bombs will have to be dropped to complete the process of elimination — This city should be subjected to sustained attack…
3… It is hoped that the night attacks will be preceded and/or followed by heavy daylight attacks by the United States Vlllth Bomber Command.
INTENTION
4. To destroy Hamburg.
The operation was code-named Gomorrah. Notice the significant claim that it would help shorten and win the war.
Operation Gomorrah began on the night of July 24, 1943, a hot summer Saturday in Hamburg under clear skies. Pathfinder bombers used radar to aid marking, and the initial Hamburg aiming point was chosen not for its strategic significance but for its distinctive radar reflection: a triangle of land at the junction of the Alster and North Elbe rivers, near the oldest part of the city and far from any war industry. Bomber Command had learned to adjust targeting for creep-back, the tendency of bombardiers to release their bombs as quickly as possible upon approaching the flak-infested aiming point that led to a gradual backup of impacts. From the ground the bombs seemed to unroll in the direction of the bomber stream's approach; survivors named the phenomenon “carpet bombing.” Targeters incorporated creep-back into their calculations by setting the aiming point several miles forward of the intended target area. The creep-back districts behind the Hamburg aiming point to a distance of four miles were entirely residential.
To give the bombers further advantage Churchill had authorized the first use of the secret radar-jamming device known as Window: bales of 10.5-inch strips of aluminum foil to be pushed out of the bombers en route to the target to disperse on the wind and cloud German defensive radar. Window worked so well that of the 791 planes of the initial raid only twelve were lost.
Hamburg sustained heavy damage that first night but not damage even on the scale of Cologne; 1,300 tons of high explosives and almost 1,-000 tons of incendiaries killed about 1,500 people and left many thousands homeless. More important for what would follow, the first raid seriously disrupted communications and overwhelmed firefighting forces.
Daylight precision bombing by American B-17's followed on July 25 and 26, attacks meant for a submarine yard and an aircraft engine factory. Smoke from the British bombing and from German defensive generators obscured the targets and they were only lightly damaged.
Harris ordered a maximum bombing effort against Hamburg again for the night of July 27. Targeters fixed the same aiming point but aligned the bomber stream to approach from the northeast rather than the north to set its creep-back over districts dense with workers' apartment buildings. Since the mix of 787 bombers for this second raid would include more Halifaxes and Stirrings, and they could carry less weight of weapons and fuel than the longer-distance Lancasters, the mix of bombs was also changed, high explosives reduced and incendiaries increased to more than 1,200 tons. More experienced pilots also came aboard, higher-ranking officers signing on to observe the effects of Window. These accidents of arrangement contributed their share to the night's catastrophe.
At 6 p.m. in Hamburg on July 27 the temperature was 86 degrees and the humidity 30 percent. Fires still burned in stores of coal and coke in the western sector of the city. Since the fires would render a blackout ineffective most of Hamburg's firefighting equipment had been moved to the area to douse them. “It was completely quiet,” recalls a German woman who lived in a district targeted for creep-back, miles to the northeast. “… It was an enchantingly beautiful summer night.”
Pathfinders started dropping yellow markers and bombs at fifty-five minutes past midnight on July 28. Five minutes later the main bomber stream arrived. Marking was good and creep-back was slow. Later arrivals began to notice a difference between this raid and others they had flown: “Most of the raids we did looked like gigantic firework displays over the target area,” a flight sergeant remarks, “but this was ‘the daddy of them all.’” A flight lieutenant distinguishes the difference:
The burning of Hamburg that night was remarkable in that I saw not many fires but one. Set in the darkness was a turbulent dome of bright red fire, lighted and ignited like the glowing heart of a vast brazier. I saw no flames, no outlines of buildings, only brighter fires which flared like yellow torches against a background of bright red ash. Above the city was a misty red haze. I looked down, fascinated but aghast, satisfied yet horrified. I had never seen a fire like that before and was never to see its like again.
The summer heat and low humidity, the mix of high-explosive and incendiary bombs that made kindling and then ignited it and the absence of firefighting equipment in the bombed districts conspired to assemble a new horror. An hour after the bombing began the horror had a name, recorded first in the main log of the Hamburg Fire Department:
Then a storm started, a shrill howling in the street. It grew into a hurricane so that we had to abandon all hope of fighting the [factory] fire. It was as though we were doing no more than throwing a drop of water on to a hot stone.The whole yard, the canal, in fact as far as we could see, was just a whole, great, massive sea of fire.
Small fires had coalesced into larger fires and, greedy for oxygen, had sucked air from around the coalescing inferno and fanned further fires there. That created the wind, a thermal column above the city like an invisible chimney above a hearth; the wind heated the fury at the center of the firestorm to more than 1,400 degrees, heat sufficient to melt the windows of a streetcar, wind sufficient to uproot trees. A fifteen-year-old Hamburg girl recalls:
Mother wrapped me in wet sheets, kissed me, and said, “Run!” I hesitated at the door. In front of me I could see only fire — everything red, like the door to a furnace. An intense heat struck me. A burning beam fell in front of my feet. I shied back but, then, when I was ready to jump over it, it was whirled away by a ghostly hand. I ran out to the street. The sheets around me acted as sails and I had the feeling that I was being carried away by the storm. I reached… a five-storey building in front of which we had arranged to meet again… Someone came out, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me into the doorway.
The fire filled the air with burning embers and melted the streets, a nineteen-year-old milliner reports:
We came to the door which was burning just like a ring in a circus through which a lion has to jump… The rain of large sparks, blowing down the street, were each as large as a five-mark piece. I struggled to run against the wind in the middle of the street but could only reach a house on the corner…
We got to the Loschplatz [park] all right but I couldn't go on across the Eiffestrasse because the asphalt had melted. There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt. They must have rushed on to the roadway without thinking. Their feet had got stuck and then they had put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.
The firestorm completely burned out some eight square miles of the city, an area about half as large as Manhattan. The bodies of the dead cooked in pools of their own melted fat in sealed shelters like kilns or shriveled to small blackened bundles that littered the streets. Or worse, as the woman who was once the fifteen-year-old girl horribly recreates:
Four-storey-high blocks of fiats [the next day] were like glowing mounds of stone right down to the basement. Everything seemed to have melted and pressed the bodies away in front of it. Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognizable; those that had died through lack of oxygen were half-charred and recognizable. Their brains had tumbled from their burst temples and their insides from the soft parts under the ribs. How terribly these people must have died. The smallest children lay like fried eels on the pavement.
