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And the economics are even better for light flak, a mere $15,000 of our 'corrected' dollars per aircraft shot down (not damaged).
A typical US medium bomber, arguably a more likely victim of light flak than 8th AF heavies flying at 27,000 feet, cost $153,000 (B-25) and $240,000 (B-26). That is a fantastic return on investment.
It doesn't matter which type of flak damaged the aircraft, and for the 8th AF bombers most was heavy anyway, damaging more than 20% of total aircraft sorties is a significant achievement. We haven't even touched on the physical damage done to killed and wounded airmen in damaged aircraft, let alone the psychological toll flak took on aircrew, particularly Americans operating in daylight.
There are many reasons that allied losses fell towards the end of the war that have nothing to do with less efficient flak, not least the redeployment of flak, particularly heavy batteries, in other roles.
Cheers
Steve
These seem to be working - couple of debriefs from Axthelm, one has some info on the double-fuse.
Hmmm still says damaged file for me once I try to open it.
Hmmm, zipped it.
The thing to note about supposed FLAK ineffectiveness between January and April 1941 is the following:
1 The Luftwaffe did not have an effective blind fire radar till June 1941 when Wurzburg-D and Wurzburg-Riesse started being delivered. These featured conical scan and the ability to transfer data to the FLAK predictor. Prior to that there was only searchlights. Best accuracy was 0.3 degrees and 25m for Wurzburg-D
2 The 8.8cm (3.5 inch) FLAK 37 has a shell only 34% the size of a 5 inch round. If the US navy reckoned it required 2000-2500 round of 5 inch DP (without proximity fuse) in daylight one would expect that al least 6000-7500 of the smaller shells, more if the fact that the space taken up by the fuse displaces a fair amount of the bursting charge.
Also note there was still much of the older FLAK 36 and even FLAK 18 around with inferior predictors that used spherical rather than Cartesian coordinates.
The bulk of German FLAK was the 8.8cm FLAK 37, about 80%. It lacked the power to deal with aircraft above 20,000ft. Its beauty lay in its economy, transportability, ease of use and manufacture.
Other guns include
10.5cm FLAK 41 and
12.7cm FLAK 39/40
Both these guns had auto loaders and fuse setting machines set into the auto loader. They tended to be too large to transport with advancing troops so most stayed within Germany. Some even had power drive so in theory could have been aimed direct from the predictors.
Of further interest is the 8.8cm FLAK 43 which was vastly more powerful than the 8.8cm FLAK 37 and could deal with any high altitude US bomber or Mosquito. It feature the auto loader, fuse setting machine and a lower profile to assist in duel purpose use. This gun ran into trouble when a change from brass to steel cartridges caused jamming as the barrel sleave was near the cartridge and so the sleave had to be re designed. It had a prodigious firing rate of nearly 30 RPM but had barrel vibration problems at those high rates of fire, these were solved by firing on the recoil so although the gun was in use by 1943 it had to be withdrawn to Germany and used with brass cases till the problems were solved.
Wruzburg rasdar were jammed by windows from Mid 1943 onwards. A recovery was made by suing a Doppler device called Wurzlaus so that during the battle of Berlin the anti windows effort helped produce the following result.
"It is generally accepted that the Battle of Berlin was a failure for the Royal Air Force (RAF) as it was not the knockout blow that Harris had predicted. The RAF lost 1,047 bombers, with a further 1,682 damaged, and well over 7,000 aircrew, culminating in the raid on Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, when 94 bombers were shot down and 71 were damaged, out of 795 aircraft."
Carpet board band noise jamming wiped out Wurzburg for much of the end of the war though anti jamming circuits esp on the Wurzburg Riesse was sometimes successful. The solution was the new microwave radars such as Egerland Kulmbach but there was also a program to vastly increase the output power of the basic Wurzburg radars 20 fold to 160kW. Again testing had been complete but production proved impossible.
Hence timing couldn't have been worse as the period of the technical inferiority was also thje period in which bombing caused the most damage and prevented recovery.
Mention should be made of German efforts at proximity fuses for FLAK shells.
There were two effforts, one using eloectrostic efforts was ready for production in 1944 (1943 if the reports are read) and another using radar which required shock hardened thermionic vacuum tubes was supposedly to enter production in 1945 (According to Goering's interrogation by Spaatz there would have been production in 5 months).
Any body mocking through the air produces a large electrostatic field especially if at high speed. Should another object come nearby the gradient of this field changes and this can be used to detect proximity of an aircraft. The Germans had used electrical fuzes in their bombs as both long terms and short arms delays as arming as arming. The secret was a device called a cold cathode tube. This didn't require a heated element and function as a sensitive switch. The discovery of these devices in German bombs caused the British to reactivate their own proximity fuze program which was handed over to the Americans because the man in charge, Cockcroft, had to develop the atomic bomb.
These electrostatic fuzes when fired in a test range gradually grew from 1, 2, 5 meter sensitivity to a target (in practice on firing range) and finally 10m and 15m was thought possible.
In my view production should have started at 2m. This is because the Germans had proven by the end of the war that fuze setting wasn't worth it. By firing a contact fuzed shell the time wasted in setting fuzes could be ignored, expensive clock work mechanism avoided and cheaper explosives used.
The thing to note about these electrostatic fuzes is that they were extremely cheap, little more expensive than a nose contact fuze, so with a 2-5m range they would have worked cost effectively since it was found that to bring down a bomber required detonation within 4 meters anyway.
Interestingly there are claims of so called double fuzes achieving extremely high efficiencies in bringing down bombers. What is odd is that fuzes lready consisted of timer, nose contact and self destruct so what could a 'double fuze' really be. Perhaps it was code for the electrostatic fuze?
I will add links and pictures tomorrow.
I can't agree with that!In terms of British AAA. The British never deployed an AAA radar of their own so their FLAK could never be effective.
In terms of British AAA. The British never deployed an AAA radar of their own so their FLAK could never be effective.
The first British radar was the US built SCR-584 delivered by the Americans to deal with the V1 in july 1944. It came equipped with synchro transmitters for British predictors.
There is no doubt Britain could have made a FLAK radar, but they didn't have the resources. The team developing and improving H2S just about dropped dead from mental and physical exhaustion.
The unit they did make was called GLAXO was quite competitive though Canadians may want to take credit for it. It never was deployed. I like it as it used twin aerials so that only the receive instead of the transmit was conically scanned thus avoiding disclosing the scanning pattern.