* * *
By the middle of 1943 there was little good news to be had in Germany about the war. German troops had suffered their first heavy defeats in Russia, at Stalingrad and Kursk, and Rommel’s troops had been ejected from the coast of North Africa. While the Nazis and their allies still controlled mainland Europe and huge areas of Russia, some people in Hamburg realized that the tide was turning. 18
The relative lull in the bombing war between July 1942 and July 1943 was no consolation. 19With raids increasing in other parts of Germany, the Hamburg authorities sensed that it was only a matter of time before the war would return to their doorstep. As the Hamburg chief of police wrote in a report, all of the air-protection services maintained the highest level of preparedness in the run-up to July 1943. 20Their only mistake, if there was one, was to assume that when the great attacks came they would be similar to those that had gone before.
It appears that the population felt much the same way. Although they feared the next attack, most people believed they had done everything they could to protect their homes – they would deal with each raid as it came. With hindsight, their concerns seem petty: they grumbled about losing sleep because of the air-raid warnings; they sent their children to the countryside, but grudgingly, as a precaution; at night they worried that an attack might damage their roof, or blast their windows, or that a direct hit might destroy their home altogether. However, it never occurred to them that their entire city was at risk. The worst they could imagine was that they might be killed, or perhaps someone close to them.
By day, it was easy to forget that there was a war on. The city had not been bombed during daylight hours since 1940 – why should that change now? – and the fighting was hundreds of miles away. People went about their business as they always had done. The sun was shining – it was a glorious summer – and the streets were filled with children making the most of their vacation.
On the afternoon of 20 July 1943 Fredy Borck was playing in the courtyard of his apartment block in Rothenburgsort when he heard an aeroplane above. Suddenly propaganda leaflets rained out of the sky: ‘We didn’t dare touch [them], because it was said they might be poisoned. So we ran to the house and brought fire tongs and coal shovels, and used those to pick them up. We weren’t supposed to read them either, but we did. It was an appeal to the people to leave the city immediately, because we were to be the next bombing target.’ 21
A debate ensued among the family as to what they should do. They had a shack in Krümmel near the coast that they could go to, but there was no guarantee of safety there – a large munitions factory stood nearby, which might easily be an alternative target for Allied bombers. Besides, Fredy’s grandmother refused to leave the city. So they decided to stay, saying ‘It would not be so bad,’ and Fredy went back out into the courtyard to play. The sun shone, scorching the city for the rest of the week, and still the war seemed hundreds of miles away.
PART TWO
Darkness Falls from the Air
6. A Brief History of Bombing
Give us something to destroy…
Don’t despise us; we’re heralds and prophets.
Primo Levi 1
The one thing that could not be said about the horrors created by the Combined Bomber Offensive is that they were unforeseen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, while most of the world was still celebrating the advent of powered flight as a thing of wonder, there were many who worried that mankind was not yet responsible enough to wield such power peacefully. Their fears were crystallized in 1908 by H. G. Wells, whose hugely popular novel, The War in the Air, described the possibility of a world war in which aerial bombing campaigns would destroy every major city and bring about ‘universal social collapse’. 2His fictional descriptions of the bombing of New York make uneasy reading for anyone acquainted with the effects of British and American bombs in 1943:
They smashed up the city as a child will shatter its cities of brick and card. Below, they left ruins and blazing conflagrations and heaped and scattered dead… Lower New York was soon a furnace of crimson flames, from which there was no escape. Cars, railways, ferries, all had ceased, and never a light led the way of the distracted fugitives in that dusky confusion but the light of burning. 3
Over the next few years, such predictions became increasingly common. When Italian aviators fighting in North Africa dropped the world’s first aerial bombs on Turkish troops in 1911, there was general dismay that the genie had been let out of the bottle.
Reports in English newspapers claimed that such bombing would revolutionize warfare. Gustaf Janson, a Swedish writer, described how aerial bombardment would one day see entire cities ‘burnt, blown to pieces in explosions, annihilated, exterminated’. 4Across Europe, the popular imagination was fired with images of a manmade Sodom and Gomorrah. 5
At the time, however, such ideas were still fantasy – fairy stories to frighten children. Powered flight was in its infancy, and not a single country was capable of delivering the mass of machines necessary to produce such devastation. The few occasions before 1914 when aircraft were used to drop bombs only seemed to demonstrate how ineffective they were. For example, after the initial excitement over the Italian bombing of Libya died down, most of the world’s press dismissed it as pointless. The German correspondent for the Berliner Tageblattclaimed that the results had been virtually nil, and that Italian aviators had had very little effect on the war. A French military observer reported that the bombs he had seen produced no casualties and no damage. Many fell into the sand without exploding, and those that detonated produced only a small and harmless blast. More importantly, the Turks did not appear in the least bit frightened by the experience. 6
Yet the idea that aerial bombardment could be used as a devastating force persisted in the popular imagination and in the minds of military theorists. The image of Sodom and Gomorrah seemed to tap something deep within human nature: not only the nightmare of being on the receiving end, but also the dream of being able to wield such irresistible power oneself. Soon military thinkers across the world were weaving their own fantasies: most seemed to think that bombing would end up saving lives by making wars shorter and more decisive. Some went so far as to claim that the threat of bombing would eventually bring peace and order to the world. 7
The outbreak of the First World War destroyed all such benign theories for good. The first bombings of the war were isolated affairs, but it was only a matter of time before those separate attacks were grouped together into full-scale bombing offensives. It was the Germans who first embraced bombing as a strategic weapon.
France was attacked regularly, especially Paris, but it was Britain that received the full shock of the German air offensive. The idea was to attack British ports, stations, arsenals, factories – anything that contributed to the British war effort – methodically and incessantly. Most of the early raids came from zeppelins, which were able to fly incredibly long distances without having to stop and refuel, but at the same time German manufacturers were developing the world’s first effective long-range bomber aeroplane – the twin-engined Gotha.
The effect on the civilian population was dramatic. For centuries Britain had been an island fortress, protected from the rest of Europe by the English Channel, but in a few short years the advent of powered flight had rendered the country defenceless. When the first bombs began to fall during the First World War there were scenes of panic in all of the areas affected. Rates of absenteeism in factories and offices rocketed in the days after an attack, and the quality of the work done by those who turned up was vastly reduced. Skilled workers in armaments factories made a much greater number of mistakes in precision work in the days after an air raid. In Hull, women and children fled the city at the first sound of the alarm and spent night after night huddled in sodden fields outside the city. As one commentator observed, exposure to the cold must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from the Zeppelins. 8