[ARC5] NASM B-26 Flak Bait Restoration - Radio Procedure

[Robert Eleazer]

I believe you are correct that every aircraft did not provide status reports.  In his book, the man who became the lead navigator for the 100th Bomb Group describes screwing up on his first ever combat mission as lead navigator and failing to provide position reports for the radio operator to report back.  Of course he failed to provide the reports because he did not know where they were due to an undercast of clouds and recognized the target sonly because the clouds cleared up and the Germans were generating a smoke screen over the target in an attempt to hide it.  The other airplanes did not provide the position reports, either, since they were not serving as lead and of course were equally clueless about where they were.  And they had an unforecast strong tailwind that pout them over the target literally hours early, anyway.  The good news was that failure to provide the position reports meant that the Luftwaffe could not DF their position and thus was unable to intercept them except for two Ju-88's after they had turned for home - and that because they stumbled over Narvik and took some flak (which was very helpful for the lead navigator since Narvik was the only place that had significant flak on the Norway coast.  They shot down both the JU-88's and suffered no losses.  In short, the temporary lead navigator screwed up so badly that they gave him a medal and made him permanent lead navigator.   

Similarly, on a typical mission the lead bombardier dropped his bombs and the others usually dropped based on that rather than sighting through the Norden bombsight.
  
However, 2 other things to consider:

1.  Almost any airplane could become the lead airplane based on the mission commander's choice of aircraft before they took off, and any aircraft might be forced to fill in due to losses and aborts.

2.  For long range radio work as well as navigation, large aircraft such as medium and heavy bombers did not fly in formation for ferrying flights to the combat base, and had to make it on their own.  They probably would have not only required the BC-348 and BC-375 but all the tuning units as well as the BC-221 freq meter since they might have to change freqs enroute and/or find themselves at some unplanned stop due to weather or mechanical problems.

Lacking long range HF liaison radios, fighter units equipped with the SCR-522 used to station radio relay aircraft over the English Channel to relay messages back to base.  I guess with an air to air line of sight the SCR-522 could get some really significant range.  

Wayne