The nighttime flights posed all kinds of difficulties. Interviews with operational crews confirmed that intense cold and long, risky flights over sea were compounded with the difficulty experienced over Germany itself, which they found to be “very black.” It proved almost impossible to find and hit a specific target in the midst of the blackout, even with leaflets, a fact that RAF planners had already realized some months before when drawing up a “Night Plan” to accommodate the shift from daylight to nighttime operations, in which it was admitted that hitting anything “will be largely a matter
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