On July 24, 1943 — 70 years ago this week — the Allies unleashed “Operation Gomorrah,” a sustained, weeklong bombing campaign that destroyed much of Hamburg, Germany.
By mid-1943, the Allies were apparently winning the war, but victory was still a long way off. True, the German offensive around the Kursk salient in Russia had petered out by mid-July, leaving the Soviets in a much stronger position than before the battle and beginning to take the offensive. Two months earlier, the German Afrika Korps had surrendered to the Allies in Tunisia, and early July saw British and American forces landing in Sicily.
Though suffering these many blows, Adolf Hitler's Third Reich remained a powerful and resilient enemy. Nazi rule stretched all the way from the Pyrenees in the west to the Russian steppes in the east. With most of Europe still in its grasp, and the planned invasion of France logistically unfeasible for another year, aerial bombing had increasingly become the Western Allies' chief weapon against the Reich.
The air war against Germany served many purposes. Bombing industrial targets such as factories, refineries and railroads crippled German war production even as the Allied war economy grew by leaps and bounds in the United States. Bombing ensured that the Germans would hold back fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft weapons from the front in order to protect cities.
Additionally, many believed that in bombing civilian housing, they were targeting civilian morale, and the subsequent refugee problem would diminish popular support for the war, perhaps even leading to the German people demanding peace from their government. This idea, however, was fanciful. When the Germans had bombed London and other British cities in late 1940 to early 1941, the British people responded to death and hardship with cool defiance, not cowardice and surrender. Now, the German people were exhibiting largely the same fortitude.
The reality of civilian area bombing stemmed from the inherent technical problems of accurate targeting. It is not the easiest thing to locate a target from the air, particularly if it is obscured by clouds. What some in the Allied high command had initially referred to as “precision bombing” was a fiction, and the only way to ensure that targets were hit was to take out everything in the vicinity.
Finally, a major reason for the bombing campaign was political. Ever since the June 1941 German invasion of Russia, Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, had demanded that the Western Allies open up a second front in France to take pressure off of the Soviet Union, viewing the war in North Africa and Italy only as a sideshow. Unable to invade France in 1943, Britain and America used the bombing campaign to prove to the Soviets that they were indeed hurting the Reich.
In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had along with many other world leaders condemned the German Luftwaffe for bombing the city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. By 1943, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made bombing cities a key strategy in their war to defeat Hitler.
As the air war intensified and with the atomic bomb still two years away, the Allies questioned how to make bombs stronger, more effective and better able to carry destruction over wider areas. One of the answers was incendiaries.
In his book, “The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945,” historian Rick Atikinson wrote: “The British Air Ministry had long studied the science of 'fire-raising,' examining the combustible qualities of German pantries, attics and furnishings, and collecting insurance maps to study firewall patterns in German buildings. Allied bombers would ultimately drop eighty million incendiary sticks, twenty-two inch hexagonal rods with a magnesium-zinc case that burned for eight minutes at two thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”
The northwest German city of Hamburg, often referred to as the “Venice of the north” because of its many canals and bridges, was targeted for destruction by an immense incendiary raid. One of the biggest cities in Germany, Hamburg boasted a large industrial port, as well as many factories.
Launched on July 24, “Operation Gomorrah” saw British and Canadian bombers let loose with their incendiary bombs over seven nights, while American bombers did the same for eight days. Roughly 3,000 bombers were employed over the course of the operation, and perhaps as many as 9,000 tons of incendiaries and explosives were dropped. Strips of aluminum foil were thrown out of the bombers en route to their targets, sending false aircraft signals to German radar and misdirecting Nazi fighters and anti-aircraft crews.
In his book, “The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War,” historian Andrew Roberts wrote: “Hamburg had been experiencing a freak heat wave and the hot, dry weather, when combined with the flames from high-explosive and incendiary bombs, created a firestorm inferno that reached 1,600 Celsius and reduced to ashes all in its path. It was said that the orange luminosity from the fires that raged, largely unfought, for forty-eight hours could be seen 120 miles away.”
Many who had fled underground to cellars or bomb shelters to escape death from the flames ended up deprived of oxygen and died from asphyxiation. In “The Third Reich at War,” historian Richard J. Evans offers the account of a 15-year-old girl, Traute Koch, whose mother had wrapped wet sheets around her and forced her out of the shelter so that she would not suffocate:
“I hesitated at the door. In front of me I could only see fire — everything red, like the door to a furnace. An intense heat struck me. A burning beam fell in front of my feet. I shied back but then, when I was ready to jump over it, it was whirled away by a ghostly hand. I ran out onto the street. The sheets around me acted as sails and I had the feeling I was being carried away by the storm. I reached the front of a five-story building in front of which we had arranged to meet again. It had been bombed and burnt out in a previous raid and there was not much left in it for the fire to get hold of. Someone came out, grabbed me in their arms, and pulled me into the doorway.”
Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, noted in his memoir, “Inside the Third Reich,” that “Hamburg had put the fear of God in me,” and that “The devastation of this series of air raids could be compared only with the effects of a major earthquake.” Atkinson noted a German witness who wrote that the firestorm “simulated the atmosphere of another planet, one incompatible with life.”
Estimates of the death toll vary, though most historians agree it was somewhere around 50,000. Many of the 1.8 million survivors left what remained of the city, creating a massive refugee problem and spreading the one disease Hitler found more and more difficult to combat — plummeting morale amongst the population.
The city suffered the effects of “Operation Gomorrah” for rest of the war, and production would never fully recover. Years later, some called the city “The German Hiroshima,” because of the death and devastation. Hamburg was not the last such raid of the war. In February 1945, the East German city of Dresden suffered a firebombing raid (the subject of Kurt Vonnegut's novel “Slaughterhouse-five”), and the next month Tokyo experienced a raid with even greater destruction, given the prevalence of wood and paper in Japanese construction.
One may ask the question — was such death and destruction necessary?
In fact, there is a world of difference in how and why violence was employed by the Allies and Axis powers in World War II. As historian Victor Davis Hanson has noted, for the Allies, violence was incidental to their goal — to win the war. For the Nazis, violence and murder were goals in and of themselves. Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945. On May 9, the Allies were no longer bombing German cities.
What if the roles had been reversed, and it was the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union that had surrendered to Nazi Germany? Would the horrid machinery of the Holocaust have stopped the next day? The intense violence the Allies used in World War II, while certainly regrettable, was done to prevent even greater death and suffering in the future.
Cody K. Carlson holds a master's degree in history from the University of Utah and teaches at SLCC. He has also appeared on many local stages, including Hale Center Theater and Off Broadway Theater. Email: ckcarlson76@gmail.com