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‘THE BEGINNING OF THE END’
GERMANY IN FLAMES
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On 9 November 1934 a Dresden schoolboy, writing an essay on aerial warfare, imagined what it would be like if in some future war the enemy decided to bomb the city. The sirens, he wrote, howled, and the people fled into their air-raid shelters. The bombs fell with a deafening noise, blowing in windows and destroying all the houses. ‘Vast flames rage over Dresden.’ A second wave of enemy planes came over, dropping gas bombs. Almost everyone in the bomb shelters was killed. Ashes and rubble were all that remained. The raid was a total catastrophe. But the boy did not gain high marks for his prescience. ‘It can’t get any worse!’ wrote his teacher on the essay in furious disbelief. ‘Stupid!’ ‘Evil! It’s not so simple to lay waste to Dresden! You write almost nothing about defences. The essay is crawling with errors.’
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Just over a decade later, the schoolboy was to be proved right in the most dramatic manner possible. Yet his teacher was not without a point either. From the very beginning of the Third Reich, in 1933, the regime had begun preparing defences against bombing. Air-raid wardens were appointed, warning sirens installed, and the population in urban centres forced to engage in repeated exercises and practice runs. Anti-aircraft batteries began to be constructed, in the belief that ground-to-air fire (‘flak’) would be decisive. However the construction of air-raid shelters and bomb-proof bunkers did not go forward with much vigour until the autumn of 1940, and, even then, shortages of labour and raw materials meant that it did not get very far. It was effectively abandoned two years later.
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When the war began, frequent alarms, very often false, caused disruption, discomfort and irritation, but, initially at least, damage inflicted by bombing was relatively light. As their military situation in France deteriorated in May 1940 the British decided to attack by selecting targets east of the Rhine: the seaport and industrial and trading centre of Hamburg, Germany’s second city, easily reachable across the North Sea, became a favourite target. The first attack on the city, on 17- 18 May 1940, was the first on any large German town, and it was followed by 69 further raids and 123 alarms to the end of the year. Hamburg’s inhabitants had to spend virtually every other night in bunkers and air-raid shelters during this period. But the damage done was relatively small: 125 deaths and 567 injuries. In 1941 and the first half of the following year, the raids continued, but at greater intervals: altogether, by the middle of July 1942, the city had suffered 137 attacks costing 1,431 lives and 4,657 injured. Just over 24,000 people had been made homeless in a city of 2 million. By this time, after a late start, the Hamburg authorities had reinforced most of the city’s cellars. In the areas near the River Elbe where the water-table was too high to allow them to be built it had erected solid bunkers above ground. Similar precautions were taken in other towns and cities across the Reich.
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But soon British bombers were ranging even further afield. Night-time air raids against Berlin in 1940-41 were neither very large-scale nor very destructive, but they were a nuisance, and they became so frequent that the inhabitants of the capital began to make light of them. People were officially advised to snatch some sleep in the late afternoon before the bombings started. The joke then ran that when someone came into the air-raid shelter and said ‘good morning’, this meant that they had indeed been sleeping. If someone arrived and said ‘good evening’, this meant they hadn’t. When a few arrived and said ‘Hail, Hitler!’, this meant they had always been asleep.
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Despite all the preparations, the rulers of the Third Reich, like their counterparts in the Soviet Union, did not set much store by large-scale, strategic bombing. Both used bombers tactically, either in support of ground forces or to prepare the way for them. The German raids on London and other cities in 1940 were intended above all to bring Britain to the conference table, and when they did not succeed, they were discontinued. The idea of destroying the enemy heartland by a persistent, long-term and large-scale bombing campaign was not entertained in Berlin. Only on the Eastern Front was anything like a campaign of this sort undertaken, but it had strictly limited military objectives and did not last for very long. In 1943-4 the German air force launched a strategic bombing offensive against Soviet industrial targets and communications. It scored some successes, most notably in the destruction of 43 US-built B-17 bombers and nearly a million tons of aviation fuel delivered to the Soviet Union and parked on an airfield at Poltava in June 1944, thus effectively eliminating the threat of American bombers attacking Germany from the east as well as from the west. But shortages of fuel and the switch of airplane production to fighters for the defence of Germany’s cities against bombing raids by the British and Americans prevented the offensive from being taken any further.
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Likewise, Stalin thought of bombing as useful mainly to help front-line troops on the ground. He did not develop a fleet of large-scale strategic bombers, and the destruction eventually wrought on German cities in the line of the Red Army’s advance in the last two years of the war came from British and American bombers, not Russian ones. But Stalin was indeed keen for the Western Allies to relieve the Red Army by developing a major bombing campaign against the German homeland.
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Fear of aerial bombardment had been widespread in Europe in the 1930s, especially after the destruction of Guernica by German and Italian bombers in the Spanish Civil War. Bombers could never attain precision in hitting targets, not least because they had to be big if they were to carry an adequate payload, and this made them slow and difficult to manoeuvre, so they had to fly as high as they could in order to avoid being hit by flak. This often took them above the clouds, which made identifying targets even more difficult. Daylight raids were virtually impossible because of the very heavy losses inflicted on the planes by fighters and ground defences. There were a few early in the war, but they were quickly abandoned. Night-bombing was far from easy, especially since all belligerent nations went to some lengths to enforce the ‘blackout’, masking or turning off public and private lighting in towns and cities so that enemy bombers could not see them. Often, too, bombers had to fly considerable distances to reach their targets, and the difficulty of navigation was another problem the crews had to overcome. The best that pilots could do was to steer their way towards where they thought their target was, and release their bombs in its general direction. While small dive-bombers like the Stuka could lend more precise tactical support to ground forces, they could only carry very limited payloads and so were useless for large-scale, strategic bombing. Thus in practice all major bombing raids were more or less indiscriminate; it simply was not possible to be precise. Almost from the very outset, therefore, strategic bombing served two purposes that it was impracticable in reality to disentangle: to destroy enemy military and industrial resources on the one hand, and to weaken enemy civilian morale on the other. In many raids in 1941 - all of them small by later standards - most of the bombs missed their intended targets. Only very large targets, in practice entire towns and cities, were likely to be hit by planes flying high at night, and this was the strategy that Churchill and the British leadership finally decided on late in 1941. To implement it they appointed Arthur Harris, an energetic and determined officer, to lead Bomber Command. Harris decided to focus on major German cities, where his bombers could be certain without looking too closely to find war-related industries and the houses of the people who manned them. In 1942, when ground fighting on the Continent and in North Africa did not seem to be going well for the British, the destruction wrought by Harris’s bombers on German cities gave a boost to British military and civilian morale. At the same time, however surprising it may seem, few British people saw in the bombing of Germany an opportunity for avenging the destruction of Coventry and the ‘Blitz’ on London.
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The British and Americans, unlike the Germans or the Russians, had already decided in the late 1930s that heavy bombers were the strategic weapon of the future. By 1942 British production of heavy bombers, notably the four-engined Avro Lancaster, first flown only a year before, and the Handley Page Halifax, introduced in 1940, was in full swing, augmenting lighter, two-engine models such as the Wellington, a staple of Bomber Command with over 11,000 manufactured altogether. When Harris took up office there were only sixty-nine heavy bombers at his disposal. By the end of the year there were nearly 2,000. They became the mainstay of British raids on Germany. Eventually more than 7,000 Lancasters and 6,000 Halifaxes were produced, replacing the less successful four-engined Stirling. They were joined from late 1942 onwards by American bombers based in UK airfields, in particular by the rugged B-17 Flying Fortress, of which more than 12,000 were produced, and the faster, lighter but more vulnerable Liberator, which was mass-produced on an enormous scale, with over 18,000 eventually coming off the production lines. Harris’s first demonstration of his new tactic of mass bombing raids on large urban targets was against L̈beck on the night of 28-9 March 1942. The city had no military or economic significance worth mentioning, but its old brick and wooden buildings made it a good subject for a demonstration of what bombing could achieve. 234 Wellington, Lancaster and Stirling bombers, flying low because L̈beck was virtually undefended and easily accessible from the sea, dropped large explosive bombs to break open buildings in the city, following them with incendiaries to set them on fire. 50 per cent of the town was destroyed; 1,425 buildings were effectively razed to the ground and 10,000 were damaged, nearly 2,000 severely. 320 people were killed and 785 wounded. Harris followed the raid up with further attacks on other small cities along the Baltic coast in April 1942, including the medieval town of Rostock.
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These raids provoked Hitler in April 1942 to announce what he called ‘terror raids’ on British targets, aiming to ‘produce the most painful effects on public life . . . within the framework of retribution’.
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After the best part of a year without any serious attacks on British cities, he ordered the German air force to launch a counter-campaign on similar British cities, known as the ‘Baedeker raids’ after a well-known series of tourist handbooks. These were carried out with only small numbers of aircraft - only thirty fighter-bombers were available for daytime raids, and 130 bombers for use during the hours of darkness - on small, more or less undefended historic towns. They caused little damage to the British war effort and achieved nothing of military significance.
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They were an entirely emotional response on Hitler’s part. There was no way that he could match the huge forces being assembled by ‘Bomber’ Harris. Yet despite the devastation caused by the raid on L̈beck, morale in the town did not seem to have been damaged. The day after the raid, many shops reopened with signs such as ‘Life goes on here!’
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Nor did the raids seem to cause outrage against the British. Luise Solmitz recorded the bombing raids impersonally in her diary, as if they were natural disasters or acts of God. ‘We are no longer in control of our fate, we are forced to allow ourselves to be driven by it and to take what comes without confidence or hope,’ she wrote resignedly on 8 September 1942.
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The destruction of the old red-brick north German Hanse town of L̈beck saddened her, but at the same time she also recorded the bombing of York and Norwich, ‘a terrible pity about all those Germanic cultural possessions . . . Suffering and annihilation everywhere’.
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The openness of L̈beck to attack was unusual. British night attacks on the Ruhr in 1940 had prompted the appointment of an air force general, Josef Kammhuber, to organize a national system of air-raid defences. By the end of the year he had set up a line of radar stations stretching from Paris to Denmark, backed by Me110 night-fighters directed by a central control room and supplemented by ground-based searchlights and anti-aircraft guns. Over 1,000 British bombers were lost in 1941 as a result. Matters only began to improve for the British in 1942 with the introduction of the Lancasters and the installation of a new radio navigation device that allowed them to stick together in formation, swamping the German defences. Harris began deploying ‘pathfinders’ in advance of the bomber fleets, to locate the targets and light them up with incendiaries. From early 1943 they were equipped with airborne radar and radio target-finders that helped them fly in poor visibility, though it was not until the following year that these were perfected. Harris put a bomb-aimer as a member of the crew in each plane so that the navigator could be left to concentrate on finding the way there and back. And from the middle of 1943, after a long delay due in part to the fear that the Germans might get the same idea, bombers were equipped with a device known as ‘Window’. This consisted of packets of strips of aluminium foil to drop out of the bomb-bays and confuse enemy radar. To counter these measures, the German air force developed its own aerial radar that enabled night-fighters to fly in groups, locate the enemy bombers and shoot them down. It moved large numbers of fighters to the west, leaving less than a third of the fighter force to confront the Red Army. Anti-aircraft batteries were manufactured on a large scale: by August 1944 there were 39,000 of them, and their nightly use absorbed a force of no fewer than a million gunners. German defences managed to knock out a substantial number of enemy bombers; the death rate amongst the men of Britain’s Bomber Command was as high as 50 per cent overall; more than 55,000 men were killed over the course of the war. Yet Hitler’s characteristic preference for attack over defence made him consistently favour retaliation by ordering fresh bombing raids over Britain and downgrading the production and deployment of fighter planes in defensive positions. And in any case, fighters found it took so long to climb up to a position where they could attack bombers flying at anything up to 30,000 feet that they were often unable to confront them until after they had dropped their payload.
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