RAF raids on Berlin in January 1943

On the evening of 16 January 1943 RAF Bomber Command sent 201 heavy bombers to Berlin: 190 Lancasters and 11 Halifaxes. The following night, 17–18 January, the raid was repeated by 170 Lancasters and 17 Halifaxes. It was the first attack on the capital of the Reich for fourteen months, and also the first operation flown entirely by four-engined aircraft and the first in which the Pathfinder force used purpose-built target-marking bombs. The results were modest: the bombs fell mainly on the southern districts of the city, and the second night brought heavy losses. Even so, those two January nights foreshadowed what Berlin was to endure over the next two years.

A fourteen-month gap

Berlin was a special target for British bombers, but a very difficult one. It lay some 950 kilometres from London, further than the industrial centres of western Germany, and the radio navigation aids the RAF relied on over the Ruhr did not reach as far as the Baltic and Brandenburg. Since the first raid in August 1940 Bomber Command had returned to the city many times, but in small numbers and to little effect, including during the May 1941 series of raids on Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin. The disaster of the night of 7 to 8 November 1941, when about 20 of the 169 aircraft sent to Berlin in bad weather failed to return, brought that period to an end. For over a year the British gave up long-range flights to the German capital, and in the whole of 1942 only nine air-raid alerts were sounded in Berlin, none of them serious.

In the meantime Bomber Command had changed beyond recognition. In February 1942 Arthur Harris, an advocate of area bombing of whole urban districts, took command; Lancasters, capable of carrying several tons of bombs as far as Berlin, were reaching the squadrons in growing numbers; and from August 1942 the Pathfinder Force had been in operation. In the autumn part of the force was turned against Italy, against Turin and Genoa, in support of the fighting in North Africa. By the beginning of January 1943 Harris had the strength to strike at Berlin, although he still lacked the tools that would allow him to hit the city in bad weather: the H2S airborne radar was not yet ready, and the Gee and Oboe systems did not reach that far.

The night of 16 to 17 January

For the first raid Bomber Command assembled a force consisting solely of four-engined aircraft. The Stirlings, which flew at too low an altitude, were dropped from the original plan, so that only the higher-flying Lancasters and Halifaxes of the Pathfinder Force and of Nos. 1, 4 and 5 Groups took part; No. 5 Group supplied most of the crews. For the first time the leading aircraft dropped special target indicators – bombs filled with coloured pyrotechnic candles intended to mark the aiming point clearly for the rest of the force.

The weather was unhelpful. On the way the bombers met a thick layer of cloud that made navigation difficult, and Berlin itself lay under haze. The bombing was scattered and fell mainly on the southern districts of the city, with the heaviest concentration in Tempelhof. The German warning system, however, failed even more badly than British navigation: it reported single aircraft rather than a large formation, so the bombs began to fall at the same moment as the sirens started to wail, in the evening, when many Berliners were away from home. Panic broke out at the entrances to the shelters, and the police had difficulty bringing it under control. According to a German report cited in British studies, 198 people were killed, including 53 prisoners of war (52 Frenchmen and one Briton) and six foreign workers. Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, was reportedly furious and ordered a review of the entire alert procedure.

The best-known episode of the night was the fate of the Deutschlandhalle, a large entertainment hall in the western part of the city, where a circus performance was in progress. Police and firemen managed to lead some 10,000 spectators and all the animals out of the building to nearby parks; 21 people were slightly injured in the crush at the exits. Moments after the last people had left, incendiary bombs fell on the hall and the Deutschlandhalle burned to the ground. The anti-aircraft defences were exceptionally weak that night, because roughly half the personnel of the Berlin batteries were away from the city on a training course. The British lost only one Lancaster, from No. 5 Group.

The night of 17 to 18 January

The following evening Harris repeated the raid with 187 aircraft. The weather was better, but once again the Pathfinders failed to mark the city centre, and the bombs again fell mostly on the southern districts. A British report claimed hits on the Daimler-Benz works, which German records do not confirm; the BMW aero-engine factory in Spandau, on the other hand, suffered slight damage from incendiaries. No more serious destruction in the city was recorded.

This time the attackers paid dearly. The bombers flew to Berlin and back along the same routes as the night before, so the German night fighters had no difficulty finding their stream. Nineteen Lancasters and three Halifaxes were shot down or otherwise lost – 11.8 per cent of the force, a rate higher than the command regarded as sustainable in the long run. In one of the Lancasters of No. 106 Squadron, piloted by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, flew the BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby, whose radio report on the raid brought home to the British public the realities of the night air war.

Flak towers and the defence of Berlin

The weakness of the anti-aircraft fire on 16 January was the exception. Berlin was the best-defended city in the Reich. After the first British raids in 1940 Hitler ordered massive reinforced-concrete flak towers (Flaktürme) to be built in the capital in pairs: a gun tower with four heavy guns and a fire-control tower with radar. By 1942 three such pairs stood, in the Tiergarten next to the Zoo, in Friedrichshain and in Humboldthain. They also served as shelters for thousands of inhabitants and as repositories for works of art from Berlin’s museums. Batteries of heavy guns, searchlights and barrage balloons ringed the city, and night fighters directed from the ground by radar operated on the approaches to Berlin. The January raids showed that this system could inflict painful losses on an attacker whenever it had time to prepare.

Harris and the offensive of 1943

The lessons Bomber Command drew from the two nights over Berlin were sober. The target indicators worked technically, but they were no substitute for navigation aids: without H2S radar the crews could not find the city centre in cloud and haze. The experiment of sending Lancasters and Halifaxes to Berlin with target indicators was therefore suspended until the new radar reached the squadrons. In any case Harris could not concentrate on Germany at that point. On 14 January the Air Ministry, under pressure from the Admiralty in its struggle against the submarines, ordered area attacks to destroy the French ports on the Bay of Biscay where U-boats were based, and that same night the attacks on Lorient began. The bases, in reinforced-concrete pens, survived; it was the French towns that were destroyed.

At the Casablanca Conference on 21 January the Allied chiefs of staff adopted a directive on a combined bomber offensive. Its aim was to be the progressive destruction of Germany’s military, industrial and economic potential and the undermining of the population’s morale, and from then on the RAF’s night raids were to be complemented by daylight operations by American bombers. For Harris this was a mandate to continue the offensive against German cities.

Place in the war

The January raids on Berlin were of greater political than military significance. They showed the inhabitants of the Reich’s capital – in the very weeks when the Sixth Army was dying at Stalingrad – that the air war was returning to their city, and showed the British that Bomber Command could reach the heart of Germany. Barely two weeks later, on 30 January 1943, the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, fast RAF Mosquitos appeared over Berlin in daylight just as Hermann Göring and Goebbels were speaking on the radio.

The real offensive, however, came later and in a different order from what the January nights had suggested. From March 1943, now equipped with H2S radar and the Oboe system, Harris waged a great campaign against the Ruhr; in July he destroyed Hamburg; and he returned to Berlin in earnest only in the second half of November 1943. The air battle of Berlin that began then lasted until March 1944, killed thousands of inhabitants and left hundreds of thousands homeless, but in that time Bomber Command lost more than a thousand aircraft in raids on Berlin and other cities, and it did not break Germany, as Harris had hoped. By the end of the war British and American aircraft had bombed Berlin hundreds of times, and the two January nights of 1943 opened the heaviest phase of its air war.