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on war, terror and living with Hamburg fire bombing survivors 2009-04-23

Reviewer: Erich

This must be a fascinating book to read. Yet, I hesitate to get a hold of it because I have for the majority of my adulthood heard of the horrors of the destruction of the 700 year old city/state Hamburg from one of it's survivors, my father.

It may be more correct to call the bombing of Hamburg - the methodical murdering of it's civilians. "Official" (Allied victors) estimates of those killed during a month of bombing are 40,000 - 45,000. A more correct and less politically correct number exceeds 250,000. Read that as 250,000 unarmed, non-military, men, women, children & infants and refugees. In Hamburg, still to this day, on large construction sites, WWII era bunkers and bomb shelters with their victims still entombed are uncovered.

In the summer of 1943 my father, a boy going on 18, left the bunker he sought shelter in to find the city he was born in insanely in flames. Charcoal bodies floated in platz fountains. The victims tried to avoid the flames by jumping into the fountain water but never considered that the petroleum jelly-like napalm floats on top of water. Later in Altona, a suburb of Hamburg, my father and grand father dug down through the rubble in an attempt to rescue his uncle and family from their basement bomb shelter. They found the fully incinerated skeleton of his uncle squatting in a window well. When my father touched it the skeleton crumbled to a fine dust - enough to fill half a paper bag. Likewise for rest of the family members. A memory that still makes tears well up in my old combat hardened father's eyes.

After the bombing of Coventry Herman Goering payed a visit to Hamburg. During this visit he was openly criticized for his involvement in the planning of this bombing. The Hamburgers pointed out that their city was a mere 3 hours flight time from Britain and that it would be a likely retaliation target. Goering brushed off their criticism and stated, "...if the Brits bomb Hamburg, my name is Schmidt." After Hamburg was bombed the press and the public did indeed referred to Goering as "Schmidt".

The fire bombing of Hamburg truly was an act of terror. There are those who justify it by bringing up Germany's brutal acts of war, yet by exceeding the barbarism of an enemy - what does that make you? What good came of it? The answer is that the Germans did capitulate sooner rather than later and we now have a German society that has no taste for warfare. And what lessons have we learned from all this? Up until 9/11 the USA was sheltered from savage acts of terrorism. However, have we really learned anything from our history? Those clueless boobs in D.C. and on the Fox network complain loudly that our German allies won't contribute combat forces for the US's military ventures don't read enough recent history. Germans have had enough of warfare. Unlike the USA, they're not militarily present in over 140 different countries.

All that having been said - I understand that war must be fought decisively but it's still best to be intelligent and clever and avoid going to battle in the first place. GWB was a dangerous, saber rattling dolt. I hope Obama can prove to be a better leader. I'm not optimistic.

I recommend a visit to Hamburg, a thriving international port city. As you walk around the beautiful Innen Alster and the Altstadt try to visualize the city surrounding you bombed FLAT and engulfed in flames and those passing by you as incinerated corpses laying where they suffered their deaths.
Another good read to follow this up with would be Other Losses.

Factual and Fair 2009-02-03

Reviewer: Kitty S.

Keith Lowe does an excellent job of blending facts and statistics with emotional first-hand accounts of the Hamburg fire bombings in a manner that generously allows the reader to use his/her own moral compass to assess the Allies' actions in the bombardment air strikes of 1943 Hamburg. He effectively forces the reader to assess the air strikes from both a modern humanistic perspective, as well as the Allies' contemporary WWII perspective, creating an interesting intellectual and moral conundrum. Morally, this book is an especially timely read for us as we continue our military presence and actions in the Middle East, often focusing on non-military targets.

Highly recommended 2008-10-19

Reviewer: Geoff M. Granum

I don't propose to match the detail or eloquence of the nearly(?) professional reviews already here, but I do whole-heartedly recommend this book.

I picked up this book on a whim, last night on the way home from work. Having visited Hamburg and made friends, and NOT having learned anything of substance about the firestorm, I figured it could be interesting.

At a pub on the way home - I walk to and from work, the bookstore and the pub are on the way home - I started the book; this around 7pm. I did not leave until page 120 or so, at around midnight. Today I finished it.

I would urge anyone to read this, even if you do know the details of the Hamburg firestorm. If you don't, then let this book be your starting point.

The Inferno of Hamburg in 1943 2008-03-08

Reviewer: Peter Staric, PhD

Between 24th July and 3rd August 1943, Hamburg was subject to seven Anglo-American air raids, which had transformed the blossoming Hanseatic town at the effusion of the river Elbe to North Sea into ruins, dust and ash. As the consequence some 45,000 citizens were killed, 37,439 wounded, 250,000 homeless and over one million of them had left the town, because they have either lost their home or their working place, or - in most cases - both.

British and Americans had two basically different ways of bombing. RAF Air Marshall Arthur Harris was sending his four engine Lancasters, Stirlings, Halifaxes and two engine Mosquitos to carpet bomb German towns during the night in order to decrease their own losses as much as possible. The American USAAF General Ira Eaker directed his B-17 Flying Fortresses and B24 Liberators to daily raids on factories, harbors, railway centers, refineries, bridges and similar strategic objects. The Americans relied on their precise Norden bombsight, with which they aimed well, even if they flew higher than the British. However, their aiming became inaccurate, if the target was obscured by clouds or smoke, if they were subject to violent antiaircraft fire, which was usually the case, or if German fighters, who spotted them much easier in daylight, were attacking them. Due these three "ifs" they suffered four times bigger losses (in percentage) than the British, who kept bombing in the darkness of night. American losses started decreasing not earlier than toward the end of 1944, when the Mustang or Lightning fighters were accompanying their bombers all the way to the target.

In the RAF night raids the British usually sent some 500 to 1000 mostly four engine bombers, which could carry 4.5 tons of bombs each. This was three times as much as each of the 515 German two engine HE-111 bombers carried on their raid of 14th of October 1940, when they completely obliterated the British town Coventry. The German bombs had killed 568 citizens and wounded more than that. In this, the most massive attack of the British town, it became evident that incendiary bombs mixed with a relatively small quantity of high explosive bombs cause much more damage than the HE bombs alone. The enormous conflagration caused by the raid, continues the devastation, because it is too extensive for the firemen to master it, and prevents the rescue of the victims many hours or even days after the bombers have flown away.

By summarizing, the RAF planes were intentionally directed to carpet bomb the towns, thus causing the majority of victims amongst the civilians. This should - besides "dehousing" the factory workers - undermine their morale. In the long run they were expected to overthrow the Government and ask for capitulation. Over the German towns the British also dispersed leaflets, where »Get rid of Hitler and the bombing will stop«, or similar demoralizing slogans were printed. However, Marshal Harris had forgotten that the German bombing of British towns did not undermine the morale of the population in any way. On the German side, the numerous members of NSDAP, Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst, kept the population of Third Reich almost under a total control. Hitler was blind to the victims amongst the civilians, no matter how numerous they were.

Contrary to RAF the USAAF bombers were aiming mostly at strategic objects, which should basically minimize the victims in the civilian population (although this was mostly not the case). But, gradually also the Americans acquired the British way of bombing and even surpassed them in their night raids on Japan (not considering Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

On 24th July at 10.00 PM the first wave of 791 RAF bombers, loaded with 2,300 tons of mostly incendiary bombs started taking off, heading toward Hamburg, where they arrived three hours later. Some bombers, which started 30 minutes ahead of them, were dispersing aluminum strips in length one half of the wavelength of the Würzburg ground radar. These German radars were used to direct their anti-aircraft fire, and lead the fighters toward the enemy bombers. The strips, called Window, which the RAF was using for the first time, had completely blinded all Würzburg radars as well as the Lichtenstein radars of the night fighters. Some other bombers sowed longer strips to jam the long range Freya radar. These strips created the impression that big swarms of bombers were also on their way against other German towns. Due to resonance effect any single strip floating high in the air caused a spot on the German radar screen equal to a bomber plane.

All these strips in the air had so utterly confused the German air defense, that all RAF bombers could drop their deadly load to the northwest residential area of Hamburg undisturbed. Their aiming points were marked by the light flares on the ground, which were dropped previously by the leading pathfinders group.

The fires, which raged some half an hour after the raid, prevented the flight of those, who managed to crawl out of ruins, because they could not walk on the softened and burning asphalt pavement. Another obstacle was the hurricane wind (Feuersturm) caused by the enormous conflagration. Those, who had survived the raid, but could not escape the ruins, suffocated from carbon monoxide, emanating from the glowing coal stocked in the cellars, or for the lack of oxygen, which was consumed by the fire, raging over so vast an area. Those in the internal area of Feuersturm were burned alive, because the temperature exceeding 1000 °C even melted bottles and jars in their makeshift air raid shelters. In case the bombs had damaged the main water supply pipes, the unfortunate people either drowned or were slowly cooked alive. The fire brigades were powerless, because the devastated water supply system was of no use, and too many deep bomb craters on the burning streets prevented moving of their vehicles. Many unexploded, delayed action bombs, filled with metallic splinters disturbed their rescue actions.

The Americans sent 123 Flying Fortresses on the 25th of June and which began dropping their bombs on the Howlandswerke shipbuilding yards at 4.36 PM. Since they were aiming more accurately, each bomber carried only half as many bombs as the RAF planes. Lighter, these planes could fly at 10,000 m, so the German anti-aircraft guns could not reach them. Shortly before reaching their target they descended lower in order to aim more accurately. The flight by day subjected them to massive fighter attacks and they lost 18 planes.

In the following days up to August 3rd Hamburg was subject to one more USAAF- and five RAF raids, which had completely destroyed the whole town. The devastation of such enormous proportions had frightened the Ministers Josef Goebbels and Albert Speer. Both warned Hitler that the Reich could not withstand such raids in the long run. They urged him to visit the town and raise the morale of the population. Contrary to Churchill, who visited bombed British towns, Hitler never visited Hamburg (where he was frequently seen before the raid), nor any other bombed German town.

The book displays in full details an important example what are the consequences when a total war (originally initiated by Hitler) is pushed to the extreme.

A Masterful Retelling of one of the Second World War's Greatest Tragedies 2007-12-27

Reviewer: Hans P. Zell

The doctrine of total war, first conceived and executed by Union forces in the American Civil War, came to full fruition in World War II. Under this concept the only two options given an enemy are either unconditional surrender or annihilation. No distinction is made between soldiers in the field and civilian populations, including women, children and other noncombatants, because the home front is considered to be an essential component in the enemy's capacity to wage war. The destruction of the German home front was agreed on in January 1943 at the Casablanca Conference between Churchill and Roosevelt. There, the American and British air forces were given the mandate to not only dismantle the German military, industrial and economic system but to undermine "the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened." The man put in charge of the operation was the chief of the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur "Butch" Harris, who immediately set out on his task by focusing his efforts on the morale part of his assignment and systematically taking out all German population centers. By the end of the war in early May 1945, Bomber Command together with the U.S. Army Air Force, which eventually joined the British campaign of area (also called saturation) bombing of population centers, had succeeded in razing every German city and most towns of any size to the ground and killing on the order of one-half million German civilians including 75,000 children under the age of 14. In addition, much of the cultural heritage of the German people and nation and of Europe as a whole had been consigned to the flames. After the much publicized firebombing of Dresden, Churchill himself acknowledged that the Western Allies had been engaged in "acts of terror."

The two biggest terrorist acts committed by the two Allies on German soil were undoubtedly the firebombings of Hamburg by the RAF on the night of July 27/28, 1943 and of Dresden by the combined Anglo-American air forces on the night of February 13/14, 1945. The civilian death toll in each of these two raids has been conservatively estimated at 40,000. The most authorative account of of the latter event remains British historian David Irving's "The Destruction of Dresden" which was first published in this country in February 1964. (The recent revisionist version of the Dresden raid by Irving's fellow countryman Frederick Taylor cannot be recommended because, rather than presenting the facts and the truth, this author massages the well known statistics, makes unfounded assertions and engages in complex rationalizations all designed to leave his American and British readers on the moral high ground. Taylor's work on Dresden is nothing less than a whitewash). The Hamburg raid has been given relatively less publicity probably because Dresden, unlike Hamburg, was a truly magnificent city known throughout Europe as the "Florence of the Elbe" and her destruction just weeks prior to war's end seemed particularily senseless and outrageous irrespective of her relative value to the war effort.

Now comes British author Keith Lowe with a truly masterly account of the Hamburg raid in which the undisguised objective was to wipe Germany's second largest city from the face of the earth. The raid was of biblical proportions and code named "Operation Gomorrah." (This choice of names appears to indicate that the Anglo-Americans saw themselves, as they so often do even to this day, as the righteous agents of God and mandated to bring down His wrath on their evil enemies). Lowe is a novelist and this is his first work of non-fiction. He appears to have found his calling because his narrative is exciting, informative and well written and includes numerous eye witness accounts by both British airmen and Hamburg residents. The author has also done his homework in that the book is well researched and organized. Most importantly, Lowe strives for the truth. He faithfully and evenhandedly tells his story giving both sides of the struggle a voice - the airmen whose job it was to deliver their deadly cargo of high explosive and incendiary bombs and the intended victims, families and single individuals, huddled in fear and panic in their basements or in public air raid shelters scattered about the city.

Those in the air and those on the ground lived through their own respective versions of hell in their fight for survival. As the RAF and USAAF bombers made their way across the Reich, they were constantly beset by determined German fighters while batteries of flak antiaircraft guns laid down a withering fire through which they had to fly. The casualty rate was high - for the duration of the war on the order of 55,000 British airmen were killed and half again as many Americans. The scenes of horror on the ground were almost indescribable as families and individuals tried to flee their basement shelters, which the flames were transforming into heated ovens, only to find the streets swept by sheets of fire driven by hurricane force winds. The whole city soon became a raging inferno from which there was no escape. It was in Hamburg where the word firestorm ("Feuersturm") was coined to describe this new and frightening phenomenon. The author concludes by briefly delving into the moral aspects of the campaign which, despite its apocalyptic horrors, failed in its primary ojective of bringing about the collapse of the German home front.

Readers wishing to delve more into this particular phase of World War II will find "The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-945" by German historian Joerg Friedrich of interest. This work, published in 2006 by Columbia University Press, is objective, well researched and chockful of fascinating recollections of eyewitnesses who survived their ordeals as well as historical facts and anecdotes of the towns and sites that were bombed. Admirably, Friedrich avoids being tempted by rancor or recrimination. The same cannot be said for author John Peter Allemand who grew up in Germany during the war and nearly became a bombing statistic. In his book "A Poetical Offering with Commentaries," Allemand reinterprets certain verses by Nostradamus and passages from the Book of Revelation to come up with his own startling prophesies about the coming Apocalypse. Last but not least, there is the important work by the British philosopher A. C. Grayling who, in his recent work "Among the Dead Cities," thoroughly examines the moral issues raised by the firebombings of German and Japanese cities and provides some interesting and provocative answers.