17 Colin Harrison, interview with the author, 8 December 2004.

18 Bill McCrea, interview with the author, 8 December 2004.

19 Trevor Timperley, interview with the author, 17 November 2004.

20 Leonard Cooper, telephone interview with the author, 19 November 2004.

21 For a fuller description of this engagement, see Musgrove, Operation Gomorrah, p. 76.

22 According to Middlebrook, Battle of Hamburg, p. 245. The general claims, though not the exact time and altitude, are backed up by Peter Hinchliffe, in The Other Battle(Shrewsbury, 2001), p. 157.

23 Quoted by Middlebrook, Battle of Hamburg, pp. 246–7.

24 Ted Groom, telephone interview with the author, 11 November 2004.

25 F. H. Quick, private manuscript diary sent to the author.

16    Firestorm

1 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, Book II, lines 170–76 (London, 1968), pp. 97–8. These words are spoken by Belial in the depths of hell, as he warns the rebel angels of the possible consequences of embarking upon a new war.

2 See Chapter 10, in particular the passages relating to notes 47 and 48.

3 For a discussion of the different types of firestorm, see Gordon Musgrove, Operation Gomorrah(London, 1981), pp. 102–3.

4 According to Hans Brunswig, who was the senior fire engineer on duty that night, the wind speeds probably reached 75 metres per second and more; see his Feuersturm über Hamburg(Stuttgart, 2003), p. 266. Charles H. V. Ebert prefers a lower estimate of about 50 metres per second; see his ‘The meteorological factor in the Hamburg Firestorm’, in Weatherwise, vol. 16, no. 2 (April 1963), p. 73.

5 Ebert, Weatherwise. For an eyewitness account, see the situation report given by the head of FE-Bereitschaft 3/X (‘Fire Service Stand-by Crew 3/X’), quoted in Brunswig, Feuersturm, p. 232: the whirlwind at the junction of Vogelweide and Volksdorfer Strasse in Eilbek was strong enough to lift large pieces of burning wood from a timber merchant and send them hurtling down the street.

6 Police engineers in Hamburg estimated that general temperatures were more likely around 800°C – see Horatio Bond, Fire and the Air War(Boston, 1946), p. 116. Bond was a US adviser to the USSBS in Hamburg after the war.

7 For a much more detailed analysis of how weather conditions contributed to this firestorm, see Ebert, Weatherwise, pp. 70–75. According to Ebert, this firestorm is ‘unmatched in the records’.

8 See Musgrove, Operation Gomorrah, p. 109; and Brunswig, Feuersturm, pp. 271–2.

9 Indeed, the Germans took great pains to keep their findings about the meteorological factor in such firestorms secret. Ibid., p. 270.

10 For contemporary theories on the relative effectiveness of incendiary bombing over high explosives, see J. Enrique Zanetti, Fire from the Air: The ABC of Incendiaries(New York, 1941), particularly pp. 49–50.

11 See the British official history, Solly Zuckerman’s The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939–45: Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit(London, 1998), p. 6: ‘the technical lessons of the German attacks on our cities were beginning to be driven home, and it was becoming more and more recognized that, in order to destroy built-up areas, incendiary bombs, and medium-charge and high-charge HE bombs were preferable to the types of load that we were then employing.’ For British and German experiments and development of incendiaries, see also Frederick Taylor, Dresden(London, 2004), pp. 113–15.

12 Hamburg Police Report, p.16, UK National Archives, AIR 20/7287. The original German is in Erhard Klöss (ed.), Der Luftkrieg über Deutschland 1939–45: Deutsche Berichte und Pressestimmen des neutralen Auslands, p. 41.

13 Fredy Borck, quoted in Kerstin Hof (ed.), Rothenburgsort 27/28 Juli 1943(unpublished booklet, produced by Stadtteilinitiative Hamm e. V.), pp. 13–14.

14 Herbert Wulff, typescript account, FZH 292–8, T–Z.

15 See Hamburg Police Report, pp. 7–12, for a description of the city’s fire-protection service.

16 Ibid., p. 19.

17 See Zanetti, Fire from the Air, p. 20: ‘On boards, flooring, beams, and other combustible but not easily ignitable material, phosphorus is not only useless but, as a matter of fact, somewhat fire retardant, since it forms a glassy deposit of phosphoric acid on exposed combustible material, thus protecting it from ignition.’ Thermite, on the other hand, which is a mixture of metallic aluminium and iron oxide, burns at much higher temperatures, creating ‘a white hot fluid that flows like water, setting fire to all combustible matter which it comes into contact with’, p. 34.

18 Henni Klank, internet account, http://www.seniorennet-hamburg.de/zeitzeugen/vergessen/klank1.htm (last viewed 1 September 2005).

19 Ibid.

20 Erich Titschak, in Renate Hauschild-Thiessen, Die Hamburger Katastrophe vom Sommer 1943 in Augenzeugenberichten(Hamburg, 1993), p. 77.

21 Titschak, in ibid., p. 77.

22 Hans Jedlicka, typescript account, FZH 292–8, G–Kra.

23 In June 1953 a reporter for North German Radio interviewed a man who claimed that he and his colleagues often had to force people out of their cellars ‘with kicks and slaps’: see Uwe Bahnsen and Kerstin von Stürmer, Die Stadt, die sterben sollte: Hamburg im Bomberkrieg(Hamburg, 2003), p. 34. Musgrove, Operation Gomorrah, p. 97, also quotes a Herr Bey, who had had repeatedly to stop a woman running back into the cellar from which he’d just rescued her.

24 Wolf Biermann interview, Der Spiegel, 25 July 2003.

25 Ibid.

26 Hamburg Police Report, p. 66. To be safe in an open space that night, the space had to be more than three hundred metres in diameter.

27 Manuscript account by ‘Albert H.’, quoted in Hamburg secondary school project, ‘Als die Bomben fielen: Hamburg vor 40 Jahren’, Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte, HaIII 68, pp. 134–43.

28 Günther Severin (ed.), Briefe an einen Pastor(unpublished), letter 12.

29 Brunswig, Feuersturm, pp. 233–4. According to the Hamburg Police Report, the spraying of water upon fugitives as a protective ‘cloak’ while they escaped from burning houses was one of the most important lessons learned that night (p.39).

30 Quoted in Brunswig, Feuersturm, p. 226.

31 Ludwig Faupel, typescript account, FZH 292–8, A–F.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Wolf Biermann interview, Der Spiegel, 25 July 2003.

36 Ernst-Günther Haberland, quoted in Hof (ed.), Rothenburgsort 27/28 Juli 1943, p. 80.

37 See, for example, Heinrich Johannsen’s description of being knocked on to his face by flying timber: Hamburg Police Report, appendix 10. A German transcript of this account is available in Klöss (ed.), Der Luftkrieg, pp. 84–7.

38 Anonymous letter from 1 August 1943, reproduced by Marcus Petersen, in ‘Den Feuersturm in Hamburg überlebt’, Die Heimat, vol. 94, no. 3/4, March/April 1987.

39 Erika Wilken’s account appears in Appendix 10 of the Hamburg Police Report: see Carl F. Miller (ed.), Appendixes 8 through 19 to the Hamburg Police President’s Report on the Large Scale Air Attacks on Hamburg, Germany, in World War II(Stanford, December 1968), pp. 82–3: this translation differs very slightly from my own. The original German account has been reproduced in Klöss (ed.), Der Luftkrieg, pp. 80–84.

40 Italian author Curzio Malaparte propagated a gruesome story in the late 1940s about hundreds of people swimming in the waterways, unable to extinguish the phosphorus burning on their skin, who had to be put out of their misery by German soldiers. The story has been repeated by later historians, most notably the American author Martin Caidin, in The Night Hamburg Died(New York, 1960), pp. 142–7. For a comprehensive refutation of this urban myth, see Martin Middlebrook, The Battle of Hamburg(London, 1980), pp. 328–9 (following Brunswig, Feuersturm, pp. 244–5). Caidin claimed to have found corroborating evidence for the story, but both Middlebrook and Brunswig find this very difficult to believe. See also Bond, Fire and the Air War, p. 121.