The raid on Wuppertal

On the night of 29–30 May 1943 RAF Bomber Command sent 719 aircraft to Wuppertal. The target was the district of Barmen, the eastern part of a city strung out along the narrow valley of the river Wupper on the southern edge of the Ruhr. The bombs, more than half of them incendiaries, started a fire that engulfed almost the whole of central Barmen. Some 3,400 people were killed, more than in any previous raid on Germany. It was the heaviest blow of the Battle of the Ruhr and a foretaste of even more terrible fires in the summer of 1943.

The city on the Wupper

Wuppertal was created in 1929 by merging two neighbouring industrial towns, Elberfeld and Barmen, together with several smaller municipalities. It had some 400,000 inhabitants. It was an old centre of the textile industry which during the war also worked for the armaments sector: there were chemical and metalworking plants and factories producing components for military equipment. Friedrich Engels was born in Barmen, and the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, in exile since 1933, in Elberfeld.

Until the spring of 1943 the city had hardly suffered: according to German tallies, 27 people had so far been killed there in air raids. This changed when Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris opened the Battle of the Ruhr in March – a series of heavy night raids on the industrial cities along the Rhine and the Ruhr, conducted in accordance with the doctrine of area bombing. Its aim was to destroy workplaces, but also workers’ homes and urban infrastructure. Two weeks earlier the Ruhr had been shaken by the attack on the Möhne and Eder dams, but Harris’s main instrument remained night raids by hundreds of bombers on cities. In the last week of May Bomber Command attacked almost every night: on 23–24 May more than 800 aircraft struck Dortmund, and on the following nights the bombers raided Düsseldorf and Essen. The raid on Wuppertal closed a month in which the offensive against the Ruhr reached its greatest intensity. The number of heavy four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes was growing, and the precise Oboe guidance system made it possible to hit targets hidden beneath the industrial haze of the valley, which had previously protected the cities of the Ruhr better than anti-aircraft guns.

The raid

On the evening of Saturday 29 May, 719 aircraft took off: 292 Avro Lancasters, 185 Handley Page Halifaxes, 118 Short Stirlings, 113 Vickers Wellingtons and 11 de Havilland Mosquitoes. They dropped some 1,900 tons of bombs, of which slightly more than half were incendiaries. Mosquitoes guided by the Oboe radio system and aircraft of the Pathfinder units marked the target with flares; the crews were to approach from the south-west along the valley, so that bombs released too early would still fall on the city’s buildings.

The marking proved exceptionally accurate, and the bombing, as later analyses showed, was the most concentrated of the air war to date. In the narrow, densely built-up valley the fire spread rapidly. The old buildings of Barmen were engulfed in a conflagration which, according to some researchers, took the form of a firestorm – although the term is usually reserved for Hamburg in July 1943. The fire brigade, weakened by its weekend staffing and unprepared for a fire on this scale, was unable to bring it under control. Some bombs also fell on Ronsdorf to the south.

Victims and destruction

In the first weeks 2,732 bodies were recovered from the rubble of more than 3,900 destroyed houses; the death toll was later revised to about 3,400 (German tallies give 3,380). Among the first 2,732 identified victims were 1,544 women, 434 children, 726 men and 28 foreigners. According to the British analysis of aerial photographs, the fire consumed some 80 per cent of the buildings of Barmen. Five of the district’s six largest industrial plants were destroyed, along with more than two hundred other industrial premises, and tens of thousands of people lost their homes. Refugees from Barmen sought shelter with relatives in undamaged Elberfeld.

Bomber Command lost 33 aircraft, or 4.6 per cent of the force. Some were shot down by night fighters, others by anti-aircraft fire; wrecks came down among other places in the area around Aachen and Maastricht.

The heaviest raid of the Battle of the Ruhr

The raid on Barmen was the high point of Harris’s campaign. For the first time a single attack killed several thousand people in a German city. Until then the victims of individual raids had been counted in hundreds: even the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne on the night of 30–31 May 1942 had killed fewer than 500 people. The British command judged the operation a model one: a well-marked target, concentrated bombing and a fire that did most of the damage. For the Germans it was a shock. Wuppertal, until then regarded as relatively safe, had proved as defenceless as Essen or Duisburg, and the question of the effectiveness of the Reich’s air defences became more pressing.

The raid also showed clearly what area bombing meant in practice. Its victims were overwhelmingly civilians, and the scale of the losses was determined not so much by the power of the high-explosive bombs as by the fire fed by tens of thousands of incendiaries in dense, old buildings. Extensive fires in one district brought traffic to a halt and cut off water and electricity supplies, and thousands of people who had lost their homes had to be evacuated, fed and housed – which in itself, as Harris intended, was meant to burden the German war economy and break the morale of the workers. The destroyed factories, however, usually resumed production after a few weeks or months, often at other, dispersed locations. Bomber Command used the same mechanism, on an even larger scale, a few weeks later.

Significance

Because Elberfeld, the western part of Wuppertal, had survived, Harris sent a second great raid against the city. On the night of 24–25 June 1943, 630 aircraft destroyed the centre of Elberfeld; according to German figures some 1,900 people were killed, and British analysis put the destruction of the district’s buildings at 94 per cent. Over the whole war, air raids on Wuppertal killed more than 6,500 people and destroyed almost 40 per cent of the city’s buildings.

At the end of July 1943 Harris shifted his main effort to Hamburg. In Operation Gomorrah the firestorm caused by the raids killed some 34,000 people. Wuppertal had been its harbinger: it showed that a concentrated incendiary attack on a densely built-up city could kill thousands of its inhabitants in a single night. The dispute over the moral and military justification of such raids, in which it was mainly civilians who died and armaments production often soon recovered, has accompanied the history of the air war to this day.