During
the summer of 1940 the British military was in a terrible plight: The army
had lost most of its equipment at Dunkirk, and only a small force was
available to receive the dreaded cross-channel invasion by German forces.
To stiffen the invasion defence many plans and schemes were devised to
stop the Germans on the beaches. Many were not feasible, some were
downright ridiculous. One of the lesser-known ideas dreamt up in Britain
were the Daisy-Cutter Project. Using the Blenheim bombers against enemy
shipping had been tried since 1939, but results were mostly disappointing
due to the small bombs carried. Against a massed invasion fleet such
attacks would be little more than pin-pricks. Aware that the German
invasion forces would be forced to use lightly converted (and mostly
unarmoured) river barges as assault craft, a novel idea was proposed by
the ever inventive aircraft designer Wally Barnis. To get enough power to
sink such a naval target, one would cram as much explosives as possible
into every available space in a light bomber and let the whole aircraft
crash into the German barges, an idea later used with horrible success by
the Japanese Kamikaze. As these would be packed with unprotected soldiers,
horses and equipment, it was thought that even a near miss by the
explosive aircraft would be an effective weapon. It was thought to be even
more effective against the German troops if they got onto land, as the
beaches would be packed with soldiers and equipment dumps for many days
after the landing.
The
idea was found to be worth investigating, and a few Blenheim I Fighters
were drawn from Operational Training Units (OTU’s) and hurriedly
converted at the Secret Project Establishment (SPE) stationed at Upper
Mudderick Wallop, Scotland: The ventral gun pack and the turret were
removed and the hole covered by an easily detachable cover, making room
for a lot of explosives. The cockpit interior was mostly removed to make
more room, and the cockpit glazing replaced by metal sheeting to make it
more durable during loading of the explosives. A rig of steel tubes was
erected in front of the aircraft to carry the detonator so the explosion
would occur above the troop barge (or above ground). The explosives were
to be surrounded by thin shrapnel-producing casings to maximize the
anti-personnel and anti-horse effect.
To
deliver the weapon a second aircraft would need to tag along, and as the
British had experience of this kind from the pre-war Short composite
flying boats, the idea was to attach a small aircraft on the Blenheim’s
back. A system for steering the bomber while attached to the smaller
aircraft was devised using cables locked to the fighter’s controls with
explosive bolts managing the break away of the bomber during release.
There was no radio control of the bomber after release, so the aiming was
very inaccurate, but used on a crowded beach head it was thought it could
do a good deal of damage anyway.
Click on
images below to see larger images
Because of the limited power of
the Blenheim, it was originally proposed to use a light aircraft such as a Miles
Magister, but because using such a slow, unarmed aircraft in a battle area would
probably be suicidal to the pilot, it was decided to try to fit a Hurricane
fighter on top of the Blenheim. As much weight as possible was removed from the
Hurricane by retaining only two guns and all other non-essential equipment such
as armour and radios. The missions were envisioned to be short range so most of
the fuel tanks were discarded in both aircraft. The Blenheim’s undercarriage
was strengthened and locked down. By these measures they managed to make it work
but only just. The pilot of the Hurricane had to be extremely careful during
take off or the undercarriage would collapse, as it reportedly did on several
occasions (in one lucky incident it even crashed without the explosives
detonating). Landing the combination was impossible so training flights were
costly in aircraft and therefore very limited. It also proved to be very slow in
the air and difficult to fly and aim towards a ground target; hitting a barge at
sea would be pure luck. Nevertheless, a few combinations were made up and
transferred to an airfield close to the expected invasion beaches. As any
sorties in the vulnerable combination would have been done under the cover of
darkness, they received an all-black finish with the yellow fuselage roundel
ring mostly blotted out.
Luckily for the pilots that would
have flown these combinations, the project was abandoned. In the cold winter of
1940-41 most of the documentation was used for insulation and lighting the
stoves of the Nissen huts housing the ground personnel at Upper Mudderick
Wallop. Only a single picture is known of this project and that probably
survived only because it carried on the back the telephone number of the station
commander’s girlfriend, or Secret Woman Acquaintance (SWA).
The models are the venerable old Airfix Hurricane
Mk-1 with quite a bit of detailing in the cockpit (invisible here of course) and
the Frog Blenheim Mk-1 (in one of its Russian reincarnations) on which I
rescribed the panel lines. The cover over the turret hole and the rigs for the
fighter attachment and the detonator were of course scratch built.
Making models should always be for the fun of it.
Ole
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