> I was reading about deaths and injuries caused by the WWII blackout in
> Britain.  I wondered whether the blackout actually caused the German
> bombers difficulties.
> I read that radio direction was used at that time.  Perhaps navigational
> technology was not that good or not widely available.
> What about silhouetting ships against the coast ?  Was that a real danger=
 ?

The blackout did work. When the Germans were bombing London during the blit=
z, all the fires made it easy for them to find the target. Any recognisable=
 feature on the ground would be used for navigation. The British flying cre=
ws got very good at using church steeples across the flat lands of Northern=
 France, Belgium and Holland as way points in their navigation.

Both the British and the Germans used fire pots to attempt to guide enemy b=
ombers away from towns and get them to drop their bombs in open country whe=
re they did no damage to anything important. The fires were lit when approa=
ching bombers were heard, and they would assume someone else reached their =
destination first and bomb over the fires.

The British used to make dummy ports to attempt to guide German bombers awa=
y from real docksides. This was done by using a marshy area and fitting the=
 sort of shaded lamps used around docksides to highlight the water and make=
 the Germans think they were over a real dockside and bomb there instead of=
 the actual dock side. It was impractical to turn the working lights off ar=
ound a dock because of the danger to workers, but the lamps were heavily sh=
aded to minimise the skywards light leakage, so similar setups were used ar=
ound suitable watery areas to fool the bombers. This apparently was reasona=
bly successful.
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