After its victory in the Battle of Britain in 1940 and the having switched to night bombing in the fall of 1940, the day fighters of Royal Air Force Fighter Command were "a force without an immediate mission". Without anything else to do, the day fighters of RAF Fighter Command were in the spring of 1941 deployed on a series of search-and-destroy missions of flying over France to engage the in combat. In the second half of 1941, the aerial offensive over France was greatly stepped up, leading to the loss of 411 British and Canadian aircraft. In the spring of 1942, the deployed the new Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighter to its airfields in France.