Searchlight black-out....!

[xylstra]

"Poke his eyes out so he can't see you!!"
....seems such an obvious tactic doesn't it?
For the purpose of Flak suppression it almost invites the development of a guided bomb to home in on the tight collimated beam of a searchlight so as to ride the beam to its source and destroy it.
So far as I'm aware I've never heard of such a project and yet it seems such an obvious thing to attempt to do.
Perhaps someone has done a deep dive into this aspect of night bombing tactics and may have 'light to shed' on whether any of the combatant nations did indeed undertake experimental research into the development of such a weapon?

 

[BlackSheep]

"Poke his eyes out so he can't see you!!"
....seems such an obvious tactic doesn't it?
For the purpose of Flak suppression it almost invites the development of a guided bomb to home in on the tight collimated beam of a searchlight so as to ride the beam to its source and destroy it.
So far as I'm aware I've never heard of such a project and yet it seems such an obvious thing to attempt to do.
Perhaps someone has done a deep dive into this aspect of night bombing tactics and may have 'light to shed' on whether any of the combatant nations did indeed undertake experimental research into the development of such a weapon?

I've never heard of any projects dealing with that issue but in the context of the day, that would have been brilliant. Kind of like a A wild Weasel hunting searchlights instead of radar.

 

[xylstra]

I've never heard of any projects dealing with that issue but in the context of the day, that would have been brilliant. Kind of like a A wild Weasel hunting searchlights instead of radar.

I've never heard of any projects dealing with that issue but in the context of the day, that would have been brilliant. Kind of like a A wild Weasel hunting searchlights instead of radar.

Your reaction to my post echoes my sentiments about it. It seems such an obvious tactical response for what was such an immediate and serious threat it's almost a no-brainer that someone must surely have tried.... yet (as far as I know), nothing!

 

[cvairwerks]

The GB-4 televison directed bomb was experimented with by the US in the UK in July of 1944. For all practical purposes, at the time, it was a complete failure. There were only two delivery aircraft and one was lost in operations to an accident. It took Project MIMO to really make the GB and VB weapons an operational reality.

 

[NevadaK]

Unfortunately such a guided bomb would be relatively easy to develop countermeasures against. The first method would be to develop a practice of moving searchlights off-beam every few seconds. This would break the bomb's guidance system lock and with the technology of the time you wouldn't be able to lock in a geo coordinate. The second method would be to have ground flares that were brighter than searchlights, similar to aircraft flares today. The bomb will track to the brightest object/point.

 

[elbmc1969]

The engineering just wasn't there's. Nobody was able to build a nutating seeker mount, stabilization was primitive, and guidance electronics was ridiculously primitive.

Besides, you're going to use a $20,000 weapon to destroy a $700 searchlight? I suppose where you're using it, but how many hundreds of searchlights were there around Berlin? How many thousands in Germany?

Do you really think you can destroy the searchlights reliably? They only need to point roughly up (60 degrees or more), so I can dig pits to put them in and then put sandbags or even concrete revetments around them a little bit out. Unless your CEP is unrealistically tiny, the crews, at least, will survive. You may need to change out the elements on the searchlights, at worst the reflector, but the body of the searchlight, the big mount, all the training mechanisms, etc. will survive.