Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

192 Squadron (RAF) is included as one of the many RAF units to which a majority of Australian aircrew were posted during WW2, under the Empire Air Training Scheme, and in which they served fought and often died.

192 Squadron was a Special Duties (Electronic Warfare) squadron based at Foulsham in Norfolk.  No. 462 Squadron (RAAF) was for a time co-located at Foulsham.  The squadron contained a mixture of aircraft; specially fitted out Halifax aircraft and the streamlined de Havilland Mosquito among others.

Their task was to use a range of Electronic Support Measures (ESM) and Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) to attack the German Air Defence network by deceiving and disrupt Luftwaffe radar and communications in order to protect night bomber formations from radar detection and guided interception. The techniques included "Window", specially cut strips of foil matched to the wavelength of the enemy radar, that when dropped in large amounts, and on timed runs, could be used to create the illusion of a large movements of aircraft or ships on the enemy radar screens.

Another technique was the so-called 'ABC" or Airborne Cigar, the code name for an electronic jamming and broadcast equipment using an eighth crewman, known as the 'spare bod' as the operator. These men were German linguists, many of whom who were refugees from the Nazis.  Many of them faced an unappealing fate if captured by the Germans. Their task was to transmit fake commands to German fighters and to emmit jamming signals. As this was an 'active' countermeasure emitting radio frequency signals, it meant they could be tracked and hunted down by night fighters vectored by radio direction finding ground stations. 192 used a combination of aircraft types to fly a range of specialised missions designed to achieve their tasking.

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