The Vultee Vengeance (Part 1)
Now after all this, you must be wondering what we might be doing in our spare time. Flying, perhaps ? It is time to introduce the Star of the Show:
"You men call yourselves the Forgotten Army.....You've not been forgotten.....It's just that no one's ever heard of you !"
(General "Bill" Slim to his troops of the 14th Army in Burma).
Much the same might be said of the Vultee "Vengeance" aircraft which the RAF and Indian Air Force flew in support of that Army during the Burmese campaigns of 1942-44.
A few of our warbirds are still household names, like the "Spitfire" and "Lancaster". (I often wonder why the US does not honour its Douglas SBD "Dauntless" as we do our "Spitfire". Single-handed, that aircraft won them the battle of Midway, and so turned the tide of the Pacific war, which up to then had gone Japan's way after Pearl Harbor).
But most of the aircraft of those days are remembered now only by the nonagenarians who flew or serviced them, and by boys of the time (and later) whose bedrooms were festooned with model aircraft. They and their memories are fading into the mists, and I think it time to put down this memorial of my cantankerous old steed before the same happens to us. I don't think any Vengeance exist in the world today, and photographs are rare, but it was similar in size and general appearance to the US Navy Grumman "Avenger" of the same era, of which examples (at the time of first writing in 2000) were still flying (and much the same size and weight as our Fairey "Barracuda").
A great deal of what follows is no more than hearsay from those days. I had no means then, and have no means now, of verifying what I was told. We lived a happy-go-lucky life, going where we were sent, and flying what they gave us to fly, without bothering our heads about the aircraft's political background or production history. It was there and we flew it. Consequently I cannot guarantee any of my facts. But it was such a good story that it ought to be true. So here goes.
The Luftwaffe had a great deal of success with their JU-87 "Stuka" in the early days of the war. There is a lot to be said for the dive-bomber. Until the advent of modern guided weapons, it was by far the most accurate way to deliver a bomb. And in those pre-atomic days, a miss with the old "iron bomb" was usually as good as a mile. (Unless your target was a city, big enough for a navigator to find and too big for a bomb-aimer to miss - within reason - post-war Bomber Command analysis calculated an average error of several miles.)
But if you need to destroy a bridge, say, or a ship, a bomb a hundred yards off was a waste of time. You needed accuracy, and a dive bomber was then the only way to get it. People bombed low-level, of course, which meant coming in close (giving the defences a fine target), chucking the thing off and hoping for the best. Results were mixed, but still better than high-level, which amounted to scattering bombs all over the countryside in the hope of blanketing the target with some of them.
The well known US Air Corps boast about "a bomb in a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet" (with their new Norden bombsight) was met with derision on both sides of the Pond:
We mocked (to the tune of "John Brown's Body"):
"We're flying Flying Fortresses at Forty Thousand Feet ----We've stowed away inside the bay a teeny little bomb ----We'll drop the damn' thing off so high we won't know where it's gone !"-----(there are many variants and more verses of this which fellow PPRuNers could supply).
"Precision Bombing" was a myth.
The success of the "Stuka" raised eyebrows in our Air Ministry. Why hadn't we developed such a weapon ? Too late now, of course. Our aircraft factories were busy round the clock with the current types and their successors. But Roosevelt had just announced Lend-Lease and the US Navy had been operating dive-bombers for years.
Better late than never. A specification was drawn up and sent to our Purchasing Commission in Washington. A contract was signed with Vultee (a small Californian firm) to design and build several hundred aircraft ("off the drawing board") to save time. Then we put the whole thing out of mind, and carried on with the war, which was going none too well for us in 1941-42.
More later.
Goodnight, all,
Danny42C
Give it time !