No place for Chivalry : RAF night fighters defend the East of England against the German Air Force in two world wars

280 Pages·2005·4.18 MB·English

by  Goodrum

Published by
Grub Street
4 Rainham Close
London
SW11 6SS
Copyright © 2005 Grub Street
Text copyright © 2005 Alastair Goodrum
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Goodrum, Alastair
No place for chivalry : RAF night fighters defend the East
of England against the German air force in two world wars
1. Great Britain. Royal Air Force – History – 1939-1945
2. World War, 1939-1945 – Aerial operations, British
3. Air defences – Great Britain – History – 20th century
4. Night fighting (Military science) 5. Night fighter planes
I. Title
940.5′44941
ISBN 1 904943 22 5
ePUB ISBN: 9781909166530
PRC ISBN: 9781904943228
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
Typeset by Pearl Graphics, Hemel Hempstead
Printed and bound by Biddles, King’s Lynn
Contents
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1 Dangerous Moonlight
Chapter 2 Zeppelin!
Chapter 3 Fighter Nights
Chapter 4 Patrolling the Blue Lines
Chapter 5 Airborne Searchlights
Chapter 6 Night Hawks
Chapter 7 Mosquitoes Bite and Beaufighters Punch
Chapter 8 Steinbock, Gisela and Buzz-bombs

Appendix 1 Imperial German Naval Zeppelin incursions over the
Midlands region in WW1
Appendix 2 Interceptions made by aircraft of Wittering and Digby
sector night fighter squadrons in WW2
Appendix 3 Explanatory notes and diagram for AI Mk IV 172
Appendix 4 Comparative ranks
Appendix 5 Maps showing Group and Sector boundaries in WW2
Appendix 6 Map showing locations of Fg Off R P Stevens’ air
victories
Appendix 7 Map showing the distribution of interceptions made by
Digby and Wittering night fighter squadrons in
WW2
Appendix 8 Abbreviations used in text

Bibliography
Index
In memory of Jack and Mike
“. . . night fighter pilots are individualists who do not want very much0to be
disciplined. For them night is more free than day,
free space for the expression of a feud. They find raiders in the moon
above low cloud, as shadows in the flare of ack-ack and searchlight
and above the flickering glare of ground fires.”
H E Bates
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Ian Blackamore and Dave Stubley of the Lincolnshire
Aircraft Recovery Group, Bill Welbourne of the Fenland and West Norfolk
Aircraft Preservation Society, Nick Squires of 23 Squadron, Peter Montgomery
and Simon Parry, all of whom have provided details that have enhanced the
technical and human interest elements of a number of the incidents mentioned. I
am grateful to C R Salewski MA, archivist of the Deutches Museum fur
Luftschiffahrt und Marinefliegerei in Nordholz, Germany, for information and
illustrations relating to WW1 Naval Zeppelin operations. Illustrations have come
from many sources but I appreciate particular help received from Roy Bonser,
Alec Brew, Peter Brooks, Robin Duke-Woolley, Ron Durand, Ken Ellis, Chris
Goss, Peter Green, Mike Kelsey, Simon Parry, Winston Ramsey, Wilhelm
Ratuszynski and E A Walker. However, the original ownership of some
photographs remains obscure or has been unable to be established and I
apologise for any credit omitted for this reason. Extracts from official documents
appear by permission of the Controller HMSO and Crown copyright is
acknowledged. Quotes from Bill Norman’s article in the December 2000 issue of
Flypast are reproduced by permission of Key Publishing Ltd. Finally I am most
grateful to John Davies and Louise Stanley of Grub Street, for giving me the
opportunity to bring my project to life.
Author’s note: Some combat reports consulted have been found to state range
distances in yards while others have expressed them in feet. Although range
measurements in feet appear in many reports where AI interceptions are
involved, this practice is only evident in such reports from 1942 onwards. In the
interests of consistency, in the narrative of this book range distances have been
expressed in yards.
CHAPTER 1
Dangerous Moonlight
Peering through the cockpit canopy of a Junkers Ju88, Luftwaffe Unteroffizier
Heinrich Beul shifted uneasily, gripped his MG15 machine gun more tightly and
tried to scan the blackness of the night sky with his eyes. Peering intently at two
flickering cathode-ray tubes, Pilot Officer Yeomans, Royal Air Force, seated in
the rear cockpit of a Beaufighter, was piercing that same blackness with his
airborne radar. On a midsummer night in 1941 each had a scent of the other;
each one was seeking a kill.
In World War 2 the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire,
clustered round The Wash, were littered with airfields that made juicy targets for
Luftwaffe raiders. For the Luftwaffe, the night fighter unit that evolved into
Nachtjagdgeschwader 2 (NJG2) bore the brunt of the first phase of intruder
missions that lasted until late 1941, scoring a considerable measure of success
against operational units, while also disrupting the flying training programme on
the RAF’s home territory. Furthermore, when the Luftwaffe’s daylight offensive
in the south and east of England was finally broken, its attention turned to
mounting a night bombing blitz across the United Kingdom that increased its
intensity from September 1940. Thus, in addition to being an arena for night
fighter versus intruder encounters, this three-dimensional corridor into the heart
of England also became an aerial crossroads for elements of the German night
bombing offensive directed, for example, against the industrial Midlands and
North. It soon became apparent that the watery expanse of The Wash, pointing
like a signpost to the heart of England, together with its sparsely populated
fenlands, was a one hundred-mile passageway through which the Luftwaffe
expected to fly with little interference into the industrial heartland – and indeed
beyond. No doubt this same philosophy also appealed to RAF Bomber
Command planners when they plotted routes into the German homeland across
the Zuider Zee in Holland. Both combatants found, to their cost, that what began
as a quiet back-door route became, instead, a killing ground for the night fighters
of RAF Wittering and Digby Sectors.
A clue to the Luftwaffe’s intentions was first discovered in the form of a
navigational radio beam, oriented from east to west near Spalding, by the
Wireless Intelligence Development Unit (WIDU), a special signals flight
commanded by Sqn Ldr R Blucke, based at RAF Wyton on the southern edge of
the region. Documents recovered from downed enemy aircraft, together with
intercepted radio traffic, suggested the existence of such beams and WIDU was
hastily established to conduct a detailed search of the airwaves. Equipped with
radio receivers capable of monitoring signals around the 30-33 megacycle
wavelength, the unit had three Avro Ansons to carry the sets and a team of
specialist wireless operators to do the job. Success came quickly, for on June 21
1940, after only a handful of sorties, Anson pilot Flt Lt Hal Bufton and his Y-
service radio operator Corporal Dennis Mackey located signals with the dot,
dash and continuous tone characteristics of the German Lorenz blind-landing
system, passing east/west one mile south of Spalding. Following the beam
allowed them to detect a second beam intersecting the first at Beeston – right on
track for the Rolls-Royce aero-engine factories in Derby! Later it was
established that the first beam was being transmitted from Kleves on the Dutch
border, while the second was believed to have originated in Bredstedt on the
German-Danish border. Together they were part of a German air radio-
navigation system used to guide bombers to their targets that became known by
the code name Knickebein (Crooked Leg). The subsequent electronics war is the
fascinating in-depth subject of several books and it is not intended to re-examine
it here.
This, then, was the stage on which the battle for control of the English night
sky in World War 2 was acted out. Now we’ll take a look at some of the players
in this deadly game in their various guises, to show what happened when the
hunter got to grips with the hunted.
Air cover against possible night bombing raids was spread thinly in the Midland
region at the beginning of 1940 and it seemed as if the lessons of the last war
had been forgotten. In order to appreciate how events unfold in this story, yet
avoid becoming bogged down with the complexity of trying to follow operations
by all the night fighter squadrons throughout the whole of the UK, the exploits
of one unit – 23 Squadron – will be taken as representative of this particular
period of the night air war. Night fighter squadrons, in the area of the country
covered by this narrative, came under the control of 12 Group of Fighter
Command, whose patch stretched across the heartland of England from The
Wash to the Mersey and York to Birmingham. 23 Squadron was in RAF
Wittering Sector.
23, equipped with the Bristol Blenheim Mk I, had moved to RAF Wittering
from RAF Northolt in May 1938 and thence to Collyweston, Wittering’s
adjacent satellite field, also known as K3, from where, at the end of March 1940,
it began night patrols. Initially five Blenheims were converted to Mark IF
(fighter) version by the addition of a bolt-on under-belly tray containing four
.303 inch calibre machine guns. This was in addition to a single forward-firing
.303 machine gun fitted as standard in the wing root plus the dorsal turret gun.
Right from the onset of war, a small number of 23 Squadron’s Blenheims,
first one, then later two sections at a time, were detached to RAF Digby for a
week in rotation, carrying out night readiness duty, standing patrols and
searchlight cooperation sorties in that sector. Between October 1939 and January
1940, however, the Digby detachments had just two night scrambles, both of
which proved fruitless.
Early in 1940 the eminent scientist Dr E G ‘Taffy’ Bowen CBE FRS worked not
only on the development and construction of the first practical airborne radar
sets – generally referred to as Airborne Interception and abbreviated to AI – but,
due to his direct involvement over several years, was also in a unique position to
give much thought to the elementary theory of air interception tactics. His
analysis showed that first:
… a pursuing night fighter must have a speed advantage over its target. If the
fighter were no faster than the target it would never catch it… if it went too fast
it would overshoot. The optimum overtaking speed was about 20 to 25% greater
than the aircraft being chased.
Secondly:
In order to have a reasonable chance of completing an interception, the night
fighter must be placed within a cone of about 40 or 50° behind the raider and
heading on a track not more than 30° different from the target. This presented a
formidable task to the ground control as it existed at that time and was not
solved until the appearance of special GCI equipment towards the end of 1940.