Quote:
Originally Posted by Edward L. Hsiao
Was there a system that allows the Germans to fire ground to air missiles at night against RAF bombers? Sound crazy. What do you think?
Edward L. Hsiao
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Würzburg allowed them to direct AA guns at night. Open to question is whether that was sufficiently accurate to have brought a single missile, as opposed to shells from multiple guns, within lethal range. They lacked the centimetric radars that gave the Allies an embryonic blind-firing capability and nor (IIRC) did they have the proximity fuses which so enhanced the lethality of Allied AA. If, as in some of the examples cited, we are talking about early-mid 1944 then deployed German systems would probably have sufficed to aim a barrage of unguided rockets (something like the British Z-guns). They could undoubtedly have managed line-of-sight wire guidance or radio-control (the latter vulnerable to jamming) as they did in their air-to-surface weapons, or possibly infra-red.
As for a missile system, what is anyone suggesting it could have been? The progress of the various guided weapon programmes (Enzian, Wasserfall, Rheintochter etc.) is pretty well documented. Where is the captured documentation or the wartime intelligence (human, photo-reconnaissance, signals) for a system or a launch unit deployed to France in 1944? A security nightmare from the German point of view, you might think.
Also, if the Allied Command assessed the reports of rocket-Flak as a genuine threat then you'd expect P/R Mosquitoes and Spitfires to have been allover the suspected launch areas like a rash, so there should be ORBs, sortie reports and pictures.