sheer insanity of the war that had overtaken them: the Jakobi Friedhof, a huge graveyard on the Wandsbeker Chaussee, was on fire. It was a sight that imprinted itself on Adolf Pauly’s memory: ‘The cemetery had been laid waste, covered with incendiary bombs, the gravestones overturned, and there was thick smoke pouring out of a family vault.’ ²⁹

Now, it seemed, the British were even bombing their dead.

19. The Tempest

For my part, I have walk’d about the streets,

Submitting me unto the perilous night…

And when the cross blue lightning seem’d to open

The very breast of heaven, I did present myself

Even in the aim and very flash of it.

          William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar ¹

In a matter of days Hamburg, a proud Hanseatic city that had existed for over seven centuries, had been reduced to an endless field of smoking ruins. Neighbourhoods that had once been filled with bustling activity were now deserted, their streets filled with rubble, their houses reduced to empty, roofless shells. In many areas the only things left standing were the chimneys: ‘solitary chimneys,’ Hans Erich Nossack recalled, ‘that grew from the ground like cenotaphs’. ²

This ghost town was populated only by small groups of soldiers, firemen and rescue workers, with occasional gangs of concentration-camp prisoners brought in to help recover the dead. Almost everyone else had gone. Thousands of wounded had been taken to hospitals in other cities, some in specially commissioned hospital trains. Orphans had been gathered together and sent to join other evacuated children in countryside schools away from the bombing. Even the inmates of the city’s prisons had either been released, shipped away or drafted in to help with the clean-up effort. ³

One group of people, however, were initially forgotten by the authorities. Many of the city’s forced labourers were abandoned, while their guards fled Hamburg with their families. Some made their way to the refugee camps, following the general exodus, but many simply stayed where they were, afraid to move without written authorization.

Wanda Chantler, a twenty-year-old woman from Poland, was one of those left behind. As mentioned previously, her barracks in Lokstedt had received a direct hit on the night of 24 July, killing most of the women with whom she lived and worked. With nowhere to sleep, she had initially spent the nights outside on the grass of the factory compound, but eventually she and the few other survivors moved into the communal dining hall. All were in a chronic state of shock, and weak from lack of food and water. There was nobody left to provide for them; apart from the other forced labourers in other blocks, the entire city seemed deserted. Wanda remembers that her perception of the world took on an apocalyptic quality:

All these dead bodies were lying about, and nobody knew what to do with them. And the weather was terrible. It was hot, and it was windy. It was as if all the walls had been taken away from the world, and all the clouds and the winds concentrated on Hamburg. It was terrible. It was light from the fires, but the smoke made it dark. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I don’t think I ever will again. It was light, and yet it was dark. And you had no direction, you could not see. The smoke was choking. ⁴

After three huge bombardments their whole world had been reduced to nothing but fire and smoke. On 2 August, the elements conspired to complete the apocalyptic picture. A violent electrical storm descended on the ruined city, the thunder and lightning a celestial echo of the bombs that had been falling all week. By this point the abandoned girl had been living among the ruins of her barracks for over a week. As she and her few companions huddled together in the darkness of the factory dining hall, they watched the torrential rain outside with growing awe. ‘The elements seemed to have clubbed together to hit the earth at the particular point that was Hamburg,’ Wanda Chantler remembers. Tonight, after everything they had already been through, it was easy to imagine that the stormclouds had come from ‘all around the globe’, that the world war had given way to something even greater, that they were witnessing not merely the destruction of a city but the end of the world.

Astonishingly, that was the night on which the British launched their fourth and final major bombardment. Through the thunder and lightning, the frightened girls soon made out the distant sound of sirens and the drone of planes, although it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the storm and the bombs exploding. As the police report later made clear, this raid was the climax to ten days of terror, ‘in which the detonation of exploding bombs, the peals of thunder and the crackling of the flames and ceaseless downpour of the rain combined to form a hellish inferno’. ⁵

Other witnesses expressed similar dismay that the RAF should be willing to brave such infernal conditions to pound the city all over again. Franz Termer had fled with his family to Pinneberg, ten or twelve miles outside Hamburg to the north-west, where he took shelter in a farmhouse. The storm was so violent that it had woken him, but as he and his wife were checking on their children their attention was soon caught by a more disturbing noise:

We had hardly finished when we heard the sirens sounding from Pinneberg between breaks in the thunder. We couldn’t believe our ears, thought it must be a mistake. Surely the planes couldn’t be coming now, in such a heavy storm. But soon afterwards a heavy flak barrage started up a short distance away, and we could already hear the terrible buzz and drone of heavy, four-engined bombers directly over our roof. Uninterrupted, one formation after another. The lightning flashed brightly, the British flares shone yellow and red, and the muzzles of the flak guns flashed like lightning in the dark night. ⁶

Despite the electrical storm, the RAF had indeed arrived, yet again, in the skies over Hamburg.

* * *

It should go without saying that Bomber Command Headquarters had never intended to send their force into the face of this storm. No matter how frightening the effect of the thunder and lightning on the shattered nerves of Hamburg’s civil population, the effect on the bomber crews, both physically and psychologically, was exponentially worse. Flying over German territory was bad enough without having to contend with such weather. And the likelihood of achieving a concentrated strike on the city was virtually nil. So why were they there? What miscalculation or error of judgement could have sent them into such danger?

Part of the blame at least must lie with Sir Arthur Harris. Ever since the previous attack on Hamburg, on 29 July, he had been itching to finish the job, and it seems he had intended originally to do so on the following night. However, he was prevented by political considerations – in the wake of Mussolini’s downfall, Churchill had been keen to increase pressure on the Italians, and an urgent directive required him to plan immediate attacks on Milan, Turin and Genoa. ⁷On the night of 1 August Hamburg was back on the cards, but the raid had to be cancelled because of bad weather. (Ironically it was this storm that prevented the crews taking off: it passed through England on 1 August on its way to northern Germany, where bomber crews caught up with it twenty-four hours later.) By 2 August Harris’s frustration was getting the better of him. Tonight, if there was the slightest chance of destroying what was left of Hamburg, he was determined to take it.