* * *
The only consolation for the British was that the terrible conditions were as bad for the German fighters as they were for the RAF. Wilhelm Johnen, a fighter pilot with III/NJG1, 24later recorded his thoughts on the sort of conditions he and his fellows had to endure on that terrible night:
When gusts of wind at gale force flung the machine about the sky; when in a fraction of a second the propellers, wings and engines were swathed in thick, heavy ice… When devilish St Elmo’s fire began to dance on the aerials, cockpit panes and propellers, blinding the pilot… In these moments is born the airman… Pilots trust in God far more than people would believe. 25
Without their radar, German night fighters were relying on their eyes to find their victims, but this was almost impossible in the midst of the stormclouds that filled the sky. Every now and then one would find a British bomber, and an extraordinary game of cat-and-mouse would develop as each aircraft wove in and out of the clouds to escape the shots of the other. 26Visibility was so bad that one Dorner 217 of II/NJG3 actually collided with the bomber it was trying to attack: the pilot, Feldwebel Krauter, could
not see to pull out of his attacking run and crashed into Flight Sergeant J. A. Couper’s 75 Squadron Stirling. Both planes crashed to the ground. Krauter escaped alive, but the crew of the British plane died in the crash. 27
As the British bomber force approached their target they became steadily more ragged: what had begun as a tight stream was now degenerating into a dispersed scattering of individual aeroplanes. This was the final, and perhaps most deadly, effect of the storm. As the British planes were blown about the sky, their navigational instruments rendered useless by the effects of static electricity, many were separated from the bunch. Since Window only worked when the bomber stream was fairly concentrated, the isolated planes showed up on German radar screens. Consequently they were now in more danger than ever.
The German defences wasted no time in picking them up. The fighters were also beginning to pick up lone bombers on their Lichtenstein airborne radar sets. Flak batteries won back some of their old accuracy: it seems that at least four British planes were brought down by flak alone, and many more seriously damaged. 28
Barely half of the bombers that set off that night reached Hamburg, and by the time they arrived they were in serious trouble. Hamburg’s flak batteries had been heavily reinforced since the night of the firestorm, and now let loose a barrage that rivalled the storm itself. According to Rudolf Schurig, the commander of a flak battery in the north-east of the city, ‘the storm paled in the diabolic noise’ given off by the German artillery. Their battery alone fired 776 rounds into the sky (compared with only 547 rounds on the night of the first attack – more than 40 per cent more). 29
Not only was there more flak for the British to contend with, it was now far more concentrated than before. Two days earlier Generaloberst Weise had decreed that all flak above a target city should be limited to 4,500 metres (14,700 feet), to give the German fighters space to attack the bombers from above. The skies over Hamburg had therefore become doubly dangerous. Above the flak level the bombers faced the combined perils of ice, lightning and the gun-power of every fighter aircraft for miles, yet if they tried to venture out of the bottom of the stormcloud they faced an alternative storm of shells from Hamburg’s greatly reinforced flak batteries.
As the raid progressed, the British situation became yet more miserable. When a greatly depleted force at last turned for home it was so broken up that any protection it might have gained from Window was long gone. Many of the crews were lost, scattered across the sky from Holland to Denmark. One 405 Squadron Halifax was so badly damaged by flak that its pilot decided to fly to Sweden: he and his crew eventually bailed out over Malmö and were interned by the Swedish authorities for the rest of the war. At the opposite extreme, six bombers were shot down just off the coast of Holland, some more than fifty miles off course. Alone, damaged by flak and forced to lose height by the power of the storm, they were no match for the fighter aces of the Luftwaffe’s coastal squadrons.
Of these six crews there was just one survivor. Peter Swan, a bomb-aimer with 44 Squadron, was the only member of his crew who bailed out before his Lancaster crashed into the sea: he hit his head on the escape hatch and passed out in mid-air, but regained consciousness just in time to pull the ripcord of his parachute. After four hours in the cold waters of the North Sea, he was eventually picked up by a German E-boat. He spent the rest of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp. 30
* * *
It was not until almost six o’clock the next morning that the last of the battered British force returned to the ground in England. As the tired, shaken crews climbed down from their aircraft, they were immediately taken to the debriefing rooms, where a fairly depressing picture of the night’s operations emerged. Some described being attacked by night fighters, many more described the increased intensity of the flak, but all spoke in awe about the violence of the storm.
It soon became apparent that many crews had not even attempted to bomb Hamburg, prevented by the conditions. To make things worse, even those who had reached the target had been unable to bomb it properly: they had been instructed to drop their loads on the green TIs, but often there were none to be seen.
Trevor Timperley, who flew one of the Pathfinder aircraft that night, explains what went wrong. It was his job to mark the target using the Wanganui method: rather than illuminating the target on the ground he had to drop indicators into the air above the aiming point, which would float down for all the other bombers to see. This was the method the Pathfinder Force used when clouds obscured the target. The problem was that even in relatively still conditions the TIs tended to drift away from where they were supposed to go. In a storm they were blown all over the sky. Even so, that was the least of Trevor Timperley’s worries:
They had forecast some cumulo-nimbus cloud, but nothing like the scale that was encountered. I was supposed to be towards the end of the raid, illuminating with this Wanganui air marker. There was no point unless it was outsidethe cloud: if you drop it in a cloud, nobody will be able to see it. As we got closer, and we were climbing up to get over the top of it, I realized that I was still going to go in the cloud… I decided that if I kept my markers only, which was the important thing, and jettisoned the bombs, I would get the height [to break out of the clouds]. This turned out in the end to be 29,000 feet, which is pretty good in a Lancaster. Anyway, I just managed it… There were big gaps between the cloud, and I dropped my markers into one of them. But whether my markers slowly drifted into cloud as they went lower, I don’t know. It was the best I could do. 31
With the impossible conditions, their instruments failing, and TIs that drifted into the clouds, it is no wonder that many of those who battled their way through the storm failed to find Hamburg. Pilot Colin Harrison was completely disillusioned with the attack:
I never saw the target. I was weighted down – the aircraft was badly iced up – and battered from all the thunder and turbulence and the like. I got knocked down from the 20,000 feet where we used to fly most of the time, to about 10,000 feet, and I came into a sort of a clear area. We were below cloud – it was practically a hole in the cloud – and there was no sign of the target. And I thought, well, this is a waste of time. 32