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
The success rates of AA for most of the second world war for most of the combatants were spectacularly low.
I can look up some exact numbers if you want but it’s a lot of work.
Something in the order of 12,000 rounds spent per aircraft downed iirc.
There was light, medium and heavy AA (short, medium and long range). Above those the defence would often have fighters.
The fighters would attack the bombers and try to push them down into the AA. The higher the bombers stayed the lower their accuracy was (which was already terrible in WW II), but the lower they went the more AA they would be exposed to. There were also batteries of large searchlights, AA-balloons, early radar systems, and ground observers involved.
There were great improvements made during the war, on all sides, and since.
Two of the biggest in WW II would be the improved radar systems, and the Variable Time fuse, in my opinion.
And with ubiquitous guided rocketry AA has become far more deadly since.
Latest Answers