Night bombers interception in Western Europe in 1944

"ian maclure" wrote in message ...
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:42:31 +0000, WalterM140 wrote:

[snip]

Hitler largely refused to allow German night fighters to
operate over England.
This was one of his misguided "brain waves"; he also didn't see the point of
shooting down bombers where the people couldn't see them. The few times
this happened any way, the Germans had good succcess.

It doesn't seem irrational to me. Protecting the secrets of German
electronics equipement would seem to be a key priority. The Germans
used various techniques: multiple frequencies, special modulation
schemes (chirping) to improve resisetence to jamming.



Operating intruders over Britain as night fighters would be
a good way to lose a lot of them. Mosquitoes and other high
performance aircraft vectored by radar would have shredded
them.

German nightfighters if equiped with tail warning radar eg those with
the SN2R or variants of the Neptune tail warning radar generally did
very well at avoiding Mosquito interception. For instance Ju 88 with
SN2R outperformed the He 219 which was much faster but had only the
SN2.

The problem the Germans had in combat was that the range of the German
radars was limited to the altitude of the aircraft since the beam was
very broad. (this also picking up the ground, jamming and
window/chaff) while the Allied aircraft could play the deadly game
down to the ground. The situation was changing from Feburary 1945
with the introduction of the FuG 244 microwave radars into Ju88 G7
series aircraft for troop testing.




IBM

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The problem the Germans had in combat was that the range of the German
radars was limited to the altitude of the aircraft since the beam was
very broad.

Not true - that was a limitation, but Nachtjägers didn't see AI in the same way
as Allied NF, so that limitation wasn't viewed as an Achilles Heal, more of an
annoyance.

They considered AI to be an arrow in the quiver, not their primary search tool.
US and RAF crews reporting a "bent gadget" turned around and went home; German
crews just turned it off and continued on their mission.

v/r
Gordon
====(A+C====
USN SAR

Its always better to lose -an- engine, not -the- engine.