RAF raids on Berlin and Hamburg

It is often said that on 25 October 1940 Berlin and Hamburg were “heavily bombed”. British bombers were indeed returning over both cities in those days, but the word “heavily” needs qualifying. Bomber Command, Britain’s bomber force, flew over Germany only at night, so the date of 25 October refers to night operations, on the night of 24–25 or of 25–26 October. The available tallies do not allow a reliable figure for the number of aircraft or casualties on those nights, but one thing is certain: these were not large raids. Each night the RAF dispatched a total of a few dozen, rarely more than a hundred, aircraft and divided them among many targets: ports and shipyards, refineries, railway junctions, airfields and the Channel ports. From each operation, therefore, at most a few dozen bombers reached Berlin or Hamburg, and only some of those found their target. The raids of the autumn of 1940 were a nuisance to the Germans, but light compared with what was happening in Britain in the same weeks. The Luftwaffe, which after the postponement of the invasion until the spring had shifted the weight of its bombing to the night, was attacking London almost every night. According to British statistics, more than 6,000 civilians were killed across the country in October, most of them Londoners, many in shelters such as Balham Underground station.

More important than the bombs themselves was what happened in London that day. On 25 October 1940 the outgoing commander of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Charles Portal, took up the post of Chief of the Air Staff, the professional head of the RAF. That same day his staff sent the new commander of the bomber force a draft directive that openly set the raids the aim of undermining the morale of the German population.

Berlin and Hamburg as targets

Berlin had been bombed since the night of 25–26 August, when the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had demanded retaliation for the bombs that had fallen on the City of London. After the Blitz began on 7 September, politicians called above all for strikes on the capital of the Reich. The Air Staff preferred closer targets of greater economic importance: British bombers had five times as far to fly from London to Berlin as German bombers had from France to London. The outcome was a compromise. The directive of 21 September listed Berlin’s power stations and gasworks among the important targets, but at the same time acknowledged that there were no objectives in the capital vital to the main strategic plans. There the raids were to cause “the greatest possible disturbance and dislocation” both to industry and to the civilian population. The largest operation so far, the raid of the night of 23–24 September, in which 119 aircraft took off, was an exception. The British official history notes that attacks on that scale had not yet become the rule.

Hamburg, the second largest city of the Reich and its biggest port, had been bombed since May 1940. According to Hamburg records, the first bombs fell on the city on 18 May 1940, and by April 1945 it had endured 213 raids. Bombers were sent to Hamburg more readily than to Berlin for two reasons. It lay closer, and the coastline and the Elbe estuary made night navigation easier, so crews found the target more readily than in the smoke-shrouded Ruhr. There was also plenty there to attack: the Blohm + Voss shipyards and other yards building submarines, the port’s quays, and the refineries and fuel tanks at Harburg. In October 1940 naval targets were of particular importance. The Admiralty was pressing for attacks on the warships and shipyards of the Kriegsmarine, especially the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau lying at Kiel, and in those weeks German submarines were inflicting very heavy losses on the British in the Atlantic, the most painful example being the slaughter of convoys SC 7 and HX 79. According to the British official history, more than a third of Bomber Command’s sorties in October were directed against naval and coastal targets.

Nights over the Reich

The bombers that flew over Germany in the autumn of 1940 were the twin-engined Handley Page Hampden, Vickers Wellington and Armstrong Whitworth Whitley. Each of them carried at most a few tons of bombs, and on the way to Berlin far less. The crews took off individually, each for an assigned point, and navigated without radio aids: by compass, watch, forecast wind and whatever could be made out by moonlight. Autumn weather, icing and fog over blacked-out Germany meant that many aircraft bombed alternative targets or failed to find the city at all. The German night-fighter force was only just being organised and shot down few bombers in 1940; a large proportion of British losses was caused by the weather, accidents and running out of fuel on the way back over the North Sea.

The scale of the problem is best conveyed by the command’s own assessment. The new commander of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Richard Peirse, in an unofficial letter to the Air Staff at the end of October, estimated that on long-range operations such as those to Berlin only one aircraft in five found the target, and on shorter ones roughly one in three. The British press and Air Ministry communiqués, meanwhile, described power stations, shipyards and railway stations being hit. In Germany the picture was the reverse: the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels portrayed the raids as attacks by “air pirates” on residential housing while at the same time playing down their effects. The material damage was slight, but nights spent in cellars, interrupted transport and lateness for work took their toll on the inhabitants. As early as 10 October Hitler had issued an order under which the so-called immediate shelter-building programme (Führer-Sofortprogramm) got under way in Berlin, Hamburg and several dozen other cities.

Portal at the head of the RAF

The change at the top of the RAF had been in preparation for several weeks. The outgoing Chief of the Air Staff, Cyril Newall, who had built up the air force before the war and led it through the Battle of Britain, was exhausted and had lost political support. His departure was pressed for in particular by the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, with whom Newall had clashed over control of aircraft production and repair. On 4 October Newall was promoted to Marshal of the Royal Air Force and retired, and in 1941 he became Governor-General of New Zealand. Portal handed over Bomber Command at the beginning of October; the British official history of the air force gives 5 October as the date on which Peirse took it over. On 25 October Portal formally became Chief of the Air Staff with the acting rank of Air Chief Marshal. He was 47 years old, the youngest of the British chiefs of staff. He led the RAF until the end of the war.

Portal came to the Air Ministry with firmly formed views. As commander of Bomber Command in the summer of 1940 he had protested against the use of bombers for defensive tasks, and on 11 September he proposed that after every “indiscriminate” German raid on a British city the RAF should retaliate by attacking, without discrimination, one of twenty designated German cities. The city, warned in advance by radio, was to be attacked by 150–160 bombers, which would drop more than 130 tons of bombs on it. Bomber Command’s leadership held that since at night it was impossible anyway to hit a single factory without striking the houses around it, destruction in the city should cease to be a side effect and become the aim. The authors of the British official history of the bomber offensive, Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, put it this way: what the Air Staff regarded as a by-product, Portal wished to make the end-product.

The directive of 30 October

The draft directive that the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, William Sholto Douglas, sent to Peirse on 25 October stated that, now that the danger of invasion had passed, the moment was “particularly opportune” to try to affect the morale of the Germans, who could no longer count on a quick victory and faced a winter and a long war. It proposed selecting twenty or thirty cities and attacking one of them every few nights with 50–100 bombers. Peirse replied that this was more than his forces could carry out. He proposed cutting the list to twelve cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Leipzig, Essen, Dresden, Breslau (Wrocław), Frankfurt am Main and Düsseldorf, with Hanover and Stuttgart in reserve. He asked not to be thought a pessimist: with twice the forces, he wrote, he would “gallop” at the directive.

The final directive, issued on 30 October, changed little. The first target remained the synthetic oil plants, to be attacked on moonlit nights when they could be found. For the remaining nights the directive provided for “regular concentrated attacks on objectives in large towns and centres of industry”, intended to demonstrate to the enemy the power and severity of bombing. Berlin was to come first, whenever the weather offered a chance of reaching the city. The first aircraft were to drop mainly incendiaries and start fires, and those that followed were to aim their bombs at the fires, so as to hamper the fire brigades and allow the fires to spread. Webster and Frankland judged that in this way the fiction that bombers attacked only “military objectives” in cities was officially abandoned. At the end of October an optimistic report also reached London from the British legation in Belgrade about flagging morale in Berlin, and the War Cabinet expressed the hope that the capital of the Reich would be bombed as often as possible.

Place in the war

The raids at the end of October 1940 did no great damage to either Berlin or Hamburg. Their significance lay in the fact that they continued: from the autumn of 1940 the air war over Germany did not let up until the spring of 1945. In mid-November the RAF sent more than two hundred bombers against Hamburg over two nights and damaged the Blohm + Voss shipyard. After the German raid on Coventry on the night of 14–15 November the War Cabinet agreed to a retaliatory attack on Mannheim, carried out on the night of 16–17 December. It was Bomber Command’s first raid deliberately aimed at the centre of a city. The Butt Report of August 1941 confirmed that Peirse had not been wrong: only about one in three crews that reported attacking dropped their bombs within five miles (eight kilometres) of the target. Portal’s response was not to abandon raids on cities but to extend them. In February 1942 the area bombing directive named the morale of the population as the target, and Arthur Harris took over Bomber Command. In July 1943, in Operation Gomorrah, Hamburg suffered a firestorm in which an estimated 34,000 people were killed, and Berlin was the target of Bomber Command’s great offensive in the winter of 1943–1944. The method described in the directive of 30 October 1940 – fires started by the first wave and fed by those that followed – became the foundation of the British bomber offensive.