The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), having recently lost many aircraft in attacks on Schweinfurt, did not participate.

The Main Force of Bomber Command attacked Berlin sixteen times but failed in its object of inflicting a decisive defeat on Germany.

The Royal Air Force lost more than 7,000 aircrew and 1,047 bombers, (5.1 per cent of the sorties flown); a further 1,682 aircraft were damaged or written off.

Despite its problems, Bomber Command had been able to achieve some spectacular results but these had been isolated events and due to favourable circumstances as well as judgement.

The signals were encoded to prevent German use but this made it harder for Bomber Command navigators to get Gee fixes.

Anti-jamming devices were short-lived in effectiveness as the Germans quickly overcame them but Gee Mk II was easier for navigators to use.

[11] Oboe was a blind-bombing device controlled by two ground stations in England which measured the distance of an aircraft from them with radar pulses.

An aircraft flying at 28,000 ft (8,500 m) could receive Oboe transmissions at about 270 mi (430 km), enough to mark targets in the Ruhr, which led to the device being installed in fast, high-flying Mosquito bombers, which usually navigated with the usual aids until beginning an Oboe run about 10 mi (16 km) from the target.

Cat and Mouse stations could handle only one aircraft at a time and a marking run took ten minutes, allowing six bomb- or marker-runs per hour.

Gee remained useful as a means of navigation on return journeys but required development to overcome German jamming.

[14] The Target Indicator bomb (TI) was an aerodynamic metal case which ejected coloured pyrotechnic candles at a set height by a barometric fuze.

After the Fall of France, a belt of Freya radar stations was built to give early warning of aircraft entering German-controlled airspace, from Denmark south to Switzerland.

The German system had not been centralised to sift the information provided by radar, searchlights, wireless interception and direction finding to co-ordinate FlaK and night-fighters.

Kammhuber used the new equipment to revise the night defence system by increasing the width of Henaja from 25–60 mi (40–97 km) with Dunaja in front of them.

[21] The British resorted to a deliberate campaign of area bombing which immediately increased the amount of destruction achieved by Bomber Command.

[22] In 1942, Bomber Command had been able to inflict considerable damage on several occasions but had failed consistently to disrupt the German war economy.

Despite the weight of the apparatus and aerodynamic penalty of its aerial array causing a loss of at least 25 mph (40 km/h) in speed, night-fighter interceptions increased to the extent that searchlight illumination was made redundant and the lights were transferred to the local FlaK units around cities.

[24] Kammhuber refused to allow night-fighters to roam freely but made the line more flexible, by deepening the Dunaja zone to 124 mi (200 km) either side of the Henaja to exploit the increased range of Freya and Würzburg, which created the Himmelbett system.

[25] Despite the big increase in the German anti-aircraft effort, such concern for the future as existed did not prevent 150 FlaK batteries from being transferred to Italy.

Only the Generalluftzeugmeister, Erhard Milch, in charge of Luftwaffe aircraft production, foresaw the crisis that would ensue if fighter output was not given greater emphasis.

Berlin was attacked by 440 Lancaster heavy bombers of the Main Force and four de Havilland Mosquitos but the city was under cloud and the damage was not severe.

This was the most effective raid on Berlin by the RAF of the war, causing extensive damage to the residential areas west of the centre, Tiergarten and Charlottenburg, Schöneberg and Spandau.

Several other buildings of note were either destroyed or damaged, including the British, French, Italian and Japanese embassies, Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin Zoo, the Ministry of Munitions, the Waffen SS Administrative College, the barracks of the Imperial Guard at Spandau and several arms factories.

There was another Main Force raid on the night of 28/29 January 1944, when the western and southern districts were hit in the most concentrated attack of this period.

On 15/16 February, important war industries were hit, including the large Siemensstadt area in the west, with the centre and south-western districts receiving most of the damage.

[30][31][32] In 1961, the British official historians, Charles Webster and Noble Frankland wrote that Bomber Command sent 16 raids comprising 9,111 sorties against Berlin.

In the winter of 1943, the attacks on Berlin began, which Tooze called fruitless, The Ruhr was the choke point and in 1943 it was within the RAF's grip.

Isolating the Ruhr could strangle the rest of the German war economy; in the campaign against Berlin, the British caused much damage but the evolution of German anti-aircraft defences, particularly night fighters, was able to counter the Bomber Command threat on its long flights to Berlin in winter weather.

[37] In 1982, Laurenz Demps [de] collated loss data using the damage reports of the Berlin police commissioner (Polizeipräsident) issued after each air raid, descriptions of losses and damage indicated by houses and distributed to 100–150 organisations and administrations busy with rescue, repair, planning and other matters, against reports of the main bureau for air raid protection (Hauptluftschutzstelle) of the city of Berlin, which issued more than 100 copies with variable frequency, each summarising losses and damage by the number of air raids; the war diary of the air raid warning command (Luftwarnkommando – (Wako Berlin), a branch of the Luftwaffe and other sources.

[39] In 2005, Kevin Wilson described the effects of smoke and dust in the air from the bombing and how long periods spent in shelters gave rise to symptoms that were called cellar influenza (Kellergrippe).