Air Warfare

WWI: Behind Enemy Lines by Aircraft II

Air Warfare Aircraft Intell 17 Min Read

Handley Page O/400 The British and French were not the only First World War combatants to carry out clandestine flights into enemy territory. In May 1918 an Italian Air Corps observer, Tenente Camillo de Carlo, was dropped behind Austro-Hungarian lines from a Voisin two-seater. He then spent three weeks sending back information, in the form of ground signals that were…

Newsletter

Get the latest from Weapons and Warfare right to your inbox.

Follow Us

Most Recent

Air Warfare 11 Min Read

Luftwaffe in Barbarossa Part I

As the German forces were being assembled in the east slowly at first and then more rapidly from February 1941, when the real buildup began-the Luftwaffe was still engaged in fighting England. Its first move consisted of an attempt to destroy the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) Fighter Command and gain…

Air Warfare 18 Min Read

Luftwaffe in Barbarossa Part II

Luftwaffe Dive Bombers, Sink the Marat at Kronshtadt Barbarossa. At 0300, 22 June 1941, the Luftwaffe opened the campaign by the now-standard method of a surprise strike at the enemy’s airfields. The weather that day was almost perfect-warm and sunny with a slight haze that cleared up later during the…

Air Warfare 11 Min Read

Luftwaffe in Barbarossa Part III

SKG 210 in flight during Operation Barbarossa. Meanwhile, far to the south, Army Group South advanced from Poland. Its left wing was formed by Sixth Army, acting as a flank guard against possible counterattacks coming from the Pripet Marshes; next, from north to south, came 1st Panzer Group, Seventeenth Army,…

Air Warfare 10 Min Read

Luftwaffe in Barbarossa Part IV

Even as these operations were going on, the most important part of the drama was taking place neither in the Baltic nor in the Ukraine but with Army Group Center north of the Pripet Marshes in Belorussia. The armored forces, forming the spearheads of the army group, were put on…

Air Warfare 13 Min Read

Luftwaffe in Barbarossa Part V

Up to this point, the Luftwaffe’s task in the east had consisted almost exclusively of operativ warfare in indirect or increasingly direct support of the army. Indeed, Hitler’s Directive No. 21 had explicitly ordered attacks on Soviet “strategic” targets such as arms manufacturers to be postponed until after the Archangelsk-Volga-Astrakhan…

Air Warfare 9 Min Read

Luftwaffe in Barbarossa Part VI

Seen in retrospect, the German campaign in Russia in 1941 was the greatest display of maneuver warfare in history, and it will likely remain so in the future. In point of preparedness, doctrine, numbers available for the offensive, and leadership, the German armed forces had peaked during the summer. These…

Most Popular

Flak towers: then and now

The construction of FlaktĂĽrme (Flak towers) in major cities began in response to the first…

American Medium Bombers of WWII Part I

Douglas A-20 Havoc Douglas Aircraft developed the Model 7B twin-engine light attack bomber in the…

SOVIET FIGHTER ACES IN KOREA

Russian MiG-15 Aces in Korea, from left to right: Aleksandr P. Smorchkov (8 kills), Nikolai…

Spitfire XIVs versus Bf 109Ks

Final Encounter (Spitfire v Messerchmitt) by Michael Turner. Wing Commander J E Johnnie Johnson, Spitfire…