Read All Hell Let Loose Online
Authors: Max Hastings
The moral effect of the USAAF’s daylight raids was immense: the German people were appalled to witness huge formations of enemy planes, their condensation trails searing the high air, parading with impunity over their homeland. ‘The white stripes moved slowly along the edge of the sky,’ wrote an onlooker as bomb groups of Eighth Air Force flew overhead, ‘calmly, on a straight course, unhurried. They came closer. When our eyes had got used to the bright lights we saw, bathed in the sunlight, the bright dots at the tips of the stripes; in neat squadrons they swept past – one, after a couple of minutes another, then a third, a fourth, a fifth … People alongside us started counting the tiny silver dots. They had already got to four hundred. But there was still no end to be seen.’
The varied weights of Allied attack fell upon 158 German cities. Braunschweig, a typical example, was the target of twelve raids which destroyed one-third of its buildings and killed 2,905 people. The steel centre of Essen experienced 635 ‘enemy aircraft approaching’ warnings between September 1939 and December 1943, followed by a further 198 warnings in the ensuing nine months. Each one obliged Essen’s weary citizens to take refuge in their shelters and bunkers for hours. Germany’s rural population was subjected to deliberate air attacks only in 1945, but nowhere was wholly safe: on the night of 17 January 1943 a single stray bomb fell on the little rural community of Neuplotzen in Brandenburg, west of Berlin, killing eight people. A cross was erected near their graves, engraved with the words: ‘They were torn from the midst of daily life by a spiteful death. Faith in victory conquers distress.’
As destruction mounted, so too did Nazi malevolence towards the Allied fliers responsible: Hitler’s secretary and intimate Martin Bormann circularised local authorities on 30 May 1944, ordering that no citizen should be punished for assaulting or killing downed enemy aircrew. There were around four hundred recorded incidents of British and American airmen being killed out of hand after parachuting or crashing. Fighter-bomber pilots, who strafed at low level in the last phase of the war, incurred special hatred. Among recorded examples, on 24 March 1944 four aircrew were killed in Bochum; on 26 August seven American airmen were killed in Rüsselsheim; on 13 December three RAF men were beaten to death by an enraged crowd in Essen. In February 1945, a member of a factory fire brigade who voiced strong protests about the maltreatment of captured Allied airmen was shot by the Gestapo.
Germany’s city-dwellers were obliged to spend up to half of each twenty-four hours in cellars and shelters. Nazi officials’ exploitation of privileged access to the best-protected refuges caused widespread resentment. In a public shelter in Bochum, party members were reported to have ‘made themselves comfortable with a few crates of beer’ while less fortunate citizens were exposed to the fury of bombardment. Hitler devoted vast resources to his personal safety: 28,000 workers and a million cubic metres of concrete – more than the weight of materials employed throughout 1943–44 on all Germany’s public shelters – were used to construct his East Prussian headquarters and Berlin bunker. A twenty-two-year-old Luftwaffe woman auxiliary described her disgust about the experience of a night in a Krefeld public bunker in November 1944:
At the front of the room men and women of all ages were knocking back schnapps … Thick clouds of tobacco smoke make sleep impossible. From one corner there came a jumble of noise of women shrieking and men mumbling drunkenly … Children and old people lay asleep among the adults, wrapped in woollen blankets and tattered rags, on wooden plank beds or in chairs. Everywhere there were slumped, exhausted bodies and haggard faces … a terrible fug of the smell of dirty underclothes, sweat and stale air almost took your breath away. A long way away a child was quietly weeping, while from the other side there came the sound of snoring and groaning.
Savage penalties were imposed on air-raid looters: on 5 March 1943 Kasimir Petrolinas, a sixty-nine-year-old Lithuanian, was caught by a policeman taking three damaged metal bowls, value one Reichsmark, from rubble in Essen. After a special court convicted him, within hours he was shot by firing squad. In March 1944 an eighteen-year-old named Ilse Mitze was charged with stealing eight vests, five pairs of knickers and thirteen pairs of stockings following an October 1943 raid on Hagen. In her defence, it was said that she had earlier helped to dig out victims. Her employer admitted that she was ‘difficult’ and ‘had a sweet tooth’, but added that she was ‘industrious and respectable’. Hagen’s medical officer, giving evidence, dismissed her as ‘a stupid, impudent and mendacious psychopath’. She was condemned to death, a sentence which caused even the local security authorities to protest. Mitze was nonetheless guillotined in Dortmund in May, and her fate proclaimed on wall posters to deter others.
The inhabitants of Germany’s cities experienced a scale of terror and devastation far beyond anything the Luftwaffe inflicted on Britain in 1940–41: a successful bomber attack unleashed a vision of hell. Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg wrote from Hamburg during its July 1943 firestorm: ‘For two whole hours this ear-splitting terror goes on and all you can see is fire. No one speaks. Tense faces wait for the worst at every gargantuan explosion. Heads go down automatically whenever there is a crash, and features are trapped in horror.’
The grotesqueries of destruction were boundless. Ursula Gebel wrote of a November 1943 attack on Berlin, during which many bombs fell on the city zoo. ‘That afternoon … I had been at the elephant enclosure and had seen the six females and one juvenile doing tricks with their keeper. That same night, all seven were burnt alive … The hippopotamus bull survived in his basin, [but] all the bears, polar bears, camels, ostriches, birds of prey and other birds were burnt. The tanks in the aquarium all ran dry; the crocodiles escaped, but like the snakes they froze in the cold November air. All that survived in the zoo was the bull elephant named Siam, the bull hippo and a few apes.’
Martha Gros lived in Darmstadt, near Frankfurt. On the night of 12 September 1944, this large industrial town suffered an attack by Bomber Command’s 5 Group which killed at least 9,000 people. ‘We stood in the farthest corner of the shelter,’ she recounted:
There was Hauptmann R. in full uniform, me, Fräulein H and G, holding each other’s hands and listening to [the planes] zooming over us. One of the first explosions was close. My heart fluttered, there was a fearful crash, the walls shook. We heard cracking noises, then a collapse and hissing flames. Plaster began to fall on us, and we expected the ceiling to collapse. The lights had failed. About thirty seconds later there was a second terrible explosion, the door blew open and I saw, bathed in bright light, the staircase above collapsing and a river of fire pouring downwards. The safety curtains were burning.
I shouted ‘Let’s get out,’ but Hauptmann R. grabbed me: ‘Stay here, they’re still over us.’ At that moment the house opposite was hit. A tongue of flame, about five metres long, whipped towards us, cupboards and other furniture burst open and fell on us. A terrible pressure forced us against the wall. Now R. shouted: ‘Get out and hold hands.’ By using all his strength he dragged me out from under the wooden wreckage. I dropped my cash box and pulled Miss H with me, and she grabbed Mr G. We climbed through the hole leading to the back. Our house was burning. I heard the ceilings collapse, watched my beds go up in flames. In the midst of the garden it was incredibly hot and there was so much smoke that we all knelt on the ground, holding our heads as low as possible, and occasionally scooping up earth and holding it against our hot faces.
In cellars and shelters beneath a nearby hospital, under battery emergency lighting, sheets were soaked in salad oil to ease the pain of hideously burned casualties, most of whom died. Water was cut off. A stench of roasted flesh filled the air. Doctors operated hour after hour, far beyond exhaustion. The corpses of some of the dead appeared unmarked – they had succumbed to asphyxiation or internal injuries inflicted by blast. Many people suffered eye damage from acrid fumes or blazing fragments whirling through the air. Ottilie Bell described a near-miss: ‘There was a crash, the lights went out, the radio went dead. We all fell on our knees, mouths wide open. My sister-in-law was praying loudly for our lives. Our puppy, barely six weeks old, started barking with terror.’
Housewife Grete Siegel said: ‘We were all petrified … Old women leaned against their garden walls in nightgowns and caps, shivering with terror and cold. Those who had been burned had blisters the size of fists on their faces, necks, everywhere. One woman had strips of skin hanging from her face … I glimpsed a charred corpse, about sixty centimetres long, lying on its face. That’s how all of them were … In the
Palaisgarten
we saw countless bodies, nearly all of them naked: one had only a sock on, others just suspender belts or a strip of shirt; there was a young blonde girl, who looked as if she was smiling.’ In cellars, dead victims of suffocation sat like ghosts, wrapped in blankets and with cloths tied in front of their faces: ‘The stench was horrific.’ When morning came on 13 September, in Martha Gros’s words, ‘there was a deathly silence in the town, ghostly and chilling. It was even more unreal than the previous night. Not a bird, not a green tree, no people, nothing but corpses.’ Ottilie Bell said, ‘All one could see were smouldering ruins. Not a single house left standing in our thousand-metre-long street.’
Between 1943 and 1945, such scenes were repeated day after day, night after night, in Germany’s cities. Beyond the sufferings of the civilians, the morale of their menfolk on distant battlefields suffered grievously from hearing the tidings from home – and eventually from seeing the destruction for themselves. ‘What a homecoming it was!’ wrote a German soldier who returned from the Russian front in 1944. ‘We had heard, of course, about the Allied air attacks on the German cities. But what we saw from our [train] windows was far beyond what we had expected. It shocked us to the very core of our being. Was this what we had been fighting for in the east? … The faces of the civilians were grey and tired, and in some of them we could even see resentment, as if it was our fault that their homes had been destroyed and so many of their dear ones burnt to cinders.’ Italy was not spared. Lt. Pietro Ostellino wrote home from North Africa: ‘I heard today that enemy aircraft have once more bombed our great and beautiful Turin … The bombing of an open city is horrible. When aircraft vent their fury on us in the front line, so be it. We are soldiers and must bear the consequences of war. But for the defenceless civilians it is an act of sub-human cruelty and savagery.’
In 1944–45, the Anglo-American bomber offensive became the supreme expression of the two nations’ industrial might and technological prowess. Much of eastern and southern England was transformed into a chequer-board of air bases overlaid on farmland, ringed by concertina wire, and variously designated for training, transport, fighters or bombers. There were 110 USAAF and RAF airfields in Norfolk alone, each occupying six hundred acres of flatland; a Bomber Command station was manned by some 2,500 ground personnel, around four hundred of them women, and a revolving cast of 250 aircrew. This was war conducted by timetable, in accordance with a deadly daily routine sustained for years.
In the last months, USAAF and RAF losses over Europe fell steeply, but operational flying never became a safe activity. Alan Gamble’s crew, a characteristic national mix of the period – Australian pilot, American tail-gunner, Scots navigator and mid-upper gunner, the rest English – began operations in February 1945 eager to be ‘in at the finish … We hoped to make a name for ourselves.’ All had completed earlier tours with Bomber Command. On 7 February, they took off with a force of a hundred Lancasters for a daylight attack on an oil refinery at Wanne-Eickel. Crossing the French coast, they saw ahead of them an angry black cloud, and climbed to maximum altitude in an attempt to avoid it. Instead, the plane began to ice up dramatically. It was soon ‘waffling about like a drunken duck’, in Gamble’s words.
They pressed on, but after a debate on the intercom decided to make for nearby Krefeld, in the Ruhr. The plane was at 8,500 feet and they had just released their bombs when there was a violent lurch as the starboard wing began to buckle ‘as if it was going to wrap itself around us’. The Lancaster rolled over and began to spin. ‘Prepare to abandon aircraft!’ called Geoff, the pilot, as he struggled to regain stability. Gamble, convinced of imminent death, thought, ‘Dear God, this is it – I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.’ Suddenly, the plane momentarily righted itself. The crew seized parachutes and one by one leapt from the forward hatch. Gamble was alarmed to find himself descending towards a turbulent river, but managed to steer away onto land. His crew was unusually lucky: all landed alive, and survived the ensuing three months as prisoners.
Until the end, cities were pounded mercilessly. A woman in Braunschweig wrote on 9 March 1945: ‘The planes are over Berlin every day, sometimes twice a day. The poor, poor people. How do they stand such suffering? Everyone is totally worn out.’ A Berliner, Karl Deutmann, wrote of one USAAF attack: ‘We heard, behind the metre-thick walls of our bunker and for more than an hour, nothing but the awful rumbling and thunder of the carpet of falling bombs, with the lights flickering and sometimes almost going out … When we left the bunker the sun had disappeared, the sky darkened with clouds. Fed by numberless small and big fires, a vast sea of smoke hung over the whole of the inner city … In the Neuburgerstrasse … the girls’ trades school had been hit; hundreds of girls had been sheltering in the cellar. Later the parents were standing in front of the shattered bodies, mangled and stripped naked by blast, no longer able to recognise their own daughters.’ In Hagen a diarist wrote on 15 March 1945: ‘Fear and panic rule among the public. There is no public building left in the town, no business, and hardly any street. Only mountains of rubble and debris. I am churned up to the depths of my being and cannot describe all the horror. The air is filled with an eerie hissing and roaring. I stand around with others, baffled and not knowing what to do.’