U.S. Fifth Army radar and antiaircraft artillery

I'm trying to understand how Fifth Army ground radar units operated with the antiaircraft units they supported in Italy. Were the radar units mainly for the larger 90 mm guns or was radar used with smaller guns, too? Did the radar units always stay with the same artillery unit, or were they moved around to different AAA units?

Thank you for any help and sources you can point me to.

 

IIRC I saw a pretty in depth analysis of British and US radar setup around the town when looking at the Bari bombing that resulted in poison gas release from a sunken ship but I can't find it right now, as far as I recall radars were in independent units not attached to individual batteries.

 

Some short answers to your questions are:

1. Radar was part of an integrated air defence plan, which reproduced in the field the characteristics of the "Dowding system" that protected Britain in 1940. AA Radars were used to provlde warning of an intruder as well as location and bearing.

2. 5th army had relatively few AA assets. Most of the AA in the Italian theatre were to protect ports such as Naples and Bari and the airfields of the 15th USAAF. Much of 5th Army's AA Artillery was British. The US were keen to transfer as much as possible to support the main operations in France.

3. HAA would use radar plots from "Gun laying " radar as imput to laying calculations. The Bell computer "predictor No 10" would ftdo this for fast moving and high flying targets, buit was only used with HAA - British 3.7" and US 90mm. (This may have been different in US service)


4. I was going to refer you to the 15th Army Group Encyclopedia written at the end of the war as a summary of lessons from the campaign. However there is no mention of AAA except in the ground role. There is the "Fifth Army Antiaircraft Artillery : Salerno to Florence, 9 September 1943 - 8 September 1944", but this too is very ligth on detail and does not mention radar at all! Brigadier Routledge's AA Artillery 1914-1955 covers the subject from the British point of view. .

Radar was highly classified and the details of tactical deployment and equipment limitations were missed out of many post war documents. Nor is AAA as sexy as tanks or fighter aircraft.and it has rarely attracted much military literature, probably as there. few readers or authors !

One by product from using Radar in Italy was the observations in the static phases of Anzio that the operators of the cenemetric GL radars could pick out the flight of incoming German mortar bombs and shells. From this they start to calculate the point of origin and arrange counter mortar barrages. Modern mortar and shell locatign rader started with AA Radars in Anzio. .

 

Thanks for the responses!

My late uncle was a 5th Army AAA radar operator in a U.S. outfit in Italy from Salerno to the end of the war. He was not in the Anzio or Rome-Arno campaigns, but was in the other campaigns. So he doesn't appear to have been in a static position, except for the two campaigns he wasn't part of.

Only a few military records exist for him, so I don't have much to go on. But he does seem to have stayed with the radar unit throughout the war.