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By the end of the second year of World War II, both the British and the Germans had lost so many bombers to fighters during day bombing raids that they turned to night bombing to cut their losses.
Night bombing was a low threat operation because night fighters could not locate the bombers. While ground radar was in place, an airborne radar set small enough to fit in a fighter, even a twin engine one, was beyond the technology of the time.
It seemed to matter little. British electronic countermeasures quickly foiled radio beams that guided Luftwaffe night bombers, sending them to drop their bombs on open fields, and the Royal Air Force had even less success.
Despite early optimistic claims, an RAF study completed in mid-1941 showed that less than 5 percent of British night bombing missions bombed within five miles of the target. The lack of effective night fighters seemed to matter little.
However, technology soon changed the night bombing effort, especially the RAF night bombing effort, and gradually German cites came under increasingly heavy attack. The Luftwaffe countered with a highly sophisticated command and control system and radar sets on twin engine night fighters.
But there was a devil in the details. The fighters’ radar sets were only accurate to about 250 meters, and at that point the attacker had to continue visually, hoping to see the bomber in the dark before he was seen by the bomber’s rear gunner in his four gun hydraulic rear turret.
To help them see the bomber, the night fighters approached the RAF bomber slowly from below to silhouette them against the sky, which has some light even on the darkest night. Once the bomber was sighted, they would fly under it, pull up sharply and fire as the bomber passed over them, then stall and drop.
The maneuver was difficult, and there was the risk of collision, the bomb load exploding or the stricken bomber falling on top of the fighter.
At the suggestion of a German night fighter commander, in 1942 the Luftwaffe weapons testing center began experimenting with two 20 Millimeter cannons fixed for upward firing at an angle of between 60 and 75 degrees and aimed by an upward looking gun sight. It was tested in the field, and the night fighter pilots found they could easily get under an RAF bomber, aim the cannon to hit the fuel tank between the fuselage and inboard engine, then break away from the bomber’s death throes.
The system was named “Schräge Musik” — jazz (literally slanted) music — and was first used operationally on a large scale on Aug. 17, 1943. The guns had no tracers, so the only thing other RAF bombers saw was the explosion of their comrade with no idea of what caused it.
The RAF lost 40 aircraft that night, and the “Jazz Music” installation made it possible for the Germans to almost drive the RAF out of German skies in the winter of 1943 and 1944. The weapon accounted for almost 80 percent of the British losses.
Unfortunately for the RAF, the ventral turrets had been removed from their bombers at the beginning of the war because they were considered useless. It was not until late 1944 that the RAF learned the Jazz Music secret, and by then the German radar control system had been overrun by Allied troops so the point was moot.
Interestingly, the Japanese developed a similar system independently at about the same time and it was used against B-29s from October 1944, but Japanese night fighters were not fast enough to catch the Superfortresses.
(For questions or comments, contact Dr. Michel at marshall.michel@ramstein.af.mil.)
