How German Anti-Aircraft Works

When WWII Allied bombers flew missions over Western Europe, not only did they have to compete with enemy fighter aircraft but also with the thousands of anti-aircraft weapons aimed at the skies. These flak batteries threw hundreds of salvos toward Allied aircraft at the time, but how do they work, exactly?

Enemy Anti-Aircraft Weapons

Enemy anti-aircraft weapons may vary from heavy guns like the German 88 mm flak, the German 105 mm flak, the Japanese 75 mm, to small caliber automatic weapons like the German 20 mm or the Japanese 25 mm. There’s also a great difference in methods of firing between the heavy gun and the small caliber automatic weapon.

The heavy gun usually destroys planes by using a time fuse shell placing a large explosive burst in the near vicinity of the target. In heavy anti-aircraft fire, being accurate requires painstaking fire control.

Tracking and Firing Enemy Aircraft

Anti-aircraft gunners should have a leading, careful mathematical calculation. The aircraft needs to be picked up in an optical sight. The sight then keeps tracking of it continuously, obtaining its direction and angular height while a stereoscopic rangefinder determines the altitude.

At night or in bad weather, the aircraft may be tracked solely by radar. The information is then fed by electrical cable to a director which digests the data and automatically computes the right lead, setting the guns. As a result, they will fire not right when the target is now, but where it will be at the end of the shell’s time of flight.

The director will then go on automatically adjusting and setting the guns as long the planes stay in range. Each battery maintains predicted fire until it can no longer reach attacking planes. However, new batteries take up the firing as soon as they come within range. This is called continuously pointed fire.

Some Drawbacks

The gunner’s firing data can never be more than the assumed future course of the target. In a continuous pointed fire, the gunner must get you in his sights obtaining your altitude. Five seconds is consumed here.

Then, the director must make calculations and set the guns. This adds roughly another five seconds. Then, the shell climbing approximately a thousand feet per second chalks up 25 more.

Continuing your present path for 35 seconds places you right at the predicted point. However, making a change after 25 seconds leaves the flak bursting on a course one is no longer flying. As a result, the gunner’s prediction needs to be re-figured to fit a new course before he can fire again.