The air Battle of Berlin begins

On the evening of 18 November 1943, 440 Avro Lancaster heavy bombers and four light Mosquitoes – 444 aircraft of the British Bomber Command in all – took off from airfields in eastern England. Their target was Berlin. That same night a second, almost equally large force flew to the Rhine to draw the German night fighters away from the capital. According to British operational records, the raid on Berlin lasted a mere sixteen minutes, from 8.56 to 9.12 p.m. The city, however, lay under thick cloud, the bombs were scattered over a wide area, and the damage proved slight. Between about 130 and more than 150 people were killed, and the British command lost nine Lancasters.

The raid itself, then, was nothing out of the ordinary. What was out of the ordinary was what it began. The night of 18–19 November is regarded as the opening of the air Battle of Berlin – a campaign in which the head of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, meant to do to the capital of the Reich what he had done to Hamburg in July, and so decide the war from the air. The campaign lasted until March 1944 and became the severest trial in the history of his command.

Many chronologies describe the raid as an attack by 440 aircraft that caused “only light damage” and killed 131 people, for the loss of nine aircraft and 53 airmen. The figure of 440 is in fact the number of Lancasters alone; with the four Mosquitoes there were 444. The figure of 131 dead comes from one of the German tallies – the report of Berlin’s police president spoke of 154 dead. The figure of 53 airmen is not borne out by the detailed loss records: according to the tally cited by Martin Middlebrook, of the nine crews 43 airmen were killed, 20 were taken prisoner and four evaded capture.

“We can wreck Berlin from end to end”

For the British, Berlin was a special target – the capital of the Reich, seat of the government and of Hitler, and at the same time one of Germany’s largest industrial centres, with electrical engineering, armaments and aircraft works. It was also, however, a very difficult target. It lay deep inside Germany, around a thousand kilometres from the English airfields, so the bombers had to spend many hours over enemy territory. The city was huge and sprawling, with wide streets and many parks, and its buildings – largely brick tenement blocks – burned far less readily than medieval old towns. Finally, Berlin was ringed by a dense belt of anti-aircraft artillery and night-fighter bases.

The RAF had been bombing Berlin since 1940, and in January 1943 it resumed its raids on the Reich capital with the new heavy bombers. After Operation Gomorrah – the series of July raids that raised a firestorm in Hamburg and killed tens of thousands of people – Harris believed he had a weapon capable of destroying any city. In late August and early September 1943 Bomber Command struck Berlin three times. The raids of 23–24 August, 31 August – 1 September and 3–4 September destroyed, among other things, a large part of the Lankwitz district, but they cost a great many aircraft, and each time the main aiming point in the city centre was missed. After the second of them Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin, speeded up the evacuation of women and children from the city. Harris broke off the attacks on the capital and for two months bombed other cities – in October, among others, Kassel. It is not clear whether the raids of late August and early September were already meant as the first phase of the Battle of Berlin; Harris himself, in his memoirs, named November as its start.

In the autumn conditions seemed favourable to Harris. The long November nights allowed the bombers to reach Berlin and return in darkness, and bad weather was thought to hamper the German fighters more than the bombers. Bomber Command had more than seven hundred serviceable Lancasters and Halifaxes available every day, and more and more of them were being fitted with the H2S airborne radar, which showed the navigator the outline of the ground beneath the aircraft even through cloud. The short-range Oboe system, so effective over the Ruhr, did not reach that far east, so over Berlin H2S was to take the place of the eye.

On 3 November 1943 Harris wrote a letter to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, that became the most famous expression of his convictions. In it he listed nineteen German cities that he regarded as “virtually destroyed” and announced that Berlin might join the list. If the American air force took part, he wrote – according to the quotations in the British and Canadian official histories – “we can wreck Berlin from end to end”; it would cost the two air forces 400–500 aircraft between them, and “it will cost Germany the war”. Behind this promise lay the belief that the systematic destruction of cities might make the invasion of France planned for the spring of 1944 unnecessary – or at least make it easy.

The condition Harris set was not met. In the autumn of 1943 the American Eighth Air Force was in crisis. After the Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid in August and the second attack on Schweinfurt on 14 October, which cost dozens of Flying Fortresses, the Americans had to curtail daylight missions deep into Germany until they received escort fighters able to accompany the bombers all the way to the target. Bomber Command went to Berlin alone.

The night of 18–19 November

The plan for the first raid reflected the experience of recent months. After Hamburg the German night defences had been thoroughly reorganised. Instead of the rigid Himmelbett (PL) system of zones, in which a ground controller guided a single fighter onto a single bomber, the Luftwaffe began to throw whole groups of night fighters straight into the bomber stream, while single-seat day fighters hunted over the target itself by the light of searchlights and fires – a tactic known as Wilde Sau. The key, therefore, was to deceive the enemy about the target and to shorten the time the bombers spent over the city.

That is why Harris sent two large forces out simultaneously that night. The main one, made up of 440 Lancasters – 29 of them from the Canadian No. 6 Group – and four Mosquitoes dropping spoof flares, was to attack Berlin. The second, numbering 395 aircraft (248 Halifaxes, 114 Stirlings and 33 Lancasters), flew to Ludwigshafen on the Rhine, with its great IG Farben chemical works, opposite Mannheim – some British tallies describe this attack simply as a raid on Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. Both forces were to cross the coast at the same time, and the southern one first headed towards Frankfurt am Main, where Mosquitoes carried out a feint attack, before turning back towards its real target. Including smaller operations, Bomber Command flew 884 sorties that night – one of the command’s largest undertakings at the time.

The weather was atrocious. Thick cloud and fog lay over the North Sea and northern Germany, at cruising altitude the temperature fell as low as minus 40 degrees Celsius, and the aircraft iced up. At the Canadian base at Middleton St George three airmen suffered frostbite – a rear gunner who had cut a panel out of his turret’s perspex for better visibility, and two navigators sitting by leaking camera hatches. Of the 440 Lancasters, 26 turned back before reaching the target because of technical faults and icing.

The German air defence controllers detected both bomber streams and divided their forces. Over Berlin, where conditions were so bad that many night fighters were ordered to land, the British lost only nine Lancasters, or 2 per cent of the aircraft dispatched. Over Ludwigshafen the weather was better and the fighters took a far heavier toll: 23 aircraft failed to return – 12 Halifaxes, 9 Stirlings and 2 Lancasters, or 5.8 per cent of the force. In all, the command lost 32 aircraft that night. The diversion had thus served its purpose, but the airmen of the second force paid for it.

Over Berlin itself the crews could see little. The Pathfinders – the crews of the specialist No. 8 Group, whose job was to mark the target with flares and target indicators – had to work blind, relying on radar and on flares suspended above the clouds. Berlin’s image on the H2S screen was hard to read: a vast, uniformly built-up city without distinct landmarks, surrounded by lakes and forests, appeared on the radar as a blob from which it was difficult to pick out the aiming point. The bombers dropped about 1,600 tons of bombs – roughly half high explosive and half incendiary – but the crews could not see the results, and it proved impossible to take photographs that would have allowed the raid to be assessed.

Modest results

German reports confirmed that the raid had failed. According to Berlin’s Main Air Raid Protection Office (Hauptluftschutzstelle), on whose reports the historian Laurenz Demps based his study, 75 high-explosive bombs fell on the city, eleven of which failed to explode or had delayed-action fuses, along with eleven aerial mines and about 2,500 incendiary and phosphorus bombs. According to the Canadian official history, no industrial building was destroyed. Comparing these figures with the tonnage dropped according to British records shows that the bulk of the load fell outside the city – on fields, forests and the towns around Berlin – and that the rest was scattered across residential districts.

The casualty figures vary by source. The police president’s report, cited in studies based on Demps’s work, spoke of 154 dead, 443 injured and some 7,500 people made homeless. Some tallies, followed by popular chronologies, give 131 dead. Either way, these losses were many times smaller than in Hamburg or Kassel – and many times smaller than Harris had expected.

The raid on Ludwigshafen did not bring the hoped-for results either. In its report the Canadian No. 6 Group judged the bombing to have been “very scattered” and the raid as a whole a failure. Destruction on the scale of Hamburg was achieved neither on the Rhine nor on the Spree.

For Berlin, then, the first night of the battle was only a warning. For Goebbels, who as Gauleiter of the capital and head of the inter-ministerial committee on air-raid damage was responsible for the city’s civil defence, it was a sign that the British were returning to the capital for good. The preparations made since August – the evacuation of children, the building of shelters and the expansion of the fire service – were soon to prove invaluable.

The Battle of Berlin

Four days later, on the night of 22–23 November, Bomber Command returned to Berlin with 764 aircraft and this time hit the city centre. It was the most effective British raid on the capital of the entire war: the dry air favoured the fires, which engulfed the districts west of the centre – Tiergarten, Charlottenburg, Schöneberg and Spandau. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church burned, about two thousand people were killed and, by contemporary estimates, some 175,000 were left homeless. The following nights brought further heavy attacks that destroyed whole blocks of the city centre.

The battle lasted all winter. By the end of March 1944 the main force of Bomber Command had attacked Berlin sixteen times, and in between it bombed other cities – Leipzig, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Brunswick, Magdeburg – so that the Germans could not concentrate their entire defence around the capital. Almost every raid on Berlin took place above cloud, so the bombing was done by radar, with results that were hard to assess. Losses, meanwhile, mounted. The German night defences, equipped with new airborne radars and the upward-firing Schräge Musik cannon, became ever more adept at guiding fighters into the bomber stream. According to the British official historians Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, the sixteen raids on Berlin, totalling 9,111 sorties, cost 492 aircraft – 5.8 per cent, more than the 5 per cent threshold that the RAF regarded as the limit of losses that could be sustained in the long run. The Canadian official history gives a loss of 1,117 aircraft for all Bomber Command night operations from 18 November 1943 to the end of March 1944. Over the whole campaign several thousand British and Commonwealth airmen were killed or captured – more than seven thousand, according to some studies.

The last major raid on Berlin in this campaign, on the night of 24–25 March 1944, was scattered by a strong wind, and 72 of the 811 aircraft failed to return. A week later, on the night of 30–31 March, Bomber Command sent 795 aircraft to Nuremberg. Under a cloudless sky and on an almost straight route, the German fighters broke into the bomber stream while it was still over Belgium; about 95 aircraft were shot down, Bomber Command’s heaviest loss on a single raid in the entire war. That night brought Harris’s winter offensive to a close.

Berlin did not share Hamburg’s fate. The city’s population, already reduced by evacuation, nonetheless suffered heavy losses. English-language literature cites figures for these months of around four thousand dead, ten thousand injured and 450,000 made homeless; German studies based on police and air-raid protection records give higher figures for individual raids, and, according to the historians Olaf Groehler and Laurenz Demps, overall estimates of the victims of all the raids on Berlin during the war lie in the range of 29,000–30,000. According to figures from I Fighter Corps, the Luftwaffe lost 256 night fighters in combat against the night offensive between November 1943 and March 1944.

Place in the war

The Battle of Berlin was both the high point and the limit of Harris’s concept. His promise that destroying Berlin “will cost Germany the war” was not fulfilled: the capital was grievously maimed but not destroyed, industry kept working, and neither the state nor society collapsed. The British official historians judged the campaign plainly to have been a defeat for Bomber Command. At the same time it tied down enormous forces – thousands of anti-aircraft guns, hundreds of thousands of people in air defence and reconstruction, and the Luftwaffe’s best night fighters, which could not fight on other fronts. Retaliation was to come in the form of Operation Steinbock, a series of German raids on London from January to May 1944 that did little damage at the cost of heavy losses.

In the spring of 1944 the RAF’s heavy bombers were placed at the service of the preparations for the invasion of France and turned against railways and fortifications in the west. From then on it was chiefly American bombers that returned to Berlin – from March 1944, by day and with long-range fighter escorts, which in great air battles bled the German fighter arm white. The heaviest raid on the Reich capital was carried out by the American Eighth Air Force on 3 February 1945. The night of 18–19 November 1943, with its cloud and scattered bombs, remained in memory as the modest beginning of Bomber Command’s longest and costliest campaign – a campaign which showed that even the most powerful bomber force in the world could not decide the war on its own.