Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (The Pacific War Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian W. Toll

The most deadly and versatile antiaircraft gun of this period was the mid-ranged 40mm Bofors, which fired a 2-pound projectile with a muzzle velocity of 2,890 feet per second and a cyclic rate of 160 rpm per barrel, and held a flat trajectory to a range of nearly two miles. The Bofors could hit a steeply diving kamikaze when it was still more than a mile away, and the 40mm rounds would begin to take the plane apart—sawing off its wings, tearing away chunks of the fuselage, shattering the windshield and canopy, shooting away the propeller. The engine and frame, being the heaviest and sturdiest portions of the airplane, might continue forward for a brief time—even after the rest of the plane was gone—until finally nosing down into the ocean. Lieutenant Robert Wallace, an antiaircraft gunnery officer on the Idaho, concluded of the Bofors gun: “No kamikaze could get past even a single quad-40 if its people knew what they were doing.”85 The full potential of the larger 5-inch/38 caliber gun was realized with the introduction of the VT (variable time) fuse, also known as the “influence” or “proximity” fuse, which placed a small short-ranged Doppler radar directly into the shell itself. This technological marvel solved the problem of detonating a shell in close proximity to a small, rapidly moving target—the enemy airplane—rather than below or behind it.86 To witnesses, the successful performance of a 5-inch VT-fused shell was a spectacular sight. If the target aircraft was a bom...