The thousand-bomber raid on Essen

Barely two days after the raid on Cologne, RAF Bomber Command sent out its “thousand-bomber armada” for a second time. On the night of 1–2 June 1942, 956 aircraft flew to Essen, the heart of the Ruhr and home of the Krupp works, the largest armaments concern in the Reich. This time there was no success. Haze and low cloud lay over the city, the bombers failed to find the target, and the bombs were scattered across the whole Ruhr.

Many lists record under 2 June “further heavy bombing of industrial plants in Germany, concentrated mainly on Essen”. This deserves to be made more precise. The target was not individual factories but the built-up area of the whole city: since the Air Ministry’s directive of February, Bomber Command had been conducting area raids, and at Essen the hope was that destroying the workers’ districts around the Krupp works would also paralyse production itself. In practice this raid left Essen’s industry untouched.

The second “thousand” raid

Air Marshal Arthur Harris, the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, wanted to take advantage of the fact that, after Cologne, the forces hastily assembled for it were still standing ready. They included aircraft and crews from the training units – the Operational Training Units – without which the figure of a thousand could not be reached. Their participation meant a break in the training of new intakes of aircrew, so with every day the pressure grew to hand them back. In addition, the full moon, which made navigation easier, was waning.

Essen was the obvious target and at the same time the most difficult. Since March Bomber Command had attacked it again and again using the Gee radio-navigation system, but the March raids had shown that over the smoke-filled industrial basin it was very hard to hit the right city even with Gee. The densely built-up region, where one town merged into the next, was usually shrouded at night in industrial haze, and the Germans built decoy sites in the area, lighting fires in the fields to imitate burning districts.

This time the full thousand could not be gathered. According to British operational records, 956 bombers took off: 545 Wellingtons, 127 Halifaxes, 77 Stirlings, 74 Lancasters, 71 Hampdens, 33 Manchesters and 29 Whitleys. In addition, 48 Blenheim light bombers were to attack German night-fighter airfields, so that the total number of aircraft sent out by Bomber Command that night slightly exceeded a thousand.

A raid in the haze

The plan repeated the pattern of Cologne: all the aircraft flew in a single concentrated stream, along a common route and at set intervals, in order to saturate the German night defences. The main change was in target marking. The Gee-equipped Wellingtons of the experienced No. 3 Group leading the raid were to drop far more illuminating flares over Essen than over Cologne and start fires on which the rest would aim.

It did not help. The crews found the ground covered by a layer of haze or low cloud. The flares lit up a milky curtain, not streets, and no one could be sure which city he was over. The bombing was very scattered. According to German municipal reports cited in British studies, in Essen itself only 11 houses were destroyed and 184 damaged, mainly in the southern part of the city; a prisoner-of-war labour camp was also burnt down. Fifteen people were killed and 91 injured. The Krupp works suffered practically no damage.

Bombs did, however, fall on at least eleven other towns in the Ruhr. The worst hit were Oberhausen, where 83 people were killed, Duisburg with 52 dead and Mülheim an der Ruhr with 15 victims. The dispersion that had been kept in check over Cologne on a clear night returned in full over the Ruhr.

Bomber Command lost 31 aircraft, or 3.2 per cent of those dispatched: 15 Wellingtons, 8 Halifaxes, 4 Lancasters and one each of the Hampdens, Manchesters, Stirlings and Whitleys. Of the Blenheims sent against the airfields, only ten managed to attack their targets, and three did not return. Losses were thus clearly lower than had been feared before the “thousand” operations, but this time no visible result offset them.

Further nights over Essen

Harris did not give up. The very next night, 2–3 June, 195 aircraft from the front-line squadrons alone, without the training units, flew to Essen. The raid was again scattered, and 14 bombers failed to return. The city recorded only three high-explosive bombs and about three hundred incendiaries, with no serious damage or casualties. In the following weeks Bomber Command returned to Essen three more times, on the nights of 5–6, 8–9 and 16–17 June, each time with similar results. In the last of these raids only sixteen crews reported identifying Essen, and most attacked alternative targets, above all Bonn.

The balance was depressing. According to tallies based on British and German data, five raids on Essen over sixteen nights consumed 1,607 sorties and 84 aircraft, or 5.2 per cent of the forces dispatched. None of them caused industrial damage in the city; a few houses were destroyed and 38 civilians were killed. After this series Bomber Command abandoned major raids on Essen for three months.

Place in the war

The raid on Essen showed the limits of what concentration of force alone could achieve. The bomber stream proved its worth as a means of beating the German defences: losses were moderate. But a thousand aircraft that could not see their target could only scatter bombs across the surrounding area. Cologne lay on a broad river, within Gee range and on a clear night; Essen, hidden in industrial haze, required more than numbers.

The failure over Essen did not, however, shake Harris’s position. The effect of Cologne was too strong, and the War Cabinet and the public judged Bomber Command above all in its light. In the King’s Birthday Honours in June its commander received a knighthood, and on 12 June George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited the airfield at Waterbeach to meet the crews of the training units that had taken part in the “thousand” raids. Within the command itself, however, it was already understood that expanding the bomber fleet would not be enough if the aircrews could not find their target in bad weather.

The lessons came in the following months. At the end of June Harris assembled the “thousand” force for the third and last time for a raid on Bremen, and in August 1942, despite his initial opposition, a specialised target-marking formation, the Pathfinder Force, was created. At the turn of 1942 and 1943 the Oboe radio-navigation system, whose range covered precisely the Ruhr, and the H2S airborne radar entered service. Only with them was Essen seriously damaged: the raid of 5–6 March 1943 opened the campaign the British called the Battle of the Ruhr, during which the Krupp works and the districts around them were hit many times. By the end of the war Bomber Command had dropped some 36,000 tons of bombs on Essen, and the city became one of the most heavily bombed in Germany. The failed raid of June 1942 was the first sign that the road to that goal would be a long one.