20 mm API Schrage musik Cannon round

[Cultus]

While digging up the remnants of my uncle’s Halifax bomber we found an intact 20 mm API cannon round. I have three questions for any experts out there . First, can someone explain how this round, which looks to be solid steel with a hollow core where phosphorus was packed, would work when fired into the wing of a bomber where there was no armour plating? Second, how would this steel round break apart thereby releasing the core of phosphorus to burn wherever it hit? And finally, was there a “typical sequence” of loading of 20 mm rounds for the Schrage musik cannon or was it up to the pilot to choose his preferred sequence for the armourers to load up the drums? Thanks in advance for all your help.

[Hans1906]

Cultus,

the so-called "Schräge Musik" is well known with former german "Luftwaffe".

Oblique music - also oblique night music - is the name of a German weapon technology at the time of the Second World War, in which machine guns or machine guns were installed in a night fighter, directed at an angle forward and upwards. With the help of the "weird music" British night bombers, which did not have a downward-acting weaponry, were to be shot down without having to endanger themselves.

The name is a play on words and was derived from the oblique arrangement of the weapons and because jazz was described as oblique by Nazi propaganda. "Weird Night Music" is the allusion to its use in night fighters.

I remember the topic from some German books, the fighter pilot Wolfgang Späte, who I personally knew, probably also used this new technology for the attacks on Allied bomber formations at the time.

Schräge Musik https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schräge_Musik

Many legends and rumors still surround this technology today, as do many books, as a non-air force expert, please don't allow myself a better answer...


Hans

[Hans1906]

Video:

Bob Jubb - The German night fighter “Schrage Musik” ("Schräge Musik")


Mentioned here in the forum before...


Hans

[LineDoggie]

IF it is API/-T the shell has no fuze, Its Phosphorous filling activates once the shell breaks up while penetrating

[Grzesio]

There were numerous variants of the API or APHE shells for 2 cm aircraft cannons, how did you identify yours as an API filled with phosphorous, i.e. the 2 cm Pzbrgr. (Phosphor) o. Zerl.?