The only course open to us now is to make an assault by fire on the barbarians under cover of night.
Sun Tzu
One byproduct of warfare, horrible as it may be, is that technology tends to make rapid advances. Wartime necessity drives innovation and governments are willing to pour money into any idea that might just give them an edge over the enemy.
That was certainly the case during the Second World War. We went from the last of the biplanes to the first jets in roughly a five year span. Electronics made similar leaps and bounds.
The problem is as old as warfare itself. How do you find the enemy, preferably without being found yourself?
This is by no means a definitive work. Many fine books have been written on the subject. For starters I might suggest "Confounding the Reich" by Martin Bowman and "Bomber Command" by Max Hastings. A fictional but very accurate account of a night bombing raid can be found in the excellent "Bomber" by Len Deighton.
I'd also recommend the 1993 indy film Map of the Human Heart. In addition to being a great movie it has a pretty realistic depiction of a German fighter attack on a Lancaster over Dresden.
So why fight at night? The answer is fairly obvious, it's a lot harder for someone to see you at night. It works both ways, however. It's a lot harder to see your target at night.
Both the RAF and Luftwaffe conducted nighttime bombing raids. Early daylight raids by the RAF had taken horrific losses. British bombers were generally not as well defended as their American counterparts. A B-17 was defended by as many as thirteen .50 caliber machine guns. A Lancaster could carry twice the bomb load but only had eight relatively weak .303 machine guns for protection. Bomber Command quickly switched to night bombing for the rest of the war (with some exceptions).
Lancaster on a night bombing raid over Hamburg. With enough light over the target area, even day fighters could attack the bombers.
Obviously if the enemy is bombing you at night you'll want some way to stop them. This is where radar and night fighters start to come into the picture.
Radar was a brand new technology at the beginning of World War II. Most people probably know by this point that we detected the Japanese strike force at Pearl Harbor on radar - and mistook them for our own aircraft. Likewise the British "Chain Home" radar sites gave early warning of German attacks during the Battle of Britain.
Detecting the enemy is only half the battle. Now you need some way to stop him. That's where night fighters came in.
So what's a night fighter exactly? The textbook definition would be a fighter plane specially modified to operate at night. It goes back to World War I when the British modified Sopwith Camels (and other types) to intercept German Zeppelins at night. If you recall, a Sopwith Camel had machine guns mounted in front of the pilot. At night the muzzle flash would blind him so they moved the guns to the top of the wing. They also modified some aircraft with a machine gun that fired upwards at a 45 degree angle into the belly of the Zeppelin - we'll see this idea come up again later.
In the early days of World War II most night fighters were simply day fighters that happened to be operating at night. When the British first started large scale night bombing, the Germans countered with radar and searchlights.
German searchlights were used to illuminate targets for flak batteries.
Once an RAF bomber was found by a searchlight, other searchlights would pile on and the bomber would be well illuminated for any Luftwaffe fighters that were in the area. There were some attempts at aircraft mounted searchlights but these never worked very well.
US 9th Bomb Squadron emblem depicts crossed searchlights spelling out "IX"
As radar sets became miniaturized enough to fit in an aircraft, we start to see the rise of dedicated night fighters. They were fielded by all sides in one form or another. Most World War II night fighters shared some common characteristics:
1. They were usually large, twin-engine fighters or even converted medium bombers.
2. Most had a primitive airborne radar and a dedicated radar operator. The radar set usually had a bunch of goofy looking antennas that look like they came off a 1950s ranch house. Those must been fun in icing conditions.
3. Lots and lots of guns. The bigger the better. A lot of time and effort was spent getting into position for a shot and you wanted to make the first one count.
Bf-110 night fighter with its large "Lichtenstein" radar array. Also note the covers over the exhaust stacks to hide the tell-tale flames. Armament varied but four machine guns plus two cannon was pretty typical for these.
A night fighter attack wasn't so much a dogfight as a cat stalking its prey. The night fighter would normally be vectored towards the target by ground based radar. Once it was in the general vicinity, the target would hopefully be spotted by the fighter's own radar and finally the good old Mark I eyeball.
From accounts I've read, they tried to get as close as possible to the target before firing. Since a lot of planes tend to look alike on a dark night, they often got close enough to count the flames from the target's exhaust stacks. The target's first warning that a night fighter was in the neighborhood might be cannon shells tearing through the fuselage.
Night fighter version of a JU-88 bomber. Speed and firepower were more important than maneuverability to a night fighter so many were based on medium bombers.
I can only imagine what it must have been like for a gunner on Lancaster. Sitting in the dark for hours on end. Staring into the blackness trying to spot the tell-tail exhaust flames of a night-fighter stalking them. Some gunners actually cut a hole in the plexiglass of their turrets to improve their vision. This made an already cold place even colder, but the slightest advantage might make the difference between life and death.
A Lancaster gunner trains against a Spitfire.
British tactics came down to a certain grim arithmetic. They figured that statistically the German radars and ground controllers could only target so many bombers in a certain time period. By concentrating the bombers into a "bomber stream" they could hopefully saturate the German defenses and get most of them through on any given night.
The tactic was successful, but loss rates were still heavy. RAF Lancasters suffered roughly a 5% loss rate on night bombing missions. Loss rates between US daylight missions and RAF nighttime missions were roughly equal. Likewise bombing accuracy, on average, was about the same. With rare exceptions "precision" bombing in WWII existed more in theory than in practice.
What follows is a series of technological counter-measures and counter-counter-measures. The British would come up with some inventive way to foil the night fighters and the Germans would turn around and use it to their advantage.
The first technical fix was a tail-warning radar for British bombers, called "Monica". Basically it was a small radar that looked rearwards and could warn of a German night fighter approaching. The only problem with this is anything that transmits a signal can itself be detected.
To counter Monica, the Germans developed a radar-detector (FuG 227) for their night fighters that would allow them to home in on the Monica beam. This is similar to the radar detectors some people use to warn of speed traps.
Some US fighters had a tail warning radar similar to Monica. This is from a P-51.
The FuG 227 was so effective that the RAF ended up removing the tail-warning radar from their bombers once they figured out what the Germans were doing.
Not to be outdone the British added their own radar detector, called "Boozer", to their bombers. This could detect German ground based and airborne radars. It worked to a point but there were so many radars being pointed at the RAF bombers that it gave off a lot of false alarms.
If the hapless bomber crew detected the German night fighter, or survived the initial onslaught, their best defensive tactic was called a "corkscrew". This was a violent descending turn that made the bomber hard to track by
fighter or searchlight. It must have been rough on the guys in back, but better than getting shot.
Defensive "corkscrew" or "make the navigator puke" maneuver used by British bombers.
Corkscrew from the German perspective.
The British had some success against German radars by dropping large bundles of tinfoil strips. This was called "Window" by the British. Today we call it "chaff" and it's still useful. The clouds of tinfoil would show up as a large blob on radar. The Germans would still suspect that a Bomber stream was in the neighborhood, but it would be tough to pick out individual aircraft. It could also be dropped as a decoy to draw the defenders off the main attack force.
A cloud of "window" or chaff being dropped by a Lancaster. We carried copious amounts of chaff on the B-52.
Another technical fix was the development of radar jammers to counter the German airborne radars. The Germans, of course, then developed a version of the FuG 227 that could home in on the radar jammers. Even today, turning on a jammer can be a mixed blessing as some missiles have a home-on-jam feature (nasty).
The next British innovation was to adapt their H2S bombing radar to detect aircraft as well.
I won't spend too much time on H2S, but suffice it to say that it was way ahead of its time. It can be considered the grandaddy of bombing radars. RAF Vulcans were still using a version of it as late as 1993. What we had in the B-52 could be considered a distant cousin.
British scientists, being a clever bunch, figured out that the H2S could also detect German night fighters, at least those that were lower than the bomber (the antenna was under the belly), out to about 30 miles. The faster moving German night fighters could usually be picked out from the slower bombers.
Radio Operator's station on a Lancaster. The round display at the bottom is the "fishpond" airborne radar.
Of course the Germans then developed something to detect the H2S radar, and so it goes.
A small number of Lancaster bombers were even fitted with radar-directed rear gun turrets. Not too far off from what we had in the B-52. Once again the radar could be detected and homed in on. Except this time there was a nasty surprise waiting at the end.
Radar directed tail turret fitted to some RAF bombers late in the war.
Probably the sneakiest thing the Germans came up with was "Schräge Musik". The direct translation would be "slanted music" but it was a slang term for jazz music at the time.
JU-88 with Schräge Musik upward firing cannons (red arrow)
Take a couple of 20 mm cannons, mount behind the cockpit of a German night fighter except angle them upwards on about a 45 degree angle. Now you could slide up underneath a British bomber, which were undefended from below, and fire upwards into the belly. Most never knew what hit 'em.
Mosquito radar console. I believe the radar operator sat to the right of the pilot.
Ultimately it turned out that the best counter to a German night fighter was a British (or American) night fighter. The German JU-88 stalking a Lancaster on a dark night might find
themselves being stalked by an RAF Mosquito. The hunter becomes the hunted.
De Havilland Mosquito. The "Mossie" was one of the best night fighters of the war due to its great speed. US pilots who had flown both considered it superior to the P-38.
The British developed a radar detector of their own, called "Serrate". RAF Mosquitos and Beaufighters roamed the night sky over Europe looking for German night fighters. One successful tactic was to hang around known night-fighter bases waiting to catch one taking off or landing. There's no such thing as a fair fight.
"Serrate" radar detector system fitted to Mosquito night fighter.
Late in the war we see some very advanced designs from the Germans. The He-219 was designed to be a "Mosquito Killer". This aircraft lists a lot of firsts:
first purposely designed night fighter, first ejection seat and first use of tricycle gear by the Germans.
He-219 Uhu "Eagle Owl"
The He-219 had the performance to match the Mosquito but it suffered from being overly complex and very few were built. Like many German late-war designs it was too little too late.
The US P-70 was a night fighter version of the Douglas A-20 Havoc bomber.
The US was late to the night fighter game. Initially we supplemented the British in the Mediterranean and European theaters. US night fighter squadrons flew a variety of aircraft including British Mosquitos and Beaufighters and converted A-20 medium bombers. Later we fielded our own dedicated night fighter, the Northrop P-61 Black Widow.
The P-61 was a very advanced aircraft for its time but lacked the speed of the Mosquito. The director of US night fighter training had this to say about it:
The P-61 was not a superior night fighter. It was not a poor night fighter. It was a good night fighter. It did not have enough speed.
The P-61 was certainly sinister looking. Its heavy armament also made it a capable ground attack aircraft.
We've mostly focused on the European theater but there was some night fighter action in the Pacific as well. The Japanese did perform the occasional night bombing raid and also flew night reconnaissance missions. In general night operations in the Pacific were no where near as extensive as they were in Europe. Many P-61 squadrons never achieved a single kill as there just weren't that many Japanese airplanes flying around at night.
Late in the war radar sets became small enough to be fitted to single engine fighters like the Corsair and Hellcat. These were used to intercept night harassment raids by Japanese aircraft.
P-38M "Night Lightning". Note the additional canopy for the radar operator. A small number of these saw duty in the Pacific late in the war.
The Japanese had their own night fighters to counter American B-29 raids. One of their best was the Nakajima J1N1 "Moonlight". It was equipped with radar and some even had a set of upwards and downwards firing guns, similar to the German "Schräge Musik". Japanese night fighter development was independent from the Germans so it's interesting that they both came up with the same solution. I also never realized that the Japanese had radar during WWII.
Nakajima J1N1
The US designation for it was "Gecko".
Some Japanese night fighter pilots were very successful against B-29s but many others were shot down by the well defended bombers. Overall they never had enough numbers to make a difference. Once again it was too little too late.
The Soviets also fielded a night fighter, the Petlyakov Pe-3. Like many other WWII night fighters, the Pe-3 was developed from their Pe-2 light bomber. A very small number were fitted with radar but most did without. While a decent airframe, it lacked firepower and needed more protective armor for the crew.
Soviet Pe-3 Night Fighter. This was based on the ubiquitous Pe-2 bomber.
If I took one thing away from writing this diary, it was that electronic warfare was much more advanced during World War II than I ever realized. So many technologies that are still in use today: radar, chaff, passive radar detection, jamming, spoofing and IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) all came of age during the War.
All warfare is deception.
- Sun Tzu
What happened to night fighters? The term stuck around through the Korean War but fell out of misuse sometime in the 1950s in favor of "All-Weather Interceptor".
The last true "day fighter" flown by the US Air Force was the Northrop F-5. Electronics and radars have advanced to where you can put a very capable radar into a fairly small package. Today every fighter in the US inventory could be called a "night fighter".