Will the whistling bomb hit me?

[Peter Clare]

The German newspaper 'Der Adler' carried the following article in September 1942:

"One question that we are often hear posed is: If I can hear a bomb whistling, does that mean it is going to hit me? Front-line soldiers have found that when they hear bullets whistle, the bullets do not hit them because by that time they have already flown past. Often people take this fact and try to apply it to aerial bombs, saying that you do not have to be afraid of a bomb you hear whistle or scream, because it will not hit where you are. The old soldiers rule that a whistling bullet does not harm you is true; but the same does not apply to an aerial bomb.

It should be kept in mind that infantry projectiles, and also flat-trajectory shells fired from cannon (e.g. from anti-tank guns) travel faster than the speed of sound. Thus they outrun the gun report and drag their whistle along behind them, so to speak, and consequently no report or whistling sound precedes them.

The sounds come in the reverse order from the usual slow-flying high-angle artillery fire. If you are fired on, the shell impact comes first, then comes the screaming of the missile, and finally the firing report. The aerial bomb is not comparable to a flat projectile; it falls much more slowly at the start. It takes over 10 seconds for it to fall a distance of 1,600ft, and 25.5 seconds to fall 9,750ft; the bomb will not reach the speed of sound (1,085ft per second) until it has fallen a distance of approximately 19,500ft. Once the bomb has reached a certain fall velocity, it begins to whistle (The sounds we hear are piercing due to its aerodynamically imperfect shape). As long as the bomb is falling slower than sound, the whistling noise will precede it, and and so is audible at the target point before the bomb itself impacts.

However, it is completely wrong to assume that the duration of a bomb whistle near the target coincides exactly with the time the bomb is falling, because the bomb is always chasing after the sound wave which it approaches at ever increasing speed. No sound follows after the bomb - unlike the case of the projectile that travels faster than the speed of sound".


Hope this makes sense

Makes sense to me, but may I also add that I read a while back that the Allies began attaching whistles to some bombs for the psychological effect after their experiences of the Stuka with it's siren under the belly.