Operation Bellicose

Operation Bellicose was a raid by the British RAF Bomber Command on the former Zeppelin airship works at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, where, British intelligence believed, antennas for German radars were being produced. Contrary to the date given in some chronologies, it did not take place in July: 60 Lancasters bombed Friedrichshafen on the night of 20–21 June 1943, and nothing happened over the town on 21 July. The raid went down in history for two reasons. It was the first “shuttle” raid of the war, since the bombers did not return to England but flew on to Algeria. And, quite by chance, it also turned out to be the first blow against the German rocket programme, although calling it “the first bombing of a V-2 factory” requires some qualification.

The target: radar antennas

At the beginning of June 1943 Claude Wavell, a photographic interpreter at the Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, noticed on aerial photographs of Friedrichshafen stacks of ribbed metal structures in front of a hall belonging to the Zeppelin works. He recognised them as parts of the huge seven-metre parabolic dishes of the Würzburg-Riese, a version of the Würzburg radar with which the German defences guided night fighters onto British bombers. The enormous hall, built in 1930–1931 for the airships Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg, had stood unused since the end of the airship era and at the beginning of 1943 had been moved piece by piece to the town’s industrial district.

Destroying the antenna factory might weaken the entire night defence of the Reich, which for months had been inflicting painful losses on Bomber Command in the Battle of the Ruhr. According to Wavell’s account, Winston Churchill himself looked at the photographs on 14 June and asked only whether the RAF had been there yet. On 16 June the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, ordered No. 5 Group to attack the target at the next full moon.

The plan

The problem was distance. Friedrichshafen lay far away in southern Germany, on the Swiss border, and in June the nights are at their shortest. The Lancasters would not have been able to return to England before dawn and would have had to cross France in daylight. It was therefore decided that after the raid they would fly on southwards, over the Alps and the Mediterranean, to American bases in Algeria, and on the way back would attack another target in Italy.

The raid was assigned to 56 crews of No. 5 Group and four Pathfinder crews from No. 97 Squadron, who were to illuminate and mark the target with flares and target indicators. In command was Group Captain Leonard Slee as “master of ceremonies” (master bomber), directing the raid by radio over the target – only the second time this method had been used, after Operation Chastise. His deputy was Wing Commander Cosme Gomm, commanding officer of the Australian No. 467 Squadron. Because the hall was a small target, the crews were to pick a reference point on the lake shore and make a timed run from it over the works.

The raid

After a one-day postponement because of thunderstorms, the bombers took off from airfields in Lincolnshire on the evening of 20 June, at around 9.45 p.m. Over France Slee’s aircraft suffered engine damage and he handed over command to Gomm. Over the target the anti-aircraft defences proved much stronger than expected, so the main force was ordered to bomb from about 4,600 m instead of the planned 3,000. The Pathfinders dropped their markers, but when smoke and dust obscured them, Gomm ordered some of the crews to bomb using the timed run from the lake shore. The raid lasted a little under twenty minutes, from roughly 1.40 to 1.58 a.m. British time on 21 June. The Swiss watched it from the other side of the lake.

Not a single Lancaster was shot down; in one crew a flak splinter killed the bomb aimer. Towards morning the bombers landed at Maison Blanche airfield near Algiers. On the night of 23–24 June the 52 serviceable aircraft, on their way back to England, bombed the Italian naval base at La Spezia, damaging a fuel depot and an armaments store, and they too returned without loss. Meanwhile the main force of Bomber Command continued to strike at the Ruhr, and on the night of 24–25 June it destroyed Elberfeld.

Photographs taken the next day by a Mosquito reconnaissance aircraft showed that the roof of the hall had survived, but half of its northern wall had been torn out, and the equipment of the antenna factory inside had most probably been badly damaged. Two neighbouring factories making tank engines and gearboxes were also hard hit. According to a later analysis, however, only about 9 per cent of the bombs fell within the target area – many crews, having climbed higher, ran into stronger winds and did not have time to correct their bombsight settings. The bombs fell mainly on industrial districts; 44 people were killed in Friedrichshafen.

The link with the V-2

The British did not know that the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin works were about to begin producing components for the A4 rocket, later known as the V-2. Friedrichshafen, alongside the Peenemünde establishment and the works at Wiener Neustadt, was one of the places where the rockets were to be assembled. According to some studies, both by German historians of Friedrichshafen and by some British authors, the raid destroyed the A4 production line that was being set up and delayed its start. This is the origin of the description of Bellicose as the first bombing of a V-2 factory.

That description is, however, misleading. The raid’s target was radars, not rockets, and the Allies learnt of A4 production at Friedrichshafen only later. The first raid deliberately aimed at the rocket programme was the attack on Peenemünde on the night of 17–18 August 1943, known as Operation Hydra. It is therefore more accurate to say that Bellicose was the first to strike the German rocket weapon by chance than that it was the first attack on it.

The A4 programme was gathering momentum at this time. On 7 July 1943 Walter Dornberger and Wernher von Braun presented the rocket to Hitler, who gave it the highest priority. Forced labourers were brought in to work at the Zeppelin works, and a subcamp of Dachau concentration camp was set up next to the factory to hold prisoners working for it.

Place in the war

Bellicose was a small raid, but many of its features pointed to the future. The shuttle flight to North Africa was repeated by the American air forces in August 1943, when B-17s flew on to Algeria after attacking Regensburg, and in 1944 the Americans landed at airfields in the Soviet Union after their raids. The “master of ceremonies” method, with a master bomber directing the raid over the target, became the standard way of conducting precision attacks in No. 5 Group and among the Pathfinders. At the same time, the poor accuracy of the bombing of a small works showed how difficult it was to hit a single building at night.

The struggle against German radar soon took another form: on the night of 24–25 July 1943, during the first great raid on Hamburg, the RAF for the first time used strips of aluminium foil, which blinded the Würzburg radars and temporarily paralysed the German night defences. The factories at Friedrichshafen were attacked many more times, and a raid in April 1944 destroyed a large part of the town.

For the rocket programme the turning point came only with the August raid on Peenemünde. After it the Germans moved the assembly of A4 rockets underground, to the Mittelwerk plant in the Kohnstein hill, where they were built by prisoners of the Mittelbau-Dora camp, who died in their thousands from hunger, exhaustion and executions. Responsibility for this system lay with the programme’s leaders, Dornberger and Wernher von Braun, with the officials subordinate to Albert Speer and with the SS. The accidental hit on the Zeppelin works in June 1943 did not change the course of the programme, but it remained the first, if unintended, episode in the Allied air war against Hitler’s rocket weapons.