Why German Pilots Couldn't Believe What The RAF Was Doing At Night?

In the summer of nineteen forty-three, seven hundred and ninety-one RAF bombers flew toward Hamburg. The Germans had built one of the most sophisticated air defence networks in the world to stop them — a belt of radar stations stretching from Denmark to France, each controlling a cell of searchlights, anti-aircraft guns, and a dedicated night fighter guided by ground controllers to within firing range. On that night, none of it worked. German radar operators looked at their screens and saw hundreds of returns that couldn't all be aircraft. Night fighters were scrambled toward radar echoes and found empty air. Searchlights swept the sky at nothing. Of seven hundred and ninety-one bombers, twelve were shot down. What had blinded the system was aluminium foil. Strips of it, ten and a half inches long, thrown out of a hatch in the Lancaster's fuselage at the rate of two thousand two hundred pieces per minute. Josef Kammhuber, the Luftwaffe general who built the entire German night defence, described what happened in four words: the whole defence was blinded in one stroke. Albert Speer, Germany's armaments minister, said that if the RAF had repeated this success on four or five other German towns, Germany would have collapsed. This account follows the full arc of the RAF's night campaign — from the Butt Report's devastating revelation that one bomber in ten was hitting within five miles of its target over the Ruhr, through the bomber stream tactic that overwhelmed the Kammhuber Line's mathematics, through the jamming and counter-jamming war that made German pilots doubt their own instruments, to Hamburg and the firestorm that Speer called the moment that put the fear of God in him. It does not ignore what the campaign cost. Fifty-five thousand five hundred and seventy-three Bomber Command aircrew died. The death rate was forty-four percent. The German civilian toll was measured in tens of thousands in a single city. Both of those things are in the account. SOURCES Butt Report — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt_Report — full statistical findings August 1941, one in three / one in ten over Ruhr figures Kammhuber Line — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kammhuber_Line — Himmelbett system structure, six-interception-per-hour capacity, bomber stream counter-tactic Bombing of Hamburg in World War II — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II — Albert Speer 1977 interview quote, Window first use, casualty figures, one million evacuated Operation Gomorrah — Defense Media Network: defensemedianetwork.com — Josef Kammhuber quote ("whole defence blinded in one stroke"), Window specs (10½ × ¾ inch strips, 2,200 per bag), searchlight and flak response Wilde Sau fighters — WarHistory.org: warhistory.org — Hajo Herrmann's proposal, Kammhuber's objections, Wild Boar first operations RAF Bomber Command — Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Bomber_Command — 55,573 dead, 44.4% death rate, 501,536 sorties, 8,325 aircraft lost #RAFBomberCommand #WW2 #WorldWarII #OperationGomorrah #Hamburg1943 #BomberCommand #Window #KammhuberLine #LuftwaffeWW2 #NightBombing #BritishRAF #MilitaryHistory #WW2History #BritishMilitary #SecondWorldWar #ElectronicWarfare #WW2Aviation #RAFHistory #NightFighter #BattleOfHamburg