When planes first went to war their purpose was to observe, take some photos and report back. This was nothing new, balloons used by the French had been doing this since the Battle of Fleurus in 1794. Balloons came into wide scale use as a wartime observing platform during the American Civil War. This time the balloons were filled with hydrogen gas and not hot air allowing them to stay aloft longer. Balloons while helpful for observation were stationary targets since most were tethered to long ropes which would allow them to be raised and lowered. There was no way to steer a balloon if it floated free. When the airplane came along it revolutionized airborne observation. Planes from both sides which pass each other as they observed the battlefield. This led to some of the pilots deciding to take small arms with them to shoot at the enemy planes. Then someone decided why not drop hand grenades on the enemy troops below. Soon the planes began to be equipped with machine guns and small bombs which were dropped over the side. The Germans made a huge breakthrough in World War I when they figured out how to rig up machine guns which could shoot between the propeller blades of their planes without shooting them off.

As the war raged on, the bombs got bigger and so did the planes. Specialized planes were created which were more powerful, had larger air frames and could carry larger loads. This is how the bomber was born. The first useful heavy bombers were developed by the Italians and Russians. The war was only one year old before the heavy bomber appeared. The Caproni Ca 2 was the first in the war, but in 1913 an earlier bomber had been created by Caproni and it was the Caproni 260 HP. By 1914 the plane was producing 300 HP. It could carry about 1,600 pounds including the two pilots and two gunners. This meant it carried about 1,000 pounds of bombs. This was quite a feat at the time. The bombs were suspended under the plane, there was no more throwing them over the side. The United States seems to have first conducted aerial bombing on 5 February 1913 when Lt. J. H. Towers of the US Navy first attempted to bomb stationary targets.

The value of bombing against heavily armored ships had been debated and the powers that be were confident the battleships and some other types of large ships could never be sunk by planes using bombs. They got a rude awakening when a bombing demonstration was conducted by Billy Mitchell, an officer in the United States Army Air Service. Around 21 July 1921 Mitchell convinced the military to put the captured German battleship Ostfriesland off the Virginia coast. He was going to use it for his demonstration. Mitchell was able to do the unthinkable at the time, to sink a heavily plated battleship using bombs from a plane. His insistence that ships were vulnerable to bombs antagonized many high ranking officers and he was demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel in 1925. The big wigs never like to be proven wrong and take it as a personal insult even when it means improving tactics and saving lives.

Munitions kept getting bigger and planes were getting bigger and more powerful so they could carry them. The first bombs were developed in China. They were cast iron shells packed with gun powder in the 13th century. They were used against the Mongols during a naval battle. When the bombs exploded the shell of cast iron broke into pieces much as a hand grenade. While these were not dropped by aircraft they led to the development of modern aerial bombs. Today these bombs would probably be known as fragmentation bombs. Bombs cause different types of effects on the human body. There is overpressure also known as shock, fragmentation, impact and heat. I guess we also have to add falling debris. We are constantly improving these effects to make our conventional bombs even more deadly. In World War II we used a bomb known as a blockbuster. This bomb got its name because it could destroy an entire block or street. In the beginning of World War II a blockbuster weighed about 4,000 pounds, but the size kept increasing as the war raged on and near the end of the war they weighed about 43,000 pounds. A method had been perfected to create a very thin casting allowing more explosive to be put into the bomb. The casting when perfected allowed the bomb to be 80% explosive. This was on the allied side whereas on the German side their bombs were only 50% explosive, because of the thicker casing. You can imagine only the biggest bombers could carry the largest blockbusters.

As incredible as it sounds a German Gotha heavy bomber in World War I was able to drop a 2,200 pound bomb on the city of London. In World War II the heaviest bomb in the German arsenal weighed 5,500 pounds. When Britain decided to attack the Mohne and Edersee dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley they used drum type bombs which skimmed the water. These bombs weighed 9,250 pounds each. The Tallboy was invented next and weighed 12,000 pounds. It was used on V-1 and V-2 launch sites and underground facilities. It was also dropped on the German battleship Tirpitz and damaged it, which allowed other planes to catch up with it and completely destroy it. As big as this bomb was it was dwarfed by the next bomb created by Britain which was the Grand Slam which weighed 22,000 pounds. They devastated underground facilities, viaducts and bridges. The United States then created the Cloudmaker, a 43,000 pound monster. None were ever used and the program was discontinued in 1948. The 13,000 pound Tarzon was not as big, but it was much more accurate and was also developed by the US. One of the most devastating bombs came along later. The US developed a 15,000 pound bomb known as the Daisy Cutter. The idea was to drop a bomb in the jungle of Vietnam which would carve out a large landing zone by cutting down everything in a target circle. Next the US developed the GBU-43/B in 2002. It was a 10,000 pound bomb with the power of a 22,000 bomb. It was deployed in Iraq and never used. In 2011 the US added the 30,000 pound GBU-57A/B to its arsenal. It is a bunker buster. The Russians not be outdone added the Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power. It is a 15,000 pound bomb with the power of a 80,000 pound bomb. It is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever created.

Some of these conventional bombs border on the power of small nukes. As conventional bombs become more powerful we may not be able to tell the difference between them and a nuke.