[ARC5] German Mil-Radios of WWII in General

[David Stinson]

I've had the chance to examine a few WWII German mil radios.
They are precision instruments- compact, tight engineering;
they remind me of a Swiss watch of 50 years ago.
One would certainly call them "high quality."
However- building them like this was a strategic error.

In the "total war" environment, one needs to carefully define
the "mission" of a particular radio set and build it to that mission,
with these factors in mind:

1. Strategic elements and other materials
    needed in production.
2. Ease and speed of production.
3. Training and supplies needed for effective
     first-echolon installation and repair.
4. Spares logistics and sparing level.

The German radios fell short on every count.
They required an excess of strategic materials, were labor
and time intensive to produce, required special tools
and men with extensive training/experiance to effectively
support them in the field, and were difficult to troubleshoot
and repair specfically because of their tight design.
It takes a lot of time and experiance to get a young man
trained-up to the level necessary to service equipment
built to this standard in the field, and many of their bones
are still bleaching on the plains of west Russia.
I've been told that, specifically because the radios were
near impossible to repair in the field, they were commonly
swapped-out and the defective units sent to the rear,
where they could be blown to bits and burned up
in a train just straffed by Allied fighters.

And as for the rear areas:  it's very hard to build or repair
a Swiss watch while being carpet-bombed
and with your build-parts burning in the same train
as the broken radios.
Even today, much comm equipment is built with
far more complexity than is required for the intended
mission, which mulitplies the difficulty of servicing
and supporting it in the field.

Most Allied equipment, on the other hand, was "built to mission;"
i.e. liaison sets were built to do an excellent job
of contacting Headquarters, but were not built to be used as
a percision frequency standard or to give a 100% chirp-free note.
There is no need to have a chirp-free note in that mission, so
designing and building it to that standard is counter-productive.
One could make a case that the ART-13 vs the BC-375
was just such an example, except that quick freq change
and fixed channels were a need and could (almost) justify the
over-build of the ART-13.  Again: I'm not knocking the engineering
excellence of something like the ART-13; only that building
it to a standard higher than was actually needed by its mission
was counterproductive.  The U.S. could afford such extravagance.
Most other combatants could not.
We could argue about how much that fits the ART-13,
but that is for another thread.

Allied radios were also built with a careful eye towards the
support they would require and a realistic idea of the kind
of repairs a 20-year-old with 90 days of training
can do in the field.  Few strategic elements were used in
their construction (there are big exceptions, like all the silver-
plating in an ATB and especially in Radar and ECM gear).
They were intentionally designed to be simple, easy to
understand and repair and not "over-built" for the mission.
Set a broken BC-454 and E10K from FUG10 on the bench
in front of a talented 23-year-old tech and see
(given all the parts are available) which one gets fixed first.

In conclusion and IMHO, the German WWII radios are
beautiful examples of engineering,  but were engineered
to the wrong standards.  They were not the kind of
radios with which to fight a war.

73 DE Dave AB5S