The raid on Berlin of 20 January

On the evening of 20 January 1944, 769 bombers of the RAF’s Bomber Command took off from airfields in eastern England: 495 Lancasters, 264 Halifaxes and 10 Mosquitoes. Their target was Berlin. The British Air Ministry later announced that in just over half an hour some 2,300 tons of bombs had fallen on the capital of the Reich, and that this had been the heaviest attack on the city so far. In terms of the number of aircraft dispatched it was indeed the largest raid on Berlin since the beginning of the war. Thick cloud, however, covered the city, so the crews bombed blind, on markers suspended above the clouds. The following day reconnaissance aircraft could not see the target either, so the results could not be assessed. German night fighters shot down 35 bombers, or damaged them so badly that they failed to return: 22 Halifaxes and 13 Lancasters, or 4.6 per cent of the force dispatched.

This raid was one of the sixteen major attacks that made up the Battle of Berlin in the air. At the same time it showed why the battle did not deliver what its author had promised: large forces, bad weather, uncertain results and losses that became harder to replace with every month.

The battle for the Reich capital

The Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, had long wanted to strike at Berlin with all his strength. The British had bombed the city before, including in January 1943, but those had been isolated attacks. On 3 November 1943 Harris wrote to Winston Churchill that if the Americans joined in, they could “wreck Berlin from end to end”. He estimated that this would cost 400 to 500 aircraft, and that it would cost Germany the war. The American Eighth Air Force, however, bled white after the raid on Schweinfurt and Regensburg and the second attack on Schweinfurt in October, was not ready for long-range missions over Germany. So Harris began on his own.

The first raid of the new series took place during the night of 18–19 November 1943. The attacks of 22–27 November caused the greatest destruction: whole districts burned in the city centre, in the Tiergarten and in Charlottenburg, several thousand people were killed and hundreds of thousands lost their homes. In December Bomber Command returned to Berlin several times. The raid of the night of 2–3 December was described to listeners in the United States by Edward R. Murrow, who flew in one of the Lancasters. In the first days of January 1944 Lancasters went to Berlin twice in succession: on the nights of 1–2 January (421 aircraft) and 2–3 January (383 aircraft). In the second of these attacks they lost about 10 per cent of the force. Then came a pause caused by the weather and by attacks on other targets. On the night of 14–15 January Lancasters bombed Brunswick for the first time in the war and lost 38 aircraft.

The capital was a difficult target. It lay deep inside the Reich, so the bombers spent several hours over enemy territory. The sprawling city, without a distinctive outline of river or coast, showed up poorly on the screens of the on-board navigational radars. In winter there was almost always cloud over Brandenburg. Throughout the winter of 1943–1944 the Pathfinders, the crews who marked the target, mostly had to drop parachute flares above the clouds. The wind pushed them aside, and the bombs were scattered over many kilometres.

The night of 20–21 January

On the evening of 20 January the weather over England allowed take-off, and it was expected to be cloudy over Germany. For the crews this meant two things. The clouds made it harder for the anti-aircraft defences to use searchlights and to aim, but they also made accurate bombing impossible. The stream of 769 bombers stretched for more than a hundred kilometres; the flight to the target and back took several hours.

This time the German controllers detected the stream early and tracked it. The night fighters got in among the bombers while they were still on the way to the target and fought them all the way to Berlin and back. The heaviest losses were suffered by the Halifaxes, which were slower and flew lower than the Lancasters. Of the 264 Halifaxes, 22 failed to return – more than 8 per cent. The airmen killed included Britons, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders: Bomber Command’s crews came from all over the British Commonwealth.

Over the target itself the Pathfinders dropped flares above the clouds, and the main force bombed on them. All the crews could see below them was the glow of fires showing through the cloud. Bomber Command’s operational record noted that the next day photographic reconnaissance was unable to assess the damage because of low cloud. Post-war British studies, based partly on German sources, state that the bombs fell mainly on the eastern districts of the city. The exact number of victims that night cannot be established from the available returns. The Berlin police and air-raid protection services drew up reports after every raid. According to the British philosopher and historian A. C. Grayling, the December and January attacks killed hundreds of people each night and left between 20,000 and 80,000 Berliners homeless.

“Tame Boar” – the German night defences

The losses of 20–21 January and the following nights were the result of changes the Luftwaffe had made to its night defences in the second half of 1943. Previously these had been based on a system of zones, called Himmelbett (PL), in which ground radar stations guided single fighters onto single bombers. In the summer of 1943, during Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg, the British for the first time dropped strips of aluminium foil code-named “Window”, which jammed the German radars. For several weeks the zone system ceased to work.

The Germans responded with two new methods. The first was Wilde Sau, “Wild Boar”: single-engined fighters hunted over the target itself, looking out for bombers silhouetted against the fires and in the searchlights. The second, more important one was Zahme Sau, “Tame Boar”, devised by Colonel Viktor von Lossberg. Twin-engined night fighters, above all Messerschmitt Bf 110s and Junkers Ju 88s, assembled around radio beacons set up all over Germany. Ground commands broadcast a running commentary by radio on the position, altitude and course of the bomber stream. The controllers directed whole groups of fighters into the stream, and from there the pilots found their targets on their own, with their own airborne radar. They fought for as long as their fuel and ammunition allowed.

New technology helped them. The Lichtenstein SN-2 airborne radar worked on a different frequency from earlier sets, and “Window” in its form at the time did not jam it. The Naxos and Flensburg devices made it possible to home in on a bomber by the signals of its own H2S navigational radar or its Monica tail-warning radar. More and more fighters were also fitted with Schräge Musik, cannon firing obliquely upwards. The pilot approached from below, in the bomber’s blind spot, and fired into the fuel tanks in its wings. Many Bomber Command crews were killed before they understood what had hit them.

As a result the Battle of Berlin became a winter battle of attrition between two fleets of night aircraft. The British answered their opponent’s changes with spoof raids on other cities, dog-leg routes, jamming of radio communications and escorting night fighters, while in the following weeks the Germans learned to see through these tricks.

Magdeburg – a night later

The very next night showed how difficult Bomber Command’s position had become. On the night of 21–22 January Harris sent 648 aircraft (421 Lancasters, 224 Halifaxes and 3 Mosquitoes) to Magdeburg. German fighters reached the bomber stream before it crossed the coast and stayed with it all the way. The wind proved stronger than the meteorologists had forecast, so some of the bombers arrived over the target ahead of the Pathfinders and bombed before it had been marked. The fires started by these first bombs and German decoy fires burned in the wrong places, and most of the bombs fell outside the city. Bomber Command lost 57 aircraft, 8.8 per cent of the force, including 35 Halifaxes. Two January nights in a row thus cost more than 90 bombers in all and more than six hundred airmen killed or taken prisoner.

Harris’s promises and reality

Harris did not change his mind. On 7 December 1943 he assured the Air Ministry that if he were given enough Lancasters, by 1 April 1944 he would reduce Germany to such a state of devastation that its surrender would become inevitable. His staff measured progress by the number of hectares of built-up area destroyed in aerial photographs and compared Berlin with Hamburg. The Chief of the Air Staff, Marshal of the RAF Charles Portal, was however pressing more and more for attacks on the German aircraft industry. Without weakening the Luftwaffe, neither the landing in France nor the bombing of the Reich itself could succeed. Harris regarded such targets as “panaceas” – illusory solutions that distracted attention from the destruction of cities.

Berlin did not burn as Hamburg had. The city had wide streets, many stone buildings and more modern construction than the old districts of Hamburg, and its vast area dispersed the bombs. The German authorities had prepared for the raids. Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and one of the chief organisers of relief for bombed cities, evacuated children, mothers and the elderly, ordered shelters to be extended, brought rescue teams to Berlin from other cities and played up the “heroism of the Berliners” in propaganda. The capital’s armaments industry suffered losses but did not stop. People grew used to nights in cellars, and doctors described a “cellar flu” caused by the smoke, dust and cold in the shelters.

Significance

The raids of 20–21 and 21–22 January were followed by three more attacks on the capital: on the nights of 27–28, 28–29 and 30–31 January. Each of them cost more than 6 per cent of the bombers dispatched. On the night of 15–16 February 891 aircraft carried out the largest raid on Berlin of the campaign, but on 19–20 February 78 bombers were shot down over Leipzig, and Harris had to withdraw the older Halifaxes from operations over Germany. The last raid of the Battle of Berlin took place during the night of 24–25 March, and a week later, on 30–31 March, Bomber Command suffered its heaviest loss of the whole war: 95 bombers failed to return from Nuremberg.

According to the British official historians Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, the sixteen major raids on Berlin (9,111 sorties) cost 492 aircraft, or 5.8 per cent, more than the RAF considered a sustainable rate of loss. In their judgement, in an operational sense the Battle of Berlin was “more than a failure. It was a defeat.” The capital of the Reich was heavily damaged, and the Germans had to keep thousands of anti-aircraft guns and hundreds of fighters at home, but the Reich did not surrender, and the Luftwaffe’s night-fighter losses were small compared with those of Bomber Command.

Indirectly, the January nights also contributed to a change in Allied strategy. During the night of 21–22 January – the same night on which the RAF attacked Magdeburg – the Luftwaffe began Operation Steinbock, a series of retaliatory raids on London and other English cities that the British called the “Baby Blitz”. It caused little damage at the cost of heavy losses of German bombers. In the spring of 1944 the upper hand against the Germans passed to the American day bombers, escorted by long-range Mustang fighters, which struck aircraft factories in February and from March attacked Berlin by day and destroyed German fighters in the air. From April 1944 Bomber Command, like the American bomber forces, carried out tasks set by Dwight Eisenhower, who had arrived in London in mid-January 1944 as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, as part of the preparations for the invasion: it bombed railway junctions in France and Belgium. Harris returned to bombing German cities in the autumn of 1944, when the Reich’s defences were already much weaker.