Secret Strobelight Weapons of World War II

[dwc43]

I thought this was interesting.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/0...trobe-t-1.html

Secret Strobelight Weapons of World War II
By David Hambling EmailMay 17, 2008 | 9:07:00 AMCategories: Bizarro, Lasers and Ray Guns, Less-lethal

Cdl_matilda It might have been the greatest lost weapon of World War II. Major-General JFC Fuller, the man credited with developing modern armored warfare in the 1920's, called failure to use it "the greatest blunder of the whole war." He even suggested that British and American tank divisions could have overrun Germany before the Russians if it had been deployed.

I've been looking at a new range of strobing weapons which use flickering lights to subdue criminals and insurgents. But it turns out that the disorienting power of such lights was discovered decades before.

The secret weapon Fuller was referring to was the Canal Defence Light -- a powerful searchlight mounted on a tank, with a shutter allowing it to flicker six times a second. The 13-million candlepower searchlight was intended as means of illuminating the battlefield and dazzling the enemy, described in a fascinating article on the CDL Tanks of Lowther castle:

The angle of the beam dispersion was 19 degrees which meant that if the CDL tanks were placed 30 yards apart in line abreast, the first intersection of light fell about 90 yards ahead and at 1000 yards the beam was 340 yards wide by 35 feet high. This formed triangles of darkness between and in front of the CDL's into which could be introduced normal fighting tanks, flame-throwing Churchill Crocodiles and infantry.


A further refinement was the ability to flicker the light. On the order given for 'Scatter', an armour plated shutter was electrically oscillitated back and forward at about six times a second. When first produced it was thought that this flicker effect (similar to the modern disco strobe lights) would have a damaging effect on the eyes of any observer and might cause temporary blindness.

It was the flickering aspect which made the CDL special. The makes found that when it was employed, it was impossible to locate the vehicle accurately. In one test a CDL-equipped vehicle was driven towards a 25-pounder anti-tank gun; even as it closed from 2000 yards to 500 yards the gunners (firing practice rounds, one assumes) were unable to hit the tank. When asked to draw the route taken by the CDL tank, the observers drew a straight line, while in fact the tank had been crossing the range from side to side.

Spraying the area with machine-gun fire would not work either; the armoured reflector of the searchlight kept working even after being hit repeatedly.
Cdl_grant_3
Although the CDL did not have the kind of disabling effect that the light-based personnel immobilization device being developed by Peak Beam for the US Army, the type of disorientation seems quite similar. If it had been used at much closer range then more dramatic effects -- dizziness, loss of balance and the ingfamous nausea -- might also have been observed. However, with its mechanical shutter the technology was much more primitive than the strobing Xenon light developed by Peak Beam which produces a 'squarer' pulse and is signficantly more effective than earlier strobes.

Over three hundred CDLs were built -- using Matilda, Churchill and Grant tanks -- and might have played a major role after D-Day. but instead, they remained unused. There seem to ahve been two reasons for this. One the one hand, the power or the CDL was kept extremely secret: "Even the Generals who should have used it did not know what the tank could do," complained its inventor, Marcel Mitzakis. And those that had heard of it had trouble believing at a simple flickering light could have any effect, and preferred to rely on proven weapons. Fuller was one of the few who appreciated what the CDl might have achieved

Another use of flickering lights in WWI was the proposal by Jasper Maskelyne, a stage magician employed by the British military. (A very colorful account of Maskelyne's role is given in the book The War Magician - reading it you might think he won the war single-handed.) The magician was set the task of making the Suez Canal invisible to enemy bombers. When the idea of constructing an illusion using mirrors was rejected as impractical, another plan was formulated, as this site on Maskelyne describes:

Maskelyne came up with the unorthodox idea of constructing 21 'dazzle lights' along the length of the Canal. These powerful searchlights, containing 24 different spinning beams, projected a swirling, cartwheeling confusion of light up to nine miles into the sky. A barrage of light to confuse and blind the enemy bombers, which Maskelyne dubbed Whirling Spray.


Fisher claims that this radical defensive shield of light was highly effective and was a major reason why the Suez Canal remained open for the duration of the war.

[Walkercolt]

A similar technology was used by the US and the British against U-Boats. Aircraft were fitted with lights along the leding edge of the wing, and their intensity could be varied. Flying low to the water, the lights were dialed up to about the brightness of the sky behind them, making the aircraft "stealthy" to very close ranges to the U-Boat, preventing the U-Boat from diving quickly enough to evade depth-charging. These "Liegh Lights" along with 3cm RADAR (which the Germans couldn't detect), made the "Bay of Biscay" run for U-Boats nearly impossible. Losing 9 out of 10 leaving and entering the Bay of Biscay bases.
Stealth Fighters and the B-2 Bomber use a derivitive of this technology with RADAR waves to "blend-in" to the background, and if I say anymore than that, some guys in cheap black suits from the NSA will be knocking down my door.

[dwc43]

Interesting. Walker, you better watch out for those black helicopters or install some of that lighting for your own use ... lol!!

[Walkercolt]

Helo's make too much noise. NSA has "funny" looking older-model black Oldsmobiles(RWD) and if you listen, you'll hear the sound of an Olds 455. Or they may have gone to Charger RST's Hemi's. The FBI sure like 'em. And the Treasury Dept.(DEA and ATF).
The new F-24 Raptor has electronics in it to "disoreint" the enemy pilot(microwaves tuned to the brain's frequency). The Defense Dept. admitted that on the PBS show about the Raptor's development. It also uses electrodes touching the pilot's head so he can "think" his way out of a 6-G turn.(Remember "Firefox"?). The contract for the new F-36 air superiority fighter has been let...no pilot. Some kid in a hole near Langley, VA. who was great at video games will be watching 20 video-displays, shooting down REAL airplanes...very, very soon.

[dwc43]

You read my mind Walker. I was thinking about "Firefox" before I got to that part of the post ... lol!! Good movie I guess. Might as well let hte video gamers shoot down enemy aircraft. THey already have those armed drones, so why not a full size. Don't have to worry about black outs and red outs and such with the high g force that way.

[Walkercolt]

Exactly. The pilot is the limiting factor in the manuerability of aircraft today. He blacks-out, red-outs, can't move his hands or feet in high-G situations. Sooo, we eliminate the pilot in the plane, put him in a nice comfotable room in a nice comfortable chair, feed him and maybe another guy all the inputs they can handle, including satilite data(GPS) on the agressor...they aquire a target maybe 100 miles away and "fire and forget" weapons destroy it...maybe from a different aircraft or from a ship or a "tank" with an anti-aircraft missle on it, or a foot soldier with a shoulder-mounted missle. Welcome to the Twenty-First Century. I can think of this. What has the Pentagon and the Rand Corp. thought of? What can those military satilites do besides shoot down other missles? Super-powered lasers, or protron or nuetron beams? They've shown stuff on PBS that will burn through 6" of steel in a micro-second. What they haven't shown could be spooky. I met Dr. Werner Von Brohm when my Dad worked for the old North Ameican Aviation during the space race to the moon, 40+ years ago. Then he was talking about having like a 6" ball of tungsten re-enter the atmosphere at like Mach 15, and if it was less than the size of a BB it would penitrate like 200 feet of granite and target an individual anywhere on Earth. Do you suppose the guys from the Pentagon forgot about that?

[dwc43]

Wonder if they got that idea about dropping the BB from the kids dropping penny's off the Empire State building ...lol!!

Yeah, it makes you wonder what they have hidden away at area 51 and otehr sites when you finally get to see some of the wonderous things they have created. One that comes to mind is the SR71. Now that's a machine. I've never seen how fast it can really go. I've seen things that says mach 2 or 2.5 plus. WHen they add that plus on the end, makes me think more like mach 3,4 maybe 5, who knows for sure. Must be a heck of a ride though.

[Walkercolt]

Yes, the SR-71 set the world air-speed record from Cal. to Paris and back at just over Mach 3, and it had to slow down to below 600MPH and drop down to 40,000 ft. at LEAST eleven times to refuel in-flight from tankers, and refueling takes quite a bit of time. Project Aurora, the replacment for the SR-71 has an estimated top speed in excess of Mach 5. And there's just a blurry picture of it taken from "Freedom Ridge" 12 miles from Area 51 in Jane's All the World's Aircraft. Only Lockheed and the Pentagon know for sure, and they ain't tellin'.

[dwc43]

Sounds interesting. I'll have to see if I can hunt up a pick of that plane. I guess you know about the Osprey. A freind sent me a pic of it the other day when it was landing at an airport where he works. Not as high tech as the other planes we mentioned, but it's still an interesting bird to see in flight.