Editing Gee (navigation) (section)

=== New offensive ===

The discovery of Gee's extended range arrived at a pivotal point in the RAF's bombing campaign. Having originally relied on day bombing, the RAF had not invested a tremendous amount of effort on the navigation skills needed for night flying. When [[The Blitz]] night-bombing offensive started, the Germans were found to have developed a series of radio aids for this, notably the [[Battle of the Beams#X-Gerät|X-Gerät]] system. The RAF initially pooh-poohed this approach, claiming it only demonstrated the superiority of the RAF's training.

By late 1940 a number of reports were trickling back from observers in the field, who were noting that Allied bombers did not appear to be bombing their targets. In one instance, bombs reportedly fell over {{convert|50|mi|km|abbr=on}} from their target. For some time, these results were dismissed, but calls for an official enquiry led to the [[Butt report]], which demonstrated only 5% of the bombs sent out on a mission landed within {{cvt|5|mi|km|0}} of their targets. With these statistics, any sort of strategic campaign based on attacks against factories and similar targets was hopeless. This led to [[Frederick Lindemann]]'s notorious "[[dehousing]]" paper, which called for the bomber efforts to be used against the houses of the German citizens to break their ability to work and will to resist. This became official policy of the RAF in 1942.

While the debate raged, Bomber Command dramatically lowered their sortie rate, awaiting the rebuilding of the force with the newly arriving 4-engine "heavies" such as the [[Handley Page Halifax]] and [[Avro Lancaster]], and the deployment of Gee. The two, combined, would offer the accuracy and weight of bombs that Lindemann's calculations called for. Efforts to test and deploy Gee became a high priority, and the Chain Executive Committee was set up under the chairmanship of [[Robert Renwick, 1st Baron Renwick|Robert Renwick]] in October 1941 to site a series of Gee stations. Gee was not the only solution being developed; it was soon joined by [[H2S radar]]s and the [[Oboe (navigation)|Oboe]] system.