The intent of this video is to discuss the 88mm FLAK threat over Europe in WWII. Topics include FLAK type, FLAK effectiveness, FLAK threat vs. fighters, and FLAK avoidance.
My grandfather had a run in with 88s. He was a forward observation officer during the Battle of the Bulge. He got caught in an artillery barrage from an 88 battery. The shells air burst in the trees above him. He kept the vest he was wearing, it had scorched holes where he was hit. He was wounded so bad that they initially listed him as KIA.
@@watsisbuttndo829 my mom told me he never talked about until near his death in the 70s. She regretted not recording his experiences. My remember going on a flight with him. He kept setting the metal detector off. He explained that he had shrapnel stuck in his ankle.
I live in north of France. In the 80/90 it was pretty easy to find 88mm shell in the field or forest. Every house in my hometown got a 88 shell as a decoration item.
I want to again express my appreciation for these great videos full of facts, facts, and more facts. The information presented is based on solid research of source documentation, and delivered in a straightforward fashion without drama, speculation, or innuendo. What a refreshing change from the typical crap served on RU-vid. Thank you for treating your viewers like they are interested in facts rather than drama and hyperbole. Please keep doing it the way you are doing it.
A pleasure to watch and very informative with great sources. I liked your use of graphs to visualize the data and thought the discussion on FLAK avoidance with the focus on planning and reconnaissance interesting too. Well researched as always!
Yes, really learned from that flak avoidance discussion. I had not realized how detailed the AA battery mapping was. I assume it was updated based on crew debriefing after every mission.
As a content suggestion, if it hasn't been covered: I've always wondered about friendly fire and accidents in bomber formations. Like everybody is blasting machine guns at passing moving targets, and then there is footage of a dropping bomb taking out another bomber. Also just the training, massed operations and formation flying must have caused a lot of problems.
@@mdr23 DAY-um!... every fighter and bomber flown by the US ejected all of its shell-casings (and links) overboard... that chart shows that this caused quite a bit of "friendly" damage! I doubt that it DOWNED many bombers, but had they been powered by JET engines, it probably would have!
As flagged by mdr23 @10:18, the line-item "Self-inflicted Damage" is quite significant!... I assume that's the upper and ball turret gunners accidentally hosing their own aircraft!... I don't think any of the other gun positions can be pointed at their own "ship"...
the upper turret guns had "blind spots" (I don't remember the exact degrees) and could not fire directly behind the plane (in order to avoid the tail) and could not lower guns beyond the point where the top of the plane or engines would be hit. As far as "self inflicted damage" goes I too am curious as to the specific causes/reasons of same. I would have thought that "friendly fire" would have been more prevalent than "self inflicted" as far as damage to the aircraft went. @@MajorCaliber
Excellent presentation! Zero complaints. Keep it up. Very informative and interesting. I put a lot of these kinds of videos on when I’m laying in bed. Talking, informative on subjects I have interests in. Nothing too loud or flashy. Perfect for those days I want to learn, and perfect for those nights I want to be entertained yet don’t mind drifting off too. Keep ‘em coming!
Great job.Still have two pieces of flak my Dad picked up that hit his flak jacket which he placed on the floor of his radio room that was his station on a B-17.He said a lot of flak would come up from below also.
Great site! I have been fascinated by WW2 since I was able to read which, in my part of the woods, was limited by the small libraries and America's insistence on forgetting weaponry!
These kind of statistics are always amazing for many reasons - how in the world and who put them together? Just a personal theory is that the heavy bomber and large formations strategies, combined Sith debriefing after missions helped. But it is so extensive I don't think modern day computers could calculate the data so quickly.. Last, great job in putting these videos together, it covers what the Allied Air Forces were up against every mission they took off on.. Although penetration got deeper each year, the Germans were tenacious adversaries and kept hitting back until the last days of the war. However I've always been surprised, even with Allied fire power, they did not use the Luftwaffe more effectively on D- Day, like they did at Dunkirk. But that's another video...
Dunkirk was in 1940, and the Luftwaffe was very strong and had most of its experienced pilots. Compare that to mid-1944, when it was decimated already by Allied fighters. There just wasn't enough planes, pilots, or fuel to do much.
Formation tightness, you want to be at the front when flying through flack, but that's not a good place to be when the fighters show up. That is quite the reduction in time: 3.6 min (>210sec) to 12 seconds, did they stack them or go wider, or both.
Interesting point at 4:28 re' the number of shells needed to bring down an aircraft (1500). The industrial/resource cost of production, and that of moving guns around and providing radar assistance must have been a serious matter for a wartime economy 'on its knees' like Germany's was. Such diversion of manpower and materials, preventing resources going towards defending against advancing Allied ground forces (particularly re' the dual-purpose 88mm gun) must have made the Allied bomber effort doubly effective when the 'Big Picture' is considered.
I remember reading about the sheer tonnage of ammunition (and therefore industrial output) it took to hit an Allied bomber. The Allied invention of the proximity fuse must have completely changed this for them (even though they were expensive initially). @@androidbox3571
Been waiting for a doc on Jerry (& Allied) flak successes/failures for 50 years!!!!!!!! Just as important as the GD US Bombing Survery, et al...(or as well as tactical MI in WW2 etc). Thanks much!! (I am as of today, your sub!!!!!!)(safety word = YAWN)
I once saw an interesting animation that showed bomber pilots how to avoid flack. The flack team had to calculate the lead and ballistics required to get the shell on target and it took 25 seconds for the shell to reach you (the flack team are not aiming at where the bomber is now but where it will be in 25 seconds time) So a bomber pilot should slightly change altitude and heading every 20 seconds. That way the flack teams lead calculations will always be a few seconds too late by changing altitude quicker than they can calculate and send a shell there.
Not Me Not Me: That's what USAF aircrews were trained to do - zig-zag at about 20 second intervals when encountering flak. Not that a good bombardier could synch his Norden bombsight on the target in about 15 seconds or less.
Not Me Not Me: That's what USAF aircrews were trained to do - zig-zag at about 20 second intervals when encountering flak. Not that a good bombardier could synch his Norden bombsight on the target in about 15 seconds or less.
This is exactly right. Indeed on the first atomic bomb run both Tibbets and his copilot had been veterans of the air war over Germany. They were flying straight and level unmolested and at one point Tibbets said to his copilot 'If we were over Germany we would already be dead' - He later commented he said that exactly because they werent zig zagging every 20 seconds (they also would change height routinely)
Thanks, not surprising to see that flak took over as the primary threat to US heavy bombers when we get to mid-1944. In 1943 the Luftwaffe's fighter force started to face some very high attrition in the Mediterranean Theater. Specifically when the Allies were waging huge air campaigns to suppress the Luftwaffe before the invasion of Sicily. Sicily, Italy, the Luftwaffe fighter force was in for a bad time, but it got worse when it was decided that the fighters had to be reduced even more as a prerequisite for the invasion of France in 1944. By the time of Operation Overlord in June 1944, the Luftwaffe's fighter force was a ghost of itself and couldn't even truly contest the landings. So your documentation of the bomber losses to fighters dropping drastically lines up perfect with these sequence of events. The one thing the Germans could keep making were big flak guns. Don't forget there's other big stuff like the 128mm Flak 40 and 105mm Flak 38. It didn't take as much time and resources to train up a flak gun crew compared to a fighter pilot. The Luftwaffe's fighter force degraded but the flak stayed dangerous until the end of the war.
Seen a restored 88 mm AA gun in an auction here in Europe , with its wheels and everything...pretty awesome piece of German engineering... Just a reminder , at the beginning it was designed as a regular artillery gun..
I read that in the final months of the war, fuses were changed from timed to a combination of timed and impact. That simple change reportedly increased the number of bomber kills per AA round by 200% to 300%. I still wonder why it took them so long to realize that so many shots actually hit the planes and harmlessly passed through them only to detonate behind them somewhere. Sure, the odds of a direct hit are minimal, but they add up if you shoot hundreds of them at each plane.
I'm glad I discovered this channel. Great videos! The whole time I've been watching, I thought your voice sounded really familiar and it was driving me nuts...then it hit me: Neil Goldman from Family Guy! LOL! Keep up the great work!
FLAK was a German abbreviation for FLugzueg-Abgewehr-Kanone or Airplane fending off cannon I think the middle word might be Abwehr rather than Abgewehr but I am not certain.
"Flak accuracy was accurate to inaccurate" So if any bomber in the formation takes even one small hit from one piece of shrapnel, flak accuracy will be accurate to inaccurate. Not every flak round is going to hit, so every report where flak was involved will have "...to inaccurate", why even say it. Does the brass back home need to be informed every report that not every flak round was a hit? Why even say "Flak was accurate to inaccurate"? Why not just say we encountered Flak, and the level of accuracy? how many hits were taken, or an estimated percentage of hits. Pretty much every battle enemy fire is going to be accurate to inaccurate. It's a meaningless phrase. I bet there were some bomber crews back then writing reports complaining this phrase was pointless too.
A very interesting presentation, backed up by references as is usual with WWII US Bombers. An interesting note: At 4:00 he says it took 1,000 to 4,000 rounds for German flak to bring down one B-17 at circa 20,000 feet. Compare that with British records that indicate that British anti-aircraft fire (optically aimed and time -fuzed) required around 20,000 rounds to bring down one Heinkel bomber - these typically flew much lower than B-17's. No wonder Churchill was worried about the much faster V-1 flying bomb. He arranged for US-sourced VT fuzed radar controlled guns to be deployed in the nick of time to counter the V-1 - these US guns needed only a few rounds to destroy an enemy craft.
The big downturn in fighters destroying bombers in late 1944 was due to the loss if the Romania oil fields. Mot of Germany's oil came from the Romanian oil fields. No oil...few fighters in the air.
👍 very interesting... does make you wonder though, if it takes approx 1500 shells to take down a single bomber, wouldn't it have been better use of the 88mm Flak gun fitted in AFV, and development of a purpose-built anti-bomber heavy fighter, though it's a trade off between one skilled fighter pilot and maybe a dozen semi-trained gun operators
Uhh.... what you suggest is literally what the Germans did. The Tiger got the 88mm, the KT got a longer barrelled 88mm. The Fw190 A8 especially had dedicated bomber hunter models, and planes like the Me163 and Me410 were made exclusively for the bomber threat.
US industrial production was scary. 12,000 bombers being hit. Even 1000 bombers fleet with adequate logistical support, spare parts , munitions would forestall conflicts for a lot of countries.
They should have mixed it up and flew in at 1-2 thousand feet and had the gunners strafe the flak guns and at that altitude the flak shells wouldn’t have armed
Thank God, the Germans didn't have proximity fuses on their shells. I have to wonder how the Vietnamese did versus the Germans in a comparison of the AA defenses.
They didn't have to because the flak guns were part of the target. They had to drop bombs over a very large area in order for a few bombs to hit what needed to be destroyed. That's why the atomic bomb was so important. With the atom bomb accuracy was not as important because if it went off within 3 miles of the target the target would be gone.
Windows was a deception tactic. Aircraft flying specifically charted routes dropped what was called “chaff”. The chaff was small strips of metal which were a calculated size to appear on German radar as if they were a formation of aircraft. The pattern of the drops made it appear the formation planes were flying a particular course. The hope was that the Germans would vector their interceptors to the perceived formation of aircraft, thus lowering the interceptors vectored to the real formation.
Not yet. The medical industry has been for a long time. The automotive industry went metric in the 80s. The electrical system has always been metric. Distance, velocity and area are still measured in imperial units. The weights and measures of food and fuel industries are all recorded in imperial units.
There are WWII army medical bulletins that show what happens when literally hit by an 88, or by the collateral damage from 88 explosion--eg plexiglass, etc-- just awful what high explosives can do to the body. Start at page 547, for wounds particular to the air corps: apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA291697.pdf
Thanks for the 907 page pdf file. Amazing analysis of the brutality of war and improvements in body armor, ballistic science, weapons and medical improvements from the 1800's to the Korean War. Much has changed since this was published in 1962; war just got worse.
