As evening approached, morale was riding high at all levels of the RAF. Harris and his staff believed that they were at the start of a new era in the bombing war: now that German defences had been blinded by Window, Bomber Command effectively had command of the air, and Harris was convinced, more than ever before, that it would be only a matter of time before Germany was forced to surrender. The airmen were similarly enamoured of their new radar-jamming device. The casualty rate had plummeted since they had started using it, and the draughty job of shoving bundles of silver strips through the flare chute had become a labour of love. A new spirit of optimism was spreading through airfields up and down the country. During their briefing for that night’s operation the crews were read a message from Harris congratulating them on the success of their previous attacks on Hamburg and Essen. It was greeted with great enthusiasm by the men, who were at last beginning to feel that they were making a difference. Perhaps their commander-in-chief had been right all along – perhaps they wouldbe able to win the war by bombing alone.
Confidence was so high that officers of increasingly senior ranks decided to join the crews on their trip that night. Station commanders were not normally allowed to go out on more than one operation each month, but that evening no fewer than five decided that it was time to see the effects of Window for themselves. 9Two air commodores also decided to fly – Air Commodore W. A. Brooke of 4 Group, and Air Commodore A. M. Wray of 1 Group. However, the highest-ranking officer to accompany the bomber crews was an American. Brigadier-General Fred Anderson, in charge of the Eighth Air Force’s bombers, was so eager to learn how his allies operated that he joined a Pathfinder crew. He had been extremely impressed on the previous raid to Essen, but flying as second pilot to Flight Lieutenant Garvey in a Lancaster from 83 Squadron, he would witness destruction on a scale few people had ever believed possible. 10
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It had been a glorious summer’s day, and when the bombers took off at around ten o’clock the dying sun had painted the sky blood-red. All along the eastern edge of England the air was soon filled with the drone of 787 aeroplanes heading off across the North Sea. To most of those who lived along the coast it was a comforting sound. At this stage of the war, bomber crews were still treated as celebrities by newspapers and newsreels, and as heroes by the general population: apart from the army in North Africa and Sicily, they were the only force capable of taking the war to Germany. People who lived near airfields would often come out to watch them take off, particularly on a fine, warm night. Children always waved, blissfully unaware of the realities of warfare.
Apart from a few minor mishaps, the whole bomber force took off safely. A small proportion turned back because of mechanical problems (only forty-two aircraft), but the vast majority congregated into three streams and made for their rendezvous point eighty miles off the German coast. 11As on the previous raid, they began Windowing a few minutes later. Also as on the previous raid, the Pathfinders dropped yellow markers as they crossed the coast in order to concentrate the stream of planes more tightly. (A second set of route markers would be dropped later, further to concentrate it.)
The route markers were all that the defending Luftwaffe fighters had to guide them to the bomber stream, once their radar systems had been blinded by Window. A Pathfinder in the vanguard of the stream had been shot down before Window had taken effect, but now that the German pilots’ radar screens had fuzzed over there was little they could do but head for the lights in the hope that they might stumble across some British bombers in the dark.
They were rewarded with just a single victory over a Lancaster from 467 Squadron. In return, one of their own Ju88s was shot down over Heide. In total, only five British bombers were lost on their way to the target, at a cost of two German night fighters. So far, Window had proved every bit as effective as it had been on the first raid, three nights before.
However, the German defences had not been idle over the past three days. Given how unprepared they were for Window, it is remarkable how quickly they responded to the crisis, and while their initial response was not enormously effective, it marked the beginning of a long fight back against the RAF.
The first thing the German radar controllers did was to rely much more on their long-range Freya radar, the only system not affected by the clouds of foil strips. While this was not nearly as accurate as the shorter-range Würzburg radar, and could not ascertain the altitude of the oncoming bombers, it could at least direct night fighters to the correct vicinity. Second, after two previous Window raids, the most skilled Würzburg radar operators were noticing differences between the images given off by Window and those by real aeroplanes. At high altitudes, for example, when the bundles of Window had not yet dispersed, the blips on their screens that moved slowly were likely to be puffs of undispersed Window, while those that moved faster were probably bombers. Sometimes aeroplanes on the fringes of the bomber stream could be distinguished from the fuzzy cloud of Window.
Changes were also taking place in German fighter tactics. While many pilots were still held back in their boxes in the vain hope that some means could be found to direct them towards the bombers in the old way, many others were allowed to go freelancing. This was a return to night-fighting as it had been before the advent of radar, when pilots had to rely on their eyes and intuition to find their prey. To help them, night-fighter headquarters broadcast a running commentary with information on the movements and possible intentions of the bomber stream.
The single most important change that took place that night, however, was the adoption of a brand new system of fighting: Major Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Sau(literally ‘Wild Boar’, but the phrase is also an idiom meaning ‘crazy’ or ‘reckless’). 12Herrmann was convinced that British bombers were much more vulnerable to fighters than they were to flak, so he devised a system whereby German day fighters could be used to reinforce the beleaguered night fighters. His idea was to fly his single-engined day fighters at high altitudes above the target, so that they could see the outlines of the bombers silhouetted below them by the fires, searchlights, marker flares and any other illumination on the ground. The German flak batteries would be ordered not to fire above a certain height, so that the fighters could swoop down on the bombers safely from above.
After a great deal of opposition, Major Herrmann had finally been given the go-ahead to try out his idea on the night of 3 July 1943, over Cologne. 13After limited success, he was granted permission to raise a Geschwaderof new ‘Wild Boars’ (i.e. three Gruppenof about twenty-five planes each – see Appendix D). He immediately established a Gruppeof modified Me109s at Hangelar airfield near Bonn, and two more at Rheine and Oldenburg. Together they would make up the famous Jagdgeschwader 300 (JG 300).
Major Herrmann’s new fighter force was still in training when the attacks on Hamburg began. On the first night of the battle, only a few planes from JG 300 at Oldenburg had been sent over the city. On that night, many British crews had reported seeing strange new flak shells bursting over the city that looked ‘like large Catherine wheels’. The official report remarks casually that they were not particularly lethal, and it now seems likely that they were employed as aerial signposting for the Wilde Saufighters.