When Puritans Fight Pt. 1
The Battle of Hamburg, codenamed Operation Gomorrah, was a series of air raids conducted by the RAF on the city of Hamburg beginning in the end of July 1943. It was at the time the heaviest assault in the history of aerial warfare and was later called the Hiroshima of Germany by British officials.
The operation was originally formulated by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill with help from Air Chief Marshal Arthur "Bomber" Harris (who famously said of the Germans "They have sown the wind, and now they shall reap the whirlwind") and was actually a joint effort between the RAF Bomber Command, the RCAF, and the USAAF (specifically 8th Air Force Bomber Command), who combined to create an "around-the-clock" bombing mission spanning 8 days and 7 nights — the Americans conducting the daylight raids with the British following after nightfall.
On July 24, at approximately 00:57AM, the first bombing started by the RAF and lasted almost an hour. A second daylight raid by US Army Air Force was conducted at 2:40PM. A third raid was conducted on the morning of the 26th. The night attack of July 26 at 00:20AM was extremely light (due to a severe thunderstorm and high winds over the North Sea during which a considerable number of bombers jettisoned the explosive part of their bomb loads) with only two bomb drops reported. That attack is often not counted when the total number of Operation Gomorrah attacks is given. There was no day raid on the 27th.
On the night of July 27, shortly before midnight, 739 aircraft attacked Hamburg. A number of factors combined to give the enormous destruction that followed; the unusually dry and warm weather, the concentration of the bombing in one area and that the city's firefighters were unable to reach the initial fires — the high explosive "Cookies" used in the early part of the raid had prevented them getting into the center of the city from the periphery where they were working on the results of the 24th. The bombings culminated in the spawning of the so-called "Feuersturm" (firestorm). Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 240 km/h (150 mph) and reaching temperatures of 800 °C (1,500 °F). It caused asphalt on the streets to burst into flame, cooked people to death in air-raid shelters, sucked pedestrians off the sidewalks like leaves into a vacuum cleaner and incinerated some eight square miles (21 km²) of the city. Most of the casualties (40,000) caused by Operation Gomorrah happened on this single night.
On the night of July 29, Hamburg was again attacked by over 700 aircraft. The last raid of Operation Gomorrah was conducted on August 3.
Operation Gomorrah caused at least 50,000 deaths and left over a million German civilians homeless. Approximately 3,000 aircraft were deployed, 9,000 tons of bombs dropped, and 250,000 houses destroyed.[citation needed] No subsequent city raid shook Germany as did that on Hamburg; documents show that German officials were thoroughly alarmed and there is some indication from later allied interrogation of high officials, that Hitler thought that further attacks of similar weight might force Germany out of the war. Hamburg was hit by air raids another 69 times before the end of World War II.
RAF Bomber Command lost 12 bombers on the first day of the attack. In total during the war, 440 were lost over Hamburg.
