Anti-Aircraft Gun

From Battleground Europe Wiki

An Anti-Aircraft Gun is a piece of artillery designed specifically to engage enemy aircraft

Development

World War I had proven that the aircraft was an important part of the battlefield. As the capabilities of aircraft improved, and more specifically their engines, it was clear that their role in future combat would be even more critical as their warload grew. Many felt that the higher speeds and altitudes would render anti-aircraft systems useless, so little effort was put into improving systems. It was only Germany that seriously considered what to do about this with any lead time before the war started. They developed a number of new anti-aircraft weapons in the late 1920s and early 1930s, often in collaboration with Swiss and Swedish companies, including a new rapid-fire 20 mm gun for low-altitude work, and a 37 mm gun for low and medium altitudes.

In the late 1920s the Swedish Navy had ordered the development of a 40 mm naval anti-aircraft gun from the Bofors company. The new gun proved to be light, fast and reliable, and a mobile version on a four wheel carriage was soon developed. Known simply as the 40 mm, it was adopted by some 17 different nations just before WWII and is still in use today in some applications such as on coastguard frigates.

By the mid-1930s the 20 mm was considered to be too low power against the increasingly fast planes but, instead of introducing a new gun, Krupp managed to squeeze four of the existing 20 mm guns onto a single carriage of about the same weight. This improved firepower enough to make a switch to a larger gun unattractive in comparison.

Prior to the war, Britain had followed conventional wisdom that the "bomber would always get through" and spent little effort on air defence. The introduction of radar so upset this conventional wisdom that, starting in the second half of the 1930s, a major effort was made to dramatically improve all defensive weapons. Up to this point, they had relied on their WWI-era 3 inch guns, but these were clearly outdated and a new QF 3.75 inch (94 mm) gun was introduced that was arguably the least effective medium anti-aircraft weapon of WWII. Both the 3 inch and 3.7 inch delivered with optical sighting systems for ranging.

Germany's high-altitude needs were originally going to be filled by a 75 mm gun from Krupp, designed in collaboration with their Swedish counterpart Bofors, but the specifications were later amended to require much higher performance. In response Krupp's engineers presented a new 88 mm design, the FlaK. 36 The eighty-eight would go on to become one of the most famous artillery pieces in history. First used in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, the gun proved to be one of the best anti-aircraft guns in the world, as well as particularly deadly against light and medium tanks.