[edwest]

Referring to the late 1930s:

"German radar was concentrated for the moment in two companies, GEMA and Telefunken, each with a basic design. GEMA had two bands, 80 cm for Seetakt and 2.4 m for Freya. Telefunken used 50 cm for the Wurzburg and the decimeter communication relays.

When the Luftwaffe became an independent arm of the Wehrmacht it obtained from the Army the AA artillery. Initially, it did not have an organization to evaluate new weapons other than aircraft, so it relied on an army agency, the Heereswaffenamt (Ordnance Department) for judgement about its AA guns and, when the matter arose, for radar. This office arbitrarily classified the early sets into three types. For various reasons they referred to GEMA's Freya as A-1, to Lorenz's Kufurst as A-2 and Telefunken's Wurzburg as A-3. Initially this coincided with A-1 for early warning, A-2 for searchlight direction and gun laying and A-3 for local observation and tracking respectively.

As the importance of radar became more obvious. Goring wanted it added to his beureacratic empire and had it moved from the Heereswaffenamt to the Reichsluftfahrtsministerium...

It is scarcely necessary to point out to the reader the parallels in American and German work. The earliest work started in service radio laboratories with heavy emphasis on microwaves. Both dropped these wavelengths in their prototypes for want of transmitter power, although retaining some research. This resulted in excellent meter-wave equipment: XAF/CXAM for the US Navy, SCR-270 for the US Army, Freya for the Luftwaffe and Seetakt for the Kriegsmarine. The approach to decimeter waves by Bell Telephone Labs is remarkably similar to the path followed by Telefunken and probably came about because both had tube laboratories. The Bell FD/mark 4 was the equal of the Wurzburg, indeed its design cousin; it was with modification the US Navy's AA gun-laying radar throughout the war. The Wurzburg was a better gun-laying set than the SCR-268, and the American equivalent, FD/mark 4, was used only by the Navy. On the other hand the SCR-268 functioned also for distant target acquisition, which the Wurzburg did not. The Germans were generally about a year ahead of the Americans.

In 1939 the German and American prototypes were superior to the British except for CD/CHL, which was a typical dipole array on 1.5 m. Neither Germany or the United States had a significant number of operational sets in 1939..."


Please pardon the lack of umlauts. Excerpted from A Radar History of World War II by Louis Brown, published by the Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia.



Ed