The clouds of smoke over Hamburg were so dense that it made you shudder. I saw this great column of smoke: I even smelt it. I flew over the target several times and, then, I saw this bomber in the searchlights… It was like daylight in those searchlights. I could see the rear gunner; he was only looking downwards, probably at the inferno below. There was no movement of his guns. You must remember that, at this time, the British were not generally warned to watch out for us over the target. I had seen other bombers over targets with the gunners looking down. I fired and he burned… As he fell, he turned and dropped away from the smoke cloud. I followed him a little but, as he got lower and lower, I left him. I watched him burst on the ground. 23
That night three more RAF planes were shot down over Hamburg. For those few doomed airmen, it was every bit as dangerous in the skies over Hamburg as it was on the ground. The flames that engulfed the planes as they fell to earth were a savage echo of the inferno below.
The narrow margin between life and death was made brutally stark to one Lancaster crew from 460 Squadron. They were as inexperienced as a crew could possibly be: their pilot, Reg Wellham, had been on the previous trip to Hamburg as a ‘second dickie’ pilot, but for the rest this was their first operation. Apart from the Australian navigator, Noel Knight, they were all in their early twenties.
They had reached the target without mishap, but just after they had dropped their load and were about to turn for home the plane was rocked by a massive explosion. The force turned it on to its back, and soon they were dropping out of the sky like a stone.
Ted Groom, the flight engineer, remembers the event vividly. He was at the back of the aircraft, dropping bundles of Window down the flare chute, when he found himself floating in the air, surrounded by foil strips from burst Window packets:
It all happened so quickly, in a matter of seconds. I didn’t know where I was – I was just rolling around amongst all these bundles. My first thought was to get a plug in somewhere. I knew where all the intercom plugs were, right through the aircraft. I stumbled around in the pitch black, got hold of the lead and plugged myself back into the intercom. Reg the skipper was shouting out for me to get up to the front as quick as possible. By that time we were right way up. I went past the wireless operator. I went past the navigator who’d lost everything off his desk and was trying to find all his stuff in the semi-darkness. Everyone was crying out, ‘What the hell’s happening?’ I eventually got up to the front and Reg said, ‘Get this sorted out!’ So I synchronized the engines at a normal climbing rate of about 2,850 revs a minute, plus seven or eight boost. I checked all the temperature gauges, and the fuel, even the oxygen to see if that was all right. I looked at the altimeter – you do this automatically when something goes wrong – and I saw that we were at 10,000 feet. I looked at the pilot, signalled to him that I didn’t want him to speak, and I pointed at the altimeter. 24
What Ted Groom was pointing out to his skipper, and what he didn’t want broadcast to the others over the intercom, was that the aircraft had dropped 9,000 feet in a matter of seconds. Just a minute or two more and they would all have died as they crashed into the fires on the ground below.
When they arrived back at Binbrook airfield just before five o’clock that morning, the ground crew checked the plane for damage. The fuel pipes were hanging out of the bottom of the aircraft, and there were loose panels where the rivets had burst, but there was nothing to indicate that they had been hit either by flak or by fighters. After an officer from the Air Ministry had checked the details, the unofficial explanation was that Reg Wellham and his crew had been directly above another British bomber when it was attacked by a German fighter. The other bomber had not yet dropped its bombs, so when it exploded the force was great enough to blow Reg Whelan’s Lancaster on to its back. If this was indeed what had happened, that German fighter had almost got two bombers with a single shot.
* * *
That was by no means the last such incident of the night. Dozens of crews returned with stories of combat and near misses: ten over Hamburg, and at least a dozen on the way home. Eight planes were shot down on the return journey: six by German fighters, and two more by flak when they strayed off course over Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven. Excluding four aircraft that were written off when returning crews crash-landed them, seventeen British planes were lost that night: five more than on the first Hamburg raid. But that was still only half of the number that Bomber Command had become used to losing over the preceding months. Despite the rapid change in German tactics, Window was still working wonders for the British.
At 1.47 a.m. the last of the attacking aircraft dropped its mix of high explosives and incendiaries, and the tail end of the bomber stream made its way back towards the coast and over the North Sea to England. Behind them they left one of the biggest man-made fires the world has ever seen, still growing in intensity. As a young rear gunner wrote in his diary that night: ‘If it had been a really clear night the fires would have been visible nearly back to our coast. As it was we could see it nearly half-way back, about 200 miles, and a column of smoke about 20,000 feet, so Hamburg must have had it.’ 25
16. Firestorm
What if the breath that kindled those grim fires
Awaked should blow them into sevenfold rage
And plunge us in the flames?… what if all
Her stores were opened and this firmament
Of hell should spout her cataracts of fire
John Milton, Paradise Lost 1
To understand what happened on the night of Tuesday, 27 July 1943, one needs to know a little about how major fires work. Few people have any direct experience of conditions inside a major conflagration, and even those unlucky enough to have lived through a house fire cannot possibly understand what it is like to be caught in a firestorm.
Large conflagrations are different from house fires in two important respects. First, because of their sheer size they produce such vast quantities of smoke that even those far away from the flames may suffocate. This is particularly dangerous in city fires – anyone sheltering in the confined space of a basement or cellar risks death from smoke inhalation or carbon monoxide poisoning, as all the oxygen is sucked out of the air and replaced with poisonous fumes.
Second, and more importantly, the incredible temperatures such fires reach – sometimes as high as 800°C – superheat the air above and around the fire, causing it to rise rapidly. In some cases this sets off a chain reaction. As air rushes skywards it leaves a vacuum, which sucks new air from the surrounding areas to fill it. The new air brings oxygen, which feeds the fire. The process accelerates: the fire gets hotter, and the winds get faster, often reaching speeds of 60 or 70 m.p.h. This is what gives the ‘firestorm’ phenomenon its name: the combination of huge fires and storm-force winds. As long as there is enough fuel to keep the fire burning the winds will continue to blow, first rushing into the fire horizontally along the ground, then shooting skywards with the heat.
As I mentioned in Chapter 10, Hamburg had already had a firestorm on Saturday night, where witnesses claimed to have seen ‘a frightful storm, caused by the heat’, and winds so strong that it was impossible to fight one’s way through them. 2On that night British air crew reported seeing clouds of smoke billowing up to 20,000 feet and beyond, forced rapidly into the sky by the heat. This was comparable to the devastating firestorm that had enveloped Wuppertal two months before the Hamburg bombings, and that would consume Dresden eighteen months later. 3
What happened on the night of 27 July, however, was in a different league. The winds reached speeds of at least 120 m.p.h., and in places perhaps as high as 170 m.p.h. 4To make things worse, they were not steady in their force: they swirled and changed direction from one moment to the next. In a forest firestorm the wind is generally free to take the most direct route to the centre of the conflagration, spiralling inwards in an anti-clockwise direction, like a cyclone. By contrast, in a city like Hamburg, the winds are forced away from their natural course by all the buildings that stand in the way. That night they were channelled along streets, sometimes meeting head-on at junctions, causing eddies and swirls that knocked people off their feet. There are many reports of ‘fire-whirls’ at such junctions – miniature tornadoes – which added to the misery of the fugitives trying to reach safety. 5