It is impossible to ask such a question without first considering some of the other by-products of the bombing war. First, it must never be forgotten that in 1943 the single most important member of the Allies was not Britain or America but the Soviet Union: it was they who were doing most of the fighting, and most of the dying, and as a consequence it was essential that Britain and America did all they could to show the Russians that they were not alone. By bombing cities like Hamburg they could demonstrate their solidarity with their eastern ally, and prove that they, too, were exerting huge pressure on the Germans. It is a common argument that had Britain and America refrained from bombing Germany, the Wehrmacht would have had ten thousand more 88mm guns to deploy against the advancing Russian tanks. ¹³About a million people manned Germany’s civil defences, and although many might have been women and schoolboys, it was still a huge drain on resources. As Albert Speer wrote in his secret diary in Spandau prison, while the actual effects of bombing on German war industries were not particularly serious, the secondary effects were pivotal:

The real importance of the air war consisted in the fact that it opened a second front long before the invasion of Europe… Defence against air attacks required the production of thousands of anti-aircraft guns, the stockpiling of tremendous quantities of ammunition all over the country, and holding in readiness hundreds of thousands of soldiers… This was the greatest lost battle on the German side. ¹⁴

The devastation of cities like Hamburg ensured the diversion of huge quantities of manpower and matériel, and in those terms it can only be seen as part of a much larger victory for the Allies.

However, there is a certain degree of hindsight to such arguments: in 1943 these consequences were by no means the main intention behind area bombing. From the British point of view, the most important reason at the time for such area raids was the effect they had on German morale. As explained earlier, the effect of Operation Gomorrah on ordinary Germans – not only survivors of Hamburg, but people across the country – was phenomenal. For the first time since the defeat at Stalingrad, people were speaking openly about the possibility of Germany losing the war. The morale of the armed forces was similarly subdued. A new kind of war had opened up in the skies above their cities – one against which they were powerless to defend themselves – and for some the fighting now seemed pointless. Despite their best efforts to push the battlefields far away from the borders of the Fatherland, their wives and children were being killed at home in their tens of thousands.

Of all the armed services it was the Luftwaffe that suffered most from the plummet in morale. After all, it had been responsible for protecting the Reich, and it had to shoulder the blame when its efforts failed, due to a huge shortfall in resources, manpower and, most importantly, adequate leadership. It had been obvious for well over a year that the Luftwaffe was incapable of defending Germany against the enormous fleets of bombers that were beginning to fly across the North Sea. To do so they needed a huge increase in the number of fighter aircraft they could put into the sky. But the only man capable of ordering the increase – Hermann Goering – had long since retreated into a life of debauched luxury. The generals under his command seemed more concerned with political infighting than with defending the homeland, largely because they felt powerless to influence the way the air war was being run. For many, the catastrophe at Hamburg merely underlined the crisis that had existed in the Luftwaffe for years. ¹⁵

General der Flieger Adolf Galland tells a revealing story about the atmosphere in the higher echelons of the Luftwaffe just after the devastation of Hamburg. He was at a meeting in Hitler’s headquarters when all of the most important Luftwaffe commanders were present. With one voice they demanded an end to the emphasis on offensive operations, so that they could concentrate instead on a single purpose: the defence of the Reich. Most importantly, they wanted to start producing thousands of new fighter planes, fast, to stop the Allied bombers getting through.

Never before and never again did I witness such determination and agreement among the circle of those responsible for the leadership of the Luftwaffe. It was as though under the impact of the Hamburg catastrophe everyone had put aside either personal or departmental ambitions. There was no conflict between General Staff and war industry, no rivalry between bombers and fighters; only the one common will to do everything in this critical hour for the defence of the Reich and to leave nothing undone to prevent a second national misfortune of this dimension. ¹⁶

But when Goering put their demands to Hitler, the Führer flatly rejected the idea. He merely repeated the mantra he had always followed: ‘Terror can only be broken by terror.’ ¹⁷There was no point in trying to defend Germany: instead they should forge ahead with reprisal attacks against Britain. The fact that the Luftwaffe was barely equipped for any such reprisal attacks seems to have entirely escaped him. ‘In this hour,’ says Galland, ‘the fate of the Luftwaffe was decided.’

Galland found Goering some time later in an adjoining room, his head buried in his arms on the table, moaning like a wounded animal. It seemed that the Führer had lost faith in his ability once and for all, and the dressing-down he had given him had sent the Reichsmarschall into a slough of self-pity and despair from which he never recovered. In the following days a cloud of gloom descended on the Luftwaffe command. A few weeks later, Galland asked to be relieved of his post as C-in-C of Fighter Command, and Goering angrily granted his request. ¹⁸One other senior Luftwaffe figure was so affected by the general depression that he went even further than Galland. On 17 August, just two weeks after the catastrophe at Hamburg, Luftwaffe Chief of Staff Hans Jeschonnek put a gun to his head and shot himself.

However, the German situation was not all negative. Despite Hitler’s refusal to defend the Fatherland against further attacks, others made sure that the defence of the Reich was not neglected. The organizational brilliance of Erhard Milch (the State Secretary of Aviation) and Albert Speer (Reichsminister of Armaments and War Production) ensured that German fighter production, against all odds, increased dramatically over the coming months. With more fighters, the Luftwaffe were better able to defend the Reich, and it is largely due to the efforts of those two men that Germany was able to withstand the terrible Allied onslaught as long as it did.

Second, while Hitler might have prevented a wholehearted change in strategy, he did nothing to stand in the way of a change in tactics. The Luftwaffe changed its tactics to a remarkable degree over the next few weeks, and it did so as a direct result of what it had experienced at Hamburg. General Kammhuber’s constrictive system of tying night fighters to specific ‘boxes’ in a long thin line along the coast was abandoned, allowing them to defend individual cities in larger numbers – especially the Wilde Saufighters of Major Hajo Herrmann. An even more effective tactic was for German fighters to insert themselves into the bomber streams, so that they could follow their prey to the target and out. All this became standard practice as a direct reaction to what had happened at Hamburg: the disaster had not only united the leadership in their resolve to defend the Fatherland, but provided a long-overdue catalyst for change.