Flak 8.8cm - The German Gun That Destroyed Bombers

hello everyone welcome back to military aviation history I'm your host Bismarck and today we are going to talk about German flak specifically the fabled 88 no to the Germans as the heart or a centimeter flew up the canola accent accent is a civilized infancy depending on what version we are dealing with chances are that you are familiar with those images of Allied bombers streams over Europe being exposed to a barrage of a a fire each puff in the sky translating into a compact high explosive package courtesy of the Luftwaffe and yes the Luftwaffe did indeed control most AAA units in Germany what I want to do today is talk about the actual effectiveness of flat because depending on whom you ask human I ever be told that German flak was best flak or that it was a waste of time to assist me in this I once again went out and got a whole bunch of primary sources that I have here with me as I tend to do and not only will these give us plenty of data but I think they are also quite revealing my sources are as always in the description down below now the German company crook started designing the 88 in the late 1920s using the 18 in the flax name as a cover pretending it was of World War one origin in reference to the flak 16 of course this was a violation of the Treaty of Versailles but what you're gonna do about it ironically that treaty is actually one of the reasons why this gun came to be in the first place during the late 1920s and mid 1930s the bomber was projected to reign supreme in the sky Germany due to Versailles was unable to develop high-performance aircraft such as fighters mainly due to the restriction in engine development and production so they needed something to take on that bomber and the 88 was set to step into exactly that role designed to be the next best thing in the realm of heavy AAA able to love large caliber shells at high-flying enemy targets it presented itself as the backbone of German ground-based air defense the gun itself as the name implies shot an 88 millimeter shell with a high muzzle velocity and a high effective firing ceiling as in its a a roll the 88 only shot into the general postcode of the enemy bomber stream without much aiming it could theoretically achieve a rate of around 20 rounds per minute with a good crew however due to ammunition consumption this was sometimes artificially decreased by the operators the gun was equipped with a variety of different shells but in its payroll we will have a look at a standard age issue only the ranganatha elf your film constitutes the primary HD shell used by Germany while a contact fuse did exist timed fuses for a a fire were preferred that sites endure as the ice age was used either with a spring wound or an inertia operated mechanical time fuse operating at 30 seconds initially they had to be set by hand later an automatic system would be used these time fuses are important do remember them for later on now the shells contain an explosive charge of 0.7 2.9 kilograms of TNT or Amato on a 4060 ratio sending out destructive shrapnel from the casing if you want to know about the AP shells and d88 in its anti-tank role be sure to check out MH v video after this one the Germans organized their ad eights and batteries of foreign goals but a team of 12 the latter were somewhat rare around cities such batteries would be collected in both regiments and divisions for example at its high point in 1940 40s tough luck division covering Berlin had around 104 heavy flak batteries predominantly consisting of 88 now you can do the math on how many barrels for pointing sky boards back then as mentioned a battery consisted of usually four guns that hatch this was a flat commander with it one auxilary commander great and a radio the commando great with its telescopic rangefinder was the principal fire direction device updating the flak guns on the heading range and altitude of the incoming bombers later on the commando grant would also supply this information to an automatic singer machine that would set the time delay fuses of the individual shells based on the trance with variables with the advances made in fact offenses the information of the commando grade was actually quite critical because it would allow the gun Amer's of each individual 88 to simply follow the transmitted instructions to keep track of the bomber formation without an actual need to spot the individual targets I found one interesting document from 1944 giving guidelines about the rift lien of the fifth the flak division covering the area around Dusseldorf in the Ruhr I'll be focusing on daytime operations only here now batteries were instructed to fire only at targets over 5,000 meters at an angle greater than 340 degrees and four targets below 5,000 meters an angle of 30 degrees would be used this gave each battery a limited time to send out their regards typically around 12 10 to 12 minutes the leading centered element would be targeted continuously by the guns until they are forced to switch to a new target once the Bombers have I ever passed out of range or have dropped their payload and the guns would consistently aim ahead of the advancing bomber stream does make sense since obviously the shells needed about 25 to 30 seconds to reach the altitude the Germans differentiate between two types main types of fire get shielded fire and bath where the former constitutes continuous fire by the guns based on the tracking data supplied by the commando raid it was generally the most accurate beyond that you have spare fire which is breaking down into the vacation spare for you and Zach - before now I'm not 100% sure what is meant with biblically - should be our fire since I couldn't find an actual source in an original German document explaining it but given the contact as it's being used and I would think that this is a shifting barrage providing short concentrated clusters of explosions while jumping from one location to the next on the Bombers fly path sector of a fire on the other hand would be a concentrated and unmoving sector in the sky constantly brushed by the guns beyond that the German differentiate between a couple of other types of fire therefore a whole fish in a fire and mosquitoes their fire now based on their names I could of course now assume they mean but sometimes the obvious answer isn't the correct one and since I don't have an original source explaining these I don't want to go out and limb here and give you guys the wrong idea so that's a project for another time moving on how did the German 88 damage or shoot down Allied bombers do you remember the time fuses from earlier on this is where we turn back to those since the shells operated on a time delay fuse they did not explode on contact with the bomber this is why sometimes you see pictures like this one young damage caused by a shell going clean through the plain structure without exploding now if one of them went off in immediate proximity to the aircraft or Gott I'm Himmel inside one you'd get something like this there are quite a few of these pictures out there from returning aircraft giving credit to the planes construction but usually those kinds of hits were fatal it's just that you don't see those pictures because the planes well they on in any case it was far more likely that shrapnel from an explosion close to the aircraft would cause damage to both ship and crew how close well we will find out with these primary sources this first thing we will look at is how an 88 would actually explode this is important because the directional sacrament ation density emitted from an explosion is quite distinct in an open space it wasn't equal all around there is a pattern to it the in static test it was found that the standardized change of 88 shells in the fragmentation is an extension of 0 to 30 degrees off the horizontal keep in mind that this is a 2d representation of an actual 3d event shells would be fired at all sorts of angles meaning that the composite burst patterns might be very different the randomness is impossible in any case we can assume that while the composite bias patterns aren't always the same it hold concentrated zones about 70% of all shells were concentrated within the main fragmentation areas and that 60% of all the shrapnel remain clustered within 10 feet or 3 meters from the exploded before expanding outward forever we can does assume that this distance is where the a DHL would be as as most destructive as it sends out Sheraton L in a concentrated cluster before the velocity and concentration of the shrapnel decreases with the distance now this also correlates somewhat with the accounts of crew members from these bombers who said that if you can just spot a puff of smoke in the sky you were usually safe but if you saw the actual explosion right in front of you you were probably too close there is an interesting study comparing the hits on b-17s and b-24s in this paper right here we've got a breakdown of flack damage to both aircraft roughly 3,000 b-17 and 900 b-24s returning to the UK bases in July 1944 the studying question shows the percentage of hits to the top bottom and sides calculate the s per square foot per 1000 aircraft there are two important factors here first off these values might be skewed because of Survivor bias the ratio here is from planes that made it back not including those enjoying an extended holiday in the German countryside the report does take this into account saying that where are we there we go the deficiencies of hits on bottoms of fuselages as shown by decreases in the ratio of top to bottom hits for both types of aircraft may be regarded as hit sustained by missing an action aircraft quote end second the relative variation in hits between the aircraft might also be to do the respective aircraft dimension the b-17 has a 25% greater bottom surface while the b-24 has a 36 percent greater lateral surface now per 100 hits there would be 34 casualties and b-17s but only 19 and b-24s the hypothesis here is that because the b-17 has a larger horizontal profile cruise and critical system are they comparatively higher risk yet the loss ratio of both aircraft was the same this would suggest that for similar hits p7 teams were more likely to return than b-24s be it with or casualties aboard there is another study that is of interest to our needs the survey of battle casualties 8th Air Force June July August 1944 remember our old friend survived abayas Unidos that comeback can be analyzed the study looked at the casualty rate of 40 different heavy bombardment ropes the flying I ever be Seventeen's or b-24s or a mixed there off the data pool consisted of 944 damaged but returned aircraft group 1117 casualties before we continue the word casualty includes both wounded in action and KAS in the report so I'll be doing the same for the sake of consistency these casualties had three causes flak fighter and secondary missiles like fragments of Plexiglas for example the overwhelming majority of cases are from flak 86% translating to 963 casualties separated into wounded and kis I'll be using two colors to separate those white for wounded and red for the Kas here we have now a breakdown of the casualties across all crustaceans and you'll see some interesting trends first off you have the waist Gunners and they are quite a distinct outlier the study explains this and I quote the high casualty rate for waist Gunners or is partially due to the fact that heavy bombers frequently carried two waist Gunners quote and second of all we have quite a high casualty rate for the navigator and bomber deer and this is most likely due to the unprotected nature of the Bombers nose the boat hurt gunner itself has a low ratio as the study actually mentioned that most of the time this position was not occupied also the copilot seems to have been a bit luckier than the actual pilot now you might have noticed that if we break down the aircraft into its compartments you'll see that the casualty rates are very consistent with Indies hinting to the relative protection of each do these studies go one step further and they actually analyze what sort of wounds the crew sustains and well the chances of survival if you've ever looked in a mirror chances are you have you'll have realized that your head represents a smaller target then well say your chest it has a smaller surface area or round also for the chest based on such body surface area ratios the air force expected to have the following hit ratios on men hit by flack the ratio based on body surface area in all wounded cases it actually got was the following and here is the ratio for all K IAS and as you can see there is a marked difference between the expected wounds based on the body surface area of the chest and abdomen this is important and I'll touch on it again later on so do remember it so while this was based on the ratio of wounds based on the body surface area what was the actual percentage breakdown between wounded and killed personnel let's have a look at that again we have an interesting outlier the chest and abdomen what's going on this is well friend the Flyers west comes into play sometimes known as flak vests these were protective covers worn by American bomber crews meant to absorb some of the flux shrapnel but how can we judge the effectiveness of armor the study admits that this is a problem and I quote it has been impossible to calculate accurate data to show the incidence of personnel hit but uninjured by flak in the regions of the body protected by armor and to solve this and I quote an evaluation of the protection offered by Armour may be obtained from a study of the quantitative relationship between flak heads and projection body surface areas to turn back to the numbers then of the expected hits based on body surface area told you this was important so I do hope that you remembered it here's a little bit of a refresher here is the actual hit ratio observed based on body surfaces in all casualties we've got 60% less than expected chest hits and 80% less than expected abdomen heads obviously to compensate a relative average of other areas went up this is then following an study that was made comparing the actual wounds of personnel wearing armor and those that didn't and boom yes go science we have a ratio that is once again telling chest and abdomen hits went down but what about head wounds then again a small study was conducted between the majority of crew members wearing a helmet and a courageous shoe that didn't now in the study a head wound is a wound from the neck up before we go into this however please observe that the paper does tell us that the sample of data was not sufficient to give statistical significance the percentage breakdown between unprotected and protected total wounds and fatal wounds is the following you'll see that head wounds were fatal in 77 percent of cases when the crew member did not wear a helmet and 58 percent in those cases when they did at the near 20% reduction in fatalities we can assume that the vast majority of the 58 percent of fatal wounds in the protective cases did not take place in a space protected by the helmet but were from the front or especially into the neck having gone through this data you know might now say well that's all very good but how many bombers were actually lost your flak sticking of the Americans here just for the sake of consistency the Air Force's statistical jest suggests that over europe between august 42 and may 45 2004 the 50 heavy bombers were lost fighters and 2439 to a a so you might think the Flyboys got this one in the back but in 1944 things look very equal but after the Luftwaffe committed death by boredom Plata in 1945 suddenly the majority of kills were of course done by the flag now there is a discussion to be had here because all Germans flag expended an ungodly amount of ammunition to achieve these numbers it does suggest itself to be as much an asset as interceptors German flak defenses throughout World War two and by 1944 were probably the best ground-based air defenses in the world not just because practice makes perfect and the German Gunners had a lot of practice but also because the organization behind it was sophisticated combine that with the relative ease of training flack who's the psychological impact of a a Barajas which I haven't touched upon and disruptive effect of these John flag does seem to fulfill his role to the extent that it could so I hope that you enjoyed this video if you did please consider supporting us on patreon earn some little purse with that as well and as always please do share our videos and as always I wish you guys a great day good hunting and see you in the sky

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 414,008

Rating: 4.8952842 out of 5

Keywords: Flak 88, German, Luftwaffe, AA, Gun, Flak 18, 36, Flak, B24, B-24, B-17, B17, Flying Fortress, Military Aviation History, AAA, 8.8cm

Id: xz_p-T2KgbU

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

The level of research this guy puts into his videos is amazing. Thanks for posting!

[u/greyseal494]

16,000 rounds on average to bring down an allied bomber...yet they brought down 10 a day...that's a lot of metal flying through the air