The raids on Stuttgart and Pilsen

On the night of 14–15 April 1943, 462 bombers of RAF Bomber Command attacked Stuttgart, the capital of Württemberg and one of the important centres of the German armaments industry. The bombs fell between 12.42 and 1.52 a.m., but not where the Pathfinders had marked: the weight of the attack drifted on to the north-eastern districts of the city. Two nights later, on the night of 16–17 April, Arthur Harris’s command sent almost six hundred aircraft simultaneously against the Škoda works at Pilsen and against Mannheim. The attack on Pilsen ended in failure, and the losses that night were the heaviest Bomber Command had suffered since the start of the war.

Stuttgart – a difficult target

Stuttgart lay deep in southern Germany, far beyond the range of the Oboe radio navigation system that had been used since March 1943 to mark targets in the Ruhr. The city sprawled along the winding valley of the Neckar, among hills that made it hard to identify the target from the air and on the screens of airborne radar. It was home to the Bosch works, which produced among other things magnetos and fuel injectors for engines, and to the Daimler-Benz factories at Untertürkheim. Earlier RAF attacks on the city, including a raid by 314 aircraft on the night of 11–12 March 1943, had achieved little: on that occasion the Germans used decoy target indicators for the first time, and most of the bombs fell in open country.

In April Harris sent much larger forces against Stuttgart: 146 Wellingtons, 135 Halifaxes, 98 Lancasters and 83 Stirlings. According to German figures, 393 of them reached the city. The Pathfinders reported that they had marked the centre accurately, but the bombing gradually crept back along the line of approach, to the north-east. Bomber Command’s British operational diary cites this raid as an example of the phenomenon known as “creep-back”. The crews of the main force, and some of the aircraft renewing the marking, did not press on to the centre of the area marked by flares but dropped their bombs on the first markers they saw. Each successive wave therefore bombed slightly earlier, and the centre of gravity of the attack moved back towards the direction from which the aircraft were coming. Bomber Command was never able to eliminate the phenomenon entirely.

The bombs fell mainly on Bad Cannstatt, Münster (PL) and Mühlhausen, districts on the Neckar north-east of the centre. According to the city’s records 619 people were killed and more than 700 injured. Some studies state that the dead included about 400 prisoners of war who were killed in the Gaisburg district. It was the deadliest raid on Stuttgart up to that time. Bomber Command lost 23 aircraft – 8 Stirlings, 8 Wellingtons, 4 Halifaxes and 3 Lancasters, or 5 per cent of the force dispatched. Losses on that scale in a single raid were hard for the command to bear at the time, but still sustainable.

Pilsen and Mannheim

After a night’s break Harris planned two large attacks for the night of 16–17 April. The first was to hit the Škoda works at Pilsen, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, one of the largest armaments factories in Europe. It produced guns, ammunition and vehicles for the Wehrmacht, and according to Czech studies about 67,000 people were working there in April 1943. The target lay so far to the east that only four-engined heavy bombers could undertake the mission: 197 Lancasters and 130 Halifaxes took off, 327 aircraft in all. A second force of 271 aircraft – 159 Wellingtons, 95 Stirlings and 17 Halifaxes – was to attack Mannheim, which had already been bombed several times.

The plan for the attack on Pilsen was complicated. The raid was carried out at full moon, and the main-force crews were to confirm the position of the factory visually themselves; the Pathfinders’ markers were to serve only as a general guide. The bombers flew low and changed course several times so that the Germans could not guess the target. But the bright night also favoured the German night fighters, which attacked the bomber stream while it was still on the way. According to Czech calculations, about 290 aircraft reached the Pilsen area. There a large psychiatric hospital at Dobřany, some 11 kilometres south-west of Pilsen, whose buildings looked from above like industrial premises, was mistaken for the factory. Only six crews brought back bombing photographs taken within 5 kilometres of the real target. The Škoda works were not hit.

The bombs destroyed most of the buildings in Dobřany and also fell on nearby barracks and the surrounding villages. Casualty figures vary from source to source. Czech studies state that in Dobřany itself about a hundred of the hospital’s patients, several dozen German soldiers and several dozen other inhabitants were killed, and more than 250 civilians in the whole area attacked. The British operational diary cites an account according to which 200 German soldiers were killed in the bombed barracks. Of the 746 houses in Dobřany, roughly a quarter survived. It was the first place in the Czech lands to be so heavily bombed during the war. The Air Ministry in London, relying on the crews’ reports, announced that the Škoda works had been destroyed, while German propaganda exploited the mistake by making a film about the raid.

The RAF paid a high price for the failed attack. Over Pilsen and on the way home 18 Lancasters and 18 Halifaxes were lost – 11 per cent of the force dispatched. The Canadian No. 408 Squadron RCAF lost 4 of its 12 Halifaxes. According to Czech calculations, 199 airmen were killed and 52 taken prisoner. One of the Lancasters shot down crashed on the edge of Dobřany; its crew were the first Allied servicemen to be killed on Czech soil in the war.

The attack on Mannheim went much better. The Pathfinders marked the target accurately and, according to the British operational diary, the raid was effective. Of the 271 aircraft, 18 failed to return – 9 Wellingtons, 7 Stirlings and 2 Halifaxes, or 6.6 per cent. In all, Bomber Command flew 609 sorties that night and lost 54 aircraft, 8.9 per cent. These were the heaviest losses in a single night since the start of the war, higher even than the 50 aircraft lost during the thousand-bomber raid on Bremen in June 1942. Fourteen aircraft from the two raids came down in the sea, and some of their crews were rescued.

Place in the war

The April raids showed the limits of what Bomber Command could achieve in the spring of 1943. Over the Ruhr, within Oboe range, Harris was destroying cities ever more effectively. Deeper into Germany and in Central Europe, beyond the reach of Oboe, and while H2S radar – with which Wilhelmshaven had in February been successfully bombed blind for the first time – was still a novelty, accuracy continued to depend on the weather, the light, the skill of the Pathfinders and the crews’ resilience under defensive fire. In practice the creep-back over Stuttgart and the error over Dobřany meant that the bombs killed above all people who were not the target: suburban residents, prisoners of war, psychiatric patients. The heavy losses of 16–17 April were, in turn, a reminder that long-range raids on bright nights were particularly dangerous for bombers.

Harris did not give up on Pilsen. On the night of 13–14 May 1943 the RAF attacked the Škoda works again, but this raid too largely missed. The factory was destroyed only by American bombers on 25 April 1945, a few days before the end of the war. Stuttgart was bombed many more times; the heaviest raids came in 1944, and over the whole war several thousand people were killed there. The main front of the night offensive, however, remained the Ruhr. At the end of April the bombers returned to Duisburg and Essen; May brought the raid on the Möhne and Eder dams and the catastrophic fire in Wuppertal, and the summer Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg.