In continental Europe the destruction of Hamburg is regarded as a defining moment in the Second World War. It happened eighteen months before Dresden, at a time when much of Germany was still confident of final victory. It was a far greater shock to the system than Dresden was, unleashing almost a million refugees across a nation that had still not quite accepted the consequences of bombing. Those refugees brought with them tales of unimaginable horror: fires hot enough to melt glass, a firestorm strong enough to uproot trees and hurl them into the flames, and rumours of 200,000 people killed within a few days and nights (although, in fact, the total was more like 45,000).
I have been consistently surprised by the general ignorance of these facts among my own countrymen. In the two years I spent writing this book I came across few people outside the world of military historians who knew that Hamburg had been bombed at all, let alone the sheer scale of the destruction that took place. On the Continent the bombing of Hamburg is a byword for horror, yet in Britain few people know it happened. In North America, too, there is widespread ignorance of the basic facts, although to some extent America’s geographical and emotional distance from Hamburg excuses this. Even those who have heard of the Hamburg firestorm are generally unaware of its ghastly human consequences.
The main purpose of this book is to put that right. My intention is to convey the events as they appeared at the time, not only to the British and American airmen who fought their way across the skies of Europe, but to the people of Hamburg who became the victims of their bombs. Hamburg was a handsome and prosperous city before it was destroyed: in the first few chapters, I will explain some of the city’s history, and try to re-create the atmosphere in this Hansestadt in the years leading up to 1943. It is only by knowing what was there before the bombing that we can truly appreciate what was lost – both physically and psychologically. I have also devoted several chapters to the immediate and long-term aftermath of the firestorm because it has never been adequately described before, in Germany or abroad. The effect of the catastrophe on the German people, and on Germany itself, was far-reaching, and continues to cause controversy today.
The second purpose of this book is to try to correct the erroneous belief that war is somehow a glorious or heroic undertaking. During the course of my research I interviewed dozens of bomber veterans, and they are unanimous on this point: there is nothing glorious about sitting in a Lancaster or a B-17 bomber for upwards of five hours, in the freezing temperatures of the upper atmosphere, waiting to find out if you will return home safely. At best it is dull, at worst it is terrifying: the rare moments of exhilaration are insignificant when compared to this.
There is nothing glorious about being bombed, either, as the British learned during the Blitz when more than 40,000 British civilians were killed. The most infamous German raid was on Coventry, where local industries, civilian houses and historic buildings in the centre of the city were devastated. In their collective imagination this is what British people believe it must have been like for the Germans – a little like Coventry, or perhaps slightly worse. It is a false impression. What happened in Essen, Bochum, Düsseldorf and the other cities around the river Ruhr was like two years of Coventrys, night after night after night. Coventry suffered only a single major bombing raid; Essen was bombed on a much larger scale, twenty-eight times. Hamburg is on another level altogether. What happened there is more accurately compared to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. 5
Until recently America did not know what it was like to be bombed at all. Geographically remote from any hostile neighbours, the USA has always enjoyed almost total immunity from air attack, 6and until a few years ago its people had never been seriously threatened. The shock was therefore all the greater when a group of Al Qaeda terrorists flew two commercial airliners into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The sheer horror of this action still consumes Americans with righteous indignation – and so it should – but tragic as this event was, it was essentially only the destruction of a handful of buildings. True, almost three thousand people perished, but imagine the sense of awe, of shock, if the whole of Lower Manhattan had been destroyed. Imagine an area from the tip of the island all the way up to Madison Square consumed by a singlefire, and the rest of the city as far as Central Park reduced to rubble. What would have been America’s reaction if the death toll had not been 2,800, but ten or fifteen times that number? Imagine eight square miles of the city without a single building left standing – mountains of rubble as far as the eye can see, corpses littering the streets, the smell of decay pervading everything. This was what happened in Hamburg in the summer of 1943.
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This book would not have been possible without the help of scores of Allied ex-airmen and German civilians who consented to be interviewed. Their willingness to share their diaries and to rake over painful memories from more than sixty years ago has been humbling, and I can only thank them for the patience with which they answered my questions. I am aware that there is something distasteful about some of the questions I was obliged to ask, especially in the specific details I demanded. Indeed, when interviewing people who lived through the firestorm I often found myself experiencing a mixture of emotions similar to that described by Nossack as he watched the bombers fly over his city – excitement at the prospect of gathering good material, a perverse hope that their descriptions would become even more graphic, and a faint sense of shame at the inappropriateness of my enthusiasm. Writing about catastrophe (or, for that matter, reading about it) is not the same as experiencing it, and there is inevitably something voyeuristic about examining someone else’s misery in this sort of detail. I hope, therefore, that this book will not merely convey my own uncomfortable fascination with the terrifying stories those people told me, but also the lingering revulsion they have communicated to me at the human cost of war.
There is no space here to list the scores of people and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic who have helped me over the past few years. Many are named in the Acknowledgements (pages 471–2), but that cannot do justice to the enormous contribution they have made, or their selfless enthusiasm for my project. There are, however, a handful of people who deserve special mention. First and foremost I am deeply indebted to Mirko Hohmann and Malte Thießen for sharing their knowledge of the German sources, and for looking after me on my various trips to Hamburg. Paul Wolf was a huge help in gathering elusive American material; and Sonia Stammwitz helped with the translation of some of the denser German documents, as did Jenny Piening and Sylvia Goulding. I am also tremendously grateful to my editors Eleo Gordon and Lisa Drew: without their support this book would never have been started.
Lastly I must thank Liza and Gabriel for giving me a reason to leave my study each evening, and lock away the terrible stories and photographs that have been my companions by day. Several years of research into some of the most frightening events of the twentieth century have taught me not to take their presence for granted.
Keith Lowe, 2007
Author’s Note
According to the old adage, Britain and America are two nations divided by a common tongue, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the different terminology that the two air forces employed to describe the same things. To avoid confusion I have used British terminology to describe the British ‘operations’, and American terminology to describe their ‘missions’. For a comparison of different terms, please see Appendix D (pages 367–8).