Скачать или смотреть Japanese Admirals Dismissed Proximity Fuses — Until 5-Inch VT Shells Made Kamikazes Vanish.

November fourteenth, nineteen forty-four. The destroyer USS Abner Read disintegrated in a ball of orange flame off the coast of Leyte Gulf as a single Mitsubishi Zero fighter, trailing smoke and fire, plunged through a curtain of anti-aircraft fire that should have shredded the aircraft a thousand feet before impact. Commander Douglas MacArthur Fowler stood on the bridge of the nearby destroyer USS Claxton, watching men die because American five-inch guns firing conventional fuses had failed to stop a determined pilot willing to trade his life for a warship.
Within seventy-two hours, everything would change.
Fowler didn't know it yet, but the weapon that would transform this desperate equation was already aboard his ship, locked in the forward magazine under guards who had been told only that the new ammunition was classified at the highest levels. The shells looked identical to standard five-inch high-explosive rounds, distinguished only by a peculiar bulbous nose cone and a small label marked VT. Variable Time fuse, the paperwork claimed, though that designation was deliberate misdirection. The device actually contained a miniature radar system that would revolutionize naval warfare in ways the Imperial Japanese Navy was about to discover with catastrophic consequences.
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