A major RAF raid on Berlin

On the night of 23/24 September 1940 Berlin went through the heaviest raid since the start of the war. Bomber Command, the RAF’s bomber force, sent between 119 and 129 aircraft (the figure varies from one record to another) over the capital of the Reich, with orders to strike at some eighteen targets: power stations, gasworks, marshalling yards and industrial plants. The alert lasted several hours, and the city’s inhabitants spent the night in their cellars. Under 24 September chronologies record that Berlin “suffers a major RAF raid”. The date is right, with one refinement: the bombers took off on the evening of 23 September and operated over the city during the night, until the early hours of 24 September.

An answer to the Blitz

British bombs had been falling on Berlin since the first raid on the night of 25/26 August. Hitler used these raids as a pretext for a change of course that was coming anyway: on 7 September the Luftwaffe began the massed bombing of London known as the Blitz. From then on London was bombed almost every night. In mid-September the RAF won the decisive daylight engagements of the Battle of Britain, and on 15 September Fighter Command’s fighters broke up two great German raids on the capital. On 17 September Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain “until further notice”, but the British knew this only in part and still reckoned with a landing.

In those weeks Bomber Command had two tasks. Most of its effort went against the Channel ports in which the Germans were assembling invasion barges: Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk, Ostend and Antwerp. These raids also involved the first two Polish bomber squadrons, Nos. 300 and 301, which went into action in September flying Fairey Battle light bombers. The second task was targets in Germany itself, above all refineries and synthetic fuel plants. Berlin, more than 900 kilometres from London, lay at the limit of the British bombers’ range and had previously been attacked by small forces. Now Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted to show that Britain could not only withstand the Blitz but also strike at the heart of the Reich. According to British studies, a raid “on the largest possible scale” was ordered explicitly as a response to the bombing of London. The order was carried out by the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Charles Portal.

A night over Berlin

On the evening of 23 September Handley Page Hampden, Vickers Wellington and Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bombers took off from airfields in eastern England. That same evening King George VI broadcast from the shelter at Buckingham Palace and announced the institution of a new award for civilian gallantry, the George Cross, intended above all for the heroes of the air raids. The RAF bombers did not fly in close formation but singly, each to its assigned target; eighteen targets had been designated in Berlin. According to the British operations record, 112 crews reported that they had found their target and dropped their bombs, even though ground mist made it hard to identify the terrain.

The American correspondent William L. Shirer wrote in his diary the next day: “The British really went to work on Berlin last night.” They had bombed for exactly four hours and hit several important factories in the north of the city, a large gasworks and the marshalling yards north of the Stettiner and Lehrter stations. The bombs cut the main railway line from the northern suburbs in three places, so the next day thousands of commuters had to change to buses three times. Two bombs fell only a few metres from the tracks of the Stadtbahn, the most important railway line crossing the city centre, and damaged neighbouring houses. According to figures given in German literature on Berlin’s air defences, the raid killed 22 people and injured 83; these studies attribute most of the deaths to a hit on a gasholder. These were Berlin’s heaviest losses in the air war so far, though not comparable with what was happening in London in the same weeks, where several thousand people were killed in the first week of the Blitz.

The raid caught in Berlin the Spanish Minister of the Interior, Ramón Serrano Suñer, brother-in-law and closest collaborator of Francisco Franco, who was then negotiating with the Germans the terms on which Spain might enter the war. The Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, and other dignitaries were giving a banquet in his honour at the Hotel Adlon. When the bombs began to fall, the dinner was interrupted before dessert and everyone went down to the hotel shelter. Shirer, returning from the radio station at four in the morning, saw the guests only just leaving it.

Propaganda and shelters

The German authorities tried harder than ever before to play down the effects of the raid. The official communiqué stated that “a few British bombers” had, despite heavy anti-aircraft fire, reached the northern and eastern suburbs and dropped their bombs far from military and industrial targets – which was supposed to prove that the British were deliberately attacking residential districts – and had caused no damage of military importance. The communiqué of the High Command of the Wehrmacht repeated the same. The Propaganda Ministry forbade foreign correspondents to write anything beyond the official version and cancelled the customary tour of the bombed sites. For several weeks the press had been calling RAF crews “pirates” and “criminals”, and Churchill “the murderer of German women and children”. Shirer observed that this hysteria said more about the public mood than about the damage: Berliners, who had been assured for a year that the air war would not reach them, took badly to nights in cold cellars, and the lies of their own newspapers provoked mockery. He also noted that in many apartment blocks Jews were not allowed into the cellar reserved for “Aryans” and during alerts had to shelter in the ground-floor hallway, the place most exposed to splinters.

The raid hastened decisions that had been under consideration in Berlin since August. According to German studies, Hitler had already ordered on 9 September the construction in the capital of massive concrete flak towers, which were to serve both as platforms for heavy guns and as shelters for thousands of people. Two days after the raid, on 26 September, he conferred with the Chief of the OKW, Wilhelm Keitel, and the Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, about the effect of the bombing on civilian morale, and demanded the building of shelters “on a large scale”. He entrusted responsibility for them in Berlin to his architect, Albert Speer. On 10 October he issued an order that launched the so-called Führer Immediate Programme for shelter building (Führer-Sofortprogramm): air-raid bunkers began to go up in Berlin and several dozen other cities. The first Berlin tower, by the zoo in the Tiergarten, was completed in the spring of 1941. For Hermann Göring, who before the war had promised that no enemy bomber would reach the Reich, every new alert in Berlin was a personal humiliation.

How much was really hit

The British crews’ reports were far more optimistic than the reality. RAF bombers flew at night without radio-navigation aids, relying on dead reckoning, forecast winds and whatever could be seen by moonlight. In mist and blackout, crews often took something else entirely for their target, and the bombs were scattered over many kilometres. The Germans, though they played down the losses in their communiqués, noted in internal reports that many bombs had fallen on fields, allotments and suburbs. By the standards of Bomber Command’s capabilities in 1940 this night was a success, but it also proved how little the force could then achieve. The scale of the problem was revealed only in August 1941 by the report of the War Cabinet official David Butt, prepared at the behest of Churchill’s adviser Frederick Lindemann. On the basis of aerial photographs it showed that of the crews reporting an attack on the target, only about one in three dropped its bombs within five miles (eight kilometres) of it.

Place in the war

The raid of 23/24 September did not change the course of the Battle of Britain or interrupt the Blitz. For both sides, however, it mattered beyond the damage done. The British, bombed every night, learnt that their air force was hitting back at the enemy’s capital. The Germans discovered that Berlin was not safe and began to invest enormous resources in shelters, flak towers and anti-aircraft defences, resources that did not reach the front. In October Richard Peirse took over Bomber Command (5 October), and on 25 October Portal became Chief of the Air Staff. At the end of October the Air Ministry began to sanction raids designed to destroy built-up areas and break civilian morale, and in December a reprisal raid on Mannheim was the first attack deliberately aimed at a city centre. After the Butt Report and the appointment of Arthur Harris to command in 1942, Bomber Command moved on to area bombing of whole cities. Berlin was bombed until April 1945, most heavily in the winter of 1943–1944 and in the last months of the war, and the three great flak towers whose construction had been ordered in the autumn of 1940 survived to the end as the last strongpoints of the besieged city.