The thousand-bomber raid on Bremen

On the night of 25–26 June 1942 the Royal Air Force sent more than a thousand aircraft against a single German city for the third time. The target was Bremen, the Reich’s second North Sea port after Hamburg and a centre of submarine and aircraft construction. According to British operational records 1,067 aircraft took off, more than had flown against Cologne at the end of May. The target, however, was covered by cloud, and the results of the raid proved far more modest than had been hoped. The losses, on the other hand, were the highest yet: RAF Bomber Command lost 48 aircraft, and Coastal Command another five.

It is often written that the attackers “suffered heavy losses”. That is true, though it needs figures. The aircraft lost amounted to exactly 5 per cent of the Bomber Command machines sent to Bremen – a high rate, but not yet an exceptional one at the time. The burden of the losses, however, fell unevenly and struck the training units hardest. It was this, rather than the rate itself, that made it the last “thousand” raid of 1942.

The third “thousand” raid

After Cologne, Air Marshal Arthur Harris had gained what he had been fighting for: he had convinced the government that his command was an instrument worth investing in. The second great raid, on Essen on the night of 1–2 June, had, however, ended in failure in the industrial haze of the Ruhr, and further June attacks on Essen and Emden produced equally scattered bombing. Harris needed one more proof that large, concentrated raids could do the Germans serious damage.

Bremen had several advantages. It lay on the broad Weser, easily visible from the air, and to reach it the bombers had to cross the belt of German night defences only on a short stretch. It held important targets: the Focke-Wulf aircraft works, the shipyards of the Deschimag group, led by AG Weser, which built U-boats, as well as the Vulkan shipyard, the Atlas works, a steelworks and a refinery. The RAF had been bombing Bremen since 1940, and in the first nights of 1941 it had attacked the Focke-Wulf works several times, generally to little effect. The last sizeable raid, on the night of 3–4 June 1942, was carried out by 170 aircraft; according to Bremen records 83 people were killed.

Gathering a thousand aircraft was harder this time. Bomber Command could put up only 960, even though it drew on everything it had: besides the front-line bombers and the aircraft of the Operational Training Units, the light bombers of No. 2 Group, until then used only by day, were also committed to the raid. The force comprised 472 Wellingtons, 124 Halifaxes, 96 Lancasters, 69 Stirlings, 51 Blenheims, 50 each of Hampdens and Whitleys, 24 Bostons, 20 Manchesters and 4 Mosquitos. It was the most varied collection of aircraft that Bomber Command ever sent against a single target.

The rest came from RAF Coastal Command. Before the Cologne raid the Admiralty had forbidden it at the last minute to take part, on the grounds that aircraft needed to fight submarines in the Battle of the Atlantic should not serve a propaganda record. This time – according to some accounts after the intervention of Winston Churchill – it sent 102 Hudsons and Wellingtons to Bremen. Army Co-operation Command added another five aircraft. Altogether this made 1,067 aircraft.

A raid above the clouds

For the first time in the “thousand” series, part of the force was assigned not to districts of the city but to specific factories. The whole of No. 5 Group, 142 aircraft, was to attack the Focke-Wulf works; twenty Blenheims and the Coastal Command aircraft the Deschimag shipyards; and all the rest the city and the port. The bombing period was cut from 90 to 65 minutes to concentrate the raid in time even more tightly.

The weather let them down again. During the day a belt of cloud lay over Bremen, but a strong wind was pushing it eastwards, and the forecasters expected the sky to clear by evening. The wind, however, dropped, and the bombers found the city completely covered throughout the raid. British analysts attributed what was achieved to the Gee radio-navigation system: the leading crews bombed on its indications and started fires, and the following waves aimed at the glow visible through the cloud. 696 Bomber Command crews reported attacking Bremen; the rest bombed other places or turned back.

According to Bremen records cited in British studies, 572 houses were completely destroyed and 6,108 damaged. 85 people were killed, 497 injured and 2,378 lost their homes; other studies give 86 or 88 dead. So small a number of victims for a raid on this scale testified to the efficiency of Bremen’s civil defence and to how widely the bombs had been scattered. At the Focke-Wulf works an assembly hall was razed to the ground and a dozen or so other buildings were more or less seriously damaged. The Atlas works, the Vulkan shipyard, the Norddeutsche Hütte steelworks, the Korff refinery and two large harbour warehouses were also damaged. It was a better result than at Essen, but far short of Cologne.

The costliest night

The losses were a record. 48 Bomber Command aircraft failed to return, including four that came down in the sea off the English coast; their crews were almost all rescued. The heaviest losses fell on the training units of No. 91 Group, which lost 23 of the 198 Whitleys and Wellingtons they had dispatched, or 11.6 per cent. Coastal Command lost 5 of its 102 aircraft. Including the aircraft sent that night against German airfields, Bomber Command flew 1,016 sorties and lost 50 aircraft, and together with Coastal Command 1,123 sorties and 55 aircraft, or 4.9 per cent. According to some studies, German anti-aircraft artillery and night fighters shot down 49 bombers.

For Harris what mattered most was whom he had lost. The instructors and the best pupils of the training units were to prepare the next intakes of crews, on which the future expansion of his force depended. Every such raid interrupted training for many days, and heavy losses in the training units struck at the foundations of the whole command.

Place in the war

The Bremen raid closed the short series of “thousand” raids of late May and June 1942. Bomber Command did not yet have enough front-line aircraft and crews to send such large forces over Germany regularly, and drawing on the training units had proved too costly. The training units took part in larger raids a few more times in the summer of 1942, but in smaller numbers, and a force of a thousand aircraft was not assembled again that year. Bomber Command did not carry out further raids on this scale until 1944, using front-line heavy bombers alone.

Harris did not, however, leave Bremen in peace. On the nights of 27–28 and 29–30 June he sent 144 and then 253 aircraft against the city; in the second of these raids four-engined bombers made up more than half the force for the first time, and fires caused serious damage to the Focke-Wulf works and the AG Weser shipyard. The growing number of Lancasters and Halifaxes was beginning to replace the mass of older twin-engined aircraft.

The June raids also showed that concentration in time and space, though effective against the German defences, was not enough when the crews could not see the target. In August 1942, despite Harris’s initial opposition, a specialised target-marking force, the Pathfinder Force, was formed, and at the turn of 1942 and 1943 new navigational aids and airborne radar came into service. In 1943 bombers of the American Eighth Air Force also appeared over Bremen by day. According to Bremen records, over the whole war the Allies carried out 173 raids on Bremen, which killed more than four thousand inhabitants and destroyed some 62 per cent of the housing stock. The raid of 25–26 June 1942 was the largest of them in the number of aircraft, but not in destruction: the heaviest came in August 1944, when in little more than half an hour 274 bombers killed over a thousand people.