Tizard’s suggestion was rejected: the bombing of Hamburg would go ahead as planned. The final piece of the jigsaw was a codename for the series of attacks, and the one they eventually settled upon was ‘Operation Gomorrah’. The symbolic implication of the title was clear: God’s power to rain down fire and destruction upon the earth now lay in man’s hands, and was being wielded in what the British establishment saw as just retribution for the damage that the Luftwaffe had caused during the Blitz.

8. The British Plan

Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.

It expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility.

Theodor W. Adorno ¹

On the morning of 24 July 1943, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris arrived at Bomber Command Headquarters in High Wycombe at his usual time of 9.00 a.m. At the base of a large grassy mound, guarded by sentries, was a doorway that led to the enormous underground Operations Room. Harris made his way into the bunker, and took his seat at the desk in the midst of the room. Behind him a huge board listed the available crews and aeroplanes, squadron by squadron, while on either side were great wall maps of Europe and a target priority list of dozens of cities and objectives. Around the table stood a dozen or so others: Harris’s deputy commander-in-chief, Sir Robert Saundby; the meteorological officer, Magnus Spence; the senior air staff officer and his deputy; naval and army liaison officers; and various representatives of Intelligence and Operations. That day an American VIP was also present: Brigadier-General Fred Anderson, the commander of the USAAF’s bomber force in Britain.

The routine at Bomber Command HQ was well established. Normally there would be a brief report of the previous night’s operations, followed by a weather report from Spence. Apart from Harris, Spence was probably the most important man at the meeting, and his reports on the movements of various weather fronts across Europe were essential when it came to choosing the following night’s targets. Having listened to his summary, Harris would select two or three and, with a hasty shuffling of folders and photographs among his staff, the possibilities would be laid out on the table before him. There was rarely any discussion over what the target should be: Harris ran the meeting, and the decision was unequivocally his. After he had examined the folders, he would make a final decision, and the meeting would draw rapidly to a close. Harris would return to his office, and his subordinates would set about putting the operation in motion. ²

That morning, however, everyone knew what the target was likely to be – weather permitting. The attack on Hamburg had been scheduled for two days now, but had been cancelled twice because a bank of heavy cloud was moving south towards the city. Now, as Spence laid out the weather charts on the table and began to explain the conditions, it became evident that the weather was at last good enough to go ahead. Harris studied the charts, then gave the order to proceed as planned. Moments later he rose from the chair, leaving the other members of the team to telephone through his decision to the Pathfinder Force, the bomber groups, the army, the navy and Fighter Command. General Anderson would take the news back to the USAAF headquarters at Wycombe Abbey. Operation Gomorrah was on.

* * *

The plan had been outlined in detail two days before, on the morning of 22 July, when the operation was first ordered. ³In theory it was fairly simple. Every available aircraft from bomber squadrons across the country would take off between about ten o’clock and ten thirty that night. They would fly to specific points along the coast, and merge together into one huge stream of bombers flying across the North Sea. About eighty miles from the German coast they would converge on a single point, where they would turn in a tight flow, and fly down towards Hamburg. (The bomber stream never flew directly towards the target, for fear of giving away their destination to German radar stations.) At exactly one o’clock on Sunday morning, the Pathfinder aircraft would drop red and yellow target marker flares over Hamburg to indicate the aiming point. Two minutes later the first crews would start dropping their bombs.

Because of the sheer number of planes taking part in the raid, they were to attack in six waves of 100 or 120 bombers each. ⁴Each wave would have an average of about eight minutes to clear the target, which meant that there would be fifteen or sixteen bombers passing over the aiming point every minute. The most important thing was to achieve as much concentration as possible, so that the whole of the area around the aiming point was saturated with bombs. Then the fire services would be overwhelmed, and unable to prevent massive conflagrations springing up. To avoid the bombing becoming unfocused, more Pathfinders would continue to mark the target – this time with green target indicators – after the attack had begun. If the bombers could not spot the red markers, they were to aim at the greens. Having released their loads, they were all to return home on a roughly parallel course.

Such plans were easier ordered than executed. Even an undefended target could be difficult to find in the darkness of night, and in the past the RAF had often bombed the wrong parts of a city, or even missed it altogether. To prevent such disastrous wastefulness, British scientists had developed a range of electronic navigational aids. The most important of these for medium to long-range targets, like Hamburg, was called H2S. It worked a little like an airborne radar device, except that instead of transmitting high-frequency pulses into the surrounding sky it would direct them at the ground. By plotting the echoes on the screen of a cathode-ray tube, it was possible to get a rough picture of the ground below, even through heavy cloud. The system was still in its infancy, and the picture it gave was sometimes so fuzzy as to be useless, but it was particularly good at picking up built-up areas surrounded by water. Hamburg would therefore be relatively easy to identify: the wide river Elbe, and the distinctive lake in the centre of the city would provide an unmistakable outline.

The second major difficulty was the strength of the defences, both on the way to Hamburg and over the city. The whole coast of Europe was guarded by squadrons of German night fighters. As soon as a formation of bombers came within a hundred miles of mainland Europe, the German long-range ‘Freya’ radar would pick them up and the defences would get ready for action. Once the bombers came within thirty miles or so, a second, short-range, radar system called ‘Würzburg’ would be able to direct night fighters towards the bomber stream. The ‘Würzburg’ system was extraordinarily effective for its time. Using one radar set to pick up an individual plane, a second set could guide a night fighter to within a few hundred yards of his quarry. The pilot would then be able to engage his own ‘Lichtenstein’ radar, and home in for the kill. The only drawback of the system was that each radar station could direct only one interception at a time. That was why the British had evolved the tactic of concentrating all their bombers into a tight stream: if they could push as many planes as possible through a single point, the German defences would intercept only a handful before the majority had gone past unscathed.

It was not only German night fighters that were directed by radar. The Reich had flak defences that stretched all the way from the sea to Berlin and beyond, and they, too, were radar-controlled. As soon as RAF bombers appeared over a city like Hamburg, radar-controlled searchlights that were a slightly different colour from all the others – usually an intense bluish beam – would begin to hunt them down. Once the blue master-beam had locked on to a British bomber, all the other searchlights would join it, creating a huge cone of lights with the hapless aeroplane at its apex. Thus lit up, the plane would have to dive violently to escape the force of German flak batteries intent on blowing it out of the sky.