How do you make invisible combat visible? Nightfighter During the Second World War the sky over The Netherlands played a significant role in the war in the air. This is a fact that is often underestimated or missed. From 1940 to the end of 1944 there raged a bitter fight over the heads of the Dutch people in occupied Holland, not only during the day but also at night. During the daylight hours, American bombers filled the skies with contrails, while at night there was another, often invisible, struggle played out in the darkness. Often the only, silent, witnesses of this deadly game of cat and mouse were the burning pieces of wreckage floating down to earth. Our airspace witnessed the first, large scale, airborne operation in history and after the capitulation of The Netherlands the Dutch airfields were soon put to good use by the Germans. The German obviously were aware of the fact that if the British Royal Air Force wanted to bomb Germany they would use Dutch airspace to go there. During the interwar period many countries started the large scale production of bombers, the weapon of the future that would rule the skies. The pre-war idea that the bomber ‘will always get through’ soon proved to be an illusion. German fighter pilot slaughtered the attacking British bombers, while the British fighters would soon stop the German bombers that attacked England. The RAF was the first to change tactics and started to fly missions at night to drop leaflets over Germany. And all of a sudden the advantage the fighter pilots enjoyed melted away. Technology What happened next was the development and use of technology to try and stop the enemy at night. It was not only a race to try and modify aircraft in such a way as to enable them to detect and kill enemy bombers. It was also the first time that technology was used on a large scale, which started with the use by the English of radar during the battle of Britain. When the Germans developed a radar system that could be operated inside an aircraft and that was able to hunt and detect a British bomber, the Brits would develop technology to jam and/or detect this apparatus. This ‘technology race’ resulted in equipment shrinking in size and getting more easily to operate and build inside an aircraft. On the ground radar stations were build, also in Holland near Arnhem, that were next connected to one another in order to share the information they had collected. They were next connected to controller stations that controlled the fighter aircraft and the air bases where the fighters took off from. Almost all the Dutch airfields, like Leeuwarden, Volkel, Deelen, and Schiphol, were used by the German fighter pilots and their aircraft. Nightfighters Messerschmitt Me-109s, Junkers Ju-88s, Heinkel He-219s, and many other aircraft types took off to try and hunt down British bombers like the Wellington and Lancaster. Pilot like Wolfgang Falck, Heinz- Wolfgang Schnaufer and Helmut Lent became household names as Experten and scored an impressive number of Abschusse in the dark. But the British started to develop their nightfighter weapon too to hunt down the Germans at night. They converted the Boulton Paul Defiant, a fighter aircraft equipped with a gun turret behind the pilot, for use as a nightfighter. Not that successful… Light bombers were converted too since they held enough space to store the necessary equipment. And it did not take long before Bristol Blenheims started flying around with all kinds of weird ‘drying rack’ like antennae. As war progressed aircraft types like the Bristol Beaufighter, de Havilland Mosquito (the wooden wonder), and the American Northrop P-61 Black Widow were introduced. These aircraft were used to hunt down German bombers that tried to bomb targets in England. They also flew among the English bombers, on their way to or from a target, to hunt for German nightfighters. They patrolled German airfields to shoot down returning German nightfighters, and flew ‘delousing’ missions to pick off German fighters that intermingled with the returning bombers, looking for an easy prey. Japan But it was not only the sky over Europe that was the scene of nighttime air combat. This was also taking place in the Pacific. Because the Americans ruled the skies over Guadalcanal in August 1942, the Japanese started to fly missions at night to disturb the Marines on the island and deprive them from sleep. Since the Americans did not suffer themselves from nighttime visitors they did not develop their nightfighter arm. It was the London Blitz in 1940 that woke them up. The American efforts to develop their nightfighter force mainly started to intensify when the Japanese started to use Kamikaze to hit and stop and US Navy. The closer they came to the Japanese home islands, and with attacks becoming more frequent, the more these efforts to develop precautionary measures became. The Americans developed a system of fighter controllers and radar equipped aircraft. The fighter controllers were either stationed aboard ships or at forward located radar post on already occupied islands. An impossible task Designing a boardwargame about the war in the air is quite an undertaking by itself, but the air war at night… Air combat takes place in a three dimensional arena. Factors like altitude, speed, flight characteristics, and aerodynamic effects, are quite hard to simulate using a cardboard counter on a map. It has been only for a short period of time that air combat games have become quite successful. Strange thing is that most of them are GMT titles. For example, the Down in Flames series by GMT/DVG, Downtown (GMT) covering the air war over Vietnam, Elusive Victory (GMT) covering the wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors, and Bloody April, 1917 (GMT) about the First World War. And now there is Nightfighter and Bomber Command, both by GMT. Nightfighter This game depicts the war in the air, at night, during the Second World War, both in Europe and the Pacific. The quality of the game components is what we have become used to in any GMT game. Nice looking counters and markers, showing the participating aircraft, a number of player aid cards, and a nicely done rulebook. A scenario book with 10 scenarios, each with its own number of variants, showing the player an interesting overview of the technological developments which took place during the war. Each scenario has a difficulty level. The first scenario starts with the pilot flying a Hurricane while using his Mk.1 eyeball to hunt down a bomber. ‘Difficulty Level: Impossible’; need I say more…? The scenarios do not follow a chronological order, which would be quite hard to achieve at all. The variants in each scenario add details like Monica, Schräge Musik, Flensburg, Beleuchter, Mattscheibe, and more. There are also Experten or Aces, the top guns. I won’t mention them all here but see the Note at the end of the article. If the air war at night is unfamiliar territory to you, this game will tell you all about it. The game Okay, all well and good, but how does it play. There are two players: a referee and a player. Both of them will have a map in front of them. The map used by the referee (11”x17”) is somewhat smaller than the map used by the player (17”x22”). A screen, containing all the needed charts and tables, will be placed between the two players. This way the player will be unable to spot where the bomber enters the map or its position. Each scenario will see a number of bombers enter the game map determined by chits, drawn by the referee. These chits contain the information about where the bomber enters the map. The bombers are flying from the top to the bottom of the map, as seen from the players position. So in a way he is flying up the stream of bombers. Obviously he can turn and try to maneuver on any bombers present. If a bomber has exited the map, it’s safe. The referee ‘feeds’ the nightfighter information, gathered by the use of his eyesight and radar, which he needs to examine. Radar equipment can be fitted at the front and the rear of the fighter. And there are also the radars that are stationed on the ground. Weather and moonlight also plays a role here. Moonlight can betray both friend and foe. Contrails could lead a nightfighter to the bombers. Searchlights were used to light up the cloud deck at low level, which turned a milky white in color, in order to make the bombers stick out like a sore thumb against the clouds. Only the referee has an overview of the ‘battlefield’, and needs to feed the player the information he has gathered. The referee can use feints and act like he is putting a bomber on the map, while he doesn’t do this at all. He also ‘directs’ the Intruders that hunted down the nightfighters. As you can imagine he doesn’t have a free hand to do so, the rules regulate what he can and can’t do. After all, he has all the information available to act at will and kill the nightfighters. The map has been divided in zones and the set-up information of a scenario will tell you where searchlights will be available. There are radio beacons that were used to assemble the nightfighters to next direct them into the bomber stream. Scenarios depicted in the Pacific have special hexes from which bombers throwing out flares will appear in order to be able to attack the American Task Forces that are stationed nearby.