ccurate bombing.
Many squadrons and personnel from Commonwealth and other European countries were distributed throughout Bomber Command. No. 6 Group, which was activated on 1 January 1943, was unique among Bomber Command groups, in that it was not an RAF unit; it was a Canadian unit attached to Bomber Command. At its peak strength, 6 Group consisted of 14 operational RCAF bomber squadrons, and 15 different squadrons served with the group. Apart from 6 Group, many individual Canadians served with British and other Commonwealth squadrons; by the end of the war, almost a quarter of Bomber Command's personnel were RCAF personnel.
No. 8 Group, also known as the Pathfinder Force, was activated on 15 August 1942. It was a critical part of solving the navigational problems referred to above. The navigational problems of Bomber Command were solved by two methods. One was the use of a range of increasingly sophisticated electronic aids to navigation and the other was the use of specialist Pathfinders. The technical aids to navigation took two forms. One was external radio navigation aids, as exemplified by Gee and the later highly accurate Oboe systems. The other was the centimetric navigation equipment H2S radar which was carried in the bombers. The Pathfinders were a group of elite, specially trained and experienced crews who flew ahead of the main bombing forces, and marked the targets with flares and special marker bombs. No. 8 Group controlled the Pathfinder squadrons.
By late 1941, RAF Bomber Command was regularly mounting raids by hundreds of aircraft.
Along with an increase in the size of the Command came a massive increase in the capability of the aircraft it was using. In 1942, the main workhorse aircraft of the later part of the war came into service. The Halifax and Lancaster made up the backbone of the Command, and had a longer range, higher speed and much greater bomb load than the earlier aircraft. The classic aircraft of the Pathfinders, the Mosquito, also made its appearance.
A prolonged offensive against the Rhine-Ruhr area (the "Armory of the Third Reich") began on March 5/6 1943 with the first raid of the Battle of the Ruhr flew RAF Bomber Command's 100,000th sortie of WWII which destroyed 160 acres and hit 53 Krupps buildings. The series of raids on Hamburg (the Battle of Hamburg) in mid 1943 was one of the most successful Command operations, although Harris' extension of the offensive into the Battle of Berlin failed to decimate the capital and cost his force over 1,000 crews through the winter of 1943-44. Operation Hydra, the mission via Bomber Command Operation Order No. 176 (9th July, 1943) that bombed Peenemünde after midnight of August 17/18 August 1943, was the opening of Operation Crossbow
By April 1944, Harris called off his strategic offensive as the bomber force was seconded (much to his annoyance) to tactical and communications targets in France prior to D-Day. The anti-transport offensive proved highly effective. By late 1944, back attacking Third Reich targets, Bomber Command did have a genuine operational capability to put 1,000 aircraft over a target without extraordinary efforts. Ironically by this time the land battle through Northern Europe was making the Bomber Offensive increasingly meaningless.
The peak of Bomber Command's operations occurred in the raids of March 1945, when its squadrons dropped their highest amount of ordnance (by weight) for any month in the entire war. The last raid on Berlin took place on the night of 21-22 April, when 76 Mosquitos made six separate attacks just before Soviet forces entered the city centre. Afterwards most of the rest of the bombing raids made by the RAF were tactical support attacks. The last major strategic raid was the destruction of the oil refinery at Tonsberg in southern Norway by 107 Lancasters, on the night of 25-26 of April.
Once the surrender of Germany had occurred, plans were put in place to send the Tiger Force of about 30 British Commonwealth bomber squadrons to bases on Okinawa, and there was a reorganisation of groups within Bomber Co