German night intruder missions vs American air bases in England

pinsog said:

Seems to me that would have worked once, then the next time they try it the airfield has a bunch of 40mm Bofors and M16 halftracks (the quad 50 halftracks) and a bunch of German nightfighters would become lawn decorations.

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Who is to say they try it against the same airfield? The Brits did not have enough AAA to cover all airfields like that, especially in 1942, as they didn't even have enough to defend their cities.

Airframes said:

B*ll*cks! Read and research the full history behind the 'Battle of the Beams' - perhaps then you'll discover why, and for what reasons, many Luftwaffe night raids got through.

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Where do you suggest looking? There is a lot of misleading or outright incorrect information out there, especially in general histories that accept 'official' claims, like that of R.V Jones, at face value without looking into contradictory information.

Asymmetric warfare.

By striking airfields at random Britain will be required to defend all of them. If Germany can accomplish that with a small number of intruder aircraft then they come out ahead.

There were times that German air crew mistook the Bristol Channel for the Thames. They are over 100 miles apart and point in opposite directions.
Yes the Germans used navigation systems to find their way over Britain. Often used by pathfinder or target marking aircraft against CITIES which had not moved in 300-1000 years. City is how many miles across? How big is even a bomber airfield? The size of a small neighborhood? 0r 10-12 blocks or ? If it is under construction is was a farmers field just a few weeks or a few months ago and while aerial photos are pretty good that is all there is to go on. Adjust the Beam system to hit a point 2 to 2/2 miles north north west of the village of Lower Swansdale by the Heath??

I Like this bit "Otherwise Luftwaffe bombing raids against seaports such as Liverpool and London wouldn't have been so effective."

Just maybe they were effective because on most nights you can find cities on the coast and rivers. Following the Thames to London isn't exactly the navigation feat of the decade. Finding Liverpool isn't that had either.
1. Fly over the Middle of England.
2. Find Irish sea.
3. Look for part of the coast line that runs north south for about 25 miles,
4. If it meets a stretch of coast line that runs almost east west for almost 40 miles at a near right angle Liverpool is just about 2 miles outside the corner.

Bombing London shouldn't hard. Bombing an an Airfield is like trying to bomb Hyde park with any bombs hitting Kensington gardens being a wide miss.

BTW. weren't they fitting IFF to a number of British planes by then? Groups of German planes stooging around the English countryside are going to be tracked and have night fighters vectored onto them. Maybe the Night fighters find then and maybe they don't but British airspace was getting to be an unfriendly place for German aircraft by 1942. It was getting pretty unfriendly in the late spring of 1941.

One of the Germans' biggest problems was post raid reconnaissance - the lack of this was demonstrated amply during the Battle of Britain when attacks were made on the same airfields day after day although the LW thought they were bombing somewhere else. Its easy to say "lets bomb a bunch of airfields at night over unlit Lincolnshire/ Yorkshire/East Anglia" etc, but how does LW High Command assess what damage is being done where, if effective post-raid reconnaissance is not being carried out? As shown on those maps, Britain was a floating aircraft carrier moored off the coast of Europe; potentially an enormous target for raiders, but if not finding the airfields is not a problem, there is still the effort of finding out which ones had been categorised as unusable or repairable so aircraft are not sent back to the same targets again and again.

Besides, if raids like this became a threat, the British would disperse their bombers to satellites as they did their fighters during the BoB. Based on the sheer number of bomber bases that were constructed during the 42-43-44 period, it would be a huge stretch, if not impossible for the LW to render enough of them unusable to destabilise the entire Allied bombing effort.

The allies never really knocked out the German airfields in France and Holland at all in 1943 and first 1/2 of 1944. And that was usually with multiple groups of medium bombers hitting the target on a frequent basis.

What makes you think the LW using fewer aircraft could accomplish even more over the UK?

Three more things for consideration.
1. The range at which you can use "beams" for navigation is limited by the altitude of the aircraft. While the beams do not follow the exact curvature of the earth, Flying low level to avoid radar and AA could very well put the raiders below the altitude needed to pick up the radio signals.
2. It is one thing to slip an occasional intruder into a returning bomber stream, lack of IFF may be put down as an equipment malfunction delaying night fighter response. It is another thing to try sending in 12-24 plane strike forces and expecting the defenders not to notice or react.
3. a note on the increasingly unfriendly British skies.
a."...saw the number of enemy aircraft destroyed begin to rise steadily during the late winter and spring of 1941 - three in January, four in
February, twenty-two in March, forty-eight in March and ninety-six in May. It should be noted, however, that these numbers represented the combined figures for radar-equipped fighters and catseye's
day-fighters (Hurricanes and Defiants) operating in the night role."
b. "During February 1942, Beaufighters of Nos.29, 68, 141 604 Squadrons, were converted to AI.VII, with the radar enclosed in a 'thimble' radome developed by the Bristol Aeroplane Company"
I don't know if that is all the aircraft those squadrons or if they converted a few aircraft in each squadron as "trainers" with total conversion taking a while longer.

While German aircraft could operate of England in 1942 by night it would be without anywhere near the freedom they enjoyed in 1940 or the early Spring of 1941.

While German aircraft could operate of England in 1942 by night it would be without anywhere near the freedom they enjoyed in 1940 or the early Spring of 1941.

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I agree. Which is why I would keep late war intruder missions small. It's not easy to pick out a handful of intruders operating among hundreds of friendly aircraft using WWII technology.

Actually it was. The planes were equipped with IFF transponders. A single plane in group or even several planes in a group might have equipment failures. All the planes in a small group having equipment failures at the same time is too suspicious. The US was using IFF with it's carrier aircraft in February of 1942. They used up a lot of fuel vectoring in the CAP on friendly aircraft with malfunctioning equipment but they found a few snoopers too.

Shortround6 said:

Actually it was. The planes were equipped with IFF transponders. A single plane in group or even several planes in a group might have equipment failures. All the planes in a small group having equipment failures at the same time is too suspicious. The US was using IFF with it's carrier aircraft in February of 1942. They used up a lot of fuel vectoring in the CAP on friendly aircraft with malfunctioning equipment but they found a few snoopers too.

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Wouldn't RAF night fighters often make a radio call asking for a signal from the plane they were about to shoot down, in case the aircraft was friendly but without IFF?

IFF and WWII era radar systems in general were far from perfect.

Yes they were, but depending on the enemy IFF system to be so defective that they ignore it ( anybody got a case of a plane triggering a POSITIVE response from an IFF system without the proper IFF equipment) to allow intruders through is not very good planning. The failures of equipment resulted in unidentified bogies. Blips on the screen were either friendly ( The IFF was working) or unidentified and needed investigating (visual identification) to separate the friendly with bad equipment from actual enemy aircraft. Unknowns were not going to be allowed to go on their merry way without some form of investigation.

wuzak said:

Wouldn't RAF night fighters often make a radio call asking for a signal from the plane they were about to shoot down, in case the aircraft was friendly but without IFF?

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I read a memoir by a Mosquito night fighter pilot and in it he says they would make a call of "break right" before firing so any other aircraft on the same frequency would then break indicating that it was a friendly (or not). He mentions it as he was distracted once and broke left after a call was given which was followed by a call of "I said right idiot" so he knew that it was him who had been tergeted.

Erich said:

the short ugly Austrian

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Whose that then?

Hitler's height is variously given as between 1.72 and 1.74,depending who,or which record,you believe. The average height for his 1886-1890 Austrian birth cohort was 167.97. Hitler was many objectionable things but he was well above average height amongst his peers.

Pedantic? Yes,but historical facts are important.

Steve