Title: Firepower: A History of the Aircraft Gun
Author: Scott Vadnais and Bill Holder
Publisher: Schiffer Military History 1998
ISBN: Lib Congress 97-81448
Price: £16.98 in UK
There is a need for a general history of aircraft guns.
Rather surprisingly, this has not been attempted for a
long time. In 1945, Aerosphere published "Aircraft
Armament" by Bruchiss; in the early 1950s, Colonel
George Chinn commenced his monumental (if patchy) study
"The Machine Gun", the fifth volume of which
did not emerge until 1987. Two years later Harry
Woodman wrote "Early Aircraft Armament" and in
the 1990s Ron Wallace Clarke produced his useful two-volume
"British Aircraft Armament". Despite all
of this, the only successful attempt to produce a
comprehensive international survey of the development of
aircraft guns is contained within Bill Gunston's "Encyclopedia
of Aircraft Armament", published in 1987, and for
reasons of space the historical content was restricted to
a concise summary.
This new book by Vadnais and Holder should be eagerly
awaited, then. Unfortunately, the title is
misleading as the content is almost entirely concerned
with gun installations rather than the guns themselves or
the ammunition they used. There is no attempt to
describe, let alone analyse, the different types of gun
mechanisms, ammunition feed arrangements, recoil
management or other installation problems. The
reasons for the development of particular national
preferences in gun armament as air warfare developed are
left untouched. Ballistics and projectile design,
and their influence on gun design and fighter tactics,
are not mentioned. There is, in fact, no data on the guns
or ammunition at all, except for a couple of references
to the rates of fire of particular weapons.
Gun designations are treated erratically, with weapons
often simply being referred to only by calibre, for
example as a "20mm cannon".
Even taken on its own terms, this book has serious
shortcomings. First and foremost, the content is
overwhelmingly American, with other nations' developments
given the most cursory, and frequently inaccurate,
treatment. To point out just a few of the errors
and omissions; there is no mention of the German 20mm
Becker cannon of WW1, which was the ancestor of the
important Oerlikon API blowback family of weapons so
widely used in WW2. The authors imaginatively
assert that in the period leading up to WW2, "Madsen
was the prime name for the British with the manufacture
of both machine guns and cannons", whereas the
products of this (Danish) company were never adopted by
Britain. The French origin of the important 20mm
Hispano-Suiza HS 404 is ignored (it is just referred to
as the "20mm Hispano"), and even pro-British
enthusiasts will be surprised to read that the Hawker
Typhoon is "considered by many to be the ultimate of
prop-driven fighters". The only "French"
aircraft listed in the WW2 chapter will cause even more
surprise, as it is the Boulton Paul Defiant! Just
two Japanese aircraft, and three Soviet ones, are
mentioned in this chapter; the 20mm ShVAK is the only
Soviet cannon identified and the 20mm Type 99 the only
Japanese one, ignoring a wealth of other weapons.
Among German equipment, the important and interesting
Rheinmetall-Borsig 30mm MK 103 is ignored, among others,
and the Bf 109 is credited with three 7.92mm guns, while
"later versions were to incorporate powerful 20mm
cannons in the wings", a highly misleading gloss on
a complex development history.
The authors appear to be impressed by the number of guns
and the ammunition capacity installed, and pay little
attention to the destructive capabilities of different
calibres. The defensive armament of British
bombers armed only with .303" guns is described as
"ample" and "awesome", whereas the
firepower of the Me 163 Komet, consisting of two 30mm MK
108 cannon with 60 rounds each, is considered "minimal",
despite the fact that only three or four of the powerful
Minengeschoss high explosive shells were considered
adequate to down a heavy bomber.
In
the postwar section, matters do not improve much.
More attention is paid to Soviet aircraft but with
haphazard results. For example, the MiG-15 was not
armed with "two 37mm cannon" but one N-37mm and
two 23mm (NS-23 initially, the faster-firing NR-23 in the
MiG-15bis). The little MiG-21 would have had
a hard job carrying the claimed "one 37-mm cannon in
the nose and a 30-mm cannon in the along the fuselage"
(sic) when the standard gun armament was of course the
neat little twin-barrelled GSh-23. The Su-27 is
credited with a 23mm cannon, whereas it uses the same 30mm
GSh-301 as the MiG-29 (incidentally referred to as the
"GHs-301").
Western European products do not fare much better.
Both SAAB and Oerlikon (who made the Viggen's 30mm KCA
cannon) would be intrigued to learn that this Swedish
aircraft carried an Aden gun, and the French will no
doubt be astonished that "one of the mainstay
fighters of the French Air Force is the long-standing
Dassault Rafale".
Even the American content is not reliable. The .50"
calibre Browning is claimed to be in use by the end of WW1,
whereas it did not see service until years later.
The American Armament Company is described as the "prime
producer of cannons when the seeds of World War II were
being sown in the late 1930s" but the only thing
that AAC was good at was publicity; their guns were
technical failures never adopted by the USA. The P-38
did not have a "23mm Madsen cannon" (it was
considered but rejected), and the statement that the P-36F
had a 23mm gun under each wing is misleading; one XP-36F
was temporarily fitted with them for trial purposes.
Later versions of the F-100 are said to have had their 20mm
M39 guns replaced by T160s, but the T160 was actually the
prototype for the M39.
A
later section of the book contains details of the
armament of the various gunships developed since Vietnam,
but a picture captioned "The business end of a 30mm
Gatling gun on an AC-130" gives pause for thought as
such a weapon was never carried by this aircraft.
Helicopter armament is also covered. Fortunately
the statement that "the RAH-66 Comanche...will carry
30mm chain gun" is changed later to a "20mm
nose gun". The assertion that the Aerospatiale
Puma can be fitted with "two side-mounted 23-mm gun
pods" is puzzling given that this calibre has only
seen service in weapons of Soviet origin.
About half of the book consists of photographs.
This could be a strength, but the pro-American bias
continues with many of the illustrations being of various
installations of the .50" M2. Most of these
are not even very informative, just pictures of gun
muzzles sticking out from various wings, fuselages and
turrets. There are a very few good installation
photos with aircraft panels removed, the best of them
apparently taken in American museums. A couple show
the 37mm M4, with its hooped continuous-belt magazine, in
the nose of a P-39; two more a pair of 20mm M39 cannon in
a F-86 Sabre (although the fact that the M39 is a
revolver cannon is never identified).
However, some of the photograph captions are startlingly
wayward, especially of non-American equipment. A
Spitfire is identified as a Hurricane, a Bf 109 as a Fw
190, a Fw 190, amazingly, as a Bf 110, and what is
clearly a view of the nose of an Me 262, with panels
removed to show two of the 30mm MK 108 cannon, is
described as "twin machine guns of the rear turret
installation on the well-armed Me 110".
I
started this review by observing that there is a need for
a general history of aircraft guns. Unfortunately, this
book does not even come close. It is very hard to
find anything good to say about it, and readers are
advised to save their money.
Anthony G Williams
(The reviewer's own book; "Rapid Fire: The
Development of Automatic Cannon, Heavy Machine Guns and
their Ammunition for Armies, Navies and Air Forces"
is published by Airlife)
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