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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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normally associated with conventional bombing: it was more akin to the annihilation that would soon become possible in the nuclear age.

* * *

The question remains as to what all the destruction achieved. Did it knock Hamburg’s U-boat and aircraft industries out of the war? Did it prevent the rest of Hitler’s war machine working efficiently? Did it shorten the war to any degree? Or did it merely take the lives of innocent civilians, who in any case contributed little to Germany’s war effort?

It cannot be denied that the immediate effect on Hamburg’s industries was huge. Almost half of the city’s 81,000 commercial and industrial buildings had been completely destroyed, and the majority of its workers had fled. By the end of the year 226,000 people had still failed to come back to work – that is, 35 per cent of the city’s workforce. ⁷With no buildings to work in, and no people to do the work, the drop in industrial output was massive. In August 1943, Hamburg produced only half of the total output it had achieved in July. By the end of 1943 the city was still producing only 82 per cent of its normal capacity. To some degree Hamburg never truly rallied from the shock of these raids, and throughout the rest of the war industrial output never fully recovered. ⁸

After the war, the Americans estimated that Hamburg lost 1.8 months of its entire industrial production as a direct result of the raids, about half of which was intended for the armed forces. ⁹This meant that fewer supplies were sent to the Russian Front, fewer aircraft took to the skies, and fewer U-boats were launched to attack British shipping in the north Atlantic. To be more precise about this last point, twenty U-boats that would otherwise have taken to the seas around Britain were prevented from doing so. ¹⁰When one considers that U-boats had been responsible for decimating the British economy before 1943, any reduction in their numbers, by whatever means, was essential to the Allies.

However, impressive though such figures are, it is important to remember that they represented only a temporary setback for the German war machine. Despite the enormous destruction in Hamburg’s residential areas, the main industrial areas of the city remained relatively untouched. Much of the harbour complex had been spared, and even those parts that had suffered quite badly were soon repaired. For example, the Neuhof power station, which suffered direct hits in the US raids, was back up and running within twenty days. ¹¹As I have mentioned, the city’s most important war industries were also coping extraordinarily well (see page 304).

According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, the effects of the 1943 catastrophe were nowhere near as disruptive to the war economy as the much smaller attacks later in the war, which targeted the city’s transport links with the Ruhr. Even the British had to concede that, despite the huge destruction such attacks caused, they ‘had only an irritant effect on German production’. ¹²So does this mean that the bombing didn’t work? Is it conceivable that the deaths of 45,000 people could have had little or no effect on the outcome of the war?

It is impossible to ask such a question without first considering some of the other by-products of the bombing war. First, it must never be forgotten that in 1943 the single most important member of the Allies was not Britain or America but the Soviet Union: it was they who were doing most of the fighting, and most of the dying, and as a consequence it was essential that Britain and America did all they could to show the Russians that they were not alone. By bombing cities like Hamburg they could demonstrate their solidarity with their eastern ally, and prove that they, too, were exerting huge pressure on the Germans. It is a common argument that had Britain and America refrained from bombing Germany, the Wehrmacht would have had ten thousand more 88mm guns to deploy against the advancing Russian tanks. ¹³About a million people manned Germany’s civil defences, and although many might have been women and schoolboys, it was still a huge drain on resources. As Albert Speer wrote in his secret diary in Spandau prison, while the actual effects of bombing on German war industries were not particularly serious, the secondary effects were pivotal:

The real importance of the air war consisted in the fact that it opened a second front long before the invasion of Europe… Defence against air attacks required the production of thousands of anti-aircraft guns, the stockpiling of tremendous quantities of ammunition all over the country, and holding in readiness hundreds of thousands of soldiers… This was the greatest lost battle on the German side. ¹⁴

The devastation of cities like Hamburg ensured the diversion of huge quantities of manpower and matériel, and in those terms it can only be seen as part of a much larger victory for the Allies.

However, there is a certain degree of hindsight to such arguments: in 1943 these consequences were by no means the main intention behind area bombing. From the British point of view, the most important reason at the time for such area raids was the effect they had on German morale. As explained earlier, the effect of Operation Gomorrah on ordinary Germans – not only survivors of Hamburg, but people across the country – was phenomenal. For the first time since the defeat at Stalingrad, people were speaking openly about the possibility of Germany losing the war. The morale of the armed forces was similarly subdued. A new kind of war had opened up in the skies above their cities – one against which they were powerless to defend themselves – and for some the fighting now seemed pointless. Despite their best efforts to push the battlefields far away from the borders of the Fatherland, their wives and children were being killed at home in their tens of thousands.

Of all the armed services it was the Luftwaffe that suffered most from the plummet in morale. After all, it had been responsible for protecting the Reich, and it had to shoulder the blame when its efforts failed, due to a huge shortfall in resources, manpower and, most importantly, adequate leadership. It had been obvious for well over a year that the Luftwaffe was incapable of defending Germany against the enormous fleets of bombers that were beginning to fly across the North Sea. To do so they needed a huge increase in the number of fighter aircraft they could put into the sky. But the only man capable of ordering the increase – Hermann Goering – had long since retreated into a life of debauched luxury. The generals under his command seemed more concerned with political infighting than with defending the homeland, largely because they felt powerless to influence the way the air war was being run. For many, the catastrophe at Hamburg merely underlined the crisis that had existed in the Luftwaffe for years. ¹⁵

General der Flieger Adolf Galland tells a revealing story about the atmosphere in the higher echelons of the Luftwaffe just after the devastation of Hamburg. He was at a meeting in Hitler’s headquarters when all of the most important Luftwaffe commanders were present. With one voice they demanded an end to the emphasis on offensive operations, so that they could concentrate instead on a single purpose: the defence of the Reich. Most importantly, they wanted to start producing thousands of new fighter planes, fast, to stop the Allied bombers getting through.

Never before and never again did I witness such determination and agreement among the circle of those responsible for the leadership of the Luftwaffe. It was as though under the impact of the Hamburg catastrophe everyone had put aside either personal or departmental ambitions. There was no conflict between General Staff and war industry, no rivalry between bombers and fighters; only the one common will to do everything in this critical hour for the defence of the Reich and to leave nothing undone to prevent a second national misfortune of this dimension. ¹⁶

But when Goering put their demands to Hitler, the Führer flatly rejected the idea. He merely repeated the mantra he had always followed: ‘Terror can only be broken by terror.’ ¹⁷There was no point in trying to defend Germany: instead they should forge ahead with reprisal attacks against Britain. The fact that the Luftwaffe was barely equipped for any such reprisal attacks seems to have entirely escaped him. ‘In this hour,’ says Galland, ‘the fate of the Luftwaffe was decided.’

Galland found Goering some time later in an adjoining room, his head buried in his arms on the table, moaning like a wounded animal. It seemed that the Führer had lost faith in his ability once and for all, and the dressing-down he had given him had sent the Reichsmarschall into a slough of self-pity and despair from which he never recovered. In the following days a cloud of gloom descended on the Luftwaffe command. A few weeks later, Galland asked to be relieved of his post as C-in-C of Fighter Command, and Goering angrily granted his request. ¹⁸One other senior Luftwaffe figure was so affected by the general depression that he went even further than Galland. On 17 August, just two weeks after the catastrophe at Hamburg, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek put a gun to his head and shot himself.

However, the German situation was not all negative. Despite Hitler’s refusal to defend the Fatherland against further attacks, others made sure that the defence of the Reich was not neglected. The organizational brilliance of Erhard Milch (the State Secretary of Aviation) and Albert Speer (Reichsminister of Armaments and War Production) ensured that German fighter production, against all odds, increased dramatically over the coming months. With more fighters, the Luftwaffe were better able to defend the Reich, and it is largely due to the efforts of those two men that Germany was able to withstand the terrible Allied onslaught as long as it did.

Second, while Hitler might have prevented a wholehearted change in strategy, he did nothing to stand in the way of a change in tactics. The Luftwaffe changed its tactics to a remarkable degree over the next few weeks, and it did so as a direct result of what it had experienced at Hamburg. General Kammhuber’s constrictive system of tying night fighters to specific ‘boxes’ in a long thin line along the coast was abandoned, allowing them to defend individual cities in larger numbers – especially the Wilde Saufighters of Major Hajo Herrmann. An even more effective tactic was for German fighters to insert themselves into the bomber streams, so that they could follow their prey to the target and out. All this became standard practice as a direct reaction to what had happened at Hamburg: the disaster had not only united the leadership in their resolve to defend the Fatherland, but provided a long-overdue catalyst for change.

* * *

It is important to remember that it was not only Germany that suffered as a result of the raids. The cost to the Allies was huge. In an extraordinary document produced a few months after the bombings, the US government calculated the financial cost of attacking Hamburg. By giving a monetary value to the number of aircraft destroyed, bombs dropped and even lives lost, the conservative figure they came up with was $46,412,700 (see Appendix K). ¹⁹While this pales into insignificance next to the cost of rebuilding Hamburg (some 23,050 million Reich Marks, or $9,220 million), it was nevertheless a huge amount of money, equivalent to more than half a billion dollars today. ²⁰

When one considers that this level of activity was carried out night after night it is little wonder that Britain ended the war virtually bankrupt. According to some estimates, the pursuit of the bomber war consumed as much as a third of the entire British economy. ²¹When looking at figures like this the question naturally arises, was it worth it? With hindsight it seems inconceivable that this level of expenditure could ever have been considered good value for money. Even at the time there were serious doubts over the efficacy of bombing, and earlier in the war there had been many who had pushed for an end to it purely for financial reasons. ²²But we must remember that at the time the politicians and planners had not yet seen the final result of the bombing war. They could only measure the cost against their predictions – or, more importantly, their expectations, which were great indeed.

In the summer of 1943, Sir Arthur Harris confidently believed that he could win the war by bombing alone. In destroying whole cities, so the theory went, the Allies were undermining the morale of the German people to such a degree that their ‘capacity for armed resistance’ would be ‘fatally weakened’. What they had achieved against Hamburg seemed only to prove that the theory was working. In September the Joint Intelligence Committee produced a report that compared the atmosphere in Germany then to that in 1918, when mutiny and revolution had swept the country. ‘A study of the picture as a whole,’ it said, ‘leads us inevitably to the conclusion that Germany is if anything in a worse position today than she was at the same period in 1918.’ The collapse of Germany might come ‘even this year’. ²³

If bombing had lived up to those expectations then the cost, in financial terms and in terms of human life, would have seemed a small price to pay. Had Harris been able to devastate a handful of other German cities in quick succession his predictions of an early end to the war might indeed have been proven right. If Berlin had suffered the same fate within a few weeks, it is conceivable that that alone might have tipped the balance. But neither the RAF nor the USAAF had the ability to do such a thing, let alone do it quickly, and the small window of opportunity created by their new, radar-jamming techniques soon began to close. By the time the Allies attacked Berlin in force that autumn the tactical advantage had already swung back towards the Luftwaffe.

The Allies did not achieve such air supremacy again for another eighteen months. It was not until February 1945, when they bombed Dresden, that they finally demonstrated the ability to replicate what had happened at Hamburg, seemingly at will. However, by this time few believed in bombing as the ultimate weapon. With the Allies poised to enter Germany from both sides, the emphasis had long since changed to land operations. It is perhaps ironic that air bombardment only ever reached its full, war-winning potential after it was no longer required to deliver the decisive blow.

This, then, is the final tragedy of what happened at Hamburg. It did not herald an end to the war, as so many people in the RAF hoped and believed that it would: instead, it was merely the opening page of the most destructive chapter in the history of air warfare. While it was the forerunner of the catastrophes at Dresden and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Allied air supremacy did not come soon enough to make Hamburg truly count. Instead Germany was subjected to a death by a thousand cuts. The countless lesser destructions that took place in the following two years would spell the devastation not only of individual cities, but of an entire nation. By the time Germany capitulated in May 1945, the country was a virtual wasteland.

24. Redemption

This only is denied even to God, The power to make what has been done undone

Agathon ¹

I am aware that this book might have made uncomfortable reading for some. There is still a great deal of bitterness towards Germany, despite the decades that have passed, and many people simply do not care if the Germans suffered or not. During the course of my research I have spoken to scores of people – Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Danes, Dutchmen, Frenchmen, the list goes on – who have listened to my descriptions of the Hamburg firestorm and merely shrugged their shoulders. ‘It was their own fault,’ is the standard reply. ‘They started it.’ I would be surprised if even the most intransigent of these people could remain unmoved by some of the eyewitness accounts of the firestorm and its horrific effects; however, I do not imagine this will produce a change of heart, especially among those who suffered directly as a result of the way the Germans conducted the war. Indeed, some may resent being manipulated into feeling an empathy they had never intended. I make no apology for their unease. War is a horrific thing, and it would be unnatural to feel comfortable in its presence.

For readers from Germany, America or the British Commonwealth there may be an added dimension to their discomfort. The legacy of guilt that surrounds the European bombings of the Second World War is huge, and both sides are still struggling to come to terms with it, even today. In Germany it remains virtually impossible to mention the bombs without the immediate acknowledgement that it was they who opened Pandora’s box in the first place. A modern generation still feels duty-bound to apologize for war crimes that were committed not by their parents, or even their grandparents, but by their great-grandparents. In the English-speaking world, feelings about the bomber war are even more complicated. While on the one hand there is a certain pride that they stood up to Hitler and rid the world of his particular brand of evil, on the other there is an unspoken sense of shame at the methods they were forced to use. There seems to be an underlying suspicion in the popular imagination that the RAF and the USAAF were only able to defeat the Nazis by descending, at least some of the way, to their level.

Two events encapsulate this discomfort. The first took place in central London, in May 1992, when hundreds of RAF veterans and their families attended a ceremony in honour of their old commander-in-chief, Sir Arthur Harris. The highlight of the day was to be the unveiling of a statue outside the church of St Clement Danes in the Strand, followed by a reception at the High Court. However, among the crowd a group of protesters had turned out to voice their disgust that the butcher of Hamburg, Dresden and countless other German cities should be so honoured. They hurled abuse at the RAF veterans, and even at the Queen Mother, who was performing the unveiling ceremony. That night the statue of Harris was daubed with red paint. This was cleaned off, but it was soon attacked again, and it has been defaced several times since.

The second event took place a year later, in Hamburg. The Lutheran Church marked the fiftieth anniversary of the firestorm by organizing a series of meetings and memorial services to commemorate the victims. On the whole these were gentle, sombre affairs, but during one service at the Michaeliskirche a group of students burst into the church and heckled the mourners. What had angered them was the all-inclusive nature of the commemoration. According to the students, the Church should have made a clear distinction between civilians and everyone else: the deaths of civilians should be mourned; the deaths of soldiers, or members of the Nazi Party, should not. After unfurling a banner with the slogan ‘Operation Gomorrah – there’s nothing to mourn’, the demonstration finally became violent, and they had to be forcibly ejected from the church. ²

Both events caused a furore at the time, not only because they represented a younger generation questioning the deeds of their grandparents, but because they highlighted some of the deep moral questions with which neither side has yet been able to come to terms. The Germans, to their credit, at least recognize that this is a subject they cannot avoid – they even have a specific word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung(‘the process of coming to terms with the past’). Britain and America, however, seem much less prepared. They do their best to look back on the war in terms of black and white, good and evil, right and wrong – I am speaking not only of the veterans, but also of those who turn out to protest against the bomber war. When either group is confronted by the more ambiguous realities of bombing, few seem quite sure how to react.

* * *

The moral questions that surround the Allied bomber offensive are much deeper, and much more disturbing, than most people realize. During the course of my research for this book I have been asked repeatedly whether I thought the bombing of cities like Hamburg was justified. I have struggled to find an answer to this question, because it opens up so many difficult issues. Certainly it cannot be taken lightly: after all, if ‘war’s glorious art’ is murder on a mass scale, then bombing is one of its most efficient weapons.

To begin with, I have very little problem with the factthat Hamburg was bombed. The city was a huge centre of industry, providing U-boats, aircraft, oil, chemicals and all kinds of other materials that were essential for the German war effort. It was imperative that the Western Allies did everything in their power to disrupt those industries, both for their own sake and for the sake of the Russians, who were dying in their millions on the Eastern Front. Britain and America lived in constant fear that the USSR would one day give up their titanic struggle by coming to some arrangement with Hitler. Bombing was the only way to prove that they were doing something to help, and successes like the devastation of Hamburg provided the Russians with a great morale boost. As Albert Speer pointed out after the war, the value of bombing cities like Hamburg lay not only in the disruption it caused to German industry but also in the huge resources it diverted away from the Russian Front.

A second issue is slightly more problematic. Towards the end of the war, and immediately after it, there was a great debate over whether the Allies were right to ‘blanket’ bomb German cities, or whether they should have concentrated more on the precision bombing of specific factories and military installations. Most people agreed that precision bombing was preferable, partly because it was much more efficient, but also because it was much less likely to involve civilian casualties.

While I wholeheartedly agree that precision bombing should always be chosen over area bombing wherever possible, in 1943 the RAF did not have the luxury of that choice. They had already tried precision bombing, and the results had been disastrous. Flying in daylight, the British planes were easy targets for German flak and fighters, and they were quickly decimated. Moreover, even during daylight, their equipment was so primitive and their accuracy so bad that they rarely hit what they were aiming for. In short, if they wanted to survive, and if they wanted to destroy specific targets, there was no choice but to go in during the night and bomb the entire area.

When the Americans joined the air war they went through much the same process. They began with a determination to fly by day, and to employ precision-bombing techniques. By the summer of 1943 they were paying for that decision with unsustainable losses. American planes were far less vulnerable to flak than British planes, and far better equipped to defend themselves against fighters – but during the battle of Hamburg their daytime flights meant that, in percentage terms, they were losing up to four times as many planes as the British. By the beginning of August their losses were so bad that they were forced to stop flying altogether. Their policy of flying by day was rescued only by the advent of long-range fighters, which finally began to escort them over Germany towards the end of the year.

It is tempting to view the Americans as the white knights of this particular story because, despite all the pressure to give up daylight bombing, they stuck to their convictions. One of the reasons they were so determined to do so was that they were convinced that the accuracy of their bombing made it worthwhile. The Americans were rightly proud of their Norden bomb sights, which were vastly superior to anything developed by either the Germans or the British, but this remarkable piece of equipment was only useful when the target was visible below. Whenever it was obscured by cloud or smoke, as it was at Hamburg, the Americans might as well have been flying by night. ³So, for example, while they hit the Blohm & Voss shipyards on 25 July they also hit the historic city centre, the river, and a farmer’s fields south of the city. ⁴The only real difference that the people of Hamburg noticed between British bombs and American ones was that there were far fewer of the latter so they did less damage.

The American decision to stick to daylight bombing over Germany was an incredibly brave one. However, I do not think it gives them any right to claim the moral high ground – and not only for the reasons above. For all their protestations about blanket bombing they were not above employing this method when they thought it appropriate: indeed, their bombardiers on 26 July were told that if they could not locate the port they were to drop their bombs anywhere in the ‘centre of the city’. ⁵And while they may have exercised restraint in the European theatre of operations, their intentions were not nearly so exemplary in the Pacific. In fact, they used their time in Europe to study British methods of bombing so that they could apply them with equal success in Japan. Their firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 was every bit as devastating as what happened in Hamburg, and the civilian death toll even higher.

* * *

The final moral issue brought up by the bombing of Hamburg is by far the most difficult to justify. It concerns the intentions of those who created the firestorm. The British always claimed that they were aiming their bombs at Hamburg’s docks and military installations: this was what they told the press, who dutifully reported that the aiming point for the RAF was the Blohm & Voss shipyard; it was also what many British crews were told during their briefings. But that was not the case. The largest concentration of purely ‘military’ targets, including the Blohm & Voss shipyards, was on the south shores of the river Elbe, yet this was the only area of Hamburg that the RAF did not aim for. Instead they went exclusively for the residential areas, to the north of the river. The targets of the bombs were not military installations at all, but civilians.

Some might argue that it makes no difference whether the RAF aimed at civilians or not. The vast area over which the bombs were dropped meant that the results were quite likely the same: the town was still flattened, the civilians still dead. But there is a huge moral gulf between bombing a suburban street by accident, and deliberately aiming for it. British planners justified this moral leap to themselves by pointing out that it was much more difficult to destroy factories than it was to kill the people who worked in them. As long as they destroyed the workforce it did not matter whether the Blohm & Voss shipyards were still intact – there would be nobody to build the U-boats.

This idea makes me extremely uncomfortable, but I have to admit that the people who planned the raids had a point. Why should there be any distinction between the German U-boat captain and the German factory worker who helped to build that U-boat? They were both working towards the same end, which was to kill British sailors. And since oil workers produced fuel for that U-boat, surely they were also legitimate targets. Farmers provided sustenance for soldiers at the front, textile workers produced their uniforms, and train drivers got them to and from the battlefield. In a ‘total war’ – and we must remember that it was the Germans who first proclaimed it as such – all of those people are considered fair game, as is anything else that supports the enemy’s war economy.

The problem with this argument is that there is no clear place to draw the line. Can we also justify the killing of actors and musicians, since they contribute so much to the country’s morale? And what about doctors and nurses, who heal soldiers’ wounds so that they can go back to the battlefield? As I mentioned in chapter 7 some theorists even go so far as to say that women and children are a legitimate target. German soldiers believed they were fighting for their families, so by killing their wives and children one took away their incentive to fight. Under this kind of logic the Second World War was no longer a just and honourable struggle against an evil regime, but a war of annihilation.

The only thing that saves this policy from the charge of total immorality is that it was born from the best of intentions. Those who advocated bombing civilians sincerely believed they were trying to save lives rather than take them. Men like Harris, who had witnessed the terrible bloodbath of the First World War, saw bombing as the only way to spare British soldiers from total carnage. Fifty-five thousand RAF men and 26,000 USAAF men died during the course of the bombing war – a huge total, but only a tiny fraction of the number who suffered in the First World War trenches. ⁶While the Russian Army was paying the butcher’s bill on the Eastern Front, the Allied air forces were able to keep them on side by paying a far smaller share until the Allied armies were strong enough to launch a successful cross-Channel invasion.

Also, the theory went, it was not only Allied lives that would be spared. The British Air Ministry was convinced that bombing would save German lives, too, because it would shorten the war – in fact, after the destruction of Hamburg many in the government believed the war would be over before the end of 1943. Had the RAF achieved that, millions of people on both sides would have been saved.

This line of thinking must have seemed incredibly seductive at the time. But it is its very seductiveness that makes it so disturbing. The British were so caught up in the bomber dream that nobody seems to have considered what would happen if the policy did not work. In the search for the elusive knock-out blow the Allies launched attacks on civilian targets for several years. Before Hamburg they had bombed Lübeck, Rostock and Cologne. After Hamburg they bombed Mannheim, Kassel, Hanover, Munich, Berlin – the list of destroyed cities goes on and on. By May 1945 they had killed somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 German civilians, most of whom had only tenuous links to the war. ⁷The knock-out blow – the final strike that would end the war and so save lives – was never achieved.