[Milsurplus] German Mil-Radios of WWII in General

[Mike Andrews]

On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 11:21:25AM -0600, David Stinson wrote:
> 
> 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.

There is a wonderful story by the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke[1], titled
"Superiority", in which the military force with undeniably superior
technical ability, resources, and fielded equipment *LOSES* to a force
with rather decidedly inferior equipment which is nonetheless much
better suited to the conflict at hand. If you have not read it, then I
most strongly urge you to do so at your earliest convenience.

It can be found here: 

<http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html>

and is utterly germane to this discussion. I understand that it also is
required reading in at least one course at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology; if that is true, it shows great insight on the part of
those who made that decision. 

[1]  The man who, in his spare time, lost billions by inventing the
notion of geosynchronous comsats and then publishing it before they
became feasible.

Very 73, de

-- 
Mike Andrews, W5EGO
mikea at mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin