However, the German defences had not been idle over the past three days. Given how unprepared they were for Window, it is remarkable how quickly they responded to the crisis, and while their initial response was not enormously effective, it marked the beginning of a long fight back against the RAF.
The first thing the German radar controllers did was to rely much more on their long-range Freya radar, the only system not affected by the clouds of foil strips. While this was not nearly as accurate as the shorter-range Würzburg radar, and could not ascertain the altitude of the oncoming bombers, it could at least direct night fighters to the correct vicinity. Second, after two previous Window raids, the most skilled Würzburg radar operators were noticing differences between the images given off by Window and those by real aeroplanes. At high altitudes, for example, when the bundles of Window had not yet dispersed, the blips on their screens that moved slowly were likely to be puffs of undispersed Window, while those that moved faster were probably bombers. Sometimes aeroplanes on the fringes of the bomber stream could be distinguished from the fuzzy cloud of Window.
Changes were also taking place in German fighter tactics. While many pilots were still held back in their boxes in the vain hope that some means could be found to direct them towards the bombers in the old way, many others were allowed to go freelancing. This was a return to night-fighting as it had been before the advent of radar, when pilots had to rely on their eyes and intuition to find their prey. To help them, night-fighter headquarters broadcast a running commentary with information on the movements and possible intentions of the bomber stream.
The single most important change that took place that night, however, was the adoption of a brand new system of fighting: Major Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Sau(literally ‘Wild Boar’, but the phrase is also an idiom meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘reckless’). 12Herrmann was convinced that British bombers were much more vulnerable to fighters than they were to flak, so he devised a system whereby German day fighters could be used to reinforce the beleaguered night fighters. His idea was to fly his single-engined day fighters at high altitudes above the target, so that they could see the outlines of the bombers silhouetted below them by the fires, searchlights, marker flares and any other illumination on the ground. The German flak batteries would be ordered not to fire above a certain height, so that the fighters could swoop down on the bombers safely from above.
After a great deal of opposition, Major Herrmann had finally been given the go-ahead to try out his idea on the night of 3 July 1943, over Cologne. 13After limited success, he was granted permission to raise a Geschwaderof new ‘Wild Boars’ (i.e. three Gruppenof about twenty-five planes each – see Appendix D). He immediately established a Gruppeof modified Me109s at Hangelar airfield near Bonn, and two more at Rheine and Oldenburg. Together they would make up the famous Jagdgeschwader 300 (JG 300).
Major Herrmann’s new fighter force was still in training when the attacks on Hamburg began. On the first night of the battle, only a few planes from JG 300 at Oldenburg had been sent over the city. On that night, many British crews had reported seeing strange new flak shells bursting over the city that looked ‘like large Catherine wheels’. The official report remarks casually that they were not particularly lethal, and it now seems likely that they were employed as aerial signposting for the Wilde Saufighters.
On 27 July, Major Herrmann received a telephone call from Goering instructing him to take his fighters out of training and employ them in full force tonight. When Herrmann protested that they were not yet ready for such a task, he was overruled: without proper radar cover, Herrmann’s Wilde Sauwere suddenly the Reich’s most important form of defence. 14
So it was that this fledgling force was employed in full for the first time over Hamburg on the night of 27/28 July. One day they would be an effective force, but now they did not have enough planes or trained pilots for the huge task that faced them.
* * *
At 12.55 a.m., two minutes ahead of schedule, the first Pathfinder dropped its load of yellow target indicators a couple of miles east of the city centre. Over the next five minutes, salvo after salvo of yellow TIs poured down on the same spot, over the suburb of Hammerbrook. When the ‘backers-up’ arrived with their green TIs, they dropped them on to the same area. Unlike the first raid, when the TIs had been spread out in four or five different areas, they were unusually concentrated. The German defenders tried to put off the bombers by sending up decoy flares about ten miles to the west of the city, but nobody was fooled: they had used red flares, the only colour notused by the British that night. 15They were not fooled by decoy fires either – compared to the real ones, these were minuscule.
If the Pathfinders arrived early at the target, so did the main force. Unable to contain their eagerness to get in and out of the target quickly, many aircraft had cut corners along the way, guided by the route marker flares. By 1.02 a.m., when the main force was supposed to start bombing, eighty-seven planes had already dropped their loads – almost all on the single concentrated spot over Hammerbrook. The fire they caused there became a beacon for those who followed. Wave after wave of bombers came in across the north-east of Hamburg to stoke the fires, and with such a concentrated group of TIs to aim at there was at first very little creepback. As the later waves came in at around half past one, the fires were spreading north- and eastwards into the district of Hamm.
More than 2,313 tons of bombs were dropped within just fifty minutes – another new world record. Unlike the last raid, however, when a similar amount had been dispatched, most of these bombs were squeezed into a few square miles. The mass of individual fires started by the opening wave now began to join up into a single conflagration. The firestorm had begun.
In all, 722 aircraft bombed the city that night – most in the same small group of districts to the east of the city centre. 16The scene below was unlike anything any of the crews had seen before. According to Colin Harrison, who was flying a 467 Squadron Lancaster in the last wave of the attack, the flames were already visible from miles away: ‘We didn’t need any navigation. We could see Hamburg from over the North Sea. We just flew where all the lights and the flares were. It looked hellish from on top. I mean, targets don’t look very nice from on top, with all the coloured fires and flames… but this was particularly awful.’ 17
Above the fires, a pall of smoke rose so high that even the high-flying Lancasters found themselves plunged into the fumes. ‘That was something frightful,’ remembers Bill McCrea of 57 Squadron:
I remember the clouds that were coming up about 30,000 feet. It was just one great volcano underneath. All I was thinking about was dropping my bombs and getting home – the same as everybody… It was an appalling sight. Every so often it was just burbling up, like a volcano. Every so often there was another explosion, another bomb went in, and there was another flash. And you could see the photo flashes going off too – they were brighter and more sudden. They took the photographs that theoretically marked your aiming point. But of course that night you couldn’t get anything, because there was no detail on the ground at all… there was just a whole sea, a mass of flame. 18
Trevor Timperley of 156 Squadron also remembers the sights he saw that night:
The firestorm still grips me most out of my whole tour – both tours. The very size of it on the ground: it was just a sea of flames… I remember I had a navigator who would never look out at all. He used to be head down in his little office, working out one thing and another,