Night fighters

[Jade_Monkey]

I'm curious about night fighters since I don't know much about the topic.

 

I read that many were modified versions of the regular fighters/bombers that had been equipped with radars and some navigation tools to facilitate landings as well.

What I have not been able to find out is what was the real purpose of night fighters.

 

I imagine that any sort of dogfight during the night would have been fruitless, so were they focused on intercepting night bombing raids in large formations? Or maybe night attacks on land targets?

 

 

[AndyJWest]

Nightfighters were intended to intercept enemy bombers, though the RAF also used radar-equipped Mosquitos as 'intruders' to accompany bombing raids, intercepting Luftwaffe nightfighters.

 

The Wikipedia article seems to give a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_fighter

[Jade_Monkey]

 

 

Nightfighters were intended to intercept enemy bombers, though the RAF also used radar-equipped Mosquitos as 'intruders' to accompany bombing raids, intercepting Luftwaffe nightfighters.

 

The Wikipedia article seems to give a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_fighter

 

Thanks, I had already read the Wiki article.

 

It covers a lot of the equipment part etc, but there is very little info on the actual engagements.

How the hell were they able to aim in the dark at all? The radar can detect incoming planes but was that useful for aiming and actually shooting enemy planes down?

[Gambit21]

I'm curious about night fighters since I don't know much about the topic.

 

I read that many were modified versions of the regular fighters/bombers that had been equipped with radars and some navigation tools to facilitate landings as well.

What I have not been able to find out is what was the real purpose of night fighters.

 

I imagine that any sort of dogfight during the night would have been fruitless, so were they focused on intercepting night bombing raids in large formations? Or maybe night attacks on land targets?

 

Hey Monkey,

 

I just read a book mostly dealing with the Nightwitches recently, and they tell stories of encountering fighters at night and having to evade.

I have a suspicion that most things you can think of happened, even if they didn't happen regularly or are documented in books etc.

[ShamrockOneFive]

Thanks, I had already read the Wiki article.

 

It covers a lot of the equipment part etc, but there is very little info on the actual engagements.

How the hell were they able to aim in the dark at all? The radar can detect incoming planes but was that useful for aiming and actually shooting enemy planes down?

 

I've read a fair number of night fighting stories over the years. One Mosquito intruder mission was particularly interesting... I remember there being a FW190 being flown at night. The Mosquito's radar picked him up and they closed in on the contact from behind. At this point I can't remember if they were able to spot the FW190's exhaust glow and that let them ID the aircraft or if there was some illumination from the moon. Either way they closed to dead 6 and he opened fire with the four Hispanos for a near instant kill.

 

For the time... the radars were good enough to get them within a few hundred meters and from there you could usually spot aircraft from their exhaust.

[AndyJWest]

I don't think any WW2 airborne radar was capable of being used for aiming: the idea was to get you close enough to acquire the target visually. As for seeing the target, it is rarely completely dark at night, and if you protect your night vision carefully, there will generally be enough contrast between an aircraft and the background to find a target if you know it is there. And there were searchlights, as well as the fires from any target being bombed, to assist. The Luftwaffe even had some limited success with Wilde Sau tactics: using day fighters (109s, 190s) equipped only with night navigation aids to intercept the bomber stream. Finding targets was probably easier than finding your way home...

[Juri_JS]

Gunsmith posted a good summery on German night fighting tactics some month ago:

https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/27742-night-fighting/?do=findComment&comment=447859

Edited September 24, 2017 by Juri_JS

[Wulf]

I'm curious about night fighters since I don't know much about the topic.

 

I read that many were modified versions of the regular fighters/bombers that had been equipped with radars and some navigation tools to facilitate landings as well.

What I have not been able to find out is what was the real purpose of night fighters.

 

I imagine that any sort of dogfight during the night would have been fruitless, so were they focused on intercepting night bombing raids in large formations? Or maybe night attacks on land targets?

 

 

As others have noted, night fighting is largely about intercepting and destroying enemy bombers.  Like bombing, night fighting rapidly evolved as the war progressed.  It began in earnest in the West when RAF Bomber Command discovered, in very short order, that deep penetration daylight operations over the Continent were so prohibitively expensive, in terms of men and machines, that it was simply unsustainable.    Although this seems sort of obvious to us now, at the time it was widely believed that it was impossible to defend an airspace against strategic bombing and that consequently, "the bomber would always get through".   Not so as it turned out.

 

However, just changing to night operations was hardly a quick fix.  Navigation in the late 1930s was rudimentary at best and in many instances RAF aircrews weren't even able to find their target city let alone military installations or munitions factories within those cities.  In part, this situation led to the introduction of 'area bombing' - but only in part.

 

The Germans responded initially with a box grid system of fighter defense (one box one fighter) but this proved ineffective once the RAF introduced the 'bomber stream' concept, which meant that large numbers of night fighters weren't able to be utilized.  When this became apparent, dedicated night fighters like the Bf 110 were augmented with day fighters which were either vectored onto and followed the bomber stream or deployed directly above the cities under attack or were held orbiting a becon until the target city had been identified.  As time went on the night war above the German cities became a real technology race in terms of electronic navigation aids, on-board radar detection and counter-measures.

 

Night fighter tactics largely depend on the time period under discussion.  Initially ground based radar would vector the night fighters onto a target until visual contact could be established.

 

Subsequently, on-board systems would be used (on dedicated night fighters) in the latter stages of an intercept.  The RAF responded to this with tail warning radar and intruder aircraft with  IFF.    Most attacks were delivered from the rear either from above or below.  Eventually the Germans introduced schrage musik installations (upward firing cannons) typically consisting of twin MGFFs , sometimes triggered by a photoelectric cell.  This allowed the night fighter crews to fly undetected beneath the target bomber which was often rendered visible  above in the available moonlight.  Because tracer ammo wasn't used in these installations, and because bomb loads often detonated, completely vapourizing the aircraft, the existence of schrage musik remained unknown for quite some time.  In fact, when RAF aircrews reported seeing massive explosions in the sky around them (resulting from schrage musik attacks) the RAF establishment dismissed the observations as German 'scarecrow' shells, designed to intimidate the aircrews.

 

The most successful German night fighter intercept occurred late in the war (1944) when the RAF undertook a full strength raid on Nuremberg.  On that occasion the RAF lost 95 heavy bombers.

[Aap]

Thanks, I had already read the Wiki article.

 

It covers a lot of the equipment part etc, but there is very little info on the actual engagements.

How the hell were they able to aim in the dark at all? The radar can detect incoming planes but was that useful for aiming and actually shooting enemy planes down?

If you are interested in night fighter tactics, type "Wilde Sau" and "Zahme Sau" in google or wikipedia. Edited September 24, 2017 by II./JG77_Kemp

[Lusekofte]

though the RAF also used radar-equipped Mosquitos

I read that RAF was afraid the radar would get in enemy hands, so the intruders was not equipped with radar.

But I am open for myself being subject to misinformation on this. 

 

The 110 that was the most successfull nightfighter in German side, (probably due to numbers) suffered heavily in flight dynamics caused by the antennas in front. The corckscrew manouver was very successfull since the Lancaster actually outmanouvered the 110 in that tactic .

But if a nightfighter was spotted before he was in shooting distance he abandoned the attack and went for another bomber, stealth was the most effective weapon.

Nightfighter testpilots in RAF after the battle of britain kept holding early models of the beugfighter as best suited, in their opinion speed and enginepower was not a advantage in this type of engagement. Stability and weaponry was 

Edited September 24, 2017 by 216th_LuseKofte

[Gunsmith86]

I read that RAF was afraid the radar would get in enemy hands, so the intruders was not equipped with radar.

But I am open for myself being subject to misinformation on this. 

This changed in march 1943

[Mesha44]

I recall one story of the US Navy using a radar equiped TBF Avenger to guide two F6F's onto a target.  Once in the general area of the target the Hellcats were able to see the exhaust of the bombers and closed in on it for the kill.

[Lusekofte]

This changed in march 1943

Thanks for the information

I recall one story of the US Navy using a radar equiped TBF Avenger to guide two F6F's onto a target.  Once in the general area of the target the Hellcats were able to see the exhaust of the bombers and closed in on it for the kill.

This is quite possible, but I know there was Hellcats and corsairs fitted with radarpods on their wing, if they where deployed in active service I do not know. I wonder how those early radars was operated by its pilot. It could not be easy task

[Royal_Flight]

This changed in march 1943

This is true.

 

I know a bit about the RAF's night operations, but not a great deal about how others did it.

At the start of the war the RAF approach was a bit ad hoc and the non-radar equipped Defiant and Blenheim (later replaced by Beaufighter) as well as standard Hurricanes would be vectored towards the location of bombers picked up by ground radar, and would then have to spot their targets visually, sometimes with the aid of ground searchlights.

This was unpopular though as the searchlights would sometimes illuminate the fighters which would alert the enemy bombers.

 

The Defiant proved a success in this role though as its turret allowed it to fly below the bombers where their silhouettes could be more easily seen against the sky.

 

When radar was made available for home defence it began to be used, first kill by a British radar-equipped night fighter was in autumn 1940, after the Battle of Britain.

By that point the Blenheim had gone and the Beaufighter itself was on the way to being replaced by the Mosquito.

 

The RAF also used the idea of 'night intruders', where fighters would follow enemy bombers back to their bases and shoot them down on landing, or raid airfields especially where enemy night fighters were based. Mosquitos were used for this later in the war, and they also used to escort RAF bomber streams as well as create diversionary attacks to draw the event night fighters away from the main target. This reached a point in 1944 called 'Moskitopanik' where for a while, every loss of a German aircraft at night was blamed on Mosquitoes.

 

However... earlier in the war, the Havoc (dedicated night intruder version of the Boston/A-20 that we are getting in BoK) was used for this, with a solid nose filled with machine guns and a bombload.

 

There was also a ridiculous proposal to mount a giant airborne searchlight in the nose of a Havoc to illuminate enemy bombers for others to intercept them, but this was scrapped because a) the flat searchlight caused too much drag, b) lighting up your own aircraft like a Christmas tree is very unsubtle and makes you an instant target, and c) it was very silly.

 

Until 1943 radar wasn't used beyond the channel for fear that it would be recovered on the event of a shootdown or forced landing, as during this period the electronic war between radar and countermeasures and counter-countermeasures was fiercely fought and highly sensitive (Battle of the Beams, etc).

In fact in one occasion (I think 1943, not sure) a Ju-88 night fighter got lost on a sortie and accidentally landed in Scotland, handing an intact version of Germany's airborne intercept radar to the RAF in what was a major coup for British scientists.

 

Incidentally, in the early war to keep a level of official cover around the use of airborne radar sets in RAF night fighters, the story was out around that RAF pilots could see Bette in the dark because they ate plenty of carrots. Incidentally, this story was also promoted by the Ministry of Food as a way to encourage people to eat carrots which were grown in the UK, at a time if food shortages and rationing.

 

Which, if you've ever heard that carrots are good for your eyes, is where they has come from.

 

 

Aaand... that's about all I know, hope some of it was useful.

[Gunsmith86]

This is also very good:

 

'Bomber' by Len Deighton

 

Part 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6U0e5DUdNQ

 

Part 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW_7NuHjfKs

 

Part 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQw72DacXrE

 

Part 4:

[Gunsmith86]

Flight Lieutenant David Murray Peden RCAF on 214 Squadron in 100 Group Flying Fortress Mark II
 
D Day (6 June 1944)  6.5 hours during invasion.
On the night of 21/22 June 1944 the aircraft was badly shot up by two night fighters.

 
This incident is reported fully in Murray Peden's book "A thousand shall fall" Chapter 18 Gelsenkirchen.:

At 4:30 that afternoon we sat in the briefing room and watched in the usual strained silence as the curtains swished noisily open to reveal route tapes running to Gelsenkirchen, in the heart of the Ruhr. Someone in the crew muttered: “Christ, Happy Valley.” I responded with supreme confidence, “Piece of cake.” Our target was the Nordstern oil plant in Gelsenkirchen. I really did not feel the confidence I had expressed as I looked at the big target map in front of us. Heavy flak areas on that map were marked with red circles. The Ruhr was one solid turnip-shaped blotch of red, many inches wide, and a foot long on our map; and it had a deep belt of searchlights all round it, denoted by a continuous broad blue border framing the whole blob. Ruhr trips had one good quality: they were short. That was their only redeeming feature. Happy Valley was probably the most heavily defended industrial area in Europe. Apart from the hundreds of flak batteries and the dense concentrations of searchlights, it was well protected by swarms of night fighters, and it was extremely difficult on such a short trip to mislead them by routing as to the intended target area. When I said “piece of cake” it was just so much whistling past the graveyard; but I was to be reminded of it later. We had skirted the fringes of the Ruhr’s defences on more than one occasion, had seen that seemingly impenetrable palisade of searchlights, and knew only too well that to run through the heaviest belt of those defences — Gelsenkirchen was like another suburb of Essen — was going to be no picnic. Main Force was actually going to split as it approached our target area and attack the oil plants at nearby Wesseling and Scholven-Buer as well1. All these attacks, and those delivered by the RAF in the days immediately preceding, were part of the co-ordinated allied bombing campaign against German oil plants initiated some weeks earlier, with gratifying success, by the Americans. These strikes were hurting the Germans, and their fighters were reacting accordingly.
Takeoff was late these summer nights. It was just after 11:00 PM when the Aldis lamp’s green flash sent F Fox roaring down the flarepath. We crossed the coast outbound near Cromer, and climbed steadily to 22,000 feet in the clear night air. Once we hit the enemy coast, the ever-present strain mounted rapidly to the higher level that was the concomitant of being in the enemy’s ball park, blindfolded by night. I always waited tensely for the first burst of flak to stab at us, hoping it would not be too close. Once that first burst came up, and I recovered from the violent start that the sudden flash in the darkness always caused, I breathed a little easier and began the game that every pilot had to play, changing altitude, course, and speed, to throw off the next burst, counting the seconds carefully and watching to see where that next burst came; then varying the course again, being careful not to “balance” the pattern with a nice symmetrical correction to the other side. The German predictors were quick to average symmetrical evasions and fire a burst at the appropriate moment along the mean track. The human system is incredibly adaptive, and what constantly surprised me, when I thought about it in safety on the ground, was how matter of factly we could play this deadly game, and even derive a certain nervous satisfaction from it, watching shells burst two or three hundred yards away, at the very spot you would have been had you not changed course as the gunners were launching their speeding projectiles on their way. We thrust inland, threading our way through the welcoming flak, and Stan soon began reporting contacts on Monica, the radar set which he monitored in his cabin. It became apparent that Sam had positioned us well towards the middle of the bomber stream, and that the concentration of Lancasters was dense. In a way I hated these frequent radar contacts, for we always had to assume that they might be night fighters, and everyone strained unconsciously until one of the gunners came on intercom with something like: “Ah, I’ve got him, Skipper, it’s a Lanc. He’s three or four hundred yards dead astern and down just a little bit.” On black nights they could not be seen at anything like that range. This night they could be spotted while they were well away from us. We had a second concern, however, even after the gunners identified the contact as a Lanc. The question uppermost in our minds then was: has he seen and identified us? The Fortress, of course, had a prominent single fin. Most of the aircraft with a single fin and rudder flying the night skies were German, and we wanted no “friendly” machine gun bullets put into us by mistake. If the friendly aircraft was slightly above you, the waiting period until you parted company was extremely tense, since it was easier for you to spot him than vice versa. At a point about 20 minutes from the target we began to approach an outlying belt of searchlights which stood before us on either side of our intended track in two great cones. I feared and hated those baleful blinding lights more than anything else the Germans used against us. While in themselves they seldom caused death — although there were reported cases of pilots, particularly at low level, apparently becoming completely disoriented by their glaring beams and diving into the earth — they were all too often the harbinger of death. A pilot trapped in a large cone had little chance of escape. For long seconds on end the dazzling glare would render him helpless, spotlighting him as the target and making it almost impossible
for him to see his instruments and maintain any sense of equilibrium. Meanwhile the searchlights’ accomplices, the heavy guns, would hurl up shells in streams, and all too frequently the aircraft would explode or begin a crazy, smoking dive to the ground. As I watched these two cones warily, I noticed that they were remaining stationary for 30 seconds or so at a time, leaving a corridor between them, then abruptly moving together and establishing one giant cone right in the middle of what had been the safe passage. Twice I saw them do this, and twice when they came together in the centre they trapped a Lancaster attempting to slip by. Each time the Lancaster was destroyed. It was an unnerving spectacle to watch, particularly when your turn to run the gauntlet was fast approaching. It was Hobson’s choice with a vengeance. You could not fly straight into either cone while they were standing separate; that was committing suicide; and detouring all the way around the outside would have involved a major departure from the prescribed track and thrown out the aircraft’s time over target by several minutes. You had no practicable alternative but to take the black void between the two cones, knowing that the lights would swing inward and illuminate some part of the safe passage every few seconds. You headed for the open spot and prayed that you would get through. I chose a spot slightly right of centre and sweated. We were lucky. Hardly had we cleared this hurdle than Stan came on the intercom again to report another contact, a close one. This time we were not left long in doubt. In less than a minute our rear gunner, Johnny Walker, spotted an aircraft directly astern at a range of about 300 yards. This was approximately where Stan had predicted the contact would be found, but it was another 30 seconds or more before Johnny Walker and Bert Lester confirmed that it was a Lancaster. Then, for a minute or two, we seemed to be holding the same relative positions. I was reluctant to weave away if I could avoid it, since Sam’s navigation thus far had kept us dead on track, and I preferred not to mar his handiwork. However, after another minute, Johnny Walker reported that the Lanc had closed further and was now just about 200 yards astern. “If he comes any closer, any closer at all,” I said, “let me know, and I’ll weave off to the side a bit.” It was at that precise moment that Fate dealt us a card off the bottom of the deck. The Lancaster abruptly stood on its wingtip and dived away. Directly behind it, and now directly behind us and in perfect firing position, was a Messerschmitt 410 which had been stalking the Lancaster. As Johnny Walker shouted a warning and began firing himself, the air around us was instantly filled with white flaming shells that flashed past our windows with horrifying speed, and F Fox shuddered heavily to the pounding of a hail of close range cannon fire. Through the back of my seat I felt a rapid series of staccato blows that jarred us like the strokes of a wild triphammer. I had instinctively thrust the control column forward and twisted the ailerons to dive into a violent corkscrew; but in the second it took to initiate the manoeuvre, F Fox absorbed heavy punishment from the torrent of shells the Messerschmitt’s cannons poured into us. Before I had 15 degrees of bank on, the starboard inner engine burst into great leaping flames and the intercom went dead. As we rolled into the dive to starboard, the heavy vibration of a long burst fired from our mid-upper turret shook the instrument panel in front of me into a great blur; it was as though the instruments were mounted on the sounding strings of some giant lyre. With remarkable presence of mind, Bill ignored the tracers flying around his head, and moved to feather number three at the same time as he activated its fire extinguisher. I was dimly aware of his actions, and of the frightening flames that gushed out of the engine and were snatched back across the cowling as I rolled to begin my climb to port. The firing ceased as suddenly as it had started — on both sides. With some difficulty I levelled up, after a fashion, and tried to take stock of the situation. F Fox was sickeningly sluggish and unresponsive; but for the next two minutes that problem paled into insignificance as I struggled to stop her swift descent, and watched Bill fight to get number three feathered so that we could get the fire under control. We had been told frequently that a fuel-fed fire, blown against the interior of the wing by the slipstream, could eat right through the main spar in as little as two minutes. If the main spar went, our chances of getting out of the aircraft as it cartwheeled earthward would be remote. Bill was unable to coax the recalcitrant propeller to feather properly, although the blades did rotate to the point where the propeller was turning over at a low speed. Meantime J. B. had clambered back to find out what had happened in the rear of the aircraft. For all we knew, the four crew members behind the mid-upper might have abandoned the plane — or been killed. F Fox continued to lose height, and without warning number three began to wind up. In moments it was up past its safe maximum and was overspeeding with a terrifying banshee wail. As it screamed itself into hysteria, the fire, which had been dying down, flared up in all its fury again. Scared half out of my wits by the flames, and the
knowledge that they were only inches away from enough gasoline to blow us into eternity, I tried vainly to remember what one did with an overspeeding propeller. In a moment Bill suggested throttling back the other three, and I strained to pull F Fox’s nose up at the same time so that the overspeeding propeller would be carrying a substantial load. It worked. Like a screaming circular saw suddenly deprived of power the propeller began to slow down, its terrifying note gradually subsiding like some manic thing being quieted. As it sank back below normal speed, we shifted the load onto the other three engines, staring appraisingly at number three and trying to gauge whether that fire would kill us with an explosion. Although it was not extinguished, it had subsided again with the propeller, so I turned my attention momentarily to the task of coaxing F Fox to hold height. As though cursed with a devilish spirit of its own, number three began to overspeed again. I knew this nerve-wracking phenomenon, with its continually rising crescendo of shrieking sound was a condition which could not long endure. The propeller shaft would let go in a short time, and when that happened, in a Fortress, the propeller from number three would fly into, or perhaps through, the nose or cockpit. Despite the fact that the manoeuvre resulted in a partial stall which then lost us more precious altitude, I had no alternative but to throttle back again, haul the nose up, and try to force some load onto number three. As I did so, the flames were flaring above the cowling once more. The technique worked again, soothing the maddened outcry of the propeller and coaxing its speed back within a range the engine could tolerate. Again F Fox mushed down in a weary stall, the inevitable product of the unnaturally nose-high position coupled with the loss of power. Bill and I bent once more to the task of restoring the power very gradually, so as not to precipitate another runaway, and nursing the weary aircraft into a normal attitude. As we levelled up, the air around us was suddenly filled with a hail of tracers again, and once again I threw F Fox into a corkscrew. But this time we could only manage a travesty of the prescribed manoeuvre, and we would have died then and there but for the good shooting of Johnny Walker. A Ju 88, drawn by the irresistible sight of fire
aboard a wounded prey, had stalked us and closed to finish us off. But the German pilot had reckoned without Johnny Walker. Hollering into the dead intercom in a fruitless attempt to warn me, Johnny drew a careful bead on the German and, in the face of the fighter’s overpowering weight of fire, traded lead so accurately that the German was shortly forced to break off. F Fox had absorbed more punishment in this second combat, although nothing like what she had taken the first time. She had lost even more of her characteristic responsiveness, and her struggle to fend off the clutch of gravity was palpably less successful. Another result of the second attack, however, was that it forced us to dive again, and this in turn had immediately started number three winding up. Once more the fire flared wickedly, ugly tongues of flame visible from a great distance at night, and again we went through our scary exercise, stalling the sluggish aeroplane to get the screaming propeller back under control. The second attack, therefore, inflicted additional structural damage upon us, re-kindled the fire in number three, and cost us altitude we could not afford to give away. It did one other thing: it convinced me that it would be foolhardy to try to make our way through the main flak and searchlight defences over the target in the condition we were in. Night fighters too were clearly in the stream in force. The Ju 88 had picked us up within minutes of the first attack, and I felt it would be simply asking for it to count on escaping from a third attack in our present condition. Although we were now no more than ten minutes away from the target, I coaxed F Fox into a gentle turn and reversed our course. Bill went forward to get me a proper course from Sam, and again I surveyed the situation with what few crumbs of equanimity I could muster. Our most worrisome problem, apart from the smouldering fire which kept threatening to flare and spread, was the generally precarious performance of the aircraft. Flying on three engines with the fourth propeller properly feathered is one thing. It is quite another doing it with an engine which is windmilling and refuses to feather, and in an aeroplane which has been torn open and battered to the point where its aerodynamic efficiency has been seriously compromised. Pulling an aeroplane through the sky with an engine windmilling is much the same as pushing a stalled car while leaving it in gear. The drag is tremendous, and the net effect is to subtract and waste a substantial amount of your remaining power. When I turned F Fox about, we were down to 15,000 feet, having lost close to 7,000 feet in the two combats and the ensuing struggle with the burning engine. We were still losing height at about 500 – 700 feet per minute, were still without intercom, and were seriously limited as to manoeuvrability. As Bill and I were setting the remaining three engines to the most power we felt we could call upon them to deliver for a protracted period, and trying to trim the aircraft into the best attitude for its sorry condition, I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked round to see Hembrow, the German-speaking special wireless operator, standing just behind my seat. He looked dishevelled and more than slightly shaken. (In fact he had been slightly wounded, with a cannon splinter in the back of the shoulder.) His terse message registered indelibly on my brain as he raised his voice and called above the noise: “The wireless operator’s been hit … And I’ve been hit … And we all want to go home.” This trusting message, implying that I could somehow wash out the balance of the exercise, and ordain safe delivery to Bückling Hall despite fire, battle damage, and anything else that might follow, made me feel rather fatherly. I reached back and clapped him lightly on the shoulder and told him everything was okay, that we were heading for home. Then the first piece of good luck to come our way since takeoff manifested itself — the intercom came back on, although it remained intermittent and undependable. Actually it was not luck as it turned out, but good work by Stan, assisted by J. B. In a few minutes I had some knowledge of what had happened. Stan had been badly wounded, including at least two splinter wounds in the head which caused him to lose a lot of blood and subjected him to a great deal of pain. J. B. had promptly decided that Stan should be given an injection of morphine, and prepared to administer it; but Stan had insisted on struggling to repair the intercom before submitting to the injection. I hoped within the next few minutes to be able to make up my mind as to whether we would be likely to make it back across the North Sea or whether we should bail out and take our chances while we were over land.
It was not to be an easy decision. Time seemed almost to stand still, measured only by the intervals that elapsed between the repeated overspeedings of number three engine, which I came to loathe and fear. Time after time it went through its hellish performance, causing the flames to spring up fiercely again, and forcing us to lose precious height in each stall. I aged ten years, worrying about how long the starboard wing would stay on, and at one point ordered everyone to prepare to abandon the aircraft, so that they would at least have their chest packs on if F Fox came apart in the air. (It was at this juncture that Bill discovered that my chute had disappeared in the jinking.) However, as we neared the coast, I could not defer the decision any longer. I had to make up my mind whether we would try to make it across the North Sea or whether it would be better to have the crew abandon the aircraft, bailing out while we were over land. We had fallen from 22,000 to 6,000 feet by this time, but in the denser air F Fox was now finding her strength again, and had almost ceased losing altitude. I decided the whole crew should try to make it to England, and got Sam to work out a course for Woodbridge, on the coast in Suffolk, one of our three big crash dromes. Over the water I told Bert to get the proper colours of the period ready for the Very pistol, thinking of our troublesome intercom and radio. Bill and I now felt justified in making a very slight reduction in power to ease the strain on the three good engines, which had laboured nobly but were showing the effort in their cylinder head temperatures. After a further tense wait the English coast appeared ahead, and in a short time we were approaching Woodbridge. Sam had brought us to it as straight as a homing pigeon, and my biggest remaining worry, or so I thought, was that at any moment the main spar on the starboard side might let go. I called the tower repeatedly as we approached, and although our reception of their response was extremely disjointed, I gathered that we were cleared to land. To make doubly sure, I told Bert to fire the colours of the period several times and follow with a signal indicating that we had wounded aboard. I flashed the appropriate letters on our recognition light, then began to concentrate on the all-important task of getting F Fox safely on the ground. I kept remembering that the main spar behind number
three had been subjected to the effects of what amounted to a giant blow torch playing on it intermittently for an hour and three-quarters, and as I pictured its possible condition in my mind’s eye, I was at pains to avoid increasing the wing loading with any steep turns in the circuit, much as I wanted to get on the ground and far away from the 2,000 gallons of gasoline and that seemingly unquenchable fire smouldering a foot or two in front of it. I offered up a silent prayer that the undercarriage would come down when I pressed the selector. F Fox had absorbed a lot of cannon shells — I had felt them striking home — and there was a distinct possibility that the electric motors or cables which activated the undercarriage mechanism had been damaged. I had not dared try it earlier, seeking to avoid both the additional drag and the vibration it produced swinging into place. Now was the time to find out. Bert fired another signal from the Very pistol, and after ordering the rest of the crew, with the exception of Bill, to take Stan and get into their crash positions, I turned gently toward the flarepath and flipped the undercarriage selector switch. Immediately I could hear the whine and then feel the reassuring drag effect indicating that the wheels were dropping out of their nacelles; the undercarriage motors seemed to be okay. In a few moments the green light on the instrument panel glowed: undercarriage down and locked. I stole a glance away from the flare path and peered into the gloom below the inboard engine nacelle on my side. The port wheel looked all right. Bill was having a more difficult time on his side. The smoke and intermittent showers of sparks made it difficult to see anything in the darkness. But in a few moments he straightened up in his seat and gave me a thumbs-up. I prepared to make the best landing I could. We touched down very lightly, and for a few brief seconds I began to relax. But our troubles were not over. One of the German fighters had shot our right tire into useless pulp. F Fox vibrated roughly and began sinking lower and lower on her wounded side. I had a terrible vision of the starboard wingtip catching and the aircraft cartwheeling into one final detonation. In a second or two we were down to the hub on the right wheel, and beginning to veer to that side as the hub dragged more and more heavily. I tried to correct the swing with a touch of brake, only to discover that we had no brakes — our hydraulics had been shot out. Immediately I applied a burst of throttle from the starboard outer to see if I could straighten our course that way, but F Fox was beyond responding; she hurtled on, continuing to veer to the right. I sat clutching the control column with both hands and practically bending the rudder bar with my foot as I tried vainly to check the swing with maximum left rudder. Out of the darkness 50 yards in front of us, the silhouette of a Lancaster suddenly loomed up directly in our path. As I threw my left arm over my face we collided with the other aircraft at 75 miles an hour, severing it completely a few feet to the rear of its mid-upper turret with our right wing. F Fox spun around violently for two or three seconds and shuddered to a halt a short distance further on. Bill and I both snatched at the master switch to cut everything off, then snapped our belts free and turned speedily to open the side windows to escape. My window jammed. I gripped it fiercely and tugged twice more. It stuck fast. Bill had wrenched his window open and was disappearing through it, so I flung myself to the right side of the cockpit to follow him out. His foot slipped as he thrashed clear, and his heavy flying boot came back into my face like the kick of a Clydesdale. I never even felt it, but twisted through the window like a limbo dancer and sprang rearward from the battered starboard wing like an Olympic athlete. Fast as Bill and I were, the others had had a few seconds head start and had been covering ground. They had boosted Stan out the rear door and were many yards ahead of us, running for all they were worth. When Bill and I had sprinted 60 or 70 yards I turned for a moment to look at F Fox, and remember thinking that the person who had warned us about the vulnerability of main spars had clearly had no idea of how rugged the Fortress’s was. True, the outer 25 feet of F Fox’s wing had been splayed open in the violent collision with the Lancaster; but the centre section was still in place and still intact. I turned to join the other members of the crew, who were now 30 or 40 yards further on. As I panted up to them, I called out to J.B.: “Where’s Stan?” He motioned behind him to a dark bundle lying on the ground. I hurried over and took a look. Stan seemed to me to be unconscious although his eyes were half open. Even in the semi-darkness I could see that his face was as white as parchment and his hair ominously matted. “Oh the poor bastard … he’s had it,” I said. This was not an example of my best bedside manner, of course; had I not been labouring under a considerable strain myself I should not have been so tactless. My sympathy and concern were genuine. (Although rather heavily drugged, Stan was still aware of what was going on, and heard my pessimistic prognosis. It made him mad, he told me later; but not as mad as he got a short time afterwards in the station hospital, when a chap wandered in beside him by mistake, saw Stan, and immediately began to throw up.) Off to the side another Lancaster, apparently in dire straits, was emulating our performance, firing Very lights as it swung toward the funnel. After our own experience, we kept a wary eye on the Lanc — which also proceeded to swing out of control on landing and head in the general direction of F Fox and the Lancaster we had clobbered. As the ambulance came hunting for us, the last card of the hand was turned over: the Tannoy gave vent to a strident announcement warning all ground crew to keep clear of the Lancaster we had just cut in half, advising in stentorian tones that it had a 12,000 pound high explosive bomb aboard. I peered across to where the truncated Lancaster squatted, now pointing skyward at an unnaturally sharp angle, and guessed thankfully that we must have missed the bomb by about two feet as we slashed through the aircraft. The third aircraft had meanwhile piled in a short distance from ours. Shaken, I climbed into the second van and we were speedily borne to sick quarters to see the MO. If you were involved in a crash, even if you walked — or ran — away from it, the rule was that you had to be given a medical inspection by the MO. In fact, the inspection varied considerably in scope and thoroughness, depending on what had happened and how busy the doctor was. We had to wait some time while they began looking after Stan. When it was my turn, the doctor called me in, looked at me, and said: “Were you hurt?” “No, not a scratch,” I said. “You may not have a scratch, but you look as though you could use this,” he rejoined, pouring what looked like
about four ounces of service rum into a graduated beaker. “Toss that off,” he said. I took the medication as directed, and was unable to get any breath for approximately two minutes. But he was a better doctor than this rough-and-ready sounding treatment suggested. In half an hour my incipient case of the shakes — which he had doubtless spotted — was gone. After everyone had been thus inspected, we went over to the mess hall for our customary reward of bacon and eggs. As I walked toward the steam table, a pilot standing with a small group ahead of us detached himself and came rather uncertainly toward me. “You the pilot of that Fortress?” he asked. “Yes I am,” I said, “who are you?” “I’m the pilot of the Lancaster you chopped in half,” he said with a little laugh, sticking out his hand. “We were standing underneath the kite when you swung and came heading for us. We had a 12,000 pounder sitting in the bomb bay over our heads. I’ll bet we raced out of there faster than you flew in.” While we waited to pick up our food, he told me that they had been attacked by a fighter just before they reached the target. In the course of the combat the fighter had shot out the Lanc’s hydraulics, effectively preventing him from opening his bomb doors and getting rid of his load. His crew had been on the ground only a few minutes when they saw our Very lights and watched F Fox come in to land. Like us, they had thought everything was all right when we touched down safely; but in a moment they had realized the peril they were in. I could imagine the thoughts that went through their minds as they saw the lights of F Fox curving through the night towards their huge bomb. I suppose that for ten seconds they were more intensely frightened than I was — difficult as that is to visualize.
After we had eaten, we were directed to an empty Nissen hut not too far away. For an hour I lay on a cot vainly trying to relax and get some sleep; but my mind was too full of the night’s events. I kept re-living the fire, the fighter attacks, and the crash. Eventually I decided to get up and go for a walk. I rose quietly, taking care not to disturb the others, and tiptoed out the door. Outside, I could see that we were only a few hundred yards from the field, and all at once I felt the urge to go back and see F Fox. I had walked no more than 50 yards when I heard a slight sound and turned to see the rest of the crew strung out behind me in Indian file. We found F Fox without any trouble. Now she sat peacefully in the grey dawn light, the tumult of her final hours — for one glance told us she would never fly again — all too easy to recapture from her dreadful appearance. Under her wing I sank onto my knees and thanked God for bringing us home alive. No one offered any comment on the Skipper’s unusual reverence. The centre section of the fuselage was riddled with bullet holes, convincing testimony of the German pilots’ marksmanship. Twenty or 30 feet of the trailing edge of the starboard wing had been ripped open and the metal pleated into accordion folds. The black rectangles of the self-sealing tanks were visible; indeed the starboard Tokyo tank lay incongruously out on the ground. The cowling of number three engine was blackened and burned, and the engine itself thoroughly charred. One propeller blade, standing vertical, had a sizeable and almost perfectly circular hole punched cleanly through it just above the level of the cowling. The sight of that clean hole through thick steel gave me a new idea of the power of the fighters’ cannon shells. An almost ludicrous touch was part of the sorry spectacle: the long, cylindrical master unit of the Lancaster’s DR compass hung crazily on our starboard outer propeller, snatched from its mount as our propeller had flailed through the Lancaster’s fuselage. After 15 sobering minutes we wended our way back to the Nissen hut. In response to a message that had gone from Woodbridge control to Oulton Johnny Gilbert arrived later in the morning to fly us home. En route he told us that Johnny Cassan and his crew had gone missing on the Gelsenkirchen raid, and there had been some confusion at Oulton as to which crew had made it back to Woodbridge and which had failed to return. Answering Gilbert’s questions, I ran over the highlights of what had happened to us, starting with the trap the first Lancaster had unwittingly sprung on us, and ending with the demolition derby at Woodbridge.

Edited September 24, 2017 by Gunsmith86

[56RAF_Roblex]

Don't be confused by the term 'Radar'. In those early RAF nightfighters we are talking about an highly experienced, sometimes civilian,  operator trying to decipher what was little more than two wiggly lines on oscilloscopes.  He could just about work out that there seems to be 'something' very approximately 1000yds ahead and possibly a bit higher.   From there he could only hope the pilot might see something in the gloom which usually happened at very short range.    It was just as hard for the gunners; I remember reading a mosquito pilots bio where he described getting so close to the Lanc rear gunner that he could see him clearly but the gunner did not see him despite the fact that he was obviously  trying to keep a good lookout for enemy fighters.

[Gunsmith86]

For a better kwnoleg about Radar you may want to read this:

http://www.cdvandt.org/Lichtenstein%20radars.pdf

 

and

 

https://web.archive.org/web/20061002113717/http://www.skylighters.org/radar/index.html

 

and

 

 

Radar Development In Germany

http://www.radarworld.org/germany.html

 

Radar Development In England

http://www.radarworld.org/england.html

 

Radar Development In America

http://www.radarworld.org/america.html

Edited September 24, 2017 by Gunsmith86

[Jade_Monkey]

Oh boy, so much reading to do!

 

Many thanks for all the resources!

[unreasonable]

And... back OT.  A fascinating one, like night fighting generally.

 

Bomber's Moon.  The night is dark, the land completely blacked out, urban areas covered with heavy smog from coal burning domestic and industrial fires.  Without moonlight the bombers sometimes cannot even hit the right country, never mind find a point target. Even with the various high tech gadgets. 

 

So often light conditions are not as bad as you might think, especially if you can silhouette a target against the sky or high cloud. Nightfighters like to be below the bombers for this reason: plus below the bombers they are hard to pick out against the ground.  (Plus the Germans developing their nasty upwards firing cannons).

[indiaciki]

There's no MP server that has night conditions. I suggested the same at the TAW thread. Would be great.

Edited September 25, 2017 by indiaciki

[unreasonable]

There's no MP server that has night conditions. I suggested the same at the TAW thread. Would be great.

 

There used to be one that had a pre-dawn scenario - was it Eagles' nest? On of my most enjoyable sorties in my limited MP career was on that - low side attack at two LW types flying just above the vapour trail level while chattering together on TS.    But I think mostly people complained that it was too dark.

 

The trouble is it is very hard to get night right in a game - I think the developers are trying to get the light right according to what a meter might read, while the human eye is a very different thing. Night vision adjusts with time, is ruined by bright lights and varies tremendously between people. The developers also cannot control how you change your gamma and contrast settings.  However hard I tried in RoF I could not get a moonlit night scenario to look right: too little contrast.  BoS might work better if moonlight reflects well, have not tried it yet.

[hames123]

I have always thought that this game could do radar much like Atlantic Fleet doea sonar. A constant pinging, with a green circle at the rough position of the enemy that radar has found. For this game, we could do away with the pinging, but the usuage of something like Atlantic Fleets green circle could help simulate the inaccuracy of radar.