Скачать или смотреть Germany Never Knew Window Chaff Blinded 50 Million Reichsmarks Worth Of Radar

Germany Never Knew Window Chaff Blinded 50 Million Reichsmarks Worth Of Radar

July twenty-fourth, nineteen forty-three. Zeist, Netherlands. General Josef Kammhuber stood before the plotting table in his command bunker, watching the green phosphorescent trace of RAF bombers crossing the North Sea toward Hamburg. The Kammhuber Line, his masterpiece of defensive engineering, stretched from Denmark to central France in a chain of radar stations that had cost the Reich over fifty million Reichsmarks to construct and equip.
Three years of meticulous planning. Hundreds of Freya early warning radars. Thousands of Würzburg tracking radars manufactured by Telefunken and the Zeppelin Company at enormous cost. A network of searchlights, flak batteries, and night fighters coordinated through dozens of Himmelbett control centers. Each defensive box covering thirty-two kilometers north to south, twenty kilometers east to west, precisely calibrated to guide Messerschmitt Bf one-ten night fighters to their targets with mathematical certainty.
Tonight, seven hundred and ninety-one British bombers were approaching Hamburg in the largest raid yet attempted. Kammhuber's system should tear them apart. Six interceptions per hour per Himmelbett zone, multiplied across dozens of boxes. The numbers were absolute. The mathematics unforgiving. RAF Bomber Command losses tonight should exceed one hundred aircraft.
But as the first pathfinder Lancasters crossed into German airspace at twelve twenty-eight in the morning of July twenty-fifth, something impossible appeared on every radar screen from Heligoland to Hamburg. The single trace marking the lead bomber suddenly exploded into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of individual returns. Cathode ray displays across the defensive network transformed into solid masses of light. Tracking radars locked onto targets that weren't there. Master searchlights wandered aimlessly across empty sky while actual bombers flew overhead unseen.
In Zeist, Kammhuber watched his carefully constructed defensive system collapse into chaos within minutes. Radar operators shouted conflicting reports. Night fighter controllers vectored aircraft toward phantom contacts. Flak batteries fired blindly at altitudes where no bombers existed. The precise mechanical ballet of ground-controlled interception, refined through three years of combat, dissolved into helpless confusion.
What neither Kammhuber nor his staff yet understood was that the British had just deployed a weapon that would render fifty million Reichsmarks worth of radar equipment nearly useless in a single night. Not through superior technology or overwhelming force, but through strips of aluminum-coated paper measuring twenty-seven centimeters long and two centimeters wide, cut with household scissors by a Welsh physicist named Joan Curran, bundled into packets weighing one pound each, and dropped by the thousands from every aircraft in the bomber stream.
Window, as the British called it. Düppel, as German scientists would recognize it when they found the metallic strips carpeting Hamburg the next morning. The simplest possible radar countermeasure, based on physics so fundamental that both sides had independently developed the concept years earlier. A cloud of metallized strips, each cut to half the wavelength of German tracking radars, creating false returns that transformed every radar display into an unreadable mess of overlapping echoes.
The psychological transformation began in those first minutes after midnight on July twenty-fifth. German radar operators, who had spent years perfecting their craft, suddenly could not distinguish real bombers from electronic ghosts. Night fighter pilots, accustomed to precise guidance from ground controllers, found themselves directed to empty air while bomber streams passed kilometers away. Flak battery commanders, who had relied on radar for accurate fire control, watched their guns shoot blindly at incorrect altitudes while actual aircraft dropped incendiaries unopposed.


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