitted in all the US heavy bombers from the B-17 and B-24 to the B-29
that dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan.
The Norden bombsite wasn't the only way that the Air Force tried to guide their
bombs onto their target.
Project Aphrodite was to be the ultimate precision bomber raid.
Unmanned B-17s packed with 20,000 pounds of high explosives were flown by remote
control into German U-boat pens.
Unfortunately, the guidance was just too difficult. So it wasn't possible to
make unmanned aerial vehicles out of these World War II bombers. The technology
just wasn't there.
The Aphrodite project wasn't a success.
Joseph P. Kennedy, brother of future president JFK, was killed when his deadly
cargo that he was flying was detonated before he had time to bail out.
Norden and Aphrodite still hadn't ensured the destruction of critical targets.
Studies into the bombing campaign after the war prompted a change in thinking.
Massive resources had gone into Allied strategic bombing, but precision
targeting had proved ineffective.
In Vietnam, it was very clear that if the targets were going to be hit
successfully, there had to be a new form of guidance.
The Americans developed the laser-guided bomb, the Paveway family. They're still
in service today. They're still highly effective.
The first Paveway laser-guided bomb mission was a huge success.
The Paul Du Maire Bridge in North Vietnam was proving a tough nut to crack. B-52
bombers dropped tons of bombs with little success.
We sent raid after raid against the bridge, and basically the bridge still
stood.
We never destroyed the bridge, and we lost numbers of aircraft and air crews to
the North Vietnamese air force.
It was the kind of small target that the Paveway had been designed to hit.
F-4 fighter bombers with a single Paveway bomb each had less problems.
They sent in four aircraft, each armed with a Paveway, dropped four bombs, and
dropped the bridge.
The bombers carried two elements, a designator pod and a bomb launcher.
The pod illuminated the target with a laser beam, and the seeker in the bomb
nose would lock on.
The bomb's on-board computer controlled the fins to fly it like a miniature
plane onto the target.
This was the designator. Inside was a laser. There's a mirror that rocks back
and forth that adjusts the beam up and down.
And the turret will rotate, so the airplane could actually be breaking away from
the target, going away, and still keep the laser beam on it.
The laser bomb is released, and its seeker follows that laser spot down to
impact.
And through these fins fitted here, it can actually change the direction of the
bomb to maneuver closer and closer to actually impact the target.
Laser-guided systems opened up a new era in precision bombing.
Laser-guided munitions achieved a long-standing promise of technology.
After years of imprecise bombing, we can now take a tremendously expensive but
very expensive weapon.
After years of imprecise bombing, we can now take a tremendously expensive but
very accurate bomb and drop it right where we want it.
This was reliable accuracy such as the World War II bombers could only have
dreamed of.
You can hit the military headquarters and miss the hospital next door.
The most significant technological advance in the bomber aircraft has been the
accuracy, the precision of the weapons.
Today, we expect bombs to be something like 90 to 95 percent accurate, and
that's due to the development of the paveway.
A stealth bomber armed with a pack of SDBs is the pinnacle of air strike
technology.
A plane almost invisible to air defenses can surgically deliver a single bomb,
and that single bomb can punch a hole through the strongest fortifications.
Drawn together, the branches on its family tree reflect the SDB's unique
genesis.
Heavy bombers capable of beating the toughest air defenses, Carl Norton's belief
in precision delivery, Barnes-Wallace giant bunker busters, and the Skunk Works
stealth breakthroughs.
The end result? The small diameter bomb. Weaponologically, it's top of the tree.