My father 1926 born was yet inhis last 2 years on gymnasium as pupil in the "Flieger-Hj" in the nights in Saarbrücken engaged at 1 8,8cm antiaircraft Batterie in Saarbrücken neat the footballstadium "Kieselhumes". For targetting they had a kind of radar, called "Funkmessgerät". With the so delivered datas they had to "program" the timer of the detonator of the 8,8cm grenades and then to try to load the canon at to shoot at the exact right time, surely more inexact then a proximity fuse, unknown in Germany. I do only exist, because my father was absent from his artillery Batterie in the night, when thus battery was hit by a bomb killing everybidy there. Greetings Martin Schneider
Luftwaffe pilots got a taste of their own Flak during Operation Bodenplatte , which mistook the large formations of fighters heading East to West , as allied planes returning from ops .It is estimated that as a result, one quarter of the German fighter units lost aircraft to their own flak gunners
@@anthonynicholich9654 ..and.. shit starts to hit the fan!! Operation bodenplatte was a failure.. Allied aircraft lost is minimum..they all were up and running in only couple off hours and luftwaffe lost more than 60% off their best and experience pilots needed to defend germany..😅 And not long after that germany surrenders and ww2 ended in europe..but!in the pacific the war is still raging on..😅
@@anthonynicholich9654thats what happen during operation bodenplatte.. im so sorry if i was smart enough to hv interest and to learn and know a thing or two about world history especially about ww1 all the way to Iraq war than your dumbass..lol.. And I knew what type off person you are.. No need to explain..😂🤣
The Flak Towers (Berlin, Vienna and Hamburg) did not rely on optical predictors (FuG 40). Each had a second tower called a Leitturm or director tower close by, which was equipped with Wurzburg tracking radar. The firing data from the radar computer was transmitted electrically to the Gefechtsturm or battle tower and was displayed on clock face pointers for the gun layers. The ammunition for the 4 x twin 128mm autoloader guns was given a fuse time setting prior to loading.
I was telling my father how sick I was as I practiced my spins for my licence, he asked me what I was in, I said a Sessna 152, he replied you should try it with 4 engines. He explained he was pilot of a Halifax in 158 Sqd.at 16,000ft bombing at night. The cockpit was lit up, he knew he had been coned by 3 search lights and now the guns could trig him, height, direction and speed, and would be hit with AA fire soon. He released all his bombs, shut down the 4 engines pulled it up and went into a spin. Ignoring the risk of hitting other aircraft the lights could not follow him, he recovered and flew back to base to fly another day...or, I would not be here as well!
My great grand uncle Gerd was a flak gunner at the Zoo tower in Berlin His unit abandoned the tower roughly a day before Hitler suicide and fought across a couple of bridges to surrender to British forces My mother kept his flak badge , iron cross second class and silver wound badge in a old jewelry box
That's something that l have wondered for long time, after all, what goes up must come down, so what did it hit on the ground? Did the gunners care where it landed, or was that just considered and acceptable cost of war?
I think the AA batteries were positioned in areas approaching potential targets. Targets were going to get bombed, so AA is positioned in a target. Unless it is on a FLAK tower.
I'd like to add that the bombers had one commander, who was obviously in one of the planes. In early days, the commander flew inside the first plane. You mentioned, that all lights tracked the first bomber? That was the reason. Kill the commander, and the fleet has to re-group. Then, the radars on the ground (you mentioned) where't radar, those were directional antennas to find out, which plane was transmitting. Because the americans quickly learned, to place the commander somewhere else, but he betrayed his position, as soon as he keyed his transmitter, it shone electromagnetically like a sun in the night. His position was then wired to the next flak battery. The number of victims you said doesn't seem to reflect the real death-toll. Remember that Avro Lancaster of the Royal Air Force “Just Jane.” It was pretty famous for completing 25 combat missions without being shot down. That was sensational, everybody else had it way harder.
Every single thing you've written here is wrong, what a mess, wow. US bombers flew in groups called boxes, each 16 bomber box had a lead bombardier that was in the lead bomber, he was the only one who used a bomb sight, all other bombers in the box dropped on his cue, there was a backup bomber in each box in the event something happened to the lead bomber that would move into the lead position and take over, it didn't require anyone on a radio to tell them to do it either, it's how they were trained. What you think was some kind of radio monitoring antenna was indeed radar just as the narrator of this video says, it was what's called gun laying radar and it was used to range the bombers so the gun crews would know what setting to put on the shell's fuses so they'd burst at the right altitude, US bombers didn't need to talk to each other during the bomb run, they knew exactly what to do, wherever it is you got the idea that they were gabbing away with each other over the radio is just absolutely laughable, once again each 16 bomber box had a lead bombardier, the other bombers in the box toggled off their bombs upon seeing him drop his, the arrangement of the bombers in the box is what gave them bomb dispersal, ie a pattern on the ground. The thought that if the Germans took out the commander then no one in the other bombers would know what to do is comical, they knew what to do in the first place and didn't rely on radio communications during the bomb run, it's called training. You really need to do your research in life before making ridiculous claims like you have here, start with this video because it's right when it comes to how the radar augmented German AA gun's worked, then go to the channel US WW II Bombers, he has several videos that go into even more detail than this one about German AA gun's and their use of radar.
@@dukecraig2402 Guess you'd be surprised that I agree. Strategies changed all the time and both sides had to learn quickly. There's no "it was like this all the time".
A DCA da Ilha de Fernando de Noronha na WWIi era por Krupp 88 e metralhadoras Breda italianas. Deve existir algumas peças em museus militares. A aviação militar usava o JU-52 alemães em 1940, a Marinha de Guerra navegava submarino italiano.
You gotta have some pity for the Japanese pilots. The Germans had the best flak on the Axis side, which exacted a terrible toll on armored, well built US aircraft. But the US Navy had the best flak of the war, with proximity radio fuses and radar guided fire control. Not to mention the almost delirious saturation of AA batteries on the ships which were themselves in massive task forces of ships. Id rather face German flak in a plane that stands a chance rather than US flak in a unarmored Japanese plane that doesnt.
I've read that the three most defended cities in WW2 were, London, Berlin and Moscow. I've read German accounts, (Granted Moscow was barely bombed during the war, in comparison), that say Moscow was the deadliest city to bomb due to their air defenses. Taking nothing away from London, nor Nerlin. The German 88mm was said to be the most definitive weapon of WW2. The German 105 mm flak guns were better in air defense than the 88. The 88 was tremendous, only they lost accuracy over about 20,000 ft. That's why Allied bombers came in at higher altitudes when they learned that. But the German 105mm worked just fine.
Toward the end of the war Dresden had not been bombed. So the army "borrowed" the 88 mm guns to kill Russian tanks. Then the bombers visited Dresden. Oops.
I wonder where & from WHOM the allies had first gotten proximity fuse tech? Also I.R compression fusing for implosion VS. rifle fired atomic bombs....Oh!...And the Uranium contained IN the bombs the U.S used on Japan? No doubt properly scrubbed of any 'Spandau Arsenal' engraving(s). As U.S stocks of enriched uranium were enough for test bombs, but not enough for test bombs & operational munitions (Of particular note being: A late-wartime night-mission, surface running German U-Boote was given >>British Allied Air Escort> where >> it wasall going right?.....The U.S "Trading With The Enemy Act" WHA-?!....; Really kindve depressing...
The 88mm and larger shells relied on fragmentation primarily. At altitude, with thinner air, blast effect is greatly decreased. Another way to look at it is, if the blast is close enough to do damage, you have been shredded by the fragmentation. The black 'smoke' seen is from TNT explosive. It is actually 'fuel rich', and that is unexploded TNT you see. The Germans, like everyone else, moved to amatol which is a mix of TNT and ammonium nitrate. 20 mm HE shells did have a self-destruct fuse, but that was just for ammunition fired over the Fatherland. They relied on a super sensitive fuse so that even the thin skin of the aircraft would detonate them. Having to produce so many FlaK weapons, and ammunition, put a hurt on the Germans as they needed more heavy weapons at the front.
You nailed it. GOLD. It's the quantity of ammo needed to fight back Allied Aviation that took a toll on Germany's War Industries. That's really an under estimated contribution of the English and Americans to the Allied Victory. That's a lot of shells spent in the air not over russian divisions. By the way, 20mm aviation shells got a fuse who was made to travel through the hard metal and detonate only in the fuel tanks when aviation gasoline flooded the inner contact fuse. That was made to challenge the self sealing tanks. What a mess ! Make those magnifiscent flying machines and then trying to shoot them down with some sort of sling. What's wrong with humans ?
@@lewcrowley3710 What really hurt, was the production of the battleship Bismark. As if Germany could challenge britains fleet. That steel should have used for tanks.
@@yong9613 The issue would be the size of the target. I doubt a prox fuse could detect the small target. You might need something like a C-RAM. They can take out mortars, so a drone should be an easy target since its slower.
@@dragospeta3812 the allies had an edge over germany in raw industrial capacity so a tradeoff like that made sense. But i think that building a sophisticated plane and to train a crew and a pilot for it is much more expensive than building a gun that shoots up. The biggest problem was the high death rates of the crew
due to the German language being a Romantic Language, where you string together what the object does,,,, like the term TV...which would be the box that shows moving pictures and sound....
@@ypaulbrown It's funny you say that, I had a very educated friend back in high school who had told me the romantic languages were ones like Italian, French and Spanish where the ugly languages were German and the Slavic languages
@@ypaulbrownHi Paul. German is frequently agglutinative in its noun formation, as you describe. Romantic - better, Romance - is the term used to describe languages derived from Latin, and German isn't one of those. It's a term that applies to Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese, among others. Best regards
@@John14-6...There is no other language with more words than german. Its because of the their ability to combine many words. "Fliegerabwehrkanone" is a combination of three words , "Aircraft/Plane (Flieger) defense (Abwehr) cannon (Kanone)". Its no big deal for an Italian to learn Spanish, Portuguese or French, but its a nightmare for them to learn german. I immigrated to germany when i was 3 years old, otherwise it would be a torture to learn german as an adult. 😅
@@alcapone9550 I know right! When I was in highschool decades ago we had to take a foreign language and I chose German. That lasted one day when I saw how complicated the language was. So I took Italian instead
@@anthonynicholich9654 Having them and having the means to have them are two different things. As was not unusual with German engineering during this period
@@anthonynicholich9654 they did not have a functioning proximity fuse during the war. They were never deployed during combat. The proximity fuse was devastating to the Germans but especially the Japanese.
Same here. Thanks for saving me the time. I often wondered the same - and all of the projectiles from machine guns, cannons and the brass. (not all was caught)
I was a little boy then. We always had alarm and people were ordered to go into shelter and nobody was on the street. Afterwards we could find splinters of flak grenades and there was the rumor that you will get a helmet when you had collected 5 kilos of splinters. I never could witness like I never heard that anybody was hit by splinters.
My mom - ageing 19 in 1945 - told me they called it flak-rain, when the little shrapnels rained down to soil, street and house. Powerless, of course, the was no charge propelling them anymore and no explosives, to drive these shrapnells through the fuselage. They were just propelled by gravity alone and being light-weight. There was a metallic sound when thy hit roofs or whatever. It sounded just like rain, so much shrapnel came down.
A statistic that could never be known, but I was super curious about, how many people were killed or wounded from falling AA/AAA fire. Now, the high explosive shells, 20mm, 37mm, and obviously 88mm, would self-detonate at certain altitude, for that very reason. But in aircrafts, not every round was HE, plus all the shrapnel from flak; there had to be lots of incidents. Especially in urban areas, plus a certain percentage of shells were defective; thus, the self-detonating rounds would fail.
I'm disappointed that the Germans were responsible for 100 million deaths and the destruction of Europe and, except for a handful of executed top Nazi officers, EVERYBODY got to go home plus having their country rebuilt free of charge.
It would be obvious for you to be highly stressed if you knew you were flying into enemy territory for what it could be you last time. I can see loosing sleep over that.
one will not be making a lot of course changes with a fully loaded bomber, in formation, flying on the edge of the performance envelope. Correct, FLAK forced the bombers higher
Selama Perang Dunia II, meriam Flak Jerman menjadi pertahanan utama melawan pesawat Sekutu. Dengan kemampuan menembak tinggi dan penggunaan peluru yang dirancang untuk meledak di ketinggian tertentu, Flak menyebabkan kerusakan signifikan pada misi pengeboman. Selain fisik, Flak juga menimbulkan dampak psikologis pada awak pesawat, meningkatkan stres dan trauma. Sorotan: 00:03 Selama Perang Dunia II, meriam Flak Jerman berfungsi sebagai pertahanan utama terhadap pesawat Sekutu, melindungi kota-kota dari serangan udara. Meriam ini efektif dalam menembakkan peluru yang dapat menyebabkan kerusakan signifikan pada pesawat. -Meriam Flak memiliki kemampuan menembak hingga 25 peluru per menit, menjadikannya senjata yang mematikan bagi pesawat musuh. Ini menunjukkan efektivitas artileri dalam perang udara. -Peluru antipeluru dirancang untuk meledak pada ketinggian tertentu, menciptakan efek ledakan yang mematikan bagi pesawat. Ini mirip dengan granat yang ditembakkan ke udara. -Dua jenis peluru digunakan, yaitu peluru tumbukan yang meledak saat mengenai target dan peluru berjangka waktu yang meledak setelah jangka waktu tertentu. Ini meningkatkan fleksibilitas sistem pertahanan. 02:28 Senjata anti-pesawat mengandalkan fragmentasi untuk mencapai efek yang diinginkan, meningkatkan kemungkinan kerusakan pada pesawat dengan meledak pada jarak dekat. Sistem canggih seperti Kommandogerät meningkatkan akurasi penembakan dengan mempertimbangkan berbagai faktor. -Sekering jarak yang diperkenalkan oleh Sekutu meningkatkan tingkat mematikan tembakan anti-pesawat dengan meledak pada jarak dekat, menghasilkan efek yang lebih efektif. -Bahan peledak berkekuatan tinggi pada peluru menghasilkan asap hitam yang membantu pilot Sekutu mengukur jarak tembakan sebelum melakukan serangan. -Kommandogerät, sistem komputer analog yang diperkenalkan sejak 1925, memungkinkan penembakan yang akurat dengan mengoreksi ketidaksesuaian dan menyelaraskan semua senjata. 05:03 Kru Flak menggunakan berbagai metode untuk melacak dan menargetkan pesawat musuh, termasuk radar dan instrumen optik, untuk meningkatkan akurasi serangan. Mereka menciptakan pola ledakan peluru untuk menyulitkan pesawat musuh dalam bernavigasi. -Penggunaan radar dan instrumen optik sangat penting dalam menentukan kecepatan dan arah pesawat musuh. Ini membantu kru Flak untuk mengarahkan tembakan secara lebih efektif. -Selama malam, radar digunakan untuk memandu kru lampu pencari ke target, sedangkan siang hari menggunakan sistem pengendalian kebakaran optik. Ini meningkatkan efektivitas serangan secara keseluruhan. -Jerman membangun Hochbunker sebagai struktur pertahanan yang dilengkapi artileri antipesawat. Ini memberikan perlindungan tambahan terhadap serangan udara dan meningkatkan daya serang Flak. 07:16 Kru Flak Jerman menggunakan senjata antipesawat kaliber 88 mm yang efektif dalam menjaga target dari serangan udara. Mereka memperhitungkan waktu tunda suara dan mengatur tembakan secara salvo untuk meningkatkan akurasi. -Senjata kaliber 88 mm dapat melontarkan proyektil hingga 20.000 kaki, berpotensi melumpuhkan pesawat dalam radius ledakan 30 yard. Ini menunjukkan kemampuan tinggi dalam pertahanan udara. -Unit Flak Jerman mengalami penguatan dengan memperbesar ukuran baterai menjadi delapan senjata, meningkatkan daya tembak dan efektivitas dalam melawan pesawat musuh. -Jerman telah mengerahkan lebih dari 15.000 senjata antipeluru, membentuk sabuk pertahanan yang luas dan tebal, memperkuat perlindungan terhadap kawasan industri penting selama Perang Dunia II. 09:40 Dengan meningkatnya serangan antipeluru selama Perang Dunia II, pesawat pengebom Sekutu menjadi sangat rentan dan menghadapi risiko tinggi selama misi. Teknik penghindaran yang digunakan oleh kru pesawat menjadi semakin tidak efektif seiring berjalannya waktu. -Pertahanan antipeluru yang kuat di pabrik kimia Leuna menyebabkan kerugian besar bagi pesawat pengebom B-17 dalam serangan pada tahun 1944. Ini menunjukkan tantangan yang dihadapi selama misi pengeboman. -Flak berperan dalam mengurangi akurasi pengeboman dengan memaksa pesawat melepaskan muatan dari ketinggian yang lebih tinggi. Ini menambah tingkat kesulitan bagi kru pesawat pengebom. -Dampak psikologis terhadap awak pesawat pengebom termasuk gejala stres dan trauma. Ini menunjukkan bahwa bahaya tidak hanya bersifat fisik tetapi juga mental bagi para kru.
the Allies had flak, too, you know? they shot German bombers, fighters, and even V-1 flying bombs. Germans had 88's, the Allies had 90 mm's and larger caliber AA guns, like the British 3.7 inch or 94mm. you're just contributing to perpetuating the supposed superiority of the losing side.
There were also the 'Nachtjäger' night fighter planes used to intercept the bomber squadrons and comunicate the positions to the Flak. They flew hiding within the enemy formation.The Nachtjäger had to move out just before the AA guns started firing. My inlaw flew on one of those. He fought the whole war, Stalingrad included, but according to him that was his most nerve-wracking experience by far.
Thanks so very much for this well explained and illustrated video. The aircrews who flew these missions were just ordinary guys BUT they had nerves of steel, going on a mission high in the sky every night until rest time or death. Nobody knows what went through their minds daily before a mission and not knowing if they would survive. RIP lads.
Seems to me that the Germans and the British would have done well to put all those guns only at the coast line. That way huge flak gun shells could have been used and the people would not be on the ground getting hit by the falling material. The material that did not end up stuck in a plane would have ended up in the water. Also the huge guns could have fired at ships
After the war, the 8th USAAF in UK did an analysis of all repairs to damage caused by Flak to US bombers in Europe. Obviously some was only a small hole due to a shell fragment, but the total recorded was over 50,000!
@Mrtweet81 Flugabwehrkanone is the word that you are looking for, I think. Nowadays such guns are guided by radar. One of the first radar guided guns was the American 'skysweeper'.
@@oml81mm No its not, if he had said flugabwherkanone, my joke, that went straight over your head, wouldn’t work. He was probably looking for that word though
Unfournate United States of America military can't even match all that ammunition,gave it to Ukraine and Israel..... If they was ever a conflict United States of America extremely unprepared and under manned
