A Bomber Command bomber stream heading for a daylight operation over France, August 1944. Rodney Allcot, who flew with No. 460 Squadron RAAF, explained the importance of the bomber stream at night: Navigation in those days was very difficult at night time particularly because it's so hard to know exactly where you are. See with navigation you've got to go from this point to that point over there, which is on a course of two hundred and fifty, let's say. So you steer to two hundred and fifty but the wind is blowing you that way and it's very hard for you to find out just how far the wind is blowing you. Navigators in bomber command on an op had to fix their position every six minutes, it's very hard to do. The point was we flew altogether, you had to stay in ... the bomber stream all together, close together so that the zoom radar cannot pick out any single aircraft. All it can see is a great lot of confetti up there. If you got six miles off track out of the group, out of the stream you were dead because the German radar could pick you out as a single aircraft and it could guide a fighter right onto you. So the poor navigator had to fix his position every six minutes and he had to do that with sharp pointed pencil and a ruler and a very accurate eye. Not my cup of tea at all and we had a very good navigator. [Interview, Rodney Allcot, Australians at War Film Archive; AWM SUK12676]
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