Correction: This was during the day but in terrible weather conditions, so they used GCI and AI to find the target.
From: "The War in the Air; The Royal Air Force in World War II" edited by Gavin Lyall. This is an anthology book where actual letters, articles, journal entries, and such were assembled. The words are not after the fact in the sense of 50 years, but more like after the fact in the period of a month (guessing).
I was personally surprised that the night fighter war was in full swing as early as 1940. This account took place in 1941.
THE KNIGHT HE COMETH
Some weeks later, on the 23rd of May, the Germans looked at their weather reports and decided to have another try. It was as dark and as horribla a day aas it was possible for the English spring to produce, with weeping clouds dragging right down over the hills and layered above right up to twenty thousand feet.
At four o'clock in the afternoon we scraped off after them into the drizzle and set course for Swanage. The earth was gone in a flash, and we were alone in the centre of a ball of white emptiness. Only the needles of the instruments of the blind-flying panel could tell us what was happening: air-speed, height, rate of climb, altitude, direction. Without them we were anywhere and nowhere, and we had to believe them or perish. We were still, floating motionlessin a void, going neither up nor down, until we looked at the instruments.
Calling Starlight, John received an answer in the reassuring voice of Keith Geddes, who as now on a rest from operational flying and acting as a controller at the GCI. Keith gave us a lead to a quick and easy stern chase, and very soon John had a Heinkel in sight a thousand yards ahead. And almost immediately it was obvious to us that the crew of that aircraft were not going to be caught napping.
The Heinkel banked steeply over to the left and came running back at us, the gunners firing broadsides as they flashed past only a hundred yards away on the beam. John had the Beaufighter already staggering around after them, the force of the turn pressing me down outrageously into my seat. But this German pilot knew what he was about and he had already faded into the mist before we were around. I pushed my head down into the visor, but my eyes had been so dazzled by the glare outside that nearly a minute passed before I could make out anything on the face of the cathode ray tubes; and by that time there was nothing worth seeing.
'More help please,' John appealed to Starlight.
It was accutely embarrassing to hear my failure broadcast in such a way, but Starlight were still coping with things, and they had our customer tracked to the north of us, near Staftesbury. They passed to us more vectors, and another chase followed. Our luck was in, and again John caught sight of the Heinkel. I tried resolutely to keep my head down on the AI set, but sitting in a ring-side seat with champions in the lists and not watching what was happening was more than I could endure. And the pilot of the Heinkel was a champion. Then suddenly I remembered the sun-glasses I always carried for daylight practices. The pull of gravity was viciously building up again as I groped in my pockets, but finally I got the glasses on. I looked out just in time to see the Heinkel flash past, heeling over at a staggering angle, with the gunners still blazing away, wasting their ammunition. John was holding his fire, saving his ammunition until he could be sure of getting in a lethal shot.
I twisted quickly back on the set, and this time the blip showed up clearly as soon as I whipped off the glasses. The other aircraft had straightened up, apparently thinking he had thrown us off. I wondered what his feelings were and if he was beginning to despair when we reappeared behind him a few minutes later. He certainly showed no signs of any panic for he immediately repeated his sound tactics of turning into our attack.
But this time John was already turning inside him, determined not to be thrown off. The turns steepened until the Heinkel appeared to be almost upside down over our heads. The affects of the "G" were becoming intolerable as the duel developed into a grim winding match, a term John always used to describe two aircraft trying to out-turn each other. My eyeballs were dragging at their sockets, and my neck muscles were aching with the sheer effort it took to try and hold up my head. Over the intercom I could hear John's breathing become laboured as he relentlessly lugged those tons of metal around the sky.
Finding that he could not out-turn us, the German began to twist and dive. I kept losing sight of him under the wing, and then he would reappear on the opposite track, flashing past at seemingly impossible angles. It was a contest between masters of flying , but the pace was becoming too hot to last. I began to wonder which of the two would be the first to crach, and whether it would be machine or man.
But a third champion had slipped by now into the lists. That sinister Black Knight Sir Isaac was standing quietly waiting for one of his human adversaries to over-reach himself so that he, too, could join in and make it a three-cornered contest. And the way things were going he would not have long to wait.
The whole fuselage of the Beaufighter was shaking and the engines were howling as the airspeed steadily climbed. The needles of the altimiter raced backwards around the dial as we ran out of feet; and the blind-flying panel had long since gone crazy. The artificial horizon had given up trying and was sulking in one corner. Things were happening altogether too fast.
'Hm ... this isn't good enough,' John said very quietly, talking to himself. He went through a little soliloquy as he calmly and deliberately sorted out the outrageous story that the instruments were trying to tell him. 'Now ... let me see ... left bank ... that's better ...'
The Beaufighter lurched over drunkenly, and peculiar things happened to its trim. The floor re-established itself in a position that was totally different from where I had supposed it should be. But now things began to quieten down, and as we swung back on what must have been an even keel I had a celar picture of the Heinkel as it flashed past in full plain view, heading straight downwards.
'If I'd only brought my camera,' I commented.
'A fine time to start worrying about cameras!' John snapped with justified asperity.
It needed only a quick glance at the AI set for me to see how horribly clos we were to the ground, and I did not need to look at the altimeter to see what it was showing. We were over high ground rising in places to nine hundred feet. As I watched the blip from the other aircraft it raced swiftly up the shortened trace and was swallowed in those menacing ground returns.
'More help, please,' John appealed again.
But Starlight could not give us any further help as the blip from the customer had faded from their tube.
I was feeling quite exhausted as I searched for our homing beacon on the AI set adn guided John back to Middle Wallop. He felt his way down through the clouds and finally broke out into the welcome reality of a dripping landscape, thankful for the relief after two and a half hours of argument with the staring -- and often angrily glaring -- dials of his instrument panels.
And then we were told that our adversary had also seen the blessed earth again, although it could only have been for a brief, horrifying moment. The German was still diving almost vertically in a last desperate bid for escape when he broke cloud a few hundred feet above that unexpectedly high ground of the sodden slopes of Cranbourne Chase. He must have failed by only a few feet to pull out in time; and close to the lonely crossroads of Alvediston there was found the wreckage of the Heinkel with what was left of the spirited pilot and his crew.
Our intelligence people discovered that the pilot -- Hauptmann Langar -- was the Commanding Officer of the proving, or development, unit of the famous K. Gr. 100. Since John had not fired a single shot, it had indeed been a match between champions. John later confirmed that his air speed indicator was reading three hundred and forty miles an hour when he broke off, a speed that was decidedly high for the Beaufighter and under those conditions.
C.F. Rawnsley and Robert Wright
Note that's in IAS not TAS. I put line breaks between each paragraph for ease of reading. The formatting was different in the book.
[EDIT: Fixed about 5-6 typos]
