America's Secret WW2 Combat Drone That Bombed The Japanese | The TDR-1

foreign 1966 a journalist by the name of Steve G Simpson discovered something remarkable in the jungles surrounding the city of rabol in Papua New Guinea he developed a habit of exploring the surrounding Countryside in search of relics from the second world war the island having been occupied by the Japanese and rabal developed into a significant military base and one of the locals who had been there during the occupation had told him stories about so-called clever planes these strange aircraft had flown over a ball in groups of two or three at a time and some of them had flown somewhat erratically and some of them had crashed Steve was taken it deep into the jungle and eventually arrived at a large overgrown crater inside of which contained a very strange wreck the wreckage fit no known description of warplanes that had operated in the area during the war but Simpson found four items of particular interest a large metal Bomb release system which still had its manifest actress plate and serial number on it a large section of welded steel tubing from the airframe a six-cylinder Lycoming engine and parts from another one and the Hub of a two-bladed wooden propeller Simpson photographed the debris and wrote to the US Department of the Air Force back in Washington DC the reply they sent back was Swift and blunt they had never heard of such an aircraft Simpson also wrote to the maker of the Bomb release system that was found in the wreck who confirmed that they had indeed produced a set system but had no idea what sort of aircraft it was designed for though he didn't yet know it Steve Simpson had just found the wreckage of a tdr1 this was one of the first successful examples of an unmanned aerial combat vehicle and it helped to Pioneer the development of radio-controlled and tv-guided drones these aircraft can trace their Origins way back to work done by Lieutenant Commander delmafani and the naval research laboratory he'd overseen the devil element of radio-controlled Target drones for the US Navy which had become a standard training assets by 1939. these unmanned aircraft were used to test the effectiveness of anti-aircraft defenses aboard Naval vessels and the deficiencies that they revealed led to the development of optical Fire Control Systems as well as the developments of proximity fuses for anti-aircraft shells and heavily encouraged the installation of aerial radar aboard most major vessels all of which proved to be critical assets for the US Navy during the second World War although Farney had been ordered to just develop Target drones he also foresaw the potential of this technology to be applied in combat aircraft as well with the rapid development of anti-aircraft Weaponry high value targets such as aircraft carriers would soon become very dangerous for the pilots of U.S torpedo bombers and dive bombers to deal with it was a reality that was soon confirmed especially for torpedo bombers during the various carrier battles of the Pacific War but what if you could remove the pilots from the equation or at the very least remove him to receive a physical location what if a cheap pilotless aircraft could be directed towards a heavily defended Target instead in the late 1930s there was already a growing effort to develop something known as an assault drone essentially a pilotless aircraft packed to the brim with explosives that could be launched towards a Target such as a Japanese aircraft carrier for example with hopefully devastating effect a lot of these early efforts struggled with one major problem though and that was guidance but funny believed that with a bit more development an aircraft without a pilot could be produced and without much cost and with the right equipment installed it could guide bombs or even a torpedo onto its Target with unparalleled remote Precision between 1939 and late 1941 as the political situation with Japan rapidly declined a number of development projects were kick-started to turn the concept of a remote controlled combat drone from a hypothetical drawing board concept into something far more tangible these projects resulted in the development of multiple types of guidance and control systems but there were now radio-controlled drone aircraft that were either Guided by radar radio homing beacons or even television cameras of the systems developed it was the TV guided drones that promised to deliver the best accuracy overall by 1941 the RCA Corporation had developed a special 70-pound TV camera and transmitter that was small enough to install an pilotless aircraft the video feed could then be transmitted back to a controller who would either be on the ground aboard a ship or in another aircraft some distance behind now obviously the camera quality wasn't exactly good but it was enough to distinguish things like Islands large landmarks and warships flight tests between February and June of 1941 proved that operators could receive a useful picture from a drone up to a range of 30 miles and then in tests in August a TV guided and radio-controlled drone proved capable of hitting a target with either depth charges or Torpedoes on 47 out of 50 dummy attempts and all of this was done while the Drone and the targets remained completely beyond the controller's visual range although these demonstrations provided excellent results there was a bit of an issue rear Admiral Towers he was the chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics and he had rightly decreed that nothing should impede the production section of standard military aircraft for the US Navy at the time because of this support for the project stalled and it was feared that the whole thing could be terminated altogether but following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the dramatic defeats that were suffered in the first six months of the Pacific War the US Navy suddenly needed every weapon it could get its hands on another demonstration of the Drone technology was then made in March of 1942 with equally good results in terms of accuracy and Admiral Ernest King who was the chief of Naval operations ordered the development production and Fielding of drone aircraft on mass under the code name of operation option this resulted in the production of two types of so-called assault drones the naval aircraft Factory TDN and the interstate tdr-1 the naval aircraft Factory received the initial order to produce the drones for the Navy the biggest requirement was that the tdn's production could not in any way impede the production of the Navy's standard military aircraft and so it had to be made from commercially available materials and powered by engines of no military consequence thus the TDN was built primarily of wood and steel tubing it was powered by a pair of six cylinder Lycoming engines and it had a simple fixed undercarriage to reduce the requirements for hydraulic equipment the Prototype which was designated xtdn1 flew for the first time in November of 1942 but during its trials it was decided that the Drone was a too complicated to build and B too expensive to build and in the end the Navy turned to a competing design that had been submitted by the interstate aircraft and Engineering Corporation this was the tdr1 designed as a low Wing monoplane and powered by the same Lycoming engine it utilized a simplified fuselage structure and made use of plywood and a newly developed form of plastic covering to reduce weight it came with a fixed tricycle Style ending gear like on the TDN but this one was designed to be jettisoned after takeoff after that it wouldn't be needed the tdr1 would be used for one-way missions delivering as much Ordnance with as much accuracy as possible it was designed to either drop its payload at close range or if needed Ram itself directly into the target equipped with two thousand pounds of bombs or an equivalent torpedo it was good for a cruising speed of approximately 135 miles an hour or 217 kilometers an hour across a range of approximately 600 miles or 965 kilometers they were guided to their target by a TV Camera in the nose that transmitted to a 6-inch screen in the mothership this was a specially converted Grumman Adventure which would follow approximately 20 miles behind following successful testing of the tdr1 prototype in Early Autumn of 1942 the type was officially ordered into immediate production with the first delivery is expected by nov November as part of operation option these drones would then be assigned to the special air task force known as sat 4 which would then assign them to units known as special task air groups known as Stags in its original form operation option was a very ambitious plan indeed it initially required the formation of no less than 18 squadrons which would require the total production of approximately 2 000 drones and 162 drone control aircraft and the required Manpower was estimated to be at 10 000 Naval personnel which would include 1600 trained pilots the plan was to amass the drones in numbers and then use them for a single large and sudden strike on multiple Japanese targets with follow-up strikes then designed to hamper repair work and the construction of better anti-aircraft defenses but in the end only about 200 of these drones would ever be built for operation option and of those less than 60 would actually be used for their intended purpose the main problem was that the operational planners had extreme difficulty in getting approval for the required finances resources and Manpower numbers and this was mostly because the rest of the Navy had no idea what was actually going on much of the planning for this operation had been done by Captain Oscar Smith who was an early advocate for unmanned military aircraft but due to the secret nature of the plan he had played things very close to the chest so close in fact that it wasn't until September of 1943 a full year later that Admiral Nimitz the commander of the Pacific Theater was even made aware of the operation's existence by this point the island hopping campaign of the Pacific was in full swing the fleet had recovered from its early disastrous start in the war and Nimitz felt that there was little need to invest in some slow untested unmanned radio-controlled things that could barely exceed 130 miles an hour and might be able to drop a bomb stonewalled by Nimitz Smith then appealed to Admiral Halsey instead Halsey wasn't particularly thrilled with the idea either but he was willing to give it a go and he deferred to the decision to rear Admiral Gunther who was his air Commander Gunther was less quick to pass judgment without seeing results first and he agreed to test the viability of the SAT 4 drones in combat and so in the spring of 1944 two squadrons of drones sailed from San Francisco aboard the escort carrier USS Marcus Island these drones were part of the first sat 4 operational unit stag one and they arrived in the Russell Islands just north of Grado canal in early June after getting set up at the air base at sunlight field Mustang one quickly got to work in demonstrating the effectiveness of their drones by attacking a beached Japanese cargo ship with some dramatic results clearly the concept appeared to work but command was still reluctant to fully commit the tdr-1 against legit about the military targets and it wasn't until September that authorization was finally given for a 30-day full combat trial stag one was then redeployed to Sterling Island and they flew their first combat mission on September the 27th four TDR ones were sent in each carrying a large 2 000 pound bomb and three of them were successfully guided onto their target which was a beached cargo ship that had been converted into a large anti-aircraft battery more missions soon followed and very quickly the tdr1 was used to successfully strike artillery emplacements Bridges tunnels Munitions dumps and one was even rammed at full speed into a lighthouse at Cape St George with supposedly spectacular results following this success some of the tdr1 units were then redeployed to support an assault on the Japanese held base of rabal their targets were protected by heavy anti-aircraft batteries or indeed was sometimes the batteries themselves and while some actually managed to drop their bombs onto the targets flying the Drone off to crash into something else many of the Drone Pilots decided instead to go with the full send and simply watched as the fuzzy Target got bigger and bigger and bigger on their six-inch screens as they sent the Drone and all of its bombs head long into it interestingly the dating of these attacks means that the US Navy might have actually beaten Japan to the punch when it came to the official launching of Kamikaze strikes depending on what sources you look at and what date you take as the official start of the Kamikaze policy of course in the case of the tdr1 there were no Pilots aboard and so there was no loss of personnel but the concept of using the mass of the airframe plus the onboard fuel to further maximize the total damage of an attack remain the same near the end of their one month trial the TDR ones were impressing some of the pilots so thoroughly that they then attempted a full return Mission armed this time with a combination of 100 and 500 pound bombs a single TD er1 was sent to the bomb positions on balail island and was then directed to return back to base unfortunately it crashed halfway on the return Journey a victim of anti-aircraft fire but by this point the operational validity of the unmanned combat aircraft had well and truly been confirmed nonetheless after just a month of combat successes the Navy terminated the use of the tdr-1 in late October of 1944 and the whole lot were then transferred back State sized to be used as aerial targets the reason for this was twofold one it was felt that the current version of the TDR was too slow making it too vulnerable to anti-aircraft guns and two the desperate need for an unmanned aircraft had faded Japan was well and truly on the back foot by this point and the much faster and conventional aircraft piloted by the brave men of the US Navy was delivering a staggering amount of damage in comparison to what forces they were actually sustaining basically the numbers didn't justify further development still of the 50 drones launched on attacks during their brief stint in the Pacific 31 had managed to either destroy or heavily damage their targets which was a remarkable success rate of 62 percent considering their primitive technology when compared to what you would see on today's aerial combat drones of the 19 drones that didn't succeed in their missions a number had been lost due to either mechanical failure or a breakdown in radio control communication and at least four of them had crashed around the region of rabal where journalist Steve Simpson would discover them 22 years later his Discovery prompted the declassification of the sap4 program in late 1966 and led to the Vindication of many frustrated Personnel members that had served in stag one who felt that they had a never gotten the recognition they deserved and B the technology had hadn't been given the recognition it deserved either though they pioneered a new type of weapon system the TDR ones did not kick off a technological Revolution developing successful uavs would prove to be a significant technological Challenge and although many interesting Target drones were developed during the Cold War it would not be until the 1990s that a truly effective combat drone would be developed in the form of the general atomics Predator the Predator was a far cry from the crude radio-controlled half wood half-plastic tdr1 but going back 70 years you can still trace a long albeit very chaotic line that links The Two Of course for its time the tdr1 was of course hugely Advanced and pioneering and as luck would have it not all of the TDR ones were blown up for target practice during the war some of them survived the war and one example of this interesting aircraft is now on display at the national Naval Aviation Museum in Florida as always thank you all so much for watching and a big thank you of course to the patron supporters uh the second part of the Douglas video should hopefully be going up in the following weekend provided I can get to the rest of the editing done um it turns out that the illness that I came down with recently wasn't just a cold it was in fact another bloody bout of covid and I'm now stuck with a really nasty lingering cough which is uh affecting my ability to record long segments of audio a bit a big thank you of course to our wing Commander dear patrons our highest tier members and I am sorry if anyone new has joined the ranks today once again I can't get updated information from patreon I don't know what on Earth is going on over there but sometimes my details just don't get updated so hopefully next time I will have enough related list but as always thank you all so much for your continued support and I will catch you all next time goodbye

Channel: Rex's Hangar

Views: 175,706

Keywords: rexs hangar, rex's hangar, military drones, ww2, tdr-1 drone, secret ww2 aircraft, pacific war, united states aircraft, us navy, drone warefare, kamikaze, world war 2, military history, aviation, aircraft

Id: 9K5v3Jwz89w

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023