THE GHASTLY HAVOC WROUGHT BY THE AIR-DEMONS
THE HORROR OF BOMB-DROPPING -- ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNS -- KINDS OF BOMBS --
STEEL DARTS--“ARROW BULLETS” AND AERIAL TORPEDOES -- MACHINE GUNS IN
AIRCRAFT -- ACCURACY IN DROPPING BOMBS.
Ten years ago the dropping of bombs from balloons was still considered
an illegitimate form of warfare, involving danger to non-combatants, and
was under the ban of the Geneva Convention. At the Hague Peace
Conference the Germans refused to abstain from bomb-dropping, and other
nations followed suit. According to the German conception of war,
civilians in the theater of operations must take their chance of being
killed, but must not shoot back under pain of summary execution. The
horrors which this theory has added to war have proved only too real,
but, so far as bomb-dropping is concerned, the reality has so far fallen
short of anticipations. The great Zeppelins, capable of carrying a ton
of explosives, have practically been frightened out of the air by the
new anti-aircraft guns; and, except for one instance at Antwerp,
bomb-dropping has been confined to aeroplanes. Now, in the first place,
an aeroplane can carry only a limited weight of bombs--say, two hundred
pounds; and in the second place, it is extraordinarily difficult to hit
anything with them. If the airman could hover over his target and take
deliberate aim, he might be more dangerous; as it is, the German airman
finds a cathedral hardly a big enough mark. The British airmen, at
Düsseldorf and Lake Constance, adopted a different plan from the
Germans; instead of dropping bombs from a great height, they made a
steep “vol piqué” down on to the target, turned sharply up again, and
dropped the bomb at the moment when the plane was checked by the
elevator. This plan is more dangerous, but affords a better chance of
hitting.
[Illustration: TYPES OF AIR-CRAFT WEAPONS.
Fig. 1.--An aeroplane bomb containing 12 lbs. of tetranitranilin, with a
screw stem up which the vanes travel in flight and thus “arm” the fuse.
Fig. 2.--Steel dart and boxes of darts used by Taube aeroplanes over
Paris, showing how they are inverted and released. Fig. 3.--A French
“arrow bullet”; very light, but able to kill a man from a height of
1,800 feet. Fig. 4.--A French aerial torpedo used by aeroplanes against
Zeppelins, exploding when it has pierced an air-ship’s envelope and is
suddenly arrested by the wooden cross.]
KINDS OF BOMBS
Various kinds of bombs are used for dropping from aeroplanes. A simple
pattern shown in Fig. 1 consists of a thin spherical shell of steel,
containing twelve pounds of tetranitranilin, which is an explosive more
powerful than melinite. The stem of the bomb, by which it is handled,
has an external screw-thread, and carries a pair of vanes. While in the
position shown, the bomb is harmless, but as it drops, the vanes screw
themselves up to the top of the stem till they press against the stop.
This, by means of a rod passing down the center of the stem, “arms” or
prepares the fuse seen at the bottom of the bomb, so that it acts at the
slightest touch, even on the wing of another aeroplane. The fuse effects
the explosion of the burster by means of a primer of azide of lead,
which causes the tetranitranilin to detonate with great violence. The
whole bomb weighs twenty-two pounds, and an aeroplane usually carries
six of them.
The Italians, in their campaign in Tripoli, used similar bombs, but
without the special device for rendering the fuse sensitive. These were
not a success, as many of them failed to explode in the desert sand, and
the Arabs used to collect them and throw them into the Italian trenches
at night.
STEEL DARTS
The Taube aeroplanes, when they flew over Paris, used sometimes to drop
steel darts pointed at one end and flattened and feathered at the other,
as shown in Fig. 2. These were put up in boxes of a hundred, so that
when the box was released from its hook, it turned over and released the
darts.
“ARROW BULLETS” AND AERIAL TORPEDOES
The “arrow bullet” shown in Fig. 3 is a French device; though weighing
only three-quarters of an ounce, its peculiar shape enables it to
acquire a high velocity, so that it will kill a man when dropped from a
height of six hundred yards. An aerial torpedo carried by French
aeroplanes for the destruction of Zeppelins is shown in Fig. 4; it
contains a powerful charge of explosive and a fuse, to which the
suspending-wire is connected. When dropped on a Zeppelin, the
needle-pointed torpedo pierces the envelope and gas-chamber, but the
wooden cross is arrested and the sudden jerk on the suspending-wire sets
the fuse in action, causing the certain destruction of the airship. The
torpedo would be too dangerous to handle, but the French have an
ingenious device which renders it perfectly safe until it is dropped.
MACHINE GUNS IN AIRCRAFT
Various attempts have been made to mount machine guns on aeroplanes, but
the operator, in his narrow seat, has hardly space to point a machine
gun in any direction except straight to his front. The American Curtis
machine gun exhibited at Olympia is the most efficient form yet
produced, but at present the airman seems to prefer an automatic rifle.
Even in the early days of the war, Sir John French was able to report
that British airmen had disposed of no less than five of the enemy’s
aircraft with this weapon.
The Zeppelins are well armed with machine guns, carrying one in each of
the two cars, and one on top of the structure. Access is had to the
latter by means of a shaft and ladder which passes up through the
gas-chambers.
ACCURACY IN DROPPING BOMBS
The Zeppelins have elaborate bomb-dropping apparatus with which it
should be theoretically possible to drop a bomb with great accuracy, but
on the occasion when it was tried at Antwerp, the Germans met with no
great success. The principle of the bomb-dropping device is as follows:
A sort of camera, pointed vertically downwards, is used, and an observer
notes the speed with which an object on the ground passes across the
field, and the direction in which it appears to move. He then reads the
height of the airship from the barometer, which gives the time taken by
the bomb to fall, say fifteen seconds for 3,500 feet. He has now to
calculate, from the data given by the camera-observation, the allowance
to be made for speed and leeway for fifteen seconds of fall, and to
point his sighting-tube accordingly. The air-ship is steered to windward
of the target, and at the moment when the target (say, the second funnel
of a dreadnaught) appears on the cross wires, the nine hundred-pound
bomb is dropped, and the ship goes to the bottom.
[Illustration: SCENE OF AIR RAID ON ENGLAND.
Leigh, shown on the map, is only twenty-five miles from the British
capital, and South End just five miles further on. The fleet of
Zeppelins, or aeroplanes, or both, it will be seen, got uncomfortably
close to the British metropolis.]