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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

15. Concentrated Bombing

The guiding principle of bombing actions should be this: the objective must be destroyed completely in one attack, making further attack on the same target unnecessary.

Douhet ¹

The British had sent maximum-effort attacks to Hamburg on Saturday night, and to Essen on Sunday night. To mount a third that Monday would have been too much to ask of the exhausted crews, so the follow-up raid on Hamburg was postponed for twenty-four hours. With Monday evening to themselves, the airmen were free to do whatever they pleased, but there was little enthusiasm for carousing. Most took the opportunity to rest, and went to bed early to catch up on sleep.

The people of Hamburg were not so lucky. After three raids in as many days they were understandably jumpy, and most people had abandoned their apartments for an uncomfortable night in one of the city’s many shelters. For those who had dared to stay at home the slightest warning would have them out of their beds, running for cover. The British knew from experience that sleep deprivation could be almost as damaging to the economy as bombardment, so that night the RAF sent six Mosquito aircraft over the city on a nuisance raid. The damage their few bombs caused was minuscule compared with what had gone before, but it was enough to keep the whole city awake. ²It had the added effect of distracting the rescue workers and fire-fighters from their efforts. Much of Altona was still on fire from the raid two nights ago, and the approaching Mosquito pilots could see the glow from twenty miles away. ³

The next day, Tuesday, 27 July, it was the Americans’ turn for a rest. Officially, they cited uncertainty over the weather as the reason for taking the day off, but the battered and harassed crews were in desperate need of a little respite. While they recuperated, Butch Harris was eager to resume his battle on Hamburg. Whatever the Americans might have said about the weather, as far as he was concerned the forecast for that night looked promising. A Mosquito reconnaissance plane was sent out over Hamburg later that morning to confirm conditions: its pilot reported back that, other than a light smoke haze from the fires that were still burning, the skies were perfectly clear. So, without further hesitation, Harris ordered his second maximum effort on Hamburg to go ahead.

The plan for tonight was similar to the one used on the night of 24 July. ⁴Once again the bombers would be using Window, and flying in a tight stream through the German defences. Zero Hour was again 1.00 a.m. and the aiming point was exactly the same as last time. The only real differences from the previous plan of attack were a slight change to the route and an alteration to the type of bombs they would be using.

Tonight, instead of flying to Hamburg from the north-west, the bomber stream would take a route right across the Schleswig peninsula, then come back to approach Hamburg from the northeast. The idea was to make it look as if they were attacking Kiel or Lübeck – indeed, some historians have stated, wrongly, that the bomber stream passed directly over Lübeck as part of the ruse. ⁵Whatever the case, it was an ineffective feint: everyone in Hamburg was expecting another attack, and the defences were still on high alert. However, it did mean that the run-in to the aiming point would be coming from a different direction, so any creepback in the bombing would land on a new part of the city. In the next few weeks the people of Hamburg would come to believe that the RAF had bombed the city with a methodical precision – ending their carpet of bombing at a particular street one night, and starting again with the next street along on the following night. Of course such accuracy was impossible, but there was an element of truth in the rumour. By coming at the city from different directions, the bombers could ensure that every suburb was hit during the series

of raids. Over the course of their four raids on the city the RAF attacked in turn from the north-west, the north-east, the north and the south. Effectively they were destroying the city a segment at a time.

The other main change to the plan was just as significant. Tonight the planes would be carrying far more incendiary bombs than they had on the previous attack – 240 tons more. ⁶Some historians have claimed that this change was made for purely operational reasons: the aircraft had further to fly, so the Halifaxes and Stirlings had reduced the weight of their loads by replacing their high-explosive bombs with lighter incendiaries. ⁷But that is not the whole story. Bomber Command planners were constantly revising the proportions of bomb loads, and it was becoming increasingly obvious that incendiaries did far more damage than explosives. Hamburg was not considered a particularly flammable city – most of the old wooden buildings in the city centre had already been burned down in the great fire of 1842 and replaced with more modern brick and stone buildings – but when the operation’s planners saw how well the city had burned on the previous attack it seemed worthwhile to increase the proportion of incendiaries. The Lancasters had already been ordered to carry ‘maximum economic incendiary loads’ when the Hamburg raids were first conceived. ⁸Tonight this order was extended to the Stirlings and Halifaxes.

As evening approached, morale was riding high at all levels of the RAF. Harris and his staff believed that they were at the start of a new era in the bombing war: now that German defences had been blinded by Window, Bomber Command effectively had command of the air, and Harris was convinced, more than ever before, that it would be only a matter of time before Germany was forced to surrender. The airmen were similarly enamoured of their new radar-jamming device. The casualty rate had plummeted since they had started using it, and the draughty job of shoving bundles of silver strips through the flare chute had become a labour of love. A new spirit of optimism was spreading through airfields up and down the country. During their briefing for that night’s operation the crews were read a message from Harris congratulating them on the success of their previous attacks on Hamburg and Essen. It was greeted with great enthusiasm by the men, who were at last beginning to feel that they were making a difference. Perhaps their commander-in-chief had been right all along – perhaps they wouldbe able to win the war by bombing alone.

Confidence was so high that officers of increasingly senior ranks decided to join the crews on their trip that night. Station commanders were not normally allowed to go out on more than one operation each month, but that evening no fewer than five decided that it was time to see the effects of Window for themselves. ⁹Two air commodores also decided to fly – Air Commodore W. A. Brooke of 4 Group, and Air Commodore A. M. Wray of 1 Group. However, the highest-ranking officer to accompany the bomber crews was an American. Brigadier-General Fred Anderson, in charge of the Eighth Air Force’s bombers, was so eager to learn how his allies operated that he joined a Pathfinder crew. He had been extremely impressed on the previous raid to Essen, but flying as second pilot to Flight Lieutenant Garvey in a Lancaster from 83 Squadron, he would witness destruction on a scale few people had ever believed possible. ¹⁰

* * *

It had been a glorious summer’s day, and when the bombers took off at around ten o’clock the dying sun had painted the sky blood-red. All along the eastern edge of England the air was soon filled with the drone of 787 aeroplanes heading off across the North Sea. To most of those who lived along the coast it was a comforting sound. At this stage of the war, bomber crews were still treated as celebrities by newspapers and newsreels, and as heroes by the general population: apart from the army in North Africa and Sicily, they were the only force capable of taking the war to Germany. People who lived near airfields would often come out to watch them take off, particularly on a fine, warm night. Children always waved, blissfully unaware of the realities of warfare.

Apart from a few minor mishaps, the whole bomber force took off safely. A small proportion turned back because of mechanical problems (only forty-two aircraft), but the vast majority congregated into three streams and made for their rendezvous point eighty miles off the German coast. ¹¹As on the previous raid, they began Windowing a few minutes later. Also as on the previous raid, the Pathfinders dropped yellow markers as they crossed the coast in order to concentrate the stream of planes more tightly. (A second set of route markers would be dropped later, further to concentrate it.)

The route markers were all that the defending Luftwaffe fighters had to guide them to the bomber stream, once their radar systems had been blinded by Window. A Pathfinder in the vanguard of the stream had been shot down before Window had taken effect, but now that the German pilots’ radar screens had fuzzed over there was little they could do but head for the lights in the hope that they might stumble across some British bombers in the dark.

They were rewarded with just a single victory over a Lancaster from 467 Squadron. In return, one of their own Ju88s was shot down over Heide. In total, only five British bombers were lost on their way to the target, at a cost of two German night fighters. So far, Window had proved every bit as effective as it had been on the first raid, three nights before.

However, the German defences had not been idle over the past three days. Given how unprepared they were for Window, it is remarkable how quickly they responded to the crisis, and while their initial response was not enormously effective, it marked the beginning of a long fight back against the RAF.

The first thing the German radar controllers did was to rely much more on their long-range Freya radar, the only system not affected by the clouds of foil strips. While this was not nearly as accurate as the shorter-range Würzburg radar, and could not ascertain the altitude of the oncoming bombers, it could at least direct night fighters to the correct vicinity. Second, after two previous Window raids, the most skilled Würzburg radar operators were noticing differences between the images given off by Window and those by real aeroplanes. At high altitudes, for example, when the bundles of Window had not yet dispersed, the blips on their screens that moved slowly were likely to be puffs of undispersed Window, while those that moved faster were probably bombers. Sometimes aeroplanes on the fringes of the bomber stream could be distinguished from the fuzzy cloud of Window.

Changes were also taking place in German fighter tactics. While many pilots were still held back in their boxes in the vain hope that some means could be found to direct them towards the bombers in the old way, many others were allowed to go freelancing. This was a return to night-fighting as it had been before the advent of radar, when pilots had to rely on their eyes and intuition to find their prey. To help them, night-fighter headquarters broadcast a running commentary with information on the movements and possible intentions of the bomber stream.

The single most important change that took place that night, however, was the adoption of a brand new system of fighting: Major Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Sau(literally ‘Wild Boar’, but the phrase is also an idiom meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘reckless’). ¹²Herrmann was convinced that British bombers were much more vulnerable to fighters than they were to flak, so he devised a system whereby German day fighters could be used to reinforce the beleaguered night fighters. His idea was to fly his single-engined day fighters at high altitudes above the target, so that they could see the outlines of the bombers silhouetted below them by the fires, searchlights, marker flares and any other illumination on the ground. The German flak batteries would be ordered not to fire above a certain height, so that the fighters could swoop down on the bombers safely from above.

After a great deal of opposition, Major Herrmann had finally been given the go-ahead to try out his idea on the night of 3 July 1943, over Cologne. ¹³After limited success, he was granted permission to raise a Geschwaderof new ‘Wild Boars’ (i.e. three Gruppenof about twenty-five planes each – see Appendix D). He immediately established a Gruppeof modified Me109s at Hangelar airfield near Bonn, and two more at Rheine and Oldenburg. Together they would make up the famous Jagdgeschwader 300 (JG 300).

Major Herrmann’s new fighter force was still in training when the attacks on Hamburg began. On the first night of the battle, only a few planes from JG 300 at Oldenburg had been sent over the city. On that night, many British crews had reported seeing strange new flak shells bursting over the city that looked ‘like large Catherine wheels’. The official report remarks casually that they were not particularly lethal, and it now seems likely that they were employed as aerial signposting for the Wilde Saufighters.

On 27 July, Major Herrmann received a telephone call from Goering instructing him to take his fighters out of training and employ them in full force tonight. When Herrmann protested that they were not yet ready for such a task, he was overruled: without proper radar cover, Herrmann’s Wilde Sauwere suddenly the Reich’s most important form of defence. ¹⁴

So it was that this fledgling force was employed in full for the first time over Hamburg on the night of 27/28 July. One day they would be an effective force, but now they did not have enough planes or trained pilots for the huge task that faced them.

* * *

At 12.55 a.m., two minutes ahead of schedule, the first Pathfinder dropped its load of yellow target indicators a couple of miles east of the city centre. Over the next five minutes, salvo after salvo of yellow TIs poured down on the same spot, over the suburb of Hammerbrook. When the ‘backers-up’ arrived with their green TIs, they dropped them on to the same area. Unlike the first raid, when the TIs had been spread out in four or five different areas, they were unusually concentrated. The German defenders tried to put off the bombers by sending up decoy flares about ten miles to the west of the city, but nobody was fooled: they had used red flares, the only colour notused by the British that night. ¹⁵They were not fooled by decoy fires either – compared to the real ones, these were minuscule.

If the Pathfinders arrived early at the target, so did the main force. Unable to contain their eagerness to get in and out of the target quickly, many aircraft had cut corners along the way, guided by the route marker flares. By 1.02 a.m., when the main force was supposed to start bombing, eighty-seven planes had already dropped their loads – almost all on the single concentrated spot over Hammerbrook. The fire they caused there became a beacon for those who followed. Wave after wave of bombers came in across the north-east of Hamburg to stoke the fires, and with such a concentrated group of TIs to aim at there was at first very little creepback. As the later waves came in at around half past one, the fires were spreading north– and eastwards into the district of Hamm.

More than 2,313 tons of bombs were dropped within just fifty minutes – another new world record. Unlike the last raid, however, when a similar amount had been dispatched, most of these bombs were squeezed into a few square miles. The mass of individual fires started by the opening wave now began to join up into a single conflagration. The firestorm had begun.

In all, 722 aircraft bombed the city that night – most in the same small group of districts to the east of the city centre. ¹⁶The scene below was unlike anything any of the crews had seen before. According to Colin Harrison, who was flying a 467 Squadron Lancaster in the last wave of the attack, the flames were already visible from miles away: ‘We didn’t need any navigation. We could see Hamburg from over the North Sea. We just flew where all the lights and the flares were. It looked hellish from on top. I mean, targets don’t look very nice from on top, with all the coloured fires and flames… but this was particularly awful.’ ¹⁷

Above the fires, a pall of smoke rose so high that even the high-flying Lancasters found themselves plunged into the fumes. ‘That was something frightful,’ remembers Bill McCrea of 57 Squadron:

I remember the clouds that were coming up about 30,000 feet. It was just one great volcano underneath. All I was thinking about was dropping my bombs and getting home – the same as everybody… It was an appalling sight. Every so often it was just burbling up, like a volcano. Every so often there was another explosion, another bomb went in, and there was another flash. And you could see the photo flashes going off too – they were brighter and more sudden. They took the photographs that theoretically marked your aiming point. But of course that night you couldn’t get anything, because there was no detail on the ground at all… there was just a whole sea, a mass of flame. ¹⁸

Trevor Timperley of 156 Squadron also remembers the sights he saw that night:

The firestorm still grips me most out of my whole tour – both tours. The very size of it on the ground: it was just a sea of flames… I remember I had a navigator who would never look out at all. He used to be head down in his little office, working out one thing and another,

but he would never come and look up. I remember saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, Smithy, look at this! You’ll never see the like of it again!’ ¹⁹

To some airmen the thought of what was happening on the ground was harrowing. Leonard Cooper, for example, was a flight engineer in a 7 Squadron Lancaster flying at an altitude of around 17,000 feet that night. He estimated that the cloud of smoke was rising to about 20,000 feet – and they were flying directly through it. ‘We could definitely smell… well, it was like burning flesh,’ he says. ‘It’s not a thing I’d like to talk about.’ ²⁰

* * *

With German defences in disarray, most of the bombers managed to make their bombing runs without difficulty. Some, however, were not so lucky. After the raid on 24/25 July, the mobile railway flak batteries that Hamburg had sent to the Ruhr were rushed back to defend the city. There seemed to be more searchlights than ever, especially above the suburbs to the west and north-west that had been hit by the previous raid. Without radar to guide them, the vast numbers of guns and searchlights were unable to pose anything like the threat they once had – but, even so, twenty-eight aircraft returned to Britain with serious flak damage.

On the rare occasions when an aircraft was caught by the searchlights, the speed with which the other lights and guns locked on to it was terrifying. When the master-beam caught a Lancaster piloted by Sergeant C. G. Hopton, the other lights zoned in almost immediately. Within moments the full force of all the flak batteries in the area was focused on this one aircraft as it turned and dived in an attempt to break free of the danger. With nothing else to aim at, though, the flak gunners were glad of any opportunity to bring down one of their attackers. As the Lancaster finally escaped the lights, a shell hit the port wing and set the inner engine on fire. Immediately the flight engineer set about feathering the engine and extinguishing the blaze, but before he could do so they were under attack a second time, this time from a German fighter who had been attracted by the lights. Blinded by the searchlights, the crew didn’t spot him until he was closing in from above. He sighted his cannon on the burning engine, and raked the port wing, before he was forced away by the Lancaster’s two gunners. Miraculously no one was hurt, and Hopton made it back to England on the three remaining engines. ²¹

The plane that attacked Hopton’s was an Me109, probably one of Major Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Saufighters. These were unquestionably more effective at shooting down RAF bombers than the flak was. As they roamed the sky high above the city they could see the bombers below, clearly silhouetted against the glow of the raging fires on the ground. It is ironic that until this point the British had suffered even fewer casualties than they had on their first raid; now, with the fires illuminating them, a handful of bombers became victims of their own success.

At 1.21 a.m. the German flak batteries were ordered to limit their fire to 5,500 metres (about 18,000 feet). ²²At a stroke the defence of the city, at least in the higher altitudes, was now entirely down to the Wilde Sau, who swooped to attack the bomber stream from above.

Appropriately, Major Herrmann claimed the first victims:

The clouds of smoke over Hamburg were so dense that it made you shudder. I saw this great column of smoke: I even smelt it. I flew over the target several times and, then, I saw this bomber in the searchlights… It was like daylight in those searchlights. I could see the rear gunner; he was only looking downwards, probably at the inferno below. There was no movement of his guns. You must remember that, at this time, the British were not generally warned to watch out for us over the target. I had seen other bombers over targets with the gunners looking down. I fired and he burned… As he fell, he turned and dropped away from the smoke cloud. I followed him a little but, as he got lower and lower, I left him. I watched him burst on the ground. ²³

That night three more RAF planes were shot down over Hamburg. For those few doomed airmen, it was every bit as dangerous in the skies over Hamburg as it was on the ground. The flames that engulfed the planes as they fell to earth were a savage echo of the inferno below.

The narrow margin between life and death was made brutally stark to one Lancaster crew from 460 Squadron. They were as inexperienced as a crew could possibly be: their pilot, Reg Wellham, had been on the previous trip to Hamburg as a ‘second dickie’ pilot, but for the rest this was their first operation. Apart from the Australian navigator, Noel Knight, they were all in their early twenties.

They had reached the target without mishap, but just after they had dropped their load and were about to turn for home the plane was rocked by a massive explosion. The force turned it on to its back, and soon they were dropping out of the sky like a stone.

Ted Groom, the flight engineer, remembers the event vividly. He was at the back of the aircraft, dropping bundles of Window down the flare chute, when he found himself floating in the air, surrounded by foil strips from burst Window packets:

It all happened so quickly, in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know where I was – I was just rolling around amongst all these bundles. My first thought was to get a plug in somewhere. I knew where all the intercom plugs were, right through the aircraft. I stumbled around in the pitch black, got hold of the lead and plugged myself back into the intercom. Reg the skipper was shouting out for me to get up to the front as quick as possible. By that time we were right way up. I went past the wireless operator. I went past the navigator who’d lost everything off his desk and was trying to find all his stuff in the semi-darkness. Everyone was crying out, ‘What the hell’s happening?’ I eventually got up to the front and Reg said, ‘Get this sorted out!’ So I synchronized the engines at a normal climbing rate of about 2,850 revs a minute, plus seven or eight boost. I checked all the temperature gauges, and the fuel, even the oxygen to see if that was all right. I looked at the altimeter – you do this automatically when something goes wrong – and I saw that we were at 10,000 feet. I looked at the pilot, signalled to him that I didn’t want him to speak, and I pointed at the altimeter. ²⁴

What Ted Groom was pointing out to his skipper, and what he didn’t want broadcast to the others over the intercom, was that the aircraft had dropped 9,000 feet in a matter of seconds. Just a minute or two more and they would all have died as they crashed into the fires on the ground below.

When they arrived back at Binbrook airfield just before five o’clock that morning, the ground crew checked the plane for damage. The fuel pipes were hanging out of the bottom of the aircraft, and there were loose panels where the rivets had burst, but there was nothing to indicate that they had been hit either by flak or by fighters. After an officer from the Air Ministry had checked the details, the unofficial explanation was that Reg Wellham and his crew had been directly above another British bomber when it was attacked by a German fighter. The other bomber had not yet dropped its bombs, so when it exploded the force was great enough to blow Reg Whelan’s Lancaster on to its back. If this was indeed what had happened, that German fighter had almost got two bombers with a single shot.

* * *

That was by no means the last such incident of the night. Dozens of crews returned with stories of combat and near misses: ten over Hamburg, and at least a dozen on the way home. Eight planes were shot down on the return journey: six by German fighters, and two more by flak when they strayed off course over Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven. Excluding four aircraft that were written off when returning crews crash-landed them, seventeen British planes were lost that night: five more than on the first Hamburg raid. But that was still only half of the number that Bomber Command had become used to losing over the preceding months. Despite the rapid change in German tactics, Window was still working wonders for the British.

At 1.47 a.m. the last of the attacking aircraft dropped its mix of high explosives and incendiaries, and the tail end of the bomber stream made its way back towards the coast and over the North Sea to England. Behind them they left one of the biggest man-made fires the world has ever seen, still growing in intensity. As a young rear gunner wrote in his diary that night: ‘If it had been a really clear night the fires would have been visible nearly back to our coast. As it was we could see it nearly half-way back, about 200 miles, and a column of smoke about 20,000 feet, so Hamburg must have had it.’ ²⁵