Date: 2024-05-18 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00018014
Military
Anti-aircraft guns
Were the 40mm pom pom anti aircraft guns used by the Royal Navy in WW2 considered of only marginal usefulness?
Peter Burgess
Far from it - it remained in production and widely used throughout the war.
The 2pdr pom-pom was probably the second-best naval AA gun in its class available to anyone during the war: the Bofors 40mm was a bit better, but also wasn’t as widely available until 1942 or so. (The Japanese didn’t have anything in that class, the Germans used a single-shot manually-loaded 37mm gun, and the US entered the war relying on the .50″ machine gun and the 1.1″ ‘Chicago Piano’, a complex, heavy and unreliable beast)
A great virtue of the pom-pom was that it was reliable, with a large ammunition capacity: with 140 rounds per gun on the mount, the water-cooled gun could keep firing for long periods and reload quickly. In January 1941, when HMS Illustrious and the Western Mediterranean fleet was attacked by a massive force of German and Italian aircraft in the Mediterranean, she expended around 30,000 rounds from her 2pdr guns with very few problems; although hit several times, she survived and was repaired and returned to action.
Later in the war, it proved very effective as an antii-kamikaze weapon: like the Bofors, it fired a heavy enough shell to quickly bring down enemy aircraft, and delivered them accurately in large numbers.
The Bofors had more potential for development and was preferred post-war, but the 2pdr was a popular, effective and widely-used weapon through the war.
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