The Battle of the Ruhr The Battle of the Ruhr was a five month long campaign fought primarily by RAF Bomber Command against the major industrial area of Germany between March and July 1943. The USAAF did fly some daylight raids, notably on 22 June against the synthetic oil plant at Huls. Targets attacked by the RAF during the battle included the Krupps armaments works at Essen, the Nordstern synthetic oil plant at Gelsenkirchen, Cologne (Koln), Dusseldorf, Duisburg and "Operation Chastise"; the famous Dam Busters raid on the night of 17 May. Whether or not the Battle of the Ruhr was a success is open to conjecture, but it did result in the loss of some 200,000 tons of steel manufacture, the Krupps plant in Essen failing to restart production at all, and as a result of Operation Chastise, so many men were required to make repairs to the damaged dams that they had to be drawn away from the construction of the "Atlantic Wall" resulting in some vulnerabilities in the German defensive installations which were successfully exploited by the Allies a year later on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Shortly before the end of the Battle of the Ruhr the Bomber Command strategy was revised with the opening of "Operation Gomorrah"; the bombing of Hamburg which created the now well documented firestorm and the area or carpet bombing of German cities and therefore the population working in the factories engaged in war material production.
