It is important to note that although the flak was fired blindly, the sheer number of shells aimed into the air meant that several aircraft in the vanguard of the attack were hit. Later on two planes would be shot down, with no survivors. 25Not everyone managed to escape the searchlights either. Gordon Moulton-Barrett, who was on his first operation as a ‘second dickie’ pilot, remembers seeing a Lancaster coned by lights: he watched as the aircraft dropped vertically downwards, falling 10,000 feet in a matter of seconds, before pulling out of the dive and disappearing once more into the safety of darkness. To the impressionable Moulton-Barrett it seemed like a brilliant, death-defying manoeuvre, and he had to suppress the urge to applaud. 26For the Lancaster and its crew, however, it had been a matter of survival: a steep dive was the only way to escape a cone of searchlights.
With just a few minutes to go before zero hour (0100), the Pathfinders were sizing up the dark city below them. As previously mentioned, the plan was to drop three different kinds of markers for the main force to aim at: yellow target indicators (TIs) to start with, at Z–3, along with flares to light up the city for the subsequent planes; red ones next, aimed visually, between Z–2 and zero hour; and green ones to back up the reds for the rest of the raid. In the event, things did not go quite according to plan. While the marking began exactly on time, led by a Lancaster of 83 Squadron, many of the first group were eight or nine minutes late. Without their flares to light the city, many of the next group did not drop their red TIs at all. Fortunately for the city centre, those that did fall were fairly spread out. There were four main groups: some fell in the Baaken dock area south of the river, near the Grasbrook gasworks, another group in the east of the city, between Wandsbeker Chaussee and Hasselbrook railway station, and two more salvos in the west, in Altona. 27
For the few minutes before the bombs began to fall, the skies over Hamburg were lit by a spectacular firework display – a prelude to the coming bonfire – as the beautiful pyrotechnic candles cascaded out of each TI and floated gently to earth. The Germans called the TIs Tannenbäume– Christmas trees – a homely term that described their beauty, but not their terrible purpose.
As the bright lights drifted down the first Lancasters of the main force made their bombing runs. The aircraft were effectively in the hands of the bomb-aimers now. As the target was sighted, the navigators would hand over responsibility to the bomb-aimer, who would guide the pilot to the correct point directly over the red glow of the TIs. Leonard Bradfield remembers the run-in clearly:
It was a brilliant night. You could see the ground absolutely crystal clear. You could see the outline of the city, and you could also see where the markers had gone down … To bring her up in line directly over the target took some twenty seconds straight and level. Then we let the bombs go. We had the 4,000-pounder as usual, and we had four 1,000-pounders, one of which was on a delayed action. Then we had the ninety-four-pound thermite incendiary bombs. Owing to their light weight we had to drop them quite early in the sequence. But the 4,000-pounder was the master – you could really feel the ‘cookie’ go. I’m talking in terms of under half a minute from the first to last being dropped … We then had to fly another twenty seconds for our photo flash to fall so it could take a photograph of where our bombs landed. 28
It was this brief period over the aiming point that was the most nerve-racking for most crews. A minute could seem like a lifetime when the crews were obliged to fly straight and level, a perfect target for the flak guns below. The bomb-aimer would direct the pilot by shouting above the drone of the engines: ‘Left, left … steady … bombs gone!’ The leap of the aircraft as the heavy 4,000-pound ‘cookie’ fell away was echoed by a leap of hearts into throats – and as soon as the photo flash had gone the pilot would veer away from the immediate danger area and head for the darkness beyond. But tonight, with the city’s defences in such disarray, even this most hazardous of times was relatively safe. As one pilot recalls: ‘I remember thinking, it’s going to be great from now on, for the rest of my tour! You could see other Lancs silhouetted against the fires all just going steadily on, whereas in the past people would have been weaving quite madly. Everyone seemed to have come to the same conclusion: from now on it was going to be easy.’ 29
During the next hour, more than seven hundred planes would pass over the west of the city, and many pilots reported seeing the sky filled with planes. In such circumstances the danger of collision was very real, and many crews had to endure the horror of seeing bombers flying directly above them, bomb doors open, about to drop their load. Tonight, fortunately, no one was harmed by a fellow bomber – but one Stirling collided with a Ju88 night fighter as he dived to avoid a searchlight. Geoff Turner and his 75 Squadron crew managed to limp home, but the night fighter was almost certainly finished. It turned on its back and fell headlong towards Hamburg, to be recorded later as a ‘probable’ victory to the British crew. 30
* * *
Between one and two o’clock in the morning of Sunday, 25 July, 2,300 tons of bombs were dropped on to Hamburg, a new and frightening world record for a single attack. A lot of the weight was made up of huge high-explosive bombs: 8,000-pound ‘blockbusters’ and 4,000-pound ‘cookies’, but it was undoubtedly the incendiaries that did most damage. The fires started by the first waves made it easier for the later waves to find their way to the target, and those in turn stoked the fires further. A total of 350,412 individual incendiary bombs fell in and around the city, starting countless fires – again, a new world record. 31
The official British intelligence report of the time announces such figures with a certain pride, which was certainly echoed in the hearts and minds of most of the crews who took part in the attack. Once they had dropped their bombs and turned away to the south of the city, they had the opportunity to see the results of their work. The comments they noted in their log books afterwards were almost always the same: ‘Good trip’, ‘A very good prang’, ‘Very nearly perfection’. Scores of crews in the latter stages of the attack reported seeing very large explosions in the docks. By the time the last Halifaxes of 6 Group had dropped their bombs, the whole of the west of the city had become ‘a mass of raging fires with black smoke rising to 19,000 feet’. Crews in the final wave reported the merging of all the separate fires into ‘one large conflagration spreading over the whole city’. It was so huge it could be seen by British Mosquitos flying on dummy attacks over Duisburg, 140 miles away. 32
It is easy to begrudge these men their feeling of pride at the destruction they were wreaking, but it is foolish to be surprised by it. Their job was to wage war, and tonight they had done their job well. For many it was nothing new. They had seen similar scenes over Dortmund, Wuppertal, Cologne and Essen. They had seen the war from the other side too, in London, Coventry, Sheffield, Plymouth and many other cities across Britain. For most of the young men in the bombers, tonight was a logical extension of all that had gone before – the concept of ‘an eye for an eye’ expanded to the scale of whole nations. And we must remember that
the crews were not only British. The Polish airmen in Bomber Command had a reputation for being particularly bloodthirsty, revelling in any opportunity to avenge the rape of their homeland. Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, who had never seen an attack on their home soil, were there for reasons that were more vague: a principle to be upheld, or a sense of loyalty to the Empire and ‘home country’. Many had joined up as volunteers simply for the excitement of flying. Their only thought now was to get home safely to their beds, one day closer to their next period of leave, and one operation closer to the magic total of thirty.