German Bouncing Bomb
After Operation Chastise, German forces discovered an Upkeep bomb intact. This was in the wreckage of the Lancaster commanded by Flt Lt Barlow, which had struck high tension cables at Haldern, near Rees, Germany, and crashed: since the bomb had not been released, and the aircraft had crashed on land, none of the detonation devices had fired. Subsequently, a 385-kilogram (850 lb) version of Upkeep, code-named "Kurt" or "Emil", was built at the Luftwaffe's Erprobungsstelle, or "test site", on Germany's Baltic coast at Travemünde. However, the importance of back-spin was not understood, and, dropped in trials by a Focke-Wulf Fw 190, it proved to be dangerous to the delivering planes, as the bomb matched the speed at which it was dropped. Attempts to rectify this with booster rockets were ultimately a failure, and the project was discontinued in 1944.
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