The Secret Fuze That Helped Overcome Japanese Air Power

hello everyone and welcome back to military aviation history I'm your host Bismarck and I am at the marina music Indian Helder in the Netherlands wargaming invited me to join their event celebrating the introduction of the first Dutch ship into world of warships world of warships is a team-based free-to-play game featuring over 200 ships in which you can play as I ever a destroyer a cruiser a battleship or a carrier lone wolf or play with your friends in divisions customize your ships and devise strategies to win sync your opponents sign up to world of warships with the link in the description below all new players will receive two ships including the premium german cruiser Emden as well as a starting curse of in-game currency lube loans and seven days of premium today I want to talk about a very specific danger that all pilots shared during world war 2 as if it wasn't enough that everyday you must you kit out with enemy pilots make sure that you don't get lost don't fly into a storm or have a mechanical failure no it turns out there is another danger out there and wants to make the life of a combat pilot air flying misery I'm of course talking about these buggers right here hey guns now nowadays you have surface-to-air missiles and once everything is said and done you really only need to press a button for the guy up there in the sky to experience a severe episode of brown alert but early on things weren't that simple the a a gun appeared as early as aircraft were used in a military role even though in World War one we see their introduction we start out with the light machine gun and work our way up to bigger guns essentially a little different to these standard artillery pieces of the time quite a lot of work went into this as aviation became an ever more important aspect of warfare to prevent bombers or recon aircraft from doing their worst it was necessary to provide that ground-based defense not only does this allow you to shoot something down but it also is great to push these aircraft to higher altitudes and bombers for example we were less accurate at that point so we see a lot of development during this time and in fact the German 88 millimeter of heavy flak on perhaps the most well-known and recognizable a a piece of all time can trace itself back to World War one ships also became the target for aircraft not just wire bombs but also later with torpedoes so it was necessary to on the move a a guns as well and we see some of this during the Great War and the interwar years but ships tended to have only very few a defenses in world war ii initially this became obvious i'm standing next to the 20-millimeter Oerlikon this gun was the standard light a a gun of the US Navy during World War two it was compact had a reasonable fire rate good all-round characteristics and could be used by a small team as a swiss interwar design the all the console service both in the Axis and Allies actually some of the early BF 109s had a gun that shared some of the family tree as this all I can write here in any case the US Navy began to use these on mass in ever-increasing numbers really whereas in 1941 much of the light AAA Suites were still centered around the 28 millimeter Chicago piano which well let's just say it had some troubles and the 50 Cal em to the 20-millimeter Oerlikon offered a compromise solution with a better all-around package the gun itself was improved in various versions over the years but the overall use was the same rows upon rows of sailors littering the sky with shells it really didn't matter if you couldn't aim volume of fire would have your back the guns were supplied in sixty round drum mags with the first two shells typically standard ball to clear out the gun bell and then you would follow up with your standard 80 rounds while initially Gunners use the standard cartwheel sight they also received the mark 14 guy role in the second half of 1942 this 20 millimeter cannon actually accounted for 48 percent of US Navy anti-aircraft air kills although this dropped to around 30 percent in the same time we have period in 43 for reasons that will become apparent very soon talking about numbers if you are actually interested in the sources for this video they are linked in the description as with all my videos now let's assume that you have lot out your 60 rounds and you have to read out a gun first of all there are essentially three ways of checking whether there is still ammo in the drum the first one is well it's the gun firing yes or no the second one is for the gunner himself you can actually see in the back of the drum in a spiral sort of fashion how many rounds are still left and upfront you also have another catch here tell you how many rounds are still left approximately any case to reload the gun first of all of course we unload it there's a latch here just press that all the way forward now you shove this part forward and you just latch it out now the empty drum weighs about I guess 5 kilos maybe one could say 4 to 5 kilos so it's not light but assuming there would be 60 rounds on there it would be a lot heavier so you chuck that away you get the next one you aim for the slit slash it in place and then it's going to go there we go and this chap is ready to fire once more a 20 millimeter cannon is good but sometimes not good enough against determined opposition so this is where this con comes into play it's the Swedish 40-millimeter Bofors gun and there is something about neutral countries and AAA guns I just don't know what it is but in any case the 40 millimeter is perhaps my personal favorite a agon of all time it's effective beyond the range of the 20 mil which tends to only bring value when it's just about to be too late and it looks like it means business and is deadly efficient now securing production licenses for this gun for the United States was it's a long story I won't go into it for now but suffice it to say the Brits and the US did actually produced a majority of the Bofors during the Second World War a Chrysler itself built like 60,000 of these and now 120,000 barrels which is quite an achievement given how complex this gun actually is the gun came as it is here by itself but could also be joined to double or quadruple mounts now generally it was water-cooled but a co home also came in air-cooled versions and the guns were used or nearly all US vessels being small minesweepers or a mighty battleship now the gun was operated by two men one hand lead reversed the other one the depression while firing the gun would be continuously reloaded by four shell clips as the gun fires faster than you could reload it this might seem like a little bit of a flaw but in practical application it really wasn't especially the double or quadruple mounts would always have at least one gun maybe even two guns firing at the same time so there was always ordnance on target and let me tell you when a fourteen millimeter HD shells hits a plane and let's just say Nigel's having a very bad day but as a comparison between the two guns the 20 mil had an assumed to hit rate of about fourteen percent against a target going at 260 kph which increased to 28% on the 14 mil combat speeds of course were considerably higher so take that with a little bit of grain of salt and I gotta say it's a pretty gun but you have to be mighty small to operate it properly because this is uncomfortable a bull force is not enough you say well I guess I can't please everyone but sure you can have one of these if you want them this is a sort of dual purpose gun that could be used both in naval engagement and as a heavy a platform against aircraft they came in much higher caliber stand the Oerlikon and the Bofors I mean just look at it yeah usually you had three inch fifty or even five inch this is actually a five inch your post-war but hey the caliper is the same a pit and a plane goes down and that's pretty much a manufacturer's guarantee these guns were around before planes even existed and on paper while the one hit one kill rating sounds pretty awesome you really need to score that one hit in order to have success and it being a breech loader it won't fire as fast as a 20 or 40 mil so for a long time this gun only had well limited potential as an a platform but things did get better with time fuses based on continuous range estimates the shells would hopefully detonate right next to an aircraft littering it with shrapnel and those explosions are the thing you see as black clouds in the moving pictures but it still takes many many shells to have that desired effect in the US Navy actually assumed it had fire 2,500 shells out of one of these guns in order to down a single aircraft this is it the 5-inch shell as you can see it's quite a big bugger it's got a normal time delay fuse on it at the moment and this would be roughly 40 45 50 kilos a piece and these would actually be occasionally and quite often actually a hand carried to the actual gun so yeah just imagine that sling slugging around with one of these on the deck of a ship that is rolling and firing its guns and yeah it's no joy but has to be done during World War 2 the Allies came up with something quite neat multiple nations worked on this but yeah in its application after taking a look at what the British had done the Americans really overshadowed everyone and I'm of course talking about the VT fuel so this is often translated as variable time in the past some have argued or speculated that this is a cover name it doesn't really explain the purpose of the fuse without you already knowing the concept these shells were a proximity detonated meaning that they could in the simplest of words well since a plane and where does detonating right where the explosion and shrapnel will do the most damage to do this the shell had a small radio transceiver complete with an amplifier and a capacitor the projector would fly towards the intended target in radio waves from the transmitter would be reflected back by the target and these of course an increase with closure and phase with the fuse generated signal and once the signal level is at that correct setting the fuse knows that now it's time to go for a witness me and the shell will detonate the technology at work here is similar to what radar does and you're using the Doppler effect essentially the drawback at this point is that well the fuses had to be of a certain size so only larger calibers could use them and not 20 or 40 mils at this point and arguably the VT fuse was ready in 42 and a test showed that while it worked there were still problems for the battery you had to ask for a power plant for transceiver of course and then only about 70 percent of the shells would actually detonate in the end but that's a pretty good number but you still need to iron out some of the kinks and a first Seabourn test was conducted in august of year shooting the VT fuses had a couple of drones and this was done on the shakedown cruise of the USS cleveland most of the sailors were still wet behind their ears they did have experienced fire control officers if test was meant to run for over two days or the first day in the morning free drones were sent out and they're gonna stalk their aim and yeah they shot all of them down with only four shells fired so yeah with that kind of success the VT fuses were put into production the USS Helena was the first to fire meaty shells in true combat conditions on a fifth of January 1943 for Japanese aircraft attacked it and its task force the light cruiser reloaded VT shells for second salvo and soon scored a kill downing a d3 a dive bomber there were other improvements to to give the crews flexibility each twin five inch gun was given a short-range director thus instead of all guns relying on a central director their own shared range directors could engage targets independently greatly increasing firing efficiency from all the guns under such conditions the Navy even considered that a single twin mount 5-inch gun was equal to four three-inch fifty or to quadruple bofors this wasn't added to all the guns of course the directors were slow to be adopted but they did have an impact where they were being employed but soon another project problem that has ended itself that might seem like a little bit of paradox and it was the shell or the fuse Rafa was effective in fact it was too effective what if it had fell into enemy hands and was reverse engineered the Japanese had already done so with previous radar equipment they had found so yeah this wasn't pure paranoia in 43 the initiative in the Pacific had changed Midway the year before had made sure of that but the Japanese were not beaten and still plenty of fight in them and sometimes you hear that this was the reason why the VT shells were taking away from the failure so this was just for secrecy but that's not the full picture in 43 actually 9,000 shells with he shells were fired credited over 50% of the 5-inch AAA kills and considering that 27,000 time fish shells were also fired during the same period this isn't bad at all and so yes way more shells were produced and made it to the frontlines in fact 70,000 fuses could be produced in anything all day and yes this didn't start rolling out to the front lines as quickly as they could have been but they were being used and to good effect some of you might be familiar with both the year British and American cap sorties close air patrol engaging Japanese aircraft long before they ever got close to a fleet this proved to be quite efficient dusting my question why all this hassle was made to improve aaaa fuses AAA shells after all Japanese attacks were broken up way before they even got close that is true but not a full picture during the first six months of 1944 for example around 300 Japanese aircraft still managed to penetrate the US cap screen and they attacked ships and transport vessels roughly 10 percent of these attacks scored hits or near misses and about a third of the attacking planes were shot down by a a Assad Lee I don't have any clear numbers on how many can be attributed to the VD fuse but we can assume that it was quite a few relying on cap alone just as much as relying only on AAA was not the answer you had to use both in conjunction to make the best possible defensive screen for your task fleet and this saved many many ships in the Pacific now with the war progressing on all fronts the access power grew ever more desperate in Europe you had the V once the buzz bombs and in the Pacific you had the kamek answer while the former was essentially a new weapon of sorts a cruise missile in its infancy the latter was particularly difficult to counter generally you can rely on pilots exhibiting a certain sense of self-preservation even though many pilots throughout the war press the attacks home even getting way closer than you might think is comfortable there was always that expectation that a plane that was hit would just bugger off to fly in our day off the common cancer this was not so you I will shut it down or at got young so you can see it at this point a shell that doesn't need direct contact with the plane that's attacking comes in more and more of its own and this is it increases the chances of a hit this also caused a lacking of security measures to take place with the defense of London for example also later on benefiting from the V T shell being used against the buzz bomb that we won additionally the shell was now also adopted in the artillery used to during the Battle of the Bulge for example at this point as well the US was were also working proactively on developing a countermeasure to its own proximity fuze design least some quirky German scientists managed to get them working for Germany Germany I had actually worked on such a project for some years by now but had never put these into production due to a lack of success before the war ended thank you very much for watching this episode and I want to thank Justin and trend for the help with sources for this video as always all sources also linked down below thank you to wargaming for sponsoring this episode and to the Latino music in then Helder for their kind welcome and assistance especially curator leon who showed us around the depot remember to Like share and subscribe and hitting that Bell button and as always have a great day good hunting and see you in the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 496,013

Keywords: Aviation, Education

Id: FpnYu4BhS2U

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Dokky]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission

Won the war but at immense post war commercial damage.