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

Автор книги: Keith Lowe

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

Ten minutes later the flight engineer in each of the leading aircraft climbed over the main spar into the back of the plane and began to drop the first bundles of Window. ¹⁰The crews had been provided with stop watches and told to throw the bundles down the flare chute at exactly one-minute intervals. The bundles were supposed to disperse into small clouds of paper that would float harmlessly down through the air. In practice, however, the ‘machine-like’ efficiency called for at the briefing often ended up being a little more chaotic. Sometimes the Window would blow back into the aircraft, filling the air in the back of the plane with metallized paper strips. Once or twice the bundles did not open properly and the solid packets hit other bombers, ripping off aerials or even breaking through the Perspex of a gun turret. ¹¹Even when the Window dispersed properly, it often blew up on to the mid-upper turrets of the aeroplanes, obscuring the gunner’s view. One side of the paper was covered with a black coating that easily rubbed off, and after fifteen minutes or so the plexiglass on the mid-upper turret was so smudged and blackened that the gunner there was effectively blinded. The black coating also came off on the man tasked with throwing it from the plane; many bombaimers and flight engineers soon looked like chimney sweeps, covered from head to toe with soot.

Despite the various mishaps, though, most of the crews managed to drop the bundles of metal strips according to plan. As they ploughed on towards the German coast they had no idea whether or not the new device would work, and gradually they became anxious once more. In less than half an hour they would be over Hamburg, and the real test of their new tactics would begin.

* * *

By now the Germans knew the RAF were coming. A long-range Freya radar station near Ostend had picked up the first aeroplanes heading across the sea at around eleven o’clock, and the defences had been plotting the course of the bomber stream ever since, waiting to see where it turned before committing their night fighters to action. ¹²By half past midnight, shortly after the first planes in the bomber stream had turned towards Hamburg, the night fighters of several airfields were airborne. Since Hamburg was now a possible target, at 12.33 a.m. the order was given to sound the Fliegeralarm sirens. ¹³

In 1943 Germany had the most impressive defences of any country in the world. First came the infamous Kammhuber Line – a belt of interlinked night-fighter ‘boxes’ that stretched the length of the European coast. Each box had its own fighters, which would patrol that box only, ensuring an evenly spread defence across the whole line. Hamburg in particular was protected by more than a dozen airfields. ¹⁴Closer in, there were belts of searchlights, and dozens of heavy-flak batteries (see Map 1, p. 36). It was a formidable set-up, and the whole structure was now on high alert, waiting for the British to arrive.

As the bomber stream approached the coast, it was being watched closely by the head of the German 2nd Fighter Division, Generalleutnant Schwabedissen, in his headquarters at Stade airfield. Housed in a giant bomb-proof bunker, Schwabedissen’s central combat station was the nerve-centre of all the defences in north-west Europe and was a true triumph of German technology. One of only five control centres in the country, it was nicknamed the ‘Battle Opera House’, or the ‘Kammhuber Kino’, because of its resemblance to a cinema. Inside, dominating the huge control room, there was a gigantic frosted-glass screen, about fifty feet wide, inscribed with a map of Germany. On to it were projected spots of light, which represented all of the different aeroplanes in the sky at any one time – white spots to show the enemy planes approaching, green spots for the German night fighters, and illuminated details of their height, position and direction of flight.

Even the Luftwaffe’s commander of fighters, Adolf Galland, found this feat of technology impressive:

The whole was reminiscent of a huge aquarium lit up, with a multitude of water-fleas scuttling madly behind the glass walls. Each single dot and each change to be seen here was the result of reports and observations from radar sets, aircraft-spotters, listening posts, reconnaissance and contact planes, or from units in action. They all merged together by telephone or wireless in this centre, to be received, sorted, and within a few minutes transposed into transmittable messages. What was represented here on a giant map was a picture of the air situation … with about one minute’s delay. ¹⁵

In front of this huge map, on rising steps like those in an amphitheatre, fighter-control officers ( Jägerleitoffiziere) were seated in several rows, ready to direct their night fighters by radio into the hunt. Above them, on a raised balcony, Generalleutnant Schwabedissen and his staff conducted the battle against the Allied bombers in an unhealthy fog of cigarette smoke, his voiced orders rising above a symphony of ticking teleprinters, humming ventilators and the urgent murmur of telephone operators across the room.

Tonight everyone was watching the screen as avidly as any cinema audience. Schwabedissen had already ordered his night fighters to scramble, and scores of green T-shapes were making their way across the frosted-glass map. Ahead a mass of white dots was making its way towards the German coastline. But something was wrong: while the front of the bomber stream still appeared to be moving forwards, the tail end remained static on the map – it was as if the RAF bomber force was expanding before their eyes.

Up on the balcony, Schwabedissen demanded to know what was going on, but nobody could give him a straight answer. Nervous telephone operators were engaged in urgent conversations with radar stations throughout north-west Germany. The messages they were getting back were always the same. It was impossible: there appeared to be not merely hundreds of bombers approaching but thousands– too many for the radar screens to cope with. Some radar sets appeared to have stopped working altogether: instead of registering single, distinct ‘blips’ on their screens they showed nothing but a general fuzz, as if the bombers were approaching in a solid wall several miles wide.

In the air, the situation was just as confused. Night-fighter pilots who had been following instructions from their fighter-control officers now found themselves being sent round in circles. When it became clear that something was wrong with the ground radar, they began to rely on their Lichtenstein sets – but they, too, were beginning to show false readings, as one German fighter pilot, Wilhelm Johnen, recalled:

It was obvious that no one knew exactly where the enemy was or what his objective would be. An early recognition of the direction was essential so that the night fighters could be introduced as early as possible into the bomber stream. But the radio reports kept contradicting themselves. Now the enemy was over Amsterdam and then suddenly west of Brussels, and a moment later they were reported far out to sea in map square 25. What was to be done? The uncertainty of the ground stations was communicated to the crews … No one knew where the British were, but all the pilots were reporting pictures on their screens. I was no exception. At 15,000 feet my sparker announced the first enemy machine on his Li [airborne Lichtenstein radar set] … Facius proceeded to report three or four pictures on his screen. I hoped that I would have enough ammunition to deal with them! Then Facius suddenly shouted: ‘Tommy flying towards us at a great speed. Distance decreasing … 2000 yards, 1,500 … 1,000 … 500 … He’s gone.’ ‘You’re crackers, Facius,’ I said jestingly. But I soon lost my sense of humour, for this crazy performance was repeated a score of times. ¹⁶

No matter where the pilot flew he made no contact with any bombers: they disappeared, like phantoms, as soon as he approached. Window, it seemed, was having exactly the effect that the British desired.

* * *

As the leading British Pathfinder aircraft crossed the German coast near Heide, they began to drop the first of their yellow route-maker flares. The idea was to give the bomber stream, which was still spread out all over the sky, a single point to fly through – that way they would be a far more concentrated force as they arrived in Hamburg. However, it was not only the RAF bombers who saw the flares: a handful of German night fighters in the area spotted them too. In the absence of anything else to help them find the bomber stream, they headed towards the light. One managed to shoot down a Halifax, which fell in flames and exploded over the sea. A few minutes later a second Halifax was attacked, but this time the rear gunner returned fire at once, and the German plane fell, eventually crashing into the ground near Flensburg. ¹⁷

It is easy to summarize such events in a few words, but combat like this was a desperate affair, especially for British bomber crews. After more than two hours of silence, a burst of fire could appear from the darkness and kill seven men in an instant. Crews that were shot down rarely saw it coming. If they did, a short burst from one of the gunners was sometimes enough to scare off the enemy – an alert bomber crew could be just as deadly as the night fighters, as the combat over the German coast that night demonstrated. Usually it was the rear gunner, with his clear-vision panel at the back, who saw the danger first. He would broadcast a warning to the pilot on the intercom: ‘Fighter on the port quarter – corkscrew port!’ The temptation to turn away from an attacker was strong, but the trick for survival was to turn intohim so that he could not follow. Then, for the next thirty seconds or so, the bomber pilot would have to throw his aircraft about the sky, hoping that he had dropped out of his attacker’s line of sight. As long as he kept flying in a spiral motion then his enemy would not be able to keep his guns trained on him for more than an instant. A minute later the bomber would be back on course, with nothing to show for the experience but the mess of charts and instruments that had been thrown off the navigator’s desk, and the faint smell of fear in the aircraft.

That night there would be very few such incidents. Most of the German night fighters remained tied to their ‘boxes’, unable to locate the bomber stream amid the confusion. The aeroplanes continued unmolested across the coast, and down to their next turning point above Kellinghausen, a few minutes north-northwest of Hamburg.

Some of the crews dropped propaganda leaflets on German towns along the way. More would drop leaflets later, either over the target or on the way home. Leafleting was an unpopular pastime in the higher levels of Bomber Command, and staff officers joked that its only effect was to supplement German civilians’ rations of toilet paper. (They were only half joking: when middle-class Hamburg housewives were reduced to cutting squares of toilet paper from biscuit wrappers, this important commodity was in short supply.) ¹⁸Tonight’s leaflets showed a picture of RAF bombers flying over the burning streets of Dortmund, with the caption ‘ Die Festung Europa hat kein Dach’ (‘Fortress Europe has no roof’). To press the message home, one or two airmen emptied the contents of their urine bottles on to the leaflets before dropping them out – a petty act of contempt to add to the injuries they were about to inflict. ¹⁹

Eventually, after almost three hours in the air, the navigators of the leading Pathfinders recognized the outline of the city on their H ₂S sets: they had arrived. As they began their final approach to Hamburg, the crews of more than seven hundred bombers braced themselves for the onslaught of flak and searchlights they expected to encounter above the most heavily defended target in northern Germany. But the nightmare never materialized. There were fifty-four heavy and twenty-six light flak batteries defending the city, and twenty-two searchlight batteries, ²⁰but they were all reliant on the same ‘Würzburg’ radar sets that were being disrupted so efficiently by Window. In some cases the battery commanders could hear the drone of aeroplanes in the sky above them, yet when they turned to their radar operators for confirmation the response was the same as before: instead of clear, distinct pulses showing where the aircraft were, the radar screens were a mass of flashing zigzag curves, making it impossible to distinguish anything specific. Some batteries began to shoot random, unaimed barrages into the sky; others remained silent. Hamburg’s defences had been blinded.

For some of the more experienced bomber crews, the sight that greeted them when they arrived over the target was a dream come true. ‘Under normal circumstances the searchlights kept a fairly accurate pinpoint on any aircraft,’ says Leonard Cooper, a flight engineer with 7 Squadron (Pathfinder Force), ‘but on this occasion they were just waving around all over the place.’ ²¹Ted Edwards, a pilot from 100 Squadron, was equally impressed: ‘We were quite amazed to see the searchlights just weaving around the countryside over enemy territory. They hadn’t got a clue where we were.’ ²²

For those sceptics who had doubted that Window would work, it was a moment of revelation. ‘They said that Window was going to upset the German radar when we went in, but we more or less said, “Oh, yes?”’ remembers Leonard Bradfield, a bomb-aimer with 49 Squadron. ‘But when we actually got there it was happening! We were absolutely delighted.’ ²³He continues:

It was absolutely fantastic. We came up the Elbe and could see the river quite clearly. The radar-controlled blue master searchlights were standing absolutely upright and the white ones were weaving around, just searching. There were no night fighters because they were all in their boxes waiting to be given the vectors. The flak was just in a block over the target … It was the only time on any bomb run I was able to have 20 seconds completely unimpeded, without being stalked by the flak. ²⁴

It is important to note that although the flak was fired blindly, the sheer number of shells aimed into the air meant that several aircraft in the vanguard of the attack were hit. Later on two planes would be shot down, with no survivors. ²⁵Not everyone managed to escape the searchlights either. Gordon Moulton-Barrett, who was on his first operation as a ‘second dickie’ pilot, remembers seeing a Lancaster coned by lights: he watched as the aircraft dropped vertically downwards, falling 10,000 feet in a matter of seconds, before pulling out of the dive and disappearing once more into the safety of darkness. To the impressionable Moulton-Barrett it seemed like a brilliant, death-defying manoeuvre, and he had to suppress the urge to applaud. ²⁶For the Lancaster and its crew, however, it had been a matter of survival: a steep dive was the only way to escape a cone of searchlights.

With just a few minutes to go before zero hour (0100), the Pathfinders were sizing up the dark city below them. As previously mentioned, the plan was to drop three different kinds of markers for the main force to aim at: yellow target indicators (TIs) to start with, at Z–3, along with flares to light up the city for the subsequent planes; red ones next, aimed visually, between Z–2 and zero hour; and green ones to back up the reds for the rest of the raid. In the event, things did not go quite according to plan. While the marking began exactly on time, led by a Lancaster of 83 Squadron, many of the first group were eight or nine minutes late. Without their flares to light the city, many of the next group did not drop their red TIs at all. Fortunately for the city centre, those that did fall were fairly spread out. There were four main groups: some fell in the Baaken dock area south of the river, near the Grasbrook gasworks, another group in the east of the city, between Wandsbeker Chaussee and Hasselbrook railway station, and two more salvos in the west, in Altona. ²⁷

For the few minutes before the bombs began to fall, the skies over Hamburg were lit by a spectacular firework display – a prelude to the coming bonfire – as the beautiful pyrotechnic candles cascaded out of each TI and floated gently to earth. The Germans called the TIs Tannenbäume– Christmas trees – a homely term that described their beauty, but not their terrible purpose.

As the bright lights drifted down the first Lancasters of the main force made their bombing runs. The aircraft were effectively in the hands of the bomb-aimers now. As the target was sighted, the navigators would hand over responsibility to the bomb-aimer, who would guide the pilot to the correct point directly over the red glow of the TIs. Leonard Bradfield remembers the run-in clearly:

It was a brilliant night. You could see the ground absolutely crystal clear. You could see the outline of the city, and you could also see where the markers had gone down … To bring her up in line directly over the target took some twenty seconds straight and level. Then we let the bombs go. We had the 4,000-pounder as usual, and we had four 1,000-pounders, one of which was on a delayed action. Then we had the ninety-four-pound thermite incendiary bombs. Owing to their light weight we had to drop them quite early in the sequence. But the 4,000-pounder was the master – you could really feel the ‘cookie’ go. I’m talking in terms of under half a minute from the first to last being dropped … We then had to fly another twenty seconds for our photo flash to fall so it could take a photograph of where our bombs landed. ²⁸

It was this brief period over the aiming point that was the most nerve-racking for most crews. A minute could seem like a lifetime when the crews were obliged to fly straight and level, a perfect target for the flak guns below. The bomb-aimer would direct the pilot by shouting above the drone of the engines: ‘Left, left … steady … bombs gone!’ The leap of the aircraft as the heavy 4,000-pound ‘cookie’ fell away was echoed by a leap of hearts into throats – and as soon as the photo flash had gone the pilot would veer away from the immediate danger area and head for the darkness beyond. But tonight, with the city’s defences in such disarray, even this most hazardous of times was relatively safe. As one pilot recalls: ‘I remember thinking, it’s going to be great from now on, for the rest of my tour! You could see other Lancs silhouetted against the fires all just going steadily on, whereas in the past people would have been weaving quite madly. Everyone seemed to have come to the same conclusion: from now on it was going to be easy.’ ²⁹

During the next hour, more than seven hundred planes would pass over the west of the city, and many pilots reported seeing the sky filled with planes. In such circumstances the danger of collision was very real, and many crews had to endure the horror of seeing bombers flying directly above them, bomb doors open, about to drop their load. Tonight, fortunately, no one was harmed by a fellow bomber – but one Stirling collided with a Ju88 night fighter as he dived to avoid a searchlight. Geoff Turner and his 75 Squadron crew managed to limp home, but the night fighter was almost certainly finished. It turned on its back and fell headlong towards Hamburg, to be recorded later as a ‘probable’ victory to the British crew. ³⁰

* * *

Between one and two o’clock in the morning of Sunday, 25 July, 2,300 tons of bombs were dropped on to Hamburg, a new and frightening world record for a single attack. A lot of the weight was made up of huge high-explosive bombs: 8,000-pound ‘blockbusters’ and 4,000-pound ‘cookies’, but it was undoubtedly the incendiaries that did most damage. The fires started by the first waves made it easier for the later waves to find their way to the target, and those in turn stoked the fires further. A total of 350,412 individual incendiary bombs fell in and around the city, starting countless fires – again, a new world record. ³¹

The official British intelligence report of the time announces such figures with a certain pride, which was certainly echoed in the hearts and minds of most of the crews who took part in the attack. Once they had dropped their bombs and turned away to the south of the city, they had the opportunity to see the results of their work. The comments they noted in their log books afterwards were almost always the same: ‘Good trip’, ‘A very good prang’, ‘Very nearly perfection’. Scores of crews in the latter stages of the attack reported seeing very large explosions in the docks. By the time the last Halifaxes of 6 Group had dropped their bombs, the whole of the west of the city had become ‘a mass of raging fires with black smoke rising to 19,000 feet’. Crews in the final wave reported the merging of all the separate fires into ‘one large conflagration spreading over the whole city’. It was so huge it could be seen by British Mosquitos flying on dummy attacks over Duisburg, 140 miles away. ³²

It is easy to begrudge these men their feeling of pride at the destruction they were wreaking, but it is foolish to be surprised by it. Their job was to wage war, and tonight they had done their job well. For many it was nothing new. They had seen similar scenes over Dortmund, Wuppertal, Cologne and Essen. They had seen the war from the other side too, in London, Coventry, Sheffield, Plymouth and many other cities across Britain. For most of the young men in the bombers, tonight was a logical extension of all that had gone before – the concept of ‘an eye for an eye’ expanded to the scale of whole nations. And we must remember that