Pathfinder Force
RAF Bomber Command was Britain’s greatest and mightiest weapon in the Second World War. It was also the only weapon it possessed capable of striking heavily and directly at the heart of Nazi Germany. At the start of the war in 1939, the only way the Allies could take the fight to Germany was through the efforts of Bomber Command, but the aircraft and the navigation techniques were not up to the job. Not only did Bombers have to contend with German night fighters, wind speeds up to 300 kilometers per hour, and huge batteries of searchlights right across Europe; but, with every bomber independently using traditional navigation methods to find its own way to the target; many bombs were dropped on the outskirts of cities or in the wrong place entirely.
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It soon became apparent that the vast effort and tonnage dropped by Bomber Command would be largely wasted unless an accurate means of guiding aircraft to their targets could be found. After a study carried out by the British War Cabinet Secretariat in 1941, it was found that fewer than one in three crews were dropping their bombs within eight kilometers of the target. This was unsustainable.
Aircraft and crew losses were also mounting rapidly as radar-equipped German night fighters quickly shot down any aircraft straying outside the narrow corridor inhabited by Main Force bombers. Every loss of a Stirling, Halifax or Lancaster Heavy Bomber involved the loss of its seven aircrew members.
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In 1941, the idea of a special force to precede the main bomber streams and mark targets for them was suggested. However, this found little favour with the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris – as he believed such a division of his resources might foster elitism and have an adverse effect on morale. However, as losses mounted and cameras located in every aircraft showed precisely where their bombs ended up, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered Harris to create such a separate force that would accurately mark targets and thus concentrate bombing to a defined area. This new concept envisaged incendiary markers being dropped by a pathfinder force on specific aiming points determined by RAF Command. Heavy Bombers would then attack the area with its bomb aimers focusing their bombsights on the coloured incendiary markers - not on a target of their own choosing.
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On 15 August 1942, the Pathfinder Force was created under Group Captain Don Bennett, an Australian who later became the youngest Air Vice-Marshall in the RAF, and the concept was soon proven to be both revolutionary and extraordinarily successful. The aircrews for the new Pathfinder Force were selected from Bomber Command’s most highly experienced crews – but a posting to the Pathfinders entailed two conditions: First, you had to volunteer. Second, you had to accept a Tour of duty of 45 sorties, 15 more than for a standard Bomber Command Tour.
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Australian aircrew served throughout the Pathfinder squadrons, bringing with them a reputation for calmness under pressure and a willingness to volunteer for demanding roles. Their work was extraordinarily dangerous. To help mark targets accurately, Pathfinder Squadrons were equipped with new, highly advanced navigation systems such as GEE, OBOE, and H2S.
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GEE measured the time delay between two fixed radio signals to produce a position fix. Accuracy was within a few hundred metres up to about 350 miles.
OBOE was one of the Pathfinder's most important technical aids. It guided crews to their targets by pinpointing positions through intersecting signals from pairs of UK-based transmitting stations and was highly effective against inland targets as far as the Ruhr Basin. Accuracy was reported to be within 15 metres.
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H2S was a self-contained radar transmitter/receiver located in the floor of the aircraft that scanned 360° to reveal outlines of major cities, rivers, dams, battleships and submarine bases and could locate targets virtually anywhere throughout Western Europe.
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The other crucial elements of this new strategy were 1,000-pound coloured incendiary bombs that could be seen 200 miles away - generating a blaze so intense that it was literally impossible to extinguish them – and giving all planes and their bomb aimers a solitary point on which to concentrate.​​​​​​​​​​​
In January 1943, the Pathfinder Force became a separate Group - the famous 8 Group - and by this time Pathfinders had proven themselves as such accurate target markers that Bomber Command had at long last become a fully effective and lethal force. The ability to mark targets so accurately resulted in more and more experienced Squadrons being assigned to Pathfinder Force and as a consequence, even more new Lancaster Heavy Bombers were commissioned to capitalise on this aggressively successful destruction of Germany’s industries. So much so that by the end of the European War in May 1945, Pathfinder Force, initially composed of five Squadrons, now consisted of 21 Squadrons – eight Lancaster Squadrons plus a training unit and 11 Mosquito squadrons plus 1409 Met Flight. They had flown a total of 50,490 sorties against 3,440 targets. The number of Pathfinder aircrew killed on operations totalled 3,618; and of the 32 Victoria Crosses awarded to airmen serving Britain in the Second World War, 21 went to Bomber Command airmen and of these, three went to Pathfinder Force pilots – all posthumously.
