Blücher: A story for the books?

Simon Orchard · Post by **Simon Orchard** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 2:36 pm

phylo_roadking wrote:
The Skuas that sunk the Königsberg at Bergen flew from land bases in the UK.
The Blackburn Skua was a torpedo bomber operated from carrier or land by the Fleet Air Arm

Enjoy..

http://freespace.virgin.net/john.dell/s ... gsberg.htm

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 5:07 pm

Yep - its original Air Ministry specification 0.27/34 specified it as a dual purpose tordpedo bomber/fighter bomber. A total of four squadrons only were ever equiped....basically because it was cr@p! Similarly to the Blackburn Roc, a turrret equiped version with an open cockpit, carrying a tropedo impeded speed in the air! (The fourth and last squadron equiped with Skuas, 806 Sqn., went straight into target-towing!)

The Fleet Air Arm through the war had a long history of shuffling designs that turned out to be unsuitable into shore-based squadrons for shortrange coastal patrols or CAP over fleet anchorages...which was what 800 Sqn was doing over Scapa Flow on the eve of the attack. Fully equiped as fighterbombers, they were referred to as "fighters" because at that time....with their 4 .303 Brownings and one rear-firing Lewis Gun...they were the most-gun-armed aircraft the Fleet Air Arm had!

But "fighters" only in the sense that at exactly the same time in the war AVM Dowding, much further south, was being obligated by the Air Ministry to accept on charge two squadrons of Blenheim bombers as day-fighters!!! (he was just VERY careful not to let any fly when there were Germans about!

) The sinking of the Konigsberg was still an RN operation with Fleet Air Arm aircraft and personnel.

Tiornu · Post by **Tiornu** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 5:22 pm

Yep - its original Air Ministry specification 0.27/34 specified it as a dual purpose tordpedo bomber/fighter bomber.

You're saying that an aircraft with a 500-lb bombload was designed as a torpedo plane?

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 5:59 pm

Originally spec'd as...but only ever produced as a fighterbomber and in small numbers....for obvious reasons! The derivative Roc couldn't even manage to be tested in prototype with a fish! Its performance was really abysmal, and of the very few produced, some were even supplied from the factory with the turret removed to save weight...for target towing! RN/FFA procurement in the 1930s was quite awful even compared to the mishmash of specifications emanating from the Air Ministry for the RAF...then being superseded, or cancelled, or preference given to selected companies...or...or...ad infinitum! Suprisingly the RAF side of the process produced aircraft like the Spitfire, Hurricane and Wellington etc,....

Whereas the FAA side of the process produced gems like the Skua, the Roc, the Fairey Albacore, Fairey Barrcuda...and the Fulmar - a fighter version of the Fairey Battle???

Tiornu · Post by **Tiornu** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 6:23 pm

Originally spec'd as...but only ever produced as a fighterbomber and in small numbers

Can you provide a citation for this? I'm dying to read how this happened.

Whereas the FAA side of the process produced gems like the Skua, the Roc, the Fairey Albacore, Fairey Barrcuda...and the Fulmar - a fighter version of the Fairey Battle?

Well, we can blame the RAF for most of that, can't we? Or maybe we can blame the Gordian administration of the FAA itself.

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 7:42 pm

My stuff on the FAA comes mostly from the pages of Flypast and Classic Aeroplane, I just happened to have an edition with a quicky article on the Norway campaign in it to hand! Had some stuff on the Skua in a sidebar...and thats nearly all of it!

The British way of doing things was well weird. In the 1930's the Air Ministry issued specifications, aircraft factories and designers started work on them...now what SHOULD have happened was prototypes were produced and tested; but what DID happen was as moods and fashions changed, some specs were withdrawn, some were changed/amended, and some were totally superseded! THEN you had the Air Ministry prepared to fiddle their own system by giving designers hints or gee-ups - or changing the specs altogether to suit what the disgners and factories could provide!!!

Example - the original spec for what was (eventually) to become the Spitfire was issued early in the '30s, and Supermarine and RJ Mitchell produced a RR-engined (like their winning Schnieder trophy engine) pig's abortion with cranked wings and spatted undercarriage...that looked for all the world like a racy STUKA!!! Thankfully it and its rivals ALL were underpowered and didn't come up to specifications. So while the RJ Mitchell was redesigning it into what years' later would be K5059, the first flying Spitfire...the Air Ministry produced their revised specification based on the changes they KNEW was making!!!

The RAF wasn't actually involved in the process that much - they contributed their requirements to the Ministry, Serving RAF pilots like Mutt Summers were detached as test pilots for commercial companies producing military aircraft etc. And they had full visibility of final designs and ran the tests/competitions between aircraft. But THEN they had to make do with the numbers and types the Ministry gave them! Hence the comment above about the "fighter" Blenheim squadrons in 1939-40.....

The FAA side of things was even more complicated, they'd been VERY slow to take on the idea for monoplane fighters, and were still testing various new biplane types in the mid 1930's with the intention of these being in service in the early '40s! And even then they were getting confused, were rejecting types and sending designs back to factories as unsuitable....sometimes loosing years in the whole process!

(the war didn't actually change this much! Look how long it took them to get the Seafire into service!!!)

Troy Tempest · Post by **Troy Tempest** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 10:01 pm

A fighter?!

Troy

Tiornu · Post by **Tiornu** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 10:16 pm

I will have to remain skeptical until I see some documentation that the Skua started as a torpedo plane project. A divebomber/fighter is not that outlandish, especially in view of the SBC's success, and even the SBD's.
One note: the Fulmar was not a fighter version of the battle, but a fighter version of a proposed replacement for the Battle.
The FAA was heir to an administrative mess, the formation of the RAF as owner of all things that flew. There's a fine case study comparing USN success with FAA failure in the book by Friedman, Hone, and Mandeles: American & British Aircraft Carrier Development 1919-1941. It's enough to make you thank heaven that Billy Mitchell didn't get his way.

Troy Tempest · Post by **Troy Tempest** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 12:45 am

What do you mean by you're glad General Mitchell didn't get his way? I thought he was a champion of naval aviation in general, and dive-bombing in particular wasn't he? That's about all I know about him, apart from showing that aircraft could attack and damage ships. Is there something not so sunny about him and/or his ideas?

Troy

Tiornu · Post by **Tiornu** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 1:13 am

Ha! General Mitchell was a champion of General Mitchell. He was instrumental in the formative years of the Army Air Force, but he was like Goering in wanting all the airplanes for himself. His misconduct of the Ostrfriesland bombing trials should have gotten him canned, and eventually he did get himself canned, and justifiably so. The USAF still regards him as a hero, but if he had gotten his way, the USN would have been all but replaced by aeroplanes. His expressed views in military aviation reveal him to be either delusional or shamelesly deceitful. He anticipated that aircraft carriers could attack Pearl Harbor, but he also anticipated that any enemy ships chancing within range of land-based aircraft would be destroyed in short order. (He wasn't fastidious about generating coherent thought on any subject.) So credit him with the good work he did for the air force, and credit him with scheming to establish a national policy that would have ruined his country.

Simon Orchard · Post by **Simon Orchard** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 1:18 am

Here's a photo from one of my albums of a Skua, shotdown over Narvik.

On the subject of Narvik, the RAF managed to deploy a Gladiator Sqdn (263) and a Hurricane Sqdn (46) to the airfield of Bardufoss. Both did sterling work against the LW over Narvik, helped by the lack of German fighter support which only took the form of the Me110. The nearest German airfiled was outside Trondheim, too far for the Me109.

Ironically, many of the Hurricanes and almost all the pilots of 46 sqdn were lost to the KM, when after landing on the carrier Glorious (first time someone had tried putting a Hurrican down on a carrier and with no special equipment or training) during the pull out from Norway, it was caught by KM and sent to the bottom.

Troy Tempest · Post by **Troy Tempest** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:42 am

Sorry Simon, I couldn't get the link to work

Troy

Simon Orchard · Post by **Simon Orchard** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 8:09 am

The picture above should come up as an image rather than a link.

Troy Tempest · Post by **Troy Tempest** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 8:29 am

That's better Simon!

phylo_roadking · Post by **phylo_roadking** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 11:02 am

Tiornu, I'd love to be able to point you at one single source for British Air Ministry specifications in the 1920s and 1930s....because they generated some of the most amazing designs and backbiting politics you'll ever see! Sadly, unlike the rise and rise of the Luftwaffe and its designs, the academic and literary studies of British achievements in this period are "eclipsed" by the successful designs and there's no single work drawing it all together....yet.....