The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

Night attacks meant that antiaircraft fire, without radar assistance, was effectively blind. The decentralized pattern of British raiding made it difficult to know what to protect. German air observation posts were set up around fifteen to twenty kilometers from predicted target areas, but nighttime conditions reduced the prospect of accurate information. The numerous sound detectors used in conjunction with searchlights were found to be vulnerable to the British tactic of throttling back the engines to dampen the noise as aircraft approached a potential danger zone. (British crews also believed that throwing empty milk bottles or beer bottles out of their aircraft confused enemy equipment. The “whistling bottle” was said to interfere with sound location and trigger the searchlights to switch off.)148 For the German side a concerted defense was difficult to mount, because RAF bombers failed to damage essential war-economic targets, which were guarded by “air defense strongpoints,” and instead scattered their loads over an extended area with few evident objectives. The Butt Report could essentially have been written by the Germans months earlier.