Chapter 1455: England Under the Eagle's Wings 2
"We were consumed in a single day with a whole aviation army! If we continue to fight like this, I'm afraid it won't be long before we will be greatly damaged! "After seeing the loss record in Paris, Kesselring can no longer describe his feeling at this time, and in the face of such a disastrous exchange ratio, Kesselring even has a feeling of despair and panic! Although the Allies' defenses were the strongest on the first day of the battle, and as they continued to wear down, the opponent's combat effectiveness would continue to decline, and the loss rate of the Allied aircraft groups would decrease accordingly, but even then Kesselring was not very optimistic about the prospects.
"You are wrong, this is not a one-day loss, the offensive at night has not yet begun, our gap with the British will be 24 hours of non-stop bombing, if any hour, the British suddenly find that there are no German planes over their heads, it will be a dereliction of duty for you and me!" Regarding the losses listed in the battle report, the red baron just glanced at it hastily, and then said calmly, since he has chosen to gamble, then don't regret and fear, and concentrate on doing the current thing is the most important thing!
The level of night bombing by the Germans was not very high, especially in the face of the British defense system with systematic radar and anti-aircraft artillery and night combat aircraft! The Germans did not intend to achieve much success at night, and in the German plan, the first thing to destroy was the British airfield, aviation industry and other air combat systems. Instead of dropping bombs into cities for systematic destruction. The number of bombers of the Germans was still relatively limited, and the Red Baron was not so frenzied. The original reason why the Germans insisted on night bombing was nothing more than to maintain constant pressure on the British Air Force, constantly attrition and exhaustion of the opponent. But to the surprise of the Germans. Fighting in the opposing airspace at night, the Germans suffered too much!
If you count the factories and facilities destroyed by the bombs of the Germans. The Germans still earned their money from air raids during the day. After all, hundreds of thousands of square meters of factory buildings have turned into ruins. The value of these facilities is not comparable to that of dozens or hundreds of aircraft. But in the evening, the Germans finally realized once again the superiority of the Entente in technology! Guided jamming from the air, battlefield perception, air engagements, there is not a place where the Luftwaffe does not suffer! About 30 percent of the more than 2,000 bombers that participated in the bombing that night completely lost their targets! And the remaining aircraft also suffered heavy losses under the interception of the night fighters of the British!
The British made good use of the German navigation beam. After such a long time, the Germans' night bombing guidance still changed the soup and did not change the medicine, and it was still the land-based launch tower that launched a narrow wave. The aircraft then has receivers installed at both ends of the wings, and when the aircraft deviates from the narrow wave, the alarm system will sound an alarm. This system appeared as early as the Italian Civil War, and by the time of the Iran War, it had been thoroughly understood by China and the Entente. And in World War II, if the Germans still used this navigation system, it would be really suspected of death! The British could not only easily crack the German guidance system, but even use it to lure German planes into the encirclement!
"We've found the streetlights. The planes of the Germans should be ahead of us! "Looking at the oscilloscope in the back seat of the plane, the radar operator in the back seat radioed the intelligence to friendly forces. British night fighters also installed signal receivers of the same frequency on their wings, so that they could also find the channel that the Germans had "paved" with radio at night. And follow this path to find the bombers of the Germans! To say that the Germans did not improve this system is absolutely wrong, but their improvement is limited to increasing the frequency modulation band, but no matter how the Germans improve, their frequency band is within the working range of the British aircraft radio receiver, so this radio guidance system has become the "point of no return" for many German bombers!
Receiving the news, the British Mosquito night bombers began to quickly assemble towards the target area like sharks smelling blood. Ground-based radars soon spotted German bomber units flying along the radio guidance system. "Brothers. Let's kick their ass hard from behind! A British pilot whistled and took the lead in rushing forward, but to his surprise, before he could open fire, the Germans' tail and belly machine guns were the first to erupt tongues of fire! The bullets flew in the air, making several bullet holes in the body of the mosquito plane. The radar receiver installed in the tail of the bomber by the Germans played a huge role, and when the night fighter plane carrying the radar approached, his radar waves were perceived by the Germans.
After a fluke of repelling a mosquito plane. In the end, the German bombers of this squadron could not beat the next swarming British night fighters, and the Mosquito planes armed with 30MM and 20MM machine guns could take out almost all targets in the air in ten seconds! Even the HE30 bomber, with a maximum weight of more than 177 tons. In the face of a volcanic eruption, the firepower will also collapse! The two sides exchanged fire fiercely at a distance of several hundred meters, with two 30mm guns and four 20mm guns in front of the Mosquito aircraft spewing flames up to 15 feet long. Looking from the night sky, a dense number of shells formed a fireball to smash the target, and a JU88 bomber was blown to two ends by the dense shells in 3 seconds!
The fierce exchange of fire attracted the night fighters escorting the bombers, and the HE219 Owl night fighters set out to search for the mosquitoes that the German bombers were biting. Although the HE219 is currently the most elite night fighter aircraft in the Luftwaffe, this aircraft is still inferior to the Mosquito, and the Mosquito with a new Morin engine and two-stage supercharging has a great advantage in speed and horizontal maneuverability, and the radar is a traditional advantage of the British. What's more, the British night fighters fighting on the ground also received the support of ground guidance, at least the British did not have to worry about not being able to return home, and it was unknown whether the Germans could go back smoothly if they were too far away from the navigation signal or the signal was interfered with!
An HE219 night fighter plane caught a fluctuating point of light from the radar, and the German airborne radar had a limited detection range, only about half that of the British (and even worse in history, about a third). A moment of silence for German radar! So they often went on search of their own bombers that were attacked, and then by looking for the night planes of the British. No, a HE177 bomber has just been destroyed. The light from the explosion of the plane exposed the shadow behind him, and he took advantage of the opportunity. The HE219 fighter successfully lassoed the opponent with a searchlight, and then at a distance of 400 meters, four guns fired a salvo to destroy the target. After getting the first kill of the night, the Night Hunter immediately ran to a low altitude, regaining his speed while dodging the other party's pursuit, he successfully dodged the aerial surveillance, but unfortunately, he was discovered by a radar on the ground, when the British found that the radio identification signal sent by them did not respond. Decisively used anti-aircraft artillery and searchlights to smash this HE219 fighter to pieces!
The night engagement was much smaller than during the day, with more than 2,000 German planes and 800 British night planes fighting all night, until the last German bomber flew out of the British mainland until dawn the next day. In this night's fighting, the Germans lost about 140 more planes of various kinds due to battle damage, loss and accidents. And the complete loss of the British had only more than 30 aircraft for night battles! Although they suffered huge losses, the Germans did not stop doing anything, and when the bomber units that bombed at night returned less than half an hour later, the Luftwaffe bomber group appeared again! As a result, the air forces of both sides fought together again, interpreting the highest level of war with courage, technology and blood!
The Luftwaffe's offensive the next day was still fierce. And after the first day of attrition, the level of combat effectiveness of the British decreased a little faster! This is not so much to say that the losses of aircraft were greater, but because the British had already lost quite a few front-line airfields during the first day of air raids. The Spitfire with short legs took off from the rear airfield and spent significantly less time in the air. The ensuing battle became boring, with both sides constantly throwing planes and pilots into exchange with each other. And with the decline in the combat effectiveness of the British Air Force, the pressure on the Chinese and American Air Force, is skyrocketing! This situation aroused the attention of Li Mei, commander of the US Air Force in Britain, and Shen Daoming, commander of the Huaxia Air Force in Britain. This is not to say that the two countries think that this kind of fighting is too much for themselves. It's because once the Americans' P47 fighters and the Huaxia's Shicha Falcon fighters lose too much, the defense system built by relying on short-legged fighters will be very sluggish!
"Although. The Allied air forces dealt a heavy blow to the adversary, but our defense system was also rapidly deteriorating. The Germans sent a considerable part of their forces to attack our radar stations and military airfields along our coast, and our first-line airfields in the south had lost about 40 percent of the five consecutive days of fighting, which meant that our air force airfield system would have to retreat 150 to 200 kilometers, and the time spent by the Spitfires in the air would drop by more than 20 minutes. The effective utilization rate of the aircraft fleet will drop by 1 percent, plus the combat losses, in just one week, the combat effectiveness of the British front-line fighter units has dropped by more than 2 percent! This is a serious problem! We have to fix it! The British Air Force of the United States and the Chinese Air Force will not be able to make up for it in a short time, and if we are severely damaged, then the British sky will be forced to break up into relatively independent theaters of war. Li May finally couldn't help but raise her concerns with the Chief of the General Staff of the British Air Force, Lieutenant General John Slesser.
"There is no way out of passive defense, we must combine offense and defense, the Germans' night combat ability is very fragile, and according to reliable intelligence analysis, the Germans have not established a relatively complete radar warning network and prevention and control system in occupied Belgium, France and the Netherlands, if our bomber forces can harass the Germans, then it is bound to distract the German army. Night bombing, not in terms of how much damage was inflicted on the Germans, but in distracting them. "Li May came up with the idea of the US Air Force.
From a tactical point of view, the defender is in an advantage, but if from a strategic point of view, the attacker has a greater advantage, because when the opponent does not know where to start, the defender must evenly deploy its own forces, so as to give the attacker the possibility of each break, if there is no early warning system support, then this defense point will have more holes, and unlike the British home defense, the Germans need to take care of the greater place, and they have no more radar and anti-aircraft artillery and other resources than the British! After research by the top brass of the Chinese and US Air Forces, they found that the night defense system of the Germans was far inferior to that of the British homeland!
And from the point of view of offensive power, the offensive capabilities of the British Air Force were much stronger than those of the Germans! At least in terms of navigation equipment and weapons! The Germans also relied heavily on land-based navigation, while the British Air Force's bomber units were already equipped with cloud-piercing radars. The function of this kind of radar is that when the radar wave scans the ground, it will produce different echoes, for example, the echoes of the water surface and the city must be different, and then the approximate direction can be found according to the map and other equipment. This allowed the offensive lines of the bomber units to be more diverse.
At the same time, the British strategic bomber unit was equipped with a new type of guided bombs from the Chinese type. THIS BOMB, WEIGHING UP TO 2 TONS, WAS SPECIALLY PREPARED FOR STRATEGIC BOMBERS, AND ITS WARHEAD WAS A 1000KG ARMOR-PIERCING BOMB EQUIPPED WITH A ROCKET ENGINE IN THE TAIL SECTION, WHICH WORKED FOR ABOUT 30 SECONDS. Radio command guidance was adopted. The missile receives signals with a high-frequency signal receiver with strong anti-jamming ability, which is basically outside the electronic warfare frequency band of the Germans, of course, if it still feels unsafe, it can also be replaced with wired guidance.
"The RAF still has at least 800 intact Lancaster and Halifax heavy bombers, these bombers did not play any role in the defensive battle of the British Isles, which is a great waste of resources, if these bombers can contain even 2,000 German night fighters, then it is a great victory, there are at least 30 days before the tsunami operation organized by the United States and China, and at this rate, our situation will be very difficult." Looking at the hesitant British, General Li May once again added a fire.
"We agreed in principle to retaliate against the Germans, but how to retaliate, which targets to bomb is a question that needs to be studied, and we need time." In the end, Lieutenant General Johnslesser gave an ambiguous answer, but to his surprise, an unexpected event spawned this revenge, which made the already bloody Battle of England even more crazy!
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