They waited at Weiden for the rest of the family to show up but they waited in vain. They were all dead. Their mother’s body had been found in a wing of the orphanage. Her time of death was given as 2 a.m. The bodies of their father and sister were never identified. Sester never saw his mother’s ‘charred remains, thank God’.13 An adolescent schoolgirl, fifteen-year-old Gertrud L, was not so fortunate. She was one of a number of girls asked by the authorities to record their experiences in essays written in the autumn after the raid. She too became separated from her family during the attack and spent the following day searching hopelessly. The next day she tried again. ‘A man told me me that my mother and my sister were dead. I could not believe it. Then the man showed me where my mother lay. She was lying on her front, one hand holding her hair. Beside her there were others, headless, charred.’ Her sister, whom she had last seen with her mother and who had an infant son, was not there. ‘Another man told me that as they lifted my sister out, her child was drawing its last breath. They tried to revive him with oxygen but it was to no avail.’ Gertrud tied a piece of paper with her mother’s name to the body but it came loose when she was carted away. She was buried as an ‘unknown’.14
The raid ended at 2.45 a.m. It had lasted ninety-five minutes. A few hours afterwards, Heinz Pettenberg, the journalist, left the safety of the suburbs to survey the damage. Walking in, he passed large numbers of rescue workers drafted in from outside. He soon realized that ‘something terrible had happened’. He was ‘walking through a destroyed city’. The fires were still burning and the heat was unbearable. Everything he knew and loved in his home town seemed to have been destroyed. His newspaper’s office had disappeared. ‘At the Bollwerk lie the collapsed ruins of the ancient inn “Zum Krützchen”, where we spent so many happy hours … there is not one house left on the Heumarkt and the house of my grandparents, Rheingasse 5, has gone … on the Waidmarkt, the irreplaceable St Georg in ruins. The Blaubach – rubble, the Postrasse, the Waisenhausgasse, rubble, rubble. One can hardly see anything. The smoke, poisonous, blue-black, drags through the streets … from time to time people with swollen eyes appear amidst the clouds of smoke, gasping refugees, holding a few saved possessions. The swollen cadaver of a dead horse lies on the street, and then – a picture of horror – corpses, twisted, barely covered up.’ Remembering the thousand-bomber raid of a year before he asked himself, ‘What was the thirty-first of May … compared with this! I will never forget this terrible walk.’15
The city records show nearly 6,500 buildings were destroyed. Of these, 6,368 were houses and apartment buildings, underneath which the population was cowering. A further 3,515 suffered heavy damage. Two hospitals, seventeen churches, twenty-four schools, two theatres, eight cinemas, seven post and telegraph offices, one railway station, six banks and ten hotels were also swept away. The list also includes twenty unspecified ‘official buildings,’ four ‘military installations’ and forty-three ‘industrial installations’.16 Given the great breadth of the violence done to Cologne it is hard to see them as anything other than incidental targets. The Gestapo headquarters, in the Appellhofplatz in the middle of town, by some malign miracle, remained intact. The back yard was equipped with a gallows where towards the end of the war civilians and many slave labourers were hanged for petty offences like stealing a cooking pot. The death toll from the bombing established another record. This time 4,377 were killed, nearly ten times more than in the ‘thousand’ raid, and probably another 10,000 wounded.
Harris was relentless. The people of Cologne were still numb with shock when bombers appeared again. Four days later another major operation was mounted against the industrial areas on the east bank of the Rhine. Some twenty factories were hit along with the homes of the workers who laboured in them. More than 580 were killed and 70,000 bombed out. There was a further attack on 8/9 July in which another 502 civilians died.
As a result of these three raids in a little over a week, 350,000 lost their homes. Some were rehoused in the few inhabitable buildings remaining in Cologne. Many more were evacuated or fled the city and the surrounding area under their own steam. The exodus was desperate and chaotic. Evacuees who had fled to the surrounding countryside had to return to the city to get a train that would take them to safety. ‘In Opladen [a small town north of Cologne] the train stops,’ a male traveller, Herr Roemer, recorded in his diary entry for 6 July 1943. ‘The journey is to continue in buses and after a long wait they finally arrive. Hundreds of people storm [the first] vehicle. Squashed children and women scream, men curse. Everyone is laden down with luggage and boxes. Many are carrying bedding. A few soldiers are sitting on the roof. We drive for an hour to Cologne. Here are thousands of people at the station, on the platform. Next to me is a heavily pregnant woman with two children and luggage. She is weeping bitterly. A train arrives. There is a surging back and forth. The train is overloaded. The platform is still packed with people bickering. The transport police remove some people from the running boards and the locomotive.’ When the train reached Bonn a fight broke out in Roemer’s compartment. On the wall of another he noticed ‘a chalk drawing. A gallows from which hangs a swastika. Everybody sees it but nobody wipes it away.’17 Many of those who fled the city did not return until the war was over. In 1940 it was the home of 770,00 people. By March 1945, the population was 40,000.
The authorities paid close attention to the mood of the city. The material gleaned by the army of informants who cocked their ears to conversations in streets, shops and workplaces was disquieting. A survey by the SS security service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), delivered nine days after the attack, reported widespread defeatism and bitterness and cynicism towards the regime.
In the immediate aftermath the Hitler salute was rarely seen. The leaflets that the RAF had showered by the million on Germany finally had a readership. People picked them from the rubble, read them and discussed their contents with their family, friends and workmates, disregarding the dire penalties that could result if they were caught.
Caution was fraying. Suffering made people bold. The authorities were amazed by the lack of circumspection. The strength of the attack was a profound shock to a nation that had been told that the enemy was weak and victory was inevitable. ‘Many people are under the impression that [the enemy], in the future development of the war, are actually much stronger and will overcome us,’ ran one passage of the report. ‘They [think] the outcome of the war is in doubt and people are nervous and feel weighed down by this.’ The fear showed in the sour, unfunny jokes: Hitler’s favourite singer Zarah Leander has been summoned to Berlin. She is going to sing her most famous hit for the Führer – ‘I Know One Day A Miracle Will Come’.
But the Nazis could take some comfort from the fact that the raid had created anger as well as despondency. The attack on Cologne cathedral had provoked particular indignation and vengeful feelings. The fact that the thirteenth-century Gothic masterpiece had only been damaged rather than destroyed made little difference. For many a devout Kölner, the sight of the smoke-blackened spires provoked rage. ‘This is the worst thing they have done yet,’ a labourer was quoted as saying in the SS report. ‘I don’t know much about culture but I want to smash the heads of the English for this.’ It was just the sentiment on the lips of people in Coventry nearly three years previously when their cathedral had been blitzed.
For others, the damage done to this great symbol of faith seemed like a portent. It was a sign that ‘God had turned his face away from the Germans’ or a punishment for the destruction of the temples of the Jews.
The fear caused by the St Peter and St Paul raid rippled outwards across Germany. The refugees who fled Cologne to all corners of the Reich took their stories with them. The SD reports from Franconia, far away in the south, spoke of a ‘panic-like fear of the Anglo-American air war and its expected consequences’. They noted ‘growing nervousness and anxiety at the fact that the enemy seem to have the upper hand in the air and at our own powerlessness
’. The utterances of the Party high-ups were given little credence. People preferred to get their news now from Swiss radio rather than official broadcasts. Around Stuttgart, morale was said to be ‘under pressure’. Overflights by Allied aircraft increased the sense of dread amongst those below and the feeling that it would be their turn next.18
The raids, then, seemed to be having the desired effect. Factories were being flattened and vast acreages of housing reduced to blackened rubble. The long rows of coffins laid out for the official mass burial ceremonies left no one in the Ruhr in any doubt that the war had arrived on their doorstep and they were as exposed to death as their husbands, brothers and fathers on the Eastern Front. People were frightened. More than 28,000 fled Aachen after a raid in mid-July that killed only 294 people. Seven weeks later most of them had failed to return.
As the Battle of the Ruhr progressed the area’s defences inevitably improved making operations increasingly dangerous. By the end of May, Harris had 800 aircraft at his immediate disposal, four fifths of which were four-engined bombers. Germany was full of attractive targets. Concentrating on the Ruhr meant that much of the rest of urban Germany was having a quiet time. To preserve his resources and to maintain the principle that all Germany should feel the lash of the bomber offensive, it was necessary to move on.
Hamburg was an obvious target for another spectacular. It had been chosen for the first ‘thousand’ raid until the weather forecast ruled it out. It was the second-biggest city in Germany with a population of 1.8 million and the country’s most important port. Ships were built there including U-boats. Despite all this, and the fact that it was reasonably easy to identify due to its proximity to the Baltic coast, it had so far got off lightly. It had been attacked ninety-eight times by Bomber Command since the beginning of the war but with little serious effect.
At the end of July the Battle of the Ruhr was over and the Battle of Hamburg was about to begin. The plan envisaged four major raids over ten nights in which 10,000 tons of bombs were to be dropped. The first came on the night of 24/25 July. Practice had intensified the concentration of aircraft in the target area and reduced their time in the danger zone so that on this night the 728 aircraft which reached Hamburg were able to drop 2,284 tons of bombs in fifty minutes. Defences were baffled by the use for the first time of Window, bundles of aluminium foil which were dumped out of special chutes cut in the bombers’ fuselages and which, for a time at least, baffled the radar operators who could not decide whether or not the blips they made on their screens represented aircraft.
The city was well beyond the range of Oboe. This may have reduced the accuracy of the bombardment. By now there was a well-established tendency for the bombing to ‘creep back’ as crews dropped their loads into the first fires and smoke they saw, spreading the zone of destruction backwards from the target. On this raid it was six miles long. The central and north-western districts of the city suffered badly and 1,200 people were killed.
The following day there were more aeroplanes over the smoking city. These were the B-17 Flying Fortresses of the American Eighth Air Force making their first appearance in support of an RAF operation. The huge plumes of smoke hanging in the air made it impossible for them to identify the industrial targets they had been ordered to destroy. They returned the following day but then withdrew from the battle, leaving it to the Lancasters, Halifaxes, Stirlings and Wellingtons.
The second raid followed seventy-two hours after the first. The Pathfinders’ marking was slightly off the city-centre aiming-point but the bombing was tightly concentrated and the 2,326 bombs dropped fell within a small radius.
The bomb load was made up of 50 per cent incendiaries, less than normal, but the effect it created was extraordinary. The night was hot and dry and the fires that sprang up charged through the working-class areas of Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfeld, devouring everything combustible. The exhausted fire services could do nothing to slow them and the blazes only began subsiding when there was nothing left for them to consume.
The death toll dwarfed anything yet achieved by Bomber Command. Some 40,000 people died, most of them asphyxiated by carbon dioxide after the fire leached all the oxygen from the air, sucking it from the shelters. The two following raids on 29/30 July and 2/3 August killed only 387. Almost everyone else had fled.
This was by far the most terrible blow suffered by German civilians since the beginning of the war. In his report on the catastrophe, the police president of Hamburg abandoned bureaucratic prose and admitted his difficulty in finding words to describe what had happened. ‘Speech is impotent to portray the measure of the horror,’ he wrote. Each night of attack was followed by ‘a day which displayed the horror in the dim and unreal light of a sky hidden in smoke … the streets were covered with hundreds of corpses. Mothers with their children, youths, old men, burnt, charred, untouched and clothed, naked with a waxen pallor like dummies in a shop window they lay in every posture, quiet and peaceful or cramped, the death struggle shown in the expression on their faces.’ The picture inside the shelters was ‘even more horrible in its effect, as it showed in many cases the final distracted struggle against a merciless fate. Although in some places shelterers sat quietly, peacefully and untouched as if sleeping in their chairs, killed without pain or realization by carbon monoxide poisoning, in other shelters the position of remains of bones and skulls showed how the occupants had fought to escape from their buried prison.’
In the minds of the authorities, at least, the victims of the raids were martyrs. ‘Posterity,’ wrote the police chief, ‘can only bow its head in honour of the fate of these innocents, sacrificed by the murderous lust of a sadistic enemy.’ If the British had hoped to create chaos and despair they had not succeeded as ‘the conduct of the population, which at no time and nowhere showed panic or even signs of panic … was worthy of the magnitude of the disaster.’ Instead there was ‘an irresistible will to rebuild’.19 German civilians suffered terribly in the summer of 1943. The RAF had achieved a scale of destruction that far surpassed anything that been seen in the history of aerial warfare. But whether or not the population was approaching a state of paralysing moral collapse was impossible to tell and the question was not about to be settled.
8
The Reasons Why
In the course of their tours, airmen seldom talked about the value of bombing or the morality of what they were engaged in. If they had doubts, they tended to keep them to themselves. They were fighting a sharply focused war. They had a public obligation to carry out the duty they had volunteered for. They had a duty to themselves to survive. These realities created a cast of mind that could make them seem impervious to all other considerations.
A few hours before his first mission, an apprehensive Peter Johnson joined a large crowd in the briefing room. They were addressed by a WAAF intelligence officer, ‘a formidable lady who minced no words’. The target, yet again, was the Krupp works in Essen.
‘Yes, they’ve been damaged,’ she shouted over the chorus of groans and expletives. ‘But make no mistake, they’re still turning out guns and shells aimed at you.’ She predicted that the defences would be stronger than ever, giving details of the known searchlight and flak dispositions. “‘They’re going to give you HELL,” she spat. “See that you give it them back!”’ She sat down ‘visibly affected by her own vehemence’.
Johnson found this performance distasteful coming from a non-combatant but he was impressed by the dangers she had so forcefully described. Looking around at the others he was surprised to see that they seemed ‘almost totally untouched by what they had heard’. Many had their eyes closed. Their concerns were simply ‘the details of route and navigation, which colour of target indicator they were to bomb and what they could do to make sure they arrived on time and got home safely.’ He concluded that ‘while the fierce lady was probably convinced that she was striking a significant blow in the great struggle, for the bulk of her audience she was whistling in the wind.’1
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br /> The face the Bomber Boys showed to the world was sardonic and displays of patriotic enthusiasm were considered infra dig. It was an ethos that did not encourage self-regard. The contrast with the Americans was marked. One Sunday night in the autumn of 1944 Ken Newman and his comrades sat down to watch a film in the anteroom of the officers’ mess at Little Staughton. A few USAAF officers were also present. The movie celebrated the fictional feats of a band of American aviators who volunteer to fly B17s in Europe. ‘All the RAF officers present were nearly doubled up with laughter at this rubbishy Hollywood propaganda,’ he wrote. ‘But when the lights were put on the faces of the USAAF aircrew were a picture – it was all too clear that they had taken the film completely seriously and identified themselves with the actors. They were visibly moved and tears were streaming from their eyes; ours too but for a very different reason.’2
Their studied coolness did not mean that the crews did not think about what they were doing. The reserve masked a solid belief in the virtue of the cause. With a very few exceptions, the men of Bomber Command accepted that Germany had wantonly provoked a war then prosecuted it with a ruthlessness and fanaticism that justified almost any amount of retaliation in kind. By the end of 1943, German civilian casualties far outstripped those that the Luftwaffe had inflicted so far on Britain, but any notion of proportionality had long disappeared.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 68