Sar Jim | The butcher bird raids prompted the RN to convert a couple of merchant ships into radar pickets in an attempt to pick up German raiders flying at low levels. Because the ship's radars were only 50 or so feet off the sea surface they had a better chance of picking up low fliers than land based stations. The state of radars then was such that ships only added about two minutes warning time compared to land based radars so the experiment wasn't continued. It did lead to the British converting older destroyers of the Battle class into so-called aircraft direction ships in the early 50's, fulfilling some of the radar picket tasks as first tried during WWII.
Japan - VisPol >> . The Doolittle Raid, also known as the Tokyo Raid, was an air raid on 18 April 1942 by the United States on the Japanese capital Tokyo and other places on Honshu during World War II. It was the first air operation to strike the Japanese archipelago. It demonstrated that the Japanese mainland was vulnerable to American air attack, served as retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor, and provided an important boost to American morale. The raid was planned, led by, and named after Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, later a Lieutenant General in the U.S. Army Air Forces and the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He was later promoted to the 4-star rank of General in the United States Air Force Reserve in 1985, after he was in a Retired status.
Sixteen B-25B Mitchell medium bombers were launched without fighter escort from the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier USS Hornet deep in the Western Pacific Ocean, each with a crew of five men. The plan called for them to bomb military targets in Japan and to continue westward to land in China. The bombing raid killed about 50 people, including civilians, and injured 400. Fifteen aircraft reached China but all crashed, while the 16th landed at Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. Of the 80 crew members, 77 survived the mission. Eight airmen were captured by Imperial Japanese Army troops in Eastern China; three were later executed. The B-25 that landed in the Soviet Union was confiscated and its crew interned for more than a year before being allowed to "escape" via Anglo-Soviet-occupiedIran with the help of the NKVD. Fourteen complete crews of five returned to the United States or to American forces, except for one crewman who was killed in action.
The raid caused negligible material damage to Japan, but it had major psychological effects. In the United States, it raised morale. In Japan, it raised doubt about the ability of military leaders to defend the home islands, but the bombing and strafing of civilians also steeled Japanese resolve to gain retribution, and this was exploited for propaganda purposes. It also pushed forward Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's plans to attack Midway Island in the Central Pacific, an attack that turned into a decisive defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) by the U.S. Navy in the Battle of Midway. The consequences were most severely felt in China, where Japanese reprisals caused the deaths of 250,000 civilians and 70,000 soldiers.
Doolittle initially believed that the loss of all his aircraft would lead to his court-martial, but he instead received the Medal of Honor and was promoted two ranks to brigadier general.
Operation K was a Japanese naval operation in WW2, intended as a reconnaissance of Pearl Harbor and disruption of repair and salvage operations following the surprise attack on 7 December 1941. It culminated on 4 March 1942, with an unsuccessful attack carried out by two Kawanishi H8K "Emily" flying boats. This was the longest distance ever undertaken by a two-plane bombing mission, and one of the longest bombing sorties ever planned without fighter escort.
In February 1942, the men of the newly formed British 2nd Parachute Battalion went into action for the first time. In one of the most daring raids of the war, they seized and brought back to England vital components of a German ‘Würzburg’ radar installation. Thing is, these paratroopers hadn’t even completed their basic parachute jumping training when they were selected for this daring raid. It is one of the lesser-known, and interesting stories of the Second World War.
Operation Biting, also known as the Bruneval Raid, was a British Combined Operationsraid on a German coastal radar installation at Bruneval in northern France during the Second World War, on the night of 27–28 February 1942.
Several of these installations were identified from Royal Air Force (RAF) aerial reconnaissance photographs during 1941, but their exact purpose and the nature of the equipment that they possessed was not known. Some British scientists believed that these stations were connected with the heavy losses being experienced by RAF bombers conducting bombing raids against targets in Occupied Europe. The scientists requested that one of these installations be raided and the technology it possessed be studied and, if possible, extracted and brought back to Britain for further examination.
Due to the extensive coastal defences erected by the Germans to protect the installation from a seaborne raid, it was believed that a commando raid from the sea would suffer heavy losses and give sufficient time for the garrison at the installation to destroy the Würzburg radar set. It was therefore decided that an airborne assault followed by seaborne evacuation would be the most practicable way to surprise the garrison of the installation, seize the technology intact, and minimise casualties to the raiding force.
On the night of 27 February, after a period of intense training and several delays due to poor weather, a company of airborne troops under the command of Major John Frost parachuted into France a few miles from the installation. The main force then assaulted the villa in which the radar equipment was kept, killing several members of the German garrison and capturing the installation after a brief firefight.
An RAF technician with the force dismantled the Würzburg radar array and removed several key pieces, after which the force withdrew to the evacuation beach. The detachment assigned to clear the beach had initially failed to do so, but the German force guarding it was soon eliminated with the help of the main force. The raiding troops were picked up by landing craft, then transferred to several Motor Gun Boats which returned them to Britain.
The raid was entirely successful. The airborne troops suffered relatively few casualties, and the pieces of the radar they brought back, along with a captured German radar technician, allowed British scientists to understand enemy advances in radar and to create countermeasures to neutralise them.
