Eventually, after almost three hours in the air, the navigators of the leading Pathfinders recognized the outline of the city on their H 2S sets: they had arrived. As they began their final approach to Hamburg, the crews of more than seven hundred bombers braced themselves for the onslaught of flak and searchlights they expected to encounter above the most heavily defended target in northern Germany. But the nightmare never materialized. There were fifty-four heavy and twenty-six light flak batteries defending the city, and twenty-two searchlight batteries, 20but they were all reliant on the same ‘Würzburg’ radar sets that were being disrupted so efficiently by Window. In some cases the battery commanders could hear the drone of aeroplanes in the sky above them, yet when they turned to their radar operators for confirmation the response was the same as before: instead of clear, distinct pulses showing where the aircraft were, the radar screens were a mass of flashing zigzag curves, making it impossible to distinguish anything specific. Some batteries began to shoot random, unaimed barrages into the sky; others remained silent. Hamburg’s defences had been blinded.
For some of the more experienced bomber crews, the sight that greeted them when they arrived over the target was a dream come true. ‘Under normal circumstances the searchlights kept a fairly accurate pinpoint on any aircraft,’ says Leonard Cooper, a flight engineer with 7 Squadron (Pathfinder Force), ‘but on this occasion they were just waving around all over the place.’ 21Ted Edwards, a pilot from 100 Squadron, was equally impressed: ‘We were quite amazed to see the searchlights just weaving around the countryside over enemy territory. They hadn’t got a clue where we were.’ 22
For those sceptics who had doubted that Window would work, it was a moment of revelation. ‘They said that Window was going to upset the German radar when we went in, but we more or less said, “Oh, yes?”’ remembers Leonard Bradfield, a bomb-aimer with 49 Squadron. ‘But when we actually got there it was happening! We were absolutely delighted.’ 23He continues:
It was absolutely fantastic. We came up the Elbe and could see the river quite clearly. The radar-controlled blue master searchlights were standing absolutely upright and the white ones were weaving around, just searching. There were no night fighters because they were all in their boxes waiting to be given the vectors. The flak was just in a block over the target … It was the only time on any bomb run I was able to have 20 seconds completely unimpeded, without being stalked by the flak. 24
It is important to note that although the flak was fired blindly, the sheer number of shells aimed into the air meant that several aircraft in the vanguard of the attack were hit. Later on two planes would be shot down, with no survivors. 25Not everyone managed to escape the searchlights either. Gordon Moulton-Barrett, who was on his first operation as a ‘second dickie’ pilot, remembers seeing a Lancaster coned by lights: he watched as the aircraft dropped vertically downwards, falling 10,000 feet in a matter of seconds, before pulling out of the dive and disappearing once more into the safety of darkness. To the impressionable Moulton-Barrett it seemed like a brilliant, death-defying manoeuvre, and he had to suppress the urge to applaud. 26For the Lancaster and its crew, however, it had been a matter of survivaclass="underline" a steep dive was the only way to escape a cone of searchlights.
With just a few minutes to go before zero hour (0100), the Pathfinders were sizing up the dark city below them. As previously mentioned, the plan was to drop three different kinds of markers for the main force to aim at: yellow target indicators (TIs) to start with, at Z–3, along with flares to light up the city for the subsequent planes; red ones next, aimed visually, between Z–2 and zero hour; and green ones to back up the reds for the rest of the raid. In the event, things did not go quite according to plan. While the marking began exactly on time, led by a Lancaster of 83 Squadron, many of the first group were eight or nine minutes late. Without their flares to light the city, many of the next group did not drop their red TIs at all. Fortunately for the city centre, those that did fall were fairly spread out. There were four main groups: some fell in the Baaken dock area south of the river, near the Grasbrook gasworks, another group in the east of the city, between Wandsbeker Chaussee and Hasselbrook railway station, and two more salvos in the west, in Altona. 27
For the few minutes before the bombs began to fall, the skies over Hamburg were lit by a spectacular firework display – a prelude to the coming bonfire – as the beautiful pyrotechnic candles cascaded out of each TI and floated gently to earth. The Germans called the TIs Tannenbäume– Christmas trees – a homely term that described their beauty, but not their terrible purpose.
As the bright lights drifted down the first Lancasters of the main force made their bombing runs. The aircraft were effectively in the hands of the bomb-aimers now. As the target was sighted, the navigators would hand over responsibility to the bomb-aimer, who would guide the pilot to the correct point directly over the red glow of the TIs. Leonard Bradfield remembers the run-in clearly:
It was a brilliant night. You could see the ground absolutely crystal clear. You could see the outline of the city, and you could also see where the markers had gone down … To bring her up in line directly over the target took some twenty seconds straight and level. Then we let the bombs go. We had the 4,000-pounder as usual, and we had four 1,000-pounders, one of which was on a delayed action. Then we had the ninety-four-pound thermite incendiary bombs. Owing to their light weight we had to drop them quite early in the sequence. But the 4,000-pounder was the master – you could really feel the ‘cookie’ go. I’m talking in terms of under half a minute from the first to last being dropped … We then had to fly another twenty seconds for our photo flash to fall so it could take a photograph of where our bombs landed. 28
It was this brief period over the aiming point that was the most nerve-racking for most crews. A minute could seem like a lifetime when the crews were obliged to fly straight and level, a perfect target for the flak guns below. The bomb-aimer would direct the pilot by shouting above the drone of the engines: ‘Left, left … steady … bombs gone!’ The leap of the aircraft as the heavy 4,000-pound ‘cookie’ fell away was echoed by a leap of hearts into throats – and as soon as the photo flash had gone the pilot would veer away from the immediate danger area and head for the darkness beyond. But tonight, with the city’s defences in such disarray, even this most hazardous of times was relatively safe. As one pilot recalls: ‘I remember thinking, it’s going to be great from now on, for the rest of my tour! You could see other Lancs silhouetted against the fires all just going steadily on, whereas in the past people would have been weaving quite madly. Everyone seemed to have come to the same conclusion: from now on it was going to be easy.’ 29
During the next hour, more than seven hundred planes would pass over the west of the city, and many pilots reported seeing the sky filled with planes. In such circumstances the danger of collision was very real, and many crews had to endure the horror of seeing bombers flying directly above them, bomb doors open, about to drop their load. Tonight, fortunately, no one was harmed by a fellow bomber – but one Stirling collided with a Ju88 night fighter as he dived to avoid a searchlight. Geoff Turner and his 75 Squadron crew managed to limp home, but the night fighter was almost certainly finished. It turned on its back and fell headlong towards Hamburg, to be recorded later as a ‘probable’ victory to the British crew. 30