Air: 1/72 Brittish WWII Bombs

According to the Profile and another couple of refs there were only sixteen missions flown with torpedoes. All the rest were done with bombs. Mine will have a torpedo regardless. As to what types of bombs were used, I've got nothing. hth

The Keeper (of too much crap!)

FWIW I have seen a couple of references stating that the Bismarck strike loadout was the American made 1600 pound armor piercing bomb. This is available in 1/48 from the Accurate Miniatures Avenger weapons sprue.

Bill Shuey

Thanks, I am realy just looking for a scorce of information letting me know prity accuratly what the verious bombs looked like including merkings. A refernece source similar the the weapons sets by Hasagawa or just info for sorces of acceptable weapons to use in general. Are the bombs the Airfix produce for their Lancaster and Sterling kits accurate and what type, that kind of info would be as well as the first paragraph of this message would be an invaluable thing to modelers and could easily be a series of articels for a magazine. I do remember Scale Aircraft Modelling doing a series called Things Under Wings several years ago, probibly at least 10 years ago, which never realy did much whom the few articales I saw, perhaps this will give impetus to someone to do this?

Thanks in advance for any info

Alastair Macfarlane

There is a book entitled "Bombs Gone; The development and use of British air-dropped weapons from 1912 to the present day", by Wg Cdr John A MacBean and Major Arthur S Hogben.

No doubt this will have all the information you need, and quite a bit more as well! :-) Having said that, it was published in 1990 and I don't know if there are any later editions. Although quite accurate concerning bomb pistols from the Second World War, there was no mention of the more modern fuzes - hardly surprising as at the time of publication, the Fuzes 947, 951 and 952 were still in service!

If you don't want to go ahead and buy it, I'm sure that your local library would be able to get hold of a copy

I believe that the Airfix Lancaster has 500lb GP bombs and a 2000lb HC weapon - this latter is the thing that looks like a depth charge. They seem to be reasonably accurate.

During the first years of the second world war, British ordnance was painted a buff colour. I believe that there was a black ring painted around the nose of the weapon to indicate a high explosive content or a red ring to indicate incendiary content. As all weapons were stored in the open, the colours would become weathered quite quickly. The tail units were stored in containers, so the paint on the tails would stay relatively pristine.

During 1941 the RAF became concerned about air attacks on munitions dumps. The buff colour showed up very nicely from the air! All munitions were then repainted Deep Bronze Green and that colour scheme is still used today. The black band was replaced with yellow to signify "high explosive". After the war, when more sophisticated weapons came into use, a black band was used to denote "armour piercing", usually in conjunction with a yellow band. For instance modern BL755 cluster bombs have both yellow and black bands.

For a short period there may have been buff bomb bodies with green tails or vice versa, but the changeover to green was made fairly quickly. Once again, the bomb bodies would have been very weathered while the tails would have been relatively clean.

The articles in that series relating to British stores were *exceptionally* inaccurate. For instance, one photograph was ostensibly of an "LOS100 pod" loaded onto a Jaguar. In fact, it was a CBLS or "seebly" (Carrier Bomb Light Store - a practice bomb carrier). It was marked with the legend LOS100 which was actually a station monogram - a method of identifying that particular CBLS for engineering purposes. "LOS" simply indicated that the CBLS was on charge to Lossiemouth!