The raid on Mannheim

On the night of 16/17 December 1940, 134 bombers of the British Bomber Command flew to Mannheim, an industrial city on the Rhine in south-western Germany. The operation bore the code name “Abigail Rachel”, and it was something new. Until then RAF crews had been given a specific installation as their target – a synthetic oil plant, a marshalling yard, a shipyard, a power station – and the houses around it were destroyed, as it were, incidentally. This time the orders were different. The first aircraft were to start fires in the city centre, and those that followed were to drop their bombs on the flames, so as to concentrate the greatest possible destruction in the heart of the city. It was, as the authors of the British official history of the bombing offensive put it, the first “area” raid of the war, carried out in reprisal for the German bombing of Coventry and Southampton.

The attack is sometimes described as “the first RAF night raid”. That is a misunderstanding. British bombers had been flying over Germany by night since the first night of the war: at first with leaflets, from March 1940 with bombs on the base at Hörnum on Sylt, from May over the Ruhr and from August over Berlin. Mannheim itself had already been bombed during the campaign in France, when the target was its oil plants. What was new on the night of 16/17 December was therefore neither the time of day nor the geographical target, but the aiming point itself: for the first time it was a city centre rather than a factory.

A December of exchanged blows

War chronologies note under 1 December that throughout the month Germany and Britain traded raids, “first the Germans, then the British”. The exchange, however, was very unequal. The Luftwaffe, which since the start of the Blitz in September and the destruction of Coventry in mid-November had been attacking one British city after another every night, often sent several hundred bombers against them. On the night of 30 November/1 December Southampton burned for the second night running; on the night of 2/3 December Bristol was bombed; and on 8/9 December, according to British figures, more than 400 bombers came over London and dropped high-explosive and incendiary bombs for more than twelve hours. On the night of 11/12 December some 270 bombers attacked Birmingham for thirteen hours, and on the nights of 12/13 and 15/16 December the Luftwaffe destroyed the centre of Sheffield, where some 660 people were killed in all. According to British data, German bombs killed nearly 4,000 civilians in Britain in December 1940.

Bomber Command could not reply with equal force. Its night operations usually involved a few dozen aircraft, divided between German cities, Channel ports, U-boat bases and airfields, and in bad weather only some of the crews found their targets. The note sometimes found under 5 December concerns just such an operation. On the night of 4/5 December the command sent 83 aircraft to Düsseldorf and Turin; two did not return. Whitley bombers had been flying from England to Turin, home of the FIAT works, since the first days of the war with Italy, on flights of many hours across France and over the Alps. According to Italian figures, one person was killed in Turin that night and eight were injured. The RAF returned to Düsseldorf on the night of 7/8 December; local records state that some 700 incendiary and 50 high-explosive bombs fell on the city. None of these raids resembled what the Luftwaffe was doing to English cities. The tension between this disparity and the demand for retaliation led to the decision to strike Mannheim.

The decision

The idea of answering German raids with attacks on whole cities had been circulating in London since the autumn. As early as the summer of 1940 Winston Churchill had written that the only way to defeat Hitler was a devastating offensive by heavy bombers against Germany. On 11 September Charles Portal, then still Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, proposed that after every “indiscriminate” German attack on a British city the RAF should bomb in reprisal one of twenty named German cities; Mannheim was on his list. The Air Staff at the time preferred to stick to industrial targets, but the directive of 30 October, issued after Portal had become Chief of the Air Staff, allowed “concentrated attacks on objectives in large towns” intended to cause heavy damage and demonstrate to the enemy the power of bombing. In November the aiming point given to the few dozen bombers sent to Berlin, Essen, Munich and Cologne was already the centre of an industrial district.

The destruction of Coventry on the night of 14/15 November and the series of raids on Birmingham, Southampton and Bristol settled the matter. According to some accounts, the Prime Minister ordered a reprisal raid to be prepared at the beginning of December. The plan, given the code name “Abigail”, called for “the greatest possible destruction in a selected German town” and was modelled on what the Luftwaffe had done at Coventry. The most experienced Wellington crews were to lead with incendiaries; the rest, navigating independently but guided by the glow of the fires, were to arrive over the target one after another throughout the night with incendiaries, mines and the heaviest high-explosive bombs available. The War Cabinet discussed the plan on 12 December, and on 13 December the Air Ministry gave Bomber Command permission to carry it out. According to accounts based on the Cabinet minutes, the approval came with the condition that the attack be treated as an experiment and not be publicised. In official communiqués the RAF was still to be attacking military objectives.

The target was to be chosen at the last minute, depending on the weather forecast, from three cities in different parts of the Reich. Each was given a biblical woman’s name: Bremen was “Jezebel”, Düsseldorf “Delilah” and Mannheim “Rachel”. The British official history of the RAF states that on the morning of 16 December, at 10.15, Düsseldorf was chosen, and three hours later the target was switched to Mannheim. The command, headed since October by Air Marshal Richard Peirse, intended to send more than 200 aircraft (the official history even mentions 235), but the forecast predicted fog over the English airfields in the second half of the night, so the number was cut to 134.

The target

Mannheim, then a city of some 280,000 people, lay at the confluence of the Neckar and the Rhine, opposite Ludwigshafen with its great IG Farben chemical works. It was one of the largest river ports in Europe and an important industrial centre. Among the firms there were Heinrich Lanz, which made tractors and, in wartime, components for armoured vehicles too, and Motorenwerke Mannheim, which built diesel engines for U-boats. For the planners, however, something else mattered. Mannheim’s city centre, laid out in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on a grid, with blocks identified by letters and numbers instead of street names, was easy to recognise from the air by moonlight, and the pattern of the rivers made navigation easier. The regular layout also made it possible afterwards to measure the effects of the raid precisely on aerial photographs. According to the RAF official history, the aiming point given in the orders lay roughly 1.4 kilometres south of the engine works.

The night of 16/17 December

On the evening of 16 December twin-engined Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens, along with a few light Blenheims, took off from airfields in eastern and northern England. The night was frosty and cloudless, the moon was bright and visibility over the target was excellent. The first to reach the city were Wellingtons flown by specially chosen, highly experienced crews and armed with incendiaries. Sources differ on their number: the RAF official history speaks of fourteen, compilations based on Bomber Command’s logs of eight. Their crews were to start fires in the city centre that would serve as a beacon for those who followed. Behind them, for about six hours, came the other aircraft, each on its own and at intervals, as was then the RAF’s practice. According to British data, 102 or 103 crews reached Mannheim and reported attacking: 47 Wellingtons, 33 Whitleys, 18 Hampdens and 4 Blenheims. They dropped about 89 tons of high explosive and nearly 14,000 incendiaries. Some of the bombs fell on the other side of the Rhine, on Ludwigshafen.

The crews came back convinced of their success. They reported that the city centre was ablaze and that most of the bombs had fallen in the designated area. Peirse at once sent his congratulations to all who had taken part. The cost was high for the time. Several aircraft failed to return from Germany, and others crashed on the way back when they ran out of fuel over England or their crews lost their way. The RAF official history gives a total of ten aircraft lost, other compilations from seven to nine. No. 101 Squadron alone lost three Blenheims that night: one went missing and two came down in England after running out of fuel.

Not all the bombs fell on Germany. That same night stray British aircraft bombed Basel in Switzerland and neighbouring Binningen, killing four people. It was one of the first occasions in the war on which Allied bombs fell on neutral Switzerland; according to Swiss figures, British and American bombs had killed 84 people in Switzerland by 1945.

What was really achieved

The German picture of the night was quite different from the British reports. According to a contemporary German report quoted in the British official history, the defenders estimated the strength of the attack at 40–50 aircraft and the number of bombs at about 100 high-explosive and a thousand incendiary. Most of the damage was in residential districts. Sixteen large and 75 medium and small fires broke out in the city, and fighting them was hampered by damaged water mains and by the freezing of water drawn from the Rhine. Bombs put a sugar refinery and a refrigeration-equipment factory out of action, damaged the power station in the Rheinau district and hit four other plants; production of armoured vehicles and their components at the Lanz works fell by a quarter. Casualty figures vary with the source. The report quoted by British historians speaks of 23 killed and 80 injured, while the municipal figures cited by most accounts give 34 killed and 81 injured. Some 1,270 people were made homeless and nearly 500 buildings were destroyed or damaged. The communiqué of the German High Command described the raid’s effect on production as “insignificant”.

The British discovered this for themselves a few days later. On 21 December, at the second attempt, a Spitfire of the new photographic reconnaissance unit photographed Mannheim in daylight. The photographic mosaic made it plain that, as Peirse himself admitted, the operation had “failed in its main object”. The damage was admittedly “considerable”, but the bombs had been scattered over a wide area. Some of the fires had been started outside the city centre, and they had drawn the following crews in the wrong direction. In a circular to group commanders on 24 December, Peirse acknowledged that the order to bomb the fires had been worded too rigidly and that crews should identify the target for themselves. The commander of No. 5 Group, Air Vice-Marshal Norman Bottomley, warned of the danger of “coming to believe that a bomb dropped anywhere in Germany has some value”. Both he and the commander of No. 4 Group, Arthur Coningham, admitted that in truth they did not know what their bombers were achieving. According to the British official historians, the Mannheim photographs were the first real evidence of how poor the accuracy of the RAF’s night raids was – and they concerned a target far larger than any factory.

Reprisal and its limits

The raid on Mannheim was a reprisal, but an unacknowledged one. The British public, bombed every night, was demanding retaliation, and the government knew it. At the same time it officially maintained that the RAF, unlike the Luftwaffe, attacked only military and industrial targets. The Air Ministry’s communiqués on the Mannheim raid spoke of a railway station, goods yards and industrial plants being hit, not of the deliberate burning of the city centre. This gap between what was decided in Cabinet and what was said in public persisted until the end of the war.

The orders for Operation Abigail Rachel also openly raised, for the first time, a question that was to accompany the bombing offensive for years to come. Until then destruction in residential districts had been an unintended, if foreseeable, consequence of night raids on factories. At Mannheim it was an aim in itself. The advocates of such a strategy, led by Portal, argued that at night it was in any case impossible to hit a single plant without striking the houses around it; that destroying cities weakened war industry, disrupted communications and broke the morale of the workers; and that the Germans had been the first to bomb Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry. The critics, few at the time, pointed out that Britain was adopting methods it had itself condemned, and that in September 1939 it had endorsed Roosevelt’s appeal to spare civilians. In 1940 this dispute was conducted almost entirely behind closed doors. It broke out in public only in 1943–1945, when carpet bombing was killing tens of thousands of people in German cities.

The question of who “started” the bombing of cities has no simple answer and was the subject of propaganda on both sides. The Luftwaffe had bombed Polish cities from the first day of the war, and Rotterdam in May 1940. From May the RAF had been attacking targets in the Ruhr and other German centres, and at night its bombs in practice fell on homes as well. Hitler presented the Blitz as a response to British raids on Berlin, which in turn had been a response to bombs dropped on the City of London in August, probably by mistake. Mannheim was the first raid in which the British deliberately chose a city centre as their target.

Place in the war

The direct results of the operation were modest. Bomber Command returned to Mannheim on the nights of 17/18 and 18/19 December and again before Christmas, but only in small numbers. No attack of this kind was repeated before the end of December. The Admiralty was pressing for raids on the U-boat bases at Lorient and Bordeaux, the weather turned bad, and over Christmas, from 24 to 27 December, both sides unofficially suspended night bombing. The next area-bombing experiment was carried out against Bremen at the beginning of January 1941. In mid-January a new directive gave priority back to the synthetic oil plants, and raids on cities receded into the background, to return in the summer of 1941.

The lessons mattered more. The Mannheim photographs deepened doubts within the RAF about the accuracy of night bombing, doubts confirmed in August 1941 by the Butt Report: only about one in three crews reporting an attack had dropped its bombs within eight kilometres of the target. Instead of a retreat from bombing cities, this led to its expansion. If at night nothing smaller than a city could be hit, the city became the target. A directive of February 1942 named the morale of the civilian population as the primary objective, and Arthur Harris took over Bomber Command. The scattering of bombs over Mannheim was also one of the first lessons that fires had to be started in the right place and that aircraft had to pass over the target within a short time, not one by one throughout the night. The answer, in 1942, was the “bomber stream”, in which hundreds of aircraft crossed the target within a quarter of an hour or so, with the target marked by specialised “pathfinder” formations. The method first tried in December 1940 produced a firestorm in Hamburg in July 1943, during Operation Gomorrah, and in February 1945 destroyed Dresden.

Mannheim itself endured more than 150 raids by March 1945, more than any other city in what is now Baden-Württemberg. The heaviest, on the night of 5/6 September 1943, reduced most of the city centre to ruins, and in 1944 bombs almost completely destroyed the baroque Electoral Palace. According to German figures, more than 25,000 tons of bombs fell on the city during the war, and some 2,200 of its inhabitants were killed in the raids; the number of victims, relatively small given the scale of the destruction, is attributed to an extensive network of shelters and bunkers. The raid of the night of 16/17 December 1940, with its few dozen dead, was among the least destructive of them. It went down in history, however, as the moment when the British bombing offensive first openly took aim at a city rather than a factory.