Later war UK radar defences.

Don't forget the impact of intelligence as well.

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British Intelligence was extraordinarily efficient and far better organised than German; that is not to say the Abwehr wasn't organised, but the usual issues of inter-service rivalries, personality clashes etc that tended to dog the Nazis affected German intel distribution as well. The Brits were better at collecting and disseminating intel from different sources and were more freer in how that intel was distributed.

davebender said:

Not luck. Just a bit of logical deduction.

Bari was primary supply port for Foggia airfield complex. On any given day some of the ships will almost certainly be carrying aircraft bombs and aviation fuel.

Mustard gas was an unexpected bonus but the seaport would have been wrecked almost as bad without it.

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Yes luck.

There were almost 35 ships within the harbour, of which just three were munitions ships and two were tankers. Of the five or six ships actually hit in the raid - hard to know for sure - two of those were munitions ships and one was a loaded with 8300 tons of av gas. The John Harvey, which held the mustard gas, may or may not have hit directly, but may have been set alight by the debris from the John Bascom. The detonations of the Bascom and Harvey were responsible for much of the destruction within the harbour itself.

Hitting two of the three munitions ships, getting a sympathetic detonation from a third, and also hitting one of the two tankers is damned lucky in my book.

Statistically they were lucky to hit 5 or 6 out of 35 ships (not my numbers). Never mind that they actually hit those particular vessels
Cheers
Steve

Its a good question about the efficiency of British late war radars. I dont know about the defensive networks, but the british were pushing ground based radar for offensive operations to the absolute limits. OBOE was essentially a beam riding system that allowed very accurate bombing to be undertaken out to about 300 miles at the wars end.

It had a problem in that the numbers of aircraft it could direct simulataneously was limited, nevertheless it offered a very accurate solution for night bombing


Introduction of OBOE and H2S

davebender said:

Not luck. Just a bit of logical deduction.

Bari was primary supply port for Foggia airfield complex. On any given day some of the ships will almost certainly be carrying aircraft bombs and aviation fuel.

Mustard gas was an unexpected bonus but the seaport would have been wrecked almost as bad without it.

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Did the Luftwaffe have anymore successes at Bari?

parsifal said:

Its a good question about the efficiency of British late war radars.

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It was a well developed system by 1944, still based on the original concept, but the Home Chain and other reporting radar stations (including come GCI and Fighter Direction (FD) stations) were far more numerous.
It was a sort of grand son of Dowding's original system.
Radar reporting stations passed plots by telephone to their parent filter room where they were displayed on the familiar plotting tables. The filter rooms then broadcast the filtered information to Fighter Command, to fighter group and sector operations rooms, to coastal Royal Observer Corps (ROC) centres and some coastal AA operations rooms.
Most reporting radars were in the Home Chain and used CH (AMES Type 1) CHL (AMES Type 2) and CHEL (AMES Type 14) sets. Some radar control stations also "told" tracking information into filter rooms. These were GCI stations (AMES Type 7,11,13,14,21 or 26 radars) and some FD stations (AMES Type 16, 24).
Tracked aircraft could be identified in three ways. First by IFF, easiest but not always reliable. It could be supported by W/T or R/T fixes on friendly aircraft. Second was the procedural method operated by the Movement Liaison Officer, whereby the track of friendly aircraft was set against pre-arranged flight paths. Finally the position of all friendly fighter aircraft was known if they were under ground control.
It was a well developed system and the essential structure bears the DNA both of Dowding's original system and the system still in operation today.
Cheers
Steve

It's interesting to note that even with the far more powerful/efficient radar systems currently available, the reporting times and time to intercept incoming hostiles is about the same as it was in 1940 because of the relative speeds of aircraft versus the range of the radar - this shows that by the mid 1940s the systems in place were essentially as good as they could be given the technology available.

True, though the modern system is far more extensive territorially due to the speed and reliability of communications and of course NATO.
Cheers
Steve