[Gregvan]

Hi,

In addition to that photo of a Marine Feld Jasta Fokker D.VII with small bomb racks under the fuselage (and yes, I DID mention the bomb shackles in the captions in "Fokker D VII Anthology 3"), there is at least one more good example.

When Ltn. Adolf Auer's Albatros-built Fokker D.VII of Jasta 40 was shot down by members of No. 41 Sqn on 28 October 1918, it was equipped with wooden shelf racks for small "Wurfgranaten 15" bombs, identical to those seen on many Halberstadt and Hannover CL types machines of the Schlachtstaffeln (you can see these in Rick and Dan-San's forthcoming book!). There were many photos taken of Auer's D.VII at No. 41 Sqn. I can do no better than to quote Alex Imrie in his book "German Bombers of WWI": "This aircraft was fitted with wooden shelf racks on either side of the fuselage enabling eight Wurfgranaten 15 to be carried. These were suspended upside down by a length of wire through their noses, as was normal on CL category machines used by the Schlachtstaffeln. Withdrawal of the wires released the grenades which had ordinary percussion fuses."

So these were small "nuisance" bombs of the grenade variety, but still deadly anti-personnel weapons. I imagine this probably was not a common practice, and was done (perhaps) on the initiative of the Staffelführer. The practice certainly was not as widespread as the use of Cooper bomb racks on Sopwith Camels, etc. And they certainly would not have had the 50 megaton effect or accuracy of those bombs seen in "The Blue Max"!!

The use of such small Wurfgranaten bombs, and regular hand grenades, was far more common by the small, nimble two-seaters of the Schlachtstaffeln-which were not much bigger than the normal single-seaters and just about as fast and maneuverable.

Greg