Bombing of Hamburg in World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bombing of Hamburg in World War II reached its most devastating expression in the last week of July 1943, when a campaign code-named Operation Gomorrah killed an estimated 34,000 people, wounded 180,000 more, and destroyed 60% of the city's houses. The name was drawn directly from the Bible, from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It was, at that moment, the heaviest assault in the history of aerial warfare. What made Hamburg so vulnerable? How did the combined forces of the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces turn a city into a self-sustaining tornado of fire 460 metres tall? And what did that inferno ultimately cost, not just Hamburg, but the German war machine itself?

• 2. Why Hamburg

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  Hamburg was Germany's second-largest city, and to RAF planners, its vulnerability was rated as "outstanding". The city's shipbuilding industry, including the Blohm and Voss yards that produced U-boats, made it a priority target for the Ministry of Economic Warfare. Beyond the shipyards, Hamburg contained more industrial targets of interest to British strategists than most other German cities. Its position on a prominent river and close to the coast made it comparatively easy for navigators to locate. The relatively short flight from British bomber bases meant aircraft spent less time exposed to anti-aircraft fire and fighter interceptions. Oil refineries in the Hamburg-Harburg area added to the list of strategic attractions. Planners also noted that Hamburg's construction patterns made it especially susceptible to incendiary attack, a judgment confirmed by the research unit RE8, which had been set up in November 1941 to study exactly how German buildings burned.

• 3. The Science of Burning

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  RE8 examined the details of how German houses were constructed and ran tests on scale models to calculate how effective an incendiary attack would be. The optimum ratio of high-explosive bombs to incendiaries was worked out with precision. High-explosive bombs had a specific role: they blew out windows and made firefighting dangerous. Delayed-action fuses in the high explosives were included to further suppress any attempt to bring fires under control. The quantity of incendiaries had to be high enough to overwhelm firefighting capacity entirely, so that a conflagration could take hold before it could be stopped. American expertise was added to this British foundation. US aircraft also carried a carefully considered mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs, despite a popular belief to the contrary. Large quantities of US-made oil-based incendiaries went into service with the 8th Bomber Command shortly before the Hamburg raid, preferred by the Americans over the 4 lb magnesium-cased thermite bomb used by the British. The effectiveness of Operation Gomorrah owed far more to this accumulated research than to any accidental or unusual circumstances.

• 4. Window and the Pathfinders

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  On the night of 24-the 25th of July 1943, between 21:45 and 23:00, 791 bombers took off from their airfields. Before the main force arrived over Hamburg, the RAF used Window for the first time in any operation. Window was an early form of chaff: clouds of aluminium foil strips dropped by the Pathfinder aircraft and the initial bomber stream, designed to flood German radar screens with false returns. The result was that German radar-directed defences were effectively blinded. The Pathfinder Force aircraft, which normally kept radio silence, also broke protocol to report the winds they encountered; that information was processed and relayed to navigators in the bomber stream. No. 35 Squadron led the target marking, using H2S radar to drop yellow target indicators and flares onto the city. The first bombs fell at 01:02; the main bombing ran in six waves until 01:50. Thanks to Window, only 12 aircraft were lost that night, 1.5% of the force. Without it, losses on previous operations at comparable scale had run as high as 7% or more.

• 5. The Firestorm

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  On the night of 27-the 28th of July, 787 RAF aircraft set out for Hamburg: 74 Vickers Wellingtons, 116 Short Stirlings, 244 Handley Page Halifaxes, and 353 Avro Lancasters. The aiming points were the dense working-class housing districts of Billwerder, Borgfelde, Hamm, Hammerbrook, Hohenfelde, and Rothenburgsort. Several factors converged that night. There had been no rain for some time. The bombing was tightly concentrated in one area. Blockbuster bombs used early in the raid suppressed firefighting, and the firemen recalled from Hanover to reinforce Hamburg were unavailable to respond. The fires merged and fed one another until they generated their own weather: winds of up to 240 km/h, temperatures reaching 800 degrees Celsius, rising to altitudes exceeding 1,000 feet. Asphalt streets appeared to burst into flame; the burning was in fact phosphorus from the fire bombs, but the visual effect was the same. Fuel oil from damaged ships, barges, and storage tanks spilled into canals and the harbour and ignited as well. Within 30 minutes of the firestorm's start, 4 square miles of the city's centre were ablaze. An estimated 18,474 people died that night, many of them sheltering in cellars and air raid rooms where the firestorm consumed the oxygen above and carbon monoxide from the fires below poisoned those who had sought safety underground. The tornadic fire incinerated more than 8 square miles of the city.

• 6. Shock and Consequences

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  In the first week after the raids, about one million people evacuated Hamburg. Two-thirds of the city's population, approximately 1,200,000 people, fled in the aftermath of the firestorm night alone. Sixty-one percent of the housing stock was destroyed or damaged. The city's labour force shrank by ten percent. Hamburg never recovered to full industrial production, except in essential armaments where maximum effort was made. Of 524 large factories in the city, 183 were destroyed; of 9,068 smaller factories, 4,118 were lost. Albert Speer, the German armaments minister, said in a 1977 interview that he had warned in a meeting at the Air Ministry that if the Allies repeated a similar success against four or five other German cities, Germany would collapse. Documents show that Nazi officials were thoroughly alarmed. Hitler reportedly stated that further raids of similar weight would force Germany out of the war, according to later Allied interrogations. By August 1943-45 percent of all German fighters had been pulled back to the home front, and heavy anti-aircraft guns in Germany had been increased by over 25 percent. Anti-aircraft units in Germany would eventually consume 25 percent of all German ammunition. Hamburg was hit by air raids another 69 times before the end of World War II.

• 7. Press, Memory, and Reckoning

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  Both The Times of London and The New York Times ran stories on the 26th of July 1943, a day before the firestorm raid, emphasising the coordinated British-American nature of the campaign. As the scale of the destruction became clear, military analyst George Fielding Eliot was writing at length about Hamburg in his syndicated column by the 3rd of August 1943. A United Press story on the 9th of August quoted a Swiss merchant's account describing what had happened as a "hell released" by a "devil's concert" amounting to "Hamburg's ceaseless, inescapable destruction on a scale that defies the imagination." Early death-toll estimates ranged widely. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, publicly released on the 30th of October 1945, cited German estimates of 60,000-100,000 deaths. The most accepted single figure now is 37,000, with a range generally between 34,000 from police records and 40,000 commonly used in Germany before the end of the war. By the 1st of December 1943, there were 31,647 confirmed dead, but of these only 15,802 were based on the identification of a body. In some cases, the number of people who perished in converted cellar shelters could only be estimated from the quantity of ash left on the floor. Those who died represented approximately 2.4% of Hamburg's total population at the time. The moral weight of what happened in Hamburg reverberated for years; when Senator Brien McMahon argued against the hydrogen bomb in the 1949-50 US government debate, he cited the Hamburg raids and asked what ethical distinction existed between them and atomic weapons.

• 8. What Hamburg Left Behind

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  The quarter of Hammerbrook, where mostly port workers had lived, was rebuilt after the war as a commercial area rather than housing. The adjoining quarter of Rothenburgsort shared the same fate; only a small area of housing was rebuilt there. The underground rail line connecting both areas to the central station was not rebuilt at all. The hills of Oejendorfer Park in Hamburg are formed from the debris of destroyed houses. In January 1946, Major Cortez F. Enloe, a surgeon who worked on the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, stated that the fire effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki "were not nearly as bad as the effects of the R.A.F. raids on Hamburg on the 27th of July 1943." The ruins of the Nikolaikirche, largely destroyed during the bombing, were preserved as a memorial against war; the spire survived. Many houses rebuilt after the war carry a memorial plaque reading "Destroyed 1943 - Rebuilt" followed by the year of reconstruction. The victims were buried in mass graves at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery, at the centre of which stands a memorial by sculptor Gerhard Marcks titled "Passage over the Styx", depicting Charon ferrying a young couple, a mother with her child, a man, and a person in despair across the river of the dead.