Been watching Catch-22 on Hulu, and I’m seeing all kinds of AA fire going off all over the place. I know the show is based on the book and somewhat of a satire, but even in Band of Brothers, the AA seemed to have a somewhat low success rate. I know these are television/movies, but was there any accuracy to the amount of AA fire shown in the films? I’m not sure how exactly how they worked. I guess the true question is, “How did these work? Why didn’t they try to fly above it? Was flying above an option? What kind of success rate did they provide? How have they improved over the years?
In: Engineering
Bomber strategy and AA capabilities changed over the years.
By WW2 flak guns could shoot high enough that bombers couldn’t avoid them but flying high kept them safe from fighters. By the middle of the war they were vulnerable to both fighters and AAA(Anti Aircraft Artillery)
On of the most common Anti Aircraft guns of WW2 was the German 88mm Flak which could hit targets 32,500 feet up. Later models like the 105mm Flak could hit bombers 37,400 feet up. Both these could easily get to even the late war B-29 Superfortress with it’s <32,000 feet max altitude.
Propeller driven aircraft with rotary engines need a fair amount of air to work. Large heavy bombers also need either thick air or large wings to stay in the sky. Both these factors kept Allied bombers within the effective range of Axis AA guns.
The AAA also fired flak rounds. These are shells which would explode into tiny fragments after X seconds or at a set height. This made it much easier to hit planes as you just needed the shell to detonate near them not actually hit the plane with the small shell.
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