Thanks. As an aside, that partially explains why navies were so eager to replace guns with guided missiles as soon as those were even rudimentarily functional post WWII.
Same goes for SAMs vs gun based heavy AA.
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In practice ships at sea of all sizes didn't do any better. The ammunition expenditure v the relatively few number of hits obtained throughout WW2 by all navies is staggering. Some data here.
It was something that was commented on by the Admiralty at various times all the way through to the final actions in the IO in the summer of 1945.
Well, all of this is unrealistic. We are arguing in 2025 about what people should have done in the 1930s. The post didn't spell out what level of hindsight. Not being sarcastic, is there some forum rule about this that I have missed?Too much hindsight is unrealistic.
"Hundreds more British [fighter] planes" and "hundreds more tanks" is exactly what I want and doesn't need magic if you make sacrifices elsewhere. I think the French, Belgians and British between them had enough infantry already - numbers were about equal overall. (In fact the French might have been better with a few less 2nd line infantry divisions and a few more skilled workers in factories.) Possibly requires an unrealistic level of hindsight by your standards.Well, unless you can fix France or magic up hundreds more British planes, hundreds more tanks (with trained crews) and about double the number of infantry you aren't going to save France.
Clearing NA in 1941 may have been doable.
Like don't go into Greece? [Yes! You don't lose a bunch of cruisers and destroyers this way too.]
Build more A 13s and kill the Covenanter in it's crib. [Sure.]
Build and issue 2pdr HE ammo. [As I've said starting in 1936 no reason not to have a MV 3" or at least a 6-pdr.]
Send a few hundred more planes (and crews) to NA and figure out ground support tactics/policy even if the fighters just use machine guns or provide decent escort to the bombers. [Yes!]
z42 has already hinted at this but if ship-to-ship accuracy was so bad this does cast doubt on building expensive warships purely to carry AAA! (And add "destroyer smoke screen and torpedoes" to the "how to protect convoys from Tirpitz without new BBs" list.)In practice ships at sea of all sizes didn't do any better. The ammunition expenditure v the relatively few number of hits obtained throughout WW2 by all navies is staggering.
Well, all of this is unrealistic. We are arguing in 2025 about what people should have done in the 1930s. The post didn't spell out what level of hindsight. Not being sarcastic, is there some forum rule about this that I have missed?
If we are arguing about what they should have done with what they knew, I wouldn't claim I would have done better.
Build more battleships? Actually I have less sympathy with this one, they knew contemporary AAA was almost useless (a drone flew over the fleet for an hour with everyone shooting at it in an early 1930s exercise and was unhit) and they knew enough torpedoes & bombs would cripple if not kill.
z42 has already hinted at this but if ship-to-ship accuracy was so bad this does cast doubt on building expensive warships purely to carry AAA!
Agree there is no "rule" but without some constraints we can wind up with Nuclear Carrier with F-14s at Pearl HarborNo rule I'm aware of, but IMHO interesting what-if scenarios are alternative choices people at the time could have chosen with the information they had at hand then. With hindsight we can then speculate whether said choices would have been more or less fortunate than the historical choices.
Sort of a repeat. You also had some "empire building" going on in a number of nations were the Air Force/s were trying to either become the dominate force or were trying to at least achieve parity and not be an after thought.Well, people at the time weren't idiots (or well, some of them were, just like some people today are idiots).
Still, there's many things they could have done better, even with the information they had then. Or making larger R&D bets on things which later turned out to be huge isn't implausible either (radar or jet engines, for instance).
Everybody thought that AA would be much more effective than it was. Of course some people thought that anything bigger than a 500lb was a waste, despite the British having 3 different studies of bomb damage that said otherwise. There was also around a 10-15 year pause in aircraft technology.I've read somewhere that the expectation wasn't that heavy AA by itself would cause heavy losses to attackers, but would break up formations making it easier for the light and medium AA to defend the ship against individual or small groups of attackers at a time rather than the entire formation all at once.
Might be that wartime experience showed that this idea wasn't worth much against experienced and determined attackers.
I have big, big problem with anything that requires a major shift in time for electronic capabilities. Electronics were undergoing a rapid shift in development in the 1920s and 1930s and 40s. We can argue if it was as fast as cell phones were developing in the last 20-25 yearsI'm not sure that's the conclusion to draw. Guided missiles weren't an option during WWII (or could they have been, given a massive R&D project, maybe an interesting what if scenario?!), so shooting a huge number of shells to achieve a result might still be a better option than doing nothing.
Germany went down that rabbit hole when it came to rocketry and ended up spending more on V weapons etc than the cost of the Manhattan project.I'm not sure that's the conclusion to draw. Guided missiles weren't an option during WWII (or could they have been, given a massive R&D project, maybe an interesting what if scenario?!), so shooting a huge number of shells to achieve a result might still be a better option than doing nothing.
I have big, big problem with anything that requires a major shift in time for electronic capabilities. Electronics were undergoing a rapid shift in development in the 1920s and 1930s and 40s. We can argue if it was as fast as cell phones were developing in the last 20-25 years
As far as firing off electronics as rounds of ammunition goes. It is often said that the proximity fuse program cost more money than the Atomic bomb program. This maybe subject to debate but the idea that working guided missiles only needed the "idea" and little effort to get rid of Battleships and Cruisers in the late 30s or early 40s doesn't hold water.
Even 1950s missiles were found to have a hit rate of 5% or under when actually used in service conditions, not tests firing, often done/assisted by manufacture's personnel.
And in the 1950s the electronics industry was much more advanced and commercialize (large plants) than it was in the 1930s and early 40s.
It also a lot easier to design a missile to attack a sizeable ground target than cannot move vs ships and aircraft that can. By 1944 radar aimed AA batteries with proximity fuses were using 1/10 to 1/ 100 the amount of shells they were in 1940 to kill an attacker. Need for guided missiles for AA work was a lot less. USN had a different requirement, after late 1944 they needed to stop Kamikazes which were sort of flying guided bombs (guided by pilot) and they had to be destroyed while incoming.
Germany went down that rabbit hole when it came to rocketry and ended up spending more on V weapons etc than the cost of the Manhattan project.
There's one in there about getting more bang for your buck but we'll leave it at that.
Seems like that the high-velocity Flak 41 was the one with low barrel life, 1000 rd. The 'normal' 8.8cm were with 5000 rd. barrel life; another data sheet says 7500 rd. barrel life.Germany spent a ridiculous amount of resources on heavy AA to shoot down heavy bombers. 16000 88mm shells for each four-engined bomber shot down, IIRC. And with a barrel life of about 1000 shells for the 88, that's about 16 new or relined barrels as well per heavy bomber. And next generation bombers were projected to fly higher and faster, which would make the ratio of shells/bomber even worse. So I'm not sure they were totally wrong either in trying to develop essentially SAMs.
So the Germans (or anybody else) need to change several things. Like.................Like hitting a ship at, say, 25 km? Take something like a Fritz X and strap a rocket to it so you can shoot it from a ship or coastal artillery battery. And use radar rather than visual tracking? (Now, realistically, even if all the necessary pieces were in place during WWII, actually integrating them all into a functional weapon system, working out the bugs etc., and it's very unlikely to actually see service during WWII..)
While the 5in/38 proximity fused shell showed up in the Pacific in Nov 1942 with first kill in Jan 1943 it took a little longer to shrink the fuse down to smaller shells, this took several stages, like into British 4.7in, 4.5in and 4in shells and US 105mm howitzer shells. This was accomplished in 1943 or early 1944.one small improvement that might actually have been possible would be to have the 3" rapid fire guns with VT shells enter service before the end of the war.)
(Un)ironically, the production of just the 'normal' 88mm AA guns was greater than the production of the 105 and 150mm howitzers combined.The 41 and higher calibres were not produced in large numbers but the ammunition requirements took a large chunk out of German
production of other equipment / munitions.
The flak 41 did have the lower barrel life as it was made to have a higher effective ceiling.
The Flak 41 used 5.12kg of propellent. The Flak 18-37 used 2.41kg of propellent.The Flak 41 used a lot of propellant, and that, coupled with the high MV, is not conductive to the barrel life.
This may (or may not?) be influenced by the available industry. The Germans were making about 40-50% more steel and iron per year than the USSR and the UK combined.The British and Soviet approach, that favored greatly the fighters vs. the heavy AA guns, seem to be better.
Soviet air defense aviation was rather extremely weak - German bomber pilots wrote in their memoirs that they feared Soviet anti-aircraft artillery rather than fighters. Soviet air defense failed both in 1943, when the Germans bombed important factories in the Volga region, and in 1944, when they failed to prevent the Germans from bombing airfields used for shuttle raids by Allied bombers during Operation Frantic.The British and Soviet approach, that favored greatly the fighters vs. the heavy AA guns, seem to be better.