Re: Historically Inaccurate Fiction

"Andrew Clark" <aclark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:dc8a8d$e9u$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> "Don Phillipson" <dphillipson@xxxxxx> wrote
>
> > German centimetric (high frequency, high
> > accuracy) appears to have been better in
> > quality than the British...
>
> The Wuerzburg GCI radar used from 1940-45 was a decimetric,
> not centimetric radar: it operated on a wave length of 50-53
> cm. It was roughly equivalent in performance to the British
> type 11 GCI, introduced 1942. The British Type 13, developed
> 1942 but not deployed operationally until 1944, was a 3 cm
> centrimetric GCI radar of very significantly higher
> performance than the Wuerzburg.
>
> > thus enabled ground control of
> > night fighters which Britain never
> > attempted on the same scale:
>
> Britain had no need for ground control of night fighters on
> the same scale as Germany, because Britain had centrimetric
> airborne search radar and Germany did not (the Lichtenstein
> SN2 was a 200 cm radar). The elaborate nature of the German
> night fighter control arrangements was due to German
> technological inferiority, not superiority.
>
> > cf. also commando raids on Bruneval
> > and other Freya radar units
> > to aid British countermeasures.
>
> These raids were much more to discover German capabilities
> than to advance British radar technology.

The Germans were first to use the radar dish, look like modern TV satellite
dishes. On was seen on the French coast on a cliff, so a Commando unit
climbed the cliffs, took away the radar sets, and went back across the
Channel. The cheek of it.

You are right, the British never copied anything the Germans did. Although
at one point, for a short time, the Germans were ahead on some minor aspects
of radar - the rotating dish being one.

> The British did not copy and German
> radar in WW2, whereas the Germans copied
> several British radars including H2S.

Towards the end of the war the Germans were using British radio guidance
transmitters for navigation, using captured receiving sets from downed
aircraft.

> > JL is right that, regardless
> > of technical quality, the British organized
> > radar better, cf. the Fighter Command
> > control system of 1940.
>
> Not quite. Britain organised its air defences better then
> Germany in 1940. By 1942, the Germans had caught up in
> purely organisational terms.
>
> > Notoriously, Germans attempted in the summer
> > of 1939 to assess British radar research by
> > sending an airship (Zeppelin type) up the
> > east coast off Bawdsey, first site of TRE.
> > It appears that for no particular reason
> > Bawdsey was not transmitting when the
> > unseen airship was near
> > enough, thus frustrating the mission.
>
> No. The British happily tracked the airship on CH, but the
> Germans were trying to detect the wrong frequencies and got
> nothing in return.

They made a serious error in assessing the frequencies they detected too,
totally underestimating the British radar system. They didn't think radar
could effectively operate on those frequencies.

--

.

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