Briefings : Brimstone, French defence cuts, Military blogging (updated)

• A new version of the Brimstone guided missile is to be tested on RAF Tornado GR4s. The tests will be carried out in 2011 to clear the missile ahead of it entering service with the RAF at a later date. The new version of Brimstone is intended for a "low-collateral, precision-attack capability deployable against manoeuvring and fixed targets in short- to medium-range close air support or counter-insurgency operations". So it should enter service just in time for our pull out from Afghanistan.
  
• France is to cut it's defence spending by 3.5 billion euros as part of it's efforts to cut it's deficit. That amounts to less than 4% of the defence budget and may be off-set by some asset sales. Current procurement programmes will not be affected it is claimed.
• The Dutch may pull out of the JSF's initial operational test and evaluation phase. Spain is reducing it's P-3 upgrade programme to just 4 aircraft.
• In comparion to recent moves by the Chinese military to ban it's personnel from blogging the British forces in Afghanistan have launched a mass blogging initiative by personnel writing regular posts from the front line. Posts have been written by personnel from the British Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.
• The 1940 sinking of the British troopship Lancastria saw the loss of up to 6000 lives and is Britain's worst naval disaster yet news of the loss was suppressed at the time to not give the Germans a propaganda coup. Survivors and supporters are now trying to get the ship's resting place recognised as a war grave. 
• The first Type 45 destroyer HMS Daring is linked to the city of Birmingham (my home) apparently. City dignitaries including the Lord Mayor were given a tour of the new ship.
• Freeze the wages of public sector workers, hooray! Wait that includes 140,000 service personnel, boooo!

Operation Dynamo 70 years on

It is 70 years since Operation Dynamo, the "miracle" when thousands of allied troops were evacuated from France at Dunkirk (and other ports) back to Britain as the Germans pressed irresistibly into France. The BBC website has created a nice selection of maps and infographics to try and explain exactly did go on at Dunkirk.

A fleet of boats, some survivors from the original operation, will re-enact the journey over to Dunkirk today. They will be escorted across by HMS Monmouth.

The Telegraph have a video report. The Daily Mail looks at some of the soldiers who didn't manage to be evacuated and their terrible fate.

The Guardian has meanwhile gone back into it's archives to 1936 to find a report complaining about the state of the British Army and how so many recruits were rejected as they were unfit. Similiar things are often said about recruits nowadays, the more things change the more things stay the same.

Retro Tucanos

The RAF have repainted two of it's Tucano T1 trainers in a "retro" WW2 camouflage style (the red in the roundels looks too small to me though) as part of it's effort to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. They flew in formation with one of the RAF's heritage flight's Spitfires a few days ago. I'd love to see a Typhoon repainted like this too.

Photo © Geoffrey Lee/Planefocus

Sunday Fail : Anti-tank Dogs

Never work with children or animals showbiz types say, Russian Army troops probably said the same thing in WW2 when they tried to use dogs to destroy German tanks. The idea seems simple enough, strap a bomb to a dog and train it to go underneath a tank and then get it to release the bomb which can then be detonated. However training dogs to do just this proved impossible. One serious problem encountered was with bombs on a timer, the dog often returned to it's trainer with the bomb still attached to itself...

In the end the Russians decided they would have to sacrifice the dogs and turned the bombs into simple contact detonation devices. The dogs were trained to go underneath a tank, the bomb would touch the underneath of the tank and boom! It seemed to work well enough in training but when it came to try the bombs out for real one problem was the dogs had been trained with stationary tanks and didn't want to go underneath the Germans who unsportingly did not stop for the dogs. The different smell of German tanks compared to the Russian tanks with which the dogs had been trained also caused canine confusion. In the first attack 30 dogs were sent out but only 4 detonated their bombs near German tanks. This maybe doesn't seem so bad until you find out 6 dogs returned to the Russian trenches and blew up there instead!

The Russians did persist with the dogs and claim 300 German tanks were destroyed by the dogs though its not known how accurate this figure is. How many dogs died is also unknown but considering the earlier success ratio the number of dogs who perished must have been vast.

The use of dogs as an offensive weapon does not have a very distinguished record. Unfortunately thousands if not millions of Man's best friends had to die before people got the message that dogs plus bombs is not a good idea. Insurgents in Iraq are reported to have also tried using dogs with bombs but the lack of success has continued.

Sunday Fail : Maus

The Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus was the heaviest tank built in World War 2, and at 192 tonnes probably the heaviest tank ever built (by comparison a Leopard 2 weighs just over 60 tonnes). Now tank designs often get heavier during their development but the Maus was rather impressive in that aspect, the original design was to be 100 tonnes but the result (which never entered service) was almost double that.

That sheer weight bought a lot of problems of course. It was too heavy to use many bridges so it had to be designed to ford rivers instead. To cross deep streams or rivers the Maus was designed to be able to travel along the river bed fully subermerged coupled up to another Maus on the bank which would supply it with electrical power for it's transmission. Late in the war you might think German engineers and scientists might have better things to do.

Moving nearly 200 tons was another problem of course, a special railway car had to be built for it. But for it's own engine no German made engine proved powerful enough to give it a decent performance. A 1200hp engine was fitted but this couldn't take the Maus over 8mp/h.

The Maus would have been a formidable tank to fight of course with a 128mm cannon and a 75mm secondary armament (which on it's own was more powerful than the guns tanks had had for much of the war). The armour ranged from 60mm to 240mm steel. However it is not thought any of the Maus prototypes saw any action. The Soviets managed to capture several prototypes but noticeably it does not seem like the Maus made much impact on postwar Soviet tank design.

The Maus was no doubt an impressive sight but it's utility as a military weapon was rather suspect. Considering the vast resources that would need to go into producing a decent force of the tank it is likely the Maus, if it had entered service, would have remained in small numbers and considering it's slow speed probably would have just been bypassed by advancing Allied forces and destroyed at their leisure.

Sunday Fail : P-75A Eagle

Two things can screw up a project: bad timing and changing requirements. Unfortunately for the rather interesting P-75 it suffered from both.

Conceived early in America's fight in the Second World War the Fisher P-75A Eagle was an innovative attempt to build a high performance fighter. Unfortunately by the time it was ready to begin flight tests the war was almost over and the USAAF no longer needed the type.

In 1942 the USAAF was desperately in need of a high performance interceptor with a high rate of climb, the Fisher Bodies division of General Electric came up with the interesting idea of combining aircraft parts already in production with a powerful engine to come up with a solution to the air force's problems quickly.

The P-75 thus took wings from a P-40 (originally they were to have come from a P-51), the tail from an A-24 and the tail wheel unit from an F4U and combined them in a new fuselage and they fitted a 2885hp Allison V-3420 engine in it. The P-75 had quite an advanced design with twin contra rotating propellers and the engine behind the cockpit.

By the time of the P-75's first flight in late 1943 however the USAAF needed a long-ranged escort fighter not an interceptor and the performance was rather disappointing anyway. The design was modified into the P-75A which was ready for testing by late 1944. Unfortunately for the P-75A by then the end of the war was in sight and the USAAF no longer wanted new fighters of this type, especially a brand new aircraft. Just 5 P-75As were built in the end, the conditional 2,500 production order was canceled.

Brave deeds of WW2 carrier pigeons remembered

In WW2 RAF bomber crews took carrier pigeons with them to send a distress message if the plane was shot down. (A very interesting book on all this kind of thing is "Shot down & in the drink" incidentally.) Sam the pigeon who rode with bomber crews from RAF Linton-on-Ouse has been honoured. Sam was injured over Berlin when a piece of shrapnel blew his beak off. The box Sam was in at the time still exists, as does the hole. Sam survived the injury thanks to care from the crew who were able to look after Sam as well as bomb the Hun. Well that is why the British won the war of course.


Harold Wood, who looked after Sam and other pigeons along with Sam's box. Pigeon is unnamed.

On a more serious note we should always remember the animals who died for the armed forces in warfare, unlike the humans (most of the time) the animals didn't have a choice in the matter!

Upgrading RAF ...er... Spitfires

Upgrading military aircraft is of course a never ending process but you may think the Spitfire and other aircraft from that time would be long off the upgrades list. However the aircraft of the Battle Of Britain Flight have just received an avionics upgrade so they can continue flying in the 21st century. The upgrade to the 70 year old Spitfires, Hurricane, Lancaster and Dakota was needed because of mandated airspace policies in place in the UK and Europe.



Increasing amounts of airspace require aircraft to carry transponders with identification friend or foe Mode S (mode select) transponders that allow an airframe to be interrogated automatically (reporting back identity, intent, capability location and altitude) using an unique address. Without this equipment the BBMF aircraft would be restricted as to where they could fly.



Luckily fitting the equipment to the old aircraft wasn't too difficult, the fittings for the old IFF system were able to be reused so no changes were required to the aircraft's structures.

Republished from my general tech blog

Book Review : Japanese Tanks 1939-45 by Steven J Zaloga

Osprey produce many interesting books on less obvious subjects at a handy price and this book is one of their New Vanguard series which focuses on weapons of war, and in this case Japanese tanks of World War 2, an aspect of the war much less covered than tank warfare in the west. Though the book is a bit misnamed, as the period covered stretches from early Japanese tank developments just after the First World War onwards.

The Japanese were the largest manufacturer of tanks in the 1930s outside of Europe, their early designs based on imported British and French tanks and steadily developed thanks in some part to combat experience in the 1930s in China. At the start of WW2 they were pretty much on a par with European and American designs and led the way in the incredible Japanese advance across the Pacific proving that tanks could be used through jungle terrain and played a full role in actions such as the capture of Singapore.

However their development and production stagnated as the Japanese navy and airforce took the priority so when the Allied fightback against the Japanese later in the war began the Japanese tanks were outclassed and had been left behind by armour and weapon advances and suffered accordingly.

This is an interesting read on the less well known aspect of tank warfare in WW2, gorgeously illustrated as with all Osprey books with some fine colour artwork. The writing by Stephen Zaloga is up to his usual high standard and covers the history of development and combat experience. My only real criticism is the book is a bit short but that is the case with all of the New Vanguard series which could be better served with a few more pages.

Republished from my tech blog