The Valour and the Horror

German Night Fighters:

50 years ago they were young men with a mission - to defend the German homeland from the allied bomber crews they called "terrorflugen"...terror-flyers.

They shot down allied pilots by the score, many of them Canadian... When he was 25 years old, Martin Becker was one of the German aces. He has 58 kills to his credit, 58 allied bombers with 7 aircrew each.

German fighter squadrons had bases all over Europe. They developed advanced radar to warn them when the bomber streams were approaching. They went after the Americans came during the day, the Canadians and the rest of the RAF at night. The lumbering bombers were easy prey. The Germans had a harder time finding the bombers at night, until they developed a new secret weapon - tracking radar antennae fixed to the nose of their fighters. This radar would allow the fighters to close in for the kill at night completely undetected by the bombers, then they would use another secret weapon, an upward firing gun called "schrage musica", slanting music. Scientist Freeman Dyson tracked such developments from Bomber Command headquarters.

FREEMAN DYSON: A simple periscope gun sight was arranged so that the German fighter pilot could take careful aim as he flew quietly below the bomber's blind spot. The main problem for the fighter pilot was to avoid being hit by pieces of the exploding bomber.

In spite of the horrendous losses his bomber squadron were taking, air Marshall Harris was determined to press home his attack against German cities. The Supreme Allied Command ordered Harris to redirect his attacks to precise military targets, in preparation for "Overlord", the planned allied invasion of Europe, but Arthur Harris would have none of it. In the end, Harris got his way. His campaign to destroy German cities would continue, with a devastating cost to his own air crews.

In the closing stages of the war, the fighters earned the admiration, even of some their enemies, like scientist Freeman Dyson.

DYSON:

The night fighters and their supporting organization put up an astonishing performance, continuing to fight and cause us serious losses until their last airfield was overrun and Hitler's Germany ceased to exist.

They ended the war morally undefeated. They had the advantage of knowing what they were fighting for, not in those last weeks of the war, for Hitler, but for the preservation of what was left of their homes and families, their cities and their people. We had given them, at the end of the war, the one thing they lacked at the beginning, a clean cause to fight for.