On 'What counted as an op', I recall Max Hastings in Bomber Command writing something about French targets initially only counting as one third.
"Then", he wrote, "they went to Mailly-le-Camp".
The Mailly operation - which my great uncle and his crew were on, a week before they were shot down - was a raid on a German army camp in France on I think 3 May 1944. There was (among other things... I'm still looking at Jack's early operations so haven't reached this one in any detail yet) a delay in marking, which led to many bombers milling around the target while waiting for the markers to go down. The nightfighters had a field day - out of about 540 aircraft on target, 48 or so were missing.
Interestingly enough a similar thing happened over Lille the next week - markers were obscured or extinguished quickly by the first bombs so a delay of some 20 minutes was incurred. Out of 89 aircraft dispatched, four aborted... and no less than 12 were shot down, six of those from Waddington. My great uncle was in the crew of one of the missing aircraft.
As Hastings wrote, "there was no more talk of French targets counting as a third of an op […] lingering around a target for accurate visual marking could be fatal."