General

One of the newest trends in American ordnance development, guided missiles became service items in last months of World War II. Guidance was applied to modified bombs, winged glide bombs, and standard aircraft, and in jet- and rocket-propelled airframes.

Guided missiles have great range, high payload capacity and extreme accuracy; and their progress in design has proceeded so rapidly that on only a few items has the design become standardized or "frozen". All the missiles included in this book were at least in the testing stage and were being pursued as active projects at the time of writing. Further-more, only those missiles designed for combat or military purposes - none of the basic research items - are included; and, of these, only their ordnance components can be described in detail.

Guidance

American missiles are usually guided by remote radio control, the receiver in the mis-sile acting through servo units to position the air foils.

Intelligence

The person controlling the flight of the missile will guide its path on the bases of infor-mation obtained visually, through a television receiver, or by ordinary radar tracking. Some missiles have automatic guidance features, of such a nature that, once the target has been "shown" to the missile's intelligence unit, it will automatically "home on" to its destination unassisted.

Propulsion

Depending on the particular item, a missile may be powdered by gravity, aircraft engi-nes, JATO units, rocket motors, or jet motors.

Warheads

Thus far, guided missiles have adapted standard bombs as their explosive payloads. Fuzing of these bombs differs from the standard fuzes in that the fuzes must be made in an elbow shape, in order to fit in the fuze pockets and, at the same time, permit vane arming.

Cognizance

For the Navy, the Bureau of Ordnance and the Bureau of Aeronautics are developing guided missiles; for the Army, the Air Forces are in charge of the program.