Target for Tonight - Op 3, Berlin

Op 1 - Berlin
Op 2 - Nuremberg

On the 31st August 1944, Bomber Command sent 622 main-force four-engined bombers against Berlin, following the Nuremberg Op on the 27th-28th August.

We played those two attacks in our previous two games of a recreation of the first month of attacks initiated by Bomber Command in the so called 'Battle for Berlin'.

The attack route was kept fairly straight forward with a direct flight into Germany offering up cities such as Nuremberg, Leipzig and Hanover as possible targets, but seeing a hook north and north west to bring the stream in over Berlin city centre.

Bomber Command often avoided long straight in legs towards a target in this manner as it would offer the nightfighters the opportunity to get into the stream and fly along with it without any sudden changes of course to shake them off.

However with the second flight to the 'Big City' within a week and knowing how jumpy crews got going their anyway, it was felt the risk was worth it if it meant that crews felt they were getting in and getting out as directly as possible.

As with all these missions deep into Germany, weather was a key factor, and bad weather at that, to keep the bomber stream masked from German nightfighters, but ideally clearer over the target to allow ground marking flares to be laid by the Pathfinders rather than parachute deployed sky-marking flares with all the built inaccuracy of drift over the target.

The weather was also key to getting bomber crews back on the ground on their return with all the inherent risks of landing in bad conditions with tired crews and damaged aircraft.

So the weather for our second op to Berlin showed thick cloud over the target and over home airfields during the return flight.

So it was off to the monthly meeting of the Devon Wargames Group with planes and ops briefs in hand to fly the third op in this eight op mini-campaign, looking to test out some rules we have been working on to allow us to use Target for Tonight to game the air battles of Bomber Harris and Bomber Command.

As previously, the Bomber Group manifest below shows the number of aircraft each group was able to put up for the op together with losses indicated and showing one aircraft turning back from 4 Group.

The five main-force bomber groups of Bomber Command and the types flown by each group, with each group testing to see how many aircraft are available for each op. As can be seeing the novice crews among the Stirlings of 3 Group took a bit of a beating on what was a very successful bombing result.

Our Group commanders decided to go for a conservative attack given the success of the previous two ops, with a standard light bomb load and plenty of fuel for getting back, arming 1 Group Lancasters with the 4,000 lb Cookies to attack the industrial and transport centres and the rest of the groups backing them up with a mix of HE and incendiary loads to help start the fires once the roofs were off.

Bomber Command forms up and heads for the coast on another long flight to Berlin and back

As the groups took off in the dusk of the 31st August, there were very few mishaps with just a Lancaster from 1 Group 'D' Duff having a tyre blow out on take-off but with the pilot maintaining control to be able to clear the runway and join up with the group.

As part of the brief we have a prepared route showing the likely German nightfighter and RAF intruders on each leg

Things started to liven up as the stream crossed the coast over the North Sea with Halifax 'O' Orange turning back with the pilot complaining of stomach cramps and then a Stirling 'I' Ink crashing into the sea with all its novice crew lost, after an engine overheated and caught fire.

The first intercept occurred over the enemy coast with a 3 Group Stirling 'J' Jug going down to an Me110 from NJG I

As the stream came in over the enemy coast another novice crewed Stirling from 3 Group 'J' Jug spotted a nightfighter closing in on the lower flying aircraft and although managing to put the aircraft into a corkscrew was shot down after the port outer engine was hit and caught fire, with only the navigator managing to bail out.

TfT makes it very easy for the players to test each of their aircraft progressing into a new leg of the flight and seeing if anything happens 

As the stream pressed on into Germany, two more aircraft succumbed to flak, one, Stirling, 'H' Harry losing track and getting coned over a nearby battery and the unlucky Lancaster, 'R' Roger which having escaped a Ju88 over Hanover and narrowly missed hitting another bomber during its corkscrew manoeuvre succumbed to the Berlin flak when its port outer engine was hit and caught fire seeing all the crew lost in the following crash.

All our intercept models are set up and ready to go should the MONICA alarm sound

The Berlin flak was as fierce as ever with a few aircraft picking up damage on the way in, but gave some respite from nightfighter attack, only to see three bombers attacked on the bomb run with an alert tail-gunner on a 3 Group Stirling 'G' George shooting down an FW 190 and the others getting away with none of little damage.

Dice tower, models, a mug of tea - A typical game of TfT in progress

On arrival over the target the players set about implementing their plan of attack with the Lancasters of 1 Group going in first, looking to lay their Cookies on Industrial and Transport centres where the bigger bombs were required to start fires once the backing up groups had come in with smaller HE and incendiaries to mix in with them.

However a problem immediately became apparent as the thick cloud over the target meant that the target markers were not visible and thus 1 Group had to bomb blind trying to navigate to where they estimated their specific targets to be.

The only Lancaster lost of this Op was 'R' Roger going down to flak after escaping a Ju88 from NJG3 near Hanover

As the groups left the target area, it appeared that the bombing was fairly concentrated, but what exactly had been bombed would only be revealed on the debrief.

A 3 Group Stirling pictured over the target with first wave attacks from 1 Group Lancasters already marked up 

As the stream set course for the homeward leg, one aircraft in particular was leading a charmed life, 6 Group, Halifax 'W' William with its novice crew on board had managed to pick up three damage dice from flak on route to Berlin and would pick up another before seeing the English coast, and thus its progress over each leg became a focus of much interest as its pilot managed to keep the badly shot up aircraft stumbling along amid the bomber stream.

The final photo-flash showing the bombing pattern and no target markers visible through the heavy cloud

All went well for the returning stream through Germany with the occasional navigational error, soon corrected, but with the additional fuel compensating for the course corrections.

Unknown to the crews at the time, Beaufighters were operating nearby and managed to intercept an Me110 tracking the stream but failed to claim a kill.

The stream on the return flight, with two more legs to go to reach the enemy coast and with a Lancaster off course and out of the stream to the right of the main group.

As the stream finally crossed the enemy coast for home, 4 Group, Halifax 'N' Nanny was intercepted by an 'Experten' Me110 of NJG1 taking hits to the starboard wing and outer engine which promptly caught fire forcing the novice crew to bail out with all exiting the aircraft except the bomb-aimer.

Our final drama of the night occurred on landing as the battered Halifax 'W' William joined the circuit only to see the accumulated damage take effect and force the crew to attempt to bail out before it went down. Amazingly all the crew managed to bail out in time as the Halifax was seen to crash nearby in open farmland.

The final debrief of a well grouped attack causing seven fires two of which were on an industrial area and the city centre.
Note the Paramata markers that drifted left with the prevailing wind, but were unseen over the target and thus with the bombing around rather than on the markers themselves.

Once back on the ground the results of the raid were analysed and plotted on the target map above showing the results of a very well planned attack despite the drift and blind bombing required, seeing seven fires started in and around the centre and just four groups of bombs landing outside the city limits in open farmland.

This result keeps Bomber Command on track for a British victory after three ops and five to go, with the next op planned for our October club meeting after this year's 'Clotted Lard' show in September.

A really good game that rattled along, given the players familiarity now with the rules and the pre-game planning system using Cyberboard, I have adopted, to speed the set up process, together with recording in game events for reporting back in posts of our games.

One aspect I am contemplating to add in, to better reflect the challenges facing Bomber Command, is to increase the stress levels on crews returning to Berlin within the same month, simulating the reluctance to fly multiple returns in a short period of time among the crews. This could see bomb aimers reduced by one level of effectiveness and more pilots likely to make an excuse to turn back and/or dump their cookies over Germany.

So the next op will be to Mannheim-Ludwigshaven, hopefully for another 'wizard-prang'.

Target for Tonight - Nuremberg

This weekend at the Devon Wargames Group a few of us got together to play the second in a series of eight planned games to work up a campaign system for Target for Tonight (TfT). Normally I would post about games at the club on the club blog, but this project to design a campaign around the basic game has been detailed here on JJ's and so for completeness and ease of looking back over previous posts I have decided to post about these games here on JJ's.

The first game in this series, which is recreating the first month in the Battle of Berlin conducted by Bomber Command between late August 1943 through to the end of March, started with the first attack on the 'Big City' on August 23rd - 24th 1943 and you can follow what happened in the link to the post below.

Target for Tonight - Berlin Game 1

As described in my recent post covering the planing for this next game, the raid on Nuremberg on the 27th-28th August 1943, I am following the list of Mainforce ops composed principally from the Bomber Command War Diaries and The Berlin Raids as mentioned in that post and listed below.

The Berlin Campaign list of raids used to inform our ops planning for our eight games

Target for Tonight- Mainforce, Nuremberg Ops Plan

As can be seen both these raids saw a maximum effort by Bomber Command, now able to put close on 700 aircraft up when required, with both these first two targets deep into enemy territory, putting a greater strain on aircrews and increasing their risks with the long flights to and from the target.

This period was another one of those turning points in the night-bomber war against Germany as Bomber Command looked to take advantage of the disarray caused to the Nachtjagd by the use of 'window', aluminium foil strips dropped in mass bundles to disrupt the signals picked up by German radar, which since the mass raids on Hamburg the previous summer, had forced the German nightfighter crews to adopt new tactics to find the bombers and destroy them.

The situation after game one 

However the struggle to accurately navigate to the target and then to mark and bomb it in sufficient numbers to cause multiple fires and mass destruction continued to be a challenge, especially when the bomber crews went further into Germany restricting the accuracy of their blind bombing technology and, when making best use of bad weather conditions to blind the nightfighters, this also tended to impact on the accuracy of target marking as well as the bombing of them through thick cloud and haze.

As covered in previous posts leading up to this series of games, we are working through a play-test to see if we have the balance right on points scoring our raids. Quite clearly these games are designed to 'bath-tub' the actual campaign by allowing the players to enjoy the best part of TfT, which is the tension generated during the flight of the multiple model aircraft along our ops route to and from the target, with the aspect of raid planning, bombing up and fuelling the aircraft and attacking targets in such away as to maximise the damage caused and victory points that will outweigh the inevitable loss in aircraft and crews.

The target plan outlined to the players with the wind direction indicated and forecast to be light and with haze over the target

The losses sustained in TfT do not accurately reflect those that Bomber Command typically suffered and it would be a very boring game if they did, so the trick, it seems to me, is to marry up results with the cost of lost assets to come up with a simple number that reflects that analysis of the game result, namely victory points.

The result of game one produced a crushing victory from a very concentrated bombing of Berlin, but seeing just under half of the aircraft used failing to return, which leads me to conclude that the VP loss rate for aircraft lost is not correct and I wanted to run a second game to a similarly deep target to assess that conclusion and this post will show what happened and my conclusions that followed.

The order of battle for the five Mainforce bomber groups with the aircraft they were able to deploy together with the losses they sustained

Pre game planning for the op puts the players in command of the five Mainforce bomber groups as seen above showing the number of aircraft they have been able to put into the air, and in this example also showing the lost aircraft from the mission marked with a red X.

As Group commanders the players, following the briefing on weather and intelligence, have to decide how much fuel and bomb load will be carried and what the bomb mix will be, ranging from Cookies (4,000 lb HE) 1,000lb HE and incendiaries, which in different quantities and combination will cause major fires to the different targets within the city being attacked.

The players on this op decided to be conservative by selecting a light bomb load with maximum fuel but with an equal mix of HE and incendiary, having the Lancaster groups primarily bombed up with Cookies.

If they had gone for a heavier bomb lift, but with less fuel, it runs the risk of aircraft not having enough fuel for the return flight and less chance to evade nightfighters on the flight to the target with all that weight restricting manoeuvrability, but a bigger bomb lift, if they can get it to the target, likely to cause greater destruction.

With the aircraft bombed up and the aircraft identified with their unique call signs, the squadrons took off heading for the North Sea and in this case without any pre and post takeoff mishaps as shown in the picture above together with the long, long flight track ahead of them to and from the target with potential nightfighter interceptors awaiting them.

The flight proceeded without mishap until the stream came in over the enemy coast when the first casualty of the night occurred when Halifax, 'L - Leather' from 4 Group fell to the guns of an NJGI Me 110 patrolling over the Dutch coast with only the navigator able to bail out but posted as missing.

We had a new member, Steve, join us for the day's play and, as this was his first game of TfT, I had the pleasure of watching his pulse rate race away as one of his 1 Group Lancasters 'A-Apple' had a 'Monica' nightfighter warning alarm sound over the Khamhuber Line and he put the Lancaster into a corkscrew on the nightfighter board with the enemy Me 110 about to administer the coup de grace, when the model was returned to the bomber stream track and he was informed that the it had been a false alarm.

Further on to the target we had a couple of night-fighter intercepts and this gave us the opportunity to try out the nightfighter rule adaptations from the chaps on the TfT Facebook Group which allows air gunners and nightfighter crews to have individual ability factors plus a more enhanced use of the bomber's defences from its various gun positions.

Our bomber stream heads on into Germany, target Nuremberg with window streaming out in its wake

These rule changes produced yet more drama with nightfighter pilots weighing up the risk of enduring bomber return fire from mid-upper and tail gunners whilst trying to ensure that close in tail chasing kill shot with zero deflection.

In addition, nightfighters and airgunners are no-longer 'vanilla' in their abilities and bomber pilots can no longer assume that the nightfighter pilot knows what he is doing until he tries to cause a hit, when his gunnery factor is revealed, likewise some airgunners were equally deserving of respect or not and the change certainly adds to the game without any added complexity.

With the Monica alarm sounding a Lancaster is flung into a corkscrew with a rearward  Me 110 in hot pursuit

As well as nightfighters to contend with we had our usual mix of navigational errors and drifting off over searchlights and flak zones leaving various aircraft carrying reduced fuel loads and damage dice from flak and nightfighters but leaving an intact bomber stream minus L Leather to arrive in the flak zone over Nuremburg.

In the main the flak was intense with plenty of buffeting and a couple of aircraft picking up extra damage dice but again the stream remained intact ready to turn in over the target ready for the bomb run.

It was at this stage that the Nachtjagd unleashed part of its new tactics with radar carrying Wild Boar single seat fighters zooming in on the bomb-run and attacking three of the bombers causing extra damage and seemingly to cause already jumpy bomb-aimers to lose control and release early, with several bomb drops looking likely to have found just fields.

'G - George, a Stirling from 3 Group starts its run in over the target, not particularly well lined up and with early bomb drops of cookies, HE and incendiary littering the forward edge causing a scattered bombing pattern  with better drops into the city up ahead.

As with the Berlin raid it seems the Nachtjagd were still not able to predict the target location until well into the op and it was on the return flight that the stream started to succumb to further attacks from fighters and damage sustained on the way in.

The next casualty was O-Orange, a  Lancaster from 5 Group that was attacked on the first part of the homeward leg by an Me 110 from NJG VII which caught the bomber as it seemed likely to evade into the dark only to see multiple hits start fires in the port and starboard outer engines as the German fighter sprayed rounds across the target with a swift kick on the rudder.

Even then the pilot of this veteran crew, managed to side-slip putting out the fire on the port side only to whip up the fire on the other engine causing him to lose control and see the aircraft lost with all its crew.

Soon after this, another veteran crew of Halifax R-Roger fell to the guns of a Ju 88 using Schrage Musik upward firing guns which managed to approach the bomber undetected and shoot the aircraft down without the crew realising they were under attack until it was too late. However the tail and mid-upper gunners managed to bail out just in time.

Then the final casualties occurred on the run back over the Belgian coast as two Lancasters from 1 Group succumbed, B-Beer and D-Duff, with both captains losing control of their aircraft from damage sustained early in the flight only to see all their hard efforts to return in vain, as the English Channel coast was about to be crossed. Only the tail gunner survived from B-Beer.

Another 1 Group Lancaster C-Charlie had a close run thing with a tyre blow out on landing but with the pilot managing to apply enough opposite rudder to stabilise the aircraft and to only sustain minor damage to the undercarriage whilst still landing safely.

In the post raid analysis it was found that the light winds had meant that the target indicators had been accurately deployed on the Oil refining plant, north of the city, but a slight drop back had meant that the serious fires had been inflicted on the nearby residential area, and with the early drops likely caused by the notable nightfighter activity, the other two major fires broke out in the industrial and urban areas to the south close to the river, but with a large bomb drop falling in nearby fields.

So points scored on the raid would be 11 for the target, 8 for the major fires, 6 for other bombs not causing fires hitting the target less 5 points for aircraft lost for a total of 20 victory points and another crushing result which again does not reflect the losses incurred.

On the next series of Ops I plan to make some changes to the victory point scoring which will increase the points loss for downed bombers to better reflect the attrition caused to bomber command.

My thinking will be to increase the basic cost of a lost aircraft from 1 to 2 points for these previous two ops and from op three onward, to cost losses similarly but with a premium added for more experienced crews.

The debrief, an important aspect of the op and in our case an opportunity to look at the game overall and the campaign structure.

As it stands then, with these basic modifications, the Berlin op would net 18 points and the Nuremberg op 15 points leaving the current situation running at a British victory at just over 16 points per mission described as;

'the targets have been plastered with losses kept at acceptable'. 

If that average should drop to 12 points, then the situation would be a draw, described as;

'mounting losses cancel the effects of the bombing' 

which would reflect the historical result and keep the campaign interesting from that perspective.

If the average should drop to 10 points then we move into a German minor victory where;

'losses outweigh the damage inflicted' 

and thus the campaign would be unsustainable.

Anything less that a 10 point average and we enter a disastrous outcome for Bomber Command described as;

'unacceptable losses causing a pause and rethink of the night bomber offensive'.

The aim will be to allow for those disastrous missions to cause pause for thought but balanced out by those that cause massive destruction for an average or less loss rate, all impacted by the changes brought about by the technological battle running alongside the air campaign and making fuel and bomb load decisions in the prevailing weather conditions that critical part of planning.

So the next game is planned for July with another op to The Big City and a chance to test out these ideas.

Thanks to Ian, Steve L, Stephen H, Si and Steve (Our new member) for flying this op and here is looking forward to the next one.

Target for Tonight Mainforce - Nuremberg Raid Plan

After my recent posts looking at my project to update my Target for Tonight collection of models, together with some ideas to create a campaign structure around the core games which culminated in me running the first of eight planned games linked together to recreate the first month of the Battle for Berlin initiated by Bomber Command in late 1943.

https://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2019/03/mainforcing-target-for-tonight.html

https://jjwargames.blogspot.com/2019/03/target-for-tonight-berlin.html

The Berlin Campaign major ops showing targets, total aircraft involved and types with losses total percentage and by type (number of aircraft), L-Lancaster, H-Halifax, S-Stirling, W-Wellington
Source - The Bomber Command War Diary, Middlebrook & Everitt

Following the first run through of the basic structure in the first game where players ran a mission with the five bomber groups to attack Berlin, recreating the first attack on August 23rd 1943, I have gone away and made adjustments and altered various aspects including adding in some of the ideas created by other players who share ideas on the Target for Tonight Facebook Group around air-gunner and nightfighter capabilities.

Target for Tonight - Facebook

The first part of the Ops brief shows the target, predicted weather, number of aircraft available by group and their potential bomb lift.

Thus I have put together a plan for the next game using the Cyberboard module I created originally but, based on the game planning involved last time, I decided to short circuit the process by preparing a op plan that would have a lot of the pre-game data already worked through, including crews, weather, nightfighter allocation and target maps, thus allowing the players on the day to simply mark up their aircraft stat cards and decide the appropriate bomb lift and fuel load out for their groups.

Part two of the brief shoes the aircraft crews, now including air gunner stats together with the route plan in tiles to the target and back

The ops planning form allows me to simply take map data from Cyberboard and type in crew stats from my prepared set of sixty randomly prepared crews now with air gunner stats added and with a final brief showing potential nightfighters by area that simply makes it easy for me to select an aircraft during an intercept, and finally the countermeasures briefing already prepared that can be used to update future games in the sequence.

The final part of the Ops plan showing likely nightfighter distribution by type and rating, the target map and predicted wind direction for pre-planning TI drop and the latest countermeasures with a summary of the campaign position since the last op.

The crew stats will change by op to reflect losses sustained in between the major operations we are creating and other likely hazards that caused a continual attrition and change within squadrons and groups.

In addition to working up the basic game structure, I have completed my collection of models with the addition of a Beaufighter IV NF to be used alongside my Mosquito to do RAF nightfighter intercept games and I might add an Me109 Wild Boar fighter just for completeness.

The new Beaufighter IV NF

In addition I have painted up the last few of my micro bombers that I picked up from Magister Militum at Salute earlier this month that completes my Stirling and Wellington squadrons and will allow the Rhur campaign order of battle as a potential future campaign.

Lines of extra Stirlings and Wellingtons complete  the bomber stream collection

Finally, just to add to the visual effect of the bomber stream heading out into the night skies over Germany I decided to kit out some of my models streaming Window in their path and I have an idea to perhaps use these to represent Bomber Support Group squadrons. Either way they look great when positioned at the back of the stream.

The Window foil strips flutters out in the wake of these four Lancasters

All my trays holding the models together with the player stat cards, playing cards, wipe pens and mission route tiles now fit into a 9ltr RUB with a raised lid and together with the playing board for Bomb Runs and Nightfighter Intercepts makes the game easy to transport to club.

So everything is ready for the next meeting of the Devon Wargames Group early next month when we will see if the early good fortune for Bomber Command over Berlin in the first op continues with another deep raid into southern Germany and the attack on Nurmemberg on the 27th August 1943 which, historically, produced negligible results despite good TI's and a Master Bomber overhead, little compensation for the 4.9% loss rate suffered.

Three really informative titles for anyone interested in campaigning the Bomber Command battles of WWII

During my preparation for this series of games I have added recently to my library to include the Bomber Command Diaries - Middlebrrok and Everitt, mentioned above which is an absolute gold mine for those wanting to know the detail of bomber command operations throughout the whole war and is a core source for putting together my series of games.

In addition the Haynes series of books looking at military subjects in great source of detail and is a book I keep dipping into when looking at Bomber Command operations.

Finally for the human dimension and in-depth detail of the Battle of Berlin campaign the Middlebrook title, 'The Berlin Raids', is a must read with excellent maps and analysis of each of the missions between August 1943 to it close in March 1944 together with a useful summary of the other activities that took place in between.

More anon
JJ

Target for Tonight - Berlin

So following on from my previous post, the game went to the Devon Wargames Group mid-month gathering last weekend and several of the chaps volunteered to road-test the new rules around Target for Tonight.

I should say, that I am an inveterate 'rules tweaker' and have never subscribed to the rules as written being the final version so I like to write a draft of proposed changes and test and test and test until I have to stop and go away for a total re-think or until they start to look like something I had originally envisaged.

Thus this proposed series of games are test games and the results are only indicative of where the testing is at the moment not the hoped for end result, unless in the unlikely event I change nothing.

So the first thing we set up was the campaign which will be a series of eight games representing a campaign month for the Battle of Berlin, starting in August 1943.

To set up my groups for the target I had each of the players roll a DAve +1 to establish how many of their aircraft would be available for the op and then set up the Target Route Map seen above to show the weather over Berlin and back in the UK.

The target map for Berlin

The weather principally affects bombing results and landing risks and is part of the raid planning which the players, acting as Bomb Group Commanders, include in their deliberations over building the bomb lift for the op.

In the end we established that we had nine aircraft not available for this mission as shown at the bottom of the screen grab above.

In addition the players set up their crew rosters from a prepared list of sixty crews arranged in ten lists of six, that I put together that simply enabled the players to roll a D10 and a D6 to find out the quality of the crew.

The route to the target and back - a long flight

Then after a discussion on the merits of extra fuel or extra bombs on a deep penetration into Germany that a Berlin raid is, the players opted to increase the bomb load by twenty percent and reduce the fuel loads by just over a similar amount, with an equal mix of HE and incendiaries but with the Lancasters carrying the extra HE with their cookies

The bomber stream forming up over the English coast before setting out for Germany

The raid turned out to be a game of two halves with one aircraft aborting the raid due to technical issues on take-off and one turning back at the enemy coast with a pilot complaining of stomach cramps and two aircraft intercepted by night fighters over the enemy coast but shot down before they knew they were under attack.

Our first Sterling bomb run with flash markers all ready dotted about on the target

Then the RAF mosquito night-fighters took a hand clearing three of the five 'Over Germany' legs of the flight and the spoof raids doing their job in the other two leaving me the pleasure of scaring a few of the novice players with some 'monica' false alarms and mock night-fighter intercepts just to raise the adrenaline levels.

This was all to the good for our British bomber pilots as having the extra bombs on board not only meant reduced fuel levels but also meant that they would have been unable to corkscrew even if they had spotted an approaching night-fighter leaving them vulnerable to attack.

So through good fortune we had a sizable gaggle of aircraft arriving at the Berlin flak belt although with a fair number having burnt up that precious fuel wasted on navigation errors en-route.

The playing area with a bomb run in play and cards getting turned

The three flak zones over Berlin managed to take down two more victims, one with a direct hit in the bomb bay and another aircraft lost when forced to go around again having missed the run in to the target.

Because of the cloud cover over the target area the mosquito pathfinders were using Parramatta markers that would likely add to the deviation factors such as the wind, poor radar signature for H2S ground radar sets; with Berlin being such a large city area and beyond OBOE direction finding, mosquito crews had to rely on inaccurate timed navigational approach.

Thus the TI was placed on the aiming point square that supposedly contained the docks just below the Dornier aircraft factory but only the follow up recce flight would validate the accuracy of the raid.

During our game I used the computer to run a video of night operations over Germany on a screen facing the players as well as showing the target map for the bomb run and later in the debrief. In addition before we began our series of bomb runs I played the link above to illustrate the thing being done for real, with a series of three aircraft intercom recordings of bomber crews over Bochum, Stettin and Berlin, with the latter recorded being attacked by and shooting down a German night-fighter whilst on the bomb run.

Not wishing to indulge in a debate over the rights and wrongs of the allied strategic bombing campaigns in WWII it is still noteworthy and admirable how these chaps behave and conduct themselves under the most extreme circumstances and it is remarkable that their chat does not include the expletives that seem to populate the conversations of later generations in much more relaxed environments.

That said a game like Target for Tonight really brings home the reality of the Second World War and a total war that brutalised civilians and military personnel alike and an appreciation of the sacrifice made by a previous generation that means the subsequent ones have not had to face anything on a similar scale, something as wargamers we are probably more able to appreciate than many others in society.

In come the Hallibags for their run over the target

The Lancasters were the last groups to run over the target and the picture below shows the spread of flash markers from the previous aircraft with two areas having two such markers indicating a good concentration close to the aiming point.

If those concentrations were able to start multiple large fires then the accuracy would again be subject to creepback, dropping back other aircraft bomb drops relative to those fires.

Lancasters from 1 and 5 Groups provided the bulk of the HE with their cookies

The return flight was a reverse of the trip to the target with five night-fighter intercepts that revealed our bombers charmed life still persisted, with five of them managing to corkscrew and evade but with two of them subsequently succumbing to damage sustained during their evasion.

However the nachtjagd also had a difficult night with two of their number falling to RAF air-gunners.

The run back to home and the landings proved relatively uneventful despite fog covering the home bases and with all the returnees safely back on the ground we then considered the results of the attack.

When the wind and drift were calculated it was found that the TIs had drifted one square to the top of the map dragging up the other drops and having all the bombs dropped over the city and thus scoring.

The bombing results for our first game

As can be seen major fires were caused on the Dornier works and Siemens Plant north and south of the docks,with additional fires caused to the city centre and three suburban districts although it seems one of these was subsequently dealt with by the city's civil-defence services.

When the final calculation was done the British raid achieved 28 victory points which is an extremely strong result, but one I am not sure was down to some extraordinary results and good fortune, a combination of concentrated bombing, extra bomb load and shooting down two night-fighters, that all helped to cancel out the -10 victory points incurred through the overall loss rate.

Hopefully the next few games will give me a better marker for where the centre of the bell curve really lies with regard to the victory point allocation.

So as the poster declares we will look for another target in about another month to see if the RAF's good fortune still holds.

Target for Tonight is a truly immersive experience of a game and the core mechanics of that still remains.

Thanks to David, Stephen and Steve L for being the guinea pigs on this play-though and to my other fellow DWG members who had to contend with our rather noisy and enthusiastic table during our day's play.