by Jeff Edwards
US Soldiers Inspect a Captured Mistel
The Mistel did not much resemble the Sperry Aerial Torpedo, or the Kettering Bug of the previous world war, but this new German design was the direct descendent of those earlier flying weapons. In the space of a single test flight, the Mistel had proven that the concept of an unmanned aerial bomb was both valid, and deadly.
The officers of the Luftwaffe high command forgot their reservations, and became instantly enthusiastic about the Mistel. They quickly began planning ways to improve the Mistel design, and push the weapon into production and use.
The Mistel went into operation in June of 1944, almost exactly a year after the first test flight. The final configuration utilized a Focke-Wulf Fw-190A fighter atop a Junkers Ju-88A-4. The nose and crew cabin of the bomber were removed, and replaced by a 7,720 pound hollow-charge warhead.
Tests demonstrated that the enormous Mistel warhead could penetrate virtually any thickness of reinforced concrete. A trial attack against an old French battleship wrought astonishing damage to the target vessel, revealing the Mistel’s potential as an anti-ship weapon. This potential was to be tested quickly, as several Mistels were used to conduct attacks against Allied ships during the weapon’s first month of operational service.
The Nazi high command began planning a massive coordinated Mistel campaign against the Allies, codenamed Operation Eisenhammer (Iron Hammer). Over 250 Mistels were built, but Operation Eisenhammer never took place. The accumulated Mistels were expended in numerous smaller attacks, mostly directed against bridges in the path of the Allied advance.
The Luftwaffe developed a number of minor variants to the Mistel, incorporating modifications and/or aircraft substitutions to accommodate various mission profiles. A jet-powered model was considered, to be built around the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter, but the concept was never implemented. Still more variants were proposed, some of which were far-fetched, even by the standards of the Mistel program. Most of the more drastic ideas did not ever progress beyond the drawing board.
* * *
While Germany was developing and deploying its new pilotless killing machine, on the far side of the Atlantic, the United States was once again pursuing the idea of the aerial torpedo.
During a visit to England in 1936, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral William H. Standley witnessed a live firing exercise against a British Queen Bee training aircraft (a radio-controlled version of the de Havilland Tiger Moth biplane, configured as an unmanned flying target). Impressed by the Queen Bee’s performance, the CNO contacted Rear Admiral Ernest J. King, the head of the Bureau of Aeronautics, and directed him to research options for developing remote-controlled aircraft for the U.S. Navy.
At the CNO’s suggestion, Rear Admiral King chose Lieutenant Commander Delmar S. Fahrney to lead the project. A veteran pilot with a masters degree in aeronautical engineering, Fahrney was experienced and technically skilled. He was also a visionary.
Working in cooperation with the Naval Aircraft Factory, Fahrney supervised the modification of two Curtiss biplanes and two Stearman biplanes into “drones.” (It’s fairly certain that Fahrney was the first person to use the term “drone” in the context of unmanned aircraft. This was probably intended as a friendly acknowledgement of the British Queen Bee from which the U.S. Navy program had taken its inspiration.)
By 1937, Fahrney’s team was conducting flight tests of these unmanned drones. A year later, the team’s drones were utilized for anti-aircraft firing tests against gun crews aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger. The drones turned out to be difficult targets, surviving barrage after barrage during simulated attack runs against the warship.
The success of the drones, and the ship’s failure to knock them out of the sky, forced a sweeping reevaluation of anti-aircraft capabilities throughout the fleet. The tests with USS Ranger also convinced Fahrney that radio-controlled aircraft could be used as offensive weapons, conducting direct bomb or torpedo attacks against enemy ships.
Fahrney quickly arranged an operational test, sending an “assault drone” armed with a dummy warhead against the battleship USS Utah. Unfortunately for Fahrney, the gunners aboard the Utah were better shots than their shipmates on the Ranger. As the drone was commencing its dive bombing run, a burst of flak made a direct hit on the unmanned aircraft. The drone crashed into the sea, ending the simulated attack.
Fahrney was not discouraged. His demonstration had been cut short by a lucky shot, but he had no doubt that the underlying concept was both practical and achievable. A remote-controlled drone could attack an enemy warship, without risking the life of a pilot.
While investigating options for improving his assault drone, Fahrney encountered Dr. Vladimir Zworykin, a brilliant immigrant from Russia who had become the chief scientist for the Radio Corporation of America (better known as RCA). Zworykin, who would eventually hold key patents for the technology behind both the television and the electron microscope, had been trying for years to interest the U.S. Navy in the idea of a flying torpedo guided by an electric eye. Navy leaders had regarded Dr. Zworykin’s concept as unnecessary, expensive, and—in all likelihood—impossible.
Fahrney took one look at the proposal, and disregarded all previous evaluations of its potential. He quickly arranged a contract with RCA to develop a series of experimental television systems for use aboard Navy aircraft.
Because Zworykin had been tinkering with the idea for years, he had a functional prototype ready in only a few months. The first model weighed 340 pounds, far too heavy for a relatively small drone, but light enough for testing aboard a manned aircraft. The initial tests were successful, proving that video signals from one airplane could be seen and interpreted from another plane up to 20 miles away.
While the prototype tests were underway, Zworykin’s team at RCA was working on a new and smaller model. Dubbed ‘Block-1’ because of its rectangular shape, the new model weighed only 97 pounds, and fit into an 8x8x24 inch box (i.e. the block).
Before the Block-1 prototype could be installed on an airframe for testing, the Japanese Imperial Navy conducted its now infamous bombing raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, inflicting unprecedented damage on the U.S. Pacific fleet. The American aircraft carriers and some light escort ships emerged unscathed, because they were absent from Pearl Harbor during the raid, but the majority of the fleet was devastated.
The U.S. Navy was thrown into chaos. The battleships, the primary might of the fleet at that time, had been mauled. Some of the damaged hulls would be salvaged and returned to service, but—with the Japanese Imperial Navy rampaging through the Pacific—the United States could not sit idle and wait for the battleships to be repaired. The American Navy needed to be combat-ready immediately.
The aircraft carriers were a major part of the solution. They represented a radical departure from the big guns and heavy armor of dreadnought warfare. In the coming months, the carriers would clearly establish themselves as the future of naval power projection, but in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, their reliability and capability had not yet been proven. In this climate of uncertainty, Fahrney’s television-guided assault drone suddenly seemed like a very promising idea.
In February of 1942, the Navy issued a top secret directive known as Project Option, making the assault drone a national defense priority. Fahrney and Zworykin didn’t even have a functional prototype ready, when they abruptly found themselves with a full-scale development program under the leadership of Commodore Oscar Smith.
Only two months after the program’s inception, the Project Option team launched a successful test attack against the USS Aaron Ward, a destroyer moving at 15 knots with full evasive maneuvering. The unmanned assault drone, which had been converted from an existing torpedo plane, was guided from remote control by the pilot of a plane circling 8 miles away—completely out of sight of the destroyer under attack.
Watching the remote video feed from a television camera in the nose of the assault drone, the pilot ha
d no trouble guiding the drone into a perfect attack run. The torpedo ran straight under the hull of the wildly evading destroyer. If the weapon had been armed with a live warhead, USS Aaron Ward would have been blasted out of the water.
Senior political officials and upper echelon military leaders were stunned by the motion picture films of the test attack. Few people who watched the films had any doubt that they were witnessing a major shift in the nature of warfare.
Admiral King, who had recently been promoted by President Roosevelt to Chief of Naval Operations, ordered Commodore Smith to proceed with the production of 5,000 assault drones. King also directed Commodore Smith to create eighteen drone squadrons, to serve under the command of a new Special Air Task Force.
Although Project Option had support at the highest level, the program was not by any means universally popular. Ironically, the fiercest opposition came from Rear Admiral John H. Towers, who had replaced Admiral King as head of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Admiral Towers insisted that it was unwise to commit valuable resources to an unproven weapon system. (His opposition seems doubly ironic in view of the struggle that Towers himself had endured in the 1920s and 30s, while attempting to gather support for naval aviation over the objections of leaders who openly doubted the effectiveness of aircraft carriers and airplanes in a world dominated by cruisers and battleships.)
While Fahrney clearly believed in the assault drone concept, he recognized the need to give the program’s detractors as little justification for criticism as possible. He decided that the full-production model torpedo drones should be manufactured using the smallest feasible quantities of war-critical resources. As a result, the first generation of torpedo drones, designated TDN-1, were constructed almost entirely of wood.
TDN-1 Torpedo Assault Drone
With a high wing and small twin engines, the TDN-1 could carry a torpedo or 2,000 pound bomb under its fuselage, at an average airspeed of 175 MPH. The drone was light, inexpensive, and it required a bare minimum of critical materials. Unfortunately, the TDN design was not well-suited for mass production. Only about 114 units were built, nearly all of which were used for evaluation, or expended as unmanned flying targets. None of the TDN-1 drones saw actual combat.
Official enthusiasm for the assault drone concept was beginning to decline, in part due to continuing derision from Admiral Towers and other vocal critics of the program. Commodore Smith and Commander Fahrney were undiscouraged. The Project Option team immediately moved forward with production of the TDR-1 series, a second generation of assault drones that were more suited to rapid manufacturing.
In May of 1944, after intense lobbying on the part of Commodore Smith and Commander Fahrney, Special Task Air Group One (STAG-1) deployed to the South Pacific for combat against the Japanese.
The TDR-1 drones of STAG-1 were controlled by specially-modified Grumman Avenger torpedo bombers, outfitted with radio control systems and television reception antennas. The drone flight controls included a joystick for use by the Avenger pilot, and a telephone dial connected by radio to the TDR-1’s autopilot system to manage flight patterns and the arming and dropping of torpedoes or bombs. The control system was only equipped with four radio channels, limiting each Avenger aircrew to controlling a maximum of four drones at a time.
The first live TDR-1 attack occurred on July 30, 1944, against an abandoned Japanese freighter that had run aground near the island of Guadalcanal. Six TDR-1s were committed to the mission: four designated for the attack, and two standing by as backups. All six drones were armed with 2,000 pound bombs.
It was not to be an auspicious beginning. Two of the drones cracked up during takeoff. Two others hit the target, but their bombs turned out to be duds. The remaining two drones conducted successful attacks, and their bombs destroyed the target ship.
The film footage of the exploding Japanese freighter was impressive, but the popularity of the assault drone concept had fallen so low that Commodore Smith had to lobby intensely to prevent immediate cancellation of the program.
Approximately eight weeks later, STAG-1 embarked on an intensive series of drone strikes against Japanese installations on the island of Bougainville. The attacks began on September 27th and ended on October 26th. A total of 46 TDR-1s were expended, 37 of which penetrated Japanese antiaircraft coverage and successfully reached their assigned target areas. At least 21 of these struck their intended targets.
The Japanese were stunned by the fury of the drone strikes, believing that the American Navy had taken up aerial suicide attacks—a tactic that Imperial Japan had embraced only weeks earlier.
While the results of the Bougainville attacks were encouraging, they were not dramatic enough to prevent the cancellation of the assault drone program. The officers and men of Project Option were understandably disappointed, but by late 1944, it was clear that the war in the Pacific was going to be won without the help of STAG-1’s strange flying bombs. The TDR-1, which had once seemed like a crucial technological breakthrough, was no longer regarded as a significant factor in the outcome of the war.
The next generation of drones, the TDR-3, was already under development when the program was cancelled. A number of photographs of the TDR-3 still exist, but it’s no longer clear if this was a functional prototype, or merely a mockup of the airframe. Either way, the Navy’s quest for an unmanned aerial assault drone, was effectively dead.
* * *
Running roughly parallel to the Navy efforts, the U.S. Army Air Force was engaged in its own attempts to develop an unmanned flying bomb. The A-1 program centered around a radio-controlled monoplane that could carry a 500 pound warhead to targets over 400 miles away. A handful of A-1s were built before the effort was terminated in 1943.
Under a program codenamed Project Aphrodite, the USAAF worked jointly with the Navy in developing a series of aerial torpedo designs with the cryptic designation of ‘BQ’. One of the most ambitious examples was the BQ-7 concept, in which aging B-17 Fortress bombers were modified for radio control, and packed with 20,000 pounds of explosives for use as unmanned assault drones.
Each BQ-7 was manned by a human pilot and copilot during takeoff. The roof of the cockpit was cut away, allowing the crew to bail out and parachute to earth after the plane was airborne. In theory, the BQ-7 would then continue to its target under radio control.
About 25 BQ-7s were built. Most were earmarked for use against hardened military installations in Germany, under a plan known as Project Perilous. Regrettably, the codename turned out to be accurate.
There were a number of attempts to use the BQ-7 in combat, none of which were notably successful, and several of which were nearly disastrous. In one reported case, a BQ-7 lost radio lock and circled repeatedly over an English city before the terrified controllers were able to reestablish a radio link and divert the malfunctioning bomber to a safe area. In another case, a BQ-7 failed to respond to radio control signals and crashed in the English countryside, leaving a massive crater to mark the site of the explosion. Project Perilous was abandoned before more serious mishaps could occur.
A follow-on effort, codenamed Project Anvil, utilized converted B-24 bombers in a new (and supposedly improved) BQ-8 configuration. But the BQ-8s were not destined to fare any better than the BQ-7 series had done.
The first Anvil mission took place on August 12, 1944. The modified bomber exploded in flight, while the two crewmen were still aboard. The pilot and copilot, Navy Lieutenants Wilford J. Willy and Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., were both killed instantly.
It’s of historical note that Lieutenant Kennedy was the eldest son of prominent businessman and political figure Joseph Kennedy Sr. At the time of his death, Joseph Junior was being groomed for the American presidency. His younger brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, would later go on to become the 35th President of the United States.
The second Anvil mission was launched on September 3, 1944. This time, the BQ-8 missed its assigned target due to spotty television reception, but managed to inflic
t some damage on an unrelated German facility.
The BQ series was subsequently cancelled, due to lackluster—and sometimes dangerous—performance.
Like the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army Air Force was out of the flying bomb business, at least in the short term. Nearly three decades had passed since the first efforts of Elmer Sperry and Charles Kettering, and the United States military had still not managed to produce an operationally reliable unmanned aerial weapon.
Unfortunately for the inhabitants of England, the Germans had finally cracked the problem wide open.
The citizens of London were about to find out the hard way just how deadly such weapons can be.
CHAPTER 23
WHITE HOUSE SITUATION ROOM
WASHINGTON, DC
THURSDAY; 27 NOVEMBER
10:34 AM EST
President Dalton Wainright ignored the blue-jacketed briefing folder on the table, and nodded toward the image on the wall-sized Situation Room display screen. “Okay, gentlemen, what am I looking at here?”
The Sit Room Duty Officer was a Navy Captain with a hawk nose and gray at his temples. “Sorry to interrupt your Thanksgiving morning, Mr. President,” he said. “This is an architectural diagram of the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River, in the People’s Republic of China.”
He allowed the image to linger on the display for a few seconds, and then pointed a remote at the screen. The architectural drawing was replaced by an aerial photograph of what was presumably the retaining wall of the dam, with the expansive spread of its attendant reservoir lake.
“This is the largest hydroelectric project ever built, sir,” the Duty Officer said. “It’s also one of the largest manmade structures in the world, second only to the Great Wall of China. The site reached full operational capacity in 2011, and now it produces approximately 85 terawatt-hours of electrical power per year. That’s slightly more than twice the annual output of China’s entire nuclear power industry.”
