Operation Clarion

On Thursday 22 February 1945, one of the first clear days after a long winter, several thousand Allied aircraft appeared over Germany at the same time. This time they did not head, as usual, for the great industrial centres, the refineries and the Reich capital, but spread out across the whole country – from Emden and Lüneburg in the north to Lake Constance and Austria in the south, from Cologne to the outskirts of Berlin and Dresden. Their targets were railway stations, junctions and marshalling yards, bridges, locomotives, trains, barges and river ports, many of them in small towns that the air war had so far barely touched. The operation was codenamed Clarion (a trumpet call) and lasted two days – 22 and 23 February.

It is often described as a massive bombing of German railways and other transport infrastructure by some 9,000 American and British aircraft, extending into 23 February. The dates are correct. The figure of 9,000, however, should be understood as the total number of sorties flown on the two days, not of aircraft: according to tallies based on American documents, some 3,500 bombers took part in the operation, together with several thousand fighters and fighter-bombers, many of which flew on both days.

The Hurricane idea and the Transportation Plan

The idea of such a strike was older than the operation itself. In September 1944 the commander of the US Army Air Forces, General Henry H. Arnold, proposed that in good weather every available American and British aircraft should be sent over the whole of the Reich to attack military targets in towns that had not yet been bombed. According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces (Craven and Cate), Arnold hoped that the Germans would then see the might of the Allies with their own eyes and reflect on their own helplessness. The plan, considered in the autumn under the name Hurricane, kept being postponed: the weather got in the way, raids on synthetic fuel had priority, and in December the German offensive in the Ardennes tied down much of the air forces in fighting over the front.

The target itself – the transport network – was not new. In the spring of 1944, after a long dispute, the Allies had adopted the so-called Transportation Plan and, in the bombing before the invasion, had wrecked the railway network of northern France and Belgium ahead of the Normandy landings. In the autumn of 1944, after conferences of the air commanders, transport within Germany itself became the second main target of the strategic bombers, alongside oil. The leading advocate of this course was Dwight Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Tedder, who was convinced that the railways and canals held the whole German war economy together.

At the beginning of February 1945 the armies of the Western Allies were preparing for decisive thrusts towards the Rhine – on 8 February the Canadians and British launched Operation Veritable in the Rhineland, and the Americans were preparing to cross the Roer. The Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) wanted the air forces to paralyse traffic on the German railways with a single massive blow and to hamper the movement of reserves to the west. The planning and command of the operation were taken on by General Carl Spaatz, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, with the backing of Tedder and of the commander of the Eighth Air Force, General Jimmy Doolittle. Each unit was assigned primary, secondary and targets of opportunity.

The dispute over small towns

The operation met opposition at the planning stage – for two different reasons. The Chief of the Air Staff, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal, and his deputy Norman Bottomley considered that spreading the effort over hundreds of small targets would do Germany no serious harm and that it would be better to concentrate the bombers on oil. A different objection was raised by the commander of the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean, General Ira Eaker. In a letter to Spaatz he warned that heavy bomber attacks on transport targets in small towns would cause many civilian casualties and might convince the Germans that the Americans were barbarians. According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces, he wrote that the history of this war must never be able to accuse the Americans of “throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street” – and he cited a similar remark by the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, Robert Lovett.

The dispute therefore concerned not only effectiveness but the very nature of the strike. Officially the targets were exclusively transport installations. At the same time, however, it was assumed from the outset that spreading the raids across the whole country and striking places that had so far been quiet would shake the population’s morale – and it was precisely this part of the plan that raised doubts. Historians still differ over how far Clarion was an operation against transport and how far an attempt to put psychological pressure on German society. It took place in the weeks when the American air forces – after the raid on Berlin of 3 February and the bombing of Dresden – were increasingly taking part in attacks in which the line between a military target and a city was becoming blurred.

22 February: the whole country under attack

Almost all the Western air forces operating over Germany took part: the US Eighth Air Force from England (northern and central Germany), the Fifteenth Air Force from bases in Italy (the south of the Reich and present-day Austria), the tactical air forces – the US Ninth Air Force, the First Tactical Air Force over south-western Germany and the British Second Tactical Air Force over the north-west – and RAF Bomber Command, which operated mainly over the Ruhr. The tactical aircraft flew from airfields in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. The targets lay in an area put in American accounts at some 250,000 square miles, or more than 600,000 square kilometres.

The novelty was the altitude. To improve accuracy, the B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers came down to about 3,000–4,000 metres (10,000–13,000 feet), and some even lower, instead of the usual 6,000–7,500 metres. This was possible because after Operation Bodenplatte and the losses of the winter of 1944–1945 the Luftwaffe was no longer able to defend the whole country, and fuel shortages grounded many of its units.

According to the official history of the US Army Air Forces, of the 1,411 Eighth Air Force bombers that took off from England on 22 February only seven were lost. Tallies based on Eighth Air Force documents (cited, among others, in the German literature) state that some 1,370 bombers attacked their targets effectively, escorted by more than 800 fighters; bombs fell on several dozen targets in northern and central Germany, including more than 20 marshalling yards. The heaviest blow fell on Ansbach, and Ulm, Salzwedel, Bamberg, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, Northeim, Peine, Ludwigslust, Kreiensen and Lüneburg were also hit. One bomber was shot down by a Me 262 jet.

From Italy, more than 700 heavy bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force and some 300 fighters attacked several dozen marshalling yards, lines and bridges in a belt some 300 miles long and 100 miles wide – in Bavaria and Austria. The tactical air forces destroyed bridges, railway junctions and rolling stock over western Germany: according to their reports, the Ninth Air Force destroyed more than a hundred locomotives, and the British Second Tactical Air Force more than 160 locomotives, hundreds of wagons and several dozen barges, losing more than twenty Mosquitoes in the process. Bomber Command’s Lancasters attacked the railway viaducts near Altenbeken and Bielefeld and the benzol plants at Gelsenkirchen and Osterfeld.

23 February and the assessment of results

On the second day the operation was smaller but still powerful. The Eighth Air Force sent some 1,200 heavy bombers, which dropped more than 3,300 tonnes of bombs on junctions and marshalling yards in central and southern Germany, among them Kitzingen, Plauen, Ansbach, Paderborn, Crailsheim, Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Treuchtlingen, Meiningen, Osnabrück and Weimar; only two bombers failed to return. The Fifteenth Air Force sent 455 heavy bombers against targets in southern Germany, and the tactical aircraft again hunted trains, bridges and depots. That day Bomber Command bombed Essen and, once again, Gelsenkirchen in daylight.

Immediately after the operation the results looked impressive. According to the assessments of the time, some 150 marshalling yards had been damaged, the tracks cut in some 500 places and some 300 locomotives destroyed, and the accuracy of low-level bombing had exceeded expectations. Spaatz, Tedder and Doolittle wanted to repeat such strikes. Later analyses, as the official history of the US Army Air Forces admits, “greatly cooled the enthusiasm”. The German railways (the Deutsche Reichsbahn) repaired most of the damage within a few days, and the highest-priority military traffic continued to get through. The British Joint Intelligence Committee concluded that the operation had not seriously weakened Germany’s capacity to resist, and Portal opposed further operations of this kind. Clarion was not repeated in the same form, although attacks on German transport continued until the end of the war and, together with the oil offensive, brought about a genuine collapse of the German economy in March and April 1945.

Casualties in small towns

For the inhabitants of small towns, the operation meant their first – often their only – heavy raid of the war. In many of them the railway stations lay right next to the old centres, and stations and trains were crowded with travellers and refugees from the east. Local tallies cited in the German literature give for the raids of 22 and 23 February some 700 dead in Kitzingen, nearly 600 in Treuchtlingen, some 500 in Neumarkt, more than 440 in Ansbach, several hundred in Plauen and Salzwedel and some 200 each in Meiningen, Oettingen, Stendal and Ludwigslust, among other places. These figures come from different sources and are not always comparable, but taken together they amount to several thousand civilian dead – mostly in places that Allied reports listed merely as railway junctions “effectively attacked”. Parts of historic old towns were also destroyed, among them in Oettingen, where the actual target – the bridge over the Wörnitz – was missed.

Bombs on Switzerland

The scale of the operation and poor target identification led on 22 February to several mistaken attacks on neutral Switzerland. A single B-17 dropped its bombs on the small town of Stein am Rhein on the Rhine; according to Swiss tallies, 9 people were killed and more than a dozen seriously injured. Bombs also fell on the municipality of Rafz in the canton of Zurich (8 dead, according to the same tallies) and on several other border localities, among them Tägerwilen, Neuhausen am Rheinfall and Beringen, as well as Vals in Graubünden; an American fighter strafed a goods train. Switzerland protested. The incident was not an isolated one – on 4 March American bombers bombed Basel and Zurich, after which Spaatz had to apologise to the Swiss in person. According to Swiss figures, a total of 84 people were killed in Switzerland by British and American bombs in 1939–1945.

Pforzheim

The raid on Pforzheim on the evening of 23 February 1945 is sometimes linked with Operation Clarion, but it was a separate night attack by RAF Bomber Command, commanded by Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris. In under half an hour some 370–380 bombers bombed the densely built-up centre of the town, known for its jewellery and watchmaking industry, which had been converted during the war to the production of fuses. The resulting fire destroyed most of the town’s buildings. According to German findings, some 17,000 people were killed, almost a fifth of the inhabitants – in proportion to the population, the highest death toll of any raid on a German city. German historiography suggests that the choice of target may have been decided above all by the flammability of the old town, in line with the British strategy of area bombing; British documents emphasised the armaments production dispersed throughout the town.

Place in the war

Operation Clarion was the largest and most widely dispersed single air operation of the Western Allies over Germany. It showed that the Allies commanded the air over the whole Reich and could strike almost any corner of it in broad daylight, from low altitude, with minimal losses. It did not, however, bring the expected breakthrough: the German railways quickly resumed operation, and the operation’s significance for the fighting on the Rhine was limited. In the weeks that followed, the air forces continued systematically to destroy transport in western Germany, which eased the crossing of the Rhine and the encirclement of the Ruhr in the spring.

The operation is also among the most debated episodes of strategic bombing. The dispute between Spaatz and Eaker, conducted within the American command itself, concerned a question that returned after the war in assessments of the raids on Dresden and Pforzheim: whether an attack on infrastructure in the middle of inhabited towns, with the intention of breaking the population’s morale, could still be distinguished from the area bombing from which the American air forces officially distanced themselves. For thousands of inhabitants of the small towns of Franconia, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, 22 and 23 February 1945 remained the days on which the air war reached places it had never reached before.