Issue 24.13
This word frequently used during World War 2 actually is an acronym first used by the Germans in World War 2. It comes from the words Flieger Abwehr Kannnonen or FLAK. This was the crew’s major concern. Flack was a much greater concern than was fighters. In 1944 alone, FLAK destroyed 600 more American planes than did enemy fighters. In 1944 alone, 3,501 American planes were shot down by FLAK over Germany and 2,901 were brought down by German fighters. The word FLAK was used by American air crews to describe different things. FLAK was described by crewmen in superlative terms. FLAK was sometimes so thick that its smoke formed a dark cloud over some targets. The sound of the explosions was loud enough to hear over the roar of the engines. To me it often sounded like someone on the outside of the plane with a chain beating on the fuselage. A flyer that had too much turmoil and was not functioning mentally was called FLAK happy. After so many missions, crewmen were given a week at a FLAK house. Of course chunks of shrapnel crashed through the thin aluminum skin of the bombers.
The thought of FLAK was so real that at times it caused me to vomit. England and Germany separately and at about the same time invented and developed radar. In 1941 before America was pushed into the war, a person in the American Ambassadors office in Berlin got word to the British that Germany was perfecting a radar ground to air tracking system that had great potential. RAF reconnaissance planes took photos of a strange large metal saucer standing on end that was pointed out to the channel. Great Britain had to know more about this new threat, so with a force of more than one hundred commandos plus naval ships, they stole one whole radar installation complete with some German prisoners. The experts then studied the apparatus. This new radar tracking system proved to be very accurate for tracking high flying planes. This was so accurate that we had one B-17 in our squadron that had two holes in its fuselage spaced about two feet apart and spaced by one minute apart put there by tracking radar. Luckily both of these rounds were duds caused by sabotaged slave labor. Radar tracking by Germany was more devastating to the Americans bombing in daylight, mostly because we flew in tight box formations for protection from enemy fighters and to give a tighter bombing pattern for more complete destruction of the target. The Royal Air Force flew at night, singly and at intervals so there was not the grouping to make better targets for ground fire. During the blitz, Germany thought that the Luftwaffe could bring Britain to her knees by bombing population centers. They even leveled one whole city. The RAF bombed mostly population centers in Germany mostly for revenge. If that strategy didn’t work for the German, why would it work for the RAF to bomb population centers? The Eight Air Force almost exclusively struck at war industries such as transportation, war factories and petroleum refineries.