The first RAF raids

On the afternoon of 4 September 1939, the day after Britain declared war on Germany, Britain’s military air arm, the Royal Air Force, carried out the first bombing raid of the war. Its targets were not German cities, factories or airfields, but solely Kriegsmarine warships lying in the roadsteads at the mouths of the Jade and the Elbe. Several dozen bombers took off in rain under a low cloud base. The bombs that struck a ship failed to explode, one of the aircraft shot down crashed onto a German cruiser, and another, which had lost its way, bombed neutral Denmark. The RAF lost seven aircraft and more than twenty airmen. The day before, British aircraft had flown over Germany for the first time, but instead of bombs they had dropped millions of leaflets.

Some accounts speak of 15 Blenheims, of which seven were lost, and of three hits on the Admiral Scheer. These figures need to be made more precise: 15 Blenheims took off, but only ten reached the target, and the seven aircraft lost were five Blenheims and two Wellingtons from a second, parallel raid. The number of hits on the Scheer is given variously – from one bomb to three – and all accounts agree that none of them exploded.

Bombers on a leash

Britain’s RAF Bomber Command went to war under orders that severely restricted its operations. On 1 September Franklin Delano Roosevelt had appealed to the parties to the conflict to spare the civilian population and not to bomb open towns. The British and French governments undertook to attack only strictly military targets. Behind this declaration lay not only humanitarian considerations and the wish to win over American opinion, but also fear of retaliation: the Luftwaffe, whose strength the British overestimated, might answer with raids on London. British bombers were therefore to attack only ships at sea or at anchor, and even then only if they were not lying alongside quays, where bombs might fall on port buildings and houses.

In September 1939 Bomber Command had several dozen squadrons with a total of several hundred front-line aircraft, some of which had been sent to France. They were light Bristol Blenheim bombers and medium Vickers Wellington, Handley Page Hampden and Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bombers. Pre-war doctrine held that well-armed bombers flying in close formation could defend themselves against fighters. The first days of the war were to put this belief to the test.

3 September: reconnaissance and leaflets

On 3 September, shortly after the British ultimatum had expired, a Blenheim of No. 139 Squadron, flown by Flying Officer Andrew McPherson with a naval officer on board, took off from Wyton airfield. It was the first British aircraft of the war to cross the German coast. From high altitude, in cloud and with heavy icing, the crew spotted German warships in the Schillig Roads off Wilhelmshaven and at the mouth of the Elbe. The radio had frozen, so the report reached headquarters only after the aircraft had landed. That same afternoon Bomber Command sent 27 aircraft, 18 Hampdens and 9 Wellingtons, to search for the ships. In the gathering dusk and bad weather they failed to find the target and returned with their bombs. This was the British air force’s first combat operation of the war.

During the night of 3–4 September ten Whitleys of Nos. 51 and 58 Squadrons flew over Hamburg, Bremen and the Ruhr. They dropped not bombs but leaflets: according to various sources between 5.4 million and about 6 million copies, well over ten tonnes of paper, bearing the British government’s message to the Germans that the war was the work of their leaders. The leaflet operations were code-named “Nickel” and had been written into the war plan as early as 1938: they were to begin before any bombing of enemy territory. They were repeated throughout the autumn and winter. In the course of them the crews learnt to navigate over Germany at night, but in Poland, which had been under bombardment for three days, news of the “leaflet bombing” was received with bitterness. Arthur Harris himself, later commander of Bomber Command, wrote after the war that the leaflets had merely supplied the Continent’s needs for toilet paper.

4 September: Wilhelmshaven

Fifteen Blenheims were detailed for the raid of 4 September, five each from Nos. 107 and 110 Squadrons at Wattisham and from No. 139 Squadron at Wyton. The weather was appalling: rain, and cloud almost down to the water. The five aircraft from No. 139 Squadron failed to find the target. The five machines of No. 110 Squadron, led by Flight Lieutenant Kenneth Doran, came out from under the clouds over the Schillig Roads and attacked the “pocket battleship” Admiral Scheer from very low altitude. Taken by surprise, the German gunners were slow to open fire. The bombs hit but bounced off without exploding: they had fuses with an eleven-second delay, intended to prevent the explosion from destroying the low-flying aircraft, and dropped from a few dozen metres they did not penetrate the armour. Two others exploded in the water alongside the hull. The Scheer came through the attack practically undamaged.

The five Blenheims of No. 107 Squadron arrived a few minutes later, when the anti-aircraft defences were already on the alert. Four were shot down. One of the stricken aircraft crashed onto the light cruiser Emden, killing, according to various findings, between 9 and 11 sailors and wounding about 30. They were among the first men of the German navy to be killed in the war. It was long believed that the aircraft had been flown by Flying Officer Henry Emden of No. 110 Squadron, which gave the story a macabre twist. More recent research, including that of the Polish aviation historian Szymon Tetera, points rather to a machine from No. 107 Squadron. Among that squadron’s dead was Flying Officer Herbert Brian Lightoller, the youngest son of Charles Lightoller, second officer of the Titanic. Two airmen of No. 107 Squadron, Sergeant George Booth and Aircraftman Larry Slattery, survived being shot down and became the first British prisoners of the war.

Brunsbüttel and Esbjerg

At the same time 14 Wellingtons of Nos. 9 and 149 Squadrons flew to Brunsbüttel, at the entrance to the Kiel Canal, where the new battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were lying. Some of the aircraft turned back because of the weather, and some failed to find the target. The crews that did drop their bombs scored no hits. A section of No. 9 Squadron was intercepted by Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters of the II Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 77 (II./JG 77), which shot down two Wellingtons; ten airmen were killed. One of these victories was credited to the NCO pilot Alfred Held, and it is regarded as one of the first, if not the first, British aircraft shot down by a German fighter in the war.

One of the Wellingtons of No. 149 Squadron lost its way in the clouds. The crew, convinced that they were over Germany, dropped four bombs at around 5.45 p.m. on the Danish port of Esbjerg, some 175 kilometres north of the target. The bombs hit residential houses. One woman, Edel Hansen, was killed (some sources mention two dead), and several people were injured. Denmark protested, and within a few days the British government offered compensation. An RAF board of inquiry concluded that it could not be established whether the crew had bombed Esbjerg or Brunsbüttel, but the circumstances left no room for doubt. This was the first bombing of a neutral country’s territory by Allied aircraft in the war – and on the very day on which the British air force had so scrupulously avoided any risk of hitting German civilians.

The day’s balance was painful for the RAF. Of the 29 bombers that flew to Germany, seven did not return; according to various tallies between 23 and 25 airmen were killed. The German warships suffered no serious damage. McPherson and Doran received the first Distinguished Flying Crosses of the war, but within Bomber Command itself nobody doubted that the operation had been a failure.

Place in the war

The British command drew only some of the lessons of 4 September. The fuses and attack tactics were improved, and No. 107 Squadron, now commanded by Basil Embry, was trained to fly in tight formation. The belief that bombers could defend themselves in daylight, however, survived until December. On 18 December 1939, over the Heligoland Bight, German fighters destroyed roughly half of the 22 Wellingtons that had reached the target within a few dozen minutes. Only after this defeat did Bomber Command switch mainly to night operations, and these in turn revealed how poor its navigation was – something foreshadowed by the lost crew over Esbjerg.

The political restrictions lasted longer than the tactical illusions. Throughout the autumn of 1939, while Poland was fighting alone, and then during the Phoney War, British bombers attacked only warships and scattered leaflets. The first bombs on a land target in Germany, the seaplane base at Hörnum on the island of Sylt, fell in March 1940, and raids on industrial plants in the Ruhr began only in May 1940, after the German attack on the Netherlands and the bombing of Rotterdam. The raid on Wilhelmshaven, from which almost one aircraft in four failed to return, thus marked the start of Bomber Command’s long road – from an operation in which crews were afraid of hitting a harbour quay to the massed raids on German cities of 1942–1945.