ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

Chapter 4
History doesn't relate the mood of the crewmembers of the Northrop
P-61 Black Widow patrolling the sky above the Rhineland that night, but
the available clues suggest that they were none too happy. A night-fighter
crew was about as close-knit a unit as you could find among the frontline
squadrons ranged against Germany in late 1944. Success—their very
survival when it came down to it—depended on a high level of trust,
intense training, the reliability of a piece of hardware then still in its
infancy—radar—and undiluted concentration.
The last thing U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant Ed Schlueter would
have needed that night was a passenger. Worse, Ringwald wasn't even
aircrew, but an intelligence officer.
Lieutenant Fred Ringwald was sitting behind and above Schlueter, the
P-61's pilot, in the position normally occupied by the gunner. Schlueter's
unit, the 415th Night Fighter Squadron of the U.S. 9th Army Air Force,
had recently upgraded from their British-made Bristol Beaufighters to
the Black Widow. They had also just transferred from the Italian theater
of operations to England and from there across the Channel, deploying
eastward in short hops across northwest France as the Allies pushed the
Nazis toward the Rhine and back into Germany itself.
Schlueter flew his aircraft south along the Rhine, looking for "trade."
The Black Widow was a heavy fighter; bigger than the Beaufighter and
considerably more menacing in appearance. While its primary targets
were the German night fighters sent up to intercept British bomber
streams heading to and from Germany, there was always the chance,
provided Schlueter was sharp-eyed enough, of hitting a Nazi train or a
vehicle convoy, especially as the Germans were moving men and materiel
under cover of darkness due to the Allies' overwhelming daytime air
superiority. This had been pretty much indisputable since the D-Day
landings five months earlier.
But night strafing operations brought their own hazards. Over the
uncertain territory of the Rhineland, sandwiched between the bluffs of
the wide and winding river and the rugged uplands of the Black Forest,
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