Night Fighters in the European War

The Battle of Britain in 1940 was a rude awakening. At first, German aircraft struck at England by day and night, the few night missions scheduled only because Luftwaffe Commander Hermann Göring wanted an all out, around-the-clock, effort. After losing nearly 1,700 aircraft in three months to British defenses by day, however, Göring switched his bombing attacks to the night in October 1940. This change in strategy also coincided with his decision to target British morale, better attacked in the uncertainty of night, with lighter losses.

Unfortunately, the British were woefully unprepared, with only eight squadrons of obsolescent night fighters (Defiants and Blenheims). Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots had to rely on newly developed long-range ground radar for warning and assistance with interception. This radar system, however, had been built with day missions in mind. Ground controllers could get day fighters to within five or ten miles of the bomber formations, where the pilots’ eyes took over. At night, directions to within five or ten miles of the target meant that the pilots might as well have stayed on the ground. The results were devastating: over Coventry on the night of 14/15 November 1940, 165 RAF sorties failed to bring down any of the 437 attacking Nazi bombers.

By 1941 the British had discovered how to use German navigation radio beams to determine where enemy bombers would attack. When this technology was combined with radars mounted in the intercepting aircraft, nighttime defenders began to claim an increasing number of enemy bombers. Still, in the last mass raid of the Blitz, hundreds of night fighter sorties resulted in only seven of the 507 attacking bombers shot down. In May 1941 Hitler began shifting Luftwaffe units to the east preparatory to the assault on the Soviet Union. The British had won the Night Blitz, not because of the success of their night fighters, but because of the Führer’s capriciousness. German losses to British night defenses and to all other causes during the Night Blitz never exceeded four percent.

U.S. officers sent to England to observe the Battle of Britain experienced the terror of night bombing and learned the lessons of night fighting firsthand. Col. Carl A. Spaatz, future head of the U.S. bombing campaign against Germany, reported the need for a night fighter aircraft high on the list of requirements for building a U.S. combat air force. In later talks, British and U.S. officials agreed that the United Kingdom would assume primary responsibility for night defense, with the RAF to produce 4,380 night fighters and the United States 1,687.

Spaatz and other U.S. observers returned to the States with lessons learned by the British: crews needed special qualifications; night fighting required special training; muzzle flashes and tracers could blind the night pilot; and ground control of intercepting aircraft by radar and radio was essential to success. But the most important lesson was that groping around in darkness looking for a moving airplane would most likely end in failure.