A planned raid on 31 July was cancelled due to thunderstorms over the UK. We were picked up by trucks and taken out of the city. And we had already worked out the quantity of strips of paper that would be required, the rate at which it should be dropped, and the areas over which it should be released. According to Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister for Propaganda, the bombing of Hamburg was the first time that he thought Nazi Germany might have to call for peace.

Every street had to have a shelter, which you could reach in five minutes. The people in the air raid shelter below were killed by the heat and, The victims of the air raids were buried on the. Managed by Caboodle UX design studio in London, Citation: C N Trueman "The bombing of Hamburg in 1943". On May 27, 1943, Harris picked a target for the RAF. It was an around-the-clock affair. Until the focus of RAF Bomber Command switched to Hamburg, their focus had been on the Ruhr industrial region which had been the target of a five-month-long campaign. Operation Gomorrah killed 42,600 people, left 37,000 wounded and caused some one million German civilians to flee the city. Asphalt streets burst into flame, and fuel oil from damaged and destroyed ships, barges and storage tanks spilled into the water of the canals and the harbour, causing them to ignite as well. Flames drove them from the shelters, but high-explosive bombs sent them scurrying back again. The attack during the last week of July, 1943, Operation Gomorrah, created one of the largest firestorms raised by the RAF and USAAF in World War II,[2] killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 in Hamburg and practically destroying the entire city. Several memorials in Hamburg are reminders of the air raids of World War II: Film footage of the daylight bombing of Hamburg, nights of 15/16 November and 16/17 November 1940. For the mission, bomber crews were issued with tin foil strips (‘chaff’) coated onto paper which were to be dropped from each bomber. It was at the time the heaviest assault in the history of aerial warfare and was later called the Hiroshima of Germanyby British officials. Remember these dead. The night attack of 26 July at 00:20 was extremely light due to a severe thunderstorm and high winds over the North Sea during which a considerable number of bombers jettisoned the explosive part of their bomb loads (retaining just the incendiaries) with only two bomb drops reported. The initial attack on Hamburg included two new introductions to the British planning: they used "Window", otherwise known as chaff, to confuse the German radar, while the Pathfinder Force aircraft, which normally kept radio silence, reported the winds they encountered, and this information was processed and relayed to the bomber force navigators. On the Thursday the smoke blotted out the sunlight associated with July. The people in the air raid shelter below were killed by the heat and, The victims of the air raids were buried on the. The hills of the Öjendorfer Park are formed by the debris of destroyed houses. Gomorrah - with eight days of bombing by the RAF and USAAF from 24 July - would prove these theories. There was not a moment when there was no Allied aircraft over Hamburg. Never again fascism. [12] Hamburg was hit by air raids another 69 times before the end of World War II.

The fires spread unhindered, causing fiery storms which reached heats of 1,000°, and speeds approaching gale force. My hands.” We passed fused masses of people made up of four or five corpses, each probably a family, visible only as a pile of burned substance no larger than a small child. The building over us was hit by an incendiary bomb and was on fire. Continuing to use this site, you agree with this. [14], In January 1946, Major Cortez F. Enloe, a surgeon in the USAAF who worked on the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), said that the fire effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki "were not nearly as bad as the effects of the R.A.F. – Genesis 19:24, The Battle of Hamburg, codenamed Operation Gomorrah, was a campaign of air raids which began on 24 July 1943 and lasted for 8 days and 7 nights. And at the same time the whole system of air defence, carefully built up, at the expense of all the other battle fronts in which the Germans were fighting, over a period of years, had been thrown into utter confusion; the night fighters, it appeared, would in future be powerless to detect the bombers in the dark, and the guns and searchlights would be altogether inefficient. No air raid ever known before had been so terrible as that which Hamburg had endured; the second largest city in Germany, with a population of nearly 2,000,000, had been wiped out in three nights. All this happened in silence. People were running around, getting hysterical. Until the focus of RAF Bomber Command …

A vast suction was in this way created so that the air "stormed through the streets with immense force, bearing upon it sparks, timber and roof beams and thus spreading the fire still further and further till it became a typhoon such as had never before been witnessed, and against which all human resistance was powerless." The terrible heat had dried throats so much that no one could scream.”. The anti aircraft …   Wikipedia, Bombing of Nordhausen in World War II — Nordhausen WWII bombings Part of Strategic bombing campaign in Europe Location Nordhausen (district), Nazi Germany …   Wikipedia, We are using cookies for the best presentation of our site.

During 24 June 1941 three waves of bombers, of 47 aircraft each, bombed Minsk.

At mid-day next day there was still a gigantic, dense cloud of smoke and dust hovering over the city which, despite the clear sky, prevented the sun from penetrating through. However the raid must have been planned more than 24 hours in advance, so although these raids are often stated to be revenge attacks, it is unlikely that they were planned to be so. Beginning on July 24, 1943, Operation Gomorrah was a coordinated bombing assault on the city of Hamburg, Germany which reduced much of the city Hamburg to rubble. He estimated that more than 40,000 people died in Hamburg:[15], "It was quite a surprise to us when the first Hamburg raid took place because you used some new device which was preventing the anti-aircraft guns to find your bombers, so you had a great success and you repeated these attacks on Hamburg several times and each time the new success was greater and the depression was larger, and I have said, in those days, in a meeting of the Air Ministry, that if you would repeat this success on four or five other German towns, then we would collapse."

A stream of haggard, terrified refugees flowed into the neighbouring provinces. On the street where we lived, there was a public air-raid shelter.

“Again and again, we saw burning people suddenly start to run and soon after, to fall. It cannot be said that there was ever an occasion when we did not need to use this weapon, but we needed it as much as ever before at the end of July, 1943, and it was just at that time that the Air Ministry after I had urged the use of this weapon at repeated intervals for many months, decided that it was now possible to accept the risk of the enemy using the same weapon against our own defences. A third raid was conducted on the morning of the 26th. While some 40,000 firemen were available to tackle fires, control of their resources was damaged when the telephone exchange caught fire and rubble blocked the passage of fire engines through the city streets;[6] fires were still burning three days later.[7]. Several memorials in Hamburg are reminders of the air raids during World War II: RAF strategic bombing during the Second World War, nights of 15/16 November and 16/17 November 1940, Time Witness Ursula Gray in :World at War - Volume 21: Nemesis, Produced and Directed by Martin Smith, Written by Stuart Hood, Narrator: Laurence Olivier - BBC London (UK) 1973, released on Video 13-6-1995. The combination of both bomber forces gave Harris a substantial number of bombers and therefore a substantial number of bombs that could be dropped. It was therefore a major target of the RAF during the Second World War. It had been intended for 300 aircraft to attack Hamburg and Hanover but problems with assembling the force in the air meant that only 90 B-17 Flying Fortresses reached Hamburg. Mosquitos carried out another nuisance raid. When I continually pressed for the introduction of this weapon, other objections were also made. Other losses included damage to or destruction of 580 industrial concerns and armaments works, 299 of which were important enough to be listed by name. Memorial at the Hamburger Strasse - a memorial for those who died in a shelter under the Karstadt department store at the corner Desenißstrasse/Hamburger Strasse. Extra firemen were brought in from other cities including Hanover; as a result when the US bombers attacked, these firemen were in Hamburg and fires in Hanover burned unchecked. As a large port and industrial centre, Hamburg's shipyards, U-boat pens, and the Hamburg-Harburg area oil refineries were attacked throughout the war. The tornadic fire created a huge inferno with winds of up to 240 km/h (150 mph) reaching temperatures of 800 °C (1,500 °F) and altitudes in excess of 1,000 feet, incinerating more than eight square miles (21 km²) of the city. Bomber crews reported smoke reaching 20,000 feet. Another attack by the RAF on Hamburg for that night was cancelled due to the problems the smoke would cause and 700 bombers raided Essen instead.

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