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I agree that something's seriously amiss with the date of the purported Japanese proximity fuzed bomb strike against B-29s on Saipan, and what digging I've done so far suggests the effects were overstated, in terms of B-29s damaged or destroyed. Shall have to talk to my brother about one particular raid with the P1Y Frances bomber (radically improved Betty) which did a lot of damage. In turn, that brings me to a discussion of blast vs. bomb fragments, and of these, the frag effects are by far the wider ranging. Blast falls off very rapidly, 1/R3, whereas frag can be 1/R2 or even 1/R, depending on weapon design.

Pak_43,

That is exactly my understanding of what should be there if you can locate the report in question, with the relevant passage on page 14 thereof. Missed that last somehow, probably from posting in the wee hours. The myrol mix is an enabling technology for the radio controlled Feuerball's and manned Kugelblitz's weaponry, which also includes high power klystrons to screw with and even damage aircraft electronics, which amounted to about a ton per heavy bomber back then. Can provide a parallel German klystron citation if you like. Basically Vesco's argument is that the Germans invented and recognized the importance of a series of technological developments, and tells who did them and where, then combined them to produce an armored circular jet turbine powered craft, which backs off when hit, is surrounded by a bright glow, can emit gasses that will wreck internal combustion engines and can really muck up avionics when it gets close. This is the craft that Vesco says he personally worked on at the underground German-controlled FIAT plant in Riva del Garda, Italy. Here's some info on that. http://werwolf.greyfalcon.us/werwolf2.html If you can read Italian, a whole book on the Riva del Garda underground factories.

Tunnel Factories

Le fabbriche aeronautiche di Fiat e Caproni

nell'Alto Garda 1943-1945

Giorgio Danilo Cocconcelli

,

280 pagine - oltre 300 foto e disegni.

formato 20x28,5

Una documentazione unica nel suo genere sull'attività

pressoché sconosciuta delle industrie italiane nel nord

dopo l' 8 settembre 1943 nelle gallerie sotterranee del

Garda. L'organizzazione Todt, le officine Fiat da Campione

a Riva del Garda, quelle della Caproni a Torbole e la

galleria Adige-Garda.

Found the above in this short, interesting thread on underground factories. http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=147864

This describes how things came together technically and how the program was organized. This is also the short form of Vesco's argument that the flying saucers were covert British reworks of German designs, NOT ET craft. http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/vesco.htm

Regards,

John Kettler

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/vesco.htm

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B-24s began operating from lengthened runways on Saipan in early September 1944, with B-29s following in October that same year per this article by a then Master's in Military Science candidate.

http://flgrube1.tripod.com/id172.html

This is conservative, seeing as how PacificWrecks shows the first B-24 mission from Saipan was flown August 10, 1944. http://www.pacificwrecks.com/airfields/japan/iwo_jima/missions-iwo-jima.htm

My bet? Something or several things got conflated in that paragraph, but the statement on VT fuzes for antiaircraft use seems clear and straightforward.

Regards,

John Kettler

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Seems I was right about Hara's being the source of the VT fuze story. My brother's copy of SUICIDE SQUADS, by O'Neill, says on page 119 (Fair use)

"Captain Hara, saying that the plan was as unrealistic as "throwing an egg at a rock," proposed that instead, he should take the newly refitted Yahagi--with her efficient radar, homing torpedoes and proximity-fused AA guns--on a high-speed raiding mission."

Am now pretty comfortable with the notion of Japanese VT fuzed antiaircraft shells being available.

Regards,

John Kettler

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Stalin's Organist,

What I think is pathetic is the length you'll go to to avoid dealing with something that pushes your buttons. Your semantic point is well taken, but you refuse to acknowledge the underlying message, which is that the Yahagi had proximity fuzed AA shells, or VT capability, if you will. The Hara quote didn't take place in a vacuum, rather, in a military staff meeting of the most serious sort.

Your obdurateness reminds me of the case of Bomber Command and its adamant refusal to recognize the clear evidence that the German night fighters were homing in on the Monica tail warning radar and using it to down bombers in droves. It ultimately took a landing in England by a night fighter so equipped (FuG 227 Flensburg) before the painful truth was finally accepted. See last paragraph under Aerial Array here. http://www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand/ju88.html

According to this, citing aviation heavyweight Gunston, Monica was compromised by March of 43, yet remained in service until mid 1944. The delay in responding was devastating. From Brewster Buffalo's post here http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-388281.html (Fair use)

"By March 1943 the Germans had examples of MONICA from shot-down aircraft and it became dangerous to use once they equipped their nightfighters to track MONICA emissions. Although partly superseded by FISHPOND, MONICA remained in use until mid 1944. According to Bill Gunston, by that time MONICA had been responsible for more bomber losses than any other single device in the War. [Night Fighters - A Development and Combat History; Bill Gunston, p11] "

Regards,

John Kettler

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Stalin's Organist,

What I think is pathetic is the length you'll go to to avoid dealing with something that pushes your buttons. Your semantic point is well taken, but you refuse to acknowledge the underlying message, which is that the Yahagi had proximity fuzed AA shells, or VT capability, if you will. The Hara quote didn't take place in a vacuum, rather, in a military staff meeting of the most serious sort.

Your obdurateness reminds me of the case of Bomber Command and its adamant refusal to recognize the clear evidence that the German night fighters were homing in on the Monica tail warning radar and using it to down bombers in droves. It ultimately took a landing in England by a night fighter so equipped (FuG 227 Flensburg) before the painful truth was finally accepted. See last paragraph under Aerial Array here. http://www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand/ju88.html

According to this, citing aviation heavyweight Gunston, Monica was compromised by March of 43, yet remained in service until mid 1944. The delay in responding was devastating. From Brewster Buffalo's post here http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-388281.html (Fair use)

"By March 1943 the Germans had examples of MONICA from shot-down aircraft and it became dangerous to use once they equipped their nightfighters to track MONICA emissions. Although partly superseded by FISHPOND, MONICA remained in use until mid 1944. According to Bill Gunston, by that time MONICA had been responsible for more bomber losses than any other single device in the War. [Night Fighters - A Development and Combat History; Bill Gunston, p11] "

Regards,

John Kettler

The Flensburg Radar wasn't introduced until spring 1944. So amazing again that it could travel back in time to 1943 and shoot down bombers. When they did capture a Flensburg in July 1944, the Brits promptly removed the remaining Monica sets.

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John I fully accept the actual underlying message - that a Japanese commander, years after the war, mentioned that he had proximity fuses on his ship.

Having accepted that he made that comment, I then look for confirmation and examine the circumstances around the comment and the actual operation that he mentioned having those VT fuses on.

And I find nothing else anywhere that mentions them or supports their possible existance. there is no industrial infrastructure of the types required to produce them, no Japanese personnel could conceive of how they might have been able to be made to withstand the stresses involved, no examples were ever found, allied technical reports into almost every aspect of Japanese technology make no mention of them.

You, on the other hand, find a statement that uses the original comment as a source, and then use that as justification for concluding that the fuses absolutely existed - pure circular reasoning.

I have no problem with condemning your faulty reasoning, and no problem being willing to look at any ACTUAL evidence that the Japanese had VT fuses or something similar.

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Other Means,

I spent over eleven years in military intelligence work, during which it was my job to make sure the firms I worked for weren't technologically surprised and that the state of the art weapons we built worked in the face of real world threats. You can't do that job unless you're willing to follow the evidence, no matter how painful the discoveries. This means making sure your homing mode is listening for the right frequency, not what you wish it to be; that those "backward Russians" have solved the hypersonic intercept fuzing problem (FOXBAT vs. expected B-70) by putting the warhead in the far aft end of the missile, with the rocket motor and nozzles in front; that their obsolete antiarmor weapons given to the Egyptians and passed to us by Israel could go right through our brand new M1s, etc. Used to blow away audiences of generals, admiral and Intelligence Community people at my comprehensive threat briefings, even got into trouble when lateral thinking about certain problems unmasked black projects and uncovered critical U.S. vulnerabilities. And it's exactly that approach I bring to bear here: all source examination of the evidence the Japanese built and fielded VT fuzes. "That's impossible" is a very poor approach to intel work, and I see the same reaction in this thread by many to the new information, much of it WW II period but long classified Top Secret before, detailing such things as the German and Japanese Bomb programs and other, even more controversial, matters. Anyone who's done even cursory reading knows both the Germans and the Japanese destroyed records, equipment and installations wholesale, rather than reveal their secrets, and did their best to hide the rest. The first batch of VT fuzed shells combat debuted in the Pacific by the U.S. came from a Noumea stockpile of a mere 5000 rounds, and the initial contract was for 500. http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-075.htm

Affentitten,

Cute, but the point was that Bomber Command wouldn't admit it had a problem until the enemy proof of use literally landed on its doorstep. Once Flensburg was introduced, the British crews soon realized they had a problem, as casualties mounted, but Bomber Command wouldn't act without ironclad proof the Germans had a Monica intercept receiver installed. That kind of bureaucratic mindset, in opposition to crews who saw the increasing numbers of empty chairs at briefing and the OR types who noted the spike in bomber losses following the arrival of Flensburg and thus deduced its presence, cost something like 200 bombers and crews, if memory serves.

Stalin's Organist,

Per O'Neill's SUICIDE SQUADS, pp. 118-119, in addition to Hara, also present at the meeting were Rear Admiral Keizo Komura (CO of DesRon 2), whose flagship was Yahagi, Rear Admiral Kosaku Ariga, Yamato's skipper, three DesDiv captains, eight destroyer commanders, and Vice Admiral Seichi Ito, whose flagship was Yamato. Hara survived the battle and the war, as did Komura http://ww2db.com/doc.php?q=72 ,at least one DesDiv captain and several destroyer commanders, this despite the loss of half the destroyers in the fight sunk and one so badly damaged she had to be sunk, leaving three. Please see epilogue and Appendix 1 in Spurr for details. Will see if I can locate Komura's full interrogation, but even if I do, there's no guarantee his interrogator thought to even ask about VT. Still, I'm willing to try. (Later) I tried. Komura's interrogation is listed on HyperWar, but the interrogation link doesn't work. I did find the interrogation of Staff Gunnery Officer, Second Fleet to Vice Admiral Ito, who commanded the Special Surface Attack Group. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/IJO/IJO-32.html Remember what I said about secrecy? He didn't even know/wasn't telling the proper bore of the Yamato's main guns! " Q. What were the size of the YAMATO'S main battery?

A. I was not informed. It was a terrific secret. They were referred to as 45 cm. I wonder if they weren't bigger, certainly not smaller than 45 cm."

The "dog robber" was right, for they were really 46 cm. That must've been a shock to the interrogator even so, for the U.S. thought they were in the 400 mm (16") category.

As you can see from the example, the questioning isn't very in depth, and the reason has to do with a terrible lack of vital records and personnel, as detailed here, from the USSBS Interrogations of Japanese Officials http://ww2db.com/doc.php?q=20

"Despite the cooperation of the Japanese, a number of unavoidable difficulties hindered the investigation. It was often a considerable problem to identify the proper individual for interrogation on a given subject, in many instances the most desirable candidates were dead, and in almost every case the selected officers had to be brought especially to TOKYO from all parts of JAPAN and even, in one case, from as far as SINGAPORE. All work was conducted by a small staff under pressure of time, without an adequate library, and in the face of an almost complete lack of original Japanese documents which had been either burned in air raids, or destroyed or hidden on surrender. Towards the end of the stay in JAPAN a quantity of hidden records were discovered; these have been returned to the United States and are now in process of translation, a work which will require a period of years to complete. In many instances, therefore, questions had to be explored entirely by interrogation with only partial or inaccurate war-time information as the starting point, with resultant delay and repetition.

So far as the question of veracity is concerned, it should be stated that almost without exception the Japanese naval officers interrogated were cooperative to the highest degree, and that no important attempt consciously to mislead the interrogator was ever noted. Accuracy on fine points was inevitably affected by the language problem which necessitated in most cases translation of both question and answer, by the specialized nature of the naval vocabulary which in some instances troubled the interpreters, and by the somewhat imprecise nature of the Japanese language itself. Allowance must also be made for the normal fallibility of human memory and in particular the memory of events months or years in the past which were witnessed under the intense strain of combat. Despite all these considerations it is felt that the interrogations provide an accurate picture of the war from the Japanese viewpoint, subject only to the qualifications that on important or disputed points documentary confirmation should where possible be obtained."

So, what are the odds of uncovering something during a short interrogation the interrogator has no documents about in the first place? You can't get the right answer if you don't the correct question to raise. As for the second paragraph, how would the interrogator even know if he was being had, and what are the odds of even finding the right person on a high security project, given the relative handful of officers interviewed?

Here's something fun that turned up while trying to locate Komura's interrogation.

Japanese Underground Factories

http://www.archive.org/stream/corporationrepor35unit#page/n3/mode/2up

Regards,

John Kettler

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So you are telling me you are basing your firm conviction that these fuses existed on the lack of any evidence?

Lack of evidence is lack of evidence - that some people didn't know this or that is not proof that something else that they didn't know about existed because they didn't know about it!! (I hope that makes sense - honestly - your reasoning is so illogical it is difficult to write about even when I do grasp the tortuous path you follow)

You should stop making unjustified associations and leaps of illogic and stick to what IS known.

Gaps in our knowledge just remain gaps in knowledge until there is something supportable to fill them - and if nothing can fill them then best to jssut leave them empty rather than discredit yourself with unsupportable "conclusions".

There is nothing wrong with imagining what might fill them and postulating possibilities - as long as you don't confuse those with what we actually have evidence for.

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Other Means,

Affentitten,

Cute, but the point was that Bomber Command wouldn't admit it had a problem until the enemy proof of use literally landed on its doorstep. Once Flensburg was introduced, the British crews soon realized they had a problem, as casualties mounted, but Bomber Command wouldn't act without ironclad proof the Germans had a Monica intercept receiver installed. That kind of bureaucratic mindset, in opposition to crews who saw the increasing numbers of empty chairs at briefing and the OR types who noted the spike in bomber losses following the arrival of Flensburg and thus deduced its presence, cost something like 200 bombers and crews, if memory serves.

Oh undoubtedly there was resistance to change until proof was in that the change was necessary. That’s even fairly logical. I guess I am inclined to not sheet home too much blame to the boffins though because this was the first time anybody was doing this stuff. Radar countermeasures wasn’t exactly textbook stuff at the time. And undoubtedly there was a certain arrogance amongst the Brits that radar was their thing and that they knew best.

Saying that over 200 bombers were lost because of this sole error though is unsupportable. For the following reasons:

1) In most cases, losses of individual aircraft were not attributable to any specific cause. Because there would need to be corroborating witnesses, survivors who actually knew what happened etc. You can of course go to German records, but we know that these were often grossly exaggerated.

2) Nightfighter kills were not always attributable to aircraft mounted radar. There were a number of ways that nightfighters might discover a night bomber, mostly with the back-up of the good old Mk1 eyeball. When witness records do exist, they unsurprisingly show that many night fighter attacks occurred AFTER planes were already damaged, suffering slight fires etc, or had already been attacked by other night fighters that obviously vectored their fellows into the area.

3) MONICA had largely been phased out by Spring 44 anyway and replaced with FISHPOND

4) Ergo to say that a sizeable portion (your example 200) of all Bomber Command losses in a 3-4 month period are attributable to Flensburg vs Monica doesn’t wash.

Though of course I, for one, am shocked by your assertion that the higher levels of command were slow to react to something that the troops at the front line knew needed to be changed.

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http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq96-1.htm

Interesting to see in this lengthy article the development and problems with VT. Particularly storage.

This site is very interesting.

http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com/A/n/Antiaircraft.htm

I do wonder if there may have been confusion with AA rockets in the mix - they could have been on timers. The logistics shows how defeated the Japanese were

The rapid growth in antiaircraft armament strained logistics. For example, on 11 November 1943, a raid by about 110 Japanese aircraft engaged an American carrier group that had just conducted a raid on Rabaul. During the 46 minutes of the battle, the three carriers in the group expended 748 rounds of 5" ammunition, 8747 rounds of 40mm ammunition, and an incredible 33,552 rounds of 20mm ammunition.

The American fleet had an impressive service force for keeping up with demand, but the Japanese encountered serious difficulties in this area. Japanese staff officers interviewed after the war told American historians that the Yokosuka, Kure, and Sasebo munitions depots were completely emptied of 25mm ammunition when Japanese ship magazines were fully loaded out for the impending conflict. By 1944, ammunition loadouts were restricted to about 100 rounds per heavy antiaircraft gun and 1000 rounds per antiaircraft machine gun. This corresponded to about 17 minutes of rapid fire from the heavy guns and just 10 minutes for the light guns. The consequences for Japanese air defense against repeated American air strikes seems obvious.

The Japanese claimed to have built their first cavity magnetron as early as 1937, and by 1939 JRC had produced a 10cm 500W cavity magnetron. The British did not produce a comparable design until February 1940. However, lack of interest and support meant that Japan quickly lost its lead in this crucial technology. The first inklings of the military potential of radar did not come to the Japanese until late 1939, which was very late in the game. Early experiments in the use of Doppler interference detectors to detect aircraft proved to be a technological dead end. Meanwhile, the British had shared their technology with the United States, and the Radiation Laboratory was established at MIT to exploit the potential of radar. This grew into a massive effort comparable with the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear bomb. The MIT Radiation Laboratory had upwards of 4000 staff members at its peak; by contrast, the Japanese Navy's Electrical Research Department, which was responsible for radar, had grown to just 300 staff by August 1943.

By the end of the war, quality control on Japanese electronics was so poor that often only one tube in 100 actually worked, and even those that passed inspection had a mean time to failure of as little as 100 hours. For a system with 40 tubes, this meant a mean time to failure of just two or three hours. The shortage of nickel, used in heater filaments, had to be alleviated by purchasing nickel coins at Hong Kong and melting them down.

Interservice rivalry hurt the Japanese radar effort, just as it hampered so many other aspects of Japan's war effort. The Army ordered its radar group to divulge none of its research results to the Navy group, and the Navy soon reciprocated. The Army even produced a small number of its own shipborne radar (Tase-1) for Army transports and submarines. This duplication of effort was compounded by the tendency to spend resources on long-term projects that could not be ready in time to be used during the war, and on such wild schemes as a microwave "death ray" to fry bomber crews. The latter project was partially a product of desperation, pushed by researchers who knew the war could not be won by conventional means. The "death ray" succeeded in killing rabbits at a range of 5 meters, but was utterly impractical for bringing down bombers. Nor was the Japanese radar effort helped by the social gulf between physicists and engineers. Japanese engineers were poorly trained in antenna theory, crucial to understanding radar performance, but the Japanese physicists who had such knowledge were largely ignorant of electronics.

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I was just browsing the Encyclopedia. And as an attitude of mind ....

The Long Lance was the finest torpedo in the world at the start of the Pacific War, and remained so until well after the war ended. It used pure oxygen rather than compressed air as its oxidizer, giving it enormous range and rendering it nearly wakeless. The Japanese Navy conducted extensive tests against hulks prior to the war, a practice neglected by the other powers, and the Long Lance was quite reliable and surprisingly safe to handle once the bugs were worked out. The accuracy figure for the torpedo shows that a Long Lance had only about a 1 in 20 chance of actually hitting a battleship at 14 miles, so the long range seems like an extravagance. However, the Japanese reaction when ambushed at night was to immediately launch shoals of the torpedo in the direction of the enemy. This proved to be a horribly effective tactic in the Solomons. The very large warhead ensured heavy damage when a hit was secured. Few destroyers ever survived a hit from a Long Lance, and even the toughest cruiser could absorb no more than three solid hits before succumbing.

Because of the long range and nearly invisible wake of the Long Lance, its existence remained a secret well into the war. Hits from the Long Lance were often attributed to mines or an undiscovered submarine. It took the capture of Japanese documents to convince Allied naval leaders that the Japanese had come up with such a capable weapon.

The Japanese always referred to this weapon as the Type 93 Model 22 Torpedo. The name "Long Lance" appears to have been an invention of famed U.S. Navy historian Samuel Eliot Morison.

References

Campbell (1985)

The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia © 2007-2009 by Kent G. Budge. Index

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Other Means,

This means making sure your homing mode is listening for the right frequency, not what you wish it to be; that those "backward Russians" have solved the hypersonic intercept fuzing problem (FOXBAT vs. expected B-70) by putting the warhead in the far aft end of the missile, with the rocket motor and nozzles in front; that their obsolete antiarmor weapons given to the Egyptians and passed to us by Israel could go right through our brand new M1s, etc. ..."That's impossible" is a very poor approach to intel work, and I see the same reaction in this thread by many to the new information, http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-075.htm

And no doubt that meant providing your generals with actual evidence. Like the actual anti-armour weapons from Israel. Not "I once read a book where somebody claimed something wild as hearsay, and then this other book quoted the first book so that means it must be true."

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Stalin's Organist,

Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence. The Allies never caught a single mobile V-2 in firing position, but that didn't stop the Germans from raining them down on London and Antwerp. When the Japanese unleashed the revolutionary Type 93 Long Lance in the Battle of the Java Sea, the victims thought they'd hit mines. The British thought the same when their Matildas were shot to pieces at Halfaya Pass, from unbelievable ranges, by the 88s. We used to think during the Cold War that the U.S. was top dog in hypersonics, but we had one such wind tunnel and the Russians seven. And recall, this was a nation that classified soap production! In a host of technologies we thought we owned, Ivan not only had the technologies but had proliferated them to all sorts of weapons, leaving us both outgunned and facing weaponry we'd counted on to offset his numerical superiority. SFW sucks when it lands on your head! The AS-4 KITCHEN hit IOC in 1962, but in 1980 we still had NO effective counter, and it was a fossil by then. We had no integral rocket/ramjet weapon, but the Russians quietly built and fielded a weapon, the SA-6, which in conjunction with existing defenses and the ZSU-23/4, temporarily gutted the IAF. I hasten to point out that it was some 15 years later that the U.S. finally had some sort of integral rocket ramjet project in development. From an intelligence standpoint, it's a lot easier to hide VT fuze development than it is to hide, say, a Wurzburg. When Merle Tuve was developing the VT fuze, the principal observable outside was, ISTR, a vertically mounted 37 mm M6 ATG, used for tube testing. Not much for the photo recce boys to work with! The first U.S. tests of 5" VT consisted of firing out across Chesapeake Bay and noting the fraction that detonated above the water before impact. 53% was good enough to rush the weapon into production, with no aircraft hanging from towers to be seen. And unlike the case of Germany, where the British agents wandered at will into all manner of defense manufacturing facilities posing as salesmen, that didn't happen in Japan. It is a notoriously closed society, and as noted before, even to its own people. You need transmitter and receiver tubes tubes that can take 20,000 G, you need small, tough, batteries, you need proper protection for "soft" components, and you need a thryatron to trigger the thing when the received signal from the target is strong enough. Most of what's needed can be built under cover, and we're talking stuff so small photo recce effectively can't see it, even on a "dicing run" a la Bruneval. The Russians created a huge armor and antiarmor gap during the Cold War, and the U.S. with all its fabulous spy gear, didn't find out for decades. Why? Because they hid/tried to hide everything they did and were very good at it. Compare what Suvorov has to say about Russian ATGM live fire exercises with the U.S. practice in Germany. Their target sat on tarps, and every scrap of missile was picked up, while our TOWs often went whistling off into the woods beyond Grafenwoehr, there to be recovered by a top Russian agent, the farmer who owned the land! And remember, the Japanese don't operate in a vacuum. To the contrary, they have a very devoted, technologically advanced ally named Germany that was running digital electronic computers in the late 1930s! Please see ROBS for pics and the second book by Stevens, Ch. 3 for details. Here's a short article. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse And a longer one http://www.thocp.net/timeline/1940.htm

dieseltaylor,

Good stuff! The Japanese did indeed get wrapped up in microwave beam weapon work, and their getting the cavity magnetron before the British is a surprise, but it didn't take a cavity magnetron to build a VT fuze. Entirely different technologies involved.

Here's a great thread with a bunch of USSBS studies online. The only one other than the Pacific War interrogations (seen separately elsewhere) I've looked at is the one on underground factories, and it's a stunner.

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=163578

Regards,

John Kettler

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John why do you keep bringing up irrelevancies? I never said absence of evidence is evidence of absence - what it is is absence of evidence, and making a conclusion in the absence of evidence is illogical. It is evidende that shows something exists - not absence of evidence.

We know there were V2 mobile launchers because there were lots of examples of them found after the war. We know about all the other stuff because there is, now, lots of evidence for it.

there is no such evidence for Japanese VT fuses - photo recce of component manufacturing plants? huh? where did anyone mention that?

All the examples you give are great examples of secrets being kept - there are many more. And none of them are connected in any way to Japanese VT fuses - their existance is utterly, completely irrelevant to that question.

I'm sort of impressed by your persistance in bringing up irrelevancies as if they had some point - but I'm not impressed in a good way.

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Accuracy on fine points was inevitably affected by the language problem which necessitated in most cases translation of both question and answer, by the specialized nature of the naval vocabulary which in some instances troubled the interpreters, and by the somewhat imprecise nature of the Japanese language itself.

This is the point I was making several posts upstream. For all we can tell at this point, the Japanese term translated as VT may have been intended to mean that in the most literal sense and not as a cover for its true operation, which is how the Allies used it. That is to say, it was an ordinary kind of AA fuse set in a fuse setter to detonate the shell after a certain interval of time after leaving the gun and having nothing to do with proximity detection. So why were they described as special? They may have been special in some other as yet unspecified way. As SO says, whatever the case may be, there simply isn't enough evidence to form a conclusion.

Michael

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Other Means,

You can believe what you want, but the truth is I left Rockwell because the job was killing me (4 months total on medical leave), NOT because anyone at the company forced me out. To the contrary, my bosses all the way to the head of NASP begged me to stay, and I was offered a new job, promotion and raise as a project leader, with my own team and budget. Hardly the picture you're so nastily trying to portray concerning me!

dieseltaylor,

I recently learned from my brother that a Type 93 missed its target in the Slot off Guadalcanal, beached itself and was recovered in 1942 by the Americans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_93_torpedo

So shattering was it to the perceptions and views of BuOrd (the wonderful people who gave us the Mark XIV torpedo), that it wasn't reported back to the Navy at war facing it in the Slot. Worse, it turns out that ONI had top grade HUMINT on it in 1940, but BuOrd refused to believe the Japanese could do this "impossible" thing and refused to accept the intel! The sordid tale is here. http://steeljawscribe.com/2009/08/10/the-solomons-campaign-unleashing-the-assassins-mace

Regards,

John Kettler

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Michael Emrys,

Neither of the quotes I provided re Hara says VT fuze/fuse or anything like that. It says something like "new proximity fused shells" or the really badly phrased "proximity fused guns." So while I think you otherwise make a good point, the actual phrasing used seems precise enough to ascertain that we are indeed talking about a shell which detonates when it gets close enough to the target (target influenced), as opposed to merely going off after a certain amount of time of flight has expired (time influenced). This would be much easier to sort out had the actual designation of the thing been provided, but the Japanese could and did employ nested security measures even within the ostensible weapon component names. Nowhere does the word "oxygen" appear in the official Japanese documents for the Type 93 torpedo, just as the Germans had their C-Stoff and T-Stoff cover names for exotic propellants. Further, even things like monster 46 cm guns on the Yamato and Musashi were called "special 40 cm guns," and the U.S. didn't find out until after the war what their actual caliber was. By any rational criteria, these shells were indeed special and highly secret. As such, they would be high priority items for destruction (recall the Japanese physicists almost completely obliterated all evidence of the army's atomic bomb program before we got there, with only a few pages of documentation to show their program ever existed), and it wouldn't be hard to make what was probably a smallish quantity of such ammo disappear, probably by either demolition or simply tossing it into the ocean somewhere. The latter, after all, is what the U.S. did to several Japanese university owned cyclotrons--ripped out bodily and dumped in Tokyo Bay.

Affentitten and Stalin's Organist,

Since you've raised the issues of timeliness to the event and Hara's credibility, I invite you to ponder what's said here in this scholarly look at the background of the man himself, the deep and cross checked research that went into the book (not just his personal memories by any means) and the fact that the book is still one of the best memoirs ever written by a Japanese military leader. From Wesleyan University's large and rich Kamikaze Images site. http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/books/related/hara/index.htm (Fair use)

"The many details in this book reflect Hara's thorough research, which included interviews, naval records, and personal statements submitted to him. The Foreword explains that the book attempts to objectively and comprehensively portray the Japanese side during WWII. Japanese Destroyer Captain was originally published in Japanese in 1958, and journalist Fred Saito interviewed Hara more than 800 hours as part of translating and expanding the original book. Roger Pineau, coauthor of the Kamikaze Corps history The Divine Wind (1958), also coauthored this book and assisted by verifying the accuracy of battle accounts. The resulting English book first published in 1961 turned out to be first-rate storytelling with great care taken in regards to historical facts and translation."

Beginning to grok why when Hara says something I pay attention? As a source, he's top notch.

Regards,

John Kettler

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Sigh.......perhaps he is for some things, but a single statement, unable to be supported from any other source (and indeed contradicted by at least 1), still does not constitute evidence of the existance of Japanese VT fuses.

It doesn't matter how much you dress it up, or how much you respect the man - it is, and always will be, insufficient evidence for a conclusion.

Certainly it raises the question - but it does not answer it.

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The reason I quoted the article on radar previously was in part because of the huge problems revealed in Japanese "electronics" manufacture. The lengthy piece on VT development in the US reveals the problems with development and usage.

Taking both of these into account, and the single source for their use, the likelihood of Naval VT being true looks miniscule.

JK does mention the proximity fused gun as being a bad translation however if this was a radar being used in conjunction with gun firing orders - using the Type 32 or possibly a trial Type 33, or Type 42 radar - then it is effectively a proximity gun if it is already got timed shells in the breech. I can see interviewers who are au fait with modern VT leaping to a conclusion in this case. However if we take into account gun control radar existed, timed shells existed, then a credible answer may exist.

Alternatively the man wa going senile but I think why not explore what was possible .. : )

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