Banzai!: General discussion of the Kamikaze and Ramming

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Why, please explain. What speed has a free falling bomb?
cimmex

Good question! Obviously the answer depends on the bomb and the hieght it is dropped from. The British Grand slam was carefully engineered and streamlined and went supersonic before impact. I guess a 500lb pound bomb dropped from, say, 3000ft from a dive bomber would not be going that fast but I don't doubt it would be going a damm sight faster than a diving aircraft. Remember, aircraft are designed to generate lift and lift means drag, which in turn means that past a certain point the wings come off, which would kind of spoil the kamikaze pilots aim. Also, a bomb laden plane is a pretty big unit and the energy of the imact is going to be spread over a much larger area. A bomb does not produce lift and is structually much stronger - and much smaller. It stands to reason it's going to have much more penetrative power. Think if it as like being poked with a finger or poked with a needle - only one of them is going to make a hole in you.
Again, I'm open to more knowlegable contradiction, but my understanding is that all the kamikazes did to the British carriers was scorch the paintwork.

Anyone out there got any info on bomb velocities at time of impact? And how fast would a Kamikaze aicraft have been travelling? Not more that 200-300mph max, I'd think.
 
understanding is that all the kamikazes did to the British carriers was scorch the paintwork.

A little more than that but they were much better equipped to absorb with Kamikaze attacks.

HMS Formidable is a good example. She was hit on the flight deck,by a Kamikaze on May 4th 1945. This caused no more than a large dent in the armoured deck but unfortunately a splinter passed down through the hangar deck and started a fire in a fuel tank. The fire was brought under control,the deck was repaired with concrete and steel plate and less than six hours after sustaining the hit Formidable was landing aircraft.

Steve
 
I believe the navy's code name was Anvil. You can read more about it in the description.
 
I saw a TV movie in which the oldest Kennedy brother was the B24 pilot who got killed testing the flying bomb setup. Any truth to this, or is it hype?

Indeed this is quite correct. It was just outside my father's village of Blythburgh and odd bits can still be occasionally found scattered around a wide area.
 
I was reading up on the Mistel attacks on the Oder and Elbe bridges and in a communique of 6 March 1945 from Generaloberst von Greim to his staff in Luftflotte 6 found a reference to

"Trials and missions by all other Luftwaffe technical means now under development such as "Wasserballon",the spraying of phosphorous or burning oil etc."

Now the Mistel attacks the bridges and elsewhere against shipping and possibly even bomber formations are well known but does anyone know if the Luftwaffe actually used "Wasserballon".

Cheers

Steve
 
A A6M2 had a never exceed speed of 410 mph, the later A6M5 had a never exceed speed of close to 450 mph. And any Zero could do well over 200 mph, at sea level, even with the 550lb bomb hung under it.

If you watched war time films of the actual attacks, most attacked from a dive, and i'm sure most of those pilots weren't too concerned with that never exceed speed in their final dive.
 
but my understanding is that all the kamikazes did to the British carriers was scorch the paintwork.

probably a good candidate for the "WW2 Myth" thread

oh yes, some heavy damage but not apparent right off

Short term, there are advantages to the British Armored Deck, but only if your carrier is being bombed or hit with Kamakizes. Lots of compromises to the ship design to achieve this DEFENSIVE capability such as less offensive power due to smaller air group thus fewer fighters. As an aircraft carrier's goal is to bring air power into an area, seems to me that arriving with 2/3 the planes a USN Carrier carries could be a disadvantage. An advantage, again, once a hit is received of the small RN Air Group is that there less things that can burn are on the ship; fewer planes, less ordnance, and less aviation fuel. Then consider what the RN could have done with more strike capability; Taranto, Matapan, and elsewhere.
Armored Deck does not defend against enemy torpedo planes, however, extra fighters DO.
Lots to think about when designing a warship especially the conflicting requirements of an aircraft carrier.

I have these article in my favorites, shall present it to you for your due consideration. Discusses the LONG TERM outlook for the armored deck carriers, structural deformities rendered nearly all of them UNFIT for postwar service.. Hmmmm, not the case for the USN Carriers. Then there is that lower hanger deck height to consider with the armored deck and the arrival of the larger Jet-powered planes post war. Lots of info and thoughts in these articles very good read too. The 2nd article discusses the Armored Box.

2 articles here

Were Armored Flight Decks on British Carriers Worthwhile?


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another article and stats here

http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-042.htm
 
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Some other articles worth reading:
Armoured flight deck - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

and an excerpt from the USS Franklin's damage report:




USS Franklin suffered over 1200 casualties from two 550lb bomb hits, bombs that would have been rejected by an armoured flight deck. Franklin was also dead in the water for over 12 hours after the attack.

The first sentence of the first quote makes it pretty clear that the USN would have adopted armoured flight decks if they had been able to study the beneficial effects of armoured flight decks prior to the Essex class having finished their design stage.

The Essex class displaced 27500 tons (38000 tons full load) and typically carried 90-110 aircraft. The RN's Implacable class displaced 23500 tons (33000 tons full load) and carried 70-80 aircraft. The difference in aircraft carried per ton is pretty minor.

USN Armoured carrier designs that were looked at as alternatives to Essex always featured shorter but fatter hulls, that had the side effect of providing superior torpedo protection.

Illustrious did not use a US style deck park during the Taranto attack, but she could have nearly doubled her strike numbers if she had done so, and this had nothing to do with her armoured flight deck.

AFAIK, the UK was bankrupt after WW2 and many ships, including carriers were scrapped because of lack of money, where the US was flush with cash and could afford to even repair Franklin, although she never saw service again.
 
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Even I,who knows bugger all about ships,found those articles interesting. Thanks both for the postings.
Steve
 
You can roughly calculate this in a spreadsheet pretty easily with a few inputs. Assume a divebomber has vertical component of velocity 250mph (367fps). Assume the bomb's terminal velocity is 650mph=953fps (might be higher as in example you gave, but not neccessarily for a smaller stubbier bomb, anyway choose any reasonable value you want). In a vacuum the acceleration is 32 fps/s, at terminal it's zero where the air resistance and bomb weight cancel out. Assume the resistance varies as the square of the speed. In the first one second, first row of the spreadsheet, calculation the starting resistance as (367/953)^2 as % of the bomb's weight=14.8%, therefore starting accelaration is 85.2% of 32 or 27.26fps^2 and roughly take that as constant over the 1 sec interval. The bomb speeds up to 393fps in that first second, and don't take that as constant but average it with the starting speed to get 380, travels 380 ft in that first second. Now for the 2nd 1 sec interval recalc the resistance and acceleration starting with 393, and repeat the process for each row of the spreadsheet.

After 5 secs the bomb is going 337mph and has travelled 2100ft, a plausible release altitude for a dive bomber. And with no air resistance it would only be going 359mph and travelled 2200', so the air resistance doesn't even make much difference in this case. But a bomb dropped from low altitude even in a moderate speed dive still won't be going any faster than a fast diving plane with the bomb attached.

I think your 250-300mph though would probably be closer to an average kamikaze a/c speed at impact than the max dive speed of a Zero. But it would vary tremendously. Some 'special attack' a/c were Type 4 Fighters ('Frank'), a few were slow biplanes. And the approach angles varied a lot, but as a rule AFAIK a long steep high speed dive was not a common tactic; a lot of the a/c came in shallow, or entered the terminal dive from fairly low altitude.

These two links give a list of 'special attacks' by IJA and IJN respectively. It's in Japanese but the following quick key should make it mainly readable without knowing Japanese (set view>encoding to 'Japanese autoselect', if your browser doesn't automatically):
—¤ŒR"ÁU
_•—"ÁU'à
First column is date, two digit year of the Showa reign, month, day, 19=1944, 20=1945
The second column is the attacking unit
The third column gives number and type of a/c. The initial number if Arabic is self explanatory, ie 97 or 99 otherwise Chinese numerals零, 一, 二, 三, 四, 百 are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 100, sometimes followed by 式= type, but in any case that number is the year type
Then followed by the kind of plane, examples:
重 heavy (bomber)
双軽 twin light (as in Type 99 Twin Light, 'Lily')
戦 fighter
襲 assault
艦爆 carrier bomber
So on the Army page 四式戦 Type 4 Fighter (Frank), 一式戦 Type 1 Fighter (Oscar), and 99 襲 Type 99 Assault (Sonia) are common, though there are many other types.
On the Navy page older a/c have year types but later ones names, eg.
彗星 Susei (aka Judy)
銀河 Ginga (aka Frances)

Anyway you can copy>past>google those a/c types and a page will generally come up with the English name(s).
After the type is the Arabic number of machines(機) in the attack
So for example among navy attacks, third row, first of the 8 attacks:
19.10.25 「敷 島 隊」 零戦6 機
Oct 25 1944, Shikishima Unit, 6 Type Zero Fighters; the rows under that date and columns further to the right give the units and a/c composition of the other 7 'special attacks' that day.

Joe
 
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The first article, above, states:

This is complete balderdash! It states that Illustrious was limited to 22 knots, post war while Indomitable had to be towed to Spithead.

USS Forrestal and all US CVs from Midway onward have armoured flight decks! This article is a complete fraud and the authors obviously don't know what the heck they are talking about!!!
Illustrious:

Indomitable:


Forrestal:

It is pretty incredible that the article Were Armored Flight Decks on British Carriers Worthwhile?remains on the web, as parts of it seem to be completely fictional!
 
apropos the topic thread: Found this on Miss Hannah's Wikipedia page following a hot link from the Eric Brown's page:

During the winter of 1943-44 she was assigned to the development of suicide aircraft and, under the command of SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, was the first founding member of the SS-Selbstopferkommando Leonidas (Leonidas Squadron). This project, in which the pilots flew manned bombs and died during the mission, similarly to the later use of Tokkōtai ("Kamikaze") by the Japanese, was proposed by Hitler on 28 February 1944. It is probable that the idea originated with Reitsch during her testing of the Messerschmitt Me 163 in 1942:[citation needed] she was the first to volunteer for the newly formed unit. The programme met with considerable resistance from the Luftwaffe high command and was never activated: even Hitler was initially reluctant to accept its use. The unit was disbanded one year later.
 
USS Forrestal and all US CVs from Midway onward have armoured flight decks! This article is a complete fraud and the authors obviously don't know what the heck they are talking about!!!!

100% correct. I knew people who served on the Forrestal (one during the fire) and it was a known fact the flight deck was armored. There were even jokes about this after the fire.
 
It would have been very difficult to find a decent amount of German pilots with the sole purpose of doing suicide missions. It is just not in the German culture.
 
100% correct. I knew people who served on the Forrestal (one during the fire) and it was a known fact the flight deck was armored. There were even jokes about this after the fire.

My class officer had half his face scarred by the Forrestal fire. He was a RIO about to climb into an F-4 fairly aft in the pack near the rounddown. According to him, a nearby member of the deck crew, a Chief Petty Office saw him garbed in his survival gear including his inflatable life vest and tackled him taking them both over the side into the water. They were picked up out of the water by the plane guard. He claimed the CPO's rapid thinking and action saved both their lives.
 

I suspect these dive figures apply to the Zero operating at its ideal altitude, as is often the case with figures cited for maximum speed. If any Zero, with its light weight and low wing-loading, got close to these velocities at sea level about the only thing the pilot could be confident of hitting would be the Pacific Ocean in general. Likewise, all the footage I have seen of Kamikaze attacks involved the aircraft approaching at a shallow angle and none of them appeared to be travelling at anything like 400 mph plus.
A bomb hits at higher speed and penetrates further before exploding. A Kamikaze has one advantage only – it's guidance system
 
No aircraft ( except maybe a Swordfish) has to be in a vertical dive to exceed it's never exceed speed, without dive brakes speed is going to build up quick even in a 30 degree dive.

It's pretty hard to judge speed from a film taken from a distance, especially over water there's nothing to judge it by. Plus a lot of that combat film is shown in slow motion.

Even though they were mostly inexperienced pilots, they'd have to realize the faster they went, the faster they got thru the flak, the less time they were exposed to the danger of AA fire. Their only defense was speed .

There is a picture of a Judy coming in with it's dive brakes out, but it's hard to tell the degree of the dive from the picture.

If they could have co-ordinated multiple attacks from different angles at the same time, they probably would have made more strikes. But the intercepting fighters usually has the surviving Kamakazi in such chaos, they had no chance to co-ordinate.
 
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They come in too hot in those Zeroes and they risk tearing off the wings and going spinning into the ocean. Another reason they want to keep their dive-speeds under control is they want to hit their targets. I've heard of both fates, the aircraft coming apart from the stress of the dives, and just plum missing their targets. I think the good success rate the kamikazes enjoyed had more to do with the vast numbers that were launched than anything else. I wonder if any empirical data survived on those numbers. I know how many got through, but not how many tried.
 

With about every gun in the fleet putting rounds in the air, how could anybody venture a guess that a diving fighter had structural failure?
 

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