ww2 anti aircraft guns

spooiirt!!

what kind of ammo did anti- aircraft cannons use? i heard somewhere about the shells having fuses in them so the explode when theyre close to the target. how does this work? anyone know?

shock

Anti aircraft cannons used shells with fuses which were set to range. The gunners on the ground would judge how high the planes were and set the fuses to explode at that height.

spooiirt!!

yeah thats what i thought. so were they just simple HE rounds or was there more to em than that?

Furez

Along with good radar guidance I think both side had these...

prox fuses

Furez

shock

I didnt know they had those in WW2.

ssh

The rounds basically left a cloud of floating, hot metal strips around the area of explosion. If you fly through it, it tears the crap out of your plane. Imagine the effect that they would have on anything fragile...

spooiirt!!

so how come the german 88 was so effective against tanks?

ssh

It was a high calibre round that moved at extremely high velocity... look at the length of the barrell on the gun. It worked purely as a kinetic energy shell until it presumabely exploded inside the tank, immolating the crew and probably rupturing the fuel tank. In the case of petrol based tanks like the M4 this was lights-out time.

Never underestimate the power of a heavy, fast moving piece of metal.

Capt'n Midnight

Anti Aircraft guns need to put a shell very high into the air - 5,000 feet is nearly a mile. Wen't the 88's first used in North Africia when a position was about to be overrun by British tanks ?

From the above link
The secret must be kept!
... During World War II, the Japanese were famous for being able to copy captured radar equipment, and the Americans did not wish this fuze copied and used against the allied forces. This restricted the fuze’s usage to naval warfare and also prevented it from being used in naval shore bombardment of enemy-held territories.

Actually they were more worried about the Germans getting it - the crates carrying the shells were labelled "for use against Jap personnel only" - the idea being that the shell explodes above the ground so there is no point in hiding in a trench...

Can't find the book right now but by the end of WWII the allies were using radar and a crude computer and the VT shells to automatically track and shoot down V1's


But at the start of the war everyone was using the older fused type of amunition.

spooiirt!!

how about anti tank shells. how did they work?

Capt'n Midnight

Anti Tank - depends on the type
the idea is that inside a tank are lots of flamables - eg ammunition and delicate things (like people) and it has hard surfaces on inside too...

Amour piercing - eg: tungsten rod pierces through the armounr and then ricochets off the walls inside the tank - possibly hitting ammo. Depleted uranium (radioactive waste) is also used , it's twice as dense as lead, toxic and inflamable.

smersh (sp) there you use a shaped charge to thump on the outside very hard and shatter off shards of srmour on the inside - does not pierce the armour - it the shards on the inside that do the damage

another type of shaped charge focuses energy on a metal core - result a supersonic jet of molten metal burns a hole through the armour and splatters on the inside.

Main problem with a tank is that even a small explosion inside will be magnified compared to one outside cos it will occur in a confined space.

Lots of unplesent ways to die in a tank - mostly involving burning...

Barry Aldwell

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
Lots of unplesent ways to die in a tank - mostly involving burning...

Or, if you are "lucky" enough not to be incinerated by the initial hit, you get the pleasure of trying to escape before the fuel or, even worse, the ammunition explodes. often in a battle you will see tanks burning for hours, even days, until the fire reaches the ammo, when there's a massive explosion.

ssh

There's two broad categories of AT round... kinetic energy rounds and checmical energy rounds.

Chemical energy rounds basically use an enourmous explosion to tear a hole in the tank. The round doesn't have to be moving too quickly. It just has to explode on the tank.

Reactive armour, which basically explodes against the shell deflecting much of the blast makes CE rounds largely useless. If you read Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy, you'll see that the gunners fire CE at the T-55s but use partially KE SABOT rounds against the newer T-72 and T-80s.

Kinetic Energy rounds do what they say on the tin. They usually consist of a fast moving shell which spits out a stream of molten metal when it reaches the target. Not much use against buildings or groups of infantry, but by god do they kill a tank.

(What on earth does this post have to do with History and Heritage? )

shock

Not much. You're talking about modern AT rounds. But what ones did they have in WW2?

ssh

Discarding SABOTS and SQUASH heads, to the best of my knowledge

http://www.4reference.net/encyclopedias/wikipedia/High_explosive_squash_head.html

Victor

AAA rounds essentially used a time fuse to detonate at the expected height /range of the aircraft, later in the war radar proximity fuses were used.

Early in the war some anti tank rounds were just solid steel.

The problem in the invasion of France was British tanks were essentially machine gun carriers with good (for then) armour for use against infantry and soft vehicles. The German tanks had lighter armour and medium sized guns. The problem was neither tank could kill the other, so the Germans just used Blitzkrieg to out-flank the British, who then fell back.