The World at War (43 page)

FRAU CHANTRAIN

Cologne Red Cross

When the sirens sounded everyone went into air-raid shelters and it was a short attack. The sirens sounded about ten o'clock and in half an hour Cologne lay practically in ruins – I came out of the air-raid shelter and Cologne was a wall of flames. I tried to get to my station but it was very difficult to reach it because Cologne was built with pretty narrow streets and the balconies were on fire and falling in the streets. The digging parties hauled the dead people out and laid them at the side of the road. Those who had been killed by high-explosive bombs were propped up, their skin was a grey, pallid colour and their hair stood off their heads like wire nails. And of those who had died of incendiaries you could only find bits of bone, which were gathered up in washtubs, big zinc baths. The cruellest thing was when you had a friend in these houses; you saw the bones lying there or you knew they were underneath. That was unbelievably horrible. Mothers came to me who had themselves very severe burns who were scarcely capable of life, with their children in their arms, and begged for help. We saw it was pointless – the children were beyond help. The soldiers on leave from the front came and asked after their relatives and you had to tell them they are dead – your wife is dead, your children are dead, your grandparents are dead.

ALBERT SPEER

We really didn't expect in 1942 such a heavy raid would take place. We were only used to smaller attacks and when I got the news that about thousand bombers were attacking Cologne it was incredible for us, but it was accepted afterwards and we tried to convince Goring who didn't want to believe it. In Cologne the morale of the people was not shattered too much, it was more like shock, a shock which passed away.

GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE

If you couldn't get the German worker in his factory it was just as easy to knock him off in his bed, and if his old Granny on the seat by the door got the chop that's hard luck, it doesn't bother me in the least. I'll tell you what bothers me a lot more, which is four or five million Jews that were pushed into gas ovens. Something that also affected me and lasted me throughout the war was Rotterdam, an undefended town that burned for ten days and was the first route marker that Bomber Command ever used. You'd see those fires from the Humber, or you saw them from the Wash, and that was a pretty terrific thing to watch a city burn for a week.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

My interpretation of
Point Blank
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was to bomb individual targets when we could find them, and hit them. It was to give first priority to the requirements of the Army. Area bombing very often took place because we were trying to find some particular targets and the Americans them-selves would be the first to admit that very often their bombing was area bombing. I contend that we did just about as much accurate pin-point bombing when we could, when conditions served, when the navigational aids were there to make it possible, just as much as the Americans did.

ALBERT SPEER

I know that there is much argument about this question of bombing was a good or bad. One can't overestimate the results of the bombing attacks enough, because what is always forgotten is that we were forced to build up a strong defence and all these anti-aircraft guns which were stationed in every town, because we never knew what town would be the next. We had all the ammunition stocked there for a heavy air attack of several hours: they had to shoot for several hours, and not run out of ammunition. But apart from that, the damage done was diminishing my production I should say by twenty or thirty per cent and that much more output of tanks or ammunition and of U-boats and so on, of course, would have been, for you, quite visible counter action.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

The majority of people in this country were only too glad to see Germany get a dose of what she'd been handing out to everybody else, hoping she would get away with it. Obviously you always get some people that object to anything. After all a lot of people, including myself, have the strongest objection to war. People talk about morality and war – tell me some action of war that is moral? People say you mustn't do anything to civilians – good Lord, what's happened to civilians in every besieged city of the past? Haven't they always been starved to surrender and bombarded into surrender? What's the difference between bombarding them with guns and bombarding the cities where they're manufacturing the weapons and ammunition?

GROUP CAPTAIN MAHADDIE

Before we had H2S [ground-mapping radar first used in January 1943] we had extremely good navigators, selected navigators, and this was the essence of the whole Pathfinder thing. These navigators were able to get much closer to the aiming point than we had previously. Then we laid great lanes of flares, hundreds of flares, and even if we missed the aiming point we could identify some very positive feature on the ground like a lake or a bend in the river, and from there we could creep on to the target and put flares down, different-coloured flares. Then later on we got target indicators and they fell to the ground looking just like a bunch of grapes or a chandelier. The Germans called them
Christmas trees.

ALBERT SPEER

I was often on the flak tower to see the air raids and the most impressive was perhaps the helplessness you felt that all the anti-aircraft guns which were shooting didn't reach the planes. The planes you could see in the searchlight, but they followed the raid undisturbed and then you saw what we called the Christmas trees that was the sign of the
Pathfinders and then you saw the blast of bombs very far away and you knew then that there had been something disastrous to us.

AIR CHIEF MARSHAL HARRIS

The effectiveness of the first
Hamburg raid was due to at last getting permission to use something we'd had in the bag for a long time, which was known as
'window' – the dropping of clouds of aluminium paper strips, which completely upset not only the German location apparatus but also their gun-aiming apparatus. Later on in the war, we had a similar argument trying to get the magnetron valve released to us. We could have done much better if we'd had it released much earlier, but we got it in the end. That was an essential aid to bombing small targets under the weather conditions which normally prevailed. There's always reluctance, and very wrongly placed I think, on the grounds that if you spring a surprise on the enemy he may make one himself and come back at you with it. War isn't done that way. If you've got something that's a surprise, use it before the other fellow's learned how to, because you can be quite certain that if you're being very clever over some electronic gadget, the enemy are not such fools that they are not probably on the same lines and likely to have the same thing or something even better coming up in the lift shortly
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BEN WITTER

Hamburg journalist

I was standing in my house and looked for a moment through the window. I heard no sirens but it was no longer night, it was light as day and as I saw this the first bombs began and I took my parents into our cellar, which was not reinforced and it seemed as though its walls were moving all the time. When we didn't hear any more bomb explosions I climbed up the stairs of the cellar and found that the roof was on fire and with the help of other people put it out. Then I went on my bicycle to the editorial office and couldn't see anything because the daylight which the so-called Christmas trees had created was over and it was night again and there were clouds of smoke. The next day people made a pilgrimage to this part of the city and were very curious. They thought it was the heaviest attack but then came even heavier attacks. I didn't go on my bicycle again but by car and I saw people running away, they were burning like torches and our car was jolting over dead people. Because of the heat the bodies had shrunk and we thought they were children, but they were adults. This attack was concentrated on an area where many working men lived but which also contained a lot of factories. The whole area was crossed by canals and most of the people tried to leap down into them but the water was on fire. It was burning because very many small ships had exploded and oil had been released into the water and people who were themselves on fire jumped into it. Some kind of chemical must have been in it because they burned, swam, burned and went under.

ALBERT SPEER

The population after heavy attacks like Hamburg were extremely shocked, but the shock is not going above a certain degree. I think this degree is overridden by events, when people can't take any more they're just getting numb, there's no more psychological reaction, and when I was seeing them going through the streets in the morning to work they were going like ghosts, they looked terribly bad but in some way like automata they went there. I had this experience mainly in the Ruhr valley where almost every night there were bombing alarms for weeks and weeks and only when it was pouring rain they maybe had one night's sleep. But work went on there in spite of that, morale was still there. But one can't say it was morale – it was German.

MAJOR HERGET

Colonel Hajo Herrmann had the idea of using bomber pilots on Messerschmitt 109s to fly at night because they knew about instrument flying, but a bomber pilot is not a fighter pilot and when he is looking mainly at his instruments he is not looking outside. We were fighters, we were looking outside the whole time. The instruments even in the nighttime didn't interest me. I watched them when I was starting and when I was landing, but during the whole flight only to see if I was flying in the right direction.
'Wild Boar' was good if the weather was good but it was wrong to order them to fly in the 109s when the weather was bad, when they were landing in the wrong place or they jumped out. They jumped because they didn't know where they were or they didn't know how deep the clouds were. Very many pilots died because they didn't jump.
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FLIGHT LIEUTENANT WILLIAM REID, VC

61 Squadron Bomber Command, night of 3 November 1943

Although I was hit in the shoulder it just felt like a numbness, you know, hit with a hammer and not painful or anything. I didn't see any sense in saying I was wounded in case they all thought, He'll pop off any minute now. We flew on again and set the same course but I had no windscreen in front. In some ways this was lucky because my head had been cut up above the helmet and it was bleeding pretty badly, but the cold air coming in – it was minus twenty-eight degrees – froze it up, made it chill up quickly, so it stopped bleeding. I thought it was flak but the rear gunner said, 'Oh, no, it was an Me 110,' and I thought at the time, You should really have said right away. Well, the next time it was again just as startling and trying evasive action we probably lost about another two thousand feet and we couldn't talk because the intercom was shot away. There were some shells going off which I found out later had gone right down the plane and made quite a number of holes in the plane and they hit the magnetic compass and the giro compass. The trimming tabs had been shot off the plane and this meant that you had to hold the stick right back. Well, because my shoulder was wounded this arm was pretty weak and the engineer held it with his other uninjured hand and so we combined to keep the plane straight and level.

WYNFORD VAUGHAN-THOMAS

BBC radio reporter, Berlin raid 3 September 1943

The night comes down and suddenly you take off and in the dusk you go tearing down the runway and you rise and slowly you circle. You still have your riding lights on and far off in the distance a single searchlight guiding you, moving back and forth, and you look behind you and the sky is full of fire coming up to join you. Aircraft rendezvousing in the sky and then the flood started to pour out away into this mystery of Europe. From there on all lighting went out and you could see back in the night sky, rising and falling behind you, the wings of other Lancasters. You got nearer and nearer the searchlight screen right along the Dutch coast and suddenly you were among it. In those days nineteen thousand feet was terrific; we were wearing oxygen masks and as we had on board a four thousand-pound bomb we couldn't get much higher and so you had to go in among these waving searchlights. And honestly I felt like a shrimp moving among luminous seaweed, and up the beams came pumping the flak.

MAJOR HERGET

I saw the bomber very late and I tried to attack, but I was much too quick. I had about double the speed and could only dive and go underneath and then – how to brake without brakes? You had to wait until the plane came along again and I had to fly so slow until the Handley Page could overtake me that I nearly could not handle my Me 110 any more. Then I saw the Handley Page and I was more than surprised when I saw something like a big cannon coming out from underneath and it was pointing at me, so I thought they must have seen me and now I must shoot as quickly as possible. This I did and then the plane exploded because it was full of bombs and then I fell from six thousand five hundred metres and I nearly had to jump out of my plane because I was spinning around all the time. I said to my navigator, 'If we pass two thousand metres then we jump out. I'll tell you, I'll give the order.' We had just passed the two thousand-metre mark on the altimeter when the plane went into a vertical dive and I took the stick and tried to get it out of the dive by force. In the meantime the moon came out and I saw already the tops of the trees when I was able to pull out and climb again. If you have to leave the Messerschmitt by parachute there are two tails, which is difficult if you are spinning. I know very many pilots who have lost an arm, a leg or were dead from hitting the tail. So I was very happy to be still alive and after that I was telling all my pilots never, never to attack the bombs in the body – shoot in the motor.