Operation Gomorrah

Shortly before midnight on 24 July 1943 almost 800 bombers of RAF Bomber Command flew out over the North Sea. Their target was Hamburg – Germany’s largest port and the second city of the Reich. So began Operation Gomorrah, a series of four great British night raids and two American daylight raids that lasted until the night of 2/3 August. In those ten days some 9,000 tonnes of bombs fell on the city. On the night of 27/28 July the bombing set off a firestorm in the densely built working-class districts of a kind never seen before. In all, between roughly 34,000 and 40,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, and around a million inhabitants fled the city. It was the deadliest raid on a European city since the beginning of the war and one of the turning points of the Allied bomber offensive.

The Reich’s second city

Before the war Hamburg had some 1.7 million inhabitants. It was the largest port in continental Europe and home to great shipyards – Blohm + Voss, Howaldtswerke and Deutsche Werft – where U-boats were built, as well as a centre of oil refining in Harburg and of hundreds of plants working for the arms industry. The RAF had been attacking it since 1940 – among other occasions in May 1941 and in July 1942 – but these were scattered raids that did not threaten the life of the city. In May 1942 Hamburg was to have been the target of the first thousand-bomber raid; because of the weather the bombers were sent to Cologne instead.

Since February 1942 Bomber Command had been led by Air Marshal Arthur Harris, an advocate of area bombing. Under the doctrine adopted by the RAF, the targets were no longer individual factories, which were hard to hit at night, but whole residential districts: destroying workers’ homes, the water mains, transport and services was meant to paralyse industry and break the population’s morale. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943 the British and Americans adopted a combined bomber offensive against Germany: the RAF was to attack by night and the American Eighth Air Force by day, a compromise that settled the earlier dispute over day and night bombing. From March to July 1943 Harris waged the Battle of the Ruhr, in which fires consumed, among other places, Barmen and Elberfeld. The experience gained there was now to be used against Hamburg. In his operational order of 27 May 1943 Harris wrote that the total destruction of the city would have incalculable effects on the enemy’s industrial capacity.

Hamburg was chosen for several reasons. It lay close to British airfields, so in the short summer nights the bombers spent less time over the Reich. The Elbe estuary and the distinctive coastline showed up well on the screens of the airborne H2S radars, which made the target easier to find even without visibility. British analysts, who since 1941 had been studying how best to set German cities on fire, judged Hamburg’s buildings – tenements with wooden floors and staircases, the cramped courtyards of the working-class districts – to be exceptionally vulnerable to fire. The experience of the Blitz had taught the British that incendiaries destroyed a city more effectively than high explosive; the right mixture was to combine the two.

The name of the operation came from the Book of Genesis, from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which God rained down brimstone and fire from heaven.

“Window”

The most important novelty of the operation was “Window”: bundles of paper strips coated on one side with aluminium foil and cut to half the wavelength of the German radars. Dropped by every bomber at one-minute intervals, they created a cloud of false echoes on the screens in which the real aircraft were lost. The British had had this device ready since 1942, but the Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, had held back its use for fear that the Germans would copy it and turn it against British radars. The Germans had in fact developed the same thing under the name “Düppel” and for the same reason did not use it. Once the Luftwaffe’s advantage over Britain was a thing of the past and new Allied radars had become less sensitive to jamming, Winston Churchill agreed on 15 July 1943 to the use of Window – against Hamburg.

The effect was immediate. The Reich’s night defences were based on a system created by General Josef Kammhuber: a belt of zones in which ground-based Würzburg radars guided a single night fighter onto a single bomber, while airborne Lichtenstein radars allowed it to catch its prey in the dark. Window blinded both. Radar operators saw hundreds of targets, the flak fired blind and the fighters circled without guidance.

The first night

The raid had been planned for the night of 23/24 July, but the weather forced a day’s delay. On the evening of 24 July 791 bombers took off – Lancasters, Halifaxes, Stirlings and Wellingtons, with British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and Polish crews. According to Polish studies, Polish bomber squadrons No. 300 and No. 305 took part in the raid and returned without loss. At around 12.57 a.m. Pathfinder Force aircraft, guided by H2S, began dropping yellow target indicators, followed by red ones laid by the light of flares. The aiming point was the area around St Nicholas’ Church in the centre. From 1.02 a.m. the main force bombed in six waves for a little under an hour.

The markers did not fall in one place, and as usual some crews released their bombs too early: the bombing “crept back” along the line of approach for several kilometres. Around a hundred aircraft attacked decoy fires lit by the Germans outside the city. Even so, large areas of Altona, Eimsbüttel, Hoheluft, St. Pauli and the city centre caught fire, and bombs also fell on the port and the shipyards. A fire at the telephone exchange cut the communications of the civil defence command, rubble blocked the fire engines, and some fires were still burning out three days later. According to contemporary estimates by the Hamburg police, some 1,500 people were killed. The British lost only 12 bombers, about one and a half per cent – far fewer than in the raids on the Ruhr.

The Americans over Hamburg

The operation had been conceived as a joint undertaking of both air forces. On the afternoon of 25 July 90 American B-17 Flying Fortresses of the Eighth Air Force, commanded by General Ira Eaker, arrived over Hamburg; other formations attacked Kiel and Warnemünde that day. The targets were the Blohm + Voss shipyard and the Klöckner aero-engine works. The city was still shrouded in smoke from the night’s fires: some of the shipyard buildings were hit, but the U-boat slipways survived, and the obscured engine factory was replaced by secondary targets. Two large liners used as accommodation ships were sunk. German fighters and flak shot down more than a dozen bombers.

In the evening reconnaissance showed that smoke still hung over Hamburg, so Harris sent the main force to Essen and dispatched only a few fast Mosquitos to Hamburg to keep the city on alert. On 26 July the Americans returned, but because of problems in forming up only 54 bombers reached Hamburg. The Germans had managed to cover the port with an artificial smokescreen; the bombs damaged the power station at Neuhof, cutting off a large part of the city’s electricity supply. After these two days the Eighth Air Force, which in the same week – later dubbed “Blitz Week” – also attacked Hanover, Kassel and Oschersleben, had suffered such heavy losses that it suspended missions deep into Germany for several weeks.

The firestorm

The night of 26/27 July was quiet – Bomber Command rarely sent out its main force three nights running. On the night of 27/28 July, around midnight, 787 bombers arrived over Hamburg. This time the target was the densely populated working-class districts east of the centre: Hammerbrook, Hamm, Borgfelde, Hohenfelde, Billwerder and Rothenburgsort. This time the markers fell unusually close together, a few kilometres east of the planned aiming point, and the bombers kept to them with exceptional accuracy.

What followed was decided by several circumstances at once. The summer was hot and dry; on 27 July daytime temperatures were around 30 degrees and the air was exceptionally dry. The raid opened with heavy high-explosive bombs and aerial mines, which tore off roofs, blew out windows and doors and smashed water mains; delayed-action bombs were meant to keep firefighters in the shelters. They were followed by tens of thousands of incendiaries. Most of Hamburg’s fire brigade was still fighting fires in the western part of the city, and the units brought in from Hanover had gone home after the American raid on that city. Individual fires quickly merged into one. The heated air rose in a column several kilometres high, and air from all around rushed in to take its place with hurricane force. According to later calculations, the wind in the streets reached some 240 km/h and the temperature at the heart of the fire reached 800 degrees or more. Within half an hour of the first bombs the fire covered some 10 square kilometres; in the end the firestorm consumed more than 20 square kilometres of the city.

Most of the victims died in cellars and shelters. What killed them was usually not lack of oxygen, as was long believed, but carbon monoxide and combustion gases forcing their way into the rooms, as well as the heat of the burning rubble above the ceilings. Rescuers later found entire families sitting without a mark on them. Those who fled into the streets died in the flames or were swept away by the wind; the survivors were mostly those who managed to reach the parks, the canals and the banks of the Elbe and the Alster. Accounts of people stuck in burning asphalt, researchers believe, arose from the burning, sticky mixture from the incendiary bombs spilt on the cobbles. According to the most commonly cited estimates, around 18,000 people died that one night. Bomber Command lost 17 aircraft.

The last raids

On the night of 28/29 July only a few Mosquitos were sent over the city, which was still shrouded in smoke. The following night 777 bombers set out on the third great raid. This time the markers fell south of the districts burnt two days earlier, and the creep-back of the bombing meant that Barmbek and Wandsbek suffered worst. The fire brigade no longer existed as an organised force, so small fires easily grew into large ones. In one large public shelter some 370 people died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The Germans were learning fast how to counter Window: instead of guiding the fighters by radar, they broadcast running commentaries by radio on the course and height of the bomber stream, and the pilots hunted for targets on their own, often by the light of searchlights and fires over the city itself. Out of this improvisation grew the Wilde Sau tactic. The British lost 28 aircraft that night.

The last raid was postponed for several days because of the weather. On the night of 2/3 August 737 bombers took off, but over the German coast they ran into a violent thunderstorm. Many crews turned back or dropped their bombs on random towns and villages, up to 160 kilometres from Hamburg. Roughly 400 aircraft reached the target, and their bombs were scattered across the city and its surroundings without doing much more damage. The dispersed stream lost the protection of Window and the bombers were picked off by night fighters; counting the victims of the storm, the British lost some 30 aircraft that night, including a Wellington of the Polish No. 300 Squadron.

Casualties and destruction

In four night and two daylight raids the Allies flew some 3,000 sorties and dropped around 9,000 tonnes of bombs. Bomber Command lost 87 bombers in all, a little under 3 per cent of the aircraft dispatched – fewer than in many raids on the Ruhr. German losses were out of all proportion. The number of dead will never be established precisely. By 30 November 1943 the city services had recovered 31,647 bodies, of which only about half were identified; in many cellars the number of victims could only be estimated from the quantity of ash. On the basis of police documents historians usually accept a figure of around 34,000 dead, sometimes up to 37,000–40,000; the figure of 40,000 given in Germany during the war is the upper limit of the estimates. Depending on the source, between 125,000 and 180,000 were injured. Among the identified dead, about half were women and one in eight were children. The Germans later sent prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp to clear the rubble, recover bodies and defuse unexploded bombs, working without any protection; many of them died at this work.

More than half of the city’s housing stock was destroyed – according to German figures some 214,000 of 414,000 dwellings – along with hundreds of industrial plants, schools, hospitals and churches. The worst-hit eastern districts were sealed off and declared a closed zone. Around a million people fled or were evacuated from Hamburg; Gauleiter and Reich Governor Karl Kaufmann ordered the evacuation of women, children and the wounded, but men, officials and factory managers also left the city. The refugees scattered all over Germany, carrying with them stories that propaganda could not suppress.

Shock in the Reich

No earlier raid had made such an impression on the leaders of the Reich. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary of a catastrophe whose scale defied all imagination. Armaments Minister Albert Speer recalled after the war that he had warned Hitler that six more raids of this kind on major cities could bring armaments production to a halt. According to later interrogations of German dignitaries, Hitler himself is also said to have remarked that further raids on this scale could knock Germany out of the war. He did not, however, visit the burnt-out city. In time Hamburg restarted its most important armaments plants, but it never regained its full productive capacity; in the first months after the raids the workforce fell by about a tenth.

The changes in the defence of the Reich proved more important. Hermann Göring and the Luftwaffe shifted priority to fighter production, work on jamming-resistant radars was speeded up, and more and more squadrons and flak batteries were pulled back from the fronts to defend Germany. According to Western studies, by August 1943 nearly half of all German fighters were stationed in the Reich and in the West, and the number of heavy anti-aircraft guns at home had risen by more than a quarter. At that very time they were lacking in the East, where the Battle of Kursk was being fought, and over the Mediterranean, where the Allies were fighting in Sicily and a few days earlier had bombed Rome for the first time.

“The heaviest attack in the history of air warfare”?

Operation Gomorrah is often described as the heaviest attack in the history of air warfare up to that time. This needs qualifying. In terms of the number of aircraft, none of the individual raids exceeded the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne of May 1942, and a similar weight of bombs had already fallen on the cities of the Ruhr. What was exceptional was the total weight of bombs dropped on a single city in the space of a few days, the cooperation between the British and American air forces, and above all the consequences: the firestorm of 27/28 July made it the deadliest raid in Europe since the beginning of the war. By way of comparison, around 43,000 people were killed in Britain in the whole of the Blitz – not many more than died in ten days in one German city.

Its place in the war

For Bomber Command, Hamburg was confirmation that area bombing combined with new technical means could destroy a great city. Harris took it as proof that the war could be won from the air and in the autumn of 1943 launched the Battle of Berlin, which, however, did not produce a similar result and cost his command very heavy losses. In August Goebbels called on all Berliners whose presence was not essential to leave the city. Firestorms recurred in Kassel in October 1943, in Darmstadt in 1944 and in Dresden in February 1945, and the American air force used a similar method on a vast scale in Japan, beginning with the raid on Tokyo in March 1945. Hamburg was attacked dozens more times, right up to the end of the war.

Operation Gomorrah neither broke German morale nor put industry out of action for long, but it forced the Reich to divert enormous resources to the defence of its own skies – fighters, guns, ammunition and men who were then missing at the fronts. At the same time it has remained one of the most controversial episodes of the war: even while it was going on, and still more afterwards, there were disputes over the morality of deliberately destroying residential districts. In Hamburg it is commemorated by the ruin of St Nicholas’ Church, preserved as a memorial to the victims of war and tyranny between 1933 and 1945, and by a mass grave in Ohlsdorf Cemetery holding tens of thousands of those killed in July and August 1943.