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Famed for his First World War works, in 1940 Nash was invited again to become an Official War Artist for the revived scheme chaired by Sir Kenneth Clark. When Clark’s War Artists’ Advisory Committee assigned him to the Air Ministry, Nash made propagandist watercolours of RAF aircraft and crashed Luftwaffe planes. This watercolour, however, dates from after the Air Ministry commission, and coincides with when Nash worked directly under the Ministry of Information, for whom he made four ambitious oil paintings: ‘The Battle of Britain’ (1941), ‘Totes Meer' (or 'Dead Sea', 1941), ‘Defence of Albion’ (1942), and ‘The Battle of Germany’ (1944). Anticipating the raid theme of the later Germany painting, in this watercolour Nash, who read reports in military periodicals, imagined the Lancaster bomber’s first daylight raid: on a Bavarian engine factory, 17 April 1942.