[Bruce Dennis]

Ed: after my earlier post on this subject, I was nagged by a half-remembered passage from British Intelligence. I found it in vol 3, part 1, Chapter 38, page 326 ‘The German Air Offensive against the UK’

“After increasing during February despite the withdrawal of two of Peltz's bomber Gruppen for operations against Anzio - a movement that was disclosed by the Enigma at the end of January - the scale and tempo of the offensive declined from the beginning of March. At the same time, the GAF diverted some of its effort away from London to Bristol and Hull in the belief that they harboured invasion shipping. * And after the night of 18-19 April, when piloted aircraft carried out their last raid of the war against London, it devoted almost all its remaining effort to ineffective attacks against the ports where shipping was collecting for Overlord. On 25-26 April all Peltz's available bombers were thrown into two attacks on Portsmouth. Four further raids on Portsmouth followed before the end of the month. On 29-30 April 100 bombers, twelve of them carrying the FX bomb, attacked a concentration of ships, including the battleship King George V, at Plymouth. In all these attacks bombing was widely scattered and did little damage. In May, despite a change in the GAF's Pathfinding techniques, two large raids - against Bristol on 14-15 May and against Portsmouth on the following night - failed-to reach the target, and smaller raids against other south coast ports did little damage in return for heavy losses. In June - following the Normandy landings - the GAF confined its operations over the United Kingdom to intruder raids against East Anglian airfields. Except that it briefly returned to such attacks in March 1945, an intruder raid on the night of 27-28 June was the last major attack of the war on the United Kingdom by piloted aircraft. The Enigma, which had given warning of the imminence of the offensive and accurate information about the size of the forces the GAF planned to devote to it, provided little intelligence about the offensive once it had begun. It occasionally confirmed that the GAF's radio aids had been rendered ineffective by jamming. Before the FX raid of 29-30 April it disclosed that FX bombs had been brought into Bordeaux and that the GAF had knowledge of the battleships in Plymouth.

* A GAF Enigma signal decrypted on 23 February reported the receipt of information to the effect that Bristol was full of important invasion shipping.”

Refs are quoted if you want to follow up.

Hope this helps,
Bruce