Blame the fog of war, command stupidity,
bad timing, bad weather, vainglory, stubbornness, or just bad luck. Every war
seems to produce on a large or small scale shake-your-head disasters that seem, in retrospect, that they could, or should have been avoided. Think the Charge of the Light Brigade, Custer
at Little Bighorn, Gallipoli, or just about the whole
damned Vietnam War.
73
years ago, on March 30, 1944 795 Royal
Air Force bombers flew into disaster.
95 planes would be lost, more
than 11% of those engaged. Many more would land damaged and riddled with
fighter cannon fire and flack.
545 officers and men were
killed, more than 150 captured, figures for the wounded unavailable,
but high. The Nuremberg Raid was Bomber command’s greatest loss of aircraft
in a single operation and to make matters
worse, the intended target suffered
relatively light damage.
Other
Allied air raids during the war
would suffer even higher losses by
percentage—the U.S, Army Air Force famous
B-24 raid on the oil refineries around Ploiesti, Romania in 1943 resulted in the loss of 53 of a 174 planes. But it was able to substantially destroy or damage
its targets. It was also, by scale, a much smaller operation than the Nuremberg
Raid.
Conversely,
later in the war, the industrial might
of the United States was able to station an air armada of thousands of heavy bombers
in Britain. Some days almost all of them
were engaged in action and on more than one very bad day, losses exceeded those
at Nuremberg, but because of the total number involved, the percentage loss was
much smaller.
The
Nuremberg Raid was a night raid. The RAF and United States Army Air Force (USAAF)
had very different bombing strategies
that had caused friction in the Allied high command. In the end, it was agreed to allow each to wage its own campaign. The
USAAF with its high flying, heavily armed B-17s
and B-24s, and their precision Norton bomb sights, elected to conduct
a daylight campaign of precision strategic bombing targeting German industry and infrastructure
as well military and naval targets. In addition by 1944 the Americans had fast, long range fighters like the P-51 Mustang that could provide fighter cover deep into enemy territory.
The
British with their lighter aircraft
preferred night time saturation bombing. They targeted
cities and towns aiming to smother them with high explosives. Certainly damage would be done to industry
and infrastructure in the process, but it was essentially terror bombing aimed at the civilian
population in order to “break the
enemy’s will to fight.” Part of it
was to mock Luftwaffe Chief Hermann
Göring’s boast that his flyers would prevent
“a single bomb” from falling on
German soil. And part of it was outright revenge for the Blitz.
Night bombing also compensated
for the fact that until bases could be secured in France, the RAF’s Spitfires and
Hurricanes did not have enough range
to provide fighter cover.
By
March of 1944 plenty of RAF bombs had fallen on German cities. Cities like Manheim, Cologne, and
above all the capital of Berlin had
already been targeted leaving behind large swaths of smoking rubble and huge
civilian casualties.
The heart of Nuremberg was quaint and medieval, but the "Spiritual heart of Nazism" was marked for destruction at the highest levels in Britain. |
The
next target was Nuremberg, a city of about 150,000. Although it certainly had industrial targets,
it was not an important German cog
in the German war machine. But, as the site of Hittler’s famous, highly
choreographed pre-war rallies,
it was considered the “spiritual heart
of Nazism.” It was to be the last of
the big RAF raids on cities before Bomber Command would turn its attention to support of the coming Normandy invasion.
The
raid was carefully planned. A route
was mapped out that would have the formations
cross the European coast over Belgium then wheel and make a direct dash
for Nuremberg. Some diversionary sorties would be flown in hopes of confusing German defenses, but far
fewer than those employed in the earlier raids.
Also the relatively direct route
to the target was a departure from the practice of making several course corrections to confuse the enemy. It was
thought that this itself would be a surprise.
The
day before the raid RAF meteorologists
relying on reports from Mosquito weather
planes flying over the continent concluded that there would be cloud cover over the Belgian coast to shield the formations from the bright half-moon and clear skies over the target which would make it easy for pathfinders to mark out the target with
incendiaries. These were ideal conditions.
But
around noon on the 30th new reports from the Mosquitos showed clouds forming
over Nuremberg and clearing skies over Belgium.
Deputy Commander Sir Robert
Saundby said after the war, “I can say that, in view of the meteorological
report and other conditions, everyone,
including myself, expected the C-in-C
(Commander in Chief) to cancel the
raid. We were most surprised when he did not. I thought perhaps there was some
top-secret political reason for the
raid, something too top-secret for even me to know.”
Air
crews were never informed of the
changed conditions into which they would fly.
At
the appointed hour 572 Lancasters,
214 Halifaxes and 9 Mosquitos took off on the main
mission. Due to the usual mechanical problems and malfunctioning electronics several
planes turned back. About 750 made it to
the Belgian coast.
Meanwhile
forces of light Mosquitos and a flight of Halifaxes flew diversionary flights
that included 49
Halifaxes minelaying in the Heligoland area, 13 Mosquitos to attack night-fighter airfields, 34
Mosquitos on diversions to Aachen, Cologne and Kassel.
The
German command was not fooled. And when the bombers came over the coast not
only were they silhouetted against the
moonlight, their contrails were clearly visible. German radio
crackled. Over 200 night-fighters
were scrambled on their way to the Ida and Otto beacons which neatly
straddled the raiders’ course. The
British were flying directly into a virtual ambush.
The
night fighters were among Germany’s best,
mostly Me-109s, Me-110s and JU-88s. Many were armed with new twin 20 mm cannons mounted on
either side of the nose at an upward
angle and a slight spread. Known
as Schräge Musik (slanting music) these weapons allowed a new tactic. Fighters attacked from below, never seen or detected by the bombers’s gun
crews. They flew within a few
hundred feet and let loose fire that straddled
the bomb-laden fuselage and tore into both wings with their heavy loads of fuel.
The
first bombers fell shortly after
clearing the coast to heavy flack.
That gave way soon enough to the swarms of night fighters tearing into the formations with deadly accuracy and effect.
At least two Luftwaffe pilot personally
downed four planes each. Another
destroyed two bombers in less than two minutes.
The wreckage of an RAF bomber and its dead crew after the Nuremberg Raid. |
The
night fighters continued to bring down the lumbering bombers for the next 45
miles until they finally disappeared
into the clouds that would also obscure the target. Not only had the attacks somewhat broken the formations, an unexpected cross wind began to blow some off course. Leading
the way the versatile little Mosquitos were the Pathfinders charged with marking
the bombing range. Two got off
course marking a mostly rural area near Lauf
ten miles distant. 150 of the bombers
followed them, dumping their bombs mostly uselessly in the fields, although
three ball bearing plants—a high priority
for American strategic bombers—were inadvertently
hit and sustained moderate damage,
but not enough to put them out of commission.
Even
those pathfinders that did find Nuremburg found that smoke from their incendiaries was blowing away from the city. In additions some pilots mistook the burning wreckage of other bombers as signals. As a result and under intense ground anti-aircraft fire, many of the bombs fell harmlessly away from city.
German
records indicated that Nuremberg suffered “133 killed (75 in city itself), 412
injured; 198 homes destroyed, 3,804 damaged, 11,000 homeless. Fires started:
120 large, 485 medium / small. Industrial damage: railway lines cut, and major
damage to three large factories; 96 industrial buildings destroyed or seriously
damaged.” This was hardly insignificant. But
had he raid proceeded as planned, the city would have been virtually leveled.
On the way back the planes
continued to be hectored by fighters
and targeted by flack. But the formation was broken up and planes were
widely scattered. Only a handful more were shot down on the
long three hour flight home, bucking a
heavy headwind almost all of the way.
But several damaged planes
crashed along the way. 11 made it
all the way back to England only to crash
either because of battle damage or because they had run out of fuel.
There
was no way around it. The raid was a disaster, more so because the
heavy losses were experienced without the mission being anywhere near
satisfactorily completed.
The
question remains to this day, why was not the mission scrubbed after the
revised weather forecasts came in? How high above the Deputy Commander could
the decision to go ahead have gone? Bomber
Command’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur
Harris? Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur Tedder, Air Commander-in-Chief, Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF)? Or perhaps even to Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself? After all in pre-mission briefings pilots were told that the Nuremberg raid was,
“…a target he [Harris] knows is very
dear to Churchill’s heart.”
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