1943
In January the USAAF is agreed to bomb by day, and the RAF by night.
On the 5th of March all hell breaks loose in Germany's night skies over the Ruhr Valley. The RAF's Ruhr Offensive has commenced! The great nightfighters of the Nachtjagd are Bf
Bombardier101 110G4s, Ju 88s and Do 217s.
The Ruhr Offensive shows the peak of the Nachtjagds effectiveness. 38 raids are mounted against Ruhr towns and industrial cities. 872 British aircraft are lost while participating in the camapaign. One of their particularly large raids was on Duesseldorf. 826 aircraft struck on the 23rd of May to the early hours of the 24th.
The Dambuster raids apparently went without the Nachtjagd to hinder it. AAA fire only.
Around the 23rd of July the RAF was equipped with a new weapon--strips of tinfoil! What could it do? On that night the RAF bombers with incendiary bombs headed for Hamburg. Decoy aircraft and the bombers dropped loads of tinfoil around the German skies and the Nachtjagd's radar operators flew into panic. Words like "Too many hostiles!", "Try without your ground control!" and "The enemy are reproducing themselves!" came from them. I would like to know how a plane reproduces!
But that's what the radar screens showed and the Nachtjagd's nightfighters mostly flailed at tinfoil targets while most of the bombers came through and nearly completely destroyed Hamburg. The firestorm ate just about everything in the area. Temperatures of 1000 degrees arose. Either get burned to death or suffocate.
After this, Hans-Joachim "Hajo" Herrman tried to get a "Wilde Sau" (Wild Boar) squadron. And soon, Goering authorized the creation of a Geschwader of Fw 190s and some Bf 109s. Oberst Kammhuber, who oposed it, was shunted off to oblivion in Scandanavia. He was the genius of the Himmelbett stations that covered the Dutch and German coast.
One night over Berlin, the bomber crews of the RAF were only accustomed to flak and searchlights were startled to find the air swarming with Fw 190s and Bf 109s.
But what about the Bf 110s? Well they were the Zahme Saus (Tame Boars). They would be guided to where the bomber stream should be and followed the bomber stream with radar on or off, shooting down any 'courier' (Nachtjagd term for any enemy aircraft) they could find in the stream. The Tame Boars proved to be a fataly successful group.
At the end of '43 the Lichtenstein SN-2 came out and was soon put on the latest Bf110s and Ju88s along with it's short range cousin the C-1 since SN-2 was problematic with short range work. The old BC radar was no more.