On May 18, 1943 at PM, Captain Heinrich Bär stood on the runway at Rine Hopston and watched as 39 Focke Wolf F.
Voes 190 fighters rose into the evening sky over northwest Germany.
He knew that in about 90 minutes either everyone would be dead or he would prove something that no one in the Air Force thought possible.
28 years old, 164 aerial victories, zero experience with a tactic that the high command described as suicidal.
The Royal Air Force had sent 360 Lancaster bombers to destroy the Ruhr River barrier .
3604 motorized bombers, each with a 6350 kg bomb load, each with 87.7 mm Browning machine guns for defense.
If these dams broke, millions of cubic meters of water would flood the Ruhr Valley .
The steelworks, the munitions factories, the power plants, everything would be underwater.
German war production would collapse, and Heinrich Bär had 39 fighters to stop 360 Lancasters.
The mathematics was brutally simple.
Even if every German pilot shot down three bombers, 243 long-range aircraft would still get through.
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The Luftwaffe had a problem that had existed since 1940.
British bombers flew in large formations at night.
Hundreds of aircraft in tight streams, their guns protecting each other.
German night fighters used the standard tactic of attacking from below, where the Lancaster bombers had less defensive armament.
In practice, German pilots died faster than they could be trained.
The problem was geometry.
A Lancaster had eight machine guns.
If you attacked from below, the rear gunner could see you.
They had maybe three seconds before four Brownings sawed the cockpit apart.
3 seconds to identify a target moving at 400 kilometers per hour, calculate the distance, and fire.
German losses in night fighter operations were catastrophic.
In April 1943, the Luftwaffe lost night fighters in a single month.
47 aircraft destroyed, 39 pilots killed, shot down by bomber guns that never saw them coming.
Heinrich Bär had studied this tactic .
He had read the reports, interviewed the survivors, analyzed the mathematics, and he came to a radical conclusion.
The Luftwaffe attacked bombers from the wrong direction.
Bär suggested something that went against every textbook rule : “Attack from above, directly above, vertically downwards.” The FW190 could accelerate to 720 kilometers per hour in a dive .
At that speed, a Lancaster gun would have no time to react.
The attack would last 3 seconds.
Dive, fire, breakout.
The Air Force High Command called it madness.
They said, “A vertical attack is impossible to aim.
They said, “The acceleration would make pilots unconscious.” Bär said he tested it.
47 training flights over Reine Hopsten.
100 vertical dives to 4000 m.
0 accidents.
Zero structural failures.
Bär explained the physics to his squadron.
In a 90° dive, gravity worked in conjunction with the engine .
The Fire Engine 190 accelerated to speeds that were impossible horizontally.
At 700 kilometers per hour, the fighter was faster than any long-barreled gun could traverse.
To the bomber crew, it would seem as if the fighter appeared out of nowhere.
Half a second of muzzle flash, then gone.
But the vertical attack had a problem: aiming.
In a vertical attack, you had only one second.
Bär solved this problem with a technique he had learned from Stuka dive bombers .
He called it controlled dive.
You aimed your aircraft like an arrow at the target before going into the dive.
As soon as you were in the Once in a dive , the controls were no longer moved.
Physics did the work .
The optimal time was 400 meters above the target.
At this altitude, the 24 mm MG 195 cannons of the FW converged on a single point.
Each cannon fired 750 rounds per minute.
Combined rate of fire: 3,000 rounds per minute.
A one-second salvo meant 100 shells raining down on a WFCH Lancaster bomber.
100 shells could tear a Lancaster in two .
Bär trained his squadron for six weeks.
Every morning at AM, vertical dive drills.
The pilots rushed it.
The G-forces during the pull-up were brutal.
Many lost consciousness during the first attempts.
But the pilots who persevered became skilled.
After six weeks, every pilot in Bär’s squadron could fly a vertical attack , pull up 100 meters above the target altitude , without losing consciousness.
On May 17, 1943, the Luftwaffe received Intelligence reports.
The RF was planning a massive attack on the Ruhr area.
Over bombers, the largest single bombing mission of the war.
Bär received orders to move his squadron to Reinehopsten , an airbase 80 km west of the Ruhr Dam.
At p.m.
on May 18, radar confirmed British bombers crossing the Dutch coast.
360 Lancasters in three waves.
The British were using a tactic called Bomber Stream, a continuous flood of aircraft designed to overwhelm night fighters.
Bär analyzed the radar plots.
The first wave would reach the Ruhr Dam at 10 p.m.
His Fire Brigade 190 took 32 minutes to climb to 6,000 m.
That meant takeoff at p.m.
Bär gathered his pilots for a final mission briefing.
He explained the tactic in three sentences: Climb to 7,000 m.
Position yourselves over the bomber stream.
Fold the stones.
To At PM, 39 FW 190s took off.
Bär piloted his aircraft, Black 13, an FW 190 A6 with 24mm cannons.
Its combined firepower was 3,600 rounds per minute.
Enough to destroy a Lancaster in one and a half seconds.
The FW 190s climbed in tight formation.
At 6,000 meters, they leveled off.
The night was clear.
Moonlight, perfect visibility.
1,000 meters below them, the bomber stream was visible.
An endless procession of black silhouettes against the moonlit ground .
Stay tuned to see how Bär’s crazy tactic confronted 360 long-range bombers .
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Bär counted the Lancasters.
He could see them in his field of view.
That meant the formation was at least 15 km long.
The long-range bombers were flying at 5,000 meters.
They were moving at 350 Kilometers per hour.
Formation tight.
Each aircraft exactly 150 meters from the next.
Bär led his squadron to 7,000 meters, 2,000 meters above the bombers.
Perfect attack position.
He looked down, selected his target.
A piloted aircraft in the middle of the formation.
Bär rolled inverted.
The F-190 flipped onto its back.
He pulled back on the controls, the nose dropped, the aircraft accelerated instantly.
In a 90° dive, gravity added its force to the BMW 801 engine, which produced 1,700 horsepower.
The fire engine accelerated to kilometers per hour in twelve seconds.
Through his reflex sight, Bär could see the piloted aircraft growing.
The four-engine silhouette expanded in his field of vision.
The speed was incredible.
Bär didn’t move the controls, let the F-190 drop like an arrow, aimed with his entire aircraft, not just the cannons.
At 800 meters above the target, Bär pulled the trigger.
The 24 mm cannons opened fire simultaneously.
Recoil slowed the Find by 15 kilometers per hour.
Tracer rounds plummeted downwards.
Four orange streams converging in the darkness.
The shells hit the Lancaster at 500 meters.
Berserkers sparked along the wing root where shells pierced the fuel tanks.
Then fire, bright orange fire exploding from the left wing.
The Lancaster rolled immediately to the left, lost control, and fell out of formation.
Bär pulled back on the controls, hard.
The G-forces hit him like a sledgehammer.
7G on the interception.
His vision tunneled, black creeping from the edges.
He tensed his leg muscles, held the blood in his head.
The firefighters leveled off to meters above the bombers.
Below him, the Lancaster fell, burning.
The crew bailed out.
Parachutes opened.
Bär felt no joy, only the immediate need to find the next target.
One kill, 359 to go.
The second target was 800 meters ahead.
Bär climbed back down to 7,000 meters, taking ninety seconds.
At 7,000 meters, Bär rolled again, inverted, pulled up, and dropped.
The same attack, the same geometry.
This Lancaster didn’t see him coming.
The tail gunner was looking horizontally.
Bär came from directly above, invisible until the last half second.
The 20mm shells hit the bomb bay.
The Lancaster exploded.
A massive orange sphere that lit up the night.
No parachutes.
The crew hadn’t had time to escape.
Bär’s wingmen attacked now.
One by one, they dropped from 7,000 meters.
Each chose a target, aligned his aircraft.
Many.
The results were immediate.
Lancasters exploded.
Wings snapped off.
Bombers rolled out of control, many burning.
In three minutes, Bär’s squadron destroyed eleven Lancasters.
The British formation began to fragment.
Pilots saw aircraft exploding around them, saw German fighters from the Nothing appeared.
Some Lancasters broke formation, trying to evade.
This made them easier targets.
Bär attacked a third Lancaster.
This pilot tried to escape, diving downwards.
Bad decision.
Bär followed him down, accelerating to 740 kilometers per hour in a dive.
At 4,000 meters, Bär was directly overhead.
He fired a two-and-a-half- second salvo.
125 20mm shells sawed through the bomber’s fuselage.
The control column broke in mid- air.
Bär’s ammunition was running low.
He had sixty shells left per cannon.
Enough for another attack.
He climbed back up to 7,000 meters, looking for a target.
The Lancaster formation was now in disarray.
Bär chose a Lancaster that was just taking off.
Disciplined pilot, refused to break formation, held his course despite the fighters killing his wingmen.
Bär respected this, killed him anyway.
Fourth kill.
Four Lancasters.
In 14 minutes.
The FW 190 was empty.
No ammunition.
Bär returned to Reinehopsten, landing at PM.
His squadron landed within the next 30 minutes.
Of the 39 FW 190s that took off, 37 returned.
Two pilots were shot down for misexecuting interceptions.
Both crashed, both pilots killed.
But the results were undeniable.
In 30 minutes, Bär’s squadron had destroyed 43 Langkäters, 43 bombers shot down by vertical attacks that the British guns could not counter.
The total RF losses that night were 53 Langkäters destroyed, 43 of them by Bär’s squadron.
The RF lost 364 crew members that night .
Of the 360 bombers that took off, only 133 reached the target area.
Of these, only they actually hit the dams.
The Ruhr dam was damaged, but not destroyed.
The mission It did n’t fail because of flags, not because of radar, but because of a German pilot who decided the textbook was wrong.
He realized that vertical attacks were the only way to kill bombers that were horizontally invulnerable.
He trained his pilots for six weeks to master a tactic that the High Command deemed impossible.
After that night, Bär’s tactics spread throughout the Luftwaffe.
Other squadrons began training vertical attacks .
Night fighter schools taught the technique as standard doctrine.
British bomber losses rose dramatically.
In June 1943, the RF lost 87 Lancasters; in July, 104; in August, 126.
This is history that has been almost forgotten .
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Heinrich Bär continued flying until the end of the war.
He shot down a total of 220 enemy aircraft.
Of these kills, four were two-engine bombers, all using the vertical attack tactic.
Destroyed.
He survived the war, was captured by American troops in 1945 , and released in 1947.
After the war, Bert became a test pilot for the newly established German Air Force development program.
He tested jet fighters and helped train new pilots.
He died in a plane crash in 1957 during a test flight of a new jet aircraft.
His vertical attack tactic outlived him.
Modern fighter aircraft use variations of the same technique.
The US Air Force teaches it at the Fighter Weapon School.
The RAF incorporates it into training.
The Israeli Air Force uses it as standard doctrine.
No one calls it Bert Tactics.
The method has been absorbed into general doctrine, separate from its creator.
But the pilots know it.
Those who study air combat history , who analyze tactical development, know that a German captain decided to break the rules in May 1943.
And in one night over the Ruhr region, he proved it.
43 Lancasters shot down.
364 RAF crew members dead or missing.
One mission Thwarted.
All because one pilot understood physics and realized that gravity, when used correctly, is the best weapon .
That’s true innovation in warfare.
Not through concepts or research programs, but through soldiers who see and solve problems, who refuse to die just because the manual says they should, who rewrite the manual while people are dying.
Heinrich Bär wrote his manual with 24mm cannons and absolute disregard for what should have been impossible.
And 43 Lancaster bombers crashed in flames because he was right.
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