Wretchard looks back at The Killer Angel, which most of us know as the proximity fuze created by Vannevar Bush and the Crosley Corporation:
What the fuze does is simple. It detects the proximity, or nearness of a target and then detonates the main charge — in most cases a shell. Before the proximity shell gunners had to guesstimate settings for a time fuze, a piece of clockwork or chemical train, so that shells would go off near their target. Since the five inch shell of the period had a lethal range of 70 yards, a region which a high speed shell would traverse in hundredths of a second, the guesstimate had to be correct to within this value. Not surprisingly the guesstimes were mostly wrong; and the Germans, who were the most methodical and precise of people, estimated it took over 3,300 88 mm shells to sucessfully shoot down a bomber flying straight and level over a city in Germany.
The USN did rather better. Using analog computers, which can be compared to an adjustable mechanical model which simulates a physical system, they could, by adjusting the settings so that the target aircraft’s observed position coincided with the position predicted by the mechanical simulation, fire at wildly maneuvering targets like Kamikazes with much better precision than the Germans. But the fact that it took “only” a third of the number of 88s (it took 1,000 5″/38s to down a single suicider) was cold comfort. There wasn’t time to fire that many shells at plunging aircraft. But the introduction of the proximity fuze meant a shell didn’t have to hit directly, just pass near enough to damage an enemy plane, and that increased the lethality of gunnery once again, this time by a factor of five. It took 200 proximity fuzed 5″/38s to down a single Kamikaze.
Fire control and superior ordnance meant that USN ships effectively carried fifteen times the lethality per gun of their counterparts in Germany. The fire control and smart sensor revolution continues to this day. GPS, laser guidance, UAVs — all the soft systems — contribute far more to the “bang” than the bang itself. And since intelligence is to operations as fire control is to flak, the philosophically inclined will readily appreciate the importance of information systems in locating and directing a response toward the modern Kamikaze — the radical Islamic terrorist.
And while it is tempting to attribute the superiority of the US Navy’s anti-aircraft defenses (which were an order of magnitude better than anyone else’s) to superior science, in reality the Navy advantages were due entirely to the superior application of science. People who have lived in the digital electronic age would be astounded to learn how in the 1930s and 40s people built near real-time computing devices with gears, cams and levers. They could stabilize an input, add them, multiply them, perform nonlinear functions and even do integration with objects that were reproducible in principle by a 19th century precision machine shop. There were no new principles involved, just new ways of use. In today’s terminology, the USN’s fire control advantage would be entirely due to business process innovations. (And BTW, the reader who has been following the links on this page will have possibly come to realize the solution to one of the great what-might-have-beens of World War 2. If an Iowa class met a Yamato class battleship in normal conditions the Iowa would have sent the Yamato to Davy Jones’s locker in short order. Not simply because the 16″/50 had almost as good a pentration as the Yamato’s 18.1″ guns but because it’s fire control systems were immeasurably better. — W.)