Dive bomber | World War II, Axis, Luftwaffe | Britannica (original) (raw)

dive bomber, in early military aircraft, a plane that was designed to dive directly at a target, release bombs at low altitude, level off abruptly, and depart. The tactic dated from an experimental Allied sortie in World War I. It was the subject of considerable exploration in the 1920s by U.S. Naval and Marine Corps fliers, who developed it into a standard tactic to be used against the lightly armoured upper decks of warships. It was exploited with telling material and psychological effect by German Junkers Ju 87 “Stuka” dive bombers during the Spanish Civil War and early in World War II. Other dive bombers of that period were the U.S. Douglas SBD Dauntless and the Japanese Aichi 99, both of them carrier-based naval airplanes. Dive bombers, by necessity slow-moving, were usually designed to carry a second crew member, who sat behind the pilot and manned a rear-facing machine gun. Even so, they proved vulnerable to the fast fighter planes that began to appear later in World War II, and they were made completely obsolete shortly after the war by the advent of jet planes and guided missiles.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Robert Curley.