page_title: Air warfare of World War II
section_title: Pioneering use of precision-guided munitions
hierarchical_section_title: Air warfare of World War II / Doctrine and technology / Tactical / Pioneering use of precision-guided munitions
caption_attribution_description: English: German "Fritz-X" Guided Bomb in the Air Power Gallery at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. (U.S. Air Force photo)
context_page_description: The air warfare of World War II was a major component in all theaters of the war and, together with anti-aircraft warfare, consumed a large fraction of the industrial output of the major powers. Germany and Japan depended on air forces that were closely integrated with land and naval forces; the Axis powers downplayed the advantage of fleets of strategic bombers, and were late in appreciating the need to defend against Allied strategic bombing. By contrast, Britain and the United States took an approach that greatly emphasised strategic bombing, and tactical control of the battlefield by air, as well as adequate air defences. Both Britain and the U.S. built a substantially larger strategic forces of large, long-range bombers. Simultaneously, they built tactical air forces that could win air superiority over the battlefields, thereby giving vital assistance to ground troops. The U.S. and Royal Navy also built a powerful naval-air component based on aircraft carriers, as did the Japanese; these played the central role in the war at sea.
context_section_description: Both the Luftwaffe and USAAF pioneered the use of what would come to be known as precision-guided munitions during World War II.  The Luftwaffe was the first to use such weapons in their pioneering use of the unpowered Fritz X armor-piercing anti-ship ordnance on September 9, 1943, against the Italian battleship Roma, with III.Gruppe/KG 100's Dornier Do 217 medium bombers achieving two hits, exploding her powder magazines in sinking her.  Both the Fritz X and the unarmored, rocket-boosted Henschel Hs 293 guided glide bomb were used successfully against Allied shipping during the Allied invasion of Italy following Italy's capitulation to the Allies earlier in September 1943, with both weapons using the same combination of a joystick-equipped Funkgerät FuG 203 Kehl MCLOS radio guidance transmitter in a deploying aircraft, with the corresponding FuG 230 Straßburg receiver in the ordnance for guidance.
  The United States Army Air Forces had come up with the Azon guided bomb, converted from a regular 453 kg (1,000 lb.) high explosive bomb with a special set of MCLOS-controlled vertical tailfins controlling the lateral path to the target.  Missions were flown in both Western Europe in the summer and autumn of 1944, and in the China-Burma-India theatre in early 1945, with two separate B-24 Liberator squadrons, one in each theatre, having some limited success with the device. The U.S. Navy's Bat unpowered anti-ship ordnance was based around the same half-ton HE bomb as the Azon, but with the same bomb contained within a much more aerodynamic airframe, and used a fully autonomous onboard radar guidance system to control its flightpath, rather than an external source of control for the Azon.
caption: A museum-displayed German Fritz-X armored PGM
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