Overall Favorite Weapon

I'll check tonight- I think I have an idea of which book I got that one from.

"howling cow" maybe? That one makes no sense (has anyone ever heard a cow "howl"???), but it sticks in my mind...

 

You see? You're not that crazy after all!

(Not even I believed that one...)

 

I suppose that is where the "donkey" name comes from anyway, the annoying screaming sound and the kick one receives if one happens to get in the way of it...

 

The "donkey" name? Now I'm confused- what donkey name?

Of course, I forgot to check on the cow thing last night... The roommate is gone tonight though, so I'll have time...

Oh yes I am, Friedrich!!!


(I was wondering about the cow one myself... it popped into my mind, but I couldn't remember where from. I'm glad Kai found something backing it up- 'cause that one does sound crazy!!)

 

Allright, good. Crazy isn't crazy. In "The Encyclopedia of Weapons of World War II", Chris Bishop, Barnes and Noble Books...
"28cm and 32cm Wurfkorper. The 28cm and 32cm rockets preceded the 15cm rockets in service with the German army, the first of them being issued for use during 1940. ... The smaller rocket used a high-explosive warhead, while the larger rocket used a liquid incendiary warhead. 2000M range, highly inaccurate, etc..."
Now here's the interesting part... "Both the rockets were issued to the troops in wooden carrying crates... These crates doubled as launching frames... Another and still more mobile launcher for these rockets was the schwerer Wurfrahmen 40 , in which six launcher frames were mounted on the sides of an SdKfz 251/1 half-track." The illustration for this entry is a color drawing of the Wurfrahmen 41... The caption says "This conversion was known as the 'Foot Stuka' or 'Howling Cow' ."

Seeing as how this is a recent book published specifically for Barnes and Noble, I certainly wouldn't make any claims as to it's accuracy.
But I KNEW I had read that somewhere!

[ 18 October 2002, 04:57 PM: Message edited by: CrazyD88 ]

 

I don't think that they called it "howling cow", perhaps they are mixing the word stuka up with the russian word for "bitch"?

regards

 

charlie, I'm not sure. Like I said, I don't know anything about the accuracy of the Bishop book- I looked at it again, and he dosen't even have a bibliography!
But then again, Kai did find that webpage that also mentioned the "cow" reference...

???

I guess we can't be sure either way unless we find some sort of more reliable source.

 

OK. The guy could be mad, crazy, insane, nuts or whatever but he has some good info!

And Friedrich isn't very well in the head either...

 

Found a story on what it feels like to be under the nebelwerfer attack by a Polish soldier ( who was in the Red army ):

"The experience of one man who encountered the Nebelwerfer in the early spring of 1942 may be considered as typical. He was a Pole who joined the Red Army after the opening of Operation Barbarossa and who served in an infantry unit on the central front.

Our regiment formed up in a forest and moved out of cover to form the second wave of the attack. We had no special winter camouflage clothing - only the first line was that well equipped and there was a reason for this. It was their task to crawl forward without being seen until the line was within assault distance of the German positions, and then to rush them. We, in the second wave, were to consolidate the gains which the first line was to make. My battalion began to form line out here and there, there were still little groups of men gathered around the officers. They were chiefly HQ personnel, company officers and senior sergeants all getting last minute instructions. We were a young unit but most of us had already seen action and we were not green troops.

There was not much noise. The sound of voices and an occasional shot from a rifle. No artillery fire at all from our side for it was to be a shock assault. Then suddenly as we moved forward away from the trees we heard a whining sound which grew and then we saw smoke trails in the sky. I thought at first that these were markers showing our position to the Nazi artillery observers but my righthand hand neighbour thought that these were aircraft which were crashing. The projectiles moved fast but were visible. Two of them exploded about twenty metres behind our line, two about the same distance in front and one each to left and right immediately in front of us. This number of explosions following immediately upon each other was like a six-gun battery firing salvo. The casualties were slight although the explosions were quite shattering. I noticed that the shell casing of one projectile peeled back like a banana as it flew through the air after detonating and as I watched it struck and nearly cut in half one of the men marching behind our wave.

We had not taken cover but continued marching and then suddenly we saw sheets of flames coming from behind the German lines, then smoke and then the howling again. This time the mass of smoke and flames roaring towards us seemed to cover the whole battalion front. The whole area in front of us and behind us as well as at intervals along the line was suddenly blotted out and what seemed to be hundreds of explosions occurred simultaneously. Snow and earth clods were flung up obscuring visibility and then came the cry for medical personnel to help the wounded. Under this first mass bombardment we had gone to ground and thus we were a stationary target. Within seconds, it seemed, of the first flight of missiles exploding the second wave had come down and then a third. After that I lost count - it just seemed as if the whole sky was raining noise and explosive on us. We lay there immobile with our senses numbed for what seemed a long time and then my right-hand man touched me on the shoulder and pointed to the groups of men who were streaming back towards the woods. We thought that the regiment had been ordered to withdraw and were rather pleased that we were going to be away from the shelling, but then as we ran I noticed that quite a lot of the men had flung their guns away and were screaming at the tops of their voices, throwing off their equipment so that they could run faster. Others had collapsed trembling and crying or were having spasms like epilepsy.

Even before we reached the safety of the woods the Nazis had increased the range and had also brought in conventional artillery so that the tree line suddenly disappeared in smoke and explosions catching the poor devils who had gathered there hoping to escape from the shelling. Even when we had penetrated deeper into the woods the smoke trails followed us and their bombs exploding in the tree tops had the effect of air burst shells.

When order had been restored we were sent in again to carry out the attack and this time we had barely emerged from the trees when the barrage came down again. The officers were desperate. If a unit did not reach its objective the commanders- in those days anyway- were held responsible and were either summarily executed or arrested, tried and then shot.

At the end of the third attempt we had shrunk to less than half strength and the attack was called off The first attack wave had penetrated the German line in parts but being without support they had been driven back. Their regiment was very bitter at our cowardice, as they called it, and their survivors were sent back to rest behind the lines. I was one of a group told to collect the equipment which had been left lying on the battlefield and as a former artilleryman was interested enough to examine the shell fragments which were lying about. These were very large and it was clear that the purpose of the projectiles was not to produce shrapnel but to create a blast effect. The shallow craters indicated that the projectiles had an instantaneous fuse and the snow around the craters was yellow and black streaked. The pieces of casing which I found showed that the walls of the projectile were thin and the blast effect which I had felt and seen indicated that the explosive charge was quite heavy in relation to the weight of case.

It was a weapon which broke our regiment inside a quarter of an hour and as I have said before, we were not green troops."

 

Of course! They had it on Panther so they would have it on an infantry man as well, stupid me! The infra red, I mean...



"During the final months World War 2, the German military came up with another ‘wonder weapon” in an attempt to change the tide of battle. This was the ZG 1229 Vampir infrared site for the STG 44 assault rifle. This thing was heavy, about 5 lbs. And was connected to a 30 lbs. battery support pack designed to be carried on the soldiers back. It is unclear as to if the Vampir was ever used in combat. There is no photographic evidence to support their use.

 

Something to gaze at:
IR on Missing Links

regards

 

Great,

Thanx Charlie! Well we´re getting further ahead all the time, sorta explains the search lights , doesn´t it?

Hmm, if Germany just had one year more to go...

 

How about "Mistel"?

1942: since the beginning of the conflict, the German high command was confronted with a crucial problem. The Home Fleet, the all powerful British war fleet anchored in Scapa Flow harbor was blocking access to the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, causing the surface vessels of the Kriegsmarine to adopt a prudent inactivity.
As for attacking Scapa Flow by air, the Luftwaffe did not possess any heavy bombers capable of such mission.

It is under those circumstances that Flugkapitän Siegfried Holzbauer, Junkers aircraft's chief test pilot thought about reviving the original, but already forgotten idea of Robert Mayo and to propose it to the Luftwaffe.

This unconventional weapon impressed the German High Command sufficiently to consider its use on prime targets: Leningrad harbor, Gibraltar, and Scapa Flow of course.

In May 1944, a unit of five Mistel was dispatched to Denmark with Scapa Flow for objective. After D-day, the composites retreated to Saint-Dizier (France) for a less ambitious mission: the allied vessels anchored in the bay of the Seine River. The attack occurred in the night of June 24th - 25th 1944. One of the Mistel pilots spotted by a British Mosquito released his payload. Having a cruise speed of barely 380 kilometers per hour, a Mistel once sighted became an easy prey. The other four Mistel successfully completed their mission and the fighters returned to base without damage. The damages on the target did not reached the level of destruction hoped for, but at last the procedure had proven to be feasible.

Project "Eisenhammer" dating back from 1941 was once again considered. It was a bold project: no less than one hundred Mistel, accompanied by an impressive armada (including Dornier 217K transporting flying bombs Fritz X), were to attack and destroy the three gigantic electric power-plants providing electricity to the Soviet Industry in Leningrad (North of Moscow) and in the Urals.( never happened as you guessed...)





http://aerostories.free.fr/appareils/compopara/page15.html

[ 03. December 2002, 05:00 PM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]

 

This is similar in theory to the USAAF's 'Aphrodite' project - another doomed venture....

 

M1 Garand, 88, B 17, North Carolina

 

My list of best weapons in WWII are the B-29 + one A-Bomb, British radar, Propaganda films,(
German and US and maybe a few Russian films), and the Russian Winter,(Probably killed more Germans than the Russians did !!!! ) And last but not least the code breakers on all sides killed alot of troops indirectly with their intellengence gathering.

 

I just thought of one more weapon of mass destruction, how would you like to have Kai-Petri on your side during the war ??

 

Thanx TA 152, I suppose it was a compliment...
But you know, without the net I would be totally useless.... and with the net all over the place, anyway...

 

The Sänger Amerika Project

Dr. Sänger, along with his staff, continued work on the Silverbird under the Amerika Bomber program. The Sänger Amerika Bomber (or Orbital Bomber, Atmosphere Skipper) was designed for supersonic flight in the stratosphere. The flat fuselage created lift, and the wings were short and wedge shaped. There was a horizontal tail surface at the extreme aft end of the fuselage, which had a small fin on each end. Fuel was carried in two tanks, one on each side of the fuselage, running from the wings aft. Oxygen was stored in tanks located one on each side of the fuselage,forward of the wings. The huge rocket engine of 100 tonnes thrust was mounted in the rear, and was flanked by two smaller rocket engines. The pilot was housed in a pressurized cockpit in the forward fuselage, and a tricycle undercarriage was fitted for a glide landing. A central bomb bay held one 3629 kg (8000lb) free-falling bomb. As the aircraft would fly far beyond the range of Allied interceptors, no defensive armament was included in the design. The dry weight was to be in the neighbourhood of 9979 kg (22000 lbs).

A peculiar flight profile was thought of for the Silverbird. It was to be propelled down a 3 km (1.9 mile) long rail by a rocket-powered sled that developed a 600 ton thrust for 11 seconds. After taking off at a 30 degree angle, the aircraft would proceed to an altitude of 1.5km (5100'), at a speed of 1850 km/h (1149 mph). The main rocket engine would then be fired for 8 minutes, burning 90 tons of fuel and propelling the Silverbird to a speed of 22100 km/h (13724 mph) and an altitude of over 145 km (90 miles). Now the skipping started...

As the aircraft accelerated and descended under the pull of gravity, it would then hit the denser air at about 40 km (25 miles) and 'skip' back up, just like a stone thrown on a lake. The skips would gradually decrease until the aircraft would glide back to a normal landing using its tricycle landing gear, after covering approximately 23500 km (14594 miles).





http://www.luft46.com/jhart/jhsang.html

In June 1935 and February 1936, Dr. Eugen Sänger published articles in the Austrian aviation publication Flug on rocket-powered aircraft. This led to his being asked by the German High Command to build a secret aerospace research institute in Trauen to research and build his "Silverbird", a manned, winged vehicle that could reach orbit. Dr. Sänger had been working on this concept for several years, and in fact he had began developing liquid-fuel rocket engines. From 1930 to 1935, he had perfected (through countless static tests) a 'regeneratively cooled' liquid-fueled rocket engine that was cooled by its own fuel, which circulated around the combustion chamber. This engine produced an astounding 3048 meters/second (10000 feet/second) exhaust velocity, as compared to the later V-2 rocket's 2000 meters/second (6560 feet/second).

http://members.visi.net/~djohnson/misc/sanger.html

http://www.spacefame.org/sanger.html



[ 11. December 2002, 07:11 AM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]

 

That's amazing stuff KP. Dr Sangers' designs look very much like the some of the old NASA prototype re-entry vehicles that were tried in the late '50's/early '60's.

Did Dr Sanger go to work for the US after the war??

___________

"We have invaded space with our rocket and for the first time - mark this well - have used space as a bridge between two points on the earth; we have proved rocket propulsion practicable for space travel. This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era of transportation, that of space travel." - General Walter Dornberger