31 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
...
[The above British account of the raid] shows that over twenty minutes
after the first release of Window the German searchlight batteries
were still ‘clear-headed.’ But the rate of Window-ing was increasing
as more bombers passed the
32 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
zero hour, at thirty—three minutes past midnight the first public
warning of imminent danger was sounded—not the usual Forewarning, but a
sudden series of twelve—second blasts on the city’s
sirens: Fliegeralarm, Full Alarm. For a full minute the sirens’
wailing echoed dis—synchronously across the city with its 1,700,000
inhabitants from Blankenese in the west to Wandsbek in the east,
from Langenhorn in the North to Harburg in the heart of the dockyard
area to the South.
The leading aircraft in the 791—strong main force of bombers
Were the twenty Blind Marker aircraft of the Pathfinder force, each nav-
igating by 9-2—cm H2S radar; their assigned task was to release
salvoes of yellow Target Indicators blindly, on the indications of
their radar screens alone. The T.I.’s were bomb—shaped containers
fabricated from sheet steel, each of which explosively ejected sixty
pyrotechnic candles, each burning at 25,000 candle—power, at an
altitude of two thousand feet; the distinctive flares would burn
fiercely in a 300-foot wide patch of brilliant, inextinguishable yellow
light on the ground. At the same time as setting these ‘primary
markers’ the Blind Markers had to release parachute flares over the city
area. Guided by the eight primary markers, eight more Pathfinder
crews, also equipped with H2S, were to attempt to identify the
actual aiming point—in the heart of the southern residential areas of
Hamburgs inner city—and to mark it visually with red ground—
burning T.I.’s.
These twenty—eight Pathfinder aircraft were thus the first aircraft to
arrive over Hamburg on the night of July 24-25. They were also the first
to release Window operationally during the war. The predicted con-
fusion of the German defences did not however immediately arise, as
an extract from the log—sheet of one of these blind Marker aircraft
shows: (The aircraft was a Lancaster from the veteran No. 83
Pathfinder squadron.)“’
12:28 a.m. HELIGOLAND to Starboard. Windows [released];
12:40 a.m. 028° CUXHAVEN 20 miles: H2S radar fix];
12:50 a.m. Violent evasive action; 338° HAMBURG 22-5;
12:50 a.m. Position ‘C’. See course for TARGET; coned by search-
lights [i.e. trapped by several searchlights after being located by
radar—predicted ‘Master’ searchlight]
This shows that over twenty minutes after the first release of
Window the German searchlight batteries were still ‘clear—headed.’
But the rate of Window—ing was increasing as more bombers passed the
Fire-Storm 33
75° East datum line, and although at one bundle per aircraft per
minute the metal foil was not being scattered as voluminously as
during later stages of the war, the increasing saturation of the air
space over the German Bight and Hamburg with clouds of these
‘tuned dipoles’ produced a cumulative effect on the ground
defences.
‘Ahead of us we could see Hamburg,’ wrote the pilot of another
Blind Marker aircraft of No 83 Squadron afterwards. ‘Every searchlight
in Germany seemed suddenly to have been switched on. Below us there
were stabs of flame as the guns started firing. I took an accurate
bearing on the target and passed it to the bomb aimer; from now on,
it would be his duty to guide us in. It was five minutes to zero. As we
approached, the incredible happened. The searchlights started
swinging all over the sky, completely without aim. The flak became
confused and wild. The radio monitors in our aircraft later reported
hearing frenzied German radio operators shouting that ‘millions of
bombers’ were coming. The night fighters waiting to be vectored on to
us could only gabble in fury as their own radar gear became useless.’
Hamburg was only ten minutes from the worst catastrophe in its
history. Within minutes the coastal radar station had ceased to
transmit data; until the bombers came within range of the flak—bat—
teries’ Wuerzburg—Dora radars, the only source of information was
visual and sound identification by the Observation Corps. ‘We
could hear excited voices coming from the radar cabin,’ recalls one
member of the crew of an eighty—eight millimetre flak—battery
located on the Harburg hills. ‘There was a wild display of flickers on
their cathode—ray tubes, clouding the whole screen. The Battery
Commander, First Lieutenant Eckhoff, telephoned at once to the
nearest battery to us. The Wuerzburg—Dora there had been put out of
action too.’ On telephoning the Flak Division’s operations room,
the battery commander was informed that every radar set in the
Hamburg area was out of action. To the British and Empire airmen
flying three and four miles above the now helpless gun crews it
seemed a miracle. Many had been frankly dubious of the claims
their commanding officers had made for Window at the briefings
that afternoon, but now their doubts were dispelled.
12:57-5 a.m. Marker bombs gone.
12:59 a.m. Over target; setting course for Position ‘D’.
The eight Visual Markers now attempted to sight and identify the
marking point; only a slight haze prevented otherwise perfect visibil-
34 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
ity but the visual marking fell short of perfect, one salvo of the red
T.I.’s falling two miles to the south—east, another one and a half miles
to the north—west, a third three and one quarter miles to the north—east,
and yet a fourth two and one half miles to the west in Altona. Large
though these margins of error may seem, it must be remembered
that they were being dropped from a level of some four miles above the
target. The main force of bombers, faced with only an ineffective
barrage of unaimed fire from the flak, were equal to the task of
bombing on these four concentrations of markers.
Of the 728 crews which subsequently claimed to have attacked,
no fewer than 306 were found from their night—photographs to have
placed their bomb loads within a three—mile radius of the aiming
point in Hamburg; the crews dropped 1,350 tons of high explosive
including many hundreds of ‘blockbusters’ which were concen-
trated in the early part of the attack to rip open the houses and
provide combustible material for the 932 tons of fire bombs carried by
the force. Hamburgs Police headquarters was gutted and the civil
defence control room was engulfed in fire. Operations were transferred
to the Security Police control room; the telephone service broke
down, but it was swiftly superseded by motorcycle despatch—riders.
This first raid of July 24-25 caused enormous fires. They had not
been extinguished even after twenty—four hours. The citizens of
Hamburg had accumulated large stocks of fuel for the winter in
their cellars, and when these stocks caught fire they could not easily be
quenched. ‘One single suburb,’ gasped Hitler at his mid—day conference
in East Prussia, ‘has lost eight hundred dead!’“
By the time that the All Clear sounded at one minute past three in
the morning, fifteen hundred people had been killed.
* * * * *
The sudden use of Window by the British caused pandemonium at
Luftwaffe headquarters. The Kammhuber Line was useless. In the
early hours of July 25 Goring telephoned Major Hajo Herrmann for the
second time in three weeks at the Mönchengladbach airfield and
told him that it had been ‘very bad’ in Hamburg; he asked whether at
least some of the new Night Fighting Experimental Kommando
could be thrown into action at once, as he anticipated further
attacks on Hamburg.
Major Herrmann promised to have at least twelve fighters air-
borne that night. On receiving Goring’s subsequent telegram of
confirmation, he understood the reasons for the pressure. The
Fire-Storm 35
night’s raid had devastated the Hamburg districts of Hoheluft,
Elrnsbüttel and Altona as well as the inner city. The conditions
would have been perfect for his ‘Wild Boar’ units over the city—the
enemy bombers would have been clearly silhouetted against the
burning streets below. Working in great haste Herrmann impro-
vised an orientation system for his fighter pilots, who had no
second crewman to act as observers or navigators and were accustomed
to day fighting conditions: he arranged for the Hamburg flak batter-
ies to fire triple parachute flares of a certain colour, the Hanover
batteries two flares, and similarly distinctive flare signals would be con-
stantly fired over the main cities to enable the fighter pilots to find their
way; later on, this system would be replaced by a more sophisticated
radio beacon network.
During the first night of the Battle, the British had lost only
twelve bombers to enemy action out of the 791 dispatched, thanks to
Window; the flak and the fighters claimed six each. As a direct con-
sequence of Major Herrmann’s new tactic, however, these losses
would now rise sharply. That night, July 25-26, Air Vice—marshal
Donald Bennett, to whose Pathfinder crews so much credit was due for
the success of the Battle of Hamburg, sent his light Mosquito force to
harass the city; the sudden Fliegemlarm sounding at thirty—five
minutes past midnight awakened fresh fears in the inhabitants. The
main attack however was on Essen, with a zero hour ten minutes
later. The Essen raid, Bennett afterwards explained, was ‘to fool the
German defences, but I sent a few Mosquitoes along to Hamburg to
ring the alarms and make the frightened people in Hamburg frightened
once again. On the 26th I did the same, just to keep their nerves on
edge.’—On the twenty—sixth two Mosquitoes dropped only two
high explosive bombs on the city; but they sent one and a half
million people to their shelters for another thirty—one minutes.
Even if no other intelligence betrayed to the Germans that it was
Harris’ intention to attack Hamburg night after night until it was
totally destroyed, this round the clock intimidation of the population
did. ‘The continuation of the first raid by daylight and nuisance
raids until the morning of the 27th disclosed the enemy’s inten-
tions,’ wrote S.S. Gruppenführer Kehrl in his report. As police chief,
Polizeipräsident, Kehrl was eX officio director of Hamburgs civil
defences. ‘When a fifth alert was sounded during the night of July
27-28 we were not surprised, but the weight of the raid exceeded all our
expectations?”
Harris had devised the bombers’ route that night with the intent of
throwing the enemy defenders off the scent. The main force and the
36 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
Pathfinder squadrons had headed out over the North Sea from
Cromer on two different routes, meeting at an appointed ren-
dezvous some forty—five miles west—north—west of Heligoland and
thereafter passing some miles south of Kiel naval base. Here the
whole force turned onto a southerly route across Hamburg; after
the attack the force divided again thirty miles south of the city
over the Lüneburg Heath; one section headed north—west out to sea,
and the other due west across country in an almost direct line for
Cromer.”
At five minutes to one the Pathfinders released the first of fifteen
salvoes of yellow Target Indicators over Hamburg. This time the
eight Visual Markers had been dispensed with, in recognition of
their aiming errors three nights before. The H2S radar marking had
proved far better. All twenty—five primary marker aircraft were to
drop their yellow T.I.’s blindly on the basis of H2S radar alone—
Hamburg’s intricate network of waterways showed up particularly
clearly on the radar screens. There were minor improvements on
the previous raid’s marking technique: during the previous main
force raid a seven—mile ‘creep—back’ had developed, with each new load
of green ‘backing—up’ T.I.’s only aggravating the error. On this
second main force raid, the ‘Backers—Up’ were instructed to over-
shoot the main yellow concentration of marker T.I.’s by about two
hundred yards to compensate for this main—force error. This time
the blind—laid yellow T.I.’s were well concentrated in the Billwarder
district, one of the most densely populated areas of Hamburg’s inner city.
By 2:40 a.m. when the All Clear sounded, a single one—minute
siren tone, the bombers had dropped a further 2,382 tons of bombs. ‘As
a result of the high—explosive bombs and “blockbusters” dropped,’ the
Police President described in his report, ‘large numbers of roofs
were stripped and the windows and doors were blasted open and
smashed; the Self Protection Service was driven for shelter into the
cellar.’ The Selbstschutz included voluntary civil defence personnel,
local air—raid wardens, etc. ‘The continually alternating hail of high-
explosive and fire-bornbs and “blockbusters” enabled the fires to
spread virtually unhindered.’
Since the bomb load included liquid incendiaries, fires spread
rapidly from the attics and upper floors downward into the lower
storeys. With 969 tons of incendiaries dropped, the proportion of
fire—bombs was much higher than in the first main—force raid.
Forty minutes after zero hour it was recognised that Germany’s first
fire—storm had begun, the tornado of rising hot air sucking in fresh
oxygen from all around, the resulting tempests reaching such hurricane
strengths that they tossed entire buildings, railroad boxcars, vehi-
Fire—Storm 37
cles, trees and people willy nilly into the searing inferno. Fires
flashed through entire streets in seconds. Few people who came
close enough to witness the infernal scene survived. It was a fiery
moloch which consumed all those who set eyes upon it. The heat was
so fierce that it melted glass, steel, and bricks; it incinerated
buildings, shelters, and their occupants without regard for sex,
age, or infirmity. 14
This second attack of the Battle of Hamburg had embraced eight
square miles of the city’s most heavily built—up and densely—populated
area, with a registered resident population of 427,637 inhabitants
swollen by thousands of evacuees from the area blitzed three nights
before. The area ravaged by this fire—storm included the four dis-
tricts of Rothenburgsort, Hammerbrook, Borgfelde and South
Hamm. In these four districts the fatality rates were appalling—
36-15 percent, 2o-1 percent, 16-o6 percent, and 37-65 percent of all
known inhabitants. 'When Dr Goebbels phoned his old friend Karl
Kaufmann, the Hamburg gauleiter screamed down the line: ‘We’ve got
fifteen thousand dead.’15 Kaufmann told Goring a few hours later
that twenty—siX thousand bodies, mostly women and children, had
been counted. The figure would eventually climb to nearly fifty
thousand. The photographs showed the streets littered with flame-
seared bodies, many of women lying tangled with their obligatory ‘air
raid suitcase’, sometimes stripped naked by the hurricane winds;
one picture showed a little boy hugging a fireman, both dead in
each other’s embrace.
It was plain that Bomber Command would return. The following
day Dr Goebbels appealed to all non—essential civilian personnel to
leave the city. Hamburg waited and sweltered—the noon temperature
was still over 84°F. Between dawn and dusk of July 28 nine hundred
thousand civilians streamed out of the centre of Hamburg. As night fell
only essential fire—fighting and defence personnel were left.
Two minutes before midnight, their grim expectation was
fulfilled as those of Hamburgs sirens which still had their voice and
power sounded the Full Alarm. The Pathfinders again adopted the pure
H2S blind marking which they had used with such catastrophic
success on the previous night; in spite of favourable weather
however the marking was less accurate—a measure of the renewed
threat presented by the German defences. Of the 777 Lancasters,
HalifaXes, Stirlings and Wellingtons despatched, only 699 crews
claimed to have attacked, dropping 2,382 tons of bombs; this was a
higher rate of abortive sorties than previously. Despite Window, the
loss rate was climbing again. Major Herrmann’s ‘wild boar’ pilots
38 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
accounted for eighteen of the twenty—eight bombers destroyed that
night. The Official History of the strategic air offensive states that ‘24
minutes after zero hour, which was at a quarter to one, an area of 24
square miles was dotted with burning incendiaries.’16 The police
chief Kehrl confirmed that this raid of July 29 was as devastating as the
raid of the twenty—seventh; the low loss of life in this third attack
could be attributed partly to Goebbels’ evacuation order.
During the four main—force attacks of the Battle of Hamburg
(there was a final raid delivered under adverse weather conditions on
the night of August 2-3) Sir Arthur Harris had dispatched 3,o95
sorties; the aircrews released 7,931 tons of bombs, nearly half of
them incendiaries, for a total casualty rate of 2-8 percent. The
Pathfinder Group had dispatched 472 sorties losing thirteen aircraft,
also 2.8 percent of its sorties.
As a direct result of this hard—fought Battle of Hamburg, as the
police chief reported on December 1, 1943, the known dead totalled
31,647, of which 15,8o2 had been identified—6,o72 men, 7,995
women and 1,735 children.” That could not be regarded as a realistic
final figure however as the centre of Hamburg was still in ruins. At the
end of 1945 the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey suggested a corrected
figure of 42,6oo killed and 37,ooo seriously injured.” After investigat-
ing the final totals of missing persons Hamburgs provincial bureau of
statistics, the Statistisches Landesamt, arrived at an estimate of
over fifty thousand dead in the 1943 Battle of Hamburg.
Whether the virtually complete destruction of a major German city
really achieved any positive effect on the course of the war is a moot
point. In fact the city’s heavy industries lost about forty—five days’ pro-
duction. Of the 524 major factories, 183 had been destroyed; of
Hamburgs smaller plants, numbering 9,o68, 4,118 were destroyed.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, generally regarded as hostile to the
British bombing effort, estimated that within five months Hamburg
had recovered eighty percent of its former productivity. The American
statisticians however ignored the argument which Sir Arthur Harris
would vigorously stress: what would have been the level of productivity
within those five months if Bomber Command had not thus
checked its expansion in its stride?
* * * * *
While undoubtedly the Battle of Hamburg had contributed to the
Casablanca Directive’s target of ‘the progressive destruction and
dislocation of the German economic and industrial system’ or not, by
Fire-Storm 39
the time that the final All Clear echoed across the now rain—soaked and
wrecked city in the early morning hours of August 3, 1943, the
British airmen had taken the lives of fifty thousand civilians, all of
whom in the years immediately preceding the war both belligerent
parties had earnestly sworn to protect.
‘The streets were littered with hundreds of corpses,’ S.S. Ober-
gruppenfuhrer Kehrl described, ‘Mothers with their children,
youths and elderly people; sometimes their bodies were charred and
burned, sometimes untouched; sometimes they were clothed,
sometimes naked, with a waXen pallor like tailors’ dummies. They lay
in every attitude, now quiet and composed, now hideously con-
torted, with the final struggle of death crying out in every line of
their faces.’ Even those who had reached the public air raid shelters had
not escaped; there scenes were little different, unusual only where
panic had broken out as the people realised the nature of the fate they
would never elude. ‘Here and there the positioning of the remains of
the bones and skulls betrayed how the occupants had fought each other
to escape from their buried prisons.’
When rescue teams finally cleared their way into the hermetically
sealed bunkers and shelters after several weeks, the heat generated
inside them had been so intense that nothing remained of their
occupants; a soft undulating layer of grey ash was left in one
bunker, from which the number of victims could only be estimated as
‘between 250 and 3oo’ by the doctors. Doctors were frequently
employed in these gruesome tasks of enumeration, as the German
Reich Statistical Office was up to January 31, 1945 most meticulous
about compiling its statistical tables and data. Pools of molten
metal, which had formerly been the pots, pans, and cooking utensils
taken into them, further testified to the uncommon temperatures in
these bunkers.
The task of recovering the bodies was allocated to the Sicherheits-
and Hilfsdienst (S.H.D.), the Rescue and Repair Service, which was
organised in five divisions: fire service, comprised of local fire-
brigades as distinct from the para—military national service;
Instandsetzungsdienst, the service which repaired fractured gas
mains, restored electricity and water supplies, and demolished dan-
gerous structures; the medical service, organised by the German
Red Cross; the decontamination service, for counter—measures
during allied gas—attacks, and finally the veterinary service for
tending wounded livestock and pets.
In Hamburg the S.H.D. cordoned off a two—and—a—half mile
square Dead Zone, embracing the whole fire—storm area; streets into
40 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
this area were sealed with barbed wire and dry masonry. This
measure was necessitated both by the undreamed of accumulation of
corpses inside this area, and by the belief that publicly visible recovery
operations would injure civilian morale. A special security formation
of police battalions was drafted in from outside Hamburg to maintain
law and order, to forestall mass breakouts by prisoners or foreign
labourers in the city, and to bolster civilian morale; according to the
Police President they were not needed, and were soon disbanded.
Most of the credit for the restoration of civilian morale in
Hamburg itself could be attributed to the prompt arrival of Dr
Goebbels from a week—end vacation with his wife in Dresden. He
was keen not only to organise on a large scale the relief measures
and rehabilitation of the homeless: he wanted to gather experience for
his own city, for he expected the R.A.F. soon to do unto the Reich
capital what it had now done to Hamburg.
Hitler’s armaments minister Albert Speer expressed the view
under interrogation that if six more German cities had been similarly
devastated, he could not have maintained arms production. Air
Vice—marshal Bennett afterwards went further: ‘Unhappily,’ he
wrote in his memoirs, ‘nobody seemed to realise that a great victory
had been won... Whatever the chances of success might have been, it
would have been certainly worth while to have tried to have weakened
German morale by some appropriate political action.’ But Harris
would point out that with the best luck in the world Bomber
Command could not repeat the Hamburg catastrophe on six major
cities at once: ‘To find new targets even half or a third the size of
Hamburg, we should have had to go as far afield as Dresden or
Breslau.’
The Battle of Hamburg, like the Dresden tragedy just eighteen
months later, was an operation executed with the precision and
determination characteristic of Bomber Command at its most puissant:
the commander had fulfilled his commission of briefly demoralising
the enemy; it was the tragedy of Casablanca, that the same political
leaders who had given the Command its directive had by their re-
quirement of ‘unconditional surrender’ ensured that the best that
the Command could accomplish on this front would not shorten
the war by one day.
A Second Fire—Storm
On the first night of the Battle of Hamburg the bombers’
loss rate had been the lowest for a year: twelve of the 791
bombers despatched had failed to return. On the second
night the losses had risen to seventeen; on the night of
July 29-30, 1943 thirty bombers had failed to return; on the fourth and
last night of the Battle, the loss rate was even higher.
After this comparative success of Major Herrmann’s new force,
now formally named the 3oth Fighter Division, General Kammhuber,
the Inspector of Night Fighters, called a conference of his senior
officers in Berlin. Dr Goebbels, as Berlin’s Reich Defence Commis-
sioner, was not alone in anticipating attempts to repeat the success of
the Battle of Hamburg in a renewed air offensive on Berlin; but the
blow did not follow as swiftly as either he or the senior air officers
expected. Hamburg had been principally a victim of the R.A.F.’s
new 9-2—centimetre H2S radar system; for Berlin, a city without any of
the large expanses of water which characterised the Hanseatic port, the
real Battle would have to await delivery to No 83 Squadron of the first
operational 3—centimetre H2S sets, with their greatly improved
definition. As in the case of Dresden in February 1945, the target
had to await the technology.
On the night of August 22-23 Sir Arthur Harris despatched a
force of 727 aircraft to attack targets in the Berlin Tempelhof area;
ninety—four of the Pathfinder aircraft carried the older version of
H2S. The same blind marking tactics, actually using where possible the
same Pathfinder crews as at Hamburg, were adopted. For the crews, the
Berlin raid was again remarkable for the comparative absence of
flak defences over their target: crews seldom noticed heavy flak
42 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
unless the shell bursts were within a few hundred feet of their aircraft,
but under debriefing after this raid many airmen reported that the
Germans had ‘put up scores of fighters’, and that there were ‘about
twenty belts of searchlights inside the capital and around it, co-
operating with the fighters.’
The raid had been timed to begin at 11:45 p.m., and, although
Window—ing had started at 1o:2o p.m., by 1o:38 p.m., before the first
waves of bombers had even crossed the Dutch coast, the German
ground controller’s running commentary was already suggesting
that Berlin was the target. At 11:o4 p.m., over half an hour before
zero hour, all night fighters were ordered to the capital. By 11:18 p.m.
aircraft were being shot down by the fighter defences all along the route
from Hanover into Berlin. The result that night was that Bomber
Command mourned its highest loss to date: fifty—six bombers did
not return, of which at least thirty—three had fallen to the German
fighter defences—no fewer than twenty of these latter over Berlin
itself, a most unwelcome innovation for the bomber crews, who
expected to be spared this hazard when over the heavy flak areas.
On August 31, the second night of this new Berlin series, the price
exacted by the fighters was even higher: no longer tied to Kammhuber’s
rigid system of fighter—boxes, they were summoned from as far
afield as Grove in Northern Denmark and Dijon in Central France.
Zero hour was at 11:3o p.m., and once again the bombers started
releasing bundles of Window some two hours previously, well out over
the North Sea, to confuse the early—warning radars. Forty—seven
bombers did not return to their bases, probably all of them the
victims of the German night fighters who claimed as many as thirty
successes over Berlin itself. During this raid, Major Herrmann
employed brilliant yellow and white fighter flares for the first time in
addition to relying on the glare of the batteries of searchlights to
illuminate the cloud layers; he and his growing band of freelance
fighters could see the British raiders clearly silhouetted against the
clouds. As the Official History later observed, with a perceptibly
puzzled tone, ‘the [flak] barrage at Berlin had been of only moderate
intensity.’ The successes of the fighter squadrons were not without
impact on Bomber Command’s aircrew morale: a thirty—mile creep-
back of bombs on this occasion testified to the unwillingness of a
large number of crews to ‘press on’ into the heart of the target area
where eight days before so many of their comrades had been lost.
This—for Bomber Command—disastrous little Berlin series
ended on September 3, 1943 with a curious example of routing,
overlooked by the Official Historians. The all—Lancaster bomber
A Second Fire-storm 43
stream was ordered to return from Berlin over neutral Sweden; this
provided the bomber crews with both a fabulous war—time glimpse of
cities with all their lights on by night and the comfort of knowing that
German night fighters could not pursue them; partly in conse-
quence of this device, only ten of the attacking force fell to German
fighter defences.
In the three raids, Sir Arthur Harris had despatched 1,719 sorties to
Berlin, of which only twenty—seven had definitely resulted in bombs
falling within three miles of the aiming point. In attained this
meagre success his Command had lost 123 bombers, an average loss
rate of 7-2 percent—higher than the level suggested by his Operational
Research experts as being the maximum permissible even over a
short term. He had no choice but to leave Berlin severely alone, at last
until improved tactics could be evolved to counter this unexpected
resurgence of the night—fighter threat.
As for Major Hajo Hermann, whose unit had saved perhaps half a
million lives in Berlin, he was decorated by the Fuhrer with the Oak
Leaves to his Knight’s Cross; while General Kammhuber was soon after
the last Berlin raid displaced to the minor post of commander—in—chief,
Luftflotte 5 in Norway; to his former post of Inspector of Night
Fighters came Major Hermann, a move which augured ill for any
future Battle of Berlin. The Inspector of Day Fighters was Adolf
Galland, whose name appears to be better known to air historians.
* * * * *
For Bomber Command it was obvious from the post—raid
debriefings that most of the aerial combats now were taking place over
the target area, where the concentration of bombers gave the night
fighters their richest pickings. The obvious solutions were to try to
deceive the German fighter controller as to the real target or targets for
the night, and to keep the raids as short as possible. From now on the
decoy raids and spoofs, executed sometimes by Air Vice—marshal
Bennett’s Light Night Striking Force and sometimes by entire
bomber groups became more frequent, their timing and routing
grew increasingly complex, and their Window deception techniques
and electronic countermeasures ever more elaborate, as Sir Arthur
Harris tried to throw the German fighter controllers off the scent.
By autumn 1943 the German Fighter Command had completed the
construction of five cavernous underground bunkers to house the
fighter control rooms for the old Kammhuber Line. At Stade, a few
miles north—west of Hamburg, the bunker housing the 2nd Fighter
44 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
Division for the German Bight was blasted out of a cliff face and
code—named Socrates; the bunker at Arnhem—Deelen housed the
3rd Fighter Division covering Holland and the Ruhr; the bunker at
Doberitz housed the 1st Fighter Division covering Berlin and
Central Germany, with other bunkers at Schleissheim—7th Fighter
Division, Southern Germany—and Metz. These control bunkers,
aptly dubbed ‘battle opera—houses’ by the Luftwaffe personnel who
worked there, served as clearing—houses for the information on
Harris’ intentions that arrived from every source including the
highly advanced German radio—monitoring units; but they were
also the system’s Achilles Heel, because it was from here that the
fighter controllers directed the airborne fighter formations by
running commentary into the bomber stream.
Soon after seven p.m. on October 22, 1943, the Duty Officers in these
western control bunkers were informed by telephone from the Paris
Headquarters of Funkhorchregiment West—the Radio Monitoring
Regiment—that the position was ‘Eagles five—hundred’. By monitoring
the enemy squadrons warming up their radios prior to take—off they
had calculated that there would be approximately five hundred
British aircraft operating that night. Shortly afterwards a further
report arrived, stating that the British Gee radio navigation chain
had been switched on for an attack on Germany.
The duty officers took up their stations: forty switches on each
control desk in each bunker provided instant communication to
every fighter plane in the Division. All officers and N.C.O.s took up
their positions on the terraces of the ‘opera house’. To the left of the
duty officer sat two officers in contact with the distant Würzburg-
Riesen early warning chain which would plot the bomber stream’s
path, Window—ing or not. One terrace lower down sat the ten Iäger-
leitofi‘iziere—fighter—control officers—already in direct radio
contact with the fighter stations, ready to hook up the fighter aircraft
to the senior controller as soon as the battle warmed up. At the foot of
the terrace was a giant translucent screen onto which Luftwaffe girls in
contact with distant radar posts projected blue and red arrows rep-
resenting German and British formations respectively at thirty
second intervals. In an office to one side sat twelve stenographers
taking down transcripts of all telephone messages and orders.
This highly ordered and ruthlessly rational conduct of the
defence of the Reich would have been better suited to earlier phases of
the war. By 1943 the whole system was already severely dislocated by the
development of Harris’ feint attacks and the decoy Mosquito raids; on
the night of October 22-23 however Harris was to toss a new and, as it
A Second Fire-storm 45
turned out‚ literally infuriating spanner into the works as the
already overburdened senior controller attempted to direct the
fighter force to the correct target in time.
At 7:40 p.m. the first intelligence arrived from the giant radar sta-
tions; their Mammut and Wassermann equipment, with a range of
some 19o miles, had detected enemy aircraft approaching over the
North Sea. The first red arrows lit up on the screen, approaching
the entrance of the Schelde. The Duty Officers ordered cockpit
readiness for the entire force of night—fighters. Everything now
depended on the senior controller determining which was the target for
the bombers.
Herein lay a problem however because on this night R.A.F.
Bomber Command was to introduce a new radio deception tech-
nique code named Corona} Air Commodore E B Addison, who was in
charge of radio jamming, had discovered that the powerful Corona
transmitter, originally intended to jam the VHF radio traffic
between German fighter controllers and their pilots, could be put to far
better use interpolating false ‘fighter control’ directions diverting
fighters to distant corners of the Reich or, more insidiously, warning of
fog closing the fighters’ home airfields so that they landed prematurely.
At Kingsdown, in Kent, the British government had established a
radio monitoring station where they had been recording these
running commentaries for some time. The Post Office had placed its
most high—powered VHF transmitters at Addison’s disposal and
now, with a handful of Jewish émigrés, Poles, and English linguists,
each carefully shadowing a different Iagerleitoffizier and studying
his idioms and dialect, their operation was ready to begin.
* * * *
The Bomber Command target for the night was Kassel, in the
province of Hesse.’ At 7:51 p.m. Hesse’s flak network issued the
order to ‘stand by’. Seven minutes later the network carried the first
warnings of ‘many enemy aircraft approaching the Schelde estuary over
a broad front’:
8:01 p.rn. Complete black—out. More waves of aircraft approaching
Schelde estuary. Observation Post ‘Dortmund’ reports: Many
enemy aircraft overhead. More waves of aircraft approaching
Schelde estuary.
8.o9 p.m. Flak: Stand by to open fire.
46 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
One minute later the flak at Kassel was reported ‘standing by’.
It is clear from the transcripts written up by the stenographers
that until the very last moment there was uncertainty about the
destination of the bombers. Sir Arthur Harris had arranged for the
actual main force attack on Kassel to be covered by a diversionary
attack on Frankfurt—on—Main, commencing five minutes before the
raid on Kassel, and by No 3 Groups mining operations (known as
Gardening’) off Terschelling; Harris had routed his bomber stream
with deliberate ambiguity, to support the possibility of a main force
attack on Frankfurt.
At 8:15 p.m. the Luftwaffe ordered Kassel’s balloon barrage sent aloft.
Two minutes later the city’s sirens sounded the Full Alarm.
8:2o p.m. 4th Flak Battery [Kassel]: Picking up radar echoes.
8:25 p.m. 4th Flak Battery: Radar echoes lost.
At 8:28 the observation posts in Holland announced that the last
waves of aircraft had passed overhead. To enable ‘wild boar’ fighter
operations the flak was ordered not to set their fuses above 18,ooo feet.
The flak gunners protested that their Würzburg equipment was
picking up radar echoes at an altitude of 19,000 feet. There was a
four—minute delay while this was considered, then the flak was given
permission to open fire on positively identified enemy bombers up to
23,000 feet; all Wuerzburg—Dora radar sets were equipped with I.F.F.
attachments to identify friend from foe. At that moment the
Observer Corps gave the signal that Sir Arthur Harris, and the
Corona team, had hoped for:
8:35 p.m. Most probable target tonight is Frankfurt—on—Main.
Knowing that the fighter controllers were dispatching their fighter air-
craft to Frankfurt the task facing the Kingsdown ‘shadow’ con-
trollers was to delay the fighters as far as possible, either by
instructing them to orbit particular beacons awaiting further orders or
by preying on their most potent fear, of all airfields suddenly being
‘socked in’ by bad weather. (On November 17, during an attack on Lud-
wigshafen, a Corona warning that all south German airfields were
becoming fogbound would achieve a dramatic collapse of the
defences as most of the fighters headed for the nearest airfield: only one
bomber was lost.)
On October 22-23, the night of the Kassel attack, weather conditions
were in fact very poor right up the eastern edge of the Ruhr, with ten-
A Second Fire-storm 47
tenths cloud up to twenty thousand feet, electrical storms and
severe icing which itself forced many aircraft to return without
bombing. At first bad luck dogged this first Corona deception
operation: most of the night fighters had assembled over beacons
north of the bomber route, to the south of which lay Frankfurt.
Convinced by the diversionary attack that Frankfurt was indeed the
main target the senior controller sent the night fighters streaming
south, and many stumbled across the tail end of the bomber stream
near Cologne, wreaking havoc on the slower Halifaxes near there.
Of the forty—two aircraft missing this night, thirty—two were probably
victims of the night fighters, twelve of them being from No 6
Group alone.
It certainly seemed to the Kassel defences at first that they were not
to be needed that night. At 8:38 p.m. they received the signal,
‘Bombs are falling on Frankfurt—on—Main.’ That city was no miles away.
But already the first Blind Marker aircraft, loaded only with yellow sky
marker flares, were beginning their bombing runs on Kassel. Most of
their flares overshot by between one—and—a—half and five miles,
although the flak would not open fire for two more minutes. Two flares
which were released over the aiming point at 8:4o p.m. were
however sufficient for the Visual Markers then arriving to drop
their red target indicators with great accuracy. By 8:43 p.m., zero
minus three minutes, there was a brilliant concentration of eighty red
T.I.’s within half a mile of the aiming point in the heart of Kassel, a
marking feat scarcely to be exceeded before the Dresden raids.
This was the technique which had produced the fire—storm in
Hamburg, and now it could hardly fail in Kassel. In Kassel, the city was
still wondering what was hitting it: Writing his report six weeks
later the police chief of Kassel would observe thickly that at 8:37 the
Kassel observation posts had reported bombs falling on Frankfurt
and that as a result of this deception ‘most of the German fighters were
ordered to that zone.’ Even as the first Pathfinder flares were being laid
in lanes across the city, the unfortunate police chief recalled, the sit-
uation in the air was still being termed ‘obscure? Then, and only
then, did the city flak begin firing. It was three minutes to zero
houh
8:42 p.m. Half of 4th Flak Battery has opened fire.
8:45 p.m. The whole 4th Flak Battery is firing. Range found optically
at 11,ooo feet.
A furious Jaegerleitoffizier ordered all fighters post—haste to Kassel.
48 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
He warned all his pilots that there was a rival ‘running commen-
tary’ emanating from the other side of the Channel, broadcasting
false directions to them, and he ordered them not to heed it; carefully
mimicking him, his Kingsdown double advised the pilots to pay no
attention to this obvious British trick. Understandably the Iäger-
leitoflîzier began swearing out loud; his ‘shadow’ coolly observed
that ‘the Englishman is now swearing,’ upon which the German
burst out: ‘It is not the Englishman who is swearing, it is me.’
As Dr Goebbels ruefully admitted in his Diary two weeks later it was
‘very humiliating to see how the enemy is leading us by the nose in the
air offensive; every month he introduces some new method, which it
takes us weeks and sometimes months to catch up with.’
* * * * *
In Kassel, with up to eight thousand people dying a horrifying
death during those two hours, there was little cause for levity.
Barely thirty minutes after the bombers’ zero hour Germany’s
second fire—storm had broken out. Harris’ bombers had dropped a total
of 1,823-7 tons of high explosive and fire—bombs on Kassel. No fewer
than 380 of the 444 bombers claiming to have attacked were later
plotted to have scored hits within three miles of the aiming point. The
night was dry and windless, as on the night of July 27-28, the
second attack on Hamburg—the ideal prerequisite for a fire—storm.
Ten minutes previously the city’s main telephone exchange had
been hit and wrecked, and although the bulk of the reinforcements
from other cities had already been summoned by the civil defence
operations room, the communications breakdown critically ham-
pered fire—fighting and rescue operations: when the individual fire-
fighting regiments and brigades from all over Hesse arrived at the city
outskirts, the ‘pilot’ offices of the Hitler Youth pilots there had no
contact with defence headquarters, and after waiting for orders for a
while the fire services went into action in disjointed operations in the
suburbs, while the main damage areas were not tended.
At 10:10 p.m.‚ eighty—five minutes after zero hour, the last
bombers were still over Kassel, a city illuminated now both by the
fire—storm and by the avenues of fighter flares above; it was undoubtedly
among these final waves of bombers that the fighters reaped their
richest harvest. Meanwhile the fire—brigades from the five—mile
radius arrived in Kassel between 1o:3o and 11:30 p.m.‚ and those from the
thirty—mile radius between 10:30 p.m. and 12:50 a.m. As the five
mobile civil defence detachments already promised did not appear
A Second Fire-storm 49
to be sufficient, the Police President appealed to Luftgaukom—
mando—Air Zone Command—VI in Münster for two more.
Anticipating the destruction of the telephone network, the Kassel
civil defence had organised a despatch—rider organisation for just
such an emergency; but by the end of the raid the headquarters was
blocked by blazing ruins, the motor—cycles had for the most part
been buried, and the streets were impassable; even those despatch-
riders who were able to penetrate the city’s side—streets had great
difficulty in clinging to their machines, so violent was the fire-
storm. Delays of over one—and—a—half hours were thus common in
transmitting the headquarters’ directions.
Since Professor Lindemann’s proposals of 1942, Bomber
Command’s night offensive had had as its foundation a series of
‘zoning’ maps issued by the Air Ministry Intelligence Directorate
dividing Germany’s cities into a central zone—the ancient Inner
City, often highly inflammable and densely built—up—with a
thickly—populated residential zone surrounding the central zone,
and a third outlying industrial zone. In Kassel, the two fire—storm
areas embraced the whole central zone, especially on the left bank of
the River Fulda. Costly though the attack had been to Bomber
Command, its effect on the target city was a total disaster. Of a pre—raid
total of 960 built—up acres, 615 had been devastated, including three
hundred acres of working—class residential areas.
A preliminary report on the damage caused by this raid, issued on
November 30, listed 26,702 homes destroyed with over 12o,ooo
people homeless; of the 55,000 homes in the city siXty—f1ve percent were
said to be uninhabitable. The police chief estimated on December 7
that ten thousand residential buildings were destroyed or damaged, and
repeated the estimate of siXty—f1ve percent of all homes being no
longer habitable; he put the number of homeless and bombed—out cit-
izens at 15o,ooo. Apparently unimpressed by these contemporary
estimates, the United States Bombing Survey estimated in late 1945 that
ninety—one thousand people had been rendered homeless that
night, while accepting that siXty—one percent of the residential
buildings had been destroyed.4 As Kassel’s pre—raid population was
228,000, one would be forgiven for accepting the police chief ’s estimate
rather than the American’s.
The raid on Kassel provided a classic illustration of the theories
underlying the area offensive. There was a chain—reaction of disloca-
5o APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
tion, which first paralysed the city’s public: utilities then stopped
even the undamaged factories: The city relied for electricity on the city
power station and on the Losse power station; the former was
wrecked, the latter halted by destruction of its coal—conveyer; the
city’s low—tension grid was also destroyed. With the loss of only
three gas—holders the undamaged gas works was not in itself unser—
viceable and the gas mains were not beyond repair. But without
electricity to drive the gas—works machinery, the whole Kassel
industrial area was deprived of both gas and power supplies.
Although the five water pumping stations were undamaged,
without electricity they too were paralysed. Without gas, water, or
power supplies Kassel’s industry was crippled.
The physical damage to the factories was considerable: nine prin-
cipal factories, including the Fieseler aircraft plant now manufac-
turing the Fi.1o3 flying bomb in Kassel—Waldau, were seriously
damaged; the dilapidations to the three Henschel locomotive and
tank plants amounted to forty—two million Reichsmarks.5 Speer, the
German armaments minister stated at his July 1945 interrogation
that although the tank assembly plants had already been slowed
down by shortages in components caused by bombing raids on
other cities, the October 1943 raid reduced production of the formi-
dable new Tiger tanks from 1oo—15o monthly to only fifty or sixty.
Although a fire—storm like that in Hamburg had broken out in
Kassel, the death—roll in this air raid, of certainly less than eight
thousand, was comparatively low. As usual, it had taken several
months to arrive at a final figure. The preliminary report of November
3o cited an interim figure of 5,599, of which 3,782 had been
identified; by the time of the Police President’s report six days later, the
figure had risen to 5,83o, of which 4,o12 were identifiable. At the end of
October 1944 the director of the Henschel works reported that the total
death—roll in Kassel was near eight thousand. Once again the United
States Strategic Bombing Survey was not satisfied with these official
figures and adopted a lower figure of 5,248. The Germans, it should be
added, kept records of all air raid losses with meticulous care—even
those of livestock: on the night of the Kassel raid, for example, the city
also mourned the deaths of ‘1o8 horses, sixty—eight pigs, twenty—six
cows, eight dogs, six goats, three calves, and one sheep’ as well as
numerous domestic pets either killed or put down.
In Hamburg the death—roll had approached 43,ooo and probably
more; the question arises, How did Kassel escape this fate? In the
first instance, the city was smaller than Hamburg. The answer also lay
in the extended measures of air raid precautions taken in the city. Since
A Second Fire-storm 51
the National Socialists’ election victory in 1933 they had pioneered a
thorough slum clearance programme and with remarkable foresight
the city authorities had endeavoured to leave the spaces thus cleared
free as escape routes for the civilian population in the event of a
major city fire; this was even before the war had begun. The escape
routes thus cleared and in some cases opened up by the demolition of
quite modern streets were clearly indicated by arrows, and the popu-
lace was drilled in mass evacuation by repeated exercises under real-
istically simulated air raid conditions.
One positive consequence of the flood—waters which had reached
Kassel after the breaching of the Eder dam by No 617 Squadron on the
night of May 16-17, 1943 as well as of the American daylight raids on
Kassel on July 28 and 3o had been a large—scale evacuation which
had left only twenty—five thousand indispensable residents in the
city centre. For those unable to reach private shelters, a concrete
bunker housing more than a thousand people had been erected at the
St Charles hospital; in fact, during the fire—storm of October 22 this
bunker had to be evacuated when the fires outside consumed so
much oxygen that its inhabitants were in danger of asphyxiation. In
spite of the total destruction of five hospitals and serious damage to six
more including a maternity—home, there was not one casualty
among either patients or staff: the immovable sick had been perma-
nently housed in underground tunnels, shelters, and bunkers, and the
ambulatory patients were invariably led to safety as soon as the Air
Danger 25 alert was privately signalled to hospitals from the civil
defence headquarters.
Like Hamburg, Kassel had been provided with an extensive inde-
pendent fire—hydrant system and the roofing timbers had been
chemically fire—proofed; this was undoubtedly a factor in preventing
the spread of the fire—storm. In addition all householders had been
required by the hastily passed Luftschutzgesetz—Air Raid Precau-
tions Act—of August 31, 1943 to provide grappling—hooks, ropes,
ladders, first—aid chests, beaters, fire—buckets, water—tubs, sand-
boxes, shovels, paper sand—bags, spades, and sledges—hammers or
axes and these were all to prove their worth on the night of October
22—23.6 Again with great foresight the dumps of sand had been located
ready for laying causeways of sand across roads: the asphalt was
expected to melt in the heat.
Since the Battle of Hamburg, conferences had been held on every
level between the city’s Nazi Party and civil defence leaders. Everybody
had been reminded that their primary duty was to organise the
timely evacuation and rescue of people trapped in air raid shelters. ...
52 APOCALYPSE 1945: The Destruction of Dresden
had proved a weak spot in the Hamburg defences: many elderly
bunker wardens had lost their nerve when they found themselves in the
midst of a fire—storm. In accordance with regulations, all Kassel
cinemas had to be closed each night by 7:30 p.m.‚ and it was the
practice to halt the State Theatre performances invariably once the Air
Danger 20 alert had been given. Thus although on the night of the fire-
storm every cinema and theatre in Kassel without exception had
been totally destroyed, the loss of life in them was small. Rescue
workers recovered 459 people alive from the ruins, the last person being
extricated alive on October 27, five days after the raid.
There was one unusual, even startling feature about the eight
thousand victims of the raid: As in Hamburg, a total of seventy
percent had been asphyxiated, the greater part of them by carbon-
monoxide fumes.7 Fifteen percent had met violent deaths. The
remainder could not be analysed, being completely carbonised. A
hindrance to recovery work was that the corpses recovered from the
basements were bloated from the heat and humidity and their limbs
were literally falling apart. The removal of the air raid victims was
effected in forty—five covered lorries operating under the orders of six
police officers with iron nerves and numbers of decontamination
troops clad in special gas—attack denims. Since there could be no
question of using individual coffins because of the danger of typhus
and other epidemics the victims were buried in six cemeteries, in
communal graves dug by excavators. To begin with, Italian prisoners
of war buried the cadavers in a single layer; later, owing to pressure on
space, the mass—graves were dug twelve inches deeper, so that the
bodies could be interred in two layers. Doctors worked around the
clock at each cemetery determining the cause of death of every
victim. Every day at six p.m. a senior civil defence doctor reported the
numbers of buried and unburied casualties at each cemetery, and
the numbers of corpses still waiting on the open streets to be trans-
ported to the cemeteries. Sixteen corpse tally—men were placed at
this doctor’s disposal by the medical arm of the S.H.D.
The city authorities organised a Missing Persons Bureau, and this
employed within a few days 150 t0 200 staff. The police chief
expressed concern in his report at the numbers killed by asphyxiation,
although for the most part they had suffered a peaceful death, ‘slipping
into unconsciousness and finally succumbing without a struggle to
death.’ This was, he suggested, the inevitable consequence of the
ethos which had been dinned into the public during the first three
years of the war—that the safest place in an air raid was in an air—raid
shelter. ...
Poster Comment:
Pages 31-52. Excerpts from chapters 3 and 4, "A Firestorm," and "A Second Firestorm." From the 2005 PDF edition. Apologies for the poor quality of the text. Downloading the PDF is free.