The Third Reich at War (73 page)

Initially, however, there was no sustained bombing campaign against Germany. To demonstrate that larger raids could be carried out on bigger targets, Harris staged a thousand-bomber attack on Cologne on 30 May 1942, destroying over 3,300 buildings and leaving 45,000 people without homes. 474 people were killed and 5,000 injured, many of them seriously. The raid proved that large fleets of bombers could reach their targets without mishap and overwhelm local defences.
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A thousand-bomber raid on Essen in the summer of 1942 was relatively unsuccessful, however, and was not repeated; among other things, it had only been possible to mount it by including aircraft normally used for training - and crewed by men who were doing courses in them. British bombers then concentrated not on urban targets but on U-boat pens on the Atlantic coast of France, which were so heavily protected by reinforced concrete that little damage was done. However, preserving Atlantic convoys seemed the highest priority. Only when Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca in January 1943 was a decision taken to begin the strategic bombing campaign in earnest. The Second Front demanded by Stalin, the two leaders agreed, would have to be postponed until 1944; in its place would come the invasion of Italy and a new campaign of bombing the aim of which, to quote the Combined Chiefs-of-Staff in their order to the British and US air forces on 21 January 1943, was to effect ‘the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened’.
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The new Combined Bombing Offensive began with a series of attacks on the Ruhr. On 5 March 1943, 362 bombers attacked Essen, where the Krupp arms factory was located; this was followed up with a whole series of further raids on the town over the following months. In between, there were attacks on Duisburg, Bochum, Krefeld, D̈sseldorf, Dortmund, Wuppertal, M̈lheim, Gelsenkirchen and Cologne, all of them major centres of industry and mining. The attack on Dortmund was particularly heavy. 800 bombers dropped twice the tonnage that had fallen on Cologne in the thousand-bomber raid the previous year. 650 people were killed, and the town’s library, with over 200,000 volumes and a unique newspaper archive, went up in flames. A further raid on Cologne on 28-9 June 1943 caused nearly 5,000 deaths. Altogether some 15,000 people were killed in the industrial cities of western Germany in this series of raids. In addition, on 16 May 1943 the ‘dam-buster’ squadron, flying low towards major dams on the Eder and M̈hne rivers, launched its ‘bouncing bombs’ which shattered the concrete barriers and released huge quantities of water, severely disrupting water supplies to the Ruhr area and flooding large tracts of countryside as well as cutting off electricity supplies to industrial plants. Just over 1,500 people were killed, the majority of them foreign workers and prisoners of war; panic rumours in the German population put the figure at anything up to 30,000. To complete the devastation, fast-moving Mosquito fighter-bombers, made of wood to give greater speed and range, flew into the Ruhr between the major raids to ensure there was no respite.
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Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels was shocked by the devastation. ‘We find ourselves in a situation of helpless inferiority,’ he confided to his diary after the attack on Dortmund, ‘and have to receive the blows of the English and Americans with dogged fury.’
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Armaments Minister Albert Speer was seriously alarmed. He visited the Ruhr repeatedly to organize the relocation of the workforce to camps from which they could be sent to other factories if their own was destroyed, and he did what he could to repair the damage and get things started again. He drafted in 7,000 men from the West Wall to rebuild the dams. The German Labour Front, the Todt Organization and the regional Nazi Party created special teams to clear up the mess and get miners and munitions workers back to work, while the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization mobilized itself to care for those who had been made homeless.
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Despite all these efforts, there could be no doubting the scale of the damage the bombers had inflicted on the war economy. Arms production had been growing at an average of 5.5 per cent a month in Germany since June 1942; now the growth stopped altogether. Steel production fell by 200,000 tons in the second quarter of 1943 and ammunition quotas had to be cut. There was a crisis in supplies of components for aircraft, and from July 1943 until March 1944 production of aircraft stagnated.
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A raid by American bombers on Schweinfurt on 17 August 1943 badly damaged a number of factories producing ball-bearings and led to a fall of 38 per cent in their production. ‘We are approaching the point of total collapse . . . in our supply industry,’ Speer told the Air Force Procurement Office. ‘Soon we will have airplanes, tanks, or trucks lacking certain key parts.’ If the raids on Germany’s industrial centres continued, he warned Hitler, then Germany’s arms production would come to a total halt.
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II

The attacks on the Ruhr were followed by a massive raid on Hamburg, Germany’s largest seaport and a leading shipbuilding and industrial centre. This was the first time that Window was used, and it proved highly effective. On the night of 24-5 July 1943, 791 bombers took off from forty-two airfields in the east of England and made their way north-east towards the mouth of the river Elbe. Forty-five had to turn back because of mechanical problems, dumping their bombs into the sea. The bulk of the fleet veered south-east and flew towards Hamburg from the north, which the city’s defenders did not expect, throwing out packets of aluminium foil strips at one-minute intervals and severely disrupting ground radar. There was very little resistance, and only twelve of the aircraft were lost. Pilots reported ground searchlight beams waving about aimlessly, looking for targets. The pathfinders dropped their markers, and the main force began releasing its bombs over the city centre shortly before one in the morning. People rushed to their shelters. Many bombs fell on sparsely populated outlying suburbs and villages, but the city centre and the shipyards in the harbour were hit as well, and fire-engines and clearance teams began their work according to a prearranged plan even before the attack was over. But the assault on Hamburg was a new kind of operation, not a single raid but a series of raids designed to destroy the city in stages. The next day, 109 American Flying Fortresses flew in over the city for another attack. Daylight raids were far more dangerous than night attacks, and no fewer than seventy-eight of the planes were hit by anti-aircraft fire, causing many to drop their bombs short of the target, though some damage was caused in the harbour and outlying suburbs. A smaller raid the following night kept up the pressure, then on the night of 27-8 July 1943, 735 British bombers flew in, this time from the east. The pathfinders dropped their markers in a concentrated area to the south-east of the city centre and the main force offloaded 2,326 tons of bombs before returning home. Seventeen planes and crews were lost, but most escaped because a third of the way through the raid the anti-aircraft gunners on the ground had been instructed to restrict their fire to 18,000 feet to allow night-fighters to attack the enemy aircraft: all the bombers apart from the Stirlings, which had already done their work, could fly above this level, and there were too few German night-fighters to make much of an impact.
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The weather was unusually hot and dry that night, and the fire-fighters were mostly over on the western area of the city still dealing with the smouldering remains of the previous raids. In the first twenty-three minutes of the raid, the bombers dropped so many incendiaries, blast-bombs and high explosives on such a small area in the south-east area of the city that the fires merged into one, sucking air out of the surrounding area until the whole square mile became one huge blaze, with temperatures reaching 800 degrees Celsius at the centre. It began to draw in air at hurricane force from all around, extending another two miles to the south-east as the bombers continued to drop their payloads there. The force of the howling, spark-filled wind created by the firestorm uprooted trees and turned people on the streets into living torches. The firestorm sucked the air out of the basement shelters in which thousands of people were cowering, killing them with carbon-monoxide poisoning, or trapping and suffocating them by reducing the buildings above to heaps of rubble that covered the air-vents and exits. 16,000 apartment-block buildings with a frontage of 133 miles were ablaze by three in the morning, until the firestorm finally began to subside. By seven a.m. it was over. Many people survived by sheer good fortune. Fifteen-year-old Traute Koch described how her mother wrapped her in wet sheets, pushed her out of the air-raid shelter, and said ‘run!’

I hesitated at the door. In front of me I could see only fire - everything red, like the door to a furnace. An intense heat struck me. A burning beam fell in front of my feet. I shied back but then, when I was ready to jump over it, it was whirled away by a ghostly hand. I ran out onto the street. The sheets around me acted as sails and I had the feeling that I was being carried away by the storm. I reached the front of a five-storey building in front of which we had arranged to meet again. It had been bombed and burnt out in a previous raid and there was not much left in it for the fire to get hold of. Someone came out, grabbed me in their arms, and pulled me into the doorway.
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They descended into the cellar, and survived. Others were not so fortunate. Johann Burmeister, a greengrocer, recorded how people leaped into one of Hamburg’s many canals to extinguish their burning clothes. Some committed suicide. A nineteen-year-old milliner described how her aunt had dragged her through the spark-filled streets until their progress was stopped because the asphalt had melted. ‘There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt . . . Their feet had got stuck and then they had put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.’ Eventually she decided to roll down a bank by some burning trees. ‘I took my hand out of my aunt’s and went. I think I rolled over some people who were still alive.’ At the bottom she found a blanket and pulled it over her. The next morning, she found her aunt’s body; she could identify it only by the blue-and-white sapphire ring she always wore. Many corpses were found black and shriveled; some were lying in a mess of coagulated human body fat.
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This was far from being the end of Hamburg’s misery. As the wind cleared away the smoke from the still-burning ruins, Bomber Command decided to mount a third raid. On the night of 29-30 July, 786 bombers set off for Hamburg. Forty-five had to turn back because of mechanical problems, and a few more were shot down on the way, but the majority reached their target, identifying the city by the glow of its fires, which could be seen even over the horizon. Extra searchlights had been rushed to the city and the area around it, and both anti-aircraft batteries and night-fighters took full advantage of the light they threw on the bombers, thus getting round the need to depend on radar readings still confused by the boxes of Window aluminium foil streamers they were dropping. This time, the bombs were released over a much wider area; strong winds had blown the pathfinders off course. As a result, the north-east of the city was devastated, rather than the area further west that had been intended. Even now, however, Harris was not satisfied; after a delay caused by adverse weather conditions, he launched a fourth and final major attack on the city on 2-3 August 1943. Two groups of bombers took off. The first, with 498 aircraft preceded by 54 pathfinders, was to attack the wealthy residential areas to the west of Hamburg’s central lake, the Alster, while the second, consisting of 245 bombers and 27 pathfinders, was to destroy the industrial area of Harburg, to the south. This time the German defences had learned how to deal with Window by allowing the night-fighters to fly freely and operate visually, guided by a continuous commentary from the ground about the bombers’ position and by their own airborne radar. Weather conditions worsened and the bombers flew into a huge electrical storm that turned their propellers into giant firewheels, as one pilot reported, and blew them all over the sky. The bomber waves were broken up, many dropped their payloads on small towns and villages, or on the countryside, and turned back before they ever got to Hamburg. Some crashed. Enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire took their toll. Altogether 35 aircraft failed to return, and little serious damage was done to the city. Nevertheless, in the four great raids taken all together, Allied bombers had flown more than 2,500 missions over the city, dropping over 8,300 tons of incendiaries and high explosives on to their target. 59 had been brought down by night-fighters, 11 by anti-aircraft ‘flak’, and another 17 by a combination of causes including storm damage in the final raid. The devastation was staggering. The city’s shipyards were pulverized, so that between twenty and twenty-five U-boats planned for or already under construction were never built. Industrial output from the city, so it was later calculated, returned to 80 per cent of its previous levels within five months, but the loss of war production caused by the bombing was reckoned to have amounted to the equivalent of nearly two months’ output from the city as a whole. The disruption was far-reaching. All the city’s railway stations were destroyed, the harbour and the river were blocked by sunken ships, the rivers and canals by fallen debris. The city’s supplies of gas, water and electricity were all cut off and could not be restored until the middle of August. Nevertheless, the major cost was human. Partly by accident and partly by design, the bulk of the bombs had fallen on residential areas. In particular, the firestorm had devastated the working-class areas to the south-east of the city centre, inhabited by people who were traditionally opposed to the Nazis, while the wealthy villa quarter to the north-west, where the pro-Nazi elite lived, was largely untouched, though its destruction had been one of the aims of the final, unsuccessful raid. Altogether 56 per cent of Hamburg’s dwellings, around 256,000 of them, had been destroyed and 900,000 people were made homeless. Some 40,000 people lost their lives and a further 125,000 required medical treatment, many of them for burns.
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