Hitler’s Flak Towers Were Anti-Aircraft Castles | Hacker News Reader

Hitler’s Flak Towers Were Anti-Aircraft Castles

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65 pointsvinnyglennon18 comments

And I lived on/ran a datacenter from one of Churchill's anti-aircraft castles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand

Guessing you have some interesting stories about Sealand. I know it's asking a lot and I understand if you don't have the free time, but did you have any you don't mind sharing with us?

1) Having a dog on a platform like that (basically a 5000 square foot trailer park with no "park") is pretty crappy for both the dog and the humans unfortunate enough to be stuck with it (not the owners of the dog).

2) 30 year old canned meat products are in fact still nominally edible.

3) Spending all day on the Internet from a random building in the middle of nowhere is actually not THAT different from my daily life today; less traffic, higher latency Internet.

I can't seem to find it anywhere, so I thought I'd add this here for the non-German speakers:

Flak stands for "Flugabwehrkanone" or "Fliegerabwehrkanone" which consists of the 3 words:

- Flug / Flieger (Flight / Airplane)

- Abwehr (Defense)

- Kanone (Cannon)

Bordeaux faced a similar problem with a submarine base. It is much bigger though: 450,000 sq ft. It is now a cultural center. According to my dad, who was involved in the conversion, working with 22 feet thick walls was very challenging.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BETASOM

I had no idea the Italians had submarines let alone in a base in France. Makes sense though, obviously.

There's a bunker in the UK [1] that I went to. Before they could allow visitors they had to add a fire escape. Apparently it took a couple of days to cut a hole in the wall for this due to how strong it is and that was state of the art diamond cutting equipment.

Good day out though.

[1] http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/

The USAAF had its best shot with 500 lb bombs, which must have chipped a certain amount of concrete. Apparently it was not a good idea for a GI to walk into French port towns with a bomb group patch on his arm in 1944 and 1945.

PBS has an old special you can find on Netflix entitled Nazi Mega Weapons. Included in there is a story on Fortress Berlin which covers towers like this. The other more impressive construction project would be the submarine bases along the coast. Even the hidden manufacturing plants for ME-262 are impressive, not only for the scale but ingenuity in construction

Wikipedia has a great section on this including lots of photos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_tower

Very interesting, one of the images [1] gives some good blue prints for the geek's version of a sand castle.

[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d7/Fl...

Waste of space on the internet.

The authors constructs questions out of thin air.

"The question is—what the Hell are you supposed to do with them? They’re certainly not going anywhere."

What could be done with them... well, exactly what they are currently doing? Music [1], living space [2], social space & clubs [3]/[4], office spaces...

The author cites the concept of the "pyramid garden" on top of the Hamburg Bunker which was not rejected because the people were unwilling to change something - it was simply rejected because a corporation tried to get its hands on the real estate under the cover of a urban gardening project [5].

But gladly the author clarifies that the bunkers are hard to crack - i was clearly suprised that war tech designed to withstand multi-ton bombs is tough.

[1] http://www.musikbunker-hamburg.de/ [2] http://bunker-hamburg.de/ [3] http://www.uebelundgefaehrlich.com/ [4] http://www.terracehill.de/ [5] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/dachgarten-in-st-pauli-d...

> Destroying them is pretty much impossible owing to their proximity to urban spaces—and the sheer amount of explosives required.

This bit also annoyed me. It's not the amount of explosives required, it's that it's too expensive. Destroying large lumps of concrete can be done with technology we've had since the start of written history - a quarry isn't all that different. It's just that it's really labour-intensive, and hence, expensive.

It's interesting also that the pictured 'renovation' idea does very little to mask the shape of the tower. If you want to stop it looking like a lumpen fascist monument, add some new lines to it, make it look visibly different, rather than overgrown.

I find it interesting that artifacts like these towers can see so many lifetimes and incarnations. It's almost as if one incarnation stands until opposition to change is overwhelmed and a new incarnation can be created.

I wonder what happened to the canon rounds that missed their target (that must have been most of them). There must be an entire region that must have gotten used to raining 128-millimeter bullets.

Anti-aircraft shells were usually fused to explode at a given altitude. The proximity fuse was developed by the allies during the war, and was regarded as a top-secret piece of technology.

Indeed, the VT fuze. It worked by using a tiny radio transmitter and receiver to detect proximity to the target. This was hugely effective both for anti-aircraft use and when attacking ground targets. WWII AA techniques had a hard time hitting aircraft. If you use bullets you can spray a lot of them near the aircraft but they have fairly limited range, and you use up a ton of ammo. With something like an artillery shell you can get the range to hit a distant aircraft but a solid shell would be useless as it would likely miss the aircraft, so you need to explode into a bunch of fragments. But even if you have good aim if the shell explodes only a little bit too early or too late then you won't hit anything, since the fragments have a short range. With the VT fuze you guarantee that the shell will explode near the aircraft if it's headed in the right direction. With ground targets there's the opposite problem. You can hit very close to a target, but if the shell explodes on the ground then most of the blast will be directed upward, and the only way you'd be able to hit the target is if it was sitting out in the open. If it's dug into even a shallow fox hole or depression then you'd have to get a direct hit. But if you can ensure the shell explodes at a specific height over the target then the fragmentation can fly downward, which can hit targets in a bigger radius than just near a surface blast.

war is boring

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