Bomber Command (57 page)

Target: LUCE

8 Group to WHITEBAIT

MONICA not to be used at any time

Aim: to destroy an enemy industrial centre

2359 H Hour

Aircraft to attack between 12,500 and 16,000 feet

Main Force 1 × 4,000 lb plus maximum 4 lb incendiary clusters . . .

5 Group’s attack on LUCE – one of Saundby’s countless fish codenames – was to be the main Bomber Command operation of the night. Bennett was dispatching forty-seven Mosquitoes of his Light Night Striking Force to Berlin. Seventy aircraft from 100 Group would be in the air, putting up the usual
Mandrel
radar-jamming screen, interrupting the night-fighter controllers, sending twenty-six Intruder Mosquitoes to attack the Luftwaffe airfields, and a further eighteen
Serrate
Mosquitoes to stalk the night-fighters in the sky. 3 Group would also be dispatching mining sorties to area GERANIUM, in the Baltic.

At 4 pm, 5 Group’s squadron and flight commanders gathered in the operations rooms of their bases across Lincolnshire. The familiar crisp, sharp, patrician voice began to echo down the broadcast link from Swinderby: ‘Good afternoon. This is the AOC. The target for tonight is Darmstadt . . .’ After Cochrane’s introduction, his weather man gave the provisional forecast for western Germany: clear skies and strong westerly winds. Then the little groups of men in the ops rooms listened intently as they heard the tactical plan for the night. Darmstadt was a 900-mile round-trip from Lincolnshire as the crow flies, but their dog-leg deception course would take them 1,083 track miles there and back. They would be carrying the usual fire-raising mix of ‘cookies’ to blast open the walls and windows, and incendiaries to ignite the households and factories’ thus exposed. Darmstadt would receive in all 399 tons of high explosive and 580 tons of incendiaries.

Marking would be offset, the marking-point being an old army parade-ground, the
Kavallerie Exerzierplatz
, a mile west of the city centre. This had been chosen because its white, chalky soil showed up vividly by day or night on the reconnaissance photographs that
they all had before them. But the most remarkable part of the plan was now to come: when the ten squadrons of 5 Group’s Main Force ran in to bomb, rather than approaching as usual along a single common axis, tonight they would bomb along no less than seven different aiming-lines at varying heights, spreading out from the marking-point in what Darmstadters were later to call ‘
Der Todesfacher
’ – ‘The Death Fan’. Every aircraft would vary its delay in bombing after passing the marking-point by between three and twelve seconds. Instead of a single mass of devastation, tonight 5 Group sought to spread its attack evenly and fatally the entire length and breadth of Darmstadt. Finally, to ensure that the key industrial targets were destroyed, after the Main Force attack seven of 627 Squadron’s Mosquitoes – the less proficient marking crews – would go in low with all-incendiary loads to deliver precision strikes on the key factories.

83 and 97 Squadrons, the Illuminating Force, took off from Coningsby a few minutes before 9 pm, 2100 hrs. Crossing the Channel, they flew down the Franco–Belgian border, high above Luxembourg, within earshot of tens of thousands of Allied and German soldiers confronting each other in the forward positions miles below. The bombers were on track for Karlsruhe, perhaps, or Mannheim or Stuttgart. German radio began its nightly running-commentary for millions of civilian listeners, huddled behind the blackout in their bedrooms or sitting-rooms, fully dressed with their suitcases and valuables beside them. Programmes were interrupted at regular intervals for the terse bulletins:

2216: Enemy bomber formations over and approaching Denmark in an easterly direction [this was the ‘Gardening’ force].

The reported fast-bomber formation is still approaching Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark – [these were Bennett’s Mosquitoes].

The sirens wailed in Copenhagen as people left the cinemas and bars for the shelters. The first Bomber Command casualty of the night, one of the ‘gardening’ Halifaxes, was hit by a night-fighter
and crashed into a farmhouse near Vordinborg. Its mines blew up, killing the farmer, his wife and three children, most of their livestock and seven young Englishmen.

2309: The reported bomber formation is now approaching Pomerania. The reported fast bomber formation is over Mark Brandenburg. A new formation of fast bombers is approaching west Germany.

Here at last were 5 Group’s marking Mosquitoes, overtaking the Lancasters and tracking fast down the Franco–Belgian frontier.

2332: The reported formation continues to approach Pomerania. The bomber formation reported over and approaching western Germany is now over west and south-west Germany. The reported bomber formation over Mark Brandenburg is flying off northwesterly.

Eight minutes earlier, the air-raid sirens sounded in Darmstadt, for the fourth time that day – the Americans had passed overhead during the afternoon. Wearily but without great fear, families gathered their children, their possessions, their helmets and a little food, and trooped down to the cellars, remembering to switch off the gas and unlock the emergency exits to their houses as they went. Many had been listening to the night’s radio broadcast of Strauss’s
Der Rosenkavalier
. They chattered to their neighbours as they slipped down from their apartments. There were the usual air-raid warning jokes.

Northwest of Karlsruhe, 5 Group suddenly swung up through a steep 75-degree turn to port. Now they were tracking north, straight for Darmstadt. The city had laughed for the last time for many days.

Darmstadt had always been low on the priority list for civil defence, flak and searchlights. ‘Looking back,’ said Jacob Glanzer, one of the survivors of this night, ‘our precautions were ridiculously dilettante.’ The great cities of Germany possessed an elaborate and efficient hierarchy for the control of air-raid reporting and rescue, reaching down from each city’s Police President to individ
ual house wardens. Darmstadt possessed the structure, but not the effectiveness. Few of its children had been evacuated to rural areas. No deep public shelters had been dug. While in the embattled industrial centres the Nazi Party under the personal direction of Dr Goebbels had taken over many of the rescue and relief functions – a shrewdly calculated propaganda move – in Darmstadt these had been left to the municipality. Communal shelters existed in the basements of offices and public buildings and in the cellars of the local brewery, but the overwhelming majority of Darmstadters relied exclusively on their own cellars for protection. Reinforced slit-trenches had been dug in and around the railway station, and ‘safety holes’ had been knocked through the brickwork of adjoining cellars in many rows of houses. But these things had been done without the terrible sense of urgency and expectancy that moved Berliners and Hamburgers. Many of the flak batteries around Darmstadt had been removed to cover seriously embattled cities. The local fire-brigade was just 150 men strong, and on the night of 11 September their thirteen engines were arrayed as usual in the courtyard of the castle, ready to move on the orders of Max Jost, the fire chief, in his underground bunker. It was not unlike holding a tugboat under orders to save the
Titanic
.

At 2346 hrs, a local hairdresser named Emil Thier rang the bunker from his observer post on Hochzietsturm, to report ‘Christmas trees in the west’. 17,000 feet above, 97 and 83 Squadrons’ Flare Force I droned over the city, laying in their wake five lines of parachute-borne light. The green proximity Target Indicators of the Primary Blind Markers, aimed by H2S, burst on the city at the same moment. Those who were still above the ground in Darmstadt heard the flares burning. Some described a rustling sound, others a persistent hiss. The town seemed frozen in the still, icy glare. Then the light flak began to clatter angrily into the sky, the heavier 88s burst into their barrage. Somebody in the control bunker said flatly: ‘Now it’s us.’
²

5 Group was not very impressed by Darmstadt’s flak and searchlights. One pilot in his report described the light AA as ‘meagre’. 83 Squadron assessed the heavy 88-mm fire as ‘light to moderate’. The three ‘Windfinder’ aircraft, circling at 22,000 feet a few miles from the city with their special equipment, maintained reports to the Master Bomber on VHF, chattering a good deal too much according to the marking aircraft crews, straining to catch R/T instructions across the busy ether. The windspeed was forty-three knots, and Main Force were instructed to feed their bombsight computers accordingly. Flare Force I had scarcely begun illuminating when there was a crackled ‘Tally-ho!’ from one of 627’s circling Mosquitoes, and the pilot swung in to mark the
Kavallerie Exerzierplatz.
Wing-Commander Woodroffe, the Master Bomber, orbited at a thousand feet. The red Target Indicators were perfectly positioned. Crews could see one German dummy green TI in the distance, perhaps ten miles westwards, and some decoy incendiaries burning furiously in a nearby wood. But none of these threatened to disturb the attack on a clear night with only the slightest haze.

Woodroffe ordered the rest of his marking pilots to back up the red TIs with greens, halted Flare Force II in the midst of their run at 2352 hrs, and a few moments later sent all the marking aircraft home. At 2356 hrs, he called in Main Force to bomb on their aiming lines as ordered, attacking by the red TIs if they could see them, by the greens if they could not. Two hours later, the Mosquitoes were back on the ground at Woodhall Spa. The Lancasters had no difficulties in bombing, but ran into night-fighter trouble as they turned away from Darmstadt. 5 Group lost twelve aircraft that night, including two crews from 97 Squadron. But those who came home described the operation without notable excitement or dismay. ‘Should prove a very successful raid,’ said Flying Officer Birdling of 83 Squadron at debriefing. ‘Marking was done quickly and without a hitch. Opposition was slight.’ 627 Squadron’s report was brief and contented: ‘Objective: Town centre, Darmstadt. All TIs were within 400 yards of the Marking Point.
Main Force bombing was well-concentrated.’ Squadron-Leader Twigge of 83 Squadron said: ‘A quiet trip all round.’

The raid on Darmstadt lasted fifty-one minutes, from the fall of the first Target Indicator to the release of the last Mosquito incendiary load. In the cellars and shelters of the city, almost a hundred thousand people lay numbed by the continuous concussions, the dust swirling in through the ventilators, the roar of falling masonry all around them. The lighting system collapsed almost immediately, and as foundations trembled cellar-doors buckled, brickwork began to fall. The civil defence organization disintegrated as streets were blocked and bombs cut the vital cable links to the control centre on Hugelstrasse and the emergency control on lower Rheinstrasse. The firemen were thenceforth without orders. The fire-watching centre behind the city church was itself ablaze. Gas, water and power mains were severed. In the first minutes of the attack, the people of Darmstadt lost their coherence as a body of citizens, capable of mutual assistance. The town became a splintered, blazing, smoking battlefield upon which a hundred thousand men, women and children struggled to save themselves as best they might. This, of course, was precisely the purpose of saturation air attack on cities. But it was very rarely, even in this last year of the war, that the intention was as comprehensively fulfilled as on the night of 11 September in Darmstadt.

In the cellars, thousands of isolated clusters of humanity lay unmoving, limbs limp, stomachs shrunken by terror. The heat grew, and burning embers began to drift through the ventilators. Most people lay in silence, huddled with their private nightmares. But where Jacob Schutz sheltered, a child cried endlessly through the attack as the walls shook: ‘Jesus, my Jesus, Mercy, Mercy . . .’ Schutz imagined the bombers above, strewing their loads upon Darmstadt like men sowing a field. A Dutchman who had been upstairs suddenly rushed into their cellar with his hair awry shouting: ‘Everything, everything is burning!’

There was a dreadful crash, the walls shook, we heard masonry cracking and collapsing, and the crackle of flames [wrote Martha Gros]. Plaster began to fall and we all thought the ceiling would collapse . . . About thirty seconds later there was a second terrible explosion, the cellar-door flew open, and I saw, bathed in a brilliant light, the staircase to the cellar collapsing and a river of fire pouring down. I shouted ‘Let’s get out!’ but the Hauptmann gripped me: ‘Stay here, they are still overhead.’ At that moment, the house opposite was hit. The armoured plate in front of our cellar flew up in the air, and a tongue of fire about fifteen feet long shot through at us. Cupboards and other furniture burst and fell on to us. The terrible pressure hurled us against the wall. Now somebody shouted: ‘Get out and hold hands!’ With all his strength he pulled me out from under the wreckage, I dropped my cash box and pulled the others with me. We climbed through the hole leading to the back . . . More bombs were already falling into the garden. We crouched low, each of us beating out the small flames flickering on the clothes of the one in front. Phosphorus clung to the trees and dripped down on us . . . The heat was terrible. Burning people raced past like live torches, and I listened to their unforgettable final screams . . .

Gerhard Hartmann sat on a chair in a shelter crowded with his family’s most precious furniture, a huge cupboard behind him ‘rolling like a ship at every blast’. Carolin Schaefer clung to her two sons in the cellar of her home in Weiterstedtstrasse, the children burying their heads deeper in her breast at each explosion. Her husband was with the army on the western front. On most nights, they spent air-raid alarms in her father-in-law’s strongly-built cellar a few streets away, but tonight they had been unable to get there in time, so they were packed into the basement of their apartment building. They shared their refuge with an elderly couple and a girl with a baby, who cried continuously about the lack of bedclothes for her child. At last Frau Schaefer passed her sons to the woman, and ran upstairs to fetch some covers. She
opened the door from the cellar to be met by a cascade of flame. She seized a sand bucket and threw it in a futile gesture into the blaze. Then there was another roar of explosives as a 4,000-lb bomb exploded nearby. She fled once more to the cellar empty-handed.