Dresden (17 page)

The failures over Essen and its neighboring industrial centers were blamed on the haze and a lack of clear landmarks, old problems that impeded the final and most important stage of the attack, the actual dropping of the bombs. All the same, the Ruhr, as Germany's heavy-industrial powerhouse, was Bomber Command's most important single destination, to which had it no choice but to return again and again. “We had to accept the fact that the Ruhr was for the time being impregnable,” Harris admitted, “because in this area industrial haze made visual identification almost impossible.”

Harris's opinion of Gee somewhat improved when better results were observed in smaller raids over other parts of the continent. These bombers were getting much closer to their targets than before. Further experiments, in Germany and especially against the Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt, had shown that devoting more aircraft to each attack, operating in a much more bunched-together sequence, led to great improvements in the quantity and concentration of damage on the ground. Those who predicted a disastrous rate of collisions because of this were proved wrong. Bomber Command was still progressing by trial and error, but with new, more dynamic leadership, things were also starting to look up.

 

HARRIS HAD DECIDED
to start his reign at Bomber Command with a bang. Real “blind” bombing aids, which would enable his aircraft to find targets even in poor visibility, were still in development. So Harris sought out targets that might be less vital to the enemy war effort but were easy to identify. No target was completely problem-free, but coastal towns were definitely at an advantage in this regard (or disadvantage, depending whether you were at ground level). After some discussion Harris fixed on the picturesque old Baltic port of Lübeck, known from the novels of the Nobel Prize–winning German novelist Thomas Mann, who grew up there. It lay beyond the range of the Gee transmitters, but Gee-equipped “leaders” could help the aircraft most of the way out and then most of the way home.

With a population of about 150,000, Lübeck was also an industrial center and a training center for U-boat crews. Its docks were the chief route through which iron ore, vital for Germany's military industries, flowed from Sweden. Above all, it boasted a medieval Altstadt filled with highly combustible buildings, a fact of which Bomber Command's planners were well aware. Harris himself described it as “more like a firelighter than a place of human habitation.”

On the moonlit night of March 28–29, 1942, Palm Sunday, 234 British bombers were dispatched to Lübeck. The first arrived over the city at 11:16
P.M
. Going in low in accordance with their briefing, around three-quarters later claimed to have found the target, dropping 160 tons of high-explosive bombs and 144 tons of incendiaries. The latter included both conventional “sticks” and a thirty-pound bomb containing a mixture of Benzol and rubber, these calculated to cause fires over a distance of ten meters from the impact point. Defenses over the city were modest. The resulting blaze could be seen by aircrew a hundred miles away, and the level of devastation was as awesome as that at Coventry. Almost a third of Lübeck's built-up area was burned to the ground, sixteen thousand people made homeless, and a great deal of the city's infrastructure wrecked, including its main power station and numerous factories. The cathedral, dating from 1173, was wholly destroyed, along with another grand medieval church, the Church of Mary (Marienkirche). A total of 320 people were killed, the largest number of fatalities in a single raid since the
RAF began its sorties over Germany. A dozen British aircraft (around 5 percent of the total) were lost.

Harris wrote with satisfaction: “On the night of the 28/29 March, the first German city went up in flames.” He added: “However, the main object of the attack was to learn to what extent a first wave of aircraft could guide a second wave to the aiming point by starting a conflagration: I ordered a half an hour interval between the two waves in order to allow the fires to get a good hold before the second wave arrived.”

This was the first admitted instance, not just of a major incendiary attack, but of the so-called double-blow technique that became much more widespread during the latter part of the war. It led not only to target-marking fires, as Harris noted, but also to far greater chaos and destruction in the target city as the local fire brigades—and forces called in from neighboring cities—struggled in vain to fight the fires and at the same time avoid being destroyed on the ground by new waves of attackers. Dresden was to be its apogee.

Thomas Mann, living in political exile in California, broadcast shortly afterward on the BBC. Speaking in his native language, he declared with a stern certainty that many of his fellow Germans must have found both chilling and infuriating that, much as he regretted the destruction wrought on his native city, which included the house where was born, “I think of Coventry, and have no objection to the lesson that everything must be paid for. Did Germany believe that she would never have to pay for the atrocities that her leap into barbarism seemed to allow?”

Goebbels, who less than eighteen months earlier had searched for ways of playing
up
the level of destruction from British raids, was shown newsreels of the destruction. He betrayed something approaching panic, describing the damage as “really enormous” and, clutching at straws, commenting, “Thank God, it is a North German population.”

The alleged phlegm of North Germans was to be much tested over the coming months and years. The Baltic city of Rostock, another Hanseatic town even farther east than Lübeck, was bombed over three nights in the third week of April 1942, causing huge damage, and forcing thousands of citizens to flee the city for the countryside. Rostock had the same combination of close-packed merchants' houses and
dockyards, plus a Heinkel aircraft factory and a U-boat production yard. Almost 70 percent of the town's area was destroyed, six thousand of its inhabitants killed or seriously wounded. Both the damage inflicted and the casualty figures were climbing alarmingly—or satisfyingly from Harris's point of view.

The German leadership, hitherto preoccupied with preparations for a spring offensive in Russia, was stung into revenge. Planning for the retaliatory strike began after the Lübeck raid. On the night of April 25–26 the Georgian spa town of Bath in the west of England was bombed, once just before midnight, then again in the small hours (the bombers having rearmed and refueled at their French bases). A German double blow. Four hundred high-explosive bombs had fallen on Bath, and over four thousand incendiaries. Four hundred civilians had been killed. Casualties might have been higher, but unlike many other old towns in Germany and England, Bath's predominantly eighteenth-century architecture favored wide thoroughfares and crescents, and the buildings were of Cotswold stone. It was an environment much less suited to firebombing than narrow, winding streets and timbered buildings.

Goebbels's comments are revealing. Both sides now admitted, privately at least, the relative feebleness of their attempts to cripple each other's war industries, and were essentially beginning to concentrate on “morale bombing.”

In the period April to June 1942, the Germans also bombed Exeter, Canterbury, Norwich, and York—all ancient cities and principally noteworthy as tourist attractions. After the first raid, the German Foreign Ministry's spokesman, Baron Gustav Braun von Stum, was said to have told the press that the Luftwaffe would “bomb every building in England marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.” This flippant remark led to the campaign being dubbed the “Baedeker
Raids.” Hitler's order for attacks against the British cultural centers had stated cold-bloodedly that “preference is to be given to those where attacks are likely to have the greatest possible effect on civilian life…terror attacks of a retaliatory nature are to be carried out against towns other than London.” Large quantities of incendiaries were used in the raids.

Harris, meanwhile, was planning another “spectacular,” the largest one so far. He gained Churchill's approval for a huge raid on a German city, code-named Millennium, which, despite the fact that Bomber Command's actual available strength was under four hundred, would involve a thousand aircraft. Coastal Command, asked to contribute, refused, but the two Operational Training Groups contributed 368 aircraft, some manned by instructors, as did the Heavy Conversion Units, whose task was to prepare qualified but inexperienced aircrew to handle the big four-engined bombers. Eventually the number did indeed exceed a thousand. As at Lübeck, the plan was for a first wave (No. 1 Group) to drop incendiaries to set the city alight. A second (No. 3 and No. 5 Groups) would follow up an hour later, when the fires had taken hold, to sow further mayhem. All the leading aircraft were equipped with Gee for the first time, which placed limitations on the choice of target. Both the proposed cities were within range: Hamburg (first choice) and Cologne.

The raid was postponed on successive nights because of unfavorable meteorological reports until, as May 30 dawned, the planners were faced with their final opportunity. It was the last night of the full moon, and also the last in which interrupted training schedules could remain that way. When Harris entered the ops room at Bomber Command, the updated weather forecast for Germany, prepared by his punctilious meteorological officer Magnus Spence, was a little better for the Rhineland than the northwest coast. Group Captain Dudley Saward was there at the decisive moment. Harris stared at the charts, moved his forefinger across Europe to a town in western Germany, and then pressed on it until the blood drained from his fingernail. Finally he turned to Saward and the other staff officers and said calmly: “The Thousand Plan tonight.”

The city selected was Cologne. Hamburg had been saved, at least for a year, by the vagaries of the weather.

The effects on the ancient city by the Rhine were horrifying.
Almost the entire public utility and transportation system out of action, damage to factories measured in months of lost production, fifteen hundred commercial and industrial premises destroyed, thirty-six major factories wrecked and another three hundred damaged. All in all, forty-five thousand people had been made homeless, thirteen thousand dwellings destroyed. Many of historic buildings, including most of what was left of Cologne's Roman remains, were pulverized. Only the death toll was astonishingly light: fewer than five hundred dead, with just over five thousand injured. These scarcely exceeded those from the Luftwaffe's recent attack on Bath, perhaps showing the difference between the undefended British town, with its relatively poor provision of shelters and air raid protection, and a city like Cologne that had always known it would be heavily attacked and had prepared accordingly. All the same, the damage to Cologne was widespread and serious. It showed not just a new level of British capability, but a change of policy to more or less indiscriminate bombing of urban areas. The raid was, from the RAF's point of view, a great success. Only 2 percent of the planes were lost. It proved to be a tremendous morale booster for the home front—and made Harris a public relations star.

The effect on local morale was so serious that citizens of Cologne leaving the city were required to sign a chilling pledge of secrecy:

On the day of the thousand-bomber raid, Goebbels wrote with habitual febrile cynicism in his diary:

As for Arthur Harris, on June 11, 1942, it was announced in the
Times
of London that he had been appointed a Knight Commander of the Bath.

From the other side of the channel, the signals were equally clear. All targets were “legitimate” targets.

 

ON OCTOBER
8, 1871,
the most devastating forest fire in American history swept through the northeastern part of the state of Wisconsin. Probably started by railroad workers clearing brush, the fire consumed 1.2 million acres and claimed between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred lives, including around eight hundred in the thriving logging village of Peshtigo, almost half its population. Many witnesses spoke in awe of the approach of fire—“so fast” or “like a tornado.” A few outran it, while most survived by taking refuge in the Peshtigo River, just outside the town, or in the wells of farms and houses, where they near-submerged themselves or wrapped wet clothing around their heads and their exposed parts. The fire crossed the river with ease, starting blazes on the eastern side, trapping many who had thought to escape by crossing the wooden bridge. For some hours the desperate “swimmers” found themselves surrounded by flames. Fireballs and burning objects rained down on them, and the air became almost unbreathable. Some suffocated, some were burned by the flying debris; some became exhausted and just sank beneath the water.