16. The British never achieved air superiority at night
With more and more Luftwaffe units being transferred to Poland and the Balkans in the spring of 1941, daytime attacks over England all but ceased. The bombers still came at night, in increasingly larger concentrations, in what had become what was in essence German terror bombing of the British civilian population. Towards the end of April and in May, morale was beginning to wane among the English people, who widely recognized that an invasion of Great Britain by the Germans was increasingly unlikely. The German bombers arrived somewhere in the British skies on a nightly basis, and the night fighters of the RAF, despite the advantages of ground-based radar guiding them to their targets (and in some cases air-based radar) were unable to stop most of them. German bomber losses hovered between 1-2% per mission.
In May the situation began to shift in favor of the British. The Boulton Paul Defiant, a fighter which resembled the Hurricane in appearance but which carried a turret armed with four machine guns, was considered obsolete as a day fighter. But at night it could fly beneath an enemy aircraft, firing upwards into its belly, unobserved by the Germans until the bullets shredded their aircraft. Other models of RAF night fighters joined the battle. Just as the Germans were beginning to disengage their remaining forces committed to the attacks on Britain the RAF demonstrated an improved and more deadly night fighting capability. The improvement in RAF night fighting capability led to the Germans sending a raid on London over two nights in May 1941, escorted with night fighters of their own.
