Other pilots are even more outspoken about the seemingly pointless nature of their ordeal. Bill McCrea, still upset at having been sent to Hamburg twenty minutes late on the previous raid, is unforgiving about being dispatched into such danger a second time:

The fourth raid was a shambles. An absolute shambles – entirely the fault of the Met men. We should never have gone, because this electric storm came through England the previous day… They said it would have cleared Hamburg in twenty-four hours – well, it hadn’t, it was right across the city. I think I flew in it for five minutes and I could feel the ice building up, so I turned round the other way. I got what I thought was a source of light coming from down below, so of course I dropped my bombs on that. I think it was Bremerhaven but I couldn’t be sure. ³³

He and his crew didn’t care what they had bombed. Shaken and silent, they were merely glad to be on their way home.

* * *

If the previous raids had been uniquely devastating in the history of bombing, tonight’s operation had been an expensive RAF flop: a miserable performance conducted in miserable conditions. The RAF had lost thirty aircraft, at least a handful of which had been defeated by the sheer force of the storm; ³⁴106 planes had dropped their bombs in the sea, 14 had jettisoned them over land, and 197 had given up on Hamburg and attacked targets of opportunity elsewhere. ³⁵Some crews had bombed Bremen, more than fifty miles to the south-west of the place they were supposed to be bombing; others had bombed Kiel, about fifty miles to the north. In fact, only 393 aircraft had made it as far as the target, barely half of the total British force, and even the planes that reached Hamburg did not attack the areas they were supposed to. In the words of the Hamburg police chief, ‘No focal point of the raid was observable… Casualties among the population remained small.’ ³⁶In other words, the city had been spared the final, lethal blow that everyone had been dreading.

It seems that many of the crews who made it to Hamburg had dropped their loads early. In the poor visibility, with their instruments affected by the storm, many navigators had been forced to calculate where they were by dead reckoning: most crews dropped their loads well south of the city, but a few hit Harburg. This southern part of the port area had been one of the two original targets and, ironically, had been taken off the list that afternoon; several bombers hit it by mistake.

A large number of planes overshot the city. The small town of Elmshorn lay about twelve miles to the north-west of Hamburg; that night a large fire was burning in the town centre, caused either by lightning or by some of the initial stray bombs. Drawn towards it, as many as seventy British planes dropped their bombs on the hapless town, destroying more than 250 houses and severely damaging 200 more. Elmshorn was one of the evacuation points from the previous raids, and was still packed with refugees, some of whom could be forgiven for thinking that the British were deliberately targeting them as they fled. ³⁷Fifty-seven people were killed there.

As for Hamburg, a few fires were started in the centre of the city and in the eastern part of the port, but they were scattered and the city’s fire-fighters were able to deal with them relatively easily. ³⁸Some bombs fell into areas that had already been destroyed, and many more fell uselessly into the surrounding countryside. For the few people who still remained in the city, like Wanda Chantler and her friends in the remains of their forced-labour camp, it was a blessed relief. Far from being a threat, the awesome force of the storm had come to their rescue.

* * *

The raid of 2/3 August brought an end to Operation Gomorrah, and also, for the moment, the devastation of Hamburg. After nearly ten thousand tons of bombs had been dropped on the city there seemed little point in repeating the attack. As far as the Allies were concerned, the job had been done.

PART THREE

The Aftermath

20. City of the Dead

Who could ever, even with unbound words, tell in full of the blood and wounds that I now saw, though he should narrate them many times?

Dante ¹

In the days following Operation Gomorrah, the Hamburg authorities found themselves facing one of the biggest clean-up operations in history. Hundreds of miles of streets were now buried beneath mounds of rubble. The city centre had been transformed into a collection of smashed monuments, broken church spires, gutted architecture. Its famous waterways were choked with floating detritus, charred wood, sunken boats. And the harbour – the heart and soul of the city – was in a terrible state. The parts that were visible across the river, such as the Blohm & Voss shipyards and the surrounding docklands, had been reduced to a mess of burned-out warehouses, sunken ships and the mangled remains of some 122 cranes. ²

At the centre of the wasteland, like a huge black hole in the landscape, lay the charred remains of what would soon become known as the ‘dead city’. It was there, in the districts of Hammerbrook, Rothenburgsort and Hamm, that the worst damage had occurred. Streets that had once teemed with activity were now a virtual moonscape, devoid of life. The whole area was fundamentally unstable: unexploded bombs lurked beneath the rubble, fires still raged in coke stores and lumber yards, and some of the house façades that had not already collapsed swayed visibly whenever the wind changed. Bodies were scattered across the streets, many so badly scorched that they were indistinguishable from the blackened tree trunks torn up by the force of the firestorm.

In the face of such devastation, not only here but in many other parts of the city, it was difficult for the authorities to know what to prioritize. The rubble had to be cleared off the roads before any major work could begin. Many damaged façades were so unstable that they had to be torn down to prevent them collapsing on rescue workers. Supplies of drinking water had to be restored to prevent outbreaks of disease, and there was pressure from Berlin to get the city’s damaged war industries back up and running. There were still fears that some of the larger fires might burn out of control again. Indeed, some would not be put out until the beginning of October, a full two months after they had first been set alight. ³

However, the authorities realized that the first priority, for everyone’s sake, had to be the recovery and burial of the dead. This was easier said than done: the sheer numbers involved meant it was impossible to recover more than a fraction of the bodies within the first week. So they decided to concentrate on those that the population would find most distressing – the ones that were strewn, visibly, throughout the streets of the firestorm area. In this they were motivated by a genuine desire to spare the people of Hamburg any further anguish: they had experienced enough without having to contend with the gruesome sight of bodies lining the roads.

Of course, it was inevitable that many people were not spared this sight – especially in the early days. Annegret Hennings was one of those who ventured through the district of Hamm a few days after the firestorm. What she saw there shook her to the core:

In the Hammer Landstrasse I saw something lying there that looked like a charred tree trunk, and next to it another, smaller thing. They were a mother and child. Totally charred, so that they were unrecognizable. The dead lay everywhere. With some of them you couldn’t tell if they had been burnt to death or killed by the blast. None of them had any bodyhair left. After some time these streets were closed off, walls were built across them. Prisoners had to go into the cellars and fetch the people out. I felt very sorry for them. ⁴