Текст книги "Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943"

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Inferno

Inferno

The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943

KEITH LOWE

VIKING

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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First published 2007

1

Copyright © Keith Lowe, 2007

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Maps by John Gilkes

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright

reserved above, no part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior

written permission of both the copyright owner and

the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents

List of Maps

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Author’s Note

Part One – Hamburg

1 City on the River

2 The Anglophile City

3 City of Rebellion

4 The Rise of the Nazis

5 Hamburg Prepares for War

Part Two – Darkness Falls from the Air

6 A Brief History of Bombing

7 The Grand Alliance

8 The British Plan

9 The First Strike

10 The Devastation Begins

11 The Americans Join the Fray

12 The Luftwaffe Strikes Back

13 The Americans Again

14 The Eye of the Storm

15 Concentrated Bombing

16 Firestorm

17 The ‘Terror of Hamburg’

18 Coup de Grâce

19 The Tempest

Part Three – The Aftermath

20 City of the Dead

21 Survival

22 Famine

23 The Reckoning

24 Redemption

Appendices

A Chronology of Hamburg

B Chronology of the Second World War

C Chronology of ‘Operation Gomorrah’

D Comparison of British, American and German Terms

E British Order of Battle, 24 July 1943

F American Order of Battle, 24 July 1943

G Luftwaffe Order of Battle of Fighters in the West, 24 July 1943

H Air Force Casualties

I Tables of Statistics

J Aircraft Specifications

K Financial Cost of the Hamburg Bombings

Notes

Archives Consulted

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

List of Maps

1 Hamburg and its defences, 1943

2 RAF route on the night of 24 July 1943

3 RAF bombs dropped on Hamburg on the night of 24 July

4 The American plan, 25 July 1943

5 USAAF route over Hamburg, 25 July

6 American bombs on Hamburg, 25 July

7 Attacks on 384th BG, 25 July

8 USAAF losses, 25 July

9 USAAF route, 26 July

10 American bombs on Hamburg, 26 July

11 Damage caused by British and American bombers, 24–26 July 1943

12 RAF route on the night of 27 July

13 RAF bombs dropped on Hamburg on the night of 27 July

14 The firestorm area

15 RAF losses on the night of 29 July

16 RAF bombs dropped on Hamburg on the night of 29 July

17 Damage caused on the night of 29 July

18 British and German losses on the night of 2 August

19 Total damage to Hamburg in the Gomorrah raids, 24 July–3 August

List of Illustrations

Section One

1 Churchill and Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference, where the Combined Bomber Offensive was first agreed (US Army)

2 Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief, RAF Bomber Command (Imperial War Museum)

3 Major General Frederick L. Anderson, commander US VIII Bomber Command (US Air Force)

4 Hitler arrives at Hamburg’s airport on one of his many pre-war visits (Archiv Erna Neumann)

5 Karl Kaufmann, Hamburg’s gauleiter and a loyal disciple of the Führer (Studio Schmidt-Luchs)

6 Göring (left) was head of the Luftwaffe, but it was Erhard Milch (right) who ran the show. Chief of Air Staff Hans Jeschonnek (centre) shot himself shortly after the bombing of Hamburg (Private collection)

7 Colin Harrison: ‘One minute I was a schoolboy, next minute they called me a man and put me in an aeroplane.’ (Private collection)

8 Bill McCrea: ‘When we were detailed on the first Hamburg raid we thought, “Now we’ll see what it’s reallylike!” ’ (Private collection)

9 Doug Fry (centre), hours before he was shot down at the end of July 1943 (Private collection)

10 Baptism of fire: Ted Groom and pilot Reg Wellham’s first operation was the firestorm raid of 27 July (Private collection)

11 Hamburg before the war. Narrow streets like this allowed fires to spread rapidly (RAF Museum)

12 The bright lights of the Reeperbahn in the 1930s (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

13 The docks and shipyards were the main target of the raids (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

14 False streets and buildings were floated on the Alster lake in an attempt to disguise the city centre (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

15 Secret weapon: a factory worker cuts strips of ‘Window’ to the right length (IWM)

16 RAF ground crew prepare bombs before loading them into a Stirling bomber (IWM)

17 Hamburg from the air, on the night of 24 July (IWM)

18 Streaks of flak over Hamburg (RAF Museum)

Section Two

19 A typical formation of B-17 Flying Fortresses, with German fighter aircraft above (US Air Force)

20 The lead crew of the USAAF’s 303rd Bomb Group before their mission to Hamburg on 25 July (Mighty Eighth Museum, Georgia)

21 American bombs fall on Howaldtswerke shipyards, 26 July (US Air Force)

22 Hamburg women and children run for cover during an air-raid warning (Studio Schmidt-Luchs)

23 German propaganda poster, 1943: ‘The enemy sees your light. Black out!’ (Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz)

24 The ‘Michel’, a symbol of Hamburg (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

25 A group of men clears the rubble on Grosse Bergstrasse in Altona, shortly after the opening raids (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

26 Elbstrasse (now Neanderstrasse) before the raids (RAF Museum)

27 Elbstrasse after the raids (RAF Museum)

28 and 29 Even before the evacuation order was given, the Ausgebombtenbegan to flee the city (above, Studio Schmidt-Luchs; below, Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

Section Three

30 The face of the victim: the trauma of being bombed scarred an entire generation of Germans (Ullstein)

31 Some of the city’s 45,000 dead litter a street in the suburb of Hamm (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

32 According to the late W. G. Sebald, in the immediate post-war years shopkeepers would pull photographs like this from under the counter with a furtiveness usually reserved for pornography (US National Archives)

33 The changeful nature of the firestorm produced some gruesome contrasts (IWM)

34 The clean-up operation: Hamburg workers clear the entrance to a buried air-raid shelter (IWM)

35 A prisoner from Neuengamme concentration camp loads charred body parts into a bucket (Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz)

36 Survivors being issued with emergency rations at one of the refugee assembly points (Josef Schorer/Archiv für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg)

37 Chalk messages appeared on many of the ruins, listing the whereabouts of those who used to live there (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

38 Ruined landscape: after the Gomorrah attacks, Volksdorfer Strasse in Barmbek was little more than a pathway cleared through the rubble (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

39 In Hamm only the façades of buildings still stand: everything else has been turned to ash (IWM)

40 Life among the ruins: for the rest of the war, and for years afterwards, families were forced to live in the most basic conditions (Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg)

41 and 42 The memorial at Ohlsdorf cemetery, and one of the four mass-graves where 36,918 bodies are buried (Private collection)

Introduction

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not

become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss

also gazes into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche ¹

In his eyewitness account of the Hamburg firestorm and its aftermath, Hans Erich Nossack admitted to feeling a mixture of awe and elation whenever he saw the fleets of British bombers flying over the city. Despite his natural fear during an air raid, he often found himself willing the bombers on, almost hoping for the opportunity to witness a truly catastrophic event. Rather than going to the shelter he would stand spellbound on his balcony watching the explosions rising above the city. He did not blame the British and American airmen for the havoc they were wreaking, but saw it rather as the inevitable expression of man’s urge to destroy – an urge that was mirrored in his own morbid fascination. That this fascination was accompanied by revulsion, both at what was happening before him and at his own emotions, did not lessen the power of his darkest cravings. ²

There is a sense in which the whole of the Second World War can be seen as a battle between these dark cravings – the human urge to destroy – and the desire to keep such instincts in check. From the victors’ point of view the war has often been portrayed as an almost mythical struggle by the ‘free’ world to rein in the destructive urges of Hitler’s regime. And yet the Allies were just as destructive towards their enemies as the Axis powers ever were – necessarily so, since destruction is the very business of war. The tragedy of this particular conflict was that both sides should so completely abandon all restraint, until there was no way out of the war but by the total devastation of one side or the other.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bomber war. Each side began bombing with relative caution – especially the British, who promised early on that all bombing would be confined to strictly military objectives. Each side gradually descended into varying degrees of what the Germans called Schrechlichkeit(‘frightfulness’) – the deliberate terrorizing of civilian populations. And each side accompanied their bomber raids not only with increasingly bloodthirsty calls for the utter destruction of their enemy, but with jubilation whenever that destruction was partially achieved. The uncomfortable elation experienced by Nossack at the bombing of his own city was merely a token of what was happening across the whole of Europe.

At the end of the war, when things had returned to ‘normality’, both sides tried to distance themselves from these events. This denial of the past has been most pronounced in Germany, where it seemed that the only way the population could cope with the horrors they had witnessed was to pretend they had never happened. In 1946, the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman described travelling through the moonscape of Hamburg on a train: despite the massive expanse of ruins not a single other passenger looked out of the window. Dagerman was immediately identified as a foreigner precisely becausehe did so. The story is an apt metaphor for the way Germans have collectively avoided looking at the ordeal they experienced. Until recently, few German authors have been willing to engage emotionally with the subject because to do so would open too many wounds. The peculiar mix of collective guilt for being a part of a nation that unleashed war upon the world, and anger at the heartlessness of their own treatment – so that they were simultaneously both perpetrators and victims of atrocity – has made it much easier to turn away and pretend that life continued as normal. ³

In Britain and America there has been a corresponding avoidance of the consequences of our bombing war. We know all about what it was like for our airmen, and the bravery they displayed in the face of formidable German flak and fighter defences is a strong part of our collective folklore. Triumphant films have been made about it, such as The Dambusters, or Hollywood’s Memphis Belle. There are countless books about the airmen’s experience – about the stress of waiting at dispersal, the nerves of the long flight into battle, the terror of flying through flak, or even of being shot down by fighters. That is as it should be – those were the things we did, and it is important that we remember them. But after the bombs have been dropped, and the surviving bombers have returned home, the story tends to end. What happened on the ground, to the cities full of people beneath those falling bombs is rarely talked about; even when it isdiscussed, it is usually only in terms of the buildings and factories destroyed, with a cursory mention of civilian casualties. We, too, like to pretend that nothing terrible came of those bombs. (I am talking here about our collectiveconsciousness – the airmen themselves are among the few of us who seem to have thought about it, understood what they were doing, and either come to terms with it or made a conscious decision not to try to square the impossible: there was a war on, and they know what we don’t, that war is a terrible thing out of which no oneescapes looking good.)

The one exception to this rule, of course, is Dresden. The disproportional amount of attention Dresden gets is our one act of contrition for the destruction we rained on the cities of Germany. There are various reasons why this city has become the emblem of our guilt – it was truly beautiful, the scale of its destruction over just a few days was awe-inspiring, and since it occurred towards the end of the war many people have wondered with hindsight whether it was not an unnecessary tragedy. All this is worthy of discussion, but it does not excuse our forgetfulness about other cities in Germany. What about Wuppertal, Düsseldorf and Berlin? Berlin suffered more bombing destruction in terms of area than any other city in the war: almost four times as much as Dresden. ⁴And what about Hamburg? Just as many people died in Hamburg as in Dresden, if not more, and in ways that were every bit as horrific.

In continental Europe the destruction of Hamburg is regarded as a defining moment in the Second World War. It happened eighteen months before Dresden, at a time when much of Germany was still confident of final victory. It was a far greater shock to the system than Dresden was, unleashing almost a million refugees across a nation that had still not quite accepted the consequences of bombing. Those refugees brought with them tales of unimaginable horror: fires hot enough to melt glass, a firestorm strong enough to uproot trees and hurl them into the flames, and rumours of 200,000 people killed within a few days and nights (although, in fact, the total was more like 45,000).

I have been consistently surprised by the general ignorance of these facts among my own countrymen. In the two years I spent writing this book I came across few people outside the world of military historians who knew that Hamburg had been bombed at all, let alone the sheer scale of the destruction that took place. On the Continent the bombing of Hamburg is a byword for horror, yet in Britain few people know it happened. In North America, too, there is widespread ignorance of the basic facts, although to some extent America’s geographical and emotional distance from Hamburg excuses this. Even those who have heard of the Hamburg firestorm are generally unaware of its ghastly human consequences.

The main purpose of this book is to put that right. My intention is to convey the events as they appeared at the time, not only to the British and American airmen who fought their way across the skies of Europe, but to the people of Hamburg who became the victims of their bombs. Hamburg was a handsome and prosperous city before it was destroyed: in the first few chapters, I will explain some of the city’s history, and try to re-create the atmosphere in this Hansestadt in the years leading up to 1943. It is only by knowing what was there before the bombing that we can truly appreciate what was lost – both physically and psychologically. I have also devoted several chapters to the immediate and long-term aftermath of the firestorm because it has never been adequately described before, in Germany or abroad. The effect of the catastrophe on the German people, and on Germany itself, was far-reaching, and continues to cause controversy today.

The second purpose of this book is to try to correct the erroneous belief that war is somehow a glorious or heroic undertaking. During the course of my research I interviewed dozens of bomber veterans, and they are unanimous on this point: there is nothing glorious about sitting in a Lancaster or a B-17 bomber for upwards of five hours, in the freezing temperatures of the upper atmosphere, waiting to find out if you will return home safely. At best it is dull, at worst it is terrifying: the rare moments of exhilaration are insignificant when compared to this.

There is nothing glorious about being bombed, either, as the British learned during the Blitz when more than 40,000 British civilians were killed. The most infamous German raid was on Coventry, where local industries, civilian houses and historic buildings in the centre of the city were devastated. In their collective imagination this is what British people believe it must have been like for the Germans – a little like Coventry, or perhaps slightly worse. It is a false impression. What happened in Essen, Bochum, Düsseldorf and the other cities around the river Ruhr was like two years of Coventrys, night after night after night. Coventry suffered only a single major bombing raid; Essen was bombed on a much larger scale, twenty-eight times. Hamburg is on another level altogether. What happened there is more accurately compared to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. ⁵

Until recently America did not know what it was like to be bombed at all. Geographically remote from any hostile neighbours, the USA has always enjoyed almost total immunity from air attack, ⁶and until a few years ago its people had never been seriously threatened. The shock was therefore all the greater when a group of Al Qaeda terrorists flew two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The sheer horror of this action still consumes Americans with righteous indignation – and so it should – but tragic as this event was, it was essentially only the destruction of a handful of buildings. True, almost three thousand people perished, but imagine the sense of awe, of shock, if the whole of Lower Manhattan had been destroyed. Imagine an area from the tip of the island all the way up to Madison Square consumed by a singlefire, and the rest of the city as far as Central Park reduced to rubble. What would have been America’s reaction if the death toll had not been 2,800, but ten or fifteen times that number? Imagine eight square miles of the city without a single building left standing – mountains of rubble as far as the eye can see, corpses littering the streets, the smell of decay pervading everything. This was what happened in Hamburg in the summer of 1943.

* * *

This book would not have been possible without the help of scores of Allied ex-airmen and German civilians who consented to be interviewed. Their willingness to share their diaries and to rake over painful memories from more than sixty years ago has been humbling, and I can only thank them for the patience with which they answered my questions. I am aware that there is something distasteful about some of the questions I was obliged to ask, especially in the specific details I demanded. Indeed, when interviewing people who lived through the firestorm I often found myself experiencing a mixture of emotions similar to that described by Nossack as he watched the bombers fly over his city – excitement at the prospect of gathering good material, a perverse hope that their descriptions would become even more graphic, and a faint sense of shame at the inappropriateness of my enthusiasm. Writing about catastrophe (or, for that matter, reading about it) is not the same as experiencing it, and there is inevitably something voyeuristic about examining someone else’s misery in this sort of detail. I hope, therefore, that this book will not merely convey my own uncomfortable fascination with the terrifying stories those people told me, but also the lingering revulsion they have communicated to me at the human cost of war.

There is no space here to list the scores of people and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic who have helped me over the past few years. Many are named in the Acknowledgements (pages 471–2), but that cannot do justice to the enormous contribution they have made, or their selfless enthusiasm for my project. There are, however, a handful of people who deserve special mention. First and foremost I am deeply indebted to Mirko Hohmann and Malte Thießen for sharing their knowledge of the German sources, and for looking after me on my various trips to Hamburg. Paul Wolf was a huge help in gathering elusive American material; and Sonia Stammwitz helped with the translation of some of the denser German documents, as did Jenny Piening and Sylvia Goulding. I am also tremendously grateful to my editors Eleo Gordon and Lisa Drew: without their support this book would never have been started.

Lastly I must thank Liza and Gabriel for giving me a reason to leave my study each evening, and lock away the terrible stories and photographs that have been my companions by day. Several years of research into some of the most frightening events of the twentieth century have taught me not to take their presence for granted.

Keith Lowe, 2007

Author’s Note

According to the old adage, Britain and America are two nations divided by a common tongue, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the different terminology that the two air forces employed to describe the same things. To avoid confusion I have used British terminology to describe the British ‘operations’, and American terminology to describe their ‘missions’. For a comparison of different terms, please see Appendix D (pages 367–8).

On the whole I have used German sources to describe the German experience, but on one or two occasions I have turned to existing English translations out of necessity. For those who are interested in further study, there are substantial notes at the end of this book (pages 401–58) – but this should not be necessary for the general reader.