The raid on Düsseldorf

On the night of 10–11 September 1942 the British RAF Bomber Command carried out one of the heaviest raids of the year. Against Düsseldorf, the capital of a Nazi Party Gau on the Rhine and the seat of the great steel concerns, it sent 479 aircraft, including machines from training units. They were led by the airmen of a new target-finding formation, the Pathfinder Force, who for the first time dropped the large target-marking bombs known as “Pink Pansies”. This time the target was found and marked. Thousands of incendiary and high-explosive bombs fell on the city and on neighbouring Neuss. According to German municipal reports cited in British studies, 132 people were killed, more than 19,000 were made homeless, and several dozen industrial plants had to stop production. Bomber Command paid a high price: 33 aircraft failed to return.

The night is usually described as a major incendiary attack, and the description is accurate. The raids on the night of 19–20 September, when the RAF bombed Munich and Saarbrücken, belong to the same series. Both September episodes illustrate the same stage of the air war: the first weeks of the Pathfinders’ work, when some nights ended in success and others in the bombing of empty fields.

The target-finding force

Since the Butt Report of August 1941 it had been known that most British bombs fell far from their targets. The Gee radio-navigation system, introduced in the spring of 1942, made it possible to reach the area of a city but did not indicate the aiming point. Air Marshal Arthur Harris sought the answer in concentration of force: in the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne a mass of aircraft overwhelmed the defences and the fire brigade in a short space of time. The next great raids, on Essen and Bremen, showed, however, that without a visible target even a thousand aircraft scattered their bombs over a vast area.

From the beginning of 1942, therefore, the Air Ministry had been pressing the idea of separating the best crews into a distinct formation that would fly ahead of the main force, find the target and mark it with flares. The model was the German experience of the Blitz, when a special bomber group had led the rest of the Luftwaffe to British cities. Harris and most of the group commanders opposed the creation of an elite that would deprive the squadrons of their best airmen. The scientific adviser Henry Tizard replied that the creation of a First XV at rugby did not make the small boys play with any less enthusiasm. The ministry, backed by the Chief of the Air Staff, Charles Portal, got its way.

The Pathfinder Force was formed on 15 August 1942. Each of Bomber Command’s four heavy bomber groups gave it one squadron: No. 7 Squadron with Stirlings, No. 35 with Halifaxes, No. 83 with Lancasters and No. 156 with Wellingtons; they were joined by No. 109 Squadron, which worked on experimental radio equipment. Its commander was a 31-year-old Australian, Group Captain Donald Bennett, an outstanding navigator, before the war an airline pilot and holder of long-distance flight records, who in the spring of 1942 had been shot down over Norway during an attack on the battleship Tirpitz and had made his way back to England through Sweden. Since Harris had to accept the new formation, it was Bennett he chose to lead it.

The beginnings were difficult. On the first operation, on the night of 18–19 August, a change in the wind pushed the bombers over Denmark and Flensburg was not hit. Over Frankfurt on 24–25 August the target was hidden by cloud. The first clear success came on 27–28 August over Kassel. September began with an embarrassment: on the night of 1–2 September the Pathfinders marked not Saarbrücken but Saarlouis, 20 kilometres away and lying in a similar bend of the Saar, and more than two hundred crews bombed the small town, killing 52 people. But as early as the night of 4–5 September a new method was tried out over Bremen: some crews lit up the area with white flares, others dropped coloured markers on the identified aiming point, and a third group kept them burning with incendiaries. This scheme became the basis of the Pathfinders’ work until the end of the war.

The target: “the desk of the Ruhr”

Düsseldorf was not a city of mines and steelworks like Essen or Duisburg, but the Germans called it “the desk of the Ruhr”. It housed the head offices of the steel concerns, banks and government offices, as well as armaments works, foremost among them the great Rheinmetall-Borsig factory. The RAF had been bombing the city since May 1940, when it began its raids on the Ruhr, but for two years the attacks were small. The first major raid came on the night of 31 July–1 August 1942: more than 600 aircraft dropped some 14,000 incendiaries on the city and, according to municipal records, about 250 people were killed. The September raid was meant to be stronger and better led.

Harris once again drew on the training units. The 479 aircraft comprised 242 Wellingtons, 89 Lancasters, 59 Halifaxes, 47 Stirlings, 28 Hampdens and 14 Whitleys, and among the crews were instructors and trainees from the Operational Training Units of Nos. 91, 92 and 93 Groups. It was a risk Bomber Command had been taking since May: experienced instructors and half-trained pupils flew worn-out aircraft, and their loss struck at the training of entire future intakes.

The night of 10–11 September

That night the Pathfinders used the “Pink Pansy” for the first time, a marker housed in the casing of a 4,000-pound bomb (about 1,800 kilograms). According to British descriptions it was filled with a mixture of benzole, rubber and phosphorus, which burned on the ground with a bright pinkish-red glow visible from far away. The weather was favourable, the target was marked accurately, and most of the main force dropped their bombs where they should.

According to records from Düsseldorf cited in British studies, every part of the city except the northern districts was hit, as was Neuss on the other side of the Rhine. 911 houses were destroyed, 1,506 seriously damaged and more than 8,000 lightly damaged. Eight public buildings were destroyed and 67 damaged; the city chronicles record, among other things, heavy damage to the town hall. 39 plants in Düsseldorf and 13 in Neuss had to halt production completely for varying periods. 132 people were killed, 120 in Düsseldorf and 12 in Neuss, and two days later 116 were still listed as missing, so the final death toll was probably higher. 19,427 people were left homeless. Most of the dead and injured were civilians, in line with the directive of February 1942, which named the morale of the industrial workforce as the objective.

The defences were effective. Luftwaffe night fighters, guided by the ground radar stations of the defensive belt stretching from Denmark to France, and the anti-aircraft artillery took a heavy toll. 33 aircraft failed to return: 20 Wellingtons, five Lancasters, four Stirlings, three Halifaxes and a Hampden. This was 7.1 per cent of the force dispatched, a rate at which the command could sustain the offensive only in the short term. Once again the training units suffered most: No. 16 Operational Training Unit at Upper Heyford lost five of its thirteen Wellingtons.

Munich and Saarbrücken, 19–20 September

Nine days later it was the turn of Munich and Saarbrücken. These raids took place on the night of 19–20 September 1942, after several days in which Bomber Command had bombed Bremen, Wilhelmshaven and Essen. The same day, 19 September, six fast Mosquitos of No. 105 Squadron made the first attempt to attack Berlin by day; only one dropped its bombs in the area of the city, through thick cloud, and one failed to return.

In the evening the RAF dispatched two raids at once, which meant that the still modest Pathfinder forces had to be divided. 118 aircraft, mainly Wellingtons and Halifaxes, flew to Saarbrücken. The target-marking crews lost their way in ground mist, the bombs fell west of the city and, according to German figures, destroyed only 13 houses in Saarbrücken, killing one person. Five aircraft failed to return. It was another failed attack on the city after the Saarlouis mistake at the beginning of the month.

The second raid, consisting of 68 Lancasters and 21 Stirlings, was sent to Munich. The Bavarian capital, called by the Nazis the “Capital of the Movement”, lay far from England, and until then only odd bombs had fallen on it, among them during a small raid in November 1940. An attack on the cradle of the Party had propaganda value. About 40 per cent of the crews dropped their bombs within five kilometres of the centre, but most of them fell on the western, southern and eastern suburbs. German studies record damage in the city centre, including around the Sonnenstraße, and in Schwabing. The casualty figures are uncertain: German literature gives anything from a few dozen to about 150 killed and several hundred injured. Six aircraft, 6.7 per cent of the force, failed to return from the raid.

Place in the war

The September raids closed the Pathfinder Force’s trial period. Düsseldorf was its first major success over an important city, while Saarbrücken was a reminder of how easily a night could end in failure. In the following months the autumn weather limited Bomber Command’s operations, and part of its strength was diverted to attacks on Italian cities ahead of the Allied landings in North Africa. In January 1943 Bennett’s formation became No. 8 (Pathfinder Force) Group, and Bennett himself, as an Air Vice-Marshal, the youngest officer of that rank in the RAF. The Pathfinders also received new equipment: the Oboe system, which in the spring of 1943 at last made it possible to hit the Ruhr, and the H2S airborne radar.

Düsseldorf was bombed until the end of the war. The heaviest raid, on the night of 11–12 June 1943, started fires that destroyed the old town and the city centre. According to municipal figures, more than 6,000 civilians were killed in Düsseldorf in over two hundred raids, and more than half of its buildings were destroyed. Munich became a frequent target only in 1944, when the American air forces joined in; by the end of the war more than 6,600 people had been killed there in several dozen raids. In this history, the night of 10–11 September 1942 was the first clear sign that Bomber Command was learning to hit its targets.