Hello everybody,
I’ll try to give an answer to all your questions and remarks. 🙂
The theory concerning individual initiatives on the part of pilots (dropping wooden bombs without their commanding officers knowing), which is the most plausible theory in my opinion, has now gone from being a reasonable assumption to a historical fact by way of various testimonies I have gathered. Since this sort of behaviour was officially forbidden, these isolated acts could have been called insubordination (war not being a game, and RAF pilots not being Monty Pythons, etc.!), and it would appear logical that the English ministries concerned would deny their existence after the war.
Let me give you another example.
Lt Stoddard’s story is a marvellous illustration of this. In the middle of the Vietnam War, he took off from the aircraft carrier Sartoga in a Skyraider, to which he had had a toilet bowl fixed under the wing that he was going to drop on the enemy! This mocking gesture towards the adversary was much more audacious than the small dropping of a wooden bomb in passing on a fake German airfield (undefended in 1943-1944), where wooden dummies were rotting. It was made possible by means of a faultless chain of complicity in the squadron: the mechanics who had adapted the hooks to fix the bowl on the rack, the armourers who had fixed it to the plane, the deck personnel who’d kept quiet during take-off, up to the sailors on the bridge who’d lined up making a “wall” so that the admiral couldn’t see the “Stoddard plan” when the plane advanced into position on deck. Even worse, as a film made by another plane at the right moment showed, when Stoddard dropped the “bacteriological bomb” (as he called it when contacting ground control who were flabbergasted to see it fall) on to the target, a relative wind flipped it over and it just missed the cabin, putting the pilot in danger of collision. But for the many photos taken proving it, “specialists” 40 years later would have denied such a thing happening, giving, as reasons, technical impossibility, military discipline, risk for the pilot, absurdity of such a gesture AND nothing in the archives about it. The pilot concerned was hauled up before his commanding officers, the film was impounded, but the photos that had been taken by others got out and have come down to us. After the war Stoddard and his accomplices, now demobbed, did nothing to hide their feat of arms. The wooden bombs were of the same stuff as Stoddard’s action (elegant irony in the middle of a war), but were easier and less dangerous for the 20-year-old pilots who wanted to have a good laugh at the expense of the enemy.
Who says that the British lost their sense of humour during the second World War?
For those who still don’t believe it, have a look at the “bacteriological bomb”.
Regards
Jean :dev2: