On 27 July, Major Herrmann received a telephone call from Goering instructing him to take his fighters out of training and employ them in full force tonight. When Herrmann protested that they were not yet ready for such a task, he was overruled: without proper radar cover, Herrmann’s Wilde Sauwere suddenly the Reich’s most important form of defence. 14
So it was that this fledgling force was employed in full for the first time over Hamburg on the night of 27/28 July. One day they would be an effective force, but now they did not have enough planes or trained pilots for the huge task that faced them.
* * *
At 12.55 a.m., two minutes ahead of schedule, the first Pathfinder dropped its load of yellow target indicators a couple of miles east of the city centre. Over the next five minutes, salvo after salvo of yellow TIs poured down on the same spot, over the suburb of Hammerbrook. When the ‘backers-up’ arrived with their green TIs, they dropped them on to the same area. Unlike the first raid, when the TIs had been spread out in four or five different areas, they were unusually concentrated. The German defenders tried to put off the bombers by sending up decoy flares about ten miles to the west of the city, but nobody was fooled: they had used red flares, the only colour notused by the British that night. 15They were not fooled by decoy fires either – compared to the real ones, these were minuscule.
If the Pathfinders arrived early at the target, so did the main force. Unable to contain their eagerness to get in and out of the target quickly, many aircraft had cut corners along the way, guided by the route marker flares. By 1.02 a.m., when the main force was supposed to start bombing, eighty-seven planes had already dropped their loads – almost all on the single concentrated spot over Hammerbrook. The fire they caused there became a beacon for those who followed. Wave after wave of bombers came in across the north-east of Hamburg to stoke the fires, and with such a concentrated group of TIs to aim at there was at first very little creepback. As the later waves came in at around half past one, the fires were spreading north- and eastwards into the district of Hamm.
More than 2,313 tons of bombs were dropped within just fifty minutes – another new world record. Unlike the last raid, however, when a similar amount had been dispatched, most of these bombs were squeezed into a few square miles. The mass of individual fires started by the opening wave now began to join up into a single conflagration. The firestorm had begun.
In all, 722 aircraft bombed the city that night – most in the same small group of districts to the east of the city centre. 16The scene below was unlike anything any of the crews had seen before. According to Colin Harrison, who was flying a 467 Squadron Lancaster in the last wave of the attack, the flames were already visible from miles away: ‘We didn’t need any navigation. We could see Hamburg from over the North Sea. We just flew where all the lights and the flares were. It looked hellish from on top. I mean, targets don’t look very nice from on top, with all the coloured fires and flames… but this was particularly awful.’ 17
Above the fires, a pall of smoke rose so high that even the high-flying Lancasters found themselves plunged into the fumes. ‘That was something frightful,’ remembers Bill McCrea of 57 Squadron:
I remember the clouds that were coming up about 30,000 feet. It was just one great volcano underneath. All I was thinking about was dropping my bombs and getting home – the same as everybody… It was an appalling sight. Every so often it was just burbling up, like a volcano. Every so often there was another explosion, another bomb went in, and there was another flash. And you could see the photo flashes going off too – they were brighter and more sudden. They took the photographs that theoretically marked your aiming point. But of course that night you couldn’t get anything, because there was no detail on the ground at all… there was just a whole sea, a mass of flame. 18
Trevor Timperley of 156 Squadron also remembers the sights he saw that night:
The firestorm still grips me most out of my whole tour – both tours. The very size of it on the ground: it was just a sea of flames… I remember I had a navigator who would never look out at all. He used to be head down in his little office, working out one thing and another,
but he would never come and look up. I remember saying, ‘For Christ’s sake, Smithy, look at this! You’ll never see the like of it again!’ 19
To some airmen the thought of what was happening on the ground was harrowing. Leonard Cooper, for example, was a flight engineer in a 7 Squadron Lancaster flying at an altitude of around 17,000 feet that night. He estimated that the cloud of smoke was rising to about 20,000 feet – and they were flying directly through it. ‘We could definitely smell… well, it was like burning flesh,’ he says. ‘It’s not a thing I’d like to talk about.’ 20
* * *
With German defences in disarray, most of the bombers managed to make their bombing runs without difficulty. Some, however, were not so lucky. After the raid on 24/25 July, the mobile railway flak batteries that Hamburg had sent to the Ruhr were rushed back to defend the city. There seemed to be more searchlights than ever, especially above the suburbs to the west and north-west that had been hit by the previous raid. Without radar to guide them, the vast numbers of guns and searchlights were unable to pose anything like the threat they once had – but, even so, twenty-eight aircraft returned to Britain with serious flak damage.
On the rare occasions when an aircraft was caught by the searchlights, the speed with which the other lights and guns locked on to it was terrifying. When the master-beam caught a Lancaster piloted by Sergeant C. G. Hopton, the other lights zoned in almost immediately. Within moments the full force of all the flak batteries in the area was focused on this one aircraft as it turned and dived in an attempt to break free of the danger. With nothing else to aim at, though, the flak gunners were glad of any opportunity to bring down one of their attackers. As the Lancaster finally escaped the lights, a shell hit the port wing and set the inner engine on fire. Immediately the flight engineer set about feathering the engine and extinguishing the blaze, but before he could do so they were under attack a second time, this time from a German fighter who had been attracted by the lights. Blinded by the searchlights, the crew didn’t spot him until he was closing in from above. He sighted his cannon on the burning engine, and raked the port wing, before he was forced away by the Lancaster’s two gunners. Miraculously no one was hurt, and Hopton made it back to England on the three remaining engines. 21
The plane that attacked Hopton’s was an Me109, probably one of Major Hajo Herrmann’s Wilde Saufighters. These were unquestionably more effective at shooting down RAF bombers than the flak was. As they roamed the sky high above the city they could see the bombers below, clearly silhouetted against the glow of the raging fires on the ground. It is ironic that until this point the British had suffered even fewer casualties than they had on their first raid; now, with the fires illuminating them, a handful of bombers became victims of their own success.
At 1.21 a.m. the German flak batteries were ordered to limit their fire to 5,500 metres (about 18,000 feet). 22At a stroke the defence of the city, at least in the higher altitudes, was now entirely down to the Wilde Sau, who swooped to attack the bomber stream from above.
Appropriately, Major Herrmann claimed the first victims: