Operation Bellicose was an attack by Avro Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force on a German radar factory housed in the former Zeppelin Works at Friedrichshafen and the Italian naval base at La Spezia.

In the second phase, as dust and smoke obscured the TIs, Gomm ordered the main force to use 'time-and-distance' bombing runs from a location on the Lake Constance shore along a measured distance to the target.

As well as damaging the radar factory, the bombers destroyed the unsuspected V-2 rocket production line also housed in the Zeppelin Works, so that Bellicose accidentally became the first Allied air strike against the German V-weapons programme.

[8] At the beginning of June 1943, Squadron Leader Claude Wavell, head of G Section (Radar & Radio) at Medmenham, noticed stacks of ribbed metalwork lying outside the relocated Zeppelin shed in recent 'covers' of Friedrichshafen.

The pattern of the stacks had changed between photographic sorties, implying activity, and Wavell identified the metalwork as parts for the distinctive 7.3-metre (24 ft) lattice reflector dishes of Giant Würzburg radar (Würzburg-Riese) sets.

51 Squadron RAF under Wing Commander Charles Pickard, stole the Würzburg and brought it to England aboard Motor Gun Boat MGB 312 of the Royal Navy.

Jones's department, drawing on information from air reconnaissance, PoW interrogations, resistance agents in France and Belgium, Enigma cipher decrypts, and the monitoring of Luftwaffe radio traffic and radar signals by RAF ground stations and specially equipped bombers known as Ferrets, had built up a detailed knowledge of the German air-defence system.

[14] Arthur Harris, as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Bomber Command, was in the midst of the Battle of the Ruhr, a campaign against the industrial conurbations of north-west Germany carried out from March to July 1943.

[20] As Harris later wrote,[19]the 8th United States Army Air Force was to attack the principal airframe and other aircraft factories while my Command was to attack the industrial towns in which there was the largest number of aircraft component factories; most of these towns, as it happened, were further east or south than the Ruhr.As a radar factory, the Zeppelin shed at Friedrichshafen was a valid and important Pointblank target, but an added attraction, in Harris's view, was its great distance from England:[21] a further reason for carrying out this rather elaborate operation was that it would help to spread the enemy's defences; Friedrichshafen had every reason to consider itself safe from attack, especially in the summer months, and this unexpectedly deep penetration might well cause other places outside the more vulnerable areas to scream for defences [...].The obvious difficulty was that, with the target lying some 1,050 kilometres (650 mi) from Bomber Command's bases as the crow flies, or 1,300 kilometres (800 mi) by the best indirect tactical route, it was impossible for 320 km/h (200 mph) bombers to fly there and back in darkness at midsummer.

[25] Next was Operation Robinson, the Le Creusot raid of 17 October 1942, when 94 Lancasters, led by Wing Commander Leonard Slee of No.49 Squadron, made a dusk attack on the Schneider-Creusot munitions complex in Burgundy, ingressing at treetop height from the Bay of Biscay and recovering to England in darkness, for the loss of only one aircraft.

Reconnaissance pilot Tony Hill, whose pictures had done so much for British understanding of enemy radar, was shot down while attempting to take post-strike photographs of Le Creusot on 21 October.

The Germans recovered him alive from the wreckage of the Spitfire, and Reginald Victor Jones, hearing this from the French Resistance, began to organise a rescue operation by special agents; but Hill died of his injuries before it could be put into effect.

On the morning of Wednesday 16 June, four Pathfinder crews of 97 (Straits Settlements) Squadron at RAF Bourn, Cambridgeshire, were detailed to,[33] take a week's kit, and fly up to Scampton directly after lunch.

Low flying would be needed to avoid detection en route to the target, so the Pathfinder crews flew low-level cross-country exercises that night and the next, visiting the giant airship sheds at RAF Cardington, Bedfordshire.

On the night of 18 June, a dress rehearsal was held, with the Pathfinders illuminating and marking a target on the bombing range at RAF Wainfleet, on the Lincolnshire coast, for the 5 Group force.

The force headed west of London and turned south over Reading, Berkshire, for the headland of Selsey Bill on the Sussex coast, climbing all the time, as high as they could go, to make allowance for the flak defences of enemy-held Normandy.

At present, Leonard Slee was station commander at RAF Dunholme Lodge and technically not an operational pilot, so he was riding as 'second dickey' in the flight engineer's seat aboard a 49 Squadron Lancaster.

[45] Crossing the enemy coast blind, in dense thunderclouds at 5,800 metres (19,000 ft), Fawke had just begun losing height to get under the storm when the Lancaster was engaged by radar-predicted flak.

[46] Jimmy Munro of 97 Squadron, passing dead on track over the correct ingress point, the high-class seaside resort of Cabourg ('Balbec' in Marcel Proust's novels[relevant?

Upland terrain restricted the enemy's radar coverage, and the heavily laden, slow-climbing bombers needed enough height in hand to cross the southern edge of the Vosges mountain range just before the Rhine.

As Munro's Lancaster made landfall on the eastern shore at 3,700 metres (12,000 ft), the bomb aimer, Sergeant Eric Suswain, hit the button to begin releasing the first batch of eight large reconnaissance flares.

[53] From reconnaissance photographs and pilots' reports, Major Mullock had estimated that Friedrichshafen was defended by 16–20 heavy and 18–20 light flak guns and 25 searchlights, all within a 10–13-kilometre (6–8 mi) radius of the target.

As Rae let go the green TI, still well short of target to allow for the bomb's forward travel, the candles of a red marker, which could only have come from Sauvage's aircraft, cascaded onto the Zeppelin shed's roof and tumbled over the side.

[63] Watchers on the Swiss side of Lake Constance, who saw the upward spray of searchlights and flak shells, the falling flares and TIs, the flash of bomb impacts and the bright fires taking hold, reported a "concentrated attack on the selected target," up to about 2:00 am.

German night fighter airfields, and ground radar stations, were mainly concentrated in a defensive line across north-east France, the Low Countries, north-west Germany, and Denmark.

[66] When the RAF raiders were reported at Friedrichshafen, 480–640 kilometres (300–400 mi) away, the Luftwaffe controller decided to marshal his fighters over the bases of Florennes, near Charleroi, and Juvincourt, near Reims, to catch the bomber force on its return.

"[This quote needs a citation] Pilot Officer Arthur Spencer, Jimmy Munro's navigator, remembered the American adding, "First man to make home base wins!"

"[This quote needs a citation] He touched down on his one good wheel, but, as the bomber's weight settled, the other undercarriage leg collapsed and the Lancaster slewed off the runway at speed and spun around, raising clouds of desert dust, till it came to rest.

Sauvage's wireless operator, Flight Sergeant Eddie Wheeler, ignored this instruction and was briefly detained by Algerian police who thought his blue RAF uniform looked German.

Sauvage, in the French accent that made him so popular with the girls in the pubs of Cambridge, treated the American to an exhibition of colloquial English invective which only an officer would dare to use, and encountered no further problems.