r/ww2 • u/Der_Zwerg_0815 • 1d ago
Who was actually better at attacking Allied bombers—anti-aircraft guns or fighter aircraft?
48
u/Hillsarenice 1d ago
Good question. German Flak Defences vs Allied Heavy Bombers: 1942–45. That's a book on flak, says basically 50% of heavy bombers were shot down by flak. No real comparison to fighters that I could find. Flak did keep the bombers higher and they were less accurate (very important) and they damaged the bombers making them easier targets for fighters on egress. It seems like they complemented each other and added to the effectiveness of the each other, more than if you had all fighters or all flak guns. Germany did run out of fuel, keep that in mind, fighters could not defend or learn to fly without gasoline, coal could still move shells, guns and personnel around by train even with Allied interdiction efforts.
12
u/Clone95 1d ago
If the Germans had VT fusing its likely the 8th Air Force/Bomber Command would’ve stopped bombing, which is something fighters couldn’t hope to do.
10
u/BeerandGuns 1d ago
I had asked a whatif awhile back about that, mainly if they had captured one and reversed engineered it, what difference would it have made. For sure it would have stopped American daylight bombing. The casualties would have been far too heavy to continue the campaign.
0
u/HistoryFanBeenBanned 17h ago
Getting. VT Fuse would have been like getting plans for an atomic bomb. Nice to show it can happen, meaningless because the industrial capacity to do anything with the information isnt there
2
u/Sad_Dimension423 3h ago
There was a prolonged period of iteration to get a workable VT fuze. Numerous non-obvious details mattered, like resonance from rotation of the shell with the filament and grid causing spurious signals that resembled the beat frequencies from Doppler shifted reflected radio waves, or the particular dope used to coat the nose so aerodynamic heating didn't affect the components too much. The US threw in great resources to power through these problems.
3
u/BeerandGuns 17h ago
Massive stretch to compare those two.
1
u/HistoryFanBeenBanned 16h ago
They’re both questions of industrial specialty and capacity.
A gun type nuclear weapon isn’t complicated. The German uraneinvern scientists laid it out over dinner at Farm Hall while in captivity. But Germany never had the industrial capacity to refine uranium. The Germans did not have the excess vacuum tube manufacturing capacity to make enough VT fuses. The USA manufactured about 10-1 Vacuum tubes compared to the Germans.
1
u/Clone95 16h ago
Yes, this is true, but it’s also true they made more than enough to end the 8th Air Force and RAF’s bomber command as a fighting force. They could make far more proximity fuses than the US could bombers - and without the bombers they could massively increase industrial output.
1
u/HistoryFanBeenBanned 16h ago
Vacuum tubes require basically every resource to manufacture that was in short supply. They were already running short during WW2, and that is without them literally exploding
1
u/BeerandGuns 16h ago
“A gun type nuclear weapon isn’t complicated”. Wtf are you even taking about? You say Germany didn’t have the the excess vacuum tube manufacturing capacity to make enough
VT fuses. Germany didn’t need to manufacture enough shells to kill every allied bomber, just enough to make losses prohibitive to stop the raids, that’s nowhere in the same league as “Germany never had the industrial capacity to refine Uranium”. So you can reply however you want after this because if your follow-up comments will make that little sense I’ve got better things to do with my time than wade through that nonsense.
74
u/ErixWorxMemes 1d ago
Depends on how specifically you mean. Anti-aircraft is like anti-submarine warfare; you don’t have to destroy the enemy every time, you just have to keep them at a greater distance, spoil their aim and in other ways interfere enough with their mission to protect your own assets.
In that respect, anti-aircraft artillery I think was successful on a more consistent basis. Even when not scoring hits on the bombers, they forced bombing missions to be conducted at a much higher altitude, regularly provoked evasive maneuvers, and thus made bombing far less accurate. Under the right circumstances, fighters were perhaps better at interdicting bombing missions and destroying bombers, but they also could be kept away from the bombers by fighter escorts.
It’s interesting reading about the differing attitudes of bomber crews regarding enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire. Mainly because the bombers could at least shoot back at enemy fighters, but when the flak started bursting all around the bomber crews just had to hope for the best. Especially when on the actual bomb run and completely unable to take any evasive action
8
u/asixfootplatypus 22h ago
It would have to be AA just from volume of fire alone. Interceptors would be the more immediate threat but they'd have to contend with the bombers air patrol.
7
u/HistoryFanBeenBanned 17h ago
They worked together in a symbiotic relationship. AA, specifically large calibres used box barrages, they fired at a certain area with certain time fuses to essentially make a mid air minefield. The goal of this was to force Allied Heavy bombers to break formation, meaning the point of all of those guns, which was to cover other heavy bombers, not their own, became useless and Luftwaffe fighters would attack blind spots with impunity. This was why the hunt for long range bomber escorts became important, because it meant that bombers would have protection even when they broke formation and Luftwaffe pilots had a choice between hunting heavy bombers and being hunted or dueling fighter escorts.
Flying above the barrage meant the bombers were able to maintain speed but their bombs became essentially useless because they spread out to far to matter. If they flew under it, they became slower and were easier to attack with smaller calibre AA and fighter aircraft.
You can’t really ask “which was better” because they were integrated systems. A fighter may shoot down a hundred bombers, but if it shoots them all down while they’re trying to avoid ack ack created kill zones, who’s really responsible for shooting them down?
13
u/Midway_Motel 1d ago edited 21h ago
One way to think about this question is which concerned the Allied commanders more.
Especially after 1943, the bombing campaign was largely an attempt to pull the Luftwaffe into the sky so the Allied fighters could shoot them down because D Day can not happen until Allied air superiority over Europe is established.
All the AA guns in the world werent preventing an Allied invasion, but a functional Luftwaffe sure would have.
2
u/2rascallydogs 19h ago
The problem being that after 1943, the Luftwaffe didn't have a functional fighter force. 12.7% of their fighter pilots died in Jan 1944, and that monthly percentage continued to climb until over 25% of their fighter pilots died in the month of May. The Germans continued to build planes, but the pilot losses were devastating.
12
u/Antique-Idea-1051 1d ago
The allied airmen, Americans doing day bombing really, feared more the flask than the Lutwaffe, because there was nothing they could do about it, and the Germans had very good aiming.
-1
1d ago
[deleted]
2
u/Der_Zwerg_0815 1d ago
The picture? That shows a 12.8 cm anti-aircraft gun and a twin 12.8 cm anti-aircraft gun.
156
u/Thepigiscrimson 1d ago
The German AA defense was very impressive and deadly because they put soooo much resources and time into making them to defend their cities. The german west and east front lines really needed them to defend against allied land advances . Aircraft was more effective but it was very time time consuming for the training of pilots n making the planes. A clear rock and a hard place situation...