Zorn, a successful day-fighter pilot and nearing “ace” status during the Battle of Britain, is both stunned and upset when he is assigned to a night-fighter squadron in Holland that has had almost zero success in shooting down bombers in the dark and loses far more pilots in flying accidents than to the enemy. He feels his talents are being wasted and asks for reassignment to a day-fighter unit when the first opportunity presents itself. But he is blessed with exceptional night vision and discovers he has the rare ability to find and shoot down bombers in the dark. Faithful to the quotation from philosopher Desiderius Erasmus that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” before long Zorn and his trusted crewman, Hajü Steinmauer, become one of the Luftwaffe’s most celebrated night-fighter teams while flying in his Me-110 with the one-eyed King of Diamonds playing card painted on its nose.
Most German night-fighter pilots are plagued by an inability to see very well in the dark, however, and fail to score until equipped with novel airborne radar sets. In an effort to cut their mounting and terrible losses during bombing raids, the Royal Air Force soon counters with its own night-fighter force, and a lethal cat-and-mouse game begins in the night skies over Europe. Over the last four years of the war, the scientists and engineers on both sides engage in a ceaseless technological war to give their pilots an advantage over the enemy. However, experienced aces like Zorn, Schnaufer, Lent, Prince Heinrich zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and their fellow night-flying warriors are just too good at what they do.
More than half the airmen who served in Bomber Command were killed during the course of the war. They had every reason to be afraid of the dark.
