Word: pilotless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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This little aircraft is a captured Japanese suicide rocket bomb, fitted with a pilot's cockpit, steering controls and an explosive warhead in the nose. It may have been modeled after the pilotless German V-i robomb, which it resembles in size and destructive capacity. Japanese broadcasts have glorified it under the name Jinrai ("sudden peal of thunder"), but U.S. fighting men promptly tagged it with another Japanese term, baka ("stupid"). In operation, Stupid is carried near its target by a bomber, then cut loose. The pilot glides down and can fire three rockets in the tail to give...
Weather did not halt the German ersatz air force of pilotless V-bombs, and by last week Allied commanders were willing to concede that the V-bombs had true military value when coupled with an offensive. The Germans fired salvos of V15 and V-25, and a shorter-ranged, smaller version of V-2 as they would have used heavy artillery in advance of an assault. Their effectiveness was obvious: even haphazard strikes could do military damage aplenty in junction towns crowded with men and materials. The enemy claimed to have poured them on Antwerp, Brussels...
Does all this add up to postwar pilotless cargo planes, shooting through the stratosphere at inhuman speeds and heights? The engineers who have developed the automatic devices think not. They believe that for some time to come it will be necessary for a pilot, to go along to correct the machines' mistakes or inadequacies. But the pilot will not have much else...
Fighters chase the Things to the edges of a balloon barrage that would scare off a bomber pilot. But many a pilotless bomber gets through...
...significant: the experimental stations at Peenemünde and Zinnowitz on the wooded Baltic coast (R.A.F. attacks there a year ago were officially credited with having delayed V-1 by six months); robot-parts plants at Friedrichshafen and Memmingen in southwest Germany; unnamed factories turning out special fuels for pilotless bombs; storage points in France and Germany for bombs and fuels. Part of the strategic pattern was a concentrated blasting of the Bayerische Motorenwerke (Munich), which makes robot propulsion engines. It was reported four-fifths destroyed...