December 7, 1941

Glider said:

One expert working at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory estimated that half the shells exploded at ground level and that they killed as many people as the German bombs.

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Okay?????

This means that of all the shells fired, some exploded a bit early (below the bombers) or shorts, some exploded at the intended height. some exploded a bit late (longs/above the target) some exploded really long (on the way down) some exploded upon impact with the ground and some never exploded at all (true duds).

If anything close to 1/2 the shells were exploding at ground level the the British were making the worst shells and fuses since the invention of the cannon.

Admiral Beez said:

But you don't disable the USN's offensive ability by sinking USS Saratoga (CV-3) and Enterprise (CV-6).

Carrier Locations - Pearl Harbor Attack

There's still USS Lexington (CV-2), Yorktown (CV-5), Ranger (CV-4) and Wasp (CV-7), Hornet (CV-8) plus three Essex class under construction. It just doesn't make sense. If Japan wanted to destroy the USN offensive capability it needed to know where the US carriers are and assign assets to kill each carrier, piecemeal if necessary. For example, until early December 1941 USS Saratoga was being overhauled at the Puget Sound Navy Yard, Bremerton, Washington. The IJN had the spy network and long range submarines to wait to torpedo the ship. Precision kills is the traditional Japanese way, not the sloppy sledgehammer they deployed on Dec. 7.

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No argument there, Admiral.
U.S.S. Yorktown and U.S.S. Hornet were still in the Atlantic. U.S.S. Lexington was delivering F-4F's somewhere. Losing CV 3 and CV 6 might not be disabling but it would sure would've hurt.
The USN kept playing the role the IJN assigned it wrong throughout the war.

Shortround6 said:

Okay?????

This means that of all the shells fired, some exploded a bit early (below the bombers) or shorts, some exploded at the intended height. some exploded a bit late (longs/above the target) some exploded really long (on the way down) some exploded upon impact with the ground and some never exploded at all (true duds).

If anything close to 1/2 the shells were exploding at ground level the the British were making the worst shells and fuses since the invention of the cannon.
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Totally agree

My father lived in Bootle near the docks during the May 1941 Blitz against Liverpool. He said after a big raid the ground would be carpeted with shell fragments and like any teenage boy he had a collection of shrapnel. A school friend of his had a nearly complete 3.7" AA shell with only the base missing that was a crown jewel in the collection until a teacher caught him with it took it off him and called the police who called in the bomb squad.

Glider said:

Unfortunately when I read the article, it doesn't by any means come close to your statement '50% of people killed in the Blitz on London were killed by British AA fire'

For Example
A large proportion of the deaths, perhaps as many as half, were caused not by the German air force, but rather by the British army and their artillery. Please notice perhaps

A total of 55 civilians were killed during the bombing, 10 of whom died as a result of the artillery fire not a 50% ratio

One expert working at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory estimated that half the shells exploded at ground level and that they killed as many people as the German bombs.
If true, this would mean that the British army and their artillery were responsible for over 25,000 deaths in Britain during the Second World War.
Because half the shells landed on the ground does not mean that they killed half the people. That assumes that if all the shells had hit the ground they would have killed all the people which is nonsense.

Beginning on Sunday, 8 September 1940, when an artillery shell landed outside a café near Kings Cross, killing 17 people, the death toll from anti-aircraft fire was constant and unrelenting No doubt this incident happened and its a tragedy, but I would be willing to bet a hell of a lot more people were killed in that raid.

In the Midlands district of Tipton, 23 civilians were killed during air raids during the Second World War. 11 of these deaths were caused by German bombs, but 12 died during an incident on 21 December 1940, when a wedding party was taking place in a pub in the village of Tividale. Again a tragedy but if they were holding a wedding party in a pub in a village then almost certainly they were not the target of the raid. I would be interested to know how many were killed in the raid itself before making headline statements. A similar comment applies to the WRNS in the Hotel.

When writers start using inflammatory language such as It is only since 1945 that we have chosen to forget about the unpalatable fact that our own artillery was shelling towns and cities and massacring thousands of civilians. I always start to look at it with a sceptical eye.

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Of course it doesn't, articles rarely support the attention grabbing headline. It discusses both WW1 and WW2 and is deliberately ambiguous as to what it is discussing.

Shortround6 said:

Okay?????

This means that of all the shells fired, some exploded a bit early (below the bombers) or shorts, some exploded at the intended height. some exploded a bit late (longs/above the target) some exploded really long (on the way down) some exploded upon impact with the ground and some never exploded at all (true duds).

If anything close to 1/2 the shells were exploding at ground level the the British were making the worst shells and fuses since the invention of the cannon.
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Or if you put a naval gun above a port and shoot at planes with houses in your line of sight, the naval shells will explode as they are made to. This one case cant be used to draw conclusions for all raids in all wars following, though some have.

Both the Army and the RN conducted extensive prewar AA practise, often using RC drones:


so the expected dud rate was well known (and very small). The naval drone trials were typically filmed, air to air by observer aircraft and each burst counted and measured for accuracy. An MT fuzed AA shell that doesn't burst at height, is also not likely to do so when it hits ground.

pbehn said:

Of course it doesn't, articles rarely support the attention grabbing headline. It discusses both WW1 and WW2 and is deliberately ambiguous as to what it is discussing.

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Besides, without heavy anti-aircraft artillery... how many citizens would have died in the Blitz?

I tend to support the view that the shells that didn't explode in the air probably wouldn't explode when they landed. Many were discovered long afterwards such as this one that came down about a mile from where I live Unexploded bomb unearthed in Amberley.

windhund116 said:

Besides, without heavy anti-aircraft artillery... how many citizens would have died in the Blitz?

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During the Blitz on London artillery made little difference, I think the searchlights had more effect. A gunner in Hyde park speaking on the BBC documentary "The World at War" said the guns weren't aimed at anything, just fired to improve the morale of Londoners, and it worked.

I am sure that exploded upon hitting the ground, some didn't.

Fuses were supposed to go off after a preset time, OR upon impact.
However there were a variety of safety mechanisms. They weren't supposed to go off too soon, like in the barrel or just after leaving the barrel.
They were often supposed to go off after a maximum time of flight (fuse failed to go off at preset time but was still exploded before it reached the ground).

The British used a powder train fuse in the early part of the wat. the No 199. it was replaced by a clock work fuse.

The powder train fuse dates back to the illustration in a previous post. treated cord burned at known rates and by cutting the "fuse" to a certain distance a desired time to the explosion could be had, this was refined somewhat over the years until about the 1860s. (flash from the powder charge igniting the fuse rather than gunner standing by the muzzle with lit match had been in use for a few hundred years) but riffled guns with elongated projectiles call for something different. Let's not forget that it was common to fire shrapnel shells (early 1800s?) over the heads of friendly troops. There were quite a few troubles with early fuses and the British did have a higher than desired dud rate in many of their shells.

However this assertion calls for a something over 50% dud rate in the air (time fuse fails to function) any safety on the contact fuse to fail to function, and the contact portion of the fuse to function 100% of the time upon impact with the ground (no duds upon impact). An extremely unlikely situation.

pbehn said:

During the Blitz on London artillery made little difference, I think the searchlights had more effect. A gunner in Hyde park speaking on the BBC documentary "The World at War" said the guns weren't aimed at anything, just fired to improve the morale of Londoners, and it worked.

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I disagree without Ack Ack a bomber can fly at the best height and speed for accuracy. No pilot likes to fly amongst exploding shells so the natural results are higher, faster and less accurate. AA doesn't need to hit to have an effect.

German flak didn't aim at a/c but at an area the a/c were predicted to enter.

Many years ago, then mayor of New York City John V. Lindsey was on an interview show. He mentioned he was in the Navy. He said during air attacks they just pointed all the AAA up and let go. He said it was called a "British Barrage".

I don't think anyone would claim that AA fire at night in 1940 was accurate. Until the introduction of radar direction, no nation had an adequate AA gun system for firing at night.

windhund116 said:

Besides, without heavy anti-aircraft artillery... how many citizens would have died in the Blitz?

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I'm British, born in SE London, but when I see the devastation German civilians endured from strategic bombing I have to think the Blitz may be overblown. Of course history is written by the victors, but some perspective is in order.

18 August 1940, the Luftwaffe launched their largest ever bombing raid on Britain with a total of 495 medium bombers divided over several targets, mostly airfields. The Luftwaffe strikes against Coventry or London never reached this size. Three years later, on the night of 27 July 1943, 787 RAF aircraft (74 Wellingtons, 116 Stirlings, 244 Halifaxes and 353 Lancasters) bombed Hamburg. And that was just one night; the RAF and USAAF continued bombing Hamburg for eight days with a total of 3,000 bomber and escort aircraft and 9,000 tons of bombs, killing nearly 40,000 civilians in one week (compared to 1,542 dead civilians over the entire BoB). Now that's a Blitz.

Admiral Beez said:

I'm British, born in SE London, but when I see the devastation German civilians endured from strategic bombing I have to think the Blitz may be overblown. Of course history is written by the victors, but some perspective is in order.

18 August 1940, the Luftwaffe launched their largest ever bombing raid on Britain with a total of 495 medium bombers divided over several targets, mostly airfields. The Luftwaffe strikes against Coventry or London never reached this size. Three years later, on the night of 27 July 1943, 787 RAF aircraft (74 Wellingtons, 116 Stirlings, 244 Halifaxes and 353 Lancasters) bombed Hamburg. And that was just one night; the RAF and USAAF continued bombing Hamburg for eight days with a total of 3,000 bomber and escort aircraft and 9,000 tons of bombs, killing nearly 40,000 civilians in one week (compared to 1,542 dead civilians over the entire BoB). Now that's a Blitz.

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True, but the Blitz when I was a child was called the London Blitz. That was a campaign targeted against a city, which Germany had done before, in Warsaw, Rotterdam and elsewhere. London was bombed on 57 consecutive nights. Churchill caught the mood very well in his speech July 14 1941 America's National Churchill Museum | Winston Churchill's Do Your Worst; We'll Do Our Best Speech. Both sides misunderstood the effects of "terror bombing" two of the boys Goering wanted to bomb in east London were holed up in a farm house in rural Yorkshire with my grandmother, mother and uncles before the BoB even started.

I am an American and my understanding of the BoB and Blitz may be a bit confused, but it seems to me that they are not usually interchangeable and quoting casualties/damage from one and applying to the other can cause considerable misunderstanding.

So can selective quotes that don't acknowledge changing conditions.

From Wiki.
" From 1940 to 1941, the most successful night-fighter was the Boulton Paul Defiant; its four squadrons shot down more enemy aircraft than any other type."

Which may be true depending on when in 1941 the cut off date is. Also from Wiki.
" The GL carpet was supported by six GCI sets controlling radar-equipped night-fighters. By the height of the Blitz, they were becoming more successful. The number of contacts and combats rose in 1941, from 44 and two in 48 sorties in January 1941, to 204 and 74 in May (643 sorties). But even in May, 67 per cent of the sorties were visual cat's-eye missions. "
No Defiant carried radar at this time.
and
"In November and December 1940, the Luftwaffe flew 9,000 sorties against British targets and RAF night fighters claimed only six shot down. In January 1941, Fighter Command flew 486 sorties against 1,965 made by the Germans. Just three and twelve were claimed by the RAF and AA defences respectively.[168] In the bad weather of February 1941, Fighter Command flew 568 sorties to counter the Luftwaffe which flew 1,644 sorties. Night fighters could claim only four bombers for four losses"

So according to this british night fighters including the Defiant claimed 13 aircraft over four months. Things got better in March through May but then Beaufighters with radar were becoming much more common.

As far as AA goes, again from wiki
" AA defences improved by better use of radar and searchlights. Over several months, the 20,000 shells spent per raider shot down in September 1940, was reduced to 4,087 in January 1941 and to 2,963 shells in February 1941".
yes in Aug/Sept of 1940 the AA guns could very well have been being fired skyward just for morale purposes, at least in may cases. However that rapidly changed.
So again, are we talking about AA use in the BoB or AA use in the London or night Blitz?

getting back to some of the early claims as to british shells.
"Although the use of the guns improved civilian morale, with the knowledge the German bomber crews were facing the barrage, it is now believed that the anti-aircraft guns achieved little and in fact the falling shell fragments caused more British casualties on the ground."
Take out the word Fragments and the meaning changes considerably. I don't know if it is right or wrong but it is certainly different than the claim that more british shells were exploding hitting the ground than were exploding in the air.

Using AA for citizen morale is more than a plus. I'd imagine that if the German bombers were allowed to fly uncontested over large British cities at night, it would be saying, "we surrender!"

No?

SaparotRob said:

U.S.S. Lexington was delivering F-4F's somewhere.

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Crumbs, it's no wonder they won...

F-4F