Lords of the Sky: Fighter Pilots and Air Combat, From the Red Baron to the F-16 (75 page)

All bombs produce blast effects—that’s the point. The severity of this depends on the type of weapon, the fuse and whatever pieces of the target are flying through the air. Aside from destroying the objective, the attacker doesn’t want to be killed by its own weapons so minimum release altitudes allow the aircraft to get clear of its own blast effects.

During the 1930’s the Luftwaffe had developed the Stachelbombe specifically for close air support work. The Strabo, as it was called, had a long spike attached to the nose which would keep the bomb from ricocheting at low graze angles and give the attacking aircraft time to get away. Others were also developed like the British Mark 1 and the German Butterfly bomb.

AN EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE DEATH OF THE RED BARON

Writing to the editors of the
Army Quarterly
(London) in May 1931, Major A. E. Beavis of the Australian Staff Corps asserts that “Richthofen was not shot down by one of our own fighters,” as the RAF had claimed, but rather was killed by ground-based anti-aircraft fire from Australian Lewis guns.

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