064128 - NACHTJAGD COMBAT ARCHIVE: 1944, Part 3, 12 May to 23 July

By Theo Boiten  

The Nachtjagd Combat Archive is possibly the largest WWII aviation project ever published running to over 1.3 million words with over 1200 original photos, a remarkable 70% of which are previously unpublished.

In simple terms, the NCA is a comprehensive record of over 6000 Luftwaffe Night Fighter Claims and over 2100 Flak claims which have been painstakingly matched to RAF Bomber Command losses resulting in over 95% of them now being identified.  This means that for the first time ever, the fate of the vast majority of RAF Bomber Command losses can be clearly understood with exact locations, times and identities of the pilots or Flak units responsible for bringing them down.

This wealth of information has been further brought to life with over 1200 original photos, full summaries of each night’s operations and compelling first-hand accounts of the Luftwaffe night fighter pilots who often were the only witnesses to the last moment of thousands of RAF airmen.  The books are further enhanced with maps that detail the crash sites and routing of RAF bombers for selected raids.

To make this huge work accessible for everyone, the publishers have decided to break it down into a series of 128 page softback books that are grouped into years.  This will allow Bomber Command researchers to focus on particular periods of operations without having to invest in a single huge and expensive hardback book. 

This volume is the third of either four or five volumes to cover 1944, a year where the tables finally turned against the Nachtjagd, but not before it had inflicted terrible losses upon RAF Bomber Command. This volume covers the period when RAF Bomber Command switched from deep penetration raids into Germany to more tactical targets around D-Day.