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This book mainly focuses on the British air campaign against Hamburg, which began with a series of small scale raids in 1940, is most famous for devastating raids of July 1943 and ended on 13-14 April 1945.
The length of this campaign means that the normal Attacker’s Capabilties and Defender’s Capabilties chapters have to cover an unusually large topic. On the British side this amounts to a brief history of Bomber Command, from the early ineffective days where a handful of medium bombs were lucky to drop their bombs somewhere near their target to the later period, where massive formations of four engined heavies could at least expect to hit their target city. It also has to cover the technical develops – electronic navigation, counter measures, chaff etc. One thing that becomes clear is just how complex raids had become by 1943 compared to the early days. Mid to late war raids involved pathfinders, electronic counter measures, very careful flight plans, concentrated bomber groups, careful target marking with back-ups and normally several waves of main force bombers.
On the German side we see how much effort went into air defences. Hamburg had 320 heavy AA guns, 400 light AA guns and 130 searchlights late in 1944, and had been a heavily defended target well before this. We also look at the development of German night fighters and their methods. One interesting feature here is that the introduction of ‘window’ only crippled the night fighters for a short period before methods were found to get around the distruption to radar coverage. The night fighters only became ineffective late in 1944, when the war had turned against Germany on all fronts.
The Campaign Objectives chapter looks at two elements of the British effort – first, why Hamburg was such an important target and second, what they were trying to achieve. Both sides considered Hamburg to be key to the German war effort, with Germany’s own Reichgrupper Industrie rating it second behind Berlin. The British placed it fourth, focusing on its two shipbuilding yards, oil refineries, U-boat construction and other major industries. An impressive 408 of the total of 1,131 U-boats were built in Hamburg. The focus of British attacks changed – early raids were meant to be precise attacks on key industries, although most missed. In the mid war period we see a focus on attacking morale, housing and the general area bombing of industrial cities. This was in part done because it was the only option available after the switch to night bombing, but also because many air war theorists believed it to be the most effective tactic.
The Campaign chapter fills the second half of the book, a sign of just how many raids were carried out against Hamburg. The first raid didn’t come until 17-18 May 1940, after the start of the German offensive in the west, and for the time was a relatively sizable raid with 48 Hampdens attacking. Over the next couple of years we see the ‘Bomber Barons’ making increasingly wild claims about what they could achieve if given the resources, rarely backed up by their actual achievements – a July 1942 raid saw only 70 of 135 night photos taken by the bombers proving to be within five miles of the city centre! One surprise is that the success of Operation Gomorrah came almost out of the blue – the most recent large scale raids had been disasterous failures. In contrast the second raid of Gomorrah saw unusually accurate bombing which triggered the famous fire storm. However even now Bomber Command was capable of equally clear failures, and the attempted raid of 2-3 August was a disaster.
We finish with a look at the effectiveness of this prolonged bombing campaign. One interesting feature of this is that even Bomber Harris admitted after the war that bombing failed to break civilian morale in the way that pre-war advocates had expected. The bombing campaign did have a big impact on Hamburg’s industries, probably reducing U-boat production by 50, and greatly reducing the capacity of the oil refineries. The one place where you won’t find any doubts about the impact of these big raids was in official German wartime circles, where they were seen as very dangerous.
This is a good examination of the impact of air attack on a single major German city during the Second World War, as well as providing a good cross-section of the history of Bomber Command.
Chapters
Chronology
Attacker’s Capabilities
Defender’s Capabilities
Campaign Objectives
The Campaign
Aftermath and Analysis
Author: Richard Worrall
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 96
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2024