The raid on Nuremberg

On the night of 30/31 March 1944 the British RAF Bomber Command sent 795 heavy bombers to Nuremberg. Under a bright moon and a cloudless sky, German night fighters broke into the bomber stream before it even reached the frontier of the Reich and for more than an hour shot the bombers down one after another. Ninety-five aircraft failed to return, almost 12 per cent of those dispatched – Bomber Command’s heaviest loss in a single raid in the whole war. 545 airmen were killed – roughly as many as RAF Fighter Command lost in the entire Battle of Britain. Nuremberg itself suffered little. The night brought to a close Arthur Harris’s winter offensive against the cities of the Reich, known as the Battle of Berlin.

Under 24 March, war chronologies record that “heavy bombing of German cities at various strategic points continued for 24 hours”. This refers to the day and night in which the Americans struck Frankfurt by day and the RAF struck Berlin by night. Both attacks belonged to the same campaign, then drawing to a close, as the raid on Nuremberg.

The winter of the Battle of Berlin

From November 1943 Harris waged the air Battle of Berlin. He promised that the destruction of the Reich capital, with American participation, would “cost Germany the war”. Bomber Command’s main force attacked Berlin sixteen times, and in between bombed other distant cities – Leipzig, Stuttgart, Brunswick, Magdeburg, Frankfurt. The most destructive were the November raids; after that Berlin was usually bombed above thick cloud, by radar, with results that were hard to assess.

Meanwhile the losses mounted. In the summer of 1943 the German night defences had switched from a rigid system of zones to the Zahme Sau (“Tame Boar”) method: ground controllers directed whole groups of twin-engined fighters – Messerschmitt Bf 110s and Junkers Ju 88s – into the bomber stream, where the pilots then found targets with their own radar. More and more fighters were fitted with Schräge Musik, upward-firing oblique cannon, with which a pilot approached from below, in the bomber’s blind spot, and fired into the fuel tanks in its wings. On the night of 19/20 February 1944, in the raid on Leipzig, the RAF lost 78 bombers. The older versions of the Halifax were then withdrawn from raids on Germany.

After the raid of 15/16 February, Bomber Command did not send its main force over Berlin for more than five weeks. It attacked Stuttgart (1/2 and 15/16 March), and with smaller forces railway junctions in France – among them Trappes, Le Mans, Amiens and Laon – as part of the preparations for the invasion. On the nights of 18/19 and 22/23 March it struck Frankfurt, whose old town went up in flames. In parallel, American bombers were flying over the Reich by day. From 6 March they attacked Berlin too, escorted by long-range P-51 Mustang fighters; the very first of these raids cost the Eighth Air Force 69 bombers, but the German fighter arm was also suffering losses in these battles that it could not make good.

24 March: Frankfurt by day, Berlin by night

On the morning of 24 March the American Eighth Air Force sent more than 260 bombers against the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, which in August 1943 had already cost it one of its bloodiest missions. Cloud covered the target and a large part of the formation bombed Frankfurt, chosen as the secondary target. The bombs fell on a city centre destroyed two nights earlier.

In the evening 811 Bomber Command aircraft – 577 Lancasters, 216 Halifaxes and 18 Mosquitos – took off from English airfields for Berlin. It was a night that Bomber Command later called “the night of the strong winds”. A northerly wind, far stronger than the meteorologists had forecast, pushed the bombers south at every stage of the flight, and the methods of measuring the wind in the air failed to register its full strength. The bomber stream scattered, the markers fell far to the south-west of the city, and on the way home some aircraft strayed over the Ruhr and other heavily defended areas. According to the Bomber Command war diary, about 50 of the 72 aircraft lost that night were brought down by radar-directed anti-aircraft artillery, the rest by night fighters. The loss rate was 8.9 per cent. It was the RAF’s last great raid on Berlin of the war; thereafter the Reich capital was harassed only by smaller formations of Mosquitos, and by American bombers by day.

Two nights later, on 26/27 March, 705 aircraft struck Essen. The sudden switch to a target just inside the Reich’s western border took the German controllers by surprise, and the British lost only 9 aircraft. Harris, however, wanted to end the winter campaign with one more great raid deep into Germany.

The decision to attack

The end of March brought a full moon. On such nights Bomber Command’s main force did not usually fly over Germany, since a bright sky made the night fighters’ work easier. The preliminary forecast for 30 March, however, predicted high cloud to shield the bombers on their way across Germany, and a clear sky over the target itself. On that basis a raid was planned on Nuremberg, far away in Bavaria. The city was a centre of the armaments and electrical industries, but above all a symbol: it was here that the Nazi Party’s rallies were held, and here that the Nuremberg Laws were proclaimed in 1935.

In the afternoon a Mosquito weather reconnaissance aircraft reported that there would most probably be no cloud cover on the route, whereas cloud might appear over Nuremberg. The raid was not cancelled. After crossing the Belgian coast, the route called for a long, almost straight leg eastwards across central Germany before the stream turned south towards the target. According to the historian Martin Middlebrook, author of a monograph on the raid, it was No. 5 Group of Bomber Command that wanted this route, against the objections of the commander of the Pathfinders, Donald Bennett, who preferred a route with several changes of course. Diversionary operations were also planned: minelaying off Heligoland and Mosquito attacks on Aachen, Cologne and Kassel.

Battle in the moonlight

On the evening of 30 March 795 aircraft took off: 572 Lancasters, 214 Halifaxes and 9 Mosquitos. There was indeed no high cloud. The moon shone brightly, and in the unusually cold air the bombers left contrails at lower altitudes than usual, clearly marking the path of the stream. The German controller ignored all the diversions. He assembled his fighters around two radio beacons – “Ida” south of Aachen and “Otto” east of Frankfurt – which happened to lie on either side of the bombers’ route.

The first fighters caught the stream just short of the Belgian–German border. For the next hour a battle raged over the Rhineland, Hesse and Franconia, which the crews later described in similar words: burning bombers fell one after another, and the wreckage of aircraft blazed on the ground along the route. An airman of No. 467 Squadron of the Royal Australian Air Force recalled that one often saw four or five Lancasters or Halifaxes going down in flames. Many German pilots approached from below with their Schräge Musik cannon and shot down bombers whose crews never even noticed the attacker. One of them, Hauptmann Martin Becker, was credited with seven kills that night. According to the Bomber Command war diary, 82 bombers had been lost by the time the stream reached the target area.

Over Nuremberg itself the raid failed. Contrary to the forecast, the city was covered by thick cloud, and a strong crosswind that sprang up on the final leg carried many of the marker aircraft to the east. The bombs were scattered widely, and the “creep-back” of the bombing stretched for a dozen or more kilometres across fields north of the city. About 120 crews, misled by the badly forecast winds, bombed Schweinfurt, some 80 kilometres to the north-west; two marker aircraft dropped flares there. Most of these bombs fell outside the town, and two people were killed in the Schweinfurt area. In Nuremberg, according to city records, 74 people were killed and 122 injured; 130 houses were destroyed. The Germans classed the raid as “moderately heavy”; the villages east of the city suffered more damage.

On the way home the fighting slackened, as most of the German fighters had to land for lack of fuel, but 13 more bombers were shot down. Cyril Barton, a Halifax pilot of No. 578 Squadron, flew on to the target although his aircraft had been badly damaged and three of his crew – including the navigator and the wireless operator – had baled out because of a misunderstanding over the intercom. With no navigator and on three engines he brought the aircraft back to England. When his fuel ran out over the coast near Sunderland, he crashed while attempting a forced landing; he was killed, but the three remaining airmen survived. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross – the only one awarded in the whole Battle of Berlin.

The losses

According to the Bomber Command war diary, 95 bombers failed to return – 64 Lancasters and 31 Halifaxes, or 11.9 per cent of the force dispatched; some tallies that include aircraft that crashed in England give 96. Dozens of other aircraft came back damaged. According to Middlebrook and the Australian War Memorial, 545 airmen were killed, and including the wounded and those taken prisoner, the losses in men totalled 723. Among the dead were 48 Australians of the Royal Australian Air Force and many Canadians, since crews from the Dominions made up a large part of Harris’s force. As the Australian War Memorial points out, in little more than an hour and a half Bomber Command lost as many airmen killed as Fighter Command had lost in more than a hundred days of the Battle of Britain in 1940. On the German side, according to the same source, eleven night-fighter airmen were killed.

For the winter campaign as a whole, the British official history by Charles Webster and Noble Frankland gives 1,117 aircraft lost in Bomber Command’s night operations between 18 November 1943 and 31 March 1944; in the sixteen raids on Berlin alone, 492. It is estimated that more than seven thousand airmen were killed or captured in the campaign.

Place in the war

The Nuremberg raid became the symbol of Bomber Command’s darkest night and brought the Battle of Berlin to an end. In April 1944, for the duration of the preparations for the invasion of France, control of the British and American heavy bombers passed to Dwight Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Harris, who had long resisted the diversion of his bombers from German cities, had to direct them against railways, bridges and fortifications in northern France and Belgium, in line with the plan championed by, among others, Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Bomber Command proved far more accurate in this task than its commander had expected, and the short flights over France cost it far less.

The British official historians judged the Battle of Berlin plainly a defeat for Bomber Command: the German night defences had won the winter of 1943–1944, and the Reich capital, though badly mauled, had not been destroyed. The situation changed only when American daylight raids escorted by Mustangs bled the German fighter arm white, and when, after the Normandy landings, the Germans lost their forward radar stations in France and Belgium. From the autumn of 1944 Bomber Command returned over Germany with renewed strength and far lower losses than in the winter.

Nuremberg came through March 1944 almost untouched, but it did not escape the fate of other cities. On the night of 2/3 January 1945 an RAF raid destroyed its medieval old town, and in April 1945 a battle was fought for the city with American troops. In the autumn of 1945 the trial of the major war criminals of the Third Reich opened in the surviving Palace of Justice. The night of 30/31 March 1944 remained in the memory of Bomber Command veterans – and, thanks to Middlebrook’s 1973 book, in the wider historiography as well – as an example of how a single error in judging the weather could cost the lives of hundreds of men.