B-24 Air-to-Air Proximity Fused Rocket- WWII Defensive Armament-Systems Review 

Glad you enjoy it!

@@WWIIUSBombers would be nice if you listed sources somewhere for later use

Agreed, it's unprecedented.

Agreed, really, where do you find this stuff?

Who’s Hell’s dentist? 👺🦷

Definetely! But id also imagine the destruction of being slapped by a rocket to the cockpit😂 But again, why not 50’s?

God I miss my Pa , not a day goes by that I don't.

wtf you talking about? Who called anyone “losers”?

Trump did@@guaporeturns9472

​@@guaporeturns9472He might be referring to reports that Trump called US war dead losers on a visit to France in 2020.

@@nickrails it was in 2018, as confirmed by John Kelly, then C-o-S.

@alanburke1893 Ah right, thanks man

I believe that is the reason proximity fuses were used in the Pacific theatre, failed shots would sink into the sea and the enemy would not gain any knowledge of them.

I believe that consideration was shelved some time between Normandy (June 1944) and the Bulge (December 1944) so the VT fuzes could be used both as anti-air and anti-infantry artillery. But it's a hazy memory and I have nothing to back it up.

@@grizwoldphantasia5005 VT fuzes on both British and US AA shells played a major part in beating the V-1 offensive in the summer of 1944. The embargo was lifted in December 1944 to allow the Allied AA guns to be used to defend the port of Antwerp from V-1 attack, two days after the start of the Battle of the Bulge . After the 5 inch shell fuze was developed for the US Navy in 1942, APL adapted the fuze for use in varying calibres of American and British AA guns, as well as other naval guns. (the first three follow on projects were two for the British (Royal Navy, then British Army) and one for the US Army's principle heavy AA guns in that order) They also modified fuzes for installation in aerial bombs and field artillery pieces. In practice that meant producing eight different fuzes for the U.S. Navy, twelve for the U.S. Army, four for the Royal Navy and six for the British army. As the proximity fuze proved itself in combat, demand grew. Eventually, some 70 versions of the device were in production, an undertaking that required continual testing, modification and assembly line changes.

@@briancavanagh7048 I believe they were also used by the British to defend England. But little risk there, as the shells would have fallen down on British territory or into the ocean.

That assumes it is widely adopted and employed and falls intact in a very well populated area and not explode...

Proximity fuses were invented in the UK. Thank us later.

The channel Curious Droid has an excellent video on the WW2 development of the proximity fuse.

Rock n Roll gets invented at angels twenty

The German Night fighters equipped with "Schräge Musik" often attacked from the rear some 20 - 100m below the targeted bomber. In most cases the bomber crew did not notice it. The night fighters usually aimed on the wings with its engines and fuel tanks (1 30mm MK 108 grenade in the fuel tank the bomber is gone). The missiles would have needed to be aimed to have a chance of a hit!!! If the fighter flies 20 or 30m below the bomber the bomber would have been damaged or destroyed as well.

@@holgernarrog962 actual jazz music confuses me, like I know it's GOOD, I just can't follow the tune. Imagine those jazz cannons, hearing the ratatat but nobody is behind you. Talk about getting a tune stuck in your head.

Fortunately only the U.S. had proximity fuses. We used them on anti-aircraft shells and artillery which gave U.S. artillery the most effective airburst capability of all WWII armies.

@@kdrapertrucker we had the electromagnetic advantage, pretty much across the board

Currently running Canada

Its a shame good recommendations get drowned out by childish ones

@@charliezw3287 we need to make it known

@@joemungus6063 agreed

They would try to make it a premium and you know it

@@derick115_1 unfortunately youre 100% right

Mm. The reasonable portion of that criticism, though, is for them spending vital resources on producing and using wunderwaffen for which their testing had shown minimal or mediocre results, resources that (at least supposedly) could have made a difference in more mundane but less politically connected use. The leaders of this weapons program tested carefully, found it didn't work, and _stopped_ to go do something else useful.

​@@HypoceeYT To me that just sounds like you buy the common narrative. Maybe you can inform by telling me which expensive weapons Germany decided to produce after testing determined they "didn't work".

@@HypoceeYTyeah jets and rockets never took off

@gort8203 So how many rocket powered fighters a' la the Me163 komet do u see put in service after the war?

@@aazz9676 That's a dumb question. But to use the 163 as an example for the question I asked, was it tested and found to not work, and put into production anyway? No. I did work, but by the end of the war it had been phased out because the more effective Me-262 was finally working. If in 1941 they had already known the 262 would work better than the 163 they might not have bothered with it, but the 262 had just flown with a piston engine because they didn't even have jet engines for it yet. At the time the 163 still looked like the quicker and simpler system than the 262. You might take a look at how many experimental fighters the U.S. abandoned during the same span of time, and how many airplanes the U.S. put into production but then abandoned before the end of the war.

There was a study into doing something like the "Old Dog" with a B-52 in the 1980's and the Boeing / Air Force drawings of it ended up in a book about the B-52 in the mid 1990's. The Weapon being chucked out of the back end of the B-52 was the FIM-92 Stinger. The rear bomb bay carried Tacit Rainbow and AGM-88 HARM's (four of each on a rotary launcher), while the Radars (front and rear) were given an Air to Air search and track capability. plus data link for 6 AIM-120 AMRAAM's to be carried on the wing pylons. I don't recall seeing a date on the drawings, so it is not known if they got the idea off Dale Brown, or Brown based his B-52I on the study. Of course the Old Dog had other stuff built into it like stealth, which at the time was still mega classified.

lots of fighters available, wider adoption of the 30mm cannons and more efficient radar guided night fighters.

@@lapin46 sources? and what about no. of missions flown by tve 8th af? night fighters are not really a factor for day raids though...

@@HennyvilleX there was a video on YT, may have even been this channel, about the effectiveness of the 30mm cannon. I would need to search for it. The 30mm cannon became more widespread at this time. I need to search for it. After mid 44 the decline in available pilots, their experience and fuel shortages on top of increasing allied aircraft numbers had the losses decline again.

@@HennyvilleX about 10.30 in: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-daiJ5arnPlw.htmlsi=yfa-Gg0AngLFPzjw

@@HennyvilleX A very big factor actually. The Germans used the night fighters during the day against the unescorted raids and the lightly escorted ones well into the spring of 1944. They did a lot of damage as their cannons had longer range than the fighters and they could stand off. Then the Mustangs and long range Thunderbolts turned up and kicked the living shit out of them.

Have a look at the "Tetse Mosquito ", I know its not a US bomber , but very cool ship and U boat hunter.

There already being used as ground attack by this point. Second Germany had something like 30 odd different proximity fuse designs.

@@SuperFunkmachine If I remember correctly, most german designs used stuff like sound or light on some cases, which is not as effective as radar. Secondly, I thought the use of proximity fuzes for artillery was a bit of a reaction to fears the Battle of the Bulge may actually work for the germans, so I suppose It was more of a silver bullet of sorts.

@@SuperFunkmachineproximity fuses aren’t used in ground attack. There’d be no point

@@bob_the_bomb4508they would be useful, especially against infantry, as they would detonate the shell above the ground without the need for timed fuses. If memory serves, they were first used in this roll by the US during the Battle of the Bulge

@@stopspammandm yes from land based artillery. However air-surface rockets were used on point targets

Love the few channels that feature the primary sources, front and center ! Plus all those drawings, in those documents were hand drawn ! Making copies, at the time was pre-"Xerox" machine. I'm old enough to not only remember hand drawn technical drawings, and blueprint, and blueline copies, but to also have drawn some of those types of drawings, and operate a blueline machine.

Dark skies and all the dark channels are just awful content farms

@@michaelmoorrees3585 - when I was a kid we had mimeograph machines with purple ink that smelled like heaven.

@@anrw886 - a couple of years ago I would type a few corrections in the comments then I realized that that job would never end.

Because a 20mm cannon is a massive weapon. Would mean a complete redesign of the turrets, and they can be unreliable.

They put one on the B29 rear mount , but took it off because the trajectory was too different than the 50 calibre already there

Sidewinders of the timeframe where interceptors would have to get into gun or Fox-2 range could usually only attain a lock from rear-aspect

They also had many destroyers, cruisers, battleships, and CAP cuddled up around them. Air defense was not their job, ground offense was.

@@HypoceeYT Then why did they get stuck out on the radar picket line with the destroyers once the bombardment phase was over on Okinawa.

@@mpetersen6 Did you notice how you used the phrase "picket line"? All sorts of ships got put on picket duty when their job was temporarily or permanently not needed. Picket ships' job was to detect incoming aircraft - largely kamikazes at that stage - and _call in fighters_ ...and to attract kamikaze pilots into hitting ships with less utility and fewer guys on board than fleet ships.

It is already going fast, forward relative to the air, when it comes out of the tube.

No, sorry, you are in correct. Relative to the aircraft if a missile is being launched rearward, the missile has to go through relative airspeed zero first at which point the missile's aerodynamic control surfaces generate *zero* lift, thus the moment of initial aerodynamic instability I mentioned before. This is precisely why you, or anyone else has never seen air to air missiles pointing backwards on jet fighters when when most attacks come from the rearward axis. Yes, it is possible to give a few counterexamples in the last few year, which is making my point. @@HypoceeYT

@@williamreymond2669 No shit, Sherlock. And like I said, it passes through zero while it's accelerating in the tube, relative to a prop aircraft with a flat-out top speed of 250 knots (a bit faster than a Formula 1 car). AAMs are heat or radar guided. Until recent models IR missiles were rear hemisphere only, and despite much gushing over forward hemisphere capability, they're still much less reliable in that regime than from behind. Fighter radars point forward and typically have a physical or virtual gimbal limit around 70 degrees off-boresight; radar missiles can't be guided backward by the host aircraft's radar. Modern AAMs are not carried in launch tubes, have large actuated control surfaces, and are mounted on jets that go much faster than a B-24. For all these reasons they would be destroyed by carrying them backwards. Jet fighters are designed to shoot other planes down. They are not overly concerned with defending against attacks from the rearward axis. The designers and the pilot are both supposed to make the airplane be the attacker, not let an "attacker" get there in the first place. Even if AAMs could be mounted and fired backward, it would be an unjustifiable loss of part of the fighter's offensive capability. For all these reasons, modern AAMs have absolutely no relevance to propeller bomber point defense against propeller fighters with gun armament. And I didn't read that part of your BS before, but missiles got by just fine without thrust-vectoring for several decades, and it's only with the development of HOBS targeting systems that IR missiles have chosen to implement it now. AMRAAM, Meteor, R-77 all do fine on fins.

Unguided air to air rockets were in use into the 1960’s.

Well, they didn't. As shown in the video they tested the idea, found it was crap, and never used it.

Just checked the wiki, 208 proximity fuse rockets and can't damage a slow target that's not dodging. Lol

Might have been better to give the rear gunner four guns instead.