RAF raids on Bremen and the Kiel Canal

British bomber aviation began 1941 with one of its largest operations to date. On New Year’s night, 1–2 January, Bomber Command sent 141 aircraft to Bremen, more than it had sent to Mannheim two weeks earlier. The main target was the Focke-Wulf aircraft works in the south of the city. On the next two nights the bombers returned to Bremen in smaller numbers, and in the same days British aircraft also attacked the Kiel Canal, the waterway linking the Baltic with the North Sea. There an incident occurred that found its way into the chronicles of the war: a bridge damaged by bombs collapsed onto the Finnish steamer Yrsa as she passed beneath it, and the ship sank in the canal.

War chronologies record these events twice: under 1 January, that the RAF bombed the aircraft works in Bremen, and under 3 January, that bombers attacked Bremen and the Kiel Canal and that a bridge over the canal, hit directly, collapsed onto the Yrsa. Both items concern a single series of night operations. They need two clarifications. The raid “of 1 January” took place on the night of 1–2 January. Nor is it known exactly which night saw the sinking of the Yrsa: British tallies of shipping losses give 3 January, while the German Chronology of the War at Sea by Jürgen Rohwer and Gerhard Hümmelchen places it in an entry covering 3 to 5 January. The available sources do not say which bridge was hit, and the German chronology speaks not of the whole bridge collapsing but of a damaged section falling onto the ship.

Bremen and the Focke-Wulf works

Bremen, the Reich’s second North Sea port after Hamburg, had more than 350,000 inhabitants in 1939 and was an important centre of the armaments industry. On the Weser stood the AG Weser and Bremer Vulkan shipyards, which built U-boats, along with refineries and a steelworks. The Focke-Wulf works were located by the airfield on the southern edge of the city. Among the aircraft built there was the four-engined Fw 200 Condor, conceived as an airliner, which in wartime became a long-range reconnaissance aircraft and bomber over the Atlantic. Condors sank their first ship in August 1940, shortly after Germany declared a blockade of the British Isles. In the same factory production of the new Fw 190 fighter was being prepared.

The RAF had dropped leaflets on Bremen as early as September 1939, and bombs from May 1940, when it began attacking targets in the Ruhr and in the ports of northern Germany. According to Bremen’s own records, 16 people were killed in the city in the raid of 18 May 1940. A Bomber Command directive of June named the refineries and aircraft works as the main targets in Bremen, one of July the shipyards building U-boats, and from September the RAF attacked the city regularly by night. In the December plan for a reprisal raid, eventually carried out against Mannheim, Bremen figured as one of three possible targets, under the codename “Jezebel”.

The nights of 1–4 January

The command, led since October by Air Marshal Richard Peirse, rarely sent more than a hundred aircraft against a single target; it usually divided a few dozen bombers between several cities, the Channel ports and airfields. The twin-engined Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens flew to the target singly, at intervals, and Bremen’s position on the Weser, not far from the coast, made night navigation easier. According to the British Bomber Command operations record, very accurate bombing was reported from Bremen, especially by the first waves, which attacked the Focke-Wulf works. These reports must be read with caution. A few days before Christmas, aerial photographs of Mannheim had shown that the crews’ accounts were at odds with reality, and in August 1941 the Butt Report showed that only about one in three crews reporting an attack dropped their bombs within eight kilometres of the target. The available records do not allow a reliable figure to be given for casualties in Bremen on these nights.

On the next two nights the RAF returned to Bremen in smaller numbers. British tallies of shipping losses record under 3 January the sinking in Bremen harbour of the Finnish steamer Liisa (1,460 GRT), whose wreck the Germans later raised.

The Kiel Canal and the Yrsa

The canal, opened in 1895 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and enlarged in 1907–1914, cuts across Schleswig-Holstein for some 98 kilometres, from the locks at Brunsbüttel at the mouth of the Elbe to the locks in the Kiel district of Holtenau. It shortens the route from the Baltic to the North Sea by about 250 nautical miles. For Germany it was an important trade route and at the same time an internal passage for the Kriegsmarine: warships passed through it from Kiel to Hamburg and the North Sea without entering waters where the Royal Navy could intercept them. As early as October 1938 Winston Churchill, then a backbench MP, advised the Minister for Coordination of Defence, Thomas Inskip, in a memorandum that in the event of war the canal should be blocked by mines or air attack. The canal, however, was strongly defended by anti-aircraft artillery, and its high bridges, rising some 40 metres above the water, were extremely hard to hit for bombers releasing their loads at night from high altitude.

According to a British naval chronology, at the beginning of January 1941 a bridge over the canal was hit directly and fell onto the Finnish steamer Yrsa (2,803 GRT), built in 1908, as she passed underneath. The ship sank and her wreck blocked the fairway. The sources do not say whether any of the crew were killed.

The Yrsa was a neutral ship, but neutrality did not protect shipping. Finland, which in March 1940 had concluded the peace ending the Winter War, was cut off from the West after the German occupation of Norway and Denmark. Most of her seaborne trade went to German ports, and Finnish ships, often carrying cargoes for the German war economy, were as exposed to British bombs and mines as German ones.

The wreck that held up the Bismarck

The consequences of the Yrsa’s sinking proved greater than anyone in London could have imagined. Raising the wreck was hampered by a harsh winter and, according to Rohwer and Hümmelchen’s chronology, lasted until March 1941. Meanwhile the new battleship Bismarck was waiting at the Blohm + Voss yard in Hamburg. After trials in the Baltic she had come there in December 1940 for final fitting-out work, and on 24 January she was to return through the canal to Kiel to train her crew in the Baltic. The blocked canal made this impossible, and the Kriegsmarine high command rejected the roundabout route around the Skaw. The ship did not receive orders to sail for Kiel until 6 March. Her commanding officer, Kapitän zur See Ernst Lindemann, noted in the war diary that the Bismarck had been tied up in Hamburg for five weeks and that the time lost at sea could not be made up, which would inevitably delay the ship’s entry into operations. According to Rohwer and Hümmelchen, the crew lost five weeks of exercises in the Baltic, including anti-aircraft gunnery.

An exchange of blows

The raids came at a time when the air war was being fought in both directions, but with very unequal forces. The Luftwaffe was continuing its night offensive against British cities. On the night of 2–3 January it heavily bombed Cardiff, where Llandaff Cathedral among other buildings was damaged, and in those days its stray aircraft also dropped bombs on neutral Ireland. Bomber Command replied with dozens of aircraft and dispersed them between different targets. On the night of 4–5 January 54 bombers attacked the heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper lying at Brest; on the night of 8–9 January Wilhelmshaven, where the Bismarck’s sister ship Tirpitz lay; and the following night the synthetic fuel plants at Gelsenkirchen. Behind this dispersal lay a dispute over the purpose of bomber aviation. The Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, had since the autumn favoured attacks on German cities, as expressed in the directive of 30 October 1940; the Admiralty demanded raids on warships, shipyards and Condor bases; and the Air Staff saw the key to victory in the fuel plants.

Place in the war

The raids of the first days of January did not halt production in Bremen. In mid-January a new directive restored priority to the synthetic fuel plants, and in March 1941, when the Battle of the Atlantic entered its most dangerous phase for the British, Churchill ordered bomber aviation to be turned against U-boats and long-range aircraft. Bremen, with its shipyards and the Focke-Wulf works, then went to the top of the target list. The RAF attacked the aircraft works again on the night of 12–13 February 1941. Much heavier raids followed later, including the third “thousand-bomber raid” in June 1942 and American daylight raids from 1943. According to Bremen’s records, the Allies carried out 173 raids on the city, in which more than 4,000 inhabitants were killed.

The Kiel Canal remained in use until the end of the war; the Germans quickly cleared the wrecks of ships sunk in it by bombs, mines and collisions. No later attack on the canal, however, produced an effect comparable to the hit of January 1941. The delay in the Bismarck’s training did not decide her fate, but the ship that sailed in May 1941 on Operation Rheinübung, her first war cruise into the Atlantic, which ended with her sinking on 27 May, had several weeks’ less training behind her than her command had planned.