Berlin at War (34 page)

twinkle in his ‘Irish eyes’ and his ‘nasal voice’, and branding him as a

‘hard-fisted, scar-faced Fascist rabble-rouser’. Yet, he conceded that ‘if

you can get over your revulsion at his being a traitor, you find him

an interesting and amusing fellow’. In Joyce’s company, lubricated by

a bottle of schnapps, Shirer ‘watched the fireworks’ as the flak

hammered away over the south of the city, lighting up the sky.53

Though often cramped and uncomfortable, the cellars repeatedly

proved their worth as the bombing intensified that autumn. Newspaper

reports after many of the raids noted that the casualties recorded were

among those people who had ‘failed to follow instructions’ and had

remained above ground.54 The subtext was clear: if you neglected to

proceed to the nearest cellar or air raid shelter as soon as the siren

sounded, you did so at your own peril.

Consequently, those caught away from home during a raid faced

the sometimes ignominious prospect of being shooed into the nearest

shelter by an often brusque policeman or air raid warden. Henry

Flannery was on the Friedrichstrasse in central Berlin when the sirens

sounded in late November 1940. He noted that the pedestrians picked

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up their pace, hurrying hither and thither, as calls and shouts echoed

through the darkened streets. Soon after, he was stopped by a

policeman: ‘Get in a shelter’, he was ordered. He protested that his

hotel was only two blocks away, but the policeman was unmoved.

‘Doesn’t make any difference’, he said. ‘Get into a shelter.’ After asking

directions, Flannery found himself in the doorway of a house with a

young German, watching the searchlights and ‘pandemonium’ as the

raid began in earnest. This time, it was the air raid warden who admon-

ished him and ordered him to go down into the cellar. ‘“You’ll have

to go below”, he said. “I’m responsible for this place and no one can

stand outside. Someone might see you and report me.”’ Finally,

Flannery was forced to make his way down into the cellar.55

Though the activity was frowned upon and actively discouraged,

remaining above ground to watch the raids was a common sport that

autumn. Those who managed to evade the air raid wardens and

policemen and witness the raids first-hand were often impressed by the

tremendous light show that unfolded. Searchlight beams raked across

the sky, while the flak shells flashed between them and tracer bullets

slashed through the darkness. Above it all, the coloured marker flares

drifted down, spreading a pale light amid the gloom. Missie Vassiltchikov

observed from the western suburb of Grunewald as flares fell on the city

during a raid. ‘We stood in the garden’, she wrote, ‘watching the many

green and red “Christmas trees” that were dropped.’ It was, she recalled

with considerable understatement, ‘quite a to-do’.56 Another eyewitness

recalled British parachute flares falling over the very heart of the city:

‘Once a tangle of four flares swung down vertically over the centre of

Berlin, and sank with a blinding light onto Unter den Linden.’57

For all the deadly beauty of the light show, it was the awful concerto

of sounds that many recalled most clearly, probably because it could

be heard even by those who dutifully remained in their shelters and

cellars. First came the wailing of the siren, which was followed by the

din of a rushed evacuation and the hushed chatter in the cellar. In

time, the distant hum of aero-engines could be discerned, growing

louder and more distinct with every passing minute. ‘The noise was

ghastly’, Missie Vassiltchikov wrote, ‘the planes flew so low that one

could hear them distinctly . . . they seemed just above our heads.’58

Finally, the climax of the performance would be reached, as the noise

of the aero-engines, flak fire and detonating bombs coincided. It was

a taste of things to come

153

a cacophony to which some would become hardened and immune,

a combination of sounds that one learned to filter and block out.

Helmuth James von Moltke described the various – almost musical –

components of a raid in September 1940:

I had slept through the starting sirens again but woke when the heavy

anti-aircraft artillery . . . began firing like mad. The windows were

rattling and the explosions of the guns created lightning effects. Quite

soon I was wide awake . . . From time to time a little hail of shrapnel

fell in the garden, some splinters so close to the window that they made

a whistling noise.

For many, such sounds were genuinely terrifying. One eyewitness

described how an acquaintance of hers reacted when the flak began

to fire during a raid: ‘The shooting was very loud and poor Mäxchen

Kieckebusch, whose nerves have gone to pieces since he was injured

in the spine in France, rolled on the floor moaning “
Ich kann das nicht

mehr hören
” [“I cannot listen to this any more”] over and over again.’59

Much of the sound and light generated during a raid came from

the flak batteries positioned around the capital. Goebbels described the

flak barrage as ‘a majestic spectacle’,60 and Missie Vassiltchikov found

her room brightly illuminated by its intensity. William Shirer was no

less impressed. ‘The concentration of anti-aircraft fire’, he wrote, ‘was

the greatest I’ve ever witnessed. It provided a magnificent, a terrible

sight.’61

The anti-aircraft defences around Berlin were indeed substantial,

consisting of searchlight units, barrage balloons and some isolated

squadrons of fighters. Their mainstay, however, was flak artillery, espe-

cially the formidable 88mm anti-aircraft gun. These guns would

provide the backbone of Berlin’s air defence network in 1940, being

arranged in 29 batteries, alongside 14 batteries of lesser calibres and

11 searchlight units. These detachments were situated across the city,

primarily located in the suburbs to the north and north-west, but also

perched on high buildings and dotted around the parks and open

spaces. In addition, four squadrons of night-fighters were posted

around the capital and a railway-mounted anti-aircraft battery was

positioned in the sidings close to Sundgauerstrasse Station in the

south-western suburbs.62

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berlin at war

Because of the sheer intensity of the barrage they fired, the Berlin

flak batteries inspired great confidence in the population. One young

Berliner spoke for many when he expressed the optimistic belief that

‘as long as the flak was firing, we were in no danger.’63 As many neutral

observers noted, however, for all its impressive firepower the flak actu-

ally appeared to be rather ineffectual at bringing down enemy planes.64

Yet Berlin’s anti-aircraft gunners were certainly effective enough,

especially if one considers that the flak barrage was intended not only

to shoot enemy aircraft down, but also to force them to increase their

altitude or to abandon their bombing runs altogether. Another

American journalist, Percival Knauth, observed many raids, often from

a rooftop close to his office. In late September, he recalled a particularly

dramatic incident:

For more than quarter of an hour, the silvery shape [of a British plane]

flashed in and out of the spiderweb of white beams stabbing upward

from various parts of the city, while anti-aircraft batteries poured a

veritable hail of fire directly around it. It was a scene of the highest

intensity. Once the plane was caught, the searchlights were inexorable,

moving slowly around from the north to northwest as the flier

attempted to escape from the trap . . . If that plane got away, it must

have been riddled with shell punctures.65

Whatever shortcomings there were in the air defences, they were

at least partially rectified in late autumn, when the flak targeting

system was overhauled. Whereas flak crews traditionally aimed by

ready reckoning and a fair amount of guesswork, by the winter of

1940 a new, automated targeting system was brought into service,

which would greatly improve the accuracy of anti-aircraft fire. In

addition, an Air Raid Warning Centre was established in Berlin to

coordinate air defence. Visited by Goebbels in November 1940, it was

described by the Propaganda Minister as ‘a miracle of system and

organisation’.66

As a result of such advances, a number of British raids were very

hard hit. German successes were naturally trumpeted in the press and

often accompanied by ghoulish pictures of the wreckage. One report

from mid-October 1940 was accompanied by a graphic image of a

British bomber that had crashed in a leafy suburban street in the west

a taste of things to come

155

of Berlin. The raid of 14 November was especially disastrous for the

British. Of the twenty-five or so bombers that actually reached the city,

ten were recorded as being shot down – the heaviest nightly loss

of the war to date for the RAF.67 True to form, Goebbels claimed that

the losses were greater, insisting that twelve bombers had been downed,

but he was certainly correct in attributing the success to the new

targeting techniques that were being employed.68

For all the elaborate measures designed to thwart them, British

bombers caused comparatively little material damage in the German

capital that autumn. This was only partly a result of the efficiency

of the flak. For one thing, the numbers of aircraft available were

very limited. Though the RAF would boast of its ‘thousand-bomber

raids’ later in the war, in the autumn and winter of 1940 only a

handful of raids consisted of more than a hundred aircraft, and it

was not unusual for only half of any force dispatched actually to

reach the target area. Meanwhile, the payloads offered by the British

planes of the period – mostly twin-engine medium bombers such

as Hampdens, Wellingtons and Whitleys – simply did not compare

to those that would later become available with the advent of the

Avro Lancaster in 1942.

The result was that the tonnage and the numbers of bombs dropped

were never sufficient to cause the mayhem that was desired. Incendiaries,

therefore, though dreaded on the ground, could not be dropped in

sufficient concentrations to cause widespread fires. And even though

a stick of high explosives might destroy a single house, or even two,

it would scarcely dent a residential block, let alone an entire street. In

fact, the most disruption was often caused by bombs with ‘delay fuses’,

which could cause roads to be closed, factory work suspended and

residents evacuated, sometimes for days on end, until the peril had been

defused and removed. In 1940, therefore, the bomber could certainly

‘get through’, but whether it could have much effect once it had got

there was rather more debatable.

Ironically, then, one of the primary risks to the Berlin public during

that early phase of the air war came not from the bombs themselves,

but from the German flak splinters falling back to earth. Given that

each of the approximately fifty flak guns around Berlin fired up to

fifteen 16-pound shrapnel shells per minute – each of which burst into

around a thousand jagged fragments – it is not hard to understand

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berlin at war

why those on the ground sometimes got the impression that it was

raining metal. William Shirer recalled the experience in August 1940:

As I stepped out of the building at five minutes to one . . . I heard a

softer but much more ominous sound. It was like hail hitting a tin roof.

You could hear it dropping through the trees and on the roofs of the

sheds. It was shrapnel from the anti-aircraft guns. For the first time in

my life, I wished I had a steel helmet. There had always been some-

thing repellent to me about a German helmet, something symbolic of

brute German force . . . Now I rather thought I could overcome my

prejudice.69

The damage inflicted by flak splinters on Berlin’s roofs was such

that the task of checking for missing or cracked roof tiles was added

to the already substantial remit of the air raid wardens. In addition,

serious material damage was regularly caused by unexploded flak

shells. During a raid in late October 1940, thirteen faulty flak shells

exploded on returning to earth, causing extensive damage. The

following month brought similar chaos, with thirty-six exploding on

the night of 14 November alone.70

There were also serious injuries and deaths. In October 1940, a railway

worker was killed by a flak shell in Rummelsburg.71 The following

month, twelve soldiers were injured in a single night by falling flak

splinters.72 In the suburb of Reinickendorf, meanwhile, a forty-two-year

old man was killed when a flak shell exploded after falling into his

bedroom.73 From reading such reports, one could almost conclude that

Berliners were as much at risk from their own flak guns as they were

from the bombs of the RAF.

Nonetheless, for all the danger that they caused, the flak splinters