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.

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Seriously, all today is missing is free cotton candy and the annual Bay State Hooker Parade to make it any better.

OK. The guy could be mad, crazy, insane, nuts or whatever but he has some good info! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

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

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"War is less costly than servitude, the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau." - Jean Dutourd, French veteran of both world wars

"A mon fils: depuis que tes yeux sont fermes les miens n’ont cessé de pleurir." - Mère française, Verdun

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."

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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.

[img]smile.gif[/img]

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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...

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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...ra/page15.html

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

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

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"Stand by to pull me out of the seat if I get hit" - Guy Gibson

M1 Garand, 88, B 17, North Carolina

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It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.
George Patton

A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice.
Edgar Watson Howe

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.

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Work Harder ! Millions on welfare are depending on you.

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

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Work Harder ! Millions on welfare are depending on you.

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...

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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 ]

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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??

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"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

The man sure was ahead of his time!

Nope, he never worked in the US. He did work in France for a while it seems, and Stalin even tried to kidnap him in some strange way(?) by the articles, because he had these ideas for the future, but the Russians didn´t succeed. The articles fail to tell how they tried to kidnap him.

"After the war he worked for the French government and he was one of the founders of the International Astronautical Federation in 1951. He served as its first president. After 1954 he worked as a professor for jet propulsion in Berlin, Germany."

Other interesting persons and history on this:

http://www.flight100.org/history/aus.html

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Panzerabwehrrakete X-7 Rotkäppchen

Another most advanced weapon conceived by the germans in WW II was the Panzerabwehrrakete X-7 ("tank defense rocket") anti-tank guided missile, nickname Rotkäppchen ("little red riding hood"), project number 8-347. Developments for a guided AT missile begun as early as 1941 when BMW (the car company) offered the weapon to the army's weapons bureau. Because of the then generally good military war situation the army wanted to save the projected development costs of 798,000 RM. In 1942 Dr.Kramer of the german research institute for aircraft developed rocket engines for weapons that resulted in the X-series of guided bombs and precision weaponry of which the X-7 was the smallest family member.
The first prototype was followed by a larger production model with a changed detonator for the shaped charge of 2.5 kg. The back part of the main body (length 46.5 cm; diameter 15 cm)contained the two-stage solid fuel rocket engine 109-506 developed and made by the company WASAG. The wings were swept forward and had wingtips which housed the guidance wires, wingspan was 60cm. The small elevator/steering rudder assembly was set off 13.2 cm of the main body's axis. Total length including the protruding detonator cap (diameter: 3.8 cm) was 95cm. The fully loaded Rotkäppchen weighed 9kg.
The missile was to be launched from a start rail tripod that was 150cm long and weighed 15kg. the missile's rocket engine was ignited with a 300V battery. This fired the 2g gunpowder positioned in the two hollow half rounds of the gyro stabilizer. the explosion gases exited through two tangential openings and immediately brought the gyro to operating speed. Then the 3kg of propellant of the first stage of the rocket engine were ignited. They developed 68kp thrust and accelerated the missile to it's flight speed of 98m/s in 2.5 sec.
In flight the X-7 rotated around it's axis at a rate of two rotations/sec. Guidance commands from the gunner were transmitted over the two wires, one for longitudinal and one for lateral corrections. A delay mechanism let the steering rudder of the elevator only work when it was in the right position for the respective command, in other words, the elevator worked both as a (longitudinal) elevator and a (lateral) rudder. Guidance was achieved through optical tracking of the small tracer in the rear of the rocket that was to be kept superimposed over the target by the gunner's commands until it impacted (a method still in use today and known as CLOS for command-line-of-sight).
The second stage of the rocket engine developed a thrust of 6kg for 8sec. This sufficed to keep up a speed of over 300km/h and reach a range of 1200m. The shaped charge warhead was strong enough for all known tanks of that era.
A trial was undertaken on September 21st 1944 with seven X-7 missiles. Because of the unusual and unfamiliar flying characteristics the first four weapons had ground contact after some distance and therefore crashed. On the next two the rocket engine exploded on the way to the target. The last Rotkäppchen flew all the way and hit the target tank at a range of 500m dead center.
Only about 300 X-7 Rotkäppchen were completed; mass production was planned and had already started at the companies Ruhrstahlwerke in Brackwede and the Mechanische Werke in Neubrandenburg. Many almost finished weapons were captured by the allies.
It is unclear whether the combat trial at the front took place or which results it had.

Improvements of the X-7 Rotkäppchen were the Steinbock which used infra-red transmitting of the guidance command and therefore didn't require the wires. An automated tracking device was the Pfeifenkopf or Pinsel project. It utilised a machine that computed the changes in angle of the two sighting devices - one was to be aimed at the target, the other at the missile- into commands for the missile. This mechanism was further atomated in the Zielsuchgerät ("target aquisition device"). By using an image recognition device called Ikonoskop the missile was to seek its target through it's own optical sensor that compared the image data from the aiming device with the data it received from its own optical sensor.
Besides these avionics and electronic equipment, other long range ATGMs were the Rochen-600, Rochen-1000 and Rochen-2000 for ranges of 500m , 1500m and 3000m respectively. Another project called Flunder utilized many parts of the Panzerfaust including it's warhead and using it's launch tube for the rocket engine. None of these projects were completed.

http://www.geocities.com/Augusta/8172/panzerfaust12.htm

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Lately I´ve found this one very interesting and very damaging...

W. J. Lawrence wrote about the Tallboy bomb in his book, No 5 Bomber Group (1951)

It was an extraordinary weapon, an apparent contradiction in terms, since it had at one and the same time the explosive force of a large high-capacity blast bomb and the penetrating power of an armour-piercing bomb. On the ground it was capable of displacing a million cubic feet of earth and made a crater which it would have taken 5,000 tons of earth to fill. It was ballistically perfect and in consequence had a very high terminal velocity, variously estimated at 3,600 and 3,700 feet a second, which was, of course, a good deal faster than sound so that, as with the V-2 rocket, the noise of its fall would be heard after that of the explosion.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWtallboy.htm

http://www.altnews.com.au/hadrian/pa...quake-bomb.htm



This 12000 pounder known as Tallboy was found in the silt and mud at the base of the Sorpe Dam in 1958 after the dam was partially drained.

http://www.btinternet.com/~paul.steele/new_page_5.htm

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