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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Relationships between the two forces, especially in the upper levels of command, were remarkably harmonious. When Eaker first arrived in Britain he lived with Harris and his family, and often brought gifts and toys from America for Harris’s young daughter. He also regularly attended Harris’s ‘morning prayers’ at Bomber Command Headquarters, when Harris and his staff chose the following night’s targets. To some degree, therefore, the RAF and the USAAF were working as a combined force from the outset. But from an official point of view, the RAF and the USAAF were, and would remain, completely separate forces, each with their own priorities and methods.

Five weeks after Harris’s thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, American airmen were ready to make their first operational flight over mainland Europe. On 4 July six USAAF crews, flying in borrowed planes, accompanied a squadron of British bombers on a daylight raid against German airfields in Holland. It was a baptism of fire: two of the six American planes were shot down by flak, while a third’s starboard engine was blown to pieces and barely managed to limp home. Nevertheless, a point had been made. The Americans had arrived in Europe.

Six weeks later a dozen American bombers made their first independent attack of the war, this time flying their own planes – the formidable B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’ of 97th Group. Their target was the Rouen-Sotteville railway marshalling yards, to the west of Paris. As the formation crossed the English Channel, one of the lead planes was carrying General Eaker, and it is proof both of the strength of American enthusiasm and their unshakeable faith in their aircraft that such a high-ranking commander was allowed to fly on this earliest of missions. Fortunately he, and all of the American air crews, returned safely late that afternoon – although two Spitfires in the British fighter escort were shot down.

The Americans had a different philosophy from the British. While the RAF had been forced to fly by night to avoid casualties, just as the Luftwaffe had been earlier in the war, the Americans were determined to conduct their bombing in daylight. There were two reasons for this. First, they were morally opposed to the bombing of civilians – at least in Europe – and strongly believed that bombing in daylight, when they could see their proper targets clearly, would result in fewer unnecessary casualties. ¹⁴Second, they were convinced that daylight bombing would be far more effective. Unlike the British, whose bombing precision had barely improved since the First World War, the Americans had developed the highly accurate Norden bombsight, which allowed them consistently to drop bombs within fifty feet of a practice target from a height of four or five miles above the earth. ¹⁵There was a saying in the USAAF that their aviators could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet: when their accuracy was so good, it made perfect sense to pinpoint their efforts on exact targets, rather than waste their bombs over large areas by night.

To start with, Harris, Portal and even Churchill objected to the American insistence on daylight attacks, largely because they thought the whole policy was doomed. It was one thing to hit a practice target in the clear blue skies of California, but a different thing altogether to find a specific building in the centre of a German city, especially when that city might be shrouded in the thick cloud of a European winter, and defended by both Luftwaffe fighters and walls of predictive flak. ¹⁶The Americans refused to be swayed, and it took them until the second half of 1943 to come to the painful realization that, in the absence of a long-range fighter escort, their terrible losses in the skies over Germany would be too heavy to bear.

But all that was in the future. For now the policy of daylight bombing seemed to be successful, largely because the Americans confined their fledgling efforts to targets in western France or the Low Countries, where they could still be accompanied by fighters. By the end of 1942 the Americans had flown more than 1,500 sorties in twenty-seven operations (missions), and lost only thirty-four aircraft – a loss rate of just two per cent. American optimism was so high that in August 1942 Ira Eaker confidently predicted that he and Butch Harris together would be able ‘completely to dislocate German industry and commerce and to remove from the enemy the means for waging successful warfare’ as early as the middle of 1943. ¹⁷When the two leaders were finally to join forces in the bombing of Hamburg, his prediction would almost come true.

* * *

Right from the beginning the British and American air forces had worked closely together, and their co-operation was formally sealed when British and American military and political leaders met in Casablanca in January 1943 to plan a combined air offensive against Germany. Since the Allies were not yet strong enough to attempt an invasion of mainland Europe it was decided that the only way to carry the fight to the Axis powers was to increase the bombing campaign. Indeed, if the Allies were ever to attempt an invasion, it was essential that they first achieved air supremacy over the Germans.

To this end, the Combined Chiefs of Staff issued a directive to Air Marshal Harris and General Eaker, ordering them to begin demolishing a range of German targets: submarine yards and bases, aircraft production, ball-bearing factories, oil and rubber plants, and military-transport systems. They were also required to undermine German morale, as the preamble to the directive made clear: ‘Your primary aim will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened…’ ¹⁸The plan was to subject Germany to a round-the-clock bombing campaign on a vast scale. RAF Bomber Command would continue their campaign against the cities by night, while the US Eighth Army Air Force would attack specific military targets by day.

The coming year would be very different from anything that had gone before. Attacks would be bigger, more widespread, and they would be repeated again and again until the destruction was total. Over the next six months the Americans built up their air force from eighty or so operating planes to a force of well over three hundred, and accumulated vital combat experience over targets in northern Europe. The British, meanwhile, began a relentless offensive against the industrial cities of the Ruhr. In March they hit the Krupps armament factory in Essen, causing severe damage to buildings and machinery. In May they devastated Dortmund and Wuppertal in quick succession, especially the latter, where a miniature firestorm consumed most of the city centre. In June they attacked Düsseldorf, starting fires that raged over forty square kilometres – twenty military installations were hit, seventy-seven companies put out of business, and 140,000 people were made homeless.

Germans all over the country noticed the increasing intensity of the bombing, and gossip flew from one city to the next. Wild estimates of the death tolls circulated: in Dortmund, they said, fifteen thousand people had been killed (the figure was actually around six hundred), in Düsseldorf seventeen thousand (in reality it was twelve hundred) and in Wuppertal twenty-seven thousand (actually 3,400). ¹⁹Worse than the numbers being touted were rumours about how people had died. Tales were told of victims being turned into living torches by the phosphorus bombs, or becoming stuck in the melted asphalt of the roads. Such rumours certainly reached Hamburg, but few who lived there truly believed that the same fate lay in store for their city. When British reconnaissance planes dropped leaflets claiming that Hamburg would be next, no one heeded them: even those Germans who thought the Nazis were doomed believed that Hamburg would be left largely intact, because the British and Americans would need the town and its harbour later on. ²⁰Besides, propaganda leaflets had been dropped throughout the war, and few people paid much attention to them.

But Hamburg would indeed be next. Even while Dortmund and Düsseldorf were still reeling from their attacks, Harris issued an operations order in which he stated his intention ‘to destroy Hamburg’: ‘The “Battle of Hamburg” cannot be won in a single night. It is estimated that at least 10,000 tons of bombs will have to be dropped to complete the process of elimination. To achieve the maximum effect of air bombardment this city should be subjected to sustained attack.’ Moreover, having learned that fire was the best weapon, Harris ordered that most of the bombers should carry ‘maximum economic incendiary loads’ to saturate the fire services of the city. ²¹

Harris expressed the hope that the Americans would join in with the bombing of Hamburg, but it was not up to him to make that decision. Until now the USAAF had never bombed a target that the British had bombed the previous night – it was deemed too dangerous – and ‘round-the-clock bombing’ had been merely a theory, not a reality. But the Americans also had their eye on Hamburg. The city contained many targets that they considered high priority, including aircraft-parts factories and submarine builders. US planes had tried to attack the city at the end of June, but had been forced back by heavy cloud. Now, weather permitting, they would be all too happy to join the RAF, and when General Eaker issued the order to attack the Blohm & Voss shipyards on the banks of the Elbe, Hamburg’s fate was sealed.

It must be said that not everyone on the Allied side was happy about this new target. Shortly before the attack took place Sir Henry Tizard, the brilliant academic who was responsible for creating the British radar network, wrote to the Prime Minister expressing his misgivings about the proposed series of raids. He was an outspoken critic of many aspects of British bombing policy, and doubted that the war could ever be won by bombing alone. He was particularly unhappy about the prospect of destroying Hamburg, a city that he believed was essential to keep intact so that it could be used to administer Germany after the invasion: ‘Hamburg is anti-Russian, anti-Prussian and anti-Nazi. It may well be soon, if not already, anti-war. Apart from submarine construction and shipping, generally it is not industrially important. It is a centre of commerce rather than of production. It is a very important port and might therefore be much more useful to us alive than dead.’ ²²

Churchill did not agree, and neither did the Chief of Air Staff. In a strongly worded rebuttal, Sir Charles Portal pointed to the numerous industrial, chemical, transportation and engineering targets within the port. ‘It seems abundantly clear that Hamburg is much more than a dormant centre of peace-time commerce,’ he said, ‘and, if so, I certainly do not think we should refrain from bombing it.’ ²³

Tizard’s suggestion was rejected: the bombing of Hamburg would go ahead as planned. The final piece of the jigsaw was a codename for the series of attacks, and the one they eventually settled upon was ‘Operation Gomorrah’. The symbolic implication of the title was clear: God’s power to rain down fire and destruction upon the earth now lay in man’s hands, and was being wielded in what the British establishment saw as just retribution for the damage that the Luftwaffe had caused during the Blitz.

8. The British Plan

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility.

Theodor W. Adorno ¹

On the morning of 24 July 1943, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris arrived at Bomber Command Headquarters in High Wycombe at his usual time of 9.00 a.m. At the base of a large grassy mound, guarded by sentries, was a doorway that led to the enormous underground Operations Room. Harris made his way into the bunker, and took his seat at the desk in the midst of the room. Behind him a huge board listed the available crews and aeroplanes, squadron by squadron, while on either side were great wall maps of Europe and a target priority list of dozens of cities and objectives. Around the table stood a dozen or so others: Harris’s deputy commander-in-chief, Sir Robert Saundby; the meteorological officer, Magnus Spence; the senior air staff officer and his deputy; naval and army liaison officers; and various representatives of Intelligence and Operations. That day an American VIP was also present: Brigadier-General Fred Anderson, the commander of the USAAF’s bomber force in Britain.

The routine at Bomber Command HQ was well established. Normally there would be a brief report of the previous night’s operations, followed by a weather report from Spence. Apart from Harris, Spence was probably the most important man at the meeting, and his reports on the movements of various weather fronts across Europe were essential when it came to choosing the following night’s targets. Having listened to his summary, Harris would select two or three and, with a hasty shuffling of folders and photographs among his staff, the possibilities would be laid out on the table before him. There was rarely any discussion over what the target should be: Harris ran the meeting, and the decision was unequivocally his. After he had examined the folders, he would make a final decision, and the meeting would draw rapidly to a close. Harris would return to his office, and his subordinates would set about putting the operation in motion. ²

That morning, however, everyone knew what the target was likely to be – weather permitting. The attack on Hamburg had been scheduled for two days now, but had been cancelled twice because a bank of heavy cloud was moving south towards the city. Now, as Spence laid out the weather charts on the table and began to explain the conditions, it became evident that the weather was at last good enough to go ahead. Harris studied the charts, then gave the order to proceed as planned. Moments later he rose from the chair, leaving the other members of the team to telephone through his decision to the Pathfinder Force, the bomber groups, the army, the navy and Fighter Command. General Anderson would take the news back to the USAAF headquarters at Wycombe Abbey. Operation Gomorrah was on.

* * *

The plan had been outlined in detail two days before, on the morning of 22 July, when the operation was first ordered. ³In theory it was fairly simple. Every available aircraft from bomber squadrons across the country would take off between about ten o’clock and ten thirty that night. They would fly to specific points along the coast, and merge together into one huge stream of bombers flying across the North Sea. About eighty miles from the German coast they would converge on a single point, where they would turn in a tight flow, and fly down towards Hamburg. (The bomber stream never flew directly towards the target, for fear of giving away their destination to German radar stations.) At exactly one o’clock on Sunday morning, the Pathfinder aircraft would drop red and yellow target marker flares over Hamburg to indicate the aiming point. Two minutes later the first crews would start dropping their bombs.

Because of the sheer number of planes taking part in the raid, they were to attack in six waves of 100 or 120 bombers each. ⁴Each wave would have an average of about eight minutes to clear the target, which meant that there would be fifteen or sixteen bombers passing over the aiming point every minute. The most important thing was to achieve as much concentration as possible, so that the whole of the area around the aiming point was saturated with bombs. Then the fire services would be overwhelmed, and unable to prevent massive conflagrations springing up. To avoid the bombing becoming unfocused, more Pathfinders would continue to mark the target – this time with green target indicators – after the attack had begun. If the bombers could not spot the red markers, they were to aim at the greens. Having released their loads, they were all to return home on a roughly parallel course.

Such plans were easier ordered than executed. Even an undefended target could be difficult to find in the darkness of night, and in the past the RAF had often bombed the wrong parts of a city, or even missed it altogether. To prevent such disastrous wastefulness, British scientists had developed a range of electronic navigational aids. The most important of these for medium to long-range targets, like Hamburg, was called H2S. It worked a little like an airborne radar device, except that instead of transmitting high-frequency pulses into the surrounding sky it would direct them at the ground. By plotting the echoes on the screen of a cathode-ray tube, it was possible to get a rough picture of the ground below, even through heavy cloud. The system was still in its infancy, and the picture it gave was sometimes so fuzzy as to be useless, but it was particularly good at picking up built-up areas surrounded by water. Hamburg would therefore be relatively easy to identify: the wide river Elbe, and the distinctive lake in the centre of the city would provide an unmistakable outline.

The second major difficulty was the strength of the defences, both on the way to Hamburg and over the city. The whole coast of Europe was guarded by squadrons of German night fighters. As soon as a formation of bombers came within a hundred miles of mainland Europe, the German long-range ‘Freya’ radar would pick them up and the defences would get ready for action. Once the bombers came within thirty miles or so, a second, short-range, radar system called ‘Würzburg’ would be able to direct night fighters towards the bomber stream. The ‘Würzburg’ system was extraordinarily effective for its time. Using one radar set to pick up an individual plane, a second set could guide a night fighter to within a few hundred yards of his quarry. The pilot would then be able to engage his own ‘Lichtenstein’ radar, and home in for the kill. The only drawback of the system was that each radar station could direct only one interception at a time. That was why the British had evolved the tactic of concentrating all their bombers into a tight stream: if they could push as many planes as possible through a single point, the German defences would intercept only a handful before the majority had gone past unscathed.

It was not only German night fighters that were directed by radar. The Reich had flak defences that stretched all the way from the sea to Berlin and beyond, and they, too, were radar-controlled. As soon as RAF bombers appeared over a city like Hamburg, radar-controlled searchlights that were a slightly different colour from all the others – usually an intense bluish beam – would begin to hunt them down. Once the blue master-beam had locked on to a British bomber, all the other searchlights would join it, creating a huge cone of lights with the hapless aeroplane at its apex. Thus lit up, the plane would have to dive violently to escape the force of German flak batteries intent on blowing it out of the sky.

Another problem was predictive flak. Using their radar screens, the German defenders could plot the height, speed and direction of flight of any one of the British bombers. They could then predict exactly where the aeroplane would be in the time it took the flak shells to fly 20,000 feet into the air, and direct the flak batteries accordingly. The only way for a British pilot to avoid this was to zigzag and corkscrew across the sky – which, when the sky was full of other aeroplanes, greatly increased the chances of a collision. When a crew were about to release their bombs even this course of evasive action was denied them: if they were to hit the target they were obliged to fly straight and level for a full minute before the bombs were released and they could think about escaping. Only when the photoflash had gone, marking the place they had bombed on an intelligence photograph, could they turn tail and head away from the hail of flak.

Hamburg had some of the most formidable flak defences in Germany. Not only was there a ring of batteries on the outskirts of the city, but four massive gun towers stood in the centre and the port. The heaviest guns were capable of firing a pair of 128mm shells twice a minute, each weighing 26 kilograms, to a range of 45,000 feet vertically into the sky. ⁵If an aircraft received a direct hit from a shell like this it spelled disaster for the crew inside – if not immediately, then during the long flight over the North Sea on the way home. Even if an aircraft was not hit, the threat of the incredible firepower exploding around them could seriously unnerve a crew, and cause them to drop their bombs early and off-target.

Given the importance of the target and the strength of Hamburg’s defences, Harris was determined to use every advantage he could to make sure the operation succeeded. By the summer of 1943 Germany’s radar-controlled defences were causing intolerable casualties, so Harris began to press the Prime Minister to authorize the use of a new secret weapon that would jam German radar. Codenamed ‘Window’, it consisted of bundles of paper strips coated with metal foil on one side. When the bundles were dropped down the flare chute during the flight over Germany they would disperse, and as the strips floated to earth they created a false ‘blip’ on German radar screens. With thousands of false readings it would become impossible for the operators to tell where the real bombers were – at a stroke, all of their defences would be rendered useless.

Until now the device had never been used because the Ministry for Home Security was terrified that Germany would copy it and use it against Britain. However, by 1943 the threat of a new Blitz by the Luftwaffe was unlikely, so on 15 July Churchill gave Harris the go-ahead. Ironically, the Germans already knew of the principle behind Window – their own version was called Düppel – but the German Chief of Air Signals, General Martini, had prevented its use because, he, too, was afraid of the consequences if the British ever copied the idea. ⁶Over the coming week Martini’s worst fears would come true.

Since Window only worked on the Würzburg and Lichtenstein frequencies, the bombers would also use two other devices: ‘Mandrel’, which interfered with the German long-range Freya radar, and ‘Tinsel’, which jammed German radio frequencies by transmitting the sound of the aircraft engines to drown the voices of the pilots and their radar controllers.

This, then, was the British plan of attack for what would become known as the battle of Hamburg. As Harris made his way back to his office, his deputy, Air Vice Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, remained in the Operations Room to organize the practicalities of the raid. First he telephoned Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett, head of the Pathfinder Force, which would lead the operation. After discussing the precise route to and from the target with him, Saundby set about organizing the other details of the attack: bomb loads, take-off times, aiming points and so on. Only after every detail had been precisely established would he and the rest of the staff retire to their own offices in the base at High Wycombe. For the rest of the day, department by department, the devastation of Hamburg was carefully prepared.