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If I remember correctly, the shells with the tiny radar set for proximity triggering were only for AA use - and there were strict orders to only use them over water to make sure no dud shells were recovered and reverse-engineered, since the advantage they gave was so huge.

It was an incredible achievement to fit a battery and some glass vacuum tubes into a device that would be fired out of a gun at 1000G.

I would also attribute some success to the Allied choice of pragmatic effectiveness over technical superiority most of the time. This allowed the effective arming of a huge force over a huge area with adequate replacements, whereas the "superweapon" approach fell to limited availability of parts and special alloys (due to Allied targeted bombing!). And the V2 program was a huge waste of resources for Germany. Good for the subsequent American space programme, though.

You were right that it was just AA for most of the war, due to the desire for secrecy, but starting at the battle of the Bulge in late 1944, proximity fuses were used by US artillery, on land.

Otherwise, I strongly agree with you.

It wasn’t just secrecy it was also production capacity pretty much as soon as they could produce enough of them they started to use them on land as well. The proximity fuse was key to the US war in the pacific as well.

It’s probably the main reason for why the US has dominated the electronics industry through the 20th century. The miniaturization required and the ability to mass produce electronics required the development of new production techniques. The proximity fuse was the first use of PCBs in mass production.

"It’s probably the main reason for why the US has dominated the electronics industry through the 20th century"

...or Japan.

The proximity fuse was used at the battle of the bulge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze

However they did tried to avoid them being captured by the Germans.

The proximity shells for AA guns were so sensitive that they with the help of targeting computers allowed the Brits to essentially neutralize V-1 attacks as they could effectively shoot down all incoming V-1’s.

Artillery was where the US had a real qualitative edge in WWII. There were the radio equipped forward observers that could call in a barrage with drastically lower latency than any other combatant. There were the computer generated firing tables aiding both accuracy and allowing things like time on target barrages[1]. And towards the end there were the proximity fused shells.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_On_Target

The science behind building a proximity fuze in 1942 is just mind boggling. Even though they infinite money at their disposal it's still insane that they were able to computerize a shell moving with 16,000-20,000 G-Forces in the days of vacuum tubes.

I read "12 Seconds of Silence: How a Team of Inventors, Tinkerers, and Spies Took Down a Nazi Superweapon" recently. Never knew about the advantage it gave the Allies. James Van Allen as in the "Van Allen Belt" was part of the effort.

One of my grandfathers was working for Metrovick [1] at the start of the 30s. His boss suggested that he go get a PhD and hopefully there would be more work when he had finished. He chose to go to Aachen [2] and learned German well enough to get his Dr Ing.

Back at Metrovick he worked on high power radio transmitters, one he designed for the Rugby Radio Station [3] became the basis of the one for the Chain Home system and he was in charge of production of them by Metrovick.

Because he spoke German he was a member of the Allied Control Commission immediately after the war and went round all the German electronics companies to find out what they had been doing. He found that he knew all the senior people who had been working on competing technology from when they had been students together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan-Vickers [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technische_Hochschule,_Aachen [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rugby_Radio_Station

If you visit Massachusetts, and go to Battleship Cove (https://www.battleshipcove.org/) in Fall River, inside the USS Massachusetts you can get up close and personal with a WWII era firing control computer. It looks both very sophisticated and antiquated at the same time.

"didn’t manage to compete" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262? the V-2? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229 ? The A-bomb seems to be the only technology they failed to build. But it played no role on the European theatre in WWII anyway. Don't forget that American reliance on foreigners led directly to leaking the atomic secrets to the Soviets.

The Allies had fielded jets earlier than the Germans. WW2 arguably slowed down jet development not accelerated it as most of them were pre-war designs.

The Brits didn’t had the industrial capacity to produce jets in large numbers and for the US the early jets were a logistical nightmare.

Early jets couldn’t fly off aircraft carriers in fact it would take quite a while for the navy to get jets working and for close air support the navy still had prop aircraft until early Vietnam.

Jet bombers weren’t viable during WW2 and the limited range of jets their fuel, landing stop and other logistical requirements meant that it was far harder to support them from frontline airbases.

So it’s more of the case that the US simply couldn’t use the jets of the time effectively if they could they would’ve built more of them and some even earlier than 43-44.

The Me-262 was built in relatively large numbers but did absolutely squat to change the tides of war as the Allies found a very simple solution to go after the air bases.

Unlike most prop aircraft of the time that could take off and land in a field and could be serviced in a barn jets needed proper runways and maintenance facilities.

Well, they first had to steal the A-bomb project from British Empire (ok, technically the theft happened post-war, when they stopped brits from taking back their notes)

As for the above examples - Nazis were a bit behind on jet engine technology, and most importantly got lost in trying to get some super weapon while their designs and production lines were hamstrung by stupid ideas

The Brits might have been able to field a Los Alamos during WWII, but not a Hanford or Oak Ridge/TVA, especially not in the British Isles while under direct fire. Also, in the very improbable event of a successful Nazi island invasion, nice to keep such projects an ocean away in the US.

The UK couldn’t have afforded an expanded post-WWII atomic program at the level the Soviets eventually fielded, at least not while transitioning back to a civilian economy. The US could and did.

The big challenge for the UK to meet at the time was decolonization, a challenge they met with aplomb and whose successful achievement was and is under-appreciated by the global community.

Could you link to anything about the vacuum tubes? I am one of the people that didn't realize that was a thing.

You can see in the diagrams toward the end that likely four tubes per fuze were used in WWII.

https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze

Probably worth pointing out that one person [1] worked on delivering both the proximity fuse and the Atomic bomb.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sterling_Parsons

Also, the deployment of radar, which (among other things) played a large role in finding German U-boats.

Yep probably one of the most important and under discussed military operations of the war was one without a single bullet fired

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission

> They Nazi’s “dejewification” of science and the pursuit of “German science” reeked havoc within their scientific community...

Wreaked havoc. It also "reeked" (stunk). So what you said, while it was a mistake, it was also perfect.

VT Fuzes For Projectiles and Spin-Stabilized Rockets , OP 1480, 1946

https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.htm