The Acht Acht was equally deadly against tanks and planes.
The most famous cartoon characters of World War II were Bill Mauldin’s scruffy and unshaven soldiers Joe and Willie, who could always be counted on to capture the gripes, dreams, and sardonic humor of the ordinary GI. In one cartoon, Joe is seen scowling ferociously at a captured German prisoner. His American interrogator says to Joe, “I’ll let ya know if I find th’ one wot invented th’ 88.”
Joe wouldn’t have been the only American GI who would have liked to get his hands on the guy. To Allied soldiers who came up against it in battle, the German 88mm gun was probably the single most feared and hated weapon of the war.
Though conceived as an antiaircraft gun, the “Acht Acht” possessed such a combination of pinpoint accuracy and hitting power that it could punch through four inches of tank armor from a mile away or reduce fortifications to rubble. An Australian infantryman spoke for many Allied soldiers who found themselves on the receiving end of German 88mm fire when he called it the “anti-everything” weapon.
In Normandy, the 88 more than any other single factor blocked Allied advances for week after week following the initial D-Day landings. By late afternoon on D-Day the British 3rd Division had advanced to within four kilometers of the city of Caen, the first major British objective. Only an engineer battalion and the 88mm guns of the German 996th Flak Battalion stood in the way. But it was enough to hold up the British advance until the 21st Panzer Division arrived. One Canadian soldier recalled, “In Normandy I saw one knock out eight of our tanks, one after another, and they didn’t even know where the thing was hidden.” When the Polish 1st Armored Division was committed to battle in Normandy, its 2nd Armored Regiment ran into a battery of 88mm guns at the village of St. Aignan-de-Cramesnil and immediately lost twenty-six tanks, nine of them to a single 88. Because of a few 88s, the battle for Caen would last for weeks, turning the Normandy campaign into a grueling attrition contest.
The deadly effectiveness of the 88 in World War II owed as much to the flexibility of German operational doctrine and a rigorous effort to learn and apply the lessons of wartime experience as it did to superb German engineering. Pioneers in recognizing the need for new high-altitude antiaircraft weapons in World War I, the German army and air force were equally quick to profit by Spanish civil war experience that suggested ways such guns could be put to use on the ground. And they were innovative enough to promptly create new units that could combine air defense and ground assault roles with deadly effect.
It was the Germans who, in the First World War, coined the term flak—an acronym for Fliegerabwehrkanone, or aircraft defense cannon. In part to make up for their own shortage of aircraft over the western front, the Imperial German Air Service moved quickly to develop and field more, and better, antiaircraft guns than the Allies had.
In the early years of the war antiaircraft guns were simply modified field artillery pieces, and given the low velocity of the shells and primitive range-finding systems, their major accomplishment was simply to waste ammunition. But by 1917 the Germans fielded new, specially designed high-velocity guns that could throw a shell to eighteen thousand feet. In 1917 German antiaircraft guns shot down 467 Allied planes, in 1918 more than 700. By contrast, the British antiaircraft force claimed fewer than 100 German planes in 1917 and only 176 in 1918. With such results the British and French tended to place a low priority on developing a flak arm, while the Germans were firmly convinced of its value by the end of the war. The Germans were right.
Although the Versailles Treaty forbade the Germans from possessing modern heavy weapons, the Reichswehr used subterfuges to continue developing antiaircraft guns. In 1928 a Krupp Company team, working with the Bofors Company in Sweden, developed plans for a new high-velocity 88mm gun with a semiautomatic loader. By 1931 prototypes were ready. The new gun could shoot a 21-lb high-explosive antiaircraft shell at a muzzle velocity of 2,630 feet per second, almost that of a rifle bullet, and had an effective range of 25,000 feet.
It was a huge leap forward in antiaircraft technology and put the Germans well ahead of the other major powers, whose guns were still little more than slightly improved versions of their ineffective World War I weapons. The 1930 French 75mm gun, for example, only fired a 14.2-lb shell to an effective range of 20,000 feet. The American 3-in gun, in use until 1940, fired a 12.8-lb shell to the same height. A good crew manning the French and American guns could fire about ten to twelve rounds a minute, while the German semiautomatic loading system made it possible to fire as many as twenty per minute.
In the late 1930s American and British designers began to catch up. In 1941 the United States began production of the 90mm antiaircraft gun, which fired a 23.4-lb shell to over 30,000 feet. The British 3.7-in antiaircraft gun could also fire a shell larger than the 88’s to 32,000 feet. Both the British and American weapons incorporated the latest features such as automatic loaders and radar guidance and, when considered purely as antiaircraft guns, both were somewhat more effective than the German 88mm. But they were also much heavier, and normally were employed in fixed positions. Neither was what could be called a battlefield gun.
In contrast, what made the German gun especially useful was its high mobility. The 88 had an eleven-man crew consisting of gun commander, gun layer, aimer, loader, fuse setter, five soldiers to supply ammunition, and vehicle driver. Mounted on a wheeled trailer designed to be towed by truck or halftrack, it could be deployed from the road and ready for action in a few minutes.
When Hitler came to power in 1933 and ordered large-scale rearmament, the 88 was ready for mass production. The Luftwaffe’s air defense program had a high priority, so the first 88s, known as the 88mm Flak 18, began to equip field units in 1935.
When Germany deployed the Condor Legion in 1936 to support the Nationalists in the Spanish civil war, it was accompanied by a flak battalion with four batteries of 88s. At first the 88s were used primarily to defend the Condor Legion’s airfields, and they proved highly effective, credited with shooting down fifty-nine Republican aircraft. But the Nationalists generally controlled the air, and the Condor Legion had more than enough flak for base defense.
The Nationalists were weak in artillery, though. And when it came to battlefield operations, Col. Wolfram von Richthofen, the Condor Legion’s chief of staff, never felt constrained by official doctrine. He and others in the Luftwaffe remembered that in 1918 the German mobile flak guns had proven very effective when they were thrown into supporting the ground battle. So in the spring of 1937, while supporting the Nationalist offensive in northern Spain, von Richthofen sent his 88mm batteries to the front to destroy the powerful Basque fortifications. Fortunately, the designers of the 88 had not overlooked the gun’s potential as a multipurpose weapon and sensibly provided an excellent Zeiss optical sight that attached easily to the gun mount. The 88 quickly proved to be the most effective artillery piece on the Nationalist side. When aimed horizontally against a ground target, the gun fired in a devastatingly accurate flat trajectory owing to its extremely high muzzle velocity. Soon, the Condor Legion’s normal practice was to concentrate the 88s at the Schwerpunkt—point of main effort—in the offense or defense. The gun was so successful in this role that it became part of standard battle doctrine and von Richthofen noted in his diary with some satisfaction that this use of the 88 “had caused considerable consternation among the air defense theorists back in Berlin.”
The experience in Spain quickly led to some modifications of the gun. A new model, of which more than ten thousand were eventually made, was designated the 88 Flak 37. The biggest change was in the gun barrel, which was now made in two sections for easier replacement. Another major change was in the design for the trailer, which had an improved cruciform gun platform that allowed the gun to be lowered to the ground and emplaced more easily. The new 88s could even be fired while still on the trailer, cutting the time to get the gun into action. By the onset of war in September 1939 Germany had more than 10,000 antiaircraft guns, of which 2,600 were 88s. In contrast, Britain and France had fewer than 2,000 antiaircraft guns each, and most of them obsolete.
In the Polish campaign the 88 again proved useful in both the air defense role and in ground action. Thanks to the Spanish experience the crews were well trained in using their guns as direct-support artillery pieces; with few Polish aircraft to oppose them, the 88s were often used to destroy Polish fortifications.
After Poland was quickly defeated the army and Luftwaffe concluded that, to exploit the weapon’s versatility to the utmost, all front flak troops ought to be massed and assigned to the units carrying the main weight of the attack. The Luftwaffe accordingly organized two flak corps, with hundreds of guns, to serve under the army’s operational control. One flak corps supported Panzergruppe Kleist’s breakthrough attack through the center of the Allied front in the Ardennes. In the subsequent fighting in May 1940 the 88 proved to be the Germans’ most effective antitank weapon. The German army’s main antitank gun, the 37mm Pak, proved useless against the armor of the British and French heavy tanks. But the 88mm antitank shell could easily punch through the heaviest armor the Allies had. In France, Luftwaffe flak units claimed 326 Allied tanks destroyed or damaged during the 1940 campaign.
In June 1941 in North Africa, Gen. Erwin Rommel demonstrated how just a handful of 88s could equalize the odds on the battlefield. In the Battleaxe offensive the British counted on breaking the German defenses using their one hundred Matilda tanks, whose heavy armor was invulnerable to the 37mm antitank gun. But Rommel countered by emplacing his thirteen 88mm guns on key terrain, and under careful camouflage, to cover the approaches. What the British did not know was that the 88mm gun could pierce even the heavy Matilda armor at more than a mile range. When the attack opened at Hafid Ridge, four concealed 88s destroyed an attacking British armor squadron in a minute. By the end of the two-day battle the British had lost sixty-seven of their one hundred heavy tanks and were forced to withdraw.
For the campaign in Russia the Luftwaffe formed more flak corps to serve with the army. Army divisions also had their own flak battalions, so the 88 became one of the major German weapons on the front lines. In 1941 the Germans were shocked at the superiority of the Russian tanks—especially the KV-1 and T-34—and again relied on the 88 as the only weapon available that could punch through the tanks’ heavy armor. It was used so widely in that role that in 1943 the Germans developed a special antitank version of the 88 by fitting the 88mm gun to the chassis and mount of a 105mm howitzer. This hybrid gun was known as the Pak 43 and it was one of the most effective antitank weapons of World War II.
As the Allied bombing offensive over Germany and occupied Europe intensified from 1942 on, thousands of 88s were deployed back in their originally envisioned role as Germany’s primary air defense system. Production of the 88mm gun steadily increased throughout the war, from 1,130 manufactured in 1940 to 5,933 in 1944. By August 1944 more than ten thousand 88s were in service. With German fighter aircraft largely swept from the skies by mid-1944, flak became Germany’s primary means of home defense. In the air defense role the 88 was most effective when batteries were mated up with the Würzburg D fire control radar, which automatically aimed the guns for effective mass fire. More than 50 percent of American aircraft losses over Germany were to flak guns, usually 88s.
Between December 1942 and June 1944 the Luftwaffe estimated that it had damaged 20,445 U.S. aircraft operating over Europe. American records showed the true figure to be more than 26,000. From 1943 to 1945 more than 20 percent of all U.S. bomber sorties over Europe suffered flak damage, and of these more than a quarter were classed as “serious” damage, requiring major repairs or scrapping of the airplane.
In addition to being deadly, the 88 was easy to operate and maintain—additional characteristics of a great weapons system. By 1944, as attrition warfare bled Germany of manpower, the 88mm flak batteries defending the Reich were manned mostly by untrained high school Hitler Youth boys and Russian POWs. Typically, only the gun commander and the personnel manning the fire control system needed to be fully trained, while most of the crew—the loaders and ammunition handlers—required little instruction.
The 88mm gun soldiered on in some Eastern European armies for many years after World War II. This was in part because so many of the guns survived the war and were readily available, but also because it remained a highly versatile weapon. The 88’s mobility, ease of operation, and great effectiveness in three roles—antiaircraft gun, antitank gun, and conventional artillery piece—gives it a special place in the rankings of the top weapons in the history of armament.
Originally published in the November 2007 issue of World War II Magazine. To subscribe, click here.
