German night fighters patrolling their "Himmelbett" boxes. An estimated 115 night fighters were up this night (i'm not adding 115 night fighters in blender), but all "chained" to their boxes. By this point the Luftwaffe was starting to bring systems online to control multiple fighters in each box instead of one, which probably would have ended RAF bombers Commands offensive as 1 fighter per box had already been causing them 4.5% losses in this period. Several boxes did have 2 or 3 night fighters operating this night, but it was still a work in progress when WINDOW destroyed the whole rigid CGI system. Though German freelance night fighting would eventually take over, it was far less efficient and then the rigid CGI system. Bomber Command's "fear" of the GCI system is why they kept the bomber stream into 1944 since they recognized the German Freelance fighter system needed 5-6x more night fighters to achieve comparable results to what the German system had done from March to July 1943.
Some search lights over Hamburg. The bombing will be shown on a more detailed map so this is just for some flavor:
Weather - Cloud over the channel apparently. I'll have the clouds disappear at some point since rendering times go from 1 frame every .5 seconds to 1 frame every 30 seconds with volumes. But I like to show/talk about the weather since it was a very important part in why raids often succeeded or failed. In this case Bomber Command had ideal bombing conditions that night. The clouds broke up before they got to Hamburg and they had clear skies for path-finding and bombing.
So the route map is done for the first raid.
Flying in showing weather, radar boxes and night fighters.
Radar boxes and weather "Turned off" at this point in the animation to improve rendering times and show window and bombers over Hamburg.
Bombers heading home and loss markers (orange - RAF, Green - Luftwaffe)