by Phil
6. December 2009 21:47
Early in World War II, German U-boats were sinking alarming numbers of Allied freighters & oil tankers along the eastern seaboard of the United States, with a peak of around 80 ships being sunk per month. This was clearly a National emergency & we needed a technological miracle. Since noisy patrol aircraft could not “sneak up” on these enemy submarines in order to attack them successfully, a stand-off, glider-type weapon was proposed. Ultimately, the BATair-to-surface missile (ASM-N-2: Special Weapons Ordnance Device - SWOD Mk 9) was the first fully automatic guided-missile to be used operationally by any of the combatants during WWII (first combat drop: April 23, 1945; first combat success: April 28, 1945) and was active in the arsenal of the United States Navy from 1945 through 1953. During the latter parts of WWII, there were many wire-, radio-, and television-guided bombs, either glider-type or self-propelled, that were used by the Germans and Americans (e.g., Henschel Hs-293, GB-4), however, the BAT was the very first, fully-automatic, weapon system, the archetype of what we now term "fire and forget" weaponry. Once launched, theBAT went solo, guided to its target by an early S-band radar unit (see below), developed by the Bell Telephone Laboratories.
Family Tree & History of the ASM-N-2 BAT Glide Bomb