>>537593070
A lot of them died for that very reason in places like the desert or in the Pacific, especially after getting separated from wingmen and squadrons. Fighter nav in WW2 was quite shit in a lot of aircraft types, for instance the US lost quite a number of fighters simply by trying to ferry them from mainland Australia to Papua New Guinea - the last refuel stop in Australia was a field called Horn Island in the Torres Strait, and there's at least four examples of aircraft that crashed because they'd been told to find Horn Island, "keep going up Cape York Peninsula and keep the land on your left and you can't miss it" - from the tip of Cape York it's about 15NM and if you know what you're looking for, readily visible - but nobody told them they should make sure they kept flying north. This P-47 is one of two that is still on the beach near the town of Weipa, because they followed that advice, got to the top of the peninsula, kept the land on the left and kept going south until they ran out of fuel and landed on the beach.

The pilots were rescued, the wrecks were dynamited after the machine guns were removed.

Later in the war, single bombers would travel with groups of fighters for navigation support.