Luftwaffe Firestorms

[bobbysocks]

i can buy that to a degree but the RAF bombed berlin in 1940. they didnt do it everyday but it showed they had the capability. in the early goings hitler still had enough assets...spies and brits who sided with him to have access to fair intel. later on in the war the germans had pretty good overall intel but lacked operational intel ( which everyone did to a certain degree ). one of the guys from my fathers fighter group was shot down and beacme a POW. at a reunion way after the war he talked about his interrogaton by the germans. before he even could give his name, rank, serial number he was told where he was born, his parents, grandparents, and siblings names and ages...home address, what high school he attended and what his grades were....what position he played on the HS football team....his fighter group/squadron and names of men he flew with....and on and on. he said the germans knew more about him than he did himself.

updated:
ok...thanks for the figures Hop....that makes more sense of it.

 

[pbehn]

It wasn't until 1943 that Bomber Command could do to a German city what the Luftwaffe had done to the UK in 1940.

But to be fair The LW flew from France and Belgium.

 

[bobbysocks]

yeah but to be fair BC could have bombed french and belgian ports, airdromes, etc too....where the germans were amassed.

 

[pbehn]

yeah but to be fair BC could have bombed french and belgian ports, airdromes, etc too....where the germans were amassed.

Creating a firestorm in a French City? completely possible but to what end? BC did bomb ports especially during the BoB, after the BoB and blitz the LW wernt really amassed anywhere.

 

[wiking85]

i can buy that to a degree but the RAF bombed berlin in 1940. they didnt do it everyday but it showed they had the capability. in the early goings hitler still had enough assets...spies and brits who sided with him to have access to fair intel. later on in the war the germans had pretty good overall intel but lacked operational intel ( which everyone did to a certain degree ). one of the guys from my fathers fighter group was shot down and beacme a POW. at a reunion way after the war he talked about his interrogaton by the germans. before he even could give his name, rank, serial number he was told where he was born, his parents, grandparents, and siblings names and ages...home address, what high school he attended and what his grades were....what position he played on the HS football team....his fighter group/squadron and names of men he flew with....and on and on. he said the germans knew more about him than he did himself.

updated:
ok...thanks for the figures Hop....that makes more sense of it.

The RAF missed Berlin badly in 1940:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Berlin_in_World_War_II#1940_to_1942

Before 1941, Berlin, at 950 kilometres (590 miles) from London, was at the extreme range attainable by the British bombers then available to the RAF. It could be bombed only at night in summer when the days were longer and skies clear—which increased the risk to Allied bombers. The first RAF raid on Berlin took place on the night of 25 August 1940; 95 aircraft were dispatched to bomb Tempelhof Airport near the center of Berlin and Siemensstadt, of which 81 dropped their bombs in and around Berlin,[9][10] and while the damage was slight, the psychological effect on Hitler was greater. The bombing raids on Berlin prompted Hitler to order the shift of the Luftwaffe's target from British airfields and air defenses to British cities, at a time when the British air defenses were critically close to collapse. It has been argued that this action may actually have saved Britain from defeat.[11] In the following two weeks there were a further five raids of a similar size, all nominally precision raids at specific targets,[10] but with the difficulties of navigating at night the bombs that were dropped were widely dispersed.[12] During 1940 there were more raids on Berlin, all of which did little damage. The raids grew more frequent in 1941, but were ineffective in hitting important targets. The head of the Air Staff of the RAF, Sir Charles Portal, justified these raids by saying that to "get four million people out of bed and into the shelters" was worth the losses involved.[13][14]

Berlin wasn't really seriously threatened until 1943.

On 7 November 1941 Sir Richard Peirse, head of RAF Bomber Command, launched a large raid on Berlin, sending over 160 bombers to the capital. More than 20 were shot down or crashed, and again little damage was done. This failure led to the dismissal of Peirse and his replacement by Sir Arthur Harris, a man who believed in both the efficacy and necessity of area bombing. Harris said: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."[15]
At the same time, new bombers with longer ranges were coming into service, particularly the Avro Lancaster, which became available in large numbers during 1942. During most of 1942, however, Bomber Command's priority was attacking Germany's U-boat ports as part of Britain's effort to win the Battle of the Atlantic. During the whole of 1942 there were only nine air alerts in Berlin, none of them serious.[16] Only in 1943 did Harris have both the means and the opportunity to put his belief in area bombing into practice.

But the Battle of Berlin did not go well for the RAF:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Berlin_(air)#Analysis

In 16 raids with 9,111 sorties on Berlin, Bomber Command lost 492 aircraft, with their crews killed or captured and 954 aircraft damaged, a rate of loss of 5.8%, well above the 5% threshold that was considered the maximum sustainable operational loss rate by the RAF.[15][16]
Daniel Oakman wrote that "Bomber Command lost 2,690 men over Berlin, and nearly 1,000 more became prisoners of war. Of Bomber Command's total losses for the war, around seven per cent were incurred during the Berlin raids.

German intelligence was badly compromised due to the Abwehr being led by anti-Nazis that were passing intel to the Brits and every single one of their agents sent to Britain were turned or captured. The only reliable intelligence the Germans had came via code breaking, sigint, and aerial recon. By 1943 all of that was closed to the Germans.
World War II -- German spy rings in Britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-cross_system

yeah but to be fair BC could have bombed french and belgian ports, airdromes, etc too....where the germans were amassed.

They did, killing lots of French and Belgian civilians, but mostly leaving the Germans intact. Coastal Command did it in 1940-41, while Bomber Command seriously did it from 1940-42 with minimal success. The US did it from 1942 on, even killing French civilians as late as May 1945:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_France_during_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royan#Destruction_of_Royan

 

[Hop]

But to be fair The LW flew from France and Belgium.

Yes, but the BC figures include attacks on targets in France. Naval targets were one of the highest priorities for BC early in the war.

Just to illustrate the different scale of British and German bombing in 1940, a couple of extracts from the war diary of the wehrmacht high command, 8 October 1940:

The heaviest attack ever conducted on Berlin took place. During this attack, 50 demolition and 48 incendiary bombs were dropped, 25 persons were killed and 50 persons injured.

The bombs loads dropped on England and Germany during September amounted to 387 tons dropped by the British on the Reich's territory, 7415 tons dropped by Germany on England. 5,818 tons were dropped on London. This amount almost equals that dropped on Warsaw. In addition 332,676 incendiary bombs were dropped.

The Germans have probably underestimated the total tonnage dropped by the RAF, as the British underestimated the amount of bombs the Luftwaffe was dropping, but it does highlight the different scale of operations.

 

[stona]

Did the LW really go into the war with high minded ideas about city bombing? Perhaps in the West, but in Poland they went after civilians from day one;

Yes, it did. It was both the written doctrine of the Luftwaffe (though not the RAF) and reinforced with a message at the outbreak of hostilities from its C-in C.

What the Allies called 'spillage' and we now call collateral damage was and is a problem with every bombing campaign undertaken. Intelligence is another problem and certainly poor intelligence contributed to one much publicised Luftwaffe bombing in Poland which did cause many civilian casualties.

It didn't take long before civilian populations were being routinely and intentionally targeted but in 1939 that was not the intention of either side.

Cheers

Steve

 

[wiking85]

Yes, it did. It was both the written doctrine of the Luftwaffe (though not the RAF) and reinforced with a message at the outbreak of hostilities from its C-in C.

What the Allies called 'spillage' and we now call collateral damage was and is a problem with every bombing campaign undertaken. Intelligence is another problem and certainly poor intelligence contributed to one much publicised Luftwaffe bombing in Poland which did cause many civilian casualties.

It didn't take long before civilian populations were being routinely and intentionally targeted but in 1939 that was not the intention of either side.

Cheers

Steve

AFAIK LW pilots were ordered to strafe columns of civilians in Poland and France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Warsaw_in_World_War_II

n 1939, the Luftwaffe opened the German attack on Poland with operation Wasserkante, an air attack on Warsaw on 1 September.

As the German Army approached Warsaw on 8 September 1939, 140 Junkers Ju-87 Stukas attacked the portions of the city on the east bank of the Vistula River and other bombers bombed the Polish Army positions in the western suburbs. On 13 September Luftwaffe level and dive bombers caused widespread fires.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Wieluń

The bombing of Wieluń refers to the bombing of the Polish town of Wieluń by the German Luftwaffe on 1 September 1939. The Luftwaffe started bombing Wielun at 4:40 am, five minutes before the shelling of Westerplatte, which has traditionally been considered the beginning of World War II. It is considered to be one of the first bombings in Europe in this war.[1] It killed an estimated 1,300 civilians, injured hundreds more and destroyed 90 percent of the town centre. There were no military targets of any importance in the area.[2] The casualty rate was more than twice as high as Guernica.[1]

 

[Denniss]

I have never heard or seen a Luftwaffe order to open fire at civilians during the Polish campaign (or later), not covered by your Wiki snippets.
Wielun is still something for a long discussions especially as it makes no sense to eliminate a city without having military targets inside. They had Intel reports of polish units nearby but there was no need to bomb the clearly marked hospital as one of the first targets (as often claimed), especially not with Ju 87 tasked with pinpoint bombing in ground support operations.

 

[Milosh]

It was not X-Great the Germans used but X-Gerät which was an improvement on Knickebein. There was also Y-Gerät.

 

[pbehn]

It was not X-Great the Germans used but X-Gerät which was an improvement on Knickebein. There was also Y-Gerät.

from what i read the translation of knickebein to English is googly, a useless translation if you havnt seen a game of cricket in India and a very poor one if you have.

 

[wiking85]

from what i read the translation of knickebein to English is googly, a useless translation if you havnt seen a game of cricket in India and a very poor one if you have.

Knickebein literally means bent leg.

 

[Koopernic]

"knickbein" was really more a navigation system than a blind bombing system as it wasn't all that accurate. It relied upon two beams: one to guide the bomber and an intersecting one to provide a release signal to the bombardier. It was an evolution of the blind landing systems (and navigation systems) the German Lorentz company had successfully developed and marketed around the world. On some German aircraft you will find in the list of avionics a FuBL (Funk Blind Landung) and Kinckbein was in fact disguised as this equipment. The Germans were in fact carrying out fully automatic landings via the autopilot in 1939.

X-geraet ( x device) used a more elaborate antenna to ensure a tighter beam and addition had three intersecting beams: one as a warning of approach to target, another two provide a means of measuring the actual ground speed of the bomber so that adjustments to the bomb release could be made accounting for wind effects, a specialist computing clock was provided to do this and generate the release signal though the bombardier had to start the clocks when he heard the crossing beams the actual release was computed and automatic. It was quite a thorough system. I imagine that as the degree of crabbing of the aircraft might be noted even cross winds could be accounted for (potentially). x-gerate was used in specialist squadrons due to its higher levels of training, for instance the antenna had side lobes that inexperienced crew could accidentally fly along.

Having to build a second station to provide a source for the intersecting beams was an inconvenience hence a new system called y-geraet was developed in which a phase modulate signal from ground station was retransmitted by the bomber and compared with the transmitting phase to establish range. This system was actually jammed from its first day of use (according to British sources). About this time the Luftwaffe withdrew rather rapidly to form up for operation Barbarossa.

Three further blind bombing systems made it into use. Around this time a IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) system was introduced into the Luftwaffe. The transponder on the aircraft was called "Erstling" (first born) and the Interrogator on the ground radar was called "Gemse". A coded signal was sent out from Gemse and retransmitted, slightly delayed, on a different frequency by Erstling and the signal displayed as an adjacent second blip to the radar operator.

By boosting these devices a blind bombing system called EGON Erstling Gemse Offensive Navigation was born. It was a contemporary of Oboe though not as accurate as it used only one ground station which functioned like a normal radar and thus had a 0.1-0.2 degree beam width, which is a lot at 300-500km but adequate for mine laying). A latter version called EGON-II could use a second ground station in the manner of Oboe for greater accuracy. Rather than embed Morse signals into the interrogation pulses to direct the pilot EGON relied upon voice commands, it did however allow completely curved and 'random' approaches. Latter, 1943 or 1944 an attachment called Nachtfee was added which allowed directions to be displayed as light patterns and a display and one imagines it could have been integrated into the autopilot. These devices were quite compact and could be carried by single seat single engined bombers like the Fw 190F and latter Arado Ar 234.

Another system was Zyklops which used a beam again, however by this time the antena forming of the beam had been greatly simplied and merely required a pair of small two wheeled traliers about the size needed to carry a lawn mower which were place a few hundred meters apart orthogonal to the direction of flight. The "Erstling" transponder was used to measure range to target with bomb release by voice. It seems to have been used if the German army needed a target destroyed in a tactical situation; eg a bridge.

Towards the end of the war the Germans began to replaced Erstling/EGON with "Neuling" (New Born) which was an IFF system with in built blind bombing and elaborate anti-jamming measures.

An elaborated development of the EGON/Neuling system was the Wasserspiegel system developed to guide the winged V2 missile (known as the A4b) of which two were launhed. This system used a giant Wassermann (Early Warning Height finding Freya) laid on its side and was to either provide a midcourse update to the missile or alternatively guide it to within 120m of target.

Those dismissing the V2 system should consider that there were a number of systems in an advanced stage of development that would have greatly improved accuracy of both the winged and fully ballistic types. This of course again highlight the effect of starting a bombing campaign without having evolved the technical means to limit civilian deaths. Something both sides did.

In regards to Luftwaffe "Firebombing" I would question as to whether there was a well developed strategy to do this. The Luftwaffe had studied Douhets theories on city bombing and mostly rejected them. It developed as a combined arms air force with strategies to attack what would be regarded as command and control centers.

What looks like firebombing (assumed to create a firestorm) could also be the byproduct of using incendiaries to create fires to target mark by the specialized target markers using x-geraete.

Due to the levels of accuracy possible even with blind bombing aids and free fall bombs meant destroying a factory and putting it out of action meant destroying the factory as well as the workers houses that were so close to the factory that they often shared a wall. It was collateral damage that eventually became a large part of the target. It certainly became amoral.

At some point it certainly evolved into targeting civilians not as a collateral or secondary target but as a primary one.. They were confronted with tactical situations and responded to those.

When it is said that London was bombed or Coventry it should be born in mind that German cities were also bombed. Berlin (Airport and the industrial suburb of Siemensstadt) was bombed on 25 August 1940 before London was. It should also be considered that the Luftwaffe had specific targets within London including factories and docks. The decision to bomb London was made in part because of the Bombing of Berlin, in part due to poor intelligence about Luftwaffe's success in attacking RAF radar and air bases and was done in support of the commerce war.

It's common for the narrative to be told in the form of the Germans terror bombing while not including the own perspective and experience except for some ghastly but nonetheless out of context quip by Goering. There was not only 'tit for tat' escalation going on here perhaps something else.

It's fairly clear that the gloves came of as either side made mistakes. Both sides initially had clear directives inhibiting their Airman from taking risks near cities. It's also clear that propaganda and the blame game is a key part of fighting a war. There are numerable ones of that then and now. It's probably fair to say that the British were more restrained morally nut its not fair to say the Germans didn't have any or that elements weren't looking for every excuse to escalate.

 

[stona]

Wielun is still something for a long discussions especially as it makes no sense to eliminate a city without having military targets inside.

This was exactly the sort of intelligence failure I was referring to. Rather like putting a smart bomb through the Chinese embassy in Belgrade or strafing the fighting vehicles of your allies in Iraq. One of the features of aerial warfare is that decisions have to be taken very quickly and are irrevocable. Does anyone believe that the US intentionally targeted a civil air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing more than 400 civilians?

A Ju 87 was a potentially accurate weapon, but only as good as the men flying it. It is entirely possible that targets (like a hospital) were hit unintentionally. Collateral damage is not a new phenomenon. Much is made of this sort of damage by propagandists then, and now.

Cheers

Steve

 

[wiking85]

Koopernic what is your source for those navigation systems? As to Y-Verfähren RV Jones was a bit of a self promoter there, as research into the German records of KG100 show that the system was successfully used prior to when he claimed it was and used successfully thereafter. The British certainly were able to make its use difficult after they figured out how to jam it, but they didn't stop it from being successfully used against targets even as late as May 1941. Not sure about thereafter though, but the Baeddeker Blitz apparently was able to find its targets. By 1944 though the LW was having trouble finding London by night, so clearly the British managed to do something or at least the LW had lost its night skills.

 

[pbehn]

Knickebein literally means bent leg.

Bent or wavy the beam had side lobes which could cause errors. I know, I speak German but the translation I read years ago was googly that is a ball bowled out of the back of the hand that spins the wrong way. I read a lot about the Knickebein, X and Y gerat at the time and the translation didnt make sense to me. Maybe because it was a combination of two beams.

 

[stona]

Knickebein is also the name of a cocktail, I remember a horrible concoction with Cognac and other things

Don't underestimate the problems of navigation for bombers. In one of the USAAF follow up raids to the British raid on Dresden (Dresden was the primary target, not a secondary as previously and subsequently) a significant portion of the force had some serious navigational problems. They eventually spotted a city with a large river running through it and assumed that they had found Dresden. Unfortunately the river was the Danube, not the Elbe, and they bombed Prague, roughly 80 miles from Dresden as the crow flies! This was February 15th 1945.


This and many, many, other similar incidents, raises questions about the USAAF's professed adherence to precision bombing. The bombers did have specific targets in Dresden, but could not possibly have found them in Prague. They simply bombed the centre of the conurbation and this is in fact less precise than the initial, devastating, raid carried out by Bomber Command's 5 Group on Dresden (they got the correct city) two days earlier.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Hop]

In regards to Luftwaffe "Firebombing" I would question as to whether there was a well developed strategy to do this. The Luftwaffe had studied Douhets theories on city bombing and mostly rejected them. It developed as a combined arms air force with strategies to attack what would be regarded as command and control centers.

The Luftwaffe had plans to attack all sorts of targets. In Bristol alone they had about 10 separate food industry targets.

What looks like firebombing (assumed to create a firestorm) could also be the byproduct of using incendiaries to create fires to target mark by the specialized target markers using x-geraete.

The Luftwaffe greatly increased their use of incendiaries over the UK as the blitz wore on. On the 19 March 1941 raid on London they dropped 470 tons of HE and 122,000 incendiaries. The goal was to cause as much fire damage to the city as possible.

When it is said that London was bombed or Coventry it should be born in mind that German cities were also bombed. Berlin (Airport and the industrial suburb of Siemensstadt) was bombed before London was.

The first bombing of Berlin was an attack by a single French bomber as retaliation for the large Luftwaffe attack on targets in and around Paris. I don't think the Germans were aware of the French attack on Berlin, though.

A few bombs fell on open ground on the outskirts of London in June 1940. The first major attack was the bombing of Croydon on 15 August, which was aimed at Croydon airport, and killed 60 workers at a perfume factory in Croydon.

The next major attack was on an electricity substation in Wimbledon that killed about 15 civilians.

Bombs were dropped on London on the night of the 19/20 August, and on the 21/22 and 23/24.

The RAF first attacked targets in Berlin on the 24/25 August (London was also bombed by the Luftwaffe at the same time)

It should also be considered that the Luftwaffe had specific targets within London including factories and docks.

The same is true for all British bombing at the time. When the RAF went out to attack Berlin, they had individual military/industrial targets.

It's fairly clear that the gloves came of as either side made mistakes. Both sides initially had clear directives inhibiting their Airman from taking risks near cities. It's also clear that propaganda and the blame game is a key part of fighting a war. There are numerable ones of that then and now. It's probably fair to say that the British were more restrained morally nut its not fair to say the Germans didn't have any or that elements weren't looking for every excuse to escalate.

Both sides overestimated their own accuracy. The consequence of that is both sides assumed the inaccuracy of enemy attacks must have been deliberate.

But it's worth pointing out that it was the Germans that escalated the bombing war from the attempt to bomb specific military/industrial targets to area bombing cities, and that they did so as their daylight offensive against the RAF failed, and as they sought a new method of forcing Britain out of the war. Chucking out as many bombs as possible over British cities was the next logical step for the Luftwaffe.

 

[stona]

The who did what first arguments always end acrimoniously but it is a fact that it was the Luftwaffe which very significantly increased the percentage of incendiary ordnance which it dropped in late 1940. This was an attempt to destroy targets by fire (not exactly a new idea, read any ancient history). The charge is that this implies a much more imprecise targeting and it does. This is simply a pragmatic response to the limitations of bombing accuracy at night from altitude. The RAF soon followed suit.
When the USAAF joined the European war it initially carried much higher percentages of high explosive ordnance than incendiary. This gradually changed as it to accepted the limitations imposed on it by ever increasing altitude and the European weather.
I'd be interested to know the make up of the loads carried to Tokyo by the B-29s in February/March 1945. I believe a lesson had been learned.
In Europe the first attempts to create 'fire storms' were made by the Luftwaffe. For a variety of reasons they were not very successful. The RAF was much more successful on occasion, but it is not an easy thing to accomplish, requiring the concentration of bombing in space and time referred to by Harris.

The fire storm at Dresden was caused by the bombing of the 224 Lancasters of 5 Group. The low level marking typical of that Group and carried out by Mosquitos was accurate. Almost all the target indicators fell within 100 metres of the aiming point. 5 Group had developed a system called sector bombing. A final aiming point was marked and each aircraft in a squadron was given not just a different heading for its approach (2 degrees difference) but a different timed overshoot. The idea was to achieve an even density of bombing over a fan shaped sector subtended by an angle of 32 degrees (16 aircraft each with a 2 degree difference in heading). It worked perfectly at Dresden as it had first at Braunschweig in October 1944. The Luftwaffe in 1940 was still essentially bombing piecemeal with individual aircraft, British techniques had come on a long way in the intervening years.

So effective was 5 Groups attack that when the rest of Bomber Command arrived with another 550 bombers the original target area was already one massive fire. This led to an urgent discussion between the master bomber (Squadron Leader De Wesselow, a Canadian) and his chief marker (Wing Commander Le Good, an Australian) in which it was decided to drop target indicators into the fringe areas around the already destroyed area. This is what has since led to wild theories about the targeting of survivors who had indeed escaped the initial bombing into precisely the areas which would now be hit. Finally at 1.42 a.m. with bomb aimers no longer able to identify target indicators De Wesselow gave a final order to bomb the centre of the fires.

Lest we imagine that the creation of such devastation was a routine achievement on the next night more than 700 aircraft from bomber command attempted to repeat the performance at Chemnitz. 5 Group were engaged elsewhere attacking oil refineries at Rositz, south of Leipzig, but 1,3,4,6 and 8 Groups turned out.
717 aircraft bombed but there was no concentration of the 1,300 tons of ordnance dropped and Chemnitz escaped almost unscathed. It was saved by the weather, target indicators on the ground were invisible and sky markers disappeared in the murk almost as soon as they were dropped The master bomber, having repeatedly tried to order more sky markers and according to one who took part in the raid seeming to have little idea where to direct the bomber stream finally gave up. His last recorded comment "Oh Hell, I'm going home, see you at breakfast."

Luftwaffe fire storms? They wanted to create them but really didn't have the means to do it without a great deal of luck and circumstance. The full might of Bomber Command did have the means, but it too struggled to achieve the effect consistently.

Cheers

Steve

 

[stona]

The who did what first arguments always end acrimoniously but it is a fact that it was the Luftwaffe which very significantly increased the percentage of incendiary ordnance which it dropped in late 1940. This was an attempt to destroy targets by fire (not exactly a new idea, read any ancient history). The charge is that this implies a much more imprecise targeting and it does. This is simply a pragmatic response to the limitations of bombing accuracy at night from altitude. The RAF soon followed suit.
When the USAAF joined the European war it initially carried much higher percentages of high explosive ordnance than incendiary. This gradually changed as it to accepted the limitations imposed on it by ever increasing altitude and the European weather.
I'd be interested to know the make up of the loads carried to Tokyo by the B-29s in February/March 1945. I believe a lesson had been learned.
In Europe the first attempts to create 'fire storms' were made by the Luftwaffe. For a variety of reasons they were not very successful. The RAF was much more successful on occasion, but it is not an easy thing to accomplish, requiring the concentration of bombing in space and time referred to by Harris.

The fire storm at Dresden was caused by the bombing of the 224 Lancasters of 5 Group. The low level marking typical of that Group and carried out by Mosquitos was accurate. Almost all the target indicators fell within 100 metres of the aiming point. 5 Group had developed a system called sector bombing. A final aiming point was marked and each aircraft in a squadron was given not just a different heading for its approach (2 degrees difference) but a different timed overshoot. The idea was to achieve an even density of bombing over a fan shaped sector subtended by an angle of 32 degrees (16 aircraft each with a 2 degree difference in heading). It worked perfectly at Dresden as it had first at Braunschweig in October 1944. The Luftwaffe in 1940 was still essentially bombing piecemeal with individual aircraft, British techniques had come on a long way in the intervening years.

So effective was 5 Groups attack that when the rest of Bomber Command arrived with another 550 bombers the original target area was already one massive fire. This led to an urgent discussion between the master bomber (Squadron Leader De Wesselow, a Canadian) and his chief marker (Wing Commander Le Good, an Australian) in which it was decided to drop target indicators into the fringe areas around the already destroyed area. This is what has since led to wild theories about the targeting of survivors who had indeed escaped the initial bombing into precisely the areas which would now be hit. Finally at 1.42 a.m. with bomb aimers no longer able to identify target indicators De Wesselow gave a final order to bomb the centre of the fires.

Lest we imagine that the creation of such devastation was a routine achievement on the next night more than 700 aircraft from bomber command attempted to repeat the performance at Chemnitz. 5 Group were engaged elsewhere attacking oil refineries at Rositz, south of Leipzig, but 1,3,4,6 and 8 Groups turned out.
717 aircraft bombed but there was no concentration of the 1,300 tons of ordnance dropped and Chemnitz escaped almost unscathed. It was saved by the weather, target indicators on the ground were invisible and sky markers disappeared in the murk almost as soon as they were dropped The master bomber, having repeatedly tried to order more sky markers and according to one who took part in the raid seeming to have little idea where to direct the bomber stream finally gave up. His last recorded comment "Oh Hell, I'm going home, see you at breakfast."

Luftwaffe fire storms? They wanted to create them but really didn't have the means to do it without a great deal of luck and circumstance. The full might of Bomber Command did have the means, but it too struggled to achieve the effect consistently.

Cheers

Steve