Bombing of Hamburg in World War II
The Allied bombing of Hamburg during World War II included numerous attacks on civilians and civic infrastructure. As a large city and industrial centre, Hamburg's shipyards, U-boat pens, and the Hamburg-Harburg area oil refineries were attacked throughout the war.[1]
As part of a sustained campaign of strategic bombing during World War II, the attack during the last week of July 1943, code named Operation Gomorrah, created one of the largest firestorms raised by the Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces in World War II,[2] killing an estimated 37,000 people in Hamburg,[3] wounding 180,000 more, and destroying 60% of the city's houses.[3]
Hamburg was selected as a target because it was considered particularly susceptible to attack with incendiaries, which, from the experience of the Blitz, were known to inflict more damage than just high explosive bombs. Hamburg also contained a high number of targets supporting the German war effort and was relatively easy for navigators to find. Careful research was done on behalf of both the RAF and USAAF to discover the optimum mix of high explosives and incendiaries. Before the development of the firestorm in Hamburg, there had been no rain for some time and everything was very dry.[4] The unusually warm weather and good conditions ensured that the bombing was highly concentrated around the intended targets, and helped the resulting conflagration create a vortex and whirling updraft of super-heated air which became a 460-metre-high (1,510 ft) tornado of fire.
Various other previously used techniques and devices were instrumental as well, such as area bombing, Pathfinders, and H2S radar, which came together to work with particular effectiveness. An early form of chaff, code named 'Window', was successfully used for the first time by the RAF – clouds of aluminium foil strips dropped by Pathfinders as well as the initial bomber stream – in order to completely cloud German radar. The raids inflicted severe damage to German armaments production in Hamburg.
Naming[edit]
The name Gomorrah comes from that of one of the two Canaanite cities of Sodom and Gomorrah whose destruction is recorded in the Bible: "Then the Lord rained brimstone and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, from the Lord out of the heavens." – Genesis 19:24
Background[edit]
Political and military pressure[edit]
RAF Bomber Command had made raids on Germany from the early days of World War II. Initially, only military targets were attacked. Navigation to the target over a blacked-out wartime landscape was extremely poor, as was bombing accuracy if the target city (let alone the actual military target) could be found. Consequently bombing operations were very open to criticism as a waste of resources, since such poor results were achieved. The extent of this failure was exposed to the War Cabinet in August 1941 by the Butt Report, which by analysing 600 photographs of raids in the previous three months, found that only a third of crews that claimed to have reached their targets had actually dropped their bombs within five miles (8.0 km) of them.[5]
Opinion on targeting steadily shifted as the war progressed, and by November 1940, the view was developing that the civilian population of Germany was a legitimate target in "total war". By June 1941, RAF thinking had been reversed from seeing any civilian casualties as collateral damage when attacking a military target, to deliberately targeting civilians in an attempt to destroy their morale. This was expected to reduce industrial production and therefore hinder the German war effort. The target was no longer factories, but the people who worked in them and their homes in the surrounding area. This became known as "area bombing". This change was not driven by the inaccuracy of bombing at this stage, but by studying which aspects of the German Blitz on Britain had had most effect. Factories had been found to be relatively difficult to destroy, but workers needed somewhere to live, and their housing was much more easily made unusable. The absenteeism of de-housed workers was considered to have a bigger effect on industrial production than the level of damage that could be caused, with the same effort, to the factories in which they worked.[6]
Air Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris had taken charge of the RAF Bomber Command in February 1942. In the same month, the USAAF 8th Bomber Command set up a headquarters in the United Kingdom ready for the deployment of American units to Britain. Roosevelt was optimistic that bombing had war-winning potential, despite his appeal to Hitler in September 1939 to avoid bombing civilians. Winston Churchill was similarly enthusiastic to bomb Germany. This gave both air forces the political support to deal, at this stage, with criticism of their ineffectiveness.[7]
The build up of the 8th Bomber Command was slow and though some small scale raids were made in France during the latter half of 1942, capability to attack Germany was not obtained until 1943. The British resources were also limited. The Western Allies had had to tell the Soviet Union that any idea of opening a second front in Europe in the summer of 1942 was unfeasible. The only thing Churchill had to offer Stalin was a bombing campaign against Germany. This was hard for the RAF to deliver, but it meant that the bombing of Germany could not be abandoned, so Harris would ultimately get the heavy bombers needed.[8] By the time of the big raid on Hamburg at the end of July 1943, both air forces needed a significant success to justify their existence.
Firebombing research[edit]
Britain's experience of being bombed in the Blitz had contributed to the RAF's thinking on how to conduct a bombing campaign. It had become clear that incendiaries could inflict much more damage than high explosive bombs. Detailed study of this was carried out by the Research and Experiment unit, RE8, (set up in November 1941). The details of how German houses were constructed were examined and tests were carried out on models to determine how effective an incendiary attack would be. The precise ratio of high explosive bombs and incendiaries was calculated. The high explosive was to blow out windows and make fire fighting dangerous. High explosive bombs with delayed action fuses were included in the mix to further suppress any fire fighting effort. The quantity of incendiaries delivered had to be high enough to totally overwhelm any fire fighting capability, so that a conflagration could become established.[9]
The Americans took a high level of interest in the British research on the effect of incendiaries. American expertise and experiments added to the planning of fire bombing raids. Despite belief to the contrary, US aircraft also carried a carefully considered mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs. Large quantities of US-made oil-based incendiaries went into service with the 8th Bomber Command shortly before the Hamburg raid – this was preferred by the Americans to the 4 lb (1.8 kg) magnesium-cased thermite bomb used by the British.[9]
It is clear that the effectiveness of the Hamburg raid relied to a large extent on the careful research on how best to cause a large fire in a German city – as opposed to the popular view that it was some sort of accidental occurrence due to unusual weather conditions.[10]
Target selection[edit]
A number of factors led to Hamburg being chosen for the planned firebombing raid. The construction of the city meant its vulnerability was considered "outstanding". It was Germany's second largest city. The city's shipbuilding industry made it a priority target. It also had more industrial targets of interest to the Ministry of Economic Warfare than most other German cities. It was reasonably close to the bomber bases in Britain, so giving a short flight, with less exposure to anti-aircraft fire and fighters. Hamburg's position, close to the coast and on a prominent river made the target easy to find.[11]
Casualties[edit]
The death toll from Operation Gomorrah will always be uncertain, but the most accepted single number is now 37,000. If a range is stated, this is generally between 34,000 (from police records) and 40,000 (a commonly used figure in Germany before the end of the war). Most of the dead were unidentified. By 1 December 1943, there were 31,647 confirmed dead, but of these only 15,802 were based on the identification of a body. In some cases, the numbers of people who had perished in cellars converted into "air protection rooms" could only be estimated from the quantity of ash left on the floor. Those who died represented about 2.4% of the total population of Hamburg at the time.[47]
Aftermath[edit]
Cityscape[edit]
The totally-destroyed quarter of Hammerbrook, in which mostly port workers lived, was rebuilt not as a housing area but as a commercial area. The adjoining quarter of Rothenburgsort shared the same fate since only a small area of housing was rebuilt. The underground line that connected both areas with the central station was not rebuilt, either.
In the destroyed residential areas, many houses were rebuilt across the street and so no longer form connected blocks. The hills of the Öjendorfer Park are formed by the debris of destroyed houses.[67]
In January 1946, Major Cortez F. Enloe, a surgeon in the USAAF who worked on the USSBS, said that the fire effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki "were not nearly as bad as the effects of the R.A.F. raids on Hamburg on July 27th 1943". He estimated that more than 40,000 people died in Hamburg.[68]
