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

by Richard Overy

In 1943 a Lancaster bomber had lasted on average for twenty-two combat sorties, whereas by 1945 the figure was sixty.112 The more experience crews got, the better their chances of survival. The German night-fighter force, on the other hand, was hit by the collapse in fuel supply in a number of ways. It was essential to be able to run full training programs for crews in the use of the complex scanning equipment, the SN-3 and FuG218, now available to locate the bomber aircraft. The dynamos needed to charge the radar equipment could not be operated because of fuel shortages; electricity supply to the radar stations was intermittent by the winter months of 1944, which also reduced training time on the new detection instruments.113 Most night fighters were now the high-quality Junkers Ju88G, fitted with SN2 and Naxos equipment, and the Flensburg detector used to home in to an Allied bomber’s “Monica” signals. By chance this equipment fell undamaged into British hands when a disoriented German night-fighter pilot landed in error on a Bomber Command station at Woodbridge in Suffolk in July 1944. Extensive testing soon showed that the simple expedient of turning off both the Monica tail radar and the H2S set would blind the enemy night fighters. New devices—“Perfectos,” “Piperack,” and “Serrate IV”—were developed to give warning of enemy fighters and to confuse German radar.114 Although a new round of research began in Germany, there was too little time or opportunity to profit fr...