In the spring of 1942 the brand-new Avro Lancaster had barely gone to war when Bomber Command sent twelve of them on a mission that bordered on suicidal: fly in broad daylight, at treetop height, a thousand miles across occupied Europe to bomb a single factory deep inside Germany, and fly home again. Seven never came back. The man who led them, Squadron Leader John Nettleton, came home with a Victoria Cross.

The Augsburg raid of 17 April 1942 is one of those operations that is hard to file as a success or a failure. As a feat of flying and nerve it was extraordinary. As a piece of arithmetic it was brutal.

Why Augsburg?

The target was chosen by the Admiralty. The MAN works at Augsburg built diesel engines for U-boats, and in the spring of 1942 the U-boat was strangling Britain's Atlantic lifeline. Cripple the engine factory, the thinking went, and you slow the wolf packs at source. The problem was that Augsburg sits in southern Germany, about as far from England as a Lancaster could reach and return.

To have any chance of hitting it, the crews would go in low — under the radar, hedge-hopping across France and Germany in daylight. It was a tactic that traded the cover of darkness for the hope of surprise, and it asked everything of the men and their new aircraft.

The RAF's daring low-level strike into Nazi Germany.

A running fight to the target

The plan unravelled early. Not long after crossing into occupied France, Nettleton's formation ran into 25 to 30 German fighters returning from another action — and the slaughter began. With no darkness to hide in and no height to dive for, the Lancasters could only hold formation and shoot back as fighters picked them off one by one. Four of Nettleton's six fell in the running battle before the target was even in sight.

The bombs, and the bill

Nettleton and the surviving aircraft reached Augsburg and bombed the works from rooftop height into a wall of light flak. Two more Lancasters went down over the target itself. The second formation from 97 Squadron, arriving minutes later, also pressed home its attack and lost aircraft in turn.

When the survivors were counted, seven of the twelve Lancasters were gone, and 49 of the 85 men who set out were dead. The factory was hit but not destroyed; production dipped and recovered. By the cold measure of damage done against crews lost, Augsburg was a poor trade — and Bomber Command largely abandoned unescorted daylight raids by heavies afterward.

Jack Currie's documentary on the Augsburg raid.

Ciò che ha dimostrato

And yet Augsburg mattered. It was the first time the new Lancaster showed how far it could reach, and the raw courage of the crews became a rallying story at a bleak point in the war. Nettleton's Victoria Cross — gazetted just a week later — put a face to it. He survived the raid but was killed in 1943 on a night operation to Turin.

The Lancaster would go on to define Bomber Command, usually under the cover of darkness where it belonged. But on one bright April afternoon it flew straight into the German heartland with the sun on its back, and paid the price to prove it could.

Squadron Leader Nettleton and veterans recall the raid.

Sources: Wikipedia (Augsburg raid, John Dering Nettleton); RAF Museum; Aircrew Remembered; London Gazette.