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Open Topic Forum : The Funny Fuze
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From: MasterGunner  (Original Message)Sent: 5/15/2008 2:01 PM
MG Note:  One of the most revolutionary devices fielded during World War 2 was the "funny fuze" for artillery.  The "funny fuze" was also known as a VT fuze (VT = variable time) or a proximity fuze.  That meant an artillery shell could be fired at a ground or an air target and the shell would detonate whenever it got within a certain distance from the target.  This was revolutionary; an artillery projectile did not have to actually hit its target or be tied to in inaccuracies of a mechanical time fuze to do its job. 
 
The "funny fuze" was developed by the Crosley Corporation for the U.S. Navy to make its anti-aircraft fire more effective against German and Japanese aircraft.  Crosley packed a miniature radar transmitter-receiver into an artillery fuze.  This radar transmitter-receiver was tough enough to withstand the brutal forces present at firing and then function to detonate the shell when it got within effective range of the intended target -- perhaps 100 feet  from an airplane -- and pepper it with hundreds of high velocity steel fragments. 
 
 First issued to Navy ships at the end of 1943, the "funny fuze" was so secret that it could only be fired over deep water for fear that the Germans or Japanese might recover a dud and discover the secret of the "funny fuze."  It was not until the Battle of the Bulge that the U.S. Army got its hands on the "funny fuze."  The gravity of the German counterattack against the allied forces in the West was so great that all previous security measures were waived, and batches of Navy fuzes were rushed to the frontlines for use by Army artillery.  Funny fuzes effectively blunted massive German attacks as the guns destroyed large amounts of exposed men and equipment regardless of weather and visibility.  This is the story of the little "funny fuze" that helped win the greatest of all wars.
 

History and History in the Making

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

The Killer Angel

Comparatively few people, if asked to list some of the most important defense contractors of World War 2 would mention the Crosley Corporation. The Crosley who? But this relatively obscure company produced the first batches of what became known as the proximity fuze without whose aid the US Navy would probably have been annihilated by the Kamikazes off Okinawa.

Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during this war, credited it with three significant effects. It was important in defense from Japanese Kamikaze attacks in the Pacific. It was an important part of the radar-controlled anti-aircraft batteries that finally neutralized the German V-1 bomb attacks on England. Third, it was released for use in land warfare for use in the Battle of the Bulge, where it decimated German divisions caught in the open. The Germans felt safe from timed fire because the weather prevented accurate observation. Bush cites an estimated seven times increase in the effect of artillery with this innovation.

What the fuze does is simple. It detects the proximity, or nearness of a target and then detonates the main charge -- in most cases a shell. Before the proximity shell gunners had to guesstimate settings for a time fuze, a piece of clockwork or chemical train, so that shells would go off near their target. Since the five inch shell of the period had a lethal range of 70 yards, a region which a high speed shell would traverse in hundredths of a second, the guesstimate had to be correct to within this value. Not surprisingly the guesstimes were mostly wrong; and the Germans, who were the most methodical and precise of people, estimated it took over 3,300 88 mm shells to sucessfully shoot down a bomber flying straight and level over a city in Germany.

The USN did rather better. Using analog computers, which can be compared to an adjustable mechanical model which simulates a physical system, they could, by adjusting the settings so that the target aircraft's observed position coincided with the position predicted by the mechanical simulation, fire at wildly maneuvering targets like Kamikazes with much better precision than the Germans. But the fact that it took "only" a third of the number of 88s (that it took 1,000 5"/38 shells to down a single suicider) was cold comfort. There wasn't time to fire that many shells at plunging aircraft. But the introduction of the proximity fuze meant a shell didn't have to hit directly, just pass near enough to damage an enemy plane, and that increased the lethality of gunnery once again, this time by a factor of five. It took 200 proximity fuzed 5"/38s to down a single Kamikaze.

Fire control and superior ordnance meant that USN ships effectively carried fifteen times the lethality per gun of their counterparts in Germany. The fire control and smart sensor revolution continues to this day. GPS, laser guidance, UAVs -- all the soft systems -- contribute far more to the "bang" than the bang itself. And since intelligence is to operations as fire control is to flak, the philosophically inclined will readily appreciate the importance of information systems in locating and directing a response toward the modern Kamikaze -- the radical Islamic terrorist.

And while it is tempting to attribute the superiority of the US Navy's anti-aircraft defenses (which were an order of magnitude better than anyone else's) to superior science, in reality the Navy advantages were due entirely to the superior application of science. People who have lived in the digital electronic age would be astounded to learn how in the 1930s and 40s people built near real-time computing devices with gears, cams and levers. [These devices were called analog computers and they were very accurate -- even when compared to the now commonplace digital computers.]  They could stabilize an input, add them, multiply them, perform nonlinear functions and even do integration with objects that were reproducible in principle by a 19th century precision machine shop. There were no new principles involved, just new ways of use. In today's terminology, the USN's fire control advantage would be entirely due to business process innovations. (And by the way, the reader who has been following the links on this page will have possibly come to realize the solution to one of the great what-might-have-beens of World War 2.  If an Iowa class met a Yamato class battleship in normal conditions, the Iowa would have sent the Yamato to Davy Jones's locker in short order.  Not simply because the 16"/50 had almost as good a pentration as the Yamato's 18.1" guns but because it's fire control systems were immeasurably better.)



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