 |
|
 |
|
|
Hamburg, 28th July 1943
For the first time the American Eighth Air Force were invited to join in with a Bomber Command 'battle'. B-17 Fortresses would fly 252 daylight sorties in the two days following the first of four RAF night raids. The American targets were all industrial and included the U-boat yards, but the American effort ran into major difficulties mainly due to the fires started by the RAF raids still obscuring their targets. The Americans quickly withdrew from attacking Hamburg and were not keen to follow immediately on the heels of RAF raids in the future because of the smoke problem.
The centre of the Pathfinder marking - all carried out by H2S on this night was about 2 miles east of the planned aiming point in the centre of the city, but the marking was particularly well concentrated and the Main Force bombing crept back only slightly. 729 aircraft dropped 2,326 tons of bombs.
The burnt-out area was almost entirely residential. Approximately 16,000 multistoreyed apartment buildings were destroyed. There were few survivors from the firestorm area and approximately 40,000 people died, most of them by carbon monoxide poisoning when all the air was drawn out of their basement shelters. In the period immediately following this raid, approximately 1,200,000 people - two thirds of Hamburg's population - fled the city in fear of further raids.
|
|
Date Last Updated : Wednesday, April 6, 2005 2:40 AM |
|
[ Aircraft | Background
| Commanders | Diary
| Anatomy | Groups
] [ Home ] © Crown Copyright 2004 and © Deltaweb International Ltd 2004
|
|
Hamburg
was a tempting target for Bomber Command forces as it was a famous shipyard
city; the battleship Bismarck, now at the bottom of the Atlantic, as
well as 200 U-Boats had already been built there. 
Sir
Arthur Harris directed four major raids against Hamburg in the space
of ten nights, known as 'Operation Gommorah'. The most famous of these
was on the 27/28 July 1943. 787 aircraft - 353 Lancasters, 244 Halifaxes,
116 Stirlings, 74 Wellingtons. 17 aircraft - 11 Lancasters, 4 Halifaxes,
1 Stirling, 1 Wellington - lost, onlt 2.2 per cent of the force. The
American commander, Brigadier-General Anderson, again flew in a Lancaster
and watched this raid.
This
was the night of the firestorm, which started through an unusual and
unexpected chain of events. The temperature was particularly high (30°
centigrade at 6 o'clock in the evening) and the humidity was only 30
per cent, compared with an average of 40-50 per cent for this time of
the year. There had been no rain for some time and everything was very
dry. The concentrated bombing caused a large number of fires in the
densely built-up working-class districts of Hammerbrook, Hamm and Borgfeld.
Most of Hamburg's fire vehicles had been in the western parts of the
city, damping down the fires still smouldering there from the raid of
3 nights earlier, and only a few units were able to pass through roads
which were blocked by the rubble of buildings destroyed by high-explosive
bombs early in this raid. About half way through the raid, the fires
in Hammerbrook started joining together and competing with each other
for the oxygen in the surrounding air. Suddenly, the whole area became
one big fire with air being drawn into it with the force of a storm.
The bombing continued for another half hour, spreading the firestorm
area gradually eastwards. It is estimated that 550-600 bomb loads fell
into an area measuring only 2 miles by 1 mile. The firestorm raged for
about 3 hours and only subsided when all burnable material was consumed.
