Bombing raids in February 1943

February 1943 was a month of transition for the Allied bomber forces in Britain. Air Marshal Arthur Harris’s RAF Bomber Command directed most of its strength not against Germany but against the French ports on the Bay of Biscay where the U-boats were based. Over Germany new navigation and radar aids were being tested, and the American day bombers were cautiously extending their operations over the Reich’s north-western coast.

Popular chronologies, drawing on English-language compilations, state under 9 February 1943 that Munich and Vienna, as well as Berlin, were heavily bombed. Bomber Command’s operational records do not bear this out. On the night of 9–10 February British aircraft only laid mines between Brest and the island of Texel, and two Mosquitoes dropped bombs on Essen and Ruhrort. In February 1943 there was no raid on either Munich or Berlin, and Vienna was then beyond the reach of Allied bombers. The compilation seems to have mixed up events from different months.

The directive of 14 January

In the winter of 1942–1943 the U-boat war in the Atlantic reached a critical point. The Admiralty demanded that the air force destroy the submarine bases on the French coast. Their concrete pens, built by the Todt Organisation, were, however, practically impervious to the bombs of the day. Nevertheless, on 14 January 1943 the Air Ministry ordered Bomber Command to destroy by area bombing the towns where the bases lay: Lorient, Saint-Nazaire, Brest and La Pallice. Since the pens could not be demolished, everything around them was to be destroyed: workers’ housing, workshops, warehouses, railways and communications. A few days later the Casablanca Conference put submarine yards and bases at the top of the list of targets for the combined bomber offensive.

Harris was opposed. He believed that it dispersed his forces and diverted them from German cities, and that destroying French towns would not knock out the pens. He nevertheless carried out the order. The first raid on Lorient was made on the night of 14–15 January.

The destruction of Lorient

In February the attacks on Lorient reached their peak. On the night of 4–5 February 128 aircraft dropped only incendiaries on the town, starting widespread fires. On 7–8 February 323 bombers flew to Lorient. The heaviest raid came on the night of 13–14 February, when 466 aircraft were sent. For the first time Bomber Command’s ordinary squadrons, without reinforcement from training units as in the thousand-bomber raids, dropped more than 1,000 tons of bombs on a single target. The last big attack of the series was made on 16–17 February by 377 aircraft.

According to British calculations, in eight raids on Lorient Bomber Command flew 1,853 sorties, dropped nearly 4,000 tons of bombs and lost 24 aircraft. The town was almost completely ruined and deserted; according to figures from Lorient’s municipal heritage service, the raids between 14 January and 13 February killed 236 people, destroyed some 5,000 buildings and led to the evacuation of about 40,000 inhabitants. The death toll was relatively low only because the authorities had moved out most of the population after the first raids. The U-boat bases at Keroman survived without serious damage, and the boats continued to sail from them.

On the last night of February, 28 February – 1 March, Bomber Command turned to the second target on the list, Saint-Nazaire. According to local accounts 437 aircraft destroyed some 60 per cent of the town, killing 29 people, since here too most of the inhabitants had left beforehand.

H2S and Wilhelmshaven

Over Germany February was a month of trials with the new H2S airborne radar, which displayed on a screen an outline of the terrain below the aircraft: water, land and built-up areas. It was meant to allow the Pathfinder Force to find the target through cloud and beyond the range of ground stations. The first trials went badly. On the night of 2–3 February a Stirling carrying H2S was shot down over Cologne. The damaged set fell into German hands; Telefunken reconstructed it and eventually built the Naxos receiver, which enabled night fighters to home in on bombers by their radar emissions. On 3–4 February a raid by 263 aircraft on Hamburg became scattered in icing and cloud, and losses reached 16 machines.

The first success came on the night of 11–12 February. Wilhelmshaven, the Kriegsmarine’s main North Sea base, lay under complete cloud cover. The Pathfinder crews dropped parachute flares guided solely by the H2S picture, and 177 bombers hit with surprising accuracy. The bombs blew up the naval ammunition depot at Mariensiel, south of the town. According to British figures, the explosion devastated an area of nearly 50 hectares and caused heavy damage in the dockyard and the town. It was the first successful raid in Bomber Command’s history carried out entirely blind with the help of radar. Further attacks on Wilhelmshaven (18–19 and 19–20 February) failed. It turned out that the Pathfinders had out-of-date maps that did not show the town’s new buildings.

In the second half of the month Bomber Command attacked in ever greater strength. On 14–15 February 243 aircraft bombed Cologne, where according to local records 51 civilians were killed, along with 25 French forced labourers whose huts in an old fort on the edge of the city were hit. On 25–26 February 337 bombers attacked Nuremberg, damaging more than 300 buildings, and on 26–27 February 427 aircraft – the largest force of the month – attacked Cologne again, although most of the bombs fell south-west of the city. At the same time Lancasters continued their raids on Italy: on Turin on 4–5 February and on Milan on 14–15 February.

The Americans over Germany

General Ira Eaker’s US Eighth Air Force, which on 27 January had bombed a target in Germany for the first time, flew daylight raids in small numbers in February. On 4 February Flying Fortresses sent against the railway junction at Hamm bombed Emden instead because of the weather, and fought heavy battles with fighters. On 16 February they attacked the U-boat base at Saint-Nazaire.

On 26 February a mission sent against Bremen bombed Wilhelmshaven instead because of cloud. Flying aboard the bombers were six war correspondents, who had undergone gunnery training for the purpose and whom their colleagues called the “Writing 69th”, among them Walter Cronkite. The Liberator carrying Robert Post of the New York Times exploded over Germany, killing Post and eight members of the crew. After this loss the practice of taking journalists on combat missions was all but abandoned.

Place in the war

February 1943 showed both sides of the bomber offensive. The raids on Lorient and Saint-Nazaire were one of the most glaring examples of area bombing that failed to achieve its military aim: the towns were reduced to rubble, while the concrete U-boat pens survived the war. In the Battle of the Atlantic the turning point came a few months later from air-escorted convoys, radar and codebreaking, not from bombs dropped on Karl Dönitz’s bases. Harris regarded the series as wasted effort. The success of H2S over Wilhelmshaven, on the other hand, heralded a change: from now on Bomber Command could bomb through cloud.

Soon the targets named in the chronologies did indeed come under the bombs. Berlin, after the January raids, was attacked again on 1–2 March 1943, and Munich on 9–10 March. On the night of 5–6 March the Battle of the Ruhr began, Bomber Command’s first great campaign, and in the summer came Operation Gomorrah over Hamburg. Vienna came within range only when the Allies had taken airfields in North Africa and Italy: on 13 August 1943 American bombers from Libya attacked the aircraft works at Wiener Neustadt, and bombs fell on Vienna itself in 1944.