Luftwaffe fighter defence organisation

(Jakob Whitfield) wrote in message . com...
Cheers all for the helpful suggestions; some I can easily find, for
others I think I may have to make a trip to St. Pancras...

Having looked at some of the suggestions, I'm still searching for a
diagram/description of the information flow in the defences.

E.g. Battle of Britain

Chain Home station - filter room - group control room - sector
airfield - friendlies vectored onto enemy a/c

(This is probably wrong, but the principle remains)

I know that originally Luftwaffe night fighters were tied to one
particular radar station: what, for instance was the chain of
information and command from the radar to the plane?

Thanks again,

Jakob

Early on the organisation didn't exist and Luftwaffe the Navy and Army
all controlled their own areas that did not integrate very well.

Kammhuber eventualy came up with a system (which he was never allowed
to build except for experiments) in which the whole of Germany was
integrated by TV run over cables.

In most cases fighter were directed by controllers siting in a cinema
like arrangment of chairs in front of a large vertical glass screen on
which markers were moved or points of light were moved manually to
represnt various types of contact or infomation form the various
sensors: Freya, Wurzburg, Jagdschloss, contact aircraft (primitve
AWACS type aircraft) and visual and accoiustic sightings.

Becuase of interference by British jamming of Audio the
Bernhard/Berhardine system tranmited a ticker tape style telemetary
over a jam resistan link. Bernhard/Bernhardine also provided highly
jam resistant naviagtional and position data to the nightfighters.
It came in quite late in the war.

Despite jaming the German anti-jaming methodus such as Wurzlaus (a
doppler style system) and other measures usually retained enough
performance to allow some interceptions albeit at such reduced range
the number of target for which their was enogh warning to intercept
was much reduced. The biggest problem was often not jamed radar but
an inability to communicate to the aircraft due to jamed voice;
someting which Bernhard/Bernhardine telemetary system solved. Also
becuase of the slow speed of the German aircraft they often couldn't
catch the bombers after being distracted by diversionary raids before
running out of fuel.


Bernhard/Bernhardine becuase of its navigational and telemetary
methods might have evolved towards a fully automatic controlled
interception if its telemetarty could be interfaced to a the
nighfighters autopilot and weapons firing computer.