The intent of this channel is to provide educational videos related to US produced WWII bombers. The material is presented by Keith M. I’m a retired Boeing airframe structures engineer. I have worked on various commercial and military products. I have an interest in all things WWII history and especially the Bombing portion of the conflict.
I’ve been volunteering at a local aviation museum since 2017 and provide museum guest tours of the B-17 and B-29. I also authored and presented the Museum’s 2022 and 2023 Bomber Training class to new museum volunteers.
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I had to squint my older eyes at the thumbnail, at first I thought it was Admiral Akbar from Star Wars, lol. Thanks for the great weapon info!
Thank you!
This is a fascinating video, especially the conclusions. Though it is unclear how those conclusions were reached and the size of 'error bars'. Your videos are very high-quality, fact-packed and well researched. Including the graphics makes the information much easier for me to understand and appreciate. So Thank You. Freeman Dyson spoke authoritatively about statistics his Operational Research unit gathered and analysed for the UK's Bomber Command (eg comparing US bomber-crew loses with UK bomber-crews), but I've never seen him present source documents, and especially graphs. Many history documentaries are much more vague than Dyson's. You're videos are among the very best factual videos on KZread or among broadcast TV. 👍👍 Best Wishes. ☮ If you have the rights to sell copies of your source documents, it might be helpful to include links to your 'shop' in the videos Description.
What happened if 2 gunners wanted to control the same turret at the same time?
I don't know what the intermittent clicking was on the video, but it was really distracting. Please fix this in future videos. Thanks.
Venn diagram on steroids 😅
why is east blotted out? 15:30
Great videos. I just wish you didn't spend so much time reciting the complete name of every document you referenced. A significant portion of the video is just saying document titles.
Thank you for this great distillation of archival data and keep up the good work!
Thanks for the generous channel donation. It is appreciated.
Welcome To The Drone Age Make Every Windmill A FLAK Tower
It seems that reports that claim that the resources devoted to flak defenses by Germany were wasted are somewhat misleading. It appears that flak made a lot of areas over occupied Europe no go zones for attacking aircraft of all types and that, in spite of the massive amount of intelligence gathering and analysis devoted to dealing with flak, that it still inflicted substantial losses and damage on the allied forces.
Appreciate ya. Thanks for sharing.
Did you mean axis of attack or the attack on the Axis? 😆🤣🤣🤣
I have a question: What were the B17 machine gun test firing procedures?
So WW2 contained very much intelligence gathering and analysis. But who were those persons, who formulated - dictated - typewrited - distributed - filed - and finally archieved all these plus other papers !
Wait, Baka Machi? Idiot town?
Thanks
Hey baby. You got good Flak density! 🐿
Everyone should have a flak playlist ! 🐿
I 2nd your defense of the sight! 🐿
Your channel is SO good. Wow
Would be interesting to learn how the Germans set the fuse before firing the AA shell. Electrical, mechanical, outside the gun, in the barrel, etc?
In the video at 00:02 the shell is pushed to a hole, where the rotating tip is set according to fusing time i.e. time to detonate.
What is the reason that bombing accuracy was less for a B-24?
The complex calculations to create the target flak clock is incredible. Thank you for this deep dive.
For the rhythms 😉
Binge watching your "old" videos <3 .
engaging for the algorithm
engaging
Another EXCELLENT video. Thank you!!!
Did the allies ever intentionally go after flak ammunition production, or flak gun factories? At a certain point they made an effort to destroy as many enemy fighters on the ground as they could, so I'm wondering if they ever tried the same kind of thing but for flak.
munition production targets were the highest priority.
@@Milkmans_Son Makes sense, thanks.
The scary part really is how large the “other” category is. Worrying about a fighter or flak, ok, but someone slamming into me? Oof.
ENGAGING
Unbelievable they did all this analysis without computers.
There were many thousands of computers in the USA in WWII - usually the computers were graduate women cranking out firing tables etc. Computer was a human job description back then.
Computer used to be a job title.
Good job 👍
I love your FACT based analysis and the research time that you put in. You do such a wonderful job. I wish our whole country would go back to the way that you do your work. THANK YOU
Adherence to reality and the rule of law is critical in sustaining this country. I hope we get back to it...
It is interesting to note how we had all this information and understood minimizing time over target was a priority but yet bombers were slowed down not sped up by extra and ineffective defensive weapons.
He's got several videos about the effectiveness of different gun positions.
@@iroll Yes-I've seen them all.
Great video
Thanks for the hard work
Blows my mind how much data was collected and forwarded to bomber crews prior to each series of missions.
The bomber crews were not given the data - they are given the best route in & the best routes out. It would be silly to show your hand to the enemy via data aboard crashed bombers & captured aircrews.
@@nightjarflying100/100🌹
@@nightjarflying I was referring to the routing, not implying that each crew was privy to the intelligence gathered or the means by which it was gathered. Give me a little credit.
@@steveturner3999I don't know you so how can I give you credit? "Data was collected & forwarded to bomber crews" reads as "data was collected & forwarded to bomber crews." And of course you are supposing that the object was to reduce bomber casualties... Distilling flak position densities onto flight maps was not done - AFAIK the crews were given waypoints, the target & the bombing run direction & timings. They were also given the route out. The key was to keep it simple as complex missions always increases bomber casualties due to inevitably poor navigation & timings resulting in bomber streams interfering with each other. Mission planning was built around collecting the bomber groups together into streams & figuring routes through the target - if one group had to go through a heavy flak area to keep streams apart then so be it. Flak avoidance was not usually the top priority, especially as attracting flak improved the timing & accuracy of consequently less flak-afflicted streams. Bomber calculus is brutal.
Another great deep dive into the wwii skies . One thing I've noticed in all these episode , seeing those declassified reports , there's an amazing level of imagery used throughout . Intelligence sections must have had a large number of draftees with marketing and graphic design backgrounds .
They did! My grandfather was drafted (despite being older, married, and with three kids), but as a graphic/fine artist was put to work illustrating operations manuals for the US Navy. Wish I had some examples of his work in this area - I have plenty of his (excellent) paintings...
What I find most fascinating is how much work went on behind the scenes. Logistics in general are more interesting than combat tales, and this is some detailed look into those logistics.
Interesting
Oh my Gosh! Did you try to sneak some humor in on us? “A Venn Diagram on steroids”.
He's good at that.
0:10 What is considerd as "others"? Ships? Cavalry?
It tells you what "other" means at the top of the graph you're referencing at 0:10 :- "Other sources of destroyed bombers during combat included collisions, equipment/mechanical failures, and pilot error"
@@nightjarflying Totally missed that. Thanks.
Did B17s ever strafe flack sites with their ball turrets as they flew over?
No.
Highly doubtful. They didn't have enough ammo to waste like that, and they were too high to call it "strafing". Besides, all the ammo they shot had to fall down sooner or later.
yes, from altitude of 25 000 feet ;)
Of course not! You'll need all the ammo you can get when attacked by interceptors. Also from five miles up the 2,000 m/s rounds will slow down to around 150 m/s terminal velocity under gravity - also it's hard to hit a target at 5 miles!
From 26,000 feet? Sure . . .
Another great contribution, thanks for sharing.
It's Flak O'Clock somewhere
Honored to be first, these are great vids.
Thanks for this. WW2/History buff here, so I really enjoyed the vid. An aspect of the air war I hadn't knew about. Excellent job!
Too little too late.