"Antoine C." wrote:
> Pardon my french, but I thought the "wing over" tactic against
> V-1's was used early on by the prop driven fighters, and that
> V-1's were abandoned by Fritz before the Meteor came to play and
> replaced by the dreaded V-2, fortunately in much samller numbers?
> Antoine
Not at all! Fighter pilots being fighter pilots around the world and across
the generations, they would prefer to shoot the little buggers down, but
failing that, could suck it up and use the technique described by Richard
earlier. Whether Meteor, Typhoon or Tempest, it involved using the mass
airflow over the fighter's big wing to disrupt the airflow on the tiny wing
of the doodlebug, thus toppling the latter's gyro. The thing would still blow
up when it hit, but hopefully that was away from any densely populated area.
Imagine the challenge, though... spotting a twinkling out of the corner of
your eye... instinctively winging over, and diving at Ludicrous Speed (if not
Plaid - Dark Helmet, where are you?), knowing you have but a few seconds
before the bastard is gone. You want to line it up and take a shot if you
can, but you can't be too close... and if you can't take the shot, there's
only one other way to bring it down before it impacts the London docks, where
thousands of your countrymen are boarding transports for the continent at
this moment...
Personally, I don't think I'd like to invite a ton or so of high explosive to
detonate a scant few yards from my bird -- there are some really good pics of
scorched Mosquitos attesting to the power of the resulting fireball! Hell of
a job, but someone had to do it...
The Meteor flew operationally in the late summer of 1944, well before the
coastal V-1 launching sites were eventually overrun by the Canadian 2nd Corps
in September of that year.
Phew... need another beer... :-)
Geoff
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jun 05 2001 - 23:18:31 PDT