The raids on Budapest and Bucharest

On Monday 3 April 1944, shortly before noon, heavy bombers of the Western Allies appeared over Budapest for the first time. Nearly four hundred four-engined aircraft of the American Fifteenth Air Force, flying from airfields in southern Italy, bombed the marshalling yard in the Ferencváros district and the aircraft works on Csepel Island. The next day, 4 April, more than three hundred bombers of the same air force struck the railway junction of Bucharest. In the two capitals some four thousand people were killed in all, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

Popular chronologies of the war sometimes record both raids under the single date of 3 April, as an Allied strike on Budapest and Bucharest “ahead of the advancing Red Army”. This calls for two qualifications. First, on 3 April the bombers attacked only Budapest; the first great raid on Bucharest came a day later, on 4 April, as Romanian sources and the records of the American air force agree. Second, both attacks were indeed connected with the Soviet offensive in Ukraine, but they were not a joint operation with the Red Army: the decisions were taken by the staffs of the Western Allies, and the aim was to paralyse the railways by which the Germans supplied their crumbling southern front.

Two capitals behind the front

In the spring of 1944 Hungary and Romania, the Third Reich’s two most important allies in Central and Eastern Europe, suddenly found themselves directly behind the Eastern Front. The great offensive in Right-Bank Ukraine had pushed the German forces back from the Dnieper beyond the Southern Bug and the Dniester. In the second half of March the troops of Marshal Ivan Konev crossed the Dniester, entered Bessarabia and on 26 March reached the Prut, the former Romanian–Soviet border; two days later some of them crossed the river and entered the territory of Romania proper. North of the Carpathians, Soviet spearheads were approaching the passes leading into Hungary.

Both states were at the same time going through a political crisis. Since 19 March Hungary had been occupied by the Wehrmacht: the Regent, Miklós Horthy, remained in office, but under German pressure he appointed a government under General Döme Sztójay, obedient to the Reich’s plenipotentiary. Until the Germans marched in, Hungary had not been a target of strategic bombing – according to Hungarian researchers the Americans had held back their preparations, waiting to see how the government in Budapest would respond to German plans. Once the occupation had passed without resistance, Hungary became for the Allies simply part of the German war machine.

Romania was ruled by Marshal Ion Antonescu, who had been fighting alongside Germany since 1941. In mid-March an envoy of the Romanian opposition, Prince Barbu Știrbey, arrived in Cairo for talks with the Allies, and on 2 April the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, gave a public assurance that the USSR had no intention of changing Romania’s social order or taking away its territory – leaving aside, however, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Bucharest had until then been beyond the reach of the Western Allies’ air forces; the only great attack on Romania – Operation Tidal Wave of 1 August 1943 – had been aimed at the refineries of Ploiești and paid for with heavy losses.

The logic of the railways

From the autumn of 1943 units of the American Fifteenth Air Force had been stationed at Foggia and the surrounding airfields of Apulia; from January 1944 it was commanded by Major General Nathan Twining. Together with the RAF’s No. 205 Group, which flew Wellington and Liberator bombers by night, it formed the strategic component of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces under General Ira Eaker. From Italy the bombers could reach targets beyond the range of aircraft based in England: southern Germany, Austria – as the raid on Vienna of 17 March had shown – and also Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

The Fifteenth Air Force’s most important task remained the offensive against the German aircraft industry, shared with the air forces in England, but in March 1944 the British began to press for a change of priorities in the Balkans. According to American studies, on 21 March the Chief of the Air Staff, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal, told General Carl Spaatz, commander of the US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, that in view of reports of the deteriorating state of the Romanian railways an attack on Bucharest should become a matter of first priority. The reasoning was simple: through the junctions of Bucharest and Budapest ran the lines by which the Germans brought reinforcements, ammunition and fuel to the troops retreating before Konev and Malinovsky, and evacuated equipment and wounded. Bucharest was, moreover, the main point for the transhipment and distribution of oil products from the Ploiești refineries.

The British planners were also counting on a political effect. Staff memoranda argued that wrecking the railways would disrupt the country’s supplies of food and fuel, add to the chaos caused by crowds of refugees from Moldavia and Bessarabia, and might hasten Romania’s withdrawal from the war. Hungary, freshly occupied by the Germans, was to be stripped of any illusion that it could sit out the war on the sidelines. In both cases the targets formally remained military – marshalling yards, railway workshops, aircraft factories – but bombing from high altitude junctions located in the middle of densely populated districts inevitably meant heavy losses among the population.

Budapest, 3 April

The force took off on the morning of 3 April. According to Hungarian records 379 heavy bombers reached the target – 111 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and 268 Consolidated B-24 Liberators – escorted by 99 twin-engined Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters and 38 Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. The alert lasted from 10.35 a.m. to 12.15 p.m. The bombers came in successive waves and dropped about a thousand tons of bombs in all: more than 600 tons on the Ferencváros marshalling yard and about 300 tons on the Danube Aircraft Works at Szigetszentmiklós on Csepel Island, which built German Messerschmitt aircraft under licence.

Accuracy, as usual in bombing from a height of several kilometres, was limited. The bombs fell not only on the tracks and factory halls but also on residential houses in the 9th, 10th and 11th districts, in Kispest, in Pestszenterzsébet, in Csepel, in Soroksár and in localities on the island such as Szigetszentmiklós and Tököl. The anti-aircraft defences were weak: at the end of 1943 Hungary had fewer than 160 guns in the whole country capable of reaching bombers flying at 6–7 kilometres, whereas the area of Ploiești and Bucharest was defended by about a thousand German guns, and several fighter squadrons were only just converting from Hungarian-built aircraft to German Bf 109s. Hungarian sources state that the Americans lost four bombers and the defenders – according to the official report – one fighter. Late in the evening, between 11.35 p.m. and 12.15 a.m., the capital went through another alert.

Hungarian records speak of 933 confirmed deaths; others give 1,073 killed and more than 500 wounded. The working-class suburbs suffered worst: in Pestszenterzsébet alone 223 people were killed, in Szigetszentmiklós 168, in Csepel 85, and in the area of the Ferencváros station – according to some studies – several hundred. Among the dead was the popular actress and operetta singer Irén Zilahy, who was killed together with other residents of her villa in its garden shelter. It was the first bombing on such a scale in Budapest – the earlier Soviet raids of 1942 had done far less damage.

Bucharest, 4 April

The next day, 4 April, the Fifteenth Air Force sent 93 B-17s and 220 B-24s over Romania, escorted by 119 P-38 fighters. The main target was the marshalling yard by the București Nord station, together with the tracks at Chitila and the Grivița railway workshops – the heart of Romanian rail traffic, through which oil and petrol from Ploiești also passed. The bombers arrived in the early afternoon, around 1.30–2 p.m., and according to American figures dropped more than 860 tons of bombs. One group of Liberators that had lost contact with its escort pressed on to the target without fighter cover and fought a hard battle with German and Romanian fighters; it later received an American unit citation for this mission.

Bucharest was protected by far stronger German and Romanian fighter forces and anti-aircraft artillery than Budapest, but the city was not prepared for an attack on this scale. According to residents’ recollections, many ignored the sirens, believing it to be another air-raid drill. The bombs fell not only on the tracks but also on residential districts in the northern and central parts of the city – Grivița, Giulești, the area around the Matache market and Cotroceni – on the Athénée Palace and Ambasador hotels and on hundreds of houses. Around the North Station thousands of refugees from Moldavia, who had fled before the front and were waiting for trains, were camping out; they made up a large proportion of the victims.

The Romanian authorities’ official toll was 2,942 killed and 2,126 wounded. Some publications give higher figures, sometimes several times higher, but these are not borne out by contemporary documents; the discrepancies arise partly from the difficulty of counting refugees whom no one had had time to register. It was the bloodiest single raid in Bucharest’s history – according to Romanian records, more than 5,500 inhabitants were killed in the whole series of Allied bombings of the city from April to August 1944.

Reactions

In Romania the raid caused shock, but not the kind the British planners had hoped for. The Antonescu regime’s propaganda presented it as a “terrorist” attack on a defenceless population, and solemn funerals and visits by the Marshal and King Michael I to the devastated districts were meant to bear witness to the nation’s unity around its rulers. Antonescu ordered government offices and state institutions moved out of the capital, the radio station was relocated to the village of Bodu, and many residents left the city for the countryside. Știrbey’s talks in Cairo went on, but the raid did not hasten the break with Germany – on the contrary, it made it harder for the opposition to argue that the Western Allies would protect Romania from the worst.

In Hungary the new Sztójay government exploited the bombing in an antisemitic campaign. The press and propaganda blamed the Jews as co-responsible for the Allied bombing, and the authorities, as the Holocaust historian Randolph L. Braham among others describes, demanded that the newly created Jewish Council vacate hundreds of Jewish flats for families affected by the raids. It was one of the first steps in a policy that over the following weeks led to the confinement of the Jews in ghettos and, from mid-May, to mass deportations to Auschwitz organised by Adolf Eichmann.

The Soviet Union welcomed the attacks on the Romanian and Hungarian railways, although they had not been formally coordinated with it: since the autumn of 1943, that is, even before the Tehran Conference, an American military mission under General John Deane had been operating in Moscow, and through it, according to American studies, the Soviet side expressed interest over the following weeks in further attacks on the Romanian transport system, and later agreed with the Americans on the targets of the so-called shuttle-bombing missions.

Place in the war

The raids of 3 and 4 April opened a new chapter in the air war in Central and Eastern Europe. As early as 5 April the bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force returned to Ploiești, this time formally in order to strike the marshalling yard there, and over the following weeks and months they attacked by turns the refineries, railway junctions and airfields of Romania and Hungary. On 13 April more than five hundred bombers struck airfields and aircraft factories near Budapest and at Győr; on 2 June, in the first American shuttle mission to bases in the Soviet Union, the target was the marshalling yard at Debrecen, while other missions that day struck railway junctions at Szeged, Szolnok and Miskolc – on 2 June alone, according to Hungarian figures, more than 2,300 people were killed in Hungary. By night the bombers of the RAF’s No. 205 Group flew over both countries, among other things mining from the air the Danube, the main route by which Romanian oil was shipped to the Reich.

The military effects were real but limited. Rail traffic in both countries was seriously disrupted, and the attacks on Ploiești and on fuel transport gradually deepened Germany’s fuel crisis. The Germans and their allies, however, were able to repair track quickly and organise diversions, and the front on the Romanian border stabilised in April for reasons that had nothing to do with air power – the Soviet advance had run out of steam on the approaches to Iași and Chișinău. The price was the death of thousands of civilians in cities that until the spring of 1944 had lived on the margins of the air war.

The political hopes attached to the bombing were fulfilled only in a different context. Romania broke with Germany on 23 August 1944, when the Jassy–Kishinev offensive shattered its front and King Michael had Antonescu arrested; in retaliation the Luftwaffe bombed Bucharest for three days, killing about three hundred people. Hungary stayed in the war to the end: Horthy’s failed attempt to withdraw in October 1944 ended with the Arrow Cross seizing power, and Budapest, bombed from then on by both the Americans and the Soviet air force, endured at the turn of 1944 and 1945 one of the heaviest sieges of the whole war. In the spring of 1944, then, both capitals learned that they no longer lay safely behind the lines – and that the war their governments were waging far to the east was coming back to them, from the sky as well as by land.