The first RAF raid on Berlin

On the night of 25/26 August 1940 British bombers flew over Berlin for the first time in the war. It was a response to the events of the previous night, when German bombs had fallen on the City of London, the historic heart of the British capital, damaged the medieval church of St Giles in Cripplegate and toppled the statue of John Milton that stood beside it. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, did not wait to find out whether the Germans had done it deliberately. He demanded retaliation against the capital of the Reich. Militarily the raid itself was almost insignificant: clouds hid the targets, the bombs were scattered over the suburbs, and no one in Berlin was killed. Its political consequences, however, proved enormous. A few days later Adolf Hitler lifted his ban on bombing London, and on 7 September the Luftwaffe began the massed raids on the British capital that went down in history as the Blitz.

Popular chronologies spread these events over three days: on 24 August German aircraft bomb the church in Cripplegate “by mistake”, on 25 August Churchill orders retaliation, and on 26 August “both London and Berlin” are bombed, “Berlin for the first time”. The overall picture is true, but it needs a few qualifications. The bombs fell on the City on the night of 24/25 August, after midnight. The British bombers took off on the evening of 25 August and appeared over Berlin in the early hours of 26 August, which is why some German documents and studies speak of “the night of 26 August”. Finally, this was not the first Allied raid on Berlin altogether, only the first British one. As early as the night of 7/8 June 1940, in retaliation for the German bombing of the Paris area, a lone French aircraft, the Jules Verne, had dropped bombs on the outskirts of the Reich capital.

London under the protection of a ban

From the start of the Battle of Britain, London was a target on which Hitler alone could decide. Directive No. 17, issued on 1 August, ordered the Luftwaffe to destroy the Royal Air Force, its airfields and its factories, but Hitler reserved to himself the decision on any “terror attacks” as a means of reprisal. On his instructions, London was to be bombed only on his express order. Political calculation lay behind this ban. Hitler still hoped that Britain would agree to peace and did not want to provoke her with a needless attack on her capital. He also feared retaliation against German cities, and above all against Berlin, whose inhabitants had been promised by propaganda that the air war would not reach them. Before the war the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, is supposed to have said that if a single enemy bomber appeared over the Reich, people could call him Meier. The authenticity and exact date of the remark are uncertain, but Berliners knew it well.

In August the Battle of Britain entered its hardest phase. After Eagle Day on 13 August the Luftwaffe attacked above all fighter airfields, radar stations and aircraft factories in southern England. At night, ever larger numbers of bombers harried ports and industrial centres all over the country. Bombs began to fall on the outskirts of London: on 15 August a German unit that was supposed to attack Kenley airfield bombed Croydon airfield by mistake, and on the following nights bombs fell on Wimbledon, Harrow and other outer districts. Central London, however, remained untouched.

The night of 24/25 August

24 August was one of the hardest days of the battle. It marked the start of what British historians call the critical fortnight: until 6 September the Luftwaffe concentrated its whole strength on the airfields of No. 11 Group, which covered London. That day German bombers attacked the forward airfield at Manston so heavily that it had to be evacuated, and they also struck Hornchurch and North Weald. In the afternoon Heinkel He 111 bombers attacked Portsmouth, killing more than a hundred people, the highest toll in a single daylight raid since the battle began.

In the evening the night bombers came over England. One formation of He 111s from Kampfgeschwader 1, then part of Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, was looking for the oil storage tanks at Thameshaven in the Thames estuary. According to the most frequently repeated version, its crews strayed off course and dropped their bombs on London, convinced that they were over the target. After midnight bombs fell on West Ham and Bethnal Green in the east of the city, on warehouses in the West India Docks and on the City. A fire broke out in Fore Street, Cripplegate, and spread through a block of warehouses and tailoring workshops as far as London Wall. A bomb damaged the north entrance of the church of St Giles-without-Cripplegate, where Milton is buried, and the blast threw his statue in the churchyard off its plinth. These were the first bombs to fall on the City since the German raids of 1918. According to British records, several dozen serious incidents were reported across London that night; 9 civilians were killed and 58 injured. Bombs also fell on the suburbs, including Croydon, Lewisham, Harrow and Hayes.

The raid on the City is still often presented as a mistake that changed the course of the war. Some historians question this picture. They point out that the bombs that fell on London that night came from several different formations, not from one stray group; that the Luftwaffe already had plans ready for raids on the port and factories of London under the codename “Loge”; and that Hitler’s ban had from the outset been conceived as a postponement, not a permanent rule. What is certain is that the German high command did not intend to bomb central London at that moment. According to documents cited by British historians, the next day Göring ordered an inquiry into which crews had dropped bombs on the forbidden zone of London and reserved the right to punish their commanders by posting them to the infantry.

Churchill’s order

Churchill had no reason to believe that the bombs on the City had been a mistake, and even if he had believed it, it would not have changed his decision. Britain had been making night raids on Germany since May, but RAF bombers attacked mainly oil plants, railway junctions and ports in the Ruhr and on the North Sea coast; since the decision of 15 May the Reich capital had been spared. Berlin lay at the limit of the British bombers’ range, and its anti-aircraft defences were considered among the strongest in Europe. On 25 August the Prime Minister ordered an attack on Berlin. The Air Ministry passed the order to the commander of RAF Bomber Command, Charles Portal, who that same day prepared an operation for the following night.

The decision was above all political and psychological. Churchill wanted to show the British that their country was not merely defending itself but could also strike back, and to show the Germans that their capital was not safe. A few days earlier, on 20 August, he had spoken in the House of Commons about “the few” fighter pilots, but also about the bomber crews who flew over Germany every night. There was a military calculation as well: every raid on Berlin forced the Germans to keep guns, searchlights and night fighters at home. Portal later put it this way: it was worth taking losses to get four million people out of bed and into the shelters.

Over Berlin

On the evening of 25 August Handley Page Hampden, Vickers Wellington and Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bombers – the only RAF aircraft that could reach Berlin and return – took off from airfields in eastern and northern England. The number of aircraft varies between sources, depending on whether all the machines sent over Germany that night are counted or only those dispatched to Berlin: figures from 81 to 95 bombers are given. According to the records of the individual squadrons, 86 aircraft from eleven squadrons were sent to Berlin. Their targets were Tempelhof airport, the Siemens works at Siemensstadt, the Klingenberg power station, the Henschel works, the airfield at Rangsdorf and the marshalling yards in the south of the city.

The flight to Berlin and back took more than eight hours, much of it over the North Sea and enemy territory, and a thick layer of cloud lay over the city. According to the same records, 57 aircraft reached the Berlin area, and only 35 crews reported having bombed their assigned targets. From the ground it looked even more modest. Fire from Berlin’s anti-aircraft guns prevented the bombers from coming down over the centre, and most of the roughly 22 tons of bombs were scattered over northern and eastern districts such as Wedding, Reinickendorf and Lichtenberg, and over fields and allotments on the edge of the city. In Rosenthal a wooden summer house was destroyed and two people were slightly injured. No one was killed. Some of the bombs did not fall on Berlin at all, because crews that failed to find the city attacked alternative targets.

The operation cost the RAF more than it cost the Germans. A strong headwind on the way home left several bombers short of fuel. Several Hampdens had to ditch in the sea or crashed on landing. According to the squadron records, six aircraft were lost: four airmen were killed, two wounded and four taken prisoner.

“They didn’t believe it could happen”

The psychological effect of the raid was out of all proportion to the damage. The sirens wailed over Berlin for several hours, people spent the night in cellars, and the sky was lit up by searchlights and anti-aircraft fire. The American correspondent William L. Shirer noted in his diary the next day that Berliners were stunned: they had not believed that such a thing could happen, because Göring had assured them it never would. The German press at first dismissed the raid with a brief mention of a few bombs dropped on the suburbs. When the raids were repeated, however, the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels began to describe them as barbaric attacks by “air pirates” on women and children. Berliners nicknamed the air-raid sirens “Meier’s hunting horns”, mocking the boasts of Göring, who was also Reich Master of the Hunt.

Meanwhile the Battle of Britain went on without a break. On 26 August the Luftwaffe again attacked airfields in Kent and Essex, among them Debden, as well as Portsmouth, and at night its bombers returned over England, including the London area. The British repeated the raid on Berlin on the night of 28/29 August. This time the bombs hit the area around the Görlitzer Bahnhof and the neighbouring residential blocks in Kreuzberg: according to German reports, 10 to 12 people were killed and 28 injured. These were the first air-raid deaths in the Reich capital. Further raids followed on the night of 30/31 August and on the nights after. All of them were small, scattered and of little effect, but each one undermined the assurances that Berlin was untouchable.

Retaliation for retaliation

Hitler’s reaction came quickly. On 30 August he lifted the ban on attacking London, and on 3 September Göring conferred in The Hague with the commanders of his air fleets. Albert Kesselring had long argued for a blow against the capital, which was to force the remnants of the British fighter force into a final battle, and he now got his way. On 4 September Hitler spoke at the Berlin Sportpalast at the opening of the Winter Relief collection. He called the British raids night-time piracy and announced that since the British were threatening large-scale attacks on German cities, Germany would “erase” their cities. For every two, three or four thousand kilograms of bombs dropped by the RAF, the Luftwaffe would reply in a single night with hundreds of thousands of kilograms. Faced with questions about why he had still not landed in England, he reassured his listeners: “He is coming.” The hall responded with enthusiasm. On 5 September the order was issued for raids on London and other cities, and on the afternoon of 7 September hundreds of bombers appeared over the docks of east London. German propaganda called it a “reprisal attack”.

Whether the British raid on Berlin really “changed the shape” of the Battle of Britain has long been a matter of dispute. Those who hold this view point to the sequence of events: bombs on the City, the raid on Berlin, Hitler’s anger, the switch to London. Thanks to that switch, Hugh Dowding’s exhausted airfields got a breathing space at the very moment when Fighter Command was closest to breaking point. Their opponents point out that German plans had from the outset provided for a great raid on London in the culminating phase of the campaign, just before the planned invasion, and that the Luftwaffe high command, wrongly convinced that the RAF had only a handful of fighters left, had itself concluded that an attack on the capital was the best way of forcing them to fight. In this interpretation the raids on Berlin gave Hitler above all a pretext and a propaganda justification for a decision that was close in any case. Most historians today accept that both factors worked together: British retaliation hastened and eased the switch, but did not invent it.

Place in the war

The night of 25/26 August 1940 opened the air war over the capitals of the belligerents. From 7 September 1940 London was bombed almost every night for nearly two months, and the Blitz lasted until May 1941 and cost the lives of more than 40,000 British civilians, nearly half of them in London. Cripplegate, where the first bombs had fallen on the City, burned almost to the ground in the great raid of 29 December 1940; the church of St Giles was gutted, and after the war the Barbican estate was built on the ruins of the district. Berlin was bombed until April 1945 by the British, American and Soviet air forces, including Bomber Command’s great offensive in the winter of 1943–1944. Estimates of the number of people killed in the raids on the Reich capital range from about 20,000 to 50,000.

The first raid on Berlin destroyed nothing of importance, but it broke a barrier that both sides had been erecting since September 1939. Hitler, who had not hesitated to use his air force against cities at Wieluń, Warsaw and Rotterdam, spared London for a few weeks in the summer of 1940 out of political calculation. British retaliation gave him the pretext to abandon that restraint and allowed him to present the Blitz to the Germans as just revenge. For Churchill, Berlin was a symbolic target: in August 1940 the only way to reach Germany was through the skies above her, and the ruins of German cities five years later were the foretaste of how this war would end.