Eighty years ago this week the RAF bombing offensive against Germany moves up a gear

 

Air Marshal 'Bert' Harris launched RAF Bomber Command into what came to be called the Battle of the Ruhr with a 442 plane raid on Essen. Harris had distorted the directive that he had been issued after the Casablanca conference into a license to prioritise attacking German morale, which he believed would win the war on its own. Bomber Command now had sufficient heavy bombers of the Lancaster class and, perhaps even more important, had adopted radio navigation aids to have a meaningful prospect of launching devastating attacks on Germany. Before the war the Air Staff had deluded itself that it would be able to attack the Ruhr (which it saw as a similarly vulnerable, high value target to London) and win the war with the resources it then had at its disposal. Essen with the Krupp weapons factories was a difficult target, well-defended and usually cloaked in industrial haze. Thanks to the Oboe radio navigation system one third of the aircraft bombed within three miles of the aiming point. The bombers suffered a loss rate of only 3%.

Rommel staged a desperate counter-attack code-named Operation Capri to try to halt the westward advance of the Eighth Army towards the Mareth Line in Tunisia. He made a frontal attack on well-prepared positions.  It was a failure and he broke off the Battle of Medenine after losing perhaps fifty tanks and inflicting negligible losses on the British. Rommel was recalled to Germany and never returned to North Africa.

General Eisenhower bit the bullet and removed Lloyd Fredendall from command of II Corps, his main unit in the eastward advance into Tunisia. The feeble pretext given out was that Fredendall had little experience of tank warfare, which expected to be the dominant feature of the Tunisian campaign; in reality he had displayed incompetence and, quite possibly, physical cowardice during the German counter-attacks a couple of weeks before. He was replaced by George Patton who had successfully commanded one of the three elements of the Torch landings and had begun to attract press attention for his unconventional and dynamic persona.

The German security police arrested Francois de La Rocque in a sign that the French far right was breaking apart into mutually hostile factions. Before the war de La Rocque had led the Croix du Feux paramilitary movement which had played a prominent part in the mssive riots in February 1934 provoked by the Stavisky scandal which took France to the verge of civil war. He had welcomed Petain's accession to power, but he had become increasingly vocal in his criticism of collaboration with the Germans. Vichy was shifting to a mindset where only unconditional subservience to German interests was acceptable.