International: Robots in Action

The stubby Grumman Hellcat, No. 1 Navy fighter craft in World War II, has long been outmoded by later propeller-driven types and by jets. Now the Navy has found a use for some of its old Hellcats: it has turned them into robots to punch the Communist enemy in Korea.

Several weeks ago a pilotless Hellcat, remote-controlled by radio, was catapulted from the carrier Boxer in the Japan Sea. For the first few minutes the robot’s flight was controlled from the carrier’s deck; then a piloted AD attack bomber, serving as a guide plane, took over. The Hellcat had a 2,000-lb. high-explosive bomb strapped to its belly, and a television camera under one wing. A TV screen in the guide plane enabled the observer to see just what the robot plane’s camera “saw.” Another screen on the Boxer also reproduced the show.

Some 150 miles from the Boxer, the guide plane and its robot (or “drone”) reached Korea’s east coast. The target was a rail-and-road bridge on the Reds’ main line from Vladivostok to Wonsan. When the attacking party reached the target area, the AD hung back out of flak range, sent the robot on in. The Hellcat’s camera and the AD’s TV screen picked up the bridge. The control man in the AD put the robot into a screaming dive, kept his aiming crosshairs on the bridge as he watched it grow bigger & bigger on his TV screen. When the screen went blank, the control man knew that the robot and its camera, the bomb and the bridge had all blown up together.

In the space of a few days, six robots were successfully fired at carefully selected targets.

Last week news of the Boxer operation made fat, sensational headlines (see PRESS). Some dispatches made it appear as if the slow-moving old Hellcats were “guided missiles” (because they were un-piloted); that the age of “pushbutton war” had been ushered in. This jubilation was wildly off the mark. The Boxer experiments were, actually, a patchwork of relatively old techniques, far behind the modern technology of real guided missiles (rocket-or jet-propelled and guided by radar). Ten years ago, in World War II, the Navy itself had successfully used a pilotless plane, controlled by radio and aimed by television, in simulated attacks on a destroyer. In the same way, the Army had sent worn-out B-17s against German V-2 launching bases.