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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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and Barmbek, causing huge destruction in the north-east of the city. The original target to the west of the Alster was also badly hit, but only because the target markers were so scattered.

After two whole days of desperate evacuation, there was hardly anyone left in the city to be killed. For those few who had stayed behind, though, it was every bit as horrific as the night of the firestorm. Helmuth Saß was sheltering in a bunker beneath the Baptist church on Weidestrasse, but was forced to leave when a collapsing building blocked the entrance. He climbed out through the shutter openings only to find himself confronted with a mountain of burning rubble, a blizzard of sparks, and four-storey houses burning all around him. As he made his escape down Vogteiweg with his mother and younger brother he suddenly became aware of the sheer absurdity of the situation:

I thought that I was experiencing some sort of macabre play. Above in the aeroplanes sat the English, who were under orders to bomb us, while we ran through this burning hell for our lives. We did not know or hate each other. Suddenly my brother’s hair was burning. Shocked, we smothered the flames, but a welt remained. Shortly afterwards, my mother screamed. A falling burning piece of wood had hit her calf, causing her to limp. We took shelter in the entrance to a shop, until a man who was hurrying past noticed that in the shop window firelighters, of all things, were on display. We had to get away from there. ²¹

They struggled onwards to an abandoned apartment building, where they found a barrel of water with which to douse themselves. Then they were off through the streets once more until they reached relative safety under a railway bridge on Barmbeker Markt. The absurdity of this kind of warfare manifested itself once more when they saw a group of men deliberately setting fire to a uniform shop at the start of the Dehnhaide. To perform an act of arson in the midst of a city that was already ablaze seems like madness, but the men justified their actions: ‘When everything is burning, the Party uniforms should burn too.’ Nobody bothered to contradict them. ²²

It was not only Helmuth Saß’s shelter that was hit in this attack. Several of the larger ‘indestructible’ public shelters were also struck. In Eilbek a high-explosive bomb hit the Hochbunkeron the corner of Wielandstrasse and Schellingstrasse, blowing a hole through two and a half metres of reinforced concrete on the seventh floor. Two women were killed, and the other two thousand shelterers were left in shock that such a thing was even possible. ²³By far the worst calamity of the night was the collapse of the Karstadt department store on Hamburgerstrasse, blocking the entrances to the store’s two large air-raid bunkers. Rescue workers managed to open one of the shelters the next day, releasing 1,200 employees from the debris. It took longer to reach the second bunker, and 370 people died inside from carbon-monoxide poisoning. ²⁴

When such disasters were possible it is not surprising that even in the biggest shelters people were afraid. Adolf Pauly took refuge in a bunker on the corner of Maxstrasse in Eilbek:

Hardly had we got there when all hell broke loose. In the bunker absolute darkness reigned, so we sat in our places, motionless, for hour upon hour upon hour. In the sweltering heat the air was suffocating. No matches, let alone a lamp, would light, so scarce was the oxygen. No ventilation flaps were allowed to be opened, otherwise the embers would have found their way in and 3,000 people would have suffocated in the bunker. Again and again the bunker shook under the resounding blows. Whether it was the collapsing walls of the neighbouring houses, or (as was claimed) actual bombs falling on the bunker, I don’t know. In the darkness we could hear general noise and cries in the floors below. There were burning people saved from the streets. Also that night two children were born in the bunker. Now and then the names of the missing would be called out… For twelve hours I sat there with my wife in absolute darkness, fastened motionless to my place. ²⁵

When he came out the following day the whole of his neighbourhood was on fire once again. His apartment, which had survived the previous two raids, was now ablaze, and there was no longer any choice but to follow the refugees who had gone before him. He was stunned by the event. The very reason he had not left the city earlier was because he did not think the British would bother to bomb his neighbourhood a third time: ‘Yet another bomb attack on this field of ruins seemed senseless.’ ²⁶

Hans J. Massaquoi was just as shocked by the sight that greeted him when he left a public shelter in Barmbek:

What awaited us was one of the saddest and most dreadful sights of our lives. The whole of Stückenstraße – no, the whole of Barmbek, our beloved neighbourhood – was practically razed to the ground. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but total devastation. In contrast to the ear-splitting noise of last night there was now a muted silence over the gruesome scenery. Here and there could be seen mummified, charred corpses. Obviously these people had decided to leave their apartments too late in order to get to a shelter. Most houses had been burnt right down to their foundations. Others were still in flames, and more still were nothing but burned out ruins. One of these smoking heaps of rubble had been my home since childhood. ²⁷

* * *

Tonight’s bombing had not caused anything like the human toll of the last attack. The official report did not attempt to put a figure on the number of dead – the city was in such chaos that it was impossible to separate the victims of one raid from another – but after the war a senior figure in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey made an estimate of about eight hundred, and later estimates range between a thousand and five thousand. ²⁸The material damage, however, was appalling. Only a few outlying suburbs now remained relatively untouched by the bombing – the rest was fire and ruins. There was seemingly nothing left to bomb.

And yet the RAF had still not finished with the city. In four nights’ time they would direct a fourth and final massive raid against Hamburg, this time attacking from the south. That they should want to do so no longer surprised anyone in Hamburg. As the final survivors straggled out of Eilbek towards the fringes of the city they came across a scene that seemed to symbolize the

sheer insanity of the war that had overtaken them: the Jakobi Friedhof, a huge graveyard on the Wandsbeker Chaussee, was on fire. It was a sight that imprinted itself on Adolf Pauly’s memory: ‘The cemetery had been laid waste, covered with incendiary bombs, the gravestones overturned, and there was thick smoke pouring out of a family vault.’ ²⁹

Now, it seemed, the British were even bombing their dead.

19. The Tempest

For my part, I have walk’d about the streets,

Submitting me unto the perilous night…

And when the cross blue lightning seem’d to open

The very breast of heaven, I did present myself

Even in the aim and very flash of it.

          William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar ¹

In a matter of days Hamburg, a proud Hanseatic city that had existed for over seven centuries, had been reduced to an endless field of smoking ruins. Neighbourhoods that had once been filled with bustling activity were now deserted, their streets filled with rubble, their houses reduced to empty, roofless shells. In many areas the only things left standing were the chimneys: ‘solitary chimneys,’ Hans Erich Nossack recalled, ‘that grew from the ground like cenotaphs’. ²

This ghost town was populated only by small groups of soldiers, firemen and rescue workers, with occasional gangs of concentration-camp prisoners brought in to help recover the dead. Almost everyone else had gone. Thousands of wounded had been taken to hospitals in other cities, some in specially commissioned hospital trains. Orphans had been gathered together and sent to join other evacuated children in countryside schools away from the bombing. Even the inmates of the city’s prisons had either been released, shipped away or drafted in to help with the clean-up effort. ³

One group of people, however, were initially forgotten by the authorities. Many of the city’s forced labourers were abandoned, while their guards fled Hamburg with their families. Some made their way to the refugee camps, following the general exodus, but many simply stayed where they were, afraid to move without written authorization.

Wanda Chantler, a twenty-year-old woman from Poland, was one of those left behind. As mentioned previously, her barracks in Lokstedt had received a direct hit on the night of 24 July, killing most of the women with whom she lived and worked. With nowhere to sleep, she had initially spent the nights outside on the grass of the factory compound, but eventually she and the few other survivors moved into the communal dining hall. All were in a chronic state of shock, and weak from lack of food and water. There was nobody left to provide for them; apart from the other forced labourers in other blocks, the entire city seemed deserted. Wanda remembers that her perception of the world took on an apocalyptic quality:

All these dead bodies were lying about, and nobody knew what to do with them. And the weather was terrible. It was hot, and it was windy. It was as if all the walls had been taken away from the world, and all the clouds and the winds concentrated on Hamburg. It was terrible. It was light from the fires, but the smoke made it dark. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think I ever will again. It was light, and yet it was dark. And you had no direction, you could not see. The smoke was choking. ⁴

After three huge bombardments their whole world had been reduced to nothing but fire and smoke. On 2 August, the elements conspired to complete the apocalyptic picture. A violent electrical storm descended on the ruined city, the thunder and lightning a celestial echo of the bombs that had been falling all week. By this point the abandoned girl had been living among the ruins of her barracks for over a week. As she and her few companions huddled together in the darkness of the factory dining hall, they watched the torrential rain outside with growing awe. ‘The elements seemed to have clubbed together to hit the earth at the particular point that was Hamburg,’ Wanda Chantler remembers. Tonight, after everything they had already been through, it was easy to imagine that the stormclouds had come from ‘all around the globe’, that the world war had given way to something even greater, that they were witnessing not merely the destruction of a city but the end of the world.

Astonishingly, that was the night on which the British launched their fourth and final major bombardment. Through the thunder and lightning, the frightened girls soon made out the distant sound of sirens and the drone of planes, although it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the storm and the bombs exploding. As the police report later made clear, this raid was the climax to ten days of terror, ‘in which the detonation of exploding bombs, the peals of thunder and the crackling of the flames and ceaseless downpour of the rain combined to form a hellish inferno’. ⁵

Other witnesses expressed similar dismay that the RAF should be willing to brave such infernal conditions to pound the city all over again. Franz Termer had fled with his family to Pinneberg, ten or twelve miles outside Hamburg to the north-west, where he took shelter in a farmhouse. The storm was so violent that it had woken him, but as he and his wife were checking on their children their attention was soon caught by a more disturbing noise:

We had hardly finished when we heard the sirens sounding from Pinneberg between breaks in the thunder. We couldn’t believe our ears, thought it must be a mistake. Surely the planes couldn’t be coming now, in such a heavy storm. But soon afterwards a heavy flak barrage started up a short distance away, and we could already hear the terrible buzz and drone of heavy, four-engined bombers directly over our roof. Uninterrupted, one formation after another. The lightning flashed brightly, the British flares shone yellow and red, and the muzzles of the flak guns flashed like lightning in the dark night. ⁶

Despite the electrical storm, the RAF had indeed arrived, yet again, in the skies over Hamburg.

* * *

It should go without saying that Bomber Command Headquarters had never intended to send their force into the face of this storm. No matter how frightening the effect of the thunder and lightning on the shattered nerves of Hamburg’s civil population, the effect on the bomber crews, both physically and psychologically, was exponentially worse. Flying over German territory was bad enough without having to contend with such weather. And the likelihood of achieving a concentrated strike on the city was virtually nil. So why were they there? What miscalculation or error of judgement could have sent them into such danger?

Part of the blame at least must lie with Sir Arthur Harris. Ever since the previous attack on Hamburg, on 29 July, he had been itching to finish the job, and it seems he had intended originally to do so on the following night. However, he was prevented by political considerations – in the wake of Mussolini’s downfall, Churchill had been keen to increase pressure on the Italians, and an urgent directive required him to plan immediate attacks on Milan, Turin and Genoa. ⁷On the night of 1 August Hamburg was back on the cards, but the raid had to be cancelled because of bad weather. (Ironically it was this storm that prevented the crews taking off: it passed through England on 1 August on its way to northern Germany, where bomber crews caught up with it twenty-four hours later.) By 2 August Harris’s frustration was getting the better of him. Tonight, if there was the slightest chance of destroying what was left of Hamburg, he was determined to take it.

The British held high expectations of this last raid. Their plan of attack was significantly different from previous operations, and reflected their growing confidence in their destructive abilities. Tonight, for the first time, they would approach Hamburg from the south, and they would have not one but two aiming points. The first waves were to drop their bombs on to a point towards the north end of the Alster lake, with the idea that the creepback would sweep a curtain of destruction over Harvesthude and Rotherbaum – two districts that had suffered only lightly in the previous attacks. Then, half-way through the raid, the aiming point would be switched to the town of Harburg on the southern edge of the vast harbour complex. ⁸It was an ambitious but well-thought-out scheme that would spell the end of those areas of the city that had so far escaped the bombs – provided everything went to plan.

After all the postponements, Harris was keen to get started, weather allowing. As evening approached, a Mosquito was sent to check conditions over northern Germany: if the storms had cleared the area the RAF could head for Hamburg a fourth time, otherwise they would have to scrap the operation again. To make sure they had the most up-to-date weather report, and to give themselves the greatest chance of sticking to their plan, Bomber Command delayed the weather reconnaissance flight until the last possible moment: the Mosquito did not leave Wyton airfield until 6.45 p.m. When it returned three hours later, the two-man crew told the Meteorological Office what they had seen: the skies over Hamburg looked relatively clear, but a huge cumulo-nimbus to the southwest of Oldenburg was moving briskly in the direction of tonight’s target. ⁹There was a chance that it would have moved on by the time the bombers reached Hamburg, but it would be a risk.

Bomber Command was fast running out of time to make a decision one way or the other: if the squadrons were to get to Hamburg and back under cover of darkness they had to leave before midnight. After a hurried assessment, the Meteorological Office sent its weather report to Bomber Command at 10 p.m. Crucially, they had watered down any worries about the storm: they claimed that there was only a ‘slight risk’ that the bombers would encounter this dangerous weather.

When it came to the lives of his men Harris was normally fairly cautious, and on any other night he might have chosen an alternative target, or scrapped his plans. That night, however, impatience got the better of him: for such an important target a ‘slight risk’ was worth taking. The only concession to the weather was a modest alteration to the plan: instead of attacking two separate aiming points in the city, the bomber force would concentrate on one, on the north-west shoulder of the Alster lake. Otherwise the raid would go ahead as briefed. ¹⁰

Thus it was that 740 crews who had been on stand-by for the past couple of hours now made their way to dispersal. Many were astonished that the raid was going ahead. Some had already been told to expect violent weather, but others were left to guess at the strength of the conditions from the vague warnings they had received at briefing. But all were about to experience a night they would never forget.

* * *

It was a blustery, overcast night when the bomber force took off. By midnight most of the planes were airborne and beginning to break through the cloud that covered the North Sea. For some crews the problems began almost as soon as they took off. At Scampton a Lancaster from 57 Squadron crashed on the runway and promptly caught fire, preventing six others behind it from taking off. ¹¹Several planes from other squadrons did not even reach the English coast before they were forced to turn back with engine trouble – two of those landed so badly that they were written off, with injuries to seven crewmen. ¹²A further shock came over the sea when a startled Royal Navy convoy mistook the bomber stream for a German force and opened fire on them. While it seems they did not do any damage, it was hardly a good omen.

Whatever happened on the journey across the North Sea, the real trouble did not begin until the bombers reached the German coast. Of all the operations those airmen flew on, this was the one they universally remembered, even to this day; and for those who completed their tour, nothing came close to the fear and confusion they experienced that night. It began with a sinister, almost surreal vision. Up ahead they saw a cloud unlike any they had seen before: a huge, dark mountain of cloud, its sides cracked with deep fissures and chasms, and lit by the continual flashes of light that glinted from its depths. Some of the crews thought it was smoke, still rising from the burning ruins of Hamburg; many believed that the heavy flashes that lit it were from some terrific new weapon among the German flak. It was not until they got closer that they realized the truth: that it was the biggest and most violent electrical storm any of them had ever seen.

No pilot likes to fly through conditions so bad, but that night there was nothing they could do to avoid it. To fly over the storm was impossible – the summit of the cloud rose to 30,000 feet, perhaps even higher, and apart from the handful of Mosquitos from 139 Squadron there was not an aircraft among them capable of flying so high while laden with bombs. There was no point in trying to fly round it either – to do that would have isolated anyone who tried it and taken him so far out of his way that he would never have had enough fuel to return home. One or two crews tried to fly under it, but gave up after sinking below 7,000 feet without managing to break free of the cloud. If they were to complete the raid they had to head directly into the storm.

As they approached the lower peaks of the massive cumulonimbus the temperature plummeted. Many crews chose this moment to turn round and head for home, sensing the danger that lay ahead. Of those that continued, most tried to delay flying through the cloud for as long as they could, choosing instead to follow the sinister rifts and valleys along its fringes. High walls of cloud loomed over them on both flanks, their dark bulk lit intermittently by sheets of lightning. Eventually the ravines ended. Then there was no alternative but to head straight for the seemingly impenetrable wall before them and break through into the heart of the storm.

Bill McCrea, the pilot who had found himself isolated on the previous raid when his squadron had sent him out twenty minutes late, remembers those moments as among the most terrifying of his life:

The stormclouds that had been over England some twenty-four hours earlier were now dead ahead, dark and forbidding, and towering above the bombers by several thousand feet. I realized that what I first took to be flak were in reality lightning flashes emanating from the stormclouds that we were rapidly approaching. As we flew into the lightning-charged clouds the effect was immediate and terrifying. The air currents came first, throwing the aircraft from side to side as well as up and down. One could almost hear the airframe protest as it was subjected to these external forces. The lightning was continuous; as it flashed one could see that the clouds were sometimes broken up by eerie canyons and ravines. ¹³

J. K. Christie, who flew a Lancaster with 35 Squadron, approached the storm with mounting anxiety. Afterwards he recorded the impressions in his diary:

Everything went smooth and according to plan until we approached Heligoland, where we started to run into clouds up to more than 20,000 feet. I carried on trying to keep above it and for some time just managed to keep popping in and out of the tops. By this time we were just about crossing the German coast. I saw numerous and colossal flashes all over the sky and for a long time I believed that the Germans had brought into action a new and terrific anti-aircraft weapon. After a certain while, we did not manage to keep on the top of the clouds and had to continue flying blind, shaken every ten seconds by terrific flashes which totally blinded me for many seconds afterwards. We got fairly heavy icing and very heavy statics.

In addition to this I had a new and very spectacular experience as the whole aircraft seemed to be completely electrified. There were huge luminous rings around the propellers, blue flames out of the wing-tips, gun muzzles and also everywhere else on the aircraft where its surface is pointed. For instance, the de-icing tube in front of my window had a blue flame around it. Electrical flowers were dancing on the windows all the time until they got iced up, when the flowers disappeared. The wireless operator told me afterwards that sparks were shooting across his equipment all the time and that his aerials were luminous throughout their lengths. I didn’t feel a bit happy and tried to go down below the clouds. ¹⁴

The mysterious blue flames were St Elmo’s fire, the phenomenon that had mystified seafarers during the golden age of sailing ships. The stormcloud through which they were flying had been so highly charged with electricity that it had begun to materialize in the form of a ghostly blue light around the aircraft.

Christie was not alone in seeing this unearthly sight; almost everyone who flew through the storm experienced the phenomenon. ‘Blue electrical discharges flashed between the muzzles of the guns,’ says Bill McCrea, ‘and our propellers looked like catherine wheels, as if a torch had been fastened to the end of each blade. From time to time the whole aircraft became shrouded in a blue shimmering light.’ ¹⁵Colin Harrison of 467 Squadron still remembers the sight with awe: ‘We were lit up in blue lights… sparks in all directions, jumping from one thing to another. And the props – there was a beautiful blue arc where the props were turning.’ James Sullivan, a wireless operator with 156 Squadron, remembers: ‘The lightning was sparking all along the fuselage and along the guns. It looked like an electrical aircraft!’ ¹⁶

When all around them was pitch dark, the effect of the luminous blue light could be unnerving – but it was virtually harmless. Much more dangerous was the ice that built on all the leading edges of the aircraft: if enough was allowed to accumulate it could destroy the plane’s aerodynamics so that it would literally fall out of the sky.

That happened to a Stirling of 620 Squadron, as one of its crew members recalls:

I have never been as scared in my life and never will be again. I sat there, petrified, then called to the skipper, ‘For Christ’s sake, get out of this.’ He started to climb more steeply but, as the Stirling’s ceiling was only about 15,000 feet loaded, we reached our maximum height and we were still in cloud. Suddenly, we started icing up. The wings of the kite were a white sheet. Great chunks of ice were flying from the propellers and hitting the fuselage like machine-gun fire. Then the port wing went down and we started dropping like a stone. After what seemed a lifetime, I heard a distant voice whisper, ‘Jettison. Jettison.’ I have prayed very few times in my life but this occasion was one of them and, thank heaven, someone was listening.’ ¹⁷

Ted Groom, a flight engineer with 460 Squadron, remembers a similar thing happening to his Lancaster:

The propellers appeared like huge catherine wheels, with ice forming and static electricity. Chunks of ice were hitting the aircraft, and the props and the control surfaces were being covered with ice… All this time we were losing height. This happened frighteningly quickly, and the pilot and myself were overwhelmed with these conditions. The rest of the crew wanted to know what was happening. Eventually, after losing several thousand feet, we were back in control again. But the aircraft was still in thick cloud. As we could not see any sky markers the decision was made to drop the bombs and return to base. ¹⁸

The only way to regain control of the plane was to lose as much weight as possible, as quickly as possible, to stop the rate of fall, so both planes jettisoned their bombs. It was also important to get rid of the ice since it could jam up the ailerons and elevators, making it virtually impossible for the pilot to control the plane. Ted Groom did this by desynchronizing the engines, which caused such vibration in the aircraft that it shook off much of the ice. It was a dangerous thing to do for any length of time, but in his case, fortunately, it worked.

In such conditions it was a battle just to keep the aircraft controls working. The flight engineers found themselves dealing simultaneously with several dangerous problems, as Sergeant Dennis Brookes recalled shortly afterwards:

The lightning was terrifying, flashing from one end of the kite to the other. Both gun turrets went u/s owing to ice and the lightning. We were thrown about by thunder, and the outer hatch was struck and wrenched open. Ice formed everywhere, and I was sweating to help keep the controls free… Great quantities of flak were bursting all around but could not be distinguished owing to the lightning. Both the compasses went u/s and very little control of the aircraft could be kept. It was impossible to keep the engine tempo up and the boost suddenly dropped off as the intake became clammed up with ice. Skipp, whom I was standing by, told us the controls were getting very stiff to handle and was far beyond the control of George [the auto-pilot]. We were all expecting the worst and were ready to abandon aircraft, when suddenly at 7,000 feet Skipp managed to pull her out of the dive and began to climb again, having lost 10,000 feet in a few seconds. ¹⁹

Tales of falling like a stone in such conditions were common. Sergeant J. Benny of 15 Squadron only managed to pull out of his dive at 4,000 feet. His squadron colleague, Flight Lieutenant G. Bould, was a mere 500 feet above the ground when he regained control of his plane; finding himself over Bremerhaven he immediately dropped his bombs and hedge-hopped back to the German coast. ²⁰

One Halifax of 35 Squadron paid the ultimate price for the horrendous conditions. Sergeant A. Stephen, the mid-upper gunner, had to watch helplessly as, within seconds, the aircraft’s wings and propellers had become coated with thick ice, then his turret.

I got out of the turret quickly to get my ’chute, for I felt we were not going to get out of this, and I was no sooner inside the fuselage than we went into a spin. The G force was very strong; I could not even lift my arm. I was in the centre section at this time and I felt someone kicking to get to the exit but he was pinned down like me. The spin seemed to go on for hours but, then, there was a crash and everything was thrown about.

After dropping through three miles of sky, Sergeant Stephen’s Halifax had crashed into German countryside. Miraculously, he and the flight engineer were still alive.

When I came round… it was daylight and I saw that I was sitting in a heap of wreckage and Bert, the engineer, was lying beside me. I could not move but I heard someone talking outside and gave a shout. They were German soldiers and they came and lifted Bert and me out of the remains of the Halifax. I remember cursing them for lifting me by the legs because they were fractured. The soldiers put us down in a field about a hundred yards from the wreckage and I saw that the part I had been in was just the two wings and the centre section. The target indicators were hanging out and the petrol tanks were right above them. How the lot did not blow up, I’ll never know. ²¹

Sergeant Stephen was the only one to survive the crash: his friend Bert died in his arms a short time later. The rest of the crew had been killed instantly.

That night at least four British planes were lost because of the ice: they crashed into the sea, or into the German countryside, their pilots unable to save them. ²²Another bomber was struck by lightning so badly that the pilot lost control. It crashed without reaching the target, killing everyone on board. ²³