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Anaerial bomb is a type ofexplosive orincendiary weapon intended to travel through theair on a predictabletrajectory. Engineers usually develop such bombs to be dropped from anaircraft.
The use of aerial bombs is termedaerial bombing.
Aerial bombs include a vast range and complexity of designs. These include unguidedgravity bombs,guided bombs, bombs hand-tossed from avehicle, bombs needing a large specially-built delivery-vehicle, bombs integrated with the vehicle itself (such as aglide bomb), instant-detonation bombs, ordelay-action bombs.
As with other types ofexplosive weapons, aerial bombs aim to kill and injure people or to destroymateriel through the projection of one or more of blast, fragmentation, radiation or fire outwards from the point of detonation.
The firstbombs delivered to their targets by air were single bombs carried on unmannedhot air balloons, launched by the Austrians againstVenice in 1849 during theFirst Italian War of Independence.[1]
The first bombs dropped from aheavier-than-air aircraft were grenades or grenade-like devices. Historically, the first use was byGiulio Gavotti on 1 November 1911, during theItalo-Turkish War.[2][3]
In 1912, during theFirst Balkan War,Bulgarian Air Forcepilot Hristo Toprakchiev suggested the use of aircraft to drop "bombs" (calledgrenades in the Bulgarian army at this time) on Turkish positions.[citation needed]Captain Simeon Petrov developed the idea and created severalprototypes by adapting different types of grenades and increasing their payload.[4]
On 16 October 1912, observer Prodan Tarakchiev dropped two of those bombs on the Turkish railway station of Karaağaç (near the besiegedEdirne) from anAlbatros F.2 aircraft piloted by Radul Milkov, for the first time in this campaign.[4][5][6][7]
During theMexican Revolution, US inventorLester P. Barlow convinced GeneralPancho Villa of the insurgentVillista forces to purchase a plane from which bombs were dropped on trains carrying onMexican Federal troops. Although the bombs were weak, they launched Barlow's career as an explosives inventor.[8][9]
Aerial bombing saw widespread use during World War Two. A precursor was the 1937bombing of Guernica by theNazi GermanLuftwaffe and theFascist ItalianAviazione Legionaria at the behest ofFrancisco Franco.[10] The bombs used were a mix of high-explosive bombs and 1 kg (2.2 lb)incendiaries, that Germany would later use also against the UK.
As part ofThe Blitz Nazi-Germany'sCoventry Blitz set a benchmark for destruction that causedJoseph Goebbels to later use the termcoventriert ("coventried") to describe similar levels of destruction of enemy cities.
While a single raid of the Coventry Blitz killed almost 600 people, later allied raids using conventional aerial bombs each killed up to tens of thousands of people, with thebombing of Dresden and thebombing of Hamburg as notable examples.
The final stages of World War Two saw themost lethal air raid in history, thebombing of Tokyo where possibly 100,000 or more were killed primarily by incendiary bombs.[11] The majority of these incendiary bombs were the 500-pound (230 kg) E-46 cluster bomb which released 38M-69 oil-based incendiary bombs at an altitude of 2,500 ft (760 m).[12]
The end of World War Two was brought about with the aerial,atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people and which remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.
An example of extensive use of aerial bombs after World War Two is theU.S. aerial bombing during the Vietnam War, where the amount of bombs dropped was more than three times what the USA dropped during World War II in Europe and Asia.
Aerial bombs typically use acontact fuze to detonate the bomb upon impact, or a delayed-action fuze initiated by impact.
Not all bombs dropped detonate; failures are common. It was estimated that during theSecond World War about 10% of German bombs failed to detonate, and thatAllied bombs had a failure rate of 15% or 20%, especially if they hit soft soil and used apistol-type detonating mechanism rather than fuzes.[13] A great many bombs were dropped during the war; thousands ofunexploded bombs which may be able to detonate are discovered every year, particularly in Germany, and have to be defused or detonated in a controlled explosion, in some cases requiring evacuation of thousands of people beforehand, seeWorld War II bomb disposal in Europe. Old bombs occasionally detonate when disturbed, or when a faulty time fuze eventually functions, showing that precautions are still essential when dealing with them.
