Civilian broadcasting networks played a significant role in the history of electronic warfare in World War II. So, in Britain, German pilots who lost their course or fell under enemy radio opposition, used BBC civilian broadcasting to determine their own position. Knowing the frequencies at which two or three stations operate, it was possible to find yourself on the map of Great Britain by the triangulation method. In this regard, the British military leadership, by order, switched all BBC broadcasting to one frequency, which seriously limited German navigation capabilities.
The second story, connected with civilian radio networks, happened to Parisian radio, which the British often listened to through household radios. Light music and variety shows, broadcast by the French from the occupied country, brightened up everyday life for many Englishmen. Of course, taking into account the fact that it was necessary to ignore the abundant fascist propaganda. The British began to notice that at some time intervals the level of reception of the signal from Paris rose sharply, which forced the sound in the receivers to be muffled. Moreover, this preceded the night raids of the Luftwaffe on certain cities. In a strange coincidence, specialists from the Ministry of Defense sorted out: they identified a new radar guidance system for German bomber aircraft.
Before the aircraft took off from the airfields of France, the Paris radio station switched from broadcast to narrow-broadcast mode with the simultaneous guidance of the radar relay to the British victim city. The inhabitants of this city just recorded a noticeable increase in French music on the air. And at this time, squadrons of bombers approached them, orienting themselves in space along a narrow beam from the radar guide. The second beam, as usual, crossed the main "radio highway" at the point where the bombs were dropped, that is, over the night city of England. The crews of the Luftwaffe, simply listening to the amusement broadcasts of the French, calmly made their way to London or Liverpool. The British named the system Ruffian and for a long time looked for an antidote for it. It is noteworthy that it is still not completely clear how the Germans managed to form a narrow (up to 3 degrees) and very powerful electromagnetic beam at the level of technology development in the 40s. The British responded in a mirror-like manner - they created a broadcast repeater of the Paris radio on their own territory, which completely confused the Nazi navigators. The bombs of the Germans began to fall anywhere, and this was a definite victory for the British electronics engineers. This system went down in history under the name Bromide.
Scheme of interaction between the German Ruffian and the British Bromide
Radar complex Benito
By the beginning of 1941, the Germans made a retaliatory move, creating the Benito complex, dedicated to the leader of the Italian fascists - Duce. In this case, it was necessary to organize the transfer of German agents to the territory of England, equipped with portable radio transmitters. With their help, bomber pilots received a full amount of information about the targets of strikes and their own location. Navigation support was also provided by the German radar Wotan, located in the territories occupied by Germany. The British intelligence Domino response program was already like a classic radio spy game - groups of operators in perfect German misled Luftwaffe pilots, who again dropped bombs in an open field. Several bombers within the framework of Domino were generally able to land in complete darkness on British airfields. But there was also a tragic page in the history of electronic warfare against the Germans - from May 30 to May 31, 1941, Domino operators mistakenly sent German planes to bomb Dublin. Ireland at that time remained neutral in the world war.
The Luftwaffe made a "mistaken" raid on the Irish capital on the night of May 31st. The northern areas of Dublin, including the presidential palace, were bombed. 34 people were killed.
The forced illumination of targets for night bombing strikes with illuminating ammunition became similar to an act of despair of the Luftwaffe. In each strike group, several aircraft were dispatched for this purpose, responding to the lighting of British cities before the bombing. However, settlements still had to be reached in complete darkness, so the British simply began to build giant conflagrations at a distance from large cities. The Germans recognized them as lights of a big city and bombarded hundreds of tons of bombs. By the end of the active phase of the air confrontation in the skies of England, both sides suffered significant losses - the British had 1,500 fighters, and the Germans had about 1,700 bombers. The accents of the Third Reich shifted to the east, and the British Isles remained unconquered. In many ways, it was the electronic countermeasures of the British that became the reason that only a fourth of the bombs dropped by the Germans achieved their goals - the rest fell on wastelands and forests, or even in the sea.
A separate page in the history of electronic warfare between Britain and Nazi Germany was the confrontation with air defense radars. To combat the previously mentioned Chain Home radar systems, the Germans deployed Garmisch-Partenkirchen false pulse equipment on the French coast of the English Channel. Operating in the radio range of 4-12 meters, this technique created false group air targets on the screens of English locators. Such jamming stations were also converted for installation on aircraft - in 1942, several Heinkel He 111s were equipped with five transmitters at once, and they successfully "littered" the air in the British air defense zone. Chain Home was a certain bone in the throat of the Luftwaffe, and in an attempt to destroy them, the Germans built radar receivers for several Messerschmitt Bf 110. This made it possible to orient the bombers at night to strike the British radar, but a powerful balloon cover prevented this idea from being realized. Electronic warfare was not limited to the vicinity of the English Channel - in Sicily, in 1942, the Germans installed several Karl-type noise jammers, with which they tried to interfere with British air defense radars and aircraft radar guidance equipment to Malta. But the Karl's power was not always enough to work on remote targets, so their efficiency left much to be desired. Karuso and Starnberg were compact enough electronic suppression stations, which allowed them to be installed on bombers to counter fighter guidance channels. And since the end of 1944, four Stordorf complexes have been commissioned, including a network of new jamming stations for allied communications channels called Karl II.
Over time, the Germans, together with the Japanese, came to a very simple method of dealing with the radar - the use of dipole reflectors in the form of foil strips, which illuminated the screens of the Allied forces' radars. The first was the Japanese Air Force, when in May 1943 such reflectors were scattered during raids on American forces on Guadalcanal. The Germans called their "foil" Duppel and have been using it since the fall of 1943. The British began to throw off metallized Window paper during the bombing of Germany several months earlier.
Of no small importance to the German Air Force was the suppression of the radar systems of the British night bombers, which dealt sensitive blows to the infrastructure of the Reich. For this purpose, German night fighters were equipped with Lichtenstein-type radars under the designation C-1, later SN-2 and B / C. Lichtenstein was quite effective in defending the German night sky, and the British Air Force could not detect its parameters for a long time. The point was in the short range of the German aviation radar, which forced the radio reconnaissance aircraft to approach German fighters.
Lichtenstein antennas on the Junkers Ju 88
Radar control panel Lichtenstein SN-2
Ju 88R-1
It often ended tragically, but on May 9, 1943, a Ju 88R-1 sat in Britain with a deserted crew and a Lichtenstein on board. Based on the results of the study of the radar in England, an aviation jamming station Airborne Grocer was created. It was interesting to confront the German special equipment onboard radar Monica (frequency 300 MHz), installed in the rear hemisphere of British bombers. It was designed to protect aircraft in the German night sky from attacks from behind, but it perfectly unmasked the carrier aircraft. Especially for the German Monica, the Flensburg detector was developed and installed at the beginning of 1944 on night fighters.
Flensburg detector antennas on wing tips
Such games continued until July 13, 1944, when the British landed Ju 88G-1 on their airfield at night (not without the help of the tricks mentioned in the article). The car had a full "stuffing" - and Lichtenstein SN-2, and Flensburg. From that day on, the Monica was no longer installed on British Bombardier vehicles.
British radar station H2S, known in Nazi Germany as Rotterdam Gerät
A real engineering masterpiece of the British was the H2S centimeter range radar, which allows detecting large contrast targets on the earth's surface. Developed on the basis of a magnetron, the H2S was used by British bombers for both navigation and targeting bombing targets. From the beginning of 1943, the technology went into a wide wave in the troops - the radars were installed on Short Stirling, Handley Page Halifax, Lancaster and Fishpond. And already on February 2, the Stirling shot down over Rotterdam provided the Germans with H2S in a fairly tolerable condition, and on March 1 Halifax presented such a gift. The Germans were so impressed by the level of technical sophistication of the radar that they gave it the semi-mystical name "Rotterdam Gerät".
Radar control unit Naxos in the cockpit Bf-110
The fruit of the study of such a device was the Naxos detector, which operates in the 8-12-centimeter range. Naxos became the ancestor of a whole family of receivers installed on aircraft, ships and electronic warfare ground stations. And so on - the British responded by switching to the 3 cm wave (H2X), and the Germans in the summer of 1944 created the corresponding Mucke detector. A little later, the war ended and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Not for long …
