The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945
Page 46
The combination of improved British defences and the weakness of the German bomber arm in the west finally persuaded Portal to approve the employment of ‘Window’, but now the chiefs of staff objected to its operational use before the invasion of Sicily in early July, in case the German Air Force used it to confuse Allied air support during the landing. As a result its use was postponed until Operation Gomorrah, following approval by Churchill on 15 July.125 A few days later Churchill was faced with another objection, this time to the choice of Hamburg as a target at all. Henry Tizard, the government’s chief scientific adviser, wrote to Churchill and Portal deploring the planned destruction of Hamburg on the grounds that it would be a useful capital for the Allies to occupy when they ran post-war Germany, and that its population was ‘anti-Russian, anti-Prussian and anti-Nazi’, and might soon be ‘anti-war’. Churchill sent the letter to the chiefs of staff, but Portal had already answered Tizard, explaining that Hamburg was too important a target to ignore. ‘It is a moot point,’ he continued, ‘whether bombing produces a more desirable effect when directed upon anti-Nazis than upon the faithful’, but he was content for Harris to find out whether Hamburg’s anti-Nazi sentiment would be stung into action by bombing. Churchill took this for approval.126 By then the first of the Gomorrah raids had already taken place.
The operation against Hamburg, like the heavy bombing of Cologne in late June and early July 1943, was spread over 10 days from the first RAF raid on 24–25 July to the final raid on 2–3 August.127 The opening night-bombing raid by 728 aircraft was the first to use ‘Window’. Around 80 miles from the target the Pathfinder force and the main force that followed emptied bundles of foil strips at the rate of one bundle a minute. The strips worked perfectly, creating numerous echoes on the cathode-ray radar screens and presenting German night-fighters with a confusion of false information. Searchlights and anti-aircraft artillery had to improvise a barrage of light and fire in the hope that bombers might be deterred anyway. In just under one hour 2,284 tons of bombs were dropped, including an average of 17,000 incendiaries for every square kilometre.128 Although fewer than 50 per cent of the bombers hit the three-mile aiming zone, the rest hit the large central and north-western residential districts, killing, according to the Reich Statistical Office, 10,289 people, three times more than the worst raid so far.129 Over the following two days the Eighth Air Force attacked targets by day in north-west Germany. On 25 July, 218 bombers bombed shipbuilding targets in Hamburg and Kiel, losing 19 aircraft in the process; on 26 July, 96 aircraft attacked Hanover and 54 raided Hamburg, with the loss of a further 18 aircraft, a rate over the two days of more than 10 per cent, an indication that the warnings about the dangers of day-time bombing voiced at Casablanca had not been misplaced. The two American raids killed 468 people in Hamburg.130
The RAF raid that followed on the night of 27–28 July was a textbook example of the incendiary planning of the previous two years. It was helped by the prevailing meteorological conditions. There had been rainfall on 22 July, but the remainder of the week was dry. Humidity levels, which had been high earlier in the month, fell abnormally, reaching 46 per cent on 25 July and only 30 per cent on 27 July. Temperatures soared in the last week, reaching 32C (90F) on the evening of 27 July; low humidity and high temperatures remained over the following two days. These summertime conditions favoured the chances of a major conflagration.131 The Pathfinder force dropped markers several miles east of the centre of Hamburg, but the 729 aircraft concentrated their 2,326 tons well on the packed working-class districts of Hammerbrook, Borgfelde, Hamm, Billwärder, Hohenfelde and Rothenburgsort. The raid lasted just over an hour. The concentration of approximately 1,200 tons of incendiaries on an area of two square miles created numerous major fires that soon merged together into a roaring inferno. Water shortages caused by the earlier heavy raid hampered firefighting. Many emergency workers and vehicles were further west in the city still coping with the aftermath of the first fires where the civil defence control room had been destroyed. Efforts to stem the fires proved useless. What followed, in the words of Hamburg’s police president, was a ‘hurricane of fire … against which all human resistance seemed vain’.132 The illusion of a hurricane was caused by the scale and intense heat of the conflagration which caused fire winds that drove the flames across natural firebreaks. The inferno created a pillar of hot air and debris that rose quickly to a height of more than two miles above the city. Greedy for more oxygen, the fire drew in cold air from the surrounding area with such force that the new winds reached hurricane-force strength in the area of the fire, collapsing buildings, uprooting trees and sucking human bodies into the flames where they were swiftly incinerated or mummified. Acting like giant bellows, the winds created temperatures in excess of 800C that destroyed everything combustible barring brick and stone. Oxygen was sucked out of the thousands of basement and cellar shelters, leaving their inhabitants to die slowly of carbon monoxide poisoning.133 An estimated 18,474 people died during the night. An area of more than 12 square miles was burnt out.
This was not the end for Hamburg. Harris’s intention of destroying the city brought two more major raids on 29–30 July and 2–3 August. The first, carried out by 707 bombers, dropped a higher tonnage than the firestorm night, but did not create a second thermal hurricane. Large residential areas were again burnt out and an estimated 9,666 killed. The final raid in August was abortive. Large thunderstorms protected Hamburg. The Pathfinder force failed to mark the city and most aircraft dropped their bombs over northern Germany or in the North Sea. The final raid killed 78 people. The cumulative total for Operation Gomorrah calculated by the local police authorities by December 1943 was 31,647; the figure was revised in May 1944 to 38,975, which is close to the figure currently favoured of 37,000.134 Around 900,000 people evacuated the city and 61 per cent of Hamburg’s houses and apartments were destroyed or damaged together with 580 industrial premises and 2,632 shops. The RAF bomber force lost only 87 aircraft, or 2.5 per cent of all sorties, thanks partly to the use of ‘Window’, partly to the shock effect on Hamburg’s defences. The post-raid report noted that smoke obscured much of the evidence of destruction but confirmed that the ‘amount of residential damage is very great’.135
The consequences for the German air defence system were profound. The catastrophe at Hamburg even more than the raids on the Ruhr catapulted the German Air Force into abandoning the principle of the fixed front, embodied in the Kammhuber Line and heavy reliance on anti-aircraft fire, and substituting instead a much larger fighter force based on new forms of combat. Even before the conflagration at Hamburg, Göring, despite his anxiety to begin offensive air operations against Britain, admitted to his staff that ‘Air defence is now in my opinion decisive.’ The terrible events in Hamburg accelerated the shift to priority for fighter production and intense efforts to combat the scientific lead in radar and radio countermeasures which the Allied air force had established over the summer months.136 By October 1943, Göring’s deputy, Erhard Milch, had drawn up firm plans for the output of more than 3,000 fighter aircraft a month, and more speculative plans for 5,000 fighters every month during 1945, at the expense of further bomber production.137 By simplifying production methods, reducing the large number of aircraft types and abandoning the habit of regular modification, Milch calculated that the output could be achieved without a large increase in labour.138 He had already taken over central responsibility for radar and radio development in May and had begun an immediate acceleration of research and production. In July a new office for high-frequency research was set up under Dr Hans Plendl, which drew in 3,000 scientific personnel to combat the variety of devices that had fallen into German hands during the Ruhr battle, thanks to the recovery of equipment from crashed bombers.139
After the success of ‘Window’, priority was given by the Germans to developing radar that would be more immune to its effects in order to increase as rapidly as possible the hitting-power of the German fighter force. Permiss
ion was now given to build up units trained for Hermann’s Wilde Sau technique while on the day following the final heavy raid on Hamburg, 30 July, the Zahme Sau tactic of controlled infiltration of the bomber stream was approved by Milch and Hubert Weise, overall commander of the German home-front air defence. The result was a substantial diversion of guns and aircraft away from the fighting fronts where they were needed more than ever by the summer of 1943. By late August there were over 1,000 fighter aircraft stationed in Germany, 45.5 per cent of all German fighter strength, and a further 224 in northern France. Over the same period the number of heavy anti-aircraft guns on the home front increased from 4,800 before Gomorrah to over 6,000 by the end of August, including more of the heavier 10.5-cm and 12.8-cm models. Shortages of skilled personnel hampered the anti-aircraft effort throughout the year, and for the first time substantial numbers of women and young people were recruited as Flakhelfer; on Hitler’s orders training began in August 1943 for 250 units of Reich Labour Service boys to undertake air defence duty in the year before they joined the armed forces.140
In Britain the Hamburg raids were treated as a great success. The Director of Intelligence in the Air Ministry thought that the operation confirmed the superiority of incendiary over high-explosive bombs: ‘the complete wipe-out of a residential area by fire is quite another and better conception. May it long continue!’141 Robert Lovett wrote to Eaker from Washington that the War Department was keen to see the photo-reconnaissance images of Hamburg’s destruction as soon as possible: ‘The pasting Hamburg got must have been terrific.’ Eaker replied that the raids had ‘a tremendous effect’.142 For Harris, Operation Gomorrah was more than he could have hoped for. The post-raid assessments, now based on RE8 research on man-months lost and acreage destroyed, transformed the statistical image of Bomber Command’s achievements and gave Harris the weapons he needed to argue the case that bombing was capable of knocking Germany out of the war. If there had been a defensiveness about Bomber Command strategy before Hamburg, the new evidence could be used to strengthen Harris’s hand. On 12 August he wrote to Portal, who was with the Combined Chiefs at the Quadrant conference in Quebec, that in his view the bombing war was ‘on the verge of a final show-down’. Harris was certain that with the same concentration of effort ‘we can push Germany over by bombing this year’.143
The results of Operation Gomorrah could only be assessed by the crudest measurements, since the detailed effects were not yet known even to the German authorities. This meant chiefly an assessment of the acreage of Zones 1 and 2A, the inner-city residential areas, ‘devastated’ predominantly by incendiary attack. The Hamburg raid had the effect of doubling the amount of damage inflicted on German cities so far. Up to the end of June it was estimated that 12.27 per cent of the inner-city areas had been destroyed; by the end of September this figure had increased to 23.31 per cent, 18,738 acres against 9,583.144 The intelligence staff at Bomber Command headquarters used this material to present a statistical way of measuring success based on the following three criteria:
Tons of bombs claimed dropped per built-up acre attacked = ‘Effort’
Acres of devastation per ton of bombs claimed dropped = ‘Efficiency’
Acres of devastation per acre of built-up area attacked = ‘Success’
On this basis it could be demonstrated that ‘success’ (acres destroyed per acres attacked) had increased from 0.001 at the end of 1941, 0.032 at the end of 1942, to 0.249 at the end of October 1943. The acres of Germany’s central urban area devastated had increased by a factor of 24 in the course of 1943.145 These figures gave no indication of what effect this was likely to have either on Germany’s war effort or on the state of mind of those bombed. The MEW warned the Air Ministry that it was hard to judge German conditions. They estimated that Operation Gomorrah had cost Hamburg the equivalent of 1.25 million man-months, or 12 per cent of the city’s annual production. The cumulative effect of all Bomber Command’s attacks during the late spring and summer was estimated at a more modest 3 per cent of Germany’s potential production effort.146
Evidence soon became available to show that the damage was not as crippling as had at first been hoped. The port of Hamburg, which had been less severely damaged than the city, was estimated by the MEW to be operating at 70 per cent of its capacity again by the end of August; intelligence on the Blohm and Voss shipyards, one of the principal targets for the Eighth Air Force, suggested that they had not been destroyed and were still functioning.147 By November the city was back to 80 per cent of its pre-raid output. When Göring was captured at the end of the war with a train full of possessions, the American army found among them a presentation folio of more than a hundred charts and graphs on the remarkable recovery of Hamburg.148 The one statistic that could only be guessed at was the number of dead. This was not a measurement used by Bomber Command, whose calculations of ‘effort’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘success’ became increasingly more abstract as the war went on. The acreage destroyed was released to the British press as early as the 6 August, though the RAF communiqué emphasized that the damage ‘particularly covers the principal manufacturing districts and the docks and wharves’.149 Sources in Sweden suggested the figure of 58,000 dead, which was reprinted in British newspapers later in August. News of the firestorm only became available from a correspondent of the Swiss paper Baseler Nachrichten in November 1943 when it was circulated among the anti-bombing lobby in Britain and published in the New Statesman. The claims that 20,000 bodies had been found, incinerated to a degree not even found in a crematorium, were contested by British scientists who were shown the material. They dismissed the description of the firestorm as scientific nonsense, an ‘intrinsic absurdity’.150
STALEMATE OVER GERMANY
In the aftermath of Operation Gomorrah both Allied bomber forces expected a growing success rate and both were impatient to achieve it. There was a growing confidence that the aims laid down at Casablanca might now be operationally in their grasp. Lovett wrote to Eaker in early July about the wave of optimism surging through the United States ‘that the Air Forces will knock Germany over by Christmas’.151 A report on the Combined Offensive produced by Eaker in early August 1943 talked of knocking out the industrial props of Germany one by one until ‘the German military machine comes closer and closer to collapse’.152 Harris telegraphed Portal at the Combined Chiefs of Staff conference in Quebec in mid-August that the combined efforts of the two forces should be enough, once again, to ‘knock Germany stiff’.153 Portal was keen for Harris to attack Berlin with the same force as Hamburg: ‘In present war situation,’ he telegraphed from Quebec, ‘attacks on Berlin on anything like Hamburg scale must have enormous effect on Germany as a whole.’ Harris explained that this would need 40,000 tons of bombs and good weather, but the battle of Berlin was to be next on his list.154
For both bomber forces there was a race against time. The Eighth Air Force needed to be able to show that it was meeting the Pointblank requirement to undermine the German Air Force in time for the projected invasion of France in May 1944. Whatever the American public expected of the bombing campaign, Eaker’s directive was to use air power to prepare the way for the ground armies, and the progress of the combined offensive was regularly measured against this requirement. The Quadrant conference in Quebec in August 1943 reiterated that destruction of German air power was to have ‘the highest strategic priority’.155 By October it was evident that the German fighter force was growing in strength and that the efforts to reduce it had been ineffective. The Eighth Air Force was directed to speed up its assault on its list of essential German targets; out of 128 attacks on Europe, only 50 had so far been against Germany.156 Throughout the last weeks of 1943 and the first months of 1944, Eaker, and his successor in January, Brig. General James Doolittle, were told insistently by Arnold and Spaatz that Pointblank ‘must be pressed to the limit’. In January 1944 the chiefs of staff wanted the offensive to focus only on German fighter strength during the preparatory per
iod for Operation Overlord, as the German Air Force had been asked to do before Sea Lion in 1940.157
Harris and Bomber Command ran a different race. He wanted city-bombing to bring the war to a conclusion without an extensive and costly ground invasion, and this meant doing such severe damage to Germany’s urban population and environment in the months after Gomorrah that the German war effort would crumble. A joint report on the progress of the combined offensive drawn up in November 1943, but clearly influenced by Harris, played down the impact of American raids and highlighted the significance of area attacks on industrial cities, which had already reduced German war potential, it was claimed, by 10 per cent and ‘may well be fatal’ if the figure could be doubled in the next few months.158 Harris drew up a list the same month of the different urban target areas (with Berlin the priority) for ‘the continuation and intensification’ of the offensive, each city defined as ‘largely destroyed’, ‘seriously damaged’, ‘damaged’ or ‘undamaged’, and with the added hope that the Eighth Air Force would soon join in the bombing of the German capital.159 In December Harris used the urban damage figures in a report to Portal and Sinclair in which he claimed that the physical destruction of 40–50 per cent of the urban area of the principal towns of Germany would produce, by April 1944, the month before Overlord, ‘a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable’.160