They were very cool tech. The trick was making the battery for the radio juice it’s self up on it’s way to the target.
:)
I forget the name of the book. But the brass didn’t allow using these fuses in European combat zones so the Germans wouldn’t get their hands on them. Once the Navy perfected them the kamikazi attacks weren’t effective anymore. Crazy what decisions have to made in war.
Strange, no mention of Harry Diamond. He was the technical driving force behind the proximity fuze.
The proximity fuze project was second in priority only to the Manhattan Project, as a military R&D effort during WWII.
An unbelievable amount of effort was spent to make artillery shells explode a few milliseconds before they struck their target. The increase in effectiveness of those shells made the effort worth it.
“The proximity fuze proved three to four times more effective than conventional time fuzes, and night kill-ratios increased by 370%.”
Wow, incredible advancement! I had no idea that proximity fuses were developed in WW II and on such a compressed time schedule.
Like radar and nuclear weapons. The US was a real tech powerhouse back then.
Lot of videos on Youboob:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=proximity+fuse
Technical manual:
https://maritime.org/doc/vtfuze/index.php
12 Seconds of Silence. By Jaime Holmes.
That tells the whole story - Much, much more complicated than the brief paragraphs above. Tells it of (what little) the Germans actually were able to determine, how little their efforts were along the process. The people - including Van Bush and the scientists on the US practical research and “aim a few hundred “anti aircraft shells directly up so they fall back on your head to test it” realists they were.
French and Brotish practical espionage as well.
12 seconds focuses on the German anti-air campaigns against the V1. Not too much on the Pacific War.
ridiculous technical misinformation in this article (e.g.,
single 6”x3” vacuum tube)
here’s a MUCH better article about the VT fuze than the ridiculous one from USNI.org:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proximity_fuze