Quote:
Originally Posted by Malcolm G
By ‘spinners’ I assume you mean what they called butterfly bombs.
They were still being found in the 1950s so I guess that the failure rate was quite high.
Re Diesel engine planes - Diesel engines in aviation were used originally on airships, then on flying boats. The Junkers Jumo was, I think, the engine used in some Junkers aircraft, but not universal.
I was told that the sinister drone was produced by having the engines (petrol or diesel) run at different speeds with prop pitch used to match the power. This produced a ‘beat’ in the tone, the ‘drone’.
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The drone may have been the result of "fake intelligence" acted upon by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz.
Once enemy aircraft had penetrated beyond the "Home Chain" radar screen, their positions were plotted by the Observer Corps. Trying to locate aircraft accurately by sound, especially at night, was difficult. I read somewhere that our Intelligence Service planted the idea in Germany that by not having engines synchronized made it impossible to track them with the listening devices then in use. In reality, it easily identified the enemy aircraft compared with the single engined defenders then in use before the Beaufighters and Mosquitoes of later years. (A very few Blenheims were used as night fighters in 1940, but their Bristol radial engines sounded very different to Junkers and Daimler Benz engines.)