The Battle of the Beams was a period early in WW2 when bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) used a number of increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation for night bombing in the United Kingdom. British scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry fought back with a variety of their own increasingly effective means, involving jamming and distortion of the radio waves. The period ended when the Wehrmacht moved their forces to the East in May 1941, in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union.
In WW2, the Lorenz beam principle was used by the German Luftwaffe as the basis of a number of blind bombing aids, notably Knickebein ('crooked leg') and the X-Gerät ('X-Apparatus'), in their bombing offensive against English cities during the winter of 1940/41. Knickebein was very similar to LFF, modifying it only slightly to be more highly directional and work over much longer distance. Using the same frequencies allowed their bombers to use the already-installed LFF receivers, although a second receiver was needed in order to pinpoint a single location.
The X-Gerät involved cross-beams of the same characteristics but on different frequencies, which would both enable the pilot to calculate his speed (from the elapsed time between crossing the Fore Cross Signal and crossing the Main Cross Signal), and indicate when he should drop his payload. The calculation was performed by a mechanical computer. Lorenz modified this system to create the Viktoria/Hawaii lateral guidance system for the V-2 rocket.
A further operational drawback of the system was that bombers had to follow a fixed course between the beam transmitter station and the target; once the beam had been detected, defensive measures were made more effective by knowledge of the course.
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