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
They’re essentially area denial. The point of flak guns isn’t hitting the enemy, it’s building a huge aerial danger mushroom meadow. Those danger mushrooms are relatively dense so by sheer chance they *will* hit at least some of the approaching bombers, if only with dropping shrapnel rather than the actual blast. In a way, they aren’t supposed to hit, just scare and confuse the enemy into missing.
This one is conjecture but I assume they also made for aerial depth charges. The explosions of those shells create pockets of vastly different air pressure which destabilizes the planes in their vicinity.
Flying above wasn’t viable for several reasons, first of which would be the depth charge effect. Airplanes also have a limited climbing height, especially heavy strategic bombers. It takes a lot of gas to climb and at some point will simply stall. Flak grenades were actually calibrated for the estimated stalling altitude of then-current bombers. Another point is that aiming becomes increasingly difficult due to target lag (as opposed to target lead, this is when you’re aiming at a stationary target from a moving platform) and differences in wind speed and direction throughout the troposphere. The last reason is that bomber cabins weren’t pressurized until very late in the war. That’s why they’re wearing breathing masks and those heavy flight suits. It’s cold and there’s barely any oxygen up there and you can only get so high before it damages whatever skin you have exposes.
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