Limoges
12 Lancasters of 617 Squadron, led by its new commanding officer Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, attacked the Gnome & Rhne aero-engine factory.
This was a very important raid. 617 Squadron had been experiencing difficulty in finding a useful role after the Dams Raid nearly 9 months earlier. Low-level precision raids on targets in Germany had been too costly. High-level precision bombing on small targets in France and Belgium had been unsatisfactory, not because 617 Squadron's bombing was inaccurate but because the Oboe marking provided by Pathfinder Mosquitoes was not quite accurate enough for extremely small targets like flying-bomb sites or individual factory buildings with civilian housing near by. Wing Commander Cheshire wanted to try his own marking, flying at very low level; he had unofficially experimented with this already. For the Limoges attack, Cheshire was given official permission to attempt low-level marking of this target, which had many French civilian houses near by.
The factory was undefended, except for 2 machine-guns, and Cheshire made 3 low-level runs in bright moonlight to warn the French factory workers to escape. On his 4th run, he dropped a load of 30-lb incendiaries from between 50 and 100 ft. Each of 11 other Lancasters then dropped a 12,000-lb bomb with great accuracy; 10 bombs hit the factory and the remaining one fell in the river alongside. The factory was severely damaged and production almost completely ceased. There were few if any casualties among the French people. No Lancasters were lost.
The tactical importance of this raid was that a method appeared to have been found of marking and bombing small targets accurately, although fears were expressed that the method would be prohibitively costly against defended targets. In the following weeks and months, 617 Squadron would show that low-level marking was reliable and did not incur heavy casualties, particularly when Mosquito aircraft were used for the marking. This type of marking was eventually employed for most 617 Squadron operations and was later extended to larger raids carried out by the whole of 5 Group, sometimes with a further group being added to the bombing force. But 8 Group, the regular Pathfinders for Bomber Command, resisted the introduction of the low-level marking method and it was never used for full-scale raids even though 8 Group operated several squadrons of Mosquitoes. It was a controversial subject then and continued so long after the war.
Minor Operations: 11 Mosquitoes to Brunswick and 8 to Elberfeld, 2 Serrate patrols, 39 aircraft on Resistance operations, 19 O.T.U. sorties. No losses.
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16 Mosquitoes dispatched - 8 to Elberfeld, 7 to Krefeld and 1 to Aachen. 1 aircraft lost on the Krefeld raid.
