The Baedeker raids

On the night of 23/24 April 1942 – St George’s Day, the feast of England’s patron saint – German bombers attacked Exeter, an old cathedral city and the county town of Devon. It was the first of a series of raids that the Luftwaffe carried out on the orders of Adolf Hitler in reprisal for the British bombing of Lübeck. In the week up to 30 April German aircraft attacked Exeter twice, Bath twice, Norwich twice and York once. The targets were not ports or factories but small, poorly defended cities full of historic buildings. The British called these attacks the Baedeker raids (Baedeker Blitz), after the German guidebooks from which – as an official of the German Foreign Ministry boasted in Berlin – the Luftwaffe was supposedly choosing its targets.

Popular war chronologies record under 4 April that the Germans were “planning Baedeker raids” on tourist and historic sites in Britain, under 23 April the start of the raids, and under 29 April the attacks on Norwich and York. The sources, however, point to no decision taken on 4 April. What is documented is Hitler’s order of 14 April 1942, and the name “Baedeker raids” arose only on 24 April, after the first attack on Exeter. Moreover, the name was coined not by Luftwaffe planners but by propaganda – and against the wishes of the Propaganda Minister.

Reprisal for Lübeck

By the spring of 1942 the German air offensive against Britain had for almost a year been practically non-existent. The Blitz, the nine-month campaign of night raids on London and the industrial cities, had ended in May 1941, when most of the bombers were moved east before the attack on the Soviet Union. In the west there remained only Luftflotte 3 under Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, based in France and occupied mainly with the war on shipping, minelaying and occasional attacks on port cities. Meanwhile RAF Bomber Command, under its new commander, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, had turned to area raids on whole cities. On the night of 28/29 March 1942 it burned out the medieval centre of Lübeck, and at the beginning of April it attacked Cologne and Hamburg.

The destruction of Lübeck shook the German leadership. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the damage was “really enormous” and that if the English kept up such raids for several weeks, they might demoralise the population. Hitler demanded a response. On 14 April 1942 the High Command of the Wehrmacht passed on to the Luftwaffe his order that the air war against England was to be given “a more aggressive character”. In selecting targets, priority was to go to those whose destruction would strike hardest at the life of the civilian population. Alongside attacks on ports and industry, “terror attacks of a retaliatory nature” (Vergeltungsangriffe) were to be made on towns other than London. At the same time aerial minelaying was curtailed to free aircraft for bombing. The order said nothing about historic monuments or guidebooks. It spoke of terror directed at the population.

The task fell to Luftflotte 3 and, within it, to IX Air Corps (IX. Fliegerkorps). The forces were modest. Their core was the bomber wing KG 2, flying the new Dornier Do 217, together with units converted from naval aviation (Küstenfliegergruppe 106) flying Junkers Ju 88s. Targets were marked by the crews of the experienced group I./KG 100 in Heinkel He 111s, which in 1940 had led the bombers over Coventry. For a single raid the Luftwaffe could usually send between thirty and forty-odd aircraft. To increase the effect, crews were where possible to fly twice in one night: after the first attack they returned to France, refuelled, loaded bombs and took off again. A raid therefore often consisted of two waves several hours apart. The cities chosen lay near the coast, were easy to find and had almost no anti-aircraft artillery, which had not been thought necessary there.

Exeter

The first attack on Exeter failed. According to British studies, 49 bombers were sent against the city on the night of 23/24 April, but the sky was covered by thick cloud and most of the bombs fell outside the city. Only a few bombs fell on the suburbs of St Thomas and Marsh Barton. About 200 houses were damaged and five people were killed. One of the bombers was shot down by a Beaufighter night fighter of No. 604 Squadron. Some accounts attribute about 70 deaths to this first raid, but this results from confusing it with the attack of the following night.

The next night, 24/25 April, under a clear sky, two waves of about twenty bombers each attacked again. With no anti-aircraft defence to face, the aircraft came in low. The bombs fell mainly on residential districts, especially around Pennsylvania. Seventy-three people were killed and 54 injured. The British shot down four bombers, three of them by night fighters.

The origin of the name

On the morning of 24 April, after the first raid, Legation Counsellor Baron Gustaf Braun von Stumm, one of the ministry’s spokesmen, addressed a press conference at the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin. According to the reports of neutral press correspondents, he said that the Luftwaffe would now bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker guide. The Baedekers, the red guidebooks issued since the 19th century by the publishing house founded by Karl Baedeker, were familiar to every travelling German and Englishman. The British press quickly seized on the remark: The Times quoted it on 29 April, and the subsequent attacks were already being described as “Baedeker raids”.

Von Stumm’s statement was, moreover, inaccurate. German researchers have pointed out that Baedeker guides had no three-star rating. Important monuments received one star and only a handful of exceptional sites two, and Exeter, Bath and Norwich were not among them. Nor is there any evidence that the Luftwaffe staff chose targets from the guidebook. Yet the spokesman’s words openly admitted what the German leadership did not wish to admit: that the targets were monuments and people, not military objectives. Goebbels, who presented British bombing as “terror raids” and German bombing as “retaliation”, was furious. In early May he noted in his diary that he had sharply rebuked those responsible for the statement. From then on, German propaganda consistently spoke of “retaliatory attacks”.

Bath

On the night of 25/26 April the target was Bath in Somerset, a spa town famous for its Roman baths and its 18th-century Georgian architecture. The inhabitants, used to sirens sounding whenever bombers passed over the city on their way to nearby Bristol, for the most part did not go to the shelters. The first wave attacked shortly before 11 p.m. and bombed until 1 a.m. The aircraft returned to France, refuelled and rearmed, and at about 4.30 a.m. struck again at the still-burning city. The following night, 26/27 April, came a third attack. The bombers came in low, dropping high-explosive and incendiary bombs, and the airmen machine-gunned the streets. Over these two nights the Luftwaffe flew, according to various tallies, from about 80 to more than 150 sorties against Bath.

Bath suffered the heaviest losses of all the cities attacked in April. According to the most commonly cited figures, 417 people were killed (some studies give 400–432 dead) and about a thousand injured. More than 19,000 buildings were damaged, about 1,100 of them seriously or completely, including over 200 of historic value. Bombs hit houses in the famous Royal Crescent, the Circus and the Paragon. The Assembly Rooms, the 18th-century ballrooms familiar from the novels of Jane Austen, were burned out. Many churches were badly damaged, and two of them, St James’s and St Andrew’s, later had to be demolished. Among the firemen fighting the fires in Bath was Harry Patch, a First World War veteran who in the 21st century was the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches (he died in 2009).

After the attack on Bath, Goebbels recorded that Hitler intended to repeat such raids night after night “until the English are sick and tired of terror attacks”, and that he agreed with him that cultural centres, spas and concentrations of civilians had to be hit. The English, Hitler added according to his account, were the kind of people one could talk to only after first knocking their teeth out.

Norwich and York

On the night of 27/28 April the bombers came over Norwich, a medieval city in East Anglia with a cathedral, a castle and dozens of churches. It was the heaviest raid in the city’s history. More than 90 tonnes of bombs fell. Houses and workshops burned, and two medieval churches, St Bartholomew’s and St Benedict’s, were destroyed so completely that only their towers survived. Two nights later, on 29/30 April, the Germans returned and destroyed another part of the city centre. Between them the two raids destroyed City station and hit Mackintosh’s chocolate factory, a brewery and department stores. According to the city’s figures, 229 people were killed in the two raids and about a thousand injured. Most of the casualties were caused by the first attack, although the figures for the individual nights vary between studies. Of Norwich’s 35,000 houses, 2,000 were destroyed and most of the rest damaged to some degree. The cathedral, the castle and the new City Hall survived.

Between the two attacks on Norwich, on the night of 28/29 April, it was the turn of York, once the capital of Roman Britain and of the north of England. Bombs began to fall at about 2.30 a.m. on 29 April, before the sirens had even sounded. The raid lasted more than two hours. According to British figures, about 70 aircraft took part; according to local researchers, fewer – between 25 and 35 – attacked the city itself. Over the target the bombers came down to a few hundred metres. The 15th-century Guildhall, the seat of the city authorities, was burned out, as was the medieval church of St Martin le Grand in Coney Street. The railway station, where a train for Edinburgh happened to be standing, was badly damaged. At the Bar Convent a bomb killed five nuns. According to various tallies, between 79 and more than 90 people were killed, and some 9,500 houses – roughly a third of York’s housing – were damaged or destroyed. York Minster survived. This time the defences were better prepared: according to the RAF, four bombers were shot down.

Defence and propaganda

The British responded quickly. Anti-aircraft batteries and barrage balloons were moved to the threatened cities, and RAF Fighter Command strengthened the night defences. The new radar-equipped night fighters, above all Beaufighters, were by now far more dangerous than during the Blitz. German aircrew losses grew week by week. According to British studies, by the autumn of 1942 KG 2 had lost 65 of its 88 crews.

Winston Churchill took the view that the raids mattered above all as propaganda. On 27 April he told the War Cabinet that the government should do everything possible to avoid giving these attacks “disproportionate publicity” and creating the impression that the Germans were fully paying Britain back for its bombing. In those same days, over four consecutive nights from 23/24 to 26/27 April, Bomber Command was destroying Rostock and the Heinkel works. The Luftwaffe lacked the strength for the exchange of blows that Hitler wanted. While a few dozen German bombers were flying over England, Harris was preparing a thousand-bomber raid.

May and June

The series did not end in April. On the night of 3/4 May the Luftwaffe returned to Exeter and this time destroyed the city centre. In about 70 minutes high-explosive bombs and thousands of incendiaries fell. Some 12 hectares of the centre burned, including High Street and Sidwell Street, the city library with more than a million books and documents, and hundreds of shops. One bomb destroyed St James’s Chapel in the cathedral. Between 156 and 164 people were killed (depending on the source) and more than 550 injured. The next night the Germans bombed Cowes on the Isle of Wight, home to a shipyard, and in May also Hull, Poole and Grimsby. A further raid on Norwich, on 8/9 May, proved ineffective despite the participation of more than 70 aircraft.

The second phase came after the British thousand-bomber raid on Cologne on the night of 30/31 May. The following night, 31 May/1 June, the Luftwaffe attacked Canterbury, the seat of the Primate of the Church of England, and destroyed a large part of the medieval centre. The death tolls given in the literature vary widely, from about 40 to more than 100. The cathedral survived, although bombs fell close by. Smaller attacks on Canterbury were repeated on the nights of 2/3 and 6/7 June. The last of these is usually taken to close the main series of Baedeker raids, and it is to this date that the statement that the attacks lasted “until 6 June” refers. It was not, however, an end date in the strict sense: in June and the following months the Luftwaffe attacked Ipswich, Poole, Norwich, Birmingham, Middlesbrough, Hull and other towns with smaller forces.

According to British figures, the raids on the five cities – Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury – killed 1,637 civilians and injured 1,760. More than 50,000 houses were destroyed or damaged. The Guildhall in York and the Assembly Rooms in Bath were burned out, but the cathedrals of Exeter, Norwich, Canterbury and York survived, although the first of them was damaged.

Place in the war

The Baedeker raids were a strategic failure for the Luftwaffe. The destruction, though painful for the cities attacked, was incomparably smaller than during the Blitz and negligible compared with what Bomber Command was then inflicting on German cities. The raids neither broke British morale nor forced London to stop bombing Germany. To the British command they were, if anything, proof that the Luftwaffe in the west was no longer capable of major attacks on London or the industrial centres. Hermann Göring, who had promised Hitler retaliation, could send at most a few dozen bombers over England, because the main strength of his air force was fighting on the Eastern Front and over the Mediterranean. Every night, moreover, cost experienced crews who could not quickly be replaced.

Attacks on towns chosen for their historic and cultural rather than military significance continued with smaller forces for almost two more years. According to British tallies, more than 3,200 people in Britain were killed in such raids by the end of 1942. Increasingly they were carried out by single fast Focke-Wulf Fw 190 aircraft attacking coastal towns at low level. In January 1944 the Luftwaffe gathered all its bombers in the west for a new offensive against London, which the British called the “Baby Blitz”; it too brought heavy losses for little result. Hitler’s retaliation was then taken over by the V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets.

The name outlived the war. In 1943 the British Ministry of Economic Warfare issued a study of targets in Germany for Bomber Command, wryly entitled “The Bomber’s Baedeker”. The cities destroyed in 1942 took decades to rebuild; in Exeter the work went on for about twenty years. In 2008 one of the German airmen who had taken part in the raid on Bath came to the city for the anniversary commemorations.