Soda,
Negative? Well, maybe it came across that way. Your post had a very 'Omg - quick ! Stop NOE flying ! People will use it' tone, and having longed for some support for NOE attacks, I find that kinda scary. Effectively "Now that you've enabled NOE please make NOE acks lethal so people can't use it" (is how your first post read).
As to
My understanding is the NOE would NOT show as a dar bar, thus you would have NO warning of an attack and you may never know until it is over. I don't seem any realism in that. Even with dot dar in the current model often nobody notices a field is under attack at all.
Well:
'The weather closed down about 50 miles short of the target. We had to fly over mountains and then come down into the valley below and fly straight towards the target. We ran into cloud over the mountains, having had glorious sunny weather all the way. I was back of the second formation, and I, together with two others out of the 14, simply lost formation. We couldn't keep in touch with the aircraft next to us, but carried on on dead reckoning.
'When I came down out of the cloud the visibility was still poor and I couldn't find the target at all. I set off to look for it, and the cloud base lifted to 1,000 feet. There was a large city spread out to my port side. I thought I would fly round the edge and look for some factory that looked worth bombing. I flew right round the edge of the city at 800 feet but it was all residential, a lot of prosperous-looking houses in the outskirts up in the hills. It turned out that this was Weimar, a university city that does not have an industrial complex. But right in the middle was a big railway station with an enormous goods train stationary in it. I dived down into the centre of the city and dropped my bombs from 200 feet straight into the railway station and then went down over the rooftops to fly away north-west of the city.
'I had no sooner dropped my bombs than the most horrendous light flak barrage I had ever known opened up. When I got clear of the city and went up the river valley the flak was coming down from both sides of the hills. I was twisting and turning. When you are under light flak you have to throw the aircraft around because they are firing over open sights and trying to aim at you. We did get clear and I set off for home, alone of course. Having come through that and then realising, having looked at the map properly, that we were right down in south-east Germany, all alone, at 50 feet, I did feel a bit daunted, a bit desperate. But there was no alternative but to keep going.
'We flew for a long time north, north-west until we were certain we were clear of Hannover, before turning to port and flying due west back to England. Once we started to fly across the open German plain I knew we'd got away with it. Once we got over the Dutch frontier it was getting dark and the Dutch farmers were amazing. When they heard low-level aircraft around - we would come up from 50 feet to about 300 feet - they would rush to the doors of their cottage or farmhouse and open and shut the door, flashing their lights inside to us as a sign. They risked death by doing that, just to give us encouragement. I've never forgotten it.'
-- Charles Patterson, Bomber Command pilot
'The great thing about low flying was that it was always the aim to be as low as you could with safety, because it protected you from the guns, and from radar. It was exciting to be down among the trees, but the pilot had to be looking a long way ahead to see what he had to do next. Over Holland and the North German plain you could get very low indeed. Further inland, with the hills, not quite so low. You did see everything that was going on. We were navigating then with a map. Church steeples were great navigation aids at low level. If you had a map with churches on, the easiest way to navigate was by steeple.
'You could also see people - you could see cars, trucks, horses and carts. In hilly country we literally flew past someone's front door, and as we flew past I looked across over the wing tip and a man opened the door. I was looking him straight in the eye at about 40 feet. On one occasion in the flat country of Northern Germany we were flying very low across some open fields with very few trees, and there was a farmer with his horse and cart coming towards us. We were down deliberately low; I doubt if 10 or 20 feet would be an exaggeration. As we got close the horse reared up and threw the man off the cart before we went over. We were that close to people.
'Low flying in itself was not dangerous. We were flying in a Blenheim, cruising at 180mph. That's slow - you've got time to see trees, even high-tension cables. I've known people clip the target by being a few feet too low, but that was unusual. Occasionally somebody came back with a piece of tree.
'Now night low level was different. That really was dangerous if you got a bit too low, and people sometimes did. We had one night when we were attacking shipping in the Channel at full moon. One Blenheim came back and landed and the pilot asked us to come and look at it.
'"What happened?" we said.
'"Well, I saw a ship so I bombed it and hit it," he said, "I pulled up over the mast and I dropped down the other side. There was another ship there I hadn't seen, so I went through his mast."
'When we got out to the aeroplane we found that the propeller hadn't hit the mast, but the engine had collected a piece of wood that was burning gently against the cylinders.'
-- Ted Sismore, Bomber Command pilot
