"Between mid-January and the end of July 1942, JG54 Bf109's shot down 56 enemy aircraft during the hours of darkness."
-Osprey Bf109 Aces of the Russian Front
The kills described above were the direct result of an initiative by Geschwaderkommodore Hannes Trautloft, who proposed that selected pilots should take off on bright moonlit nights and circle low over the snowy landscape of the Lake Ilmen area, ready to pounce on any unwary Soviet bombers. The fighters sortied carried no radar. These were front line "day" fighter units and they relied on moonlight, snowy landscape, good eyesight, proper positioning and the element of suprise.
The highest JG54 night scorer during this time period had 16 kills. Haupt. Reinhard Seiler. Next was Oblt Gunther Fink with 9. Haupt Seiler's final tally was 96 kills with 16 of those being at night...and he wasn't even in a night fighter unit.
Obviously night operations were carried out by day fighters on occasions such as the 6 month period described above. I'm sure somebody can find some sort of record of night operations for other "day fighter" units as well. Especially in records pertaining to early to mid-war actions. Maybe even some defense of the Reich sorties of day fighters flown at night?
For AH, it's not necessary to have a dedicated night fighter with on board radar set and heavier armament in order to night fight. Day fighters could and did operate at night. So should we be able to.
Kill levels may be lower at night, and maybe people don't like landing a sortie empty handed from time to time. But it's not completely accurate to say that day fighters did not fight at night with any regularity. 6 months is a fairly large chunk of time out the average life expectancy of a fighter pilot. And that's just taking into account night operations as officially ordered for JG54 during the first part of 1942.
There are other accounts of "early risers" starting patrols at 2:30 or 3:30am from front line bases along the Eastern Front and returning before or with the dawn. So if they spotted an enemy plane in the wee hours of the morning, did they radio it back to hq and ask to have a night fighter despatched? I doubt that was even an option. There's a fair chance that unofficial night operations, or more accurately, operations during darkness, were carried out by "day" fighter units, depending on the needs of their particular theatre of combat.
I'd like to see night return because it was fun. Maybe it's not fun for other people. Maybe not even for the majority of people, in which case, it's probably unlikely that it would make a return. But it's just not accurate to say that actual fighter pilots that DID fight in ww2 on all sides simply didn't sortie day fighters at night. If the need was there to sortie somebody in a fighter, then I bet somebody was going to up a fighter regardless of the time of day or night. It may not have been an everyday occurance, but it did happen.
For AH purposes, we don't need special radar sets in special aircraft, though that would be even more fun. We already have a Ground Controlled Intercept style radar in our dot dar and dar bar and I can't really understand why night would have to have that radar turned off, yet day fighters could benefit from it? Silly. You can still blind the another country by knocking out the HQ's radar buildings. We dont' have any night fighters that carry on board radar yet, so as night approached, country's would finally have a reason to defend their HQ's. All around play quality would increase in my opinion with a slightly greater emphasis on the strategy of winning the "war" than on endless furballing. (And maybe some people would actually get better at level bombing and stop trying to dive bomb with b17's and Lancs.)
We always have a full moon too, or at least AH1 did, and there was enough light to see and fly by instruments unless the clouds obscured the moonlight. Visibility wasn't all that terrible but it was dark. Ground targets were visible enough to bomb, but you had to perfect your technique with the shorter line of sight runs. Maybe it was primarily those of us who like to level bomb that loved the night...though I always thought most people had fun during the night, whatever they flew. I enjoyed killing night bombers as much as bombing stuff at night though, and some people did manage to furball and jabo, though the fights were generally smaller and it was a little easier to disengage if you got into trouble. But then one day the night was gone.
If the night comes back, I'll be happy. If it doesn't. No big deal I guess. It's a shame to not have it, but...I guess the majority will rule. I'll still have fun regardless.
-Hack9
