| Raids on Hamburg, Part One
David Lippman
November 2013
The weather that July in Hamburg had been very hot, mostly dry. Two days before, a heavy thunderstorm had rumbled through, but the rain evaporated in the heat. On Saturday, July 24, 1943, the citizens of Hamburg were taking a rest from the heat and the backbreaking strain of World War II.
All across Germany�s leading seaport, Hamburg�s 1.75 million people enjoyed her cafes on the Alster and Elbe rivers, the huge zoo and the Ufa-Palast cinema, the Reich�s largest. Once again Hamburg was free of air raids. To the average citizen, it must have seemed unlikely that the city would ever be bombed.
But Hamburg was about to be destroyed.
The architect of that destruction was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, head of British Bomber Command. The stocky Harris had great intelligence, enormous determination and an unyielding hatred of Germany. His aim as chief of Britain�s bomber offensive was to destroy Germany�s cities.
By 1943, Bomber Command�s four-engine Avro Lancaster bombers could deliver 8,000-pound bombloads on German cities nightly, guided to their targets by radar. The U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) flew daylight missions and made precision attacks on German factories. Round-the-clock bombing was becoming a reality.
On May 27, 1943, Harris picked a target for the RAF. Because of the short summer nights, they targeted a city relatively close to Britain. Hamburg was Germany�s second largest city, producing warships like Bismarck and churning out U-boats � 400 during the whole war. Hamburg was protected by flak, rings of searchlights and night fighters, all controlled by a string of radar stations. But Harris had a new secret weapon, code-named Window, to use on Hamburg. British scientists said Window would blind the Nazi defenses.
Harris� plan to bomb Hamburg, Operation Gomorrah, was simple: Hit Hamburg by day and night, dropping at least 10,000 tons of bombs and destroying the city. The Royal Air Force, accustomed to area bombing by night, selected the center of Hamburg, just north of the Alster River, as its target. The Americans, who planned to hit Hamburg by day with precision attacks, chose giant factories south of the Alster.
On July 22, the only question remaining was what the weather would be like. Harris and Brig. Gen. Frederick L. Anderson, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force�s 4th Bombardment Wing, met with meteorologists and learned that skies were clearing. Harris set the attack to begin at precisely one minute after midnight on Sunday, July 25. Bomber Command would dispatch 792 planes loaded with a variety of ordnance, ranging from 4-pound incendiary sticks to 8,000-pound high-explosive bombs that looked like giant dustbins.
Window also was prepared. The new device seemed an unlikely weapon to RAF crews. It consisted of bundles of metalized paper strips � each bundle had 2,200 strips � made of coarse black paper with aluminum foil stuck to one side.
Operation Gomorrah began at precisely 9:45 p.m., when a Short Stirling bomber of the 75th New Zealand Squadron took off from RAF Mepal in Cambridge. The last bombers took off at 11 p.m. Pathfinders dropped marker bombs � a mix of benzol, rubber and phosphorus that detonated at preset heights, set off by a barometric fuse � to blaze the route to Hamburg. Flying conditions were perfect as bombers advanced at 160 mph, using radar fixes to stay on course. The stream of aircraft was 203 miles long.
The Luftwaffe picked up the advancing British planes on its radar and sent up twin-engine Messerschmitt Me-110 and Junkers Ju-88 night fighters to intercept. The British reached their assembly point at about 12:20 a.m. and began dropping Window, which turned out to be a brilliant device.
British scientists had theorized that the strips of metalized paper floating in the air would swamp German radar with false echoes. The idea was not new. Japanese naval aircraft had used such a weapon � called Giman-shi, or deceiving paper � during night attacks on Guadalcanal. Adolf Hitler�s scientists had developed their own, called Duppel, in Berlin and tested it. The test was so successful that the Germans were afraid it would fall into British hands and be used against them. Incredibly, Reichsmarshall Hermann G�ring, chief of the Luftwaffe, not only ordered all research on Duppel stopped but forbade development of a counter to the device.
Now, from Lancasters and Handley Page Halifaxes, bundles were hurled out flare chutes into the freezing dark, a wearying task. In all, 7,000 bundles were dropped.
Down below, Luftwaffe radar stations that had been easily plotting RAF bomber streams were flooded with false returns. Hostile planes were everywhere. The whole defense system was blinded.
German ground controllers panicked. All Luftwaffe planes were ordered to simply fly toward Hamburg and find their own targets. Rolf Angersbach, in a Dornier Do-217, obediently headed for the city and found himself surrounded by slow-moving radar contacts � but no planes. After firing his guns all over the sky, he was ordered to land to tell his bosses what was going on. Angersbach later recalled that he found everyone helpless and bewildered.
Not every Luftwaffe pilot was flummoxed. A Lieutenant Bottinger shot down one Halifax bomber. But 740 planes roared on untouched toward Hamburg. Ahead of them flew the Pathfinders. Bombardiers looked down through their H2S radar sets, which were unaffected by Window, to find Hamburg glowing beneath them. There were no clouds, and a gentle wind blew. Bombing conditions were perfect.
At precisely 12:57 a.m., the lead de Havilland Mosquitoes opened their bomb doors and dropped 39 yellow and red target indicators, marking out a 4-by-3-mile rectangle over downtown Hamburg. Minutes later, the main force of Lancasters arrived to find the German defenses defeated by Window.
The master searchlights and all the others were waving aimlessly about the sky like a man trying to swat a flying ant in a swarm. All the crew were delighted, said Flight Lt. G.F. Pentnoy. For 50 minutes, RAF crews bombed the city in security.
German night fighters hung at Hamburg�s edge, hoping to hit a bomber. The main force lost only three bombers over Germany�s most heavily defended city. The attack seemed incredibly easy.
Down below, it was nightmarishly different.
In the confusion of the evening, the air raid alarms had been set off at 9:30 p.m., followed by the all-clear at 10, and then set off again at 12:33 a.m. The Hamburg police logged their 319th air raid alarm of the war at 12:51 a.m. as the target indicators skittered down in the night, each looking like a large fireball in the sky. Within minutes, the target indicators and 30-pound incendiaries started exploding, and people dived for the air raid shelters.
Most of Hamburg was burned to ashes. Firefighters, reserve police and Hitler Youth, the backbone of Hamburg�s civil defense, were overwhelmed. More than 54 miles of street frontage was burning. Karl Kaufmann, the district party leader, sent for reinforcements, and as many as 86 brigades were working in 692 teams by the end of the night.
The bombing was concentrated and continuous. Within minutes, the city�s telephone lines were snapped and police headquarters was hit. Kaufmann had to take his maps and message forms to Gestapo headquarters. Fire Chief Otto Zaps could not get through the wrecked streets.
Nonetheless, Hamburg fought back. City flak defenses were jammed by Window but still fired off 50,000 rounds. Traugott Bauer-Schlichtgeroll of the 267th Heavy Flak Battalion was dismayed that his radar had gone crazy. As the other defenders blazed away anyway, the 17-year-old gunner looked uneasily at the blood-red sky over Hamburg.
Whole neighborhoods were going up in flame. The Rathaus, the Nikolaikirche, the central police station and the telephone exchange were all gone. So was the Ufa-Palast cinema. Helpless firefighters stood by, unable to save the great theater because armor-piercing bombs had burrowed through the streets and sliced the water mains.
Police later estimated 1,500 dead, many more injured and thousands homeless. The RAF had dropped 184 flares, 263 target indicators, 1,346 tons of high explosives and 938 tons of incendiaries.
Overhead, the last bomber to fly over the burning city that night, a Halifax of No. 102 Squadron, turned for home at 1:55 a.m. Flight Sergeant E.M. Cartwright said the RAF crews could see the fires of Hamburg behind them for much of their flight home.
The return trip was fairly easy. The crews dumped more Window bundles. One Lancaster flew over flak at Cuxhaven and was brought down. Another was caught by a lone German fighter. The bombers started landing at 3:19 a.m., and the final plane, a Canadian bomber, came in at 5:15 a.m. Only 12 bombers were lost. Eighty RAF crewmen were dead, and seven had been captured.
In Hamburg, the sirens warbled the all-clear signal at 3:02 a.m., and citizens trooped out to the streets to find Window strips blowing around. They also found scenes of horror. Otto Mahncke saw sailors rescuing people from a burning house, passing them from balcony to balcony. Suddenly the house collapsed, and everyone fell into the ruins.
Order seemed to break down. Mahncke tried to save a woman trapped in a burning house but failed. As he left, he saw policemen at a nearby station not doing anything to help. All over Hamburg, people searched for their ruined homes and lost families. Dawn brought little daylight, since burning fires cast a huge pall of smoke across the city.
The Nazi civil defense machine rumbled into action. At 4:10 a.m. the fire department logged, Situation of Major Catastrophe declared, which placed every man and woman working in the city under Nazi Party control. Firefighters from Bremen, Kiel, Neumunster, Oldenburg and Eidelstedt were on their way, joined by Ukrainian Wehrmacht recruits from Training Corps VIII. In all, 35,000 men were soon at work quelling blazes. The fire department logged at 8:50 a.m., "Eight large areas of fires are still without firefighting forces."
David H. Lippman, an award-winning journalist and graduate of the New School for Social Research, has written many magazine articles about World War II. This article originally appeared in World War II magazine. He currently works as a public information officer for the city of Newark, N.J.
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