The rainbow never sets

We then received our uniforms and were allocated our barracks. I shared one with 11 others. Corporal Fritz Gensch was in charge of our group: "You will receive training in the most secret part of our unit, the brain centre, so to speak. You will have the best job of all, for you will be sitting inside. I will show you shortly the dish, which is being guarded 24 hours a day, as it is new and the latest aircraft detection device. It is called FU-EM-GE or Funk Mess Gerät (RADAR in English, acronym of radio detection and ranging). It can trace a plane at night and in cloudy weather."

"How does it work?" asked Erich. "It sends out a radio signal from the centre of the dish, and when that signal hits a firm object, like a plane, it bounces back, and the dish catches the signal and records it."

"That's physics," Albert commented. "Quite right. Now because of this radar, our unit does not need a search light, and thus does not become an easy target for the bombs. But why am I telling you all this? It's much easier to show you. Come with me now."

We all followed him to a bunker, which stood in the centre of the complex, with 6 guns (88 mm) surrounding it.

"The radar dish is over there and sends its signals here into this bunker. Next to the radar is our four meter base telescope, for the visual tracing of planes."

We entered the command bunker. "Here the data of the radar and telescope are converted and passed on to the six guns by voice through these microphones."

"How do they work?" "You hang them around your neck, like this, and these two little things that look like ear phones press against your vocal chords. They just pick up your voice, and ignore all the other noise in this room. You can imagine, in the middle of an attack, it gets very noisy here."

"That's quite ingenious. But why are there so many of these microphones on this table?"

"Patience, gentlemen, I'll tell you, everything in turn. When the RADAR has latched its beam onto a plane, the position is given here in degrees, for the horizontal level it is given in the degrees of a full circle, i.e. 360°, and the height is given also in degrees, but only to a maximum of 70° of course. Why do you think this is so, smart arse?"

"Because it would be too heavy to wind the gun any higher." "You've still got a lot to learn, boys. 'Too heavy to wind up', you fool. Because the gun would topple over, of course!"

He looked around and could see a grin of approval on most faces. "The third data you need for a shell to hit a plane is the distance. That is also given by the radar. Can you follow me so far?"

Erhard stretched out his fist and let out his thumb, index and middle finger, as he was counting: "We have the side or horizontal, the height, and the distance."

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