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AA Shells - 7/5/2002 3:47:35 PM   
Hades

 

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From: Texas
Status: offline 		When AA or FlaK guns fire at aircraft they send lots of steel into the air. This steel has to land. Alot of AA guns were around cities. Say an 8.8cm fires a shell fused for contact explosion at an B-17, but the shell misses. It reaches its zenith and starts heading back down to Berlin. Does it hit he ground?.. Does it kill civilians? Just wondering.

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It happened at Pearl Harbor... - 7/5/2002 9:12:50 PM   
Orzel Bialy


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From: Wisconsin USA
Status: offline 		the sailors were firing so quickly that at times they didn't set the fuses and thus more than a few 5 inch shells arched their way into the sky and then fell back earthward....some of them on parts of Honolulu.
For the most part contact fuses weren't regularly used (from what I've read at least) for AA fire. Proximity or time burst shells were used for that purpose...to avoid the problem of raining "missed shots" back on your own people.
Anyone else out there have any better info?

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- 7/7/2002 10:39:43 AM   
G_X

 

Posts: 518
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From: Atlanta, Georgia
Status: offline 		Flak theory is based on time, you gauge the height and distance you need to fire, and then the time it will take your shell to get there, and start shooting, your cannon basically shoots the same spot over and over again, flak's not very effective because of this, it simply puts up a giant area of explosions, if you watch historical films of US bombing raids, you'll see thousands of black clouds floating in the air, that's from flak shots, it doesn't take much to take an airplane down, because of their design they can't have that much armor, so the flak never needed to score direct hits.

Even now-days contact fuses aren't used for Missiles, contact odds are a joke, you'd have to have precognitive abilities to shoot that kind of thing, Alot of AA that wasn't flak-style (IE the timed explosives fired from large .cal cannons) were machine gun style, these are basically just large .cal bullets, there are occasional go-betweens, but these were usually designed for special scenarios.

That should all be correct, if it's not, I'd love someone to correct me.

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- 7/7/2002 12:54:20 PM   
Hades

 

Posts: 565
Joined: 12/3/2001
From: Texas
Status: offline 		I get the whole thing on how FlaK works but I was wondering what happens when the shells come down. Maybe FlaK was a bad example. What happens when fighter are in a dogfight over a city. The shell casing only fall down. Thats more what i was wondering.

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- 7/7/2002 2:57:24 PM   
G_X

 

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From: Atlanta, Georgia
Status: offline 		Ever watched Black Hawk Down?

Anyways, here's a scene from it, A captain is on the ground, shooting at the enemy, a Blackhawk heli opens up with it's 20mm Gatling to provide support to him, lucky enough for that captain, he's right under the heli's Gatling and get's rained on by 20mm shell casing.


In other words, yes, the shell casings do fall to the ground, though normally it's so spread out that maybe 1 falls within 100 feet, remember planes do go pretty fast.


Now, say a Flak shell's timer didn't go off, or was improperly set, then yes, you have scenarios where the flak shell falls down and hits the ground, most of the time doing nothing.

There are to my knowledge no cases of this being a large problem, so I assume quality standards were rather high ;)


Also, alot of DogFighter's used Chain link guns, so the shell casings were on the chain as it cycled through the gun, this was sometimes done to stabilize the plane, or simply to keep shell casings from flying back at high speeds and tearing off a part of the tail.

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Post #: 5
Info on proximity fuses - 7/8/2002 5:52:36 AM   
chief


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From: Haines City FL, USA
Status: offline 		Proximity fuses were not available in Dec 1941.
Project commenced to design AA proximity fuses for joint US (5"aa) and British (4"?) naval rifles in Sept 41.
First shell with new (then SECRET) shells got to the fleet and Brits sometime in 1943.
Actual usage in quanity late fall 1943 in time for most island invasions in WestPac.
Usage for 105 hows and brit weapons late 43 also.

From former shipmates of mine at Pearl on 7 Dec 41. "Japs were flying so low that we literally sprayed our own ships with aa & mg fire probably adding to the chaos" "When the second wave came in we were more aware and better organized so less friendly fire damage resulted" These are paraphrased quotes.

Hope this helps clear up a few misconceptions.

Chief:cool:

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- 6/6/2003 12:14:08 AM   
arethusa

 

Posts: 145
Joined: 5/12/2003
From: GTA, Canada
Status: offline 		The 105mm's that I worked with were capable of AA fire although we never used them as such, just had some "hands-off" training.

If we had used them for AA, we would have had to dig a 'recoil pit' between the gun trails to allow for the breech of the gun to move back without hitting the ground. What a sight it would have been without such a pit as I saw a gun once lose it's brakes and the whole thing jumped up into the air when it fired and move about half it's length backwards.

Anyway, we were issued a variety of ammo. We usually had about 5% AP available, 5% smoke, 5% phosphorus, a few starshells and the balance was HE. There were different kinds of HE for schrapnel, explosive or other effects. The HE was fused or contact. In other words, we set a time with the fuse and if it hit something before the timer went off, it exploded anyway.

The fuse setting was done by the #7 in the gun crew on instructions from the battery commander. He in turn got his instructions from the artillery plotter who went through a series of calculations including range, altitude of gun, altitude of target (you even do this if the target is on the ground), wind, rain (it slows down the shell and could deflect it), the weight of the shell (different types are different) and how close you wanted it to explode. The length of time it would take the shell to get there was calculated and the fuse set for that time, usually in seconds or fractions of seconds.

The whole calculation took a minute or two but that was before computers. Then all the shells were set to the same time by the #7 and picked up by #6 and #5 and taken to the gun.

IIRC, almost any shell could have a fuse screwed onto it. The fuse wasn't armed until a few seconds out of the gun by the centrifical force of the spin resetting a mechanism inside the shell. Therefore you could hit them on the nose with a hammer and they wouldn't go off. I don't know anybody who ever tested that theory however. :rolleyes: :D :eek:

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- 6/6/2003 3:54:41 PM   
Jags

 

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From: Athens, Greece
Status: offline 		Hi everybody, first post.

I believe that those days nobody cared where the AA shells would land since anyway, at the same moment, hell was raised by the B17's!!!!! Seriously now, I have read long time ago a very interesting article in a war history magazine abt the AA fire, proximity fuses and all this during WWII. I will refresh my memory and I will revert abt this.

Reg bullets and casing from fighters here's something interesting. Erich Hartmann, top ace of all years, was accused as a war criminal by the Russians. Their case was that some of the bullets he fired must have missed the target and killed innocent civilians!!!!! He was imprisoned in Soviet Union for abt 10 years.

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Post #: 8
- 6/6/2003 4:12:42 PM   
Belisarius


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From: Gothenburg, Sweden
Status: offline 		A lot of civilian casualties in Baghdad was explained (by Reuters, at least) with AA shells coming down again.

Then again, it sounds just a little too convenient, doesn't it? :rolleyes:

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- 6/6/2003 5:30:32 PM   
Marek Tucan


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From: Kladno, Czech Republic
Status: offline 		Only to add to the FLAK threads above, there also was a serious danger due to the splinters falling off the skies, at least few our historicians mentioned it. But as it was said, the planes above make a bigger damage and the people used to be mostly in shelters.

Btw I think in Pacific there was quite common that ships were hit by even 5in AAA from other vessels during the Japanese torpedo raids?

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Post #: 10
- 6/6/2003 10:01:41 PM   
Wolfleader

 

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Status: offline 		Flak shells tend to explode at a preset time and altitude since as G_X indicated accurately hitting with projectile rounds anything flying thousands of feet in the air from the ground is next to impossible, hence why flak guns predominantly use HE shells. (non HE rounds like the 7.92 AA MG and .50 cal flak guns were used for very low flying aircraft on strafing runs where the odds of a round impacting a target are much greater). Not particularly sure if the German 20mm and 37mm used HE rounds though, as far as I know they didn't.

Shrapnel and unexploded flakshells also rained down the ground below and undoubtedly some civilians were killed by these things though probably not a lot. You have to take into consideration that if enemy aircraft are in the air, odds are most of the civilian population would be hiding in whatever shelter they could find and that the shrapnel and unexploded flak shells would end up falling in totally random areas.

Also G_X indicated in his post that AA missiles also explode on proxiimity not contact with their airborne targets. Thought I'd point out to anyone whose interested that the first 15 minutes of the movie Behind Enemy Lines did a pretty good demonstration of how an AA missile shoots down an aircraft.

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- 6/6/2003 10:10:59 PM   
Voriax

 

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Status: offline 		I happen to have a German 20mm AA round that's been cut open for display purposes.

Unfortunately I cannot disassemble the nose fuse, I suspect it's been intentionally glued? together..so I can't tell whether it's just a contact fuse or if it contains also a centrifugal safety/trigger system. Bit tiny fuse for such system.

At the bottom of the actual round there's the tracer material. And there's a channel leading from tracer space into the bursting charge and there's a cavity in the burst charge for a bottom fuse. So, when the tracer is just about to burn out it lights up the bottom fuse and Boom!

Voriax

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- 6/6/2003 10:21:39 PM   
Wolfleader

 

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Status: offline 		It would probably be by proximity then if its setup like that. My guess is that the shell was probably designed to physically impact and rip through low flying aircraft but explode to deal with planes flying at higher altitudes.

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Post #: 13
- 6/7/2003 3:07:59 AM   
arethusa

 

Posts: 145
Joined: 5/12/2003
From: GTA, Canada
Status: offline 		[QUOTE]Originally posted by Wolfleader
[B]It would probably be by proximity then if its setup like that. My guess is that the shell was probably designed to physically impact and rip through low flying aircraft but explode to deal with planes flying at higher altitudes. [/B][/QUOTE]
I think Wolfleader's right on that. 20mm is small to put much mechanism into. My father has a couple of 20mm shells on his mantle that don't have room for much more than some HE that would be set off my phosphorous burning it out from the tail and that would be it.

Possibly it was meant to hit and lodge into the aircraft and then explode when the phos. burnt out. Or explode after a certain time even if it didn't hit. Even a timed fuse would be unlikely in that size.

My father said that when he flew through FLAK, it sometimes looked "thick enough to walk on". He said he could hear the schrapnel from it pinging and rattling off the fuselage of the plane and that the whole plane shook violently if it came close enough for the blast. He was shot down by an Me110 in Feb. '44 and at an airforce reunion in 1985, he met a Luftwaffe pilot who may have been the one who shot him down. Dad bought the German a beer and said he's glad they both made it through alive.

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Post #: 14
- 6/7/2003 8:59:06 PM   
Irinami

 

Posts: 746
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From: Florida, USA
Status: offline 		(Welcome Jags!)

One of my buddies in school had an uncle who was a West Bank businessman. He told of a murder case he read about. Jewish man was shot with 7.62x39mm round. Long story short...

You know the footage of Palestinians (or Russians or Hillbillies or anyone else, for Newton works the same everywhere) shooting their guns into the air? Those bullets have to come down somewhere.

Same thing happened in Iraq, Iran, Israel--anywhere that's used light cannon and machineguns for AAA. The ZSU-23 is a common AAA platform, especially in the Middle East, and fires 23mm shells. Doctrinally, the ZSU-23 is loaded with 2 Frag-HE-T per 1 API-T round. (HEI-T is also available.) I believe the T is for Timer.

Now, shells go up. There is a certain tolerance for errors, and in most militaries the tolerance is higher than in business--especially Warsaw Pact militaries. On something that can fire 4,000 rounds per minute, if the tolerance at the ammo manufacturing is, say, 10%, then that's 400 rounds that don't blow up in the air after a minute of fire. (100 after 15 seconds.) Those rounds have to come down. Whether they explode or not--and plenty of times they will--those things come down with a heckuva lot of kinetic energy... roughly the same amount of energy it left the barrel with, which for AAA is pretty high. Can you imagine a chunk of metal roughly 1 inch square flying at high velocity into your car? You ought to be able to... there are plenty of 20+/-mm AT weapons in SPWAW.

Long story short:
AAA that goes up, sometimes comes down... just like bombs that are dropped sometimes don't blow up. Non-fused AAA that goes up comes down (though sometimes with the plane). Whether it comes down and explodes or not is the difference between being bayonetted and being bayonetted THEN shot. It's not good either way. This is something forgotten by many military enthusiasts. All those machinegun rounds... all those air-to-air missiles/rockets... All those missed shots... have to go somewhere.

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- 6/7/2003 10:55:43 PM   
Voriax

 

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Status: offline 		[QUOTE]Originally posted by Irinami
[B] Whether they explode or not--and plenty of times they will--those things come down with a heckuva lot of kinetic energy... roughly the same amount of energy it left the barrel with, which for AAA is pretty high.[/B][/QUOTE]

Excuse me when I disagree.

While all rounds that are fired up will come down, they certainly don't have that kind of an energy they have when they leave the barrel. And that's because when the round reaches its maximum altitude, it stops and very momentarily has zero kinetic energy. Then gravity wins and the round falls down in free fall. And at certain phase the round reaches it's maximum free fall velocity, just like a parachutist does before opening the 'chute. The speed will be very high, but it's in the order of couple hundred km/h not like 1000+ m/s an AAA round may have when it leaves the barrel.

If the rounds is fired at lower angle it may still have some of the initial energy left when it hits the ground thus being more destructive.

Voriax

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- 6/8/2003 1:12:21 AM   
Irinami

 

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Status: offline 		I stand corrected. I'm used to considering these things in the vacuum of space, and forgot about air resistance. ^^;

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- 6/10/2003 6:00:04 AM   
Raskolnikov

 

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Joined: 4/12/2002
From: London, England
Status: offline 		[QUOTE]Originally posted by Voriax
[B]Excuse me when I disagree... [/B][/QUOTE]

Voriax is of course correct, but a bullet in freefall will be travelling at more than sufficient speed to kill.

Whilst AFVs might not be in serious danger from returning AA rounds (tho' 88s falling back down on to M4s...?) there are literally hundreds of cases of individuals being maimed by such fire. As most impacts are head wounds, they are frequently extremely serious. The above-mentioned practise of loosing off burst of automatic fire skywards, favoured amongst the Kalashnikov-toters of the world, is demonstrably idiotic. Personally, I have to say the sight of some clown spraying the sky with bullets is extremely distasteful... especially when combined with the numbers of individuals killed/injured/blinded by it.

Of course, a combat sim like SPWaW which included such details would be unplayable. Just imagine... soldier's bootlace untied, trips, safety off, fires round, disables officer on radio, arty barrage misplaced...:D

Rask.

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- 6/10/2003 6:44:26 AM   
arethusa

 

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From: GTA, Canada
Status: offline 		[QUOTE]Originally posted by Raskolnikov
[B]
Of course, a combat sim like SPWaW which included such details would be unplayable. Just imagine... soldier's bootlace untied, trips, safety off, fires round, disables officer on radio, arty barrage misplaced...:D

Rask. [/B][/QUOTE]
SPWAW does have that though. It's friendly fire such as CAS hitting the wrong target or artillery rounds wandering. Having been the recipient of a number of rounds of HE into my position once, and finding out that the error was just the result of somebody not hearing an order correctly and being in the wrong location, well, I can see how little things can make a big difference.

"For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For the want of a shoe, the horse was lamed. For the want of a horse, the message was late. For the want of the message, the battle was lost." Or something like that anyway.

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Post #: 19
- 6/13/2003 7:47:53 AM   
Golf33

 

Posts: 1962
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From: Canberra, Australia
Status: offline 		HEI-T = High Explosive Incendiary - Tracer.

I don't have failure rates for WW2 fuzes (they'd be higher than for modern fuzes but lower than for WW1 at a guess) but modern arty fuzes generally fail at a rate well under 2%. Submunition fuzes fail at a higher rate than the bigger shells, generally around 3-5% for GW1-era munitions and I think 1-2% for current generation fuzes.

Even in WW2 I'd be surprised to get a failure rate on mech time fuzes like those used in AAA of more than 1% or so.

Cheers
33

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Post #: 20
- 6/18/2003 1:17:12 AM   
Raskolnikov

 

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Status: offline 		In the Chapter III ('The Pilotless Bombardment') of Volume VI ('Triumph and Tragedy') of [I]The Second World War[/I], Churchill discusses the movement of the main AAA batteries from their defensive line on the North Downs to the south coast.

The ADGB (Air Defence of Great Britain) deployment at the start of the V1 attacks was with 'fighters ranging out over the sea and over most of Kent and Sussex, where the bombs were dispersed, and guns concentrated in a belt nearer London, where the bombs drew into a more compact front as they approached their target.' However, this was altered and the guns were moved forwards for two reasons. Firstly, 'their Radar for fire control would have more scope' nearer the coast, and, secondly, 'it would be safer to use the proximity-fuzed shells which were now arriving from America' as they would be farther away from urban concentrations. In a footnote, Churchill adds: 'these shells, which were designed to explode as they passed near the target, were dangerous to use over land, since if they missed the target badly they did not explode until they fell to earth.'

Thus, the complete redployment of the vast ADGB organisation was effected by two considerations: the military advantage of an advanced position and the possibility of using proximity-fuzed shells. From Churchill's comments it is clear that if the AAA batteries were located near London, the fall-back rate on the proximity-fuzed shells would be so high as to prohibit their use.

Rask.

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