but he would never come and look up. I remember saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, Smithy, look at this! You’ll never see the like of it again!’ ¹⁹

To some airmen the thought of what was happening on the ground was harrowing. Leonard Cooper, for example, was a flight engineer in a 7 Squadron Lancaster flying at an altitude of around 17,000 feet that night. He estimated that the cloud of smoke was rising to about 20,000 feet – and they were flying directly through it. ‘We could definitely smell… well, it was like burning flesh,’ he says. ‘It’s not a thing I’d like to talk about.’ ²⁰

* * *

With German defences in disarray, most of the bombers managed to make their bombing runs without difficulty. Some, however, were not so lucky. After the raid on 24/25 July, the mobile railway flak batteries that Hamburg had sent to the Ruhr were rushed back to defend the city. There seemed to be more searchlights than ever, especially above the suburbs to the west and north-west that had been hit by the previous raid. Without radar to guide them, the vast numbers of guns and searchlights were unable to pose anything like the threat they once had – but, even so, twenty-eight aircraft returned to Britain with serious flak damage.

On the rare occasions when an aircraft was caught by the searchlights, the speed with which the other lights and guns locked on to it was terrifying. When the master-beam caught a Lancaster piloted by Sergeant C. G. Hopton, the other lights zoned in almost immediately. Within moments the full force of all the flak batteries in the area was focused on this one aircraft as it turned and dived in an attempt to break free of the danger. With nothing else to aim at, though, the flak gunners were glad of any opportunity to bring down one of their attackers. As the Lancaster finally escaped the lights, a shell hit the port wing and set the inner engine on fire. Immediately the flight engineer set about feathering the engine and extinguishing the blaze, but before he could do so they were under attack a second time, this time from a German fighter who had been attracted by the lights. Blinded by the searchlights, the crew didn’t spot him until he was closing in from above. He sighted his cannon on the burning engine, and raked the port wing, before he was forced away by the Lancaster’s two gunners. Miraculously no one was hurt, and Hopton made it back to England on the three remaining engines. ²¹

The plane that attacked Hopton’s was an Me109, probably one of Major Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Saufighters. These were unquestionably more effective at shooting down RAF bombers than the flak was. As they roamed the sky high above the city they could see the bombers below, clearly silhouetted against the glow of the raging fires on the ground. It is ironic that until this point the British had suffered even fewer casualties than they had on their first raid; now, with the fires illuminating them, a handful of bombers became victims of their own success.

At 1.21 a.m. the German flak batteries were ordered to limit their fire to 5,500 metres (about 18,000 feet). ²²At a stroke the defence of the city, at least in the higher altitudes, was now entirely down to the Wilde Sau, who swooped to attack the bomber stream from above.

Appropriately, Major Herrmann claimed the first victims:

The clouds of smoke over Hamburg were so dense that it made you shudder. I saw this great column of smoke: I even smelt it. I flew over the target several times and, then, I saw this bomber in the searchlights… It was like daylight in those searchlights. I could see the rear gunner; he was only looking downwards, probably at the inferno below. There was no movement of his guns. You must remember that, at this time, the British were not generally warned to watch out for us over the target. I had seen other bombers over targets with the gunners looking down. I fired and he burned… As he fell, he turned and dropped away from the smoke cloud. I followed him a little but, as he got lower and lower, I left him. I watched him burst on the ground. ²³

That night three more RAF planes were shot down over Hamburg. For those few doomed airmen, it was every bit as dangerous in the skies over Hamburg as it was on the ground. The flames that engulfed the planes as they fell to earth were a savage echo of the inferno below.

The narrow margin between life and death was made brutally stark to one Lancaster crew from 460 Squadron. They were as inexperienced as a crew could possibly be: their pilot, Reg Wellham, had been on the previous trip to Hamburg as a ‘second dickie’ pilot, but for the rest this was their first operation. Apart from the Australian navigator, Noel Knight, they were all in their early twenties.

They had reached the target without mishap, but just after they had dropped their load and were about to turn for home the plane was rocked by a massive explosion. The force turned it on to its back, and soon they were dropping out of the sky like a stone.

Ted Groom, the flight engineer, remembers the event vividly. He was at the back of the aircraft, dropping bundles of Window down the flare chute, when he found himself floating in the air, surrounded by foil strips from burst Window packets:

It all happened so quickly, in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know where I was – I was just rolling around amongst all these bundles. My first thought was to get a plug in somewhere. I knew where all the intercom plugs were, right through the aircraft. I stumbled around in the pitch black, got hold of the lead and plugged myself back into the intercom. Reg the skipper was shouting out for me to get up to the front as quick as possible. By that time we were right way up. I went past the wireless operator. I went past the navigator who’d lost everything off his desk and was trying to find all his stuff in the semi-darkness. Everyone was crying out, ‘What the hell’s happening?’ I eventually got up to the front and Reg said, ‘Get this sorted out!’ So I synchronized the engines at a normal climbing rate of about 2,850 revs a minute, plus seven or eight boost. I checked all the temperature gauges, and the fuel, even the oxygen to see if that was all right. I looked at the altimeter – you do this automatically when something goes wrong – and I saw that we were at 10,000 feet. I looked at the pilot, signalled to him that I didn’t want him to speak, and I pointed at the altimeter. ²⁴

What Ted Groom was pointing out to his skipper, and what he didn’t want broadcast to the others over the intercom, was that the aircraft had dropped 9,000 feet in a matter of seconds. Just a minute or two more and they would all have died as they crashed into the fires on the ground below.

When they arrived back at Binbrook airfield just before five o’clock that morning, the ground crew checked the plane for damage. The fuel pipes were hanging out of the bottom of the aircraft, and there were loose panels where the rivets had burst, but there was nothing to indicate that they had been hit either by flak or by fighters. After an officer from the Air Ministry had checked the details, the unofficial explanation was that Reg Wellham and his crew had been directly above another British bomber when it was attacked by a German fighter. The other bomber had not yet dropped its bombs, so when it exploded the force was great enough to blow Reg Whelan’s Lancaster on to its back. If this was indeed what had happened, that German fighter had almost got two bombers with a single shot.

* * *

That was by no means the last such incident of the night. Dozens of crews returned with stories of combat and near misses: ten over Hamburg, and at least a dozen on the way home. Eight planes were shot down on the return journey: six by German fighters, and two more by flak when they strayed off course over Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven. Excluding four aircraft that were written off when returning crews crash-landed them, seventeen British planes were lost that night: five more than on the first Hamburg raid. But that was still only half of the number that Bomber Command had become used to losing over the preceding months. Despite the rapid change in German tactics, Window was still working wonders for the British.