The RAF raid on Berlin of 7 September

War chronologies record under 7 September 1941 that Berlin was “heavily hit” by RAF bombers. The raid in question took place on the night of 7–8 September. British bomber forces, Bomber Command, sent 197 aircraft to the Reich capital that night: twin-engined Wellingtons, Hampdens and Whitleys, together with a few of the new bombers: four-engined Stirlings and Halifaxes and twin-engined Manchesters. According to Bomber Command’s operations record it was the heaviest raid on Berlin up to that time. Fifteen aircraft failed to return. These descriptions need qualifying, however: “heaviest” here means “largest”, not “most effective”. There is much to suggest that the bombs were scattered over a wide area and that the city itself suffered far less than was believed in England.

Berlin at the limit of range

Berlin, almost a thousand kilometres from the British airfields, had been a target of air raids since August 1940, but throughout that first year it could be attacked only on longer, clear nights and with small forces. The largest raid on the capital so far, that of the night of 23–24 September 1940, had involved about 120 aircraft. In the spring of 1941, when priority went to the struggle against the U-boats, the bombers were sent mainly against ports and shipyards on the North Sea, while Berlin was visited by smaller detachments. The Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, defended such raids even when they destroyed little. He is credited with the remark that getting four million people out of their beds and into the shelters was worth the losses incurred.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union the pressure in the Atlantic eased, and a directive of 9 July 1941 turned Bomber Command against German railway junctions and, explicitly, against the morale of the civilian population. The raids on the Reich also gained political significance. Britain could not send an army to the east, and its bombers were the only weapon with which it could strike at Germany itself while the Red Army was falling back under the Wehrmacht’s blows. Moscow, indeed, sought a similar gesture of its own: from the night of 7–8 August Soviet bombers flying from Saaremaa attacked Berlin several times with small forces, until at the beginning of September the Germans closed in on the Estonian islands.

The raid came three weeks after a report that had called Bomber Command’s claims into question. David Bensusan-Butt, an official of the War Cabinet Secretariat, acting on the instructions of Churchill’s scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, had compared 633 photographs taken by bombers’ cameras in June and July with the crews’ reports. The report, circulated on 18 August 1941, found that of the aircraft that reported having attacked the target, only about one in three had dropped its bombs within five miles (eight kilometres) of it. Over Germany as a whole the proportion was one in four, over the Ruhr one in ten, and on moonless nights only one in fifteen. The air force command accepted these findings reluctantly and challenged the method, but did not ignore them.

The night of 7–8 September

Early September brought better weather and longer nights, which allowed the bombers to reach Berlin and return before dawn. The raid was planned on the largest scale yet: almost two hundred aircraft were sent against a single city, while smaller forces flew that same night against the port of Kiel and against Boulogne-sur-Mer. In accordance with the tactics of the day, the bombers flew individually, at intervals, and each crew sought out the target on its own, navigating by compass, watch, forecast winds and whatever could be made out in the dark. Before flying on over Germany they had to cross the Netherlands and the German coast through a belt of night-fighter zones, in which ground radars guided Messerschmitt Bf 110s onto the bombers, while over Berlin itself searchlights and strong anti-aircraft artillery lay in wait.

What such a raid looked like at close quarters is shown by the operations record of No. 115 Squadron RAF at Marham in Norfolk. On the evening of 7 September, between 8.03 and 9.05 p.m., twelve Wellingtons took off from there, bound for Berlin, Kiel and Boulogne. Over Berlin itself three aircraft dropped their bombs, and none observed any clear results. A fourth attacked a “camouflaged factory” some thirty kilometres south of the city and started a large fire, and a fifth dropped its bombs on Magdeburg. One crew was attacked by a German fighter and turned back with its bombs still on board. Another Wellington crashed on take-off on the airfield runway, its crew escaping unhurt. Two of the squadron’s aircraft did not return. One of them was shot down over the Netherlands by Oberleutnant Helmut Lent of Nachtjagdgeschwader 1 (Night Fighter Wing 1), later one of the most successful German night-fighter pilots. The bomber came down at 4.58 a.m. near Drachten in Friesland. Six airmen aged between 19 and 30 were killed: four Britons, a Canadian and a New Zealander.

This record from a single squadron illustrates the conclusions of the Butt Report well. Eight of the twelve crews reported that they had found and attacked their assigned targets, but only three dropped their bombs over Berlin, one attacked something it took for the target several dozen kilometres from the city, and another chose an alternative target.

Losses and results

Of the 197 aircraft sent to Berlin, fifteen did not return, almost eight per cent. It was a heavy loss: at that rate, within a dozen or so raids the command lost as many aircraft and trained crews as several squadrons contained. They were shot down by night fighters and anti-aircraft guns, but some bombers were lost without any enemy involvement, to icing, engine failure and lack of fuel on the way back over the North Sea.

British communiqués spoke of fires in the city and hits on industrial targets. Detailed figures for the damage and casualties in Berlin that night, consistent across several sources, are not available. British studies speak of the heaviest raid so far, but none attributes any serious effect on German production to it. Even after earlier raids German internal reports had noted that many British bombs were falling on suburbs, allotments and fields around the city, and the Marham record suggests that this night was no different. The German authorities had drawn their conclusions from this earlier: from the autumn of 1940 they had been building large shelters and anti-aircraft towers in Berlin, the Flaktürme, and from September 1941 the capital’s air defences operated as the 1st Flak Division.

Place in the war

The raid of 7–8 September 1941 was the high point of British raids on Berlin in the first two years of the war, and at the same time a reminder of their cost. In September Bomber Command was arguing with the War Cabinet over its own future. On 22 September the Air Ministry’s Directorate of Bomber Operations calculated, on the basis of the damage to British cities, that a force of four thousand bombers could destroy forty-three German towns with populations of over a hundred thousand. Portal argued that such a force could win the war in six months. Churchill, fresh from reading the Butt Report, replied sceptically that it was very doubtful whether bombing alone could decide the war.

The next large raid on Berlin ended in disaster. On the night of 7–8 November 1941 the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Richard Peirse, sent over three hundred and ninety aircraft against the Reich, 169 of them against Berlin. In bad weather fewer than half reached the target, and 21 aircraft from the Berlin raid alone failed to return. The Air Ministry suspended attacks on the capital for a time, and at the beginning of 1942 Peirse was removed. The answer to the Butt Report was therefore not to abandon the raids but to change them. A directive of 14 February 1942 named the morale of the population of German cities as the main target, and eight days later command passed to Arthur Harris, an advocate of area bombing. New radio navigation aids, the “bomber stream” and target-marking units meant that several hundred aircraft could drop their bombs on a single area within the space of a quarter of an hour or so. In the winter of 1943–1944 Berlin endured Bomber Command’s great offensive, and towards the end of the war daylight raids by the American air force as well. Seen in this light, the September night of 1941, with fewer than two hundred bombers, was still a trial of strength.