In the last years Berlin city has undergone a radical transformation, with an influx of money from public institutions and private companies, far away from the cold days of the German reunification in 1990. This has benefited in the architectural modernization and services improvement for its inhabitants but in contrast led to the loss of its unique condition among other European capital cities: historical buildings, bridges, roads and streets, survivors of the 1939-1945 war years and its battle fires are all being refurbished to clean and nearly new condition (the Reinhardtstraße bridge of the Stadtbahn is one of the last examples of this).
Berlin is now losing its value as a “time capsule” from the past.
This battle-scarred building is located at Am Kupfergraben Ecke Dorotheenstraße nr 1 in Berlin-Mitte district, today home of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin School of Business and Economics.
With its walls full of signs of war, smoke and fire from Luftangriffe by British RAF and American air-raids, and shrapnel from howitzers and splinters due to street-fighting with the Soviets during the final Battle of Berlin in May 1945, it is an evident survivor of the destruction experienced by the city.
[Two pictures of this building before the restoration work, as viewed in 2008.]
The heavily damaged building was restored and cleaned a few years ago, helping in preserve it but in the process erasing forever its original state, much more blackened and holed, a true-live survivor of the aerial bombings and battles suffered by the city during the Second World War which now has lost its past.
[This aerial view taken a few days after the war’s end in Berlin, clearly shows the devastation suffered by Mitte district. Museumsinsel with Altes Museum is in the foreground, Unter den Linden crossing from top to bottom, and other main sites like the Zeughaus, Staatsoper, Humboldt Universität, and the green Tiergarten park far behind. Our “time-capsule” building is seen at extreme right, marked with a red arrow.]
It has survived in those conditions due to its location in Berlin Mitte, near the Museumsinsel. During the postwar years, located at the Soviet Occupation sector, it was repaired by a number of securing provisions of concrete and brickwork, a patchwork which made extend its life until the end of the Cold War in 1990.
[Different views of today’s condition of the Humboldt building.]
This building was built in 1879-83 with a four-storey sandstone facade in Italian Renaissance forms mixed with simple Prussian functional design.
It was renovated in 2002 to be the Faculty of Economic Sciences and from 2009 started the restoration of the roof and facade in cooperation with the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege (the State Office for preservation of historic monuments), with emphasis in that the signs of war remain legible on its 1.200 m2 facade.
The work was made by Ellwart Steinrestaurieung, an experienced company focused on monument and ancient buildings restoration, in close cooperation with the architecture office Martin Focks. In their study they asked themselves before the restoration began: “…Can a façade repair appropriate to the monument be realized without neglecting the age value of the building and without distorting or even eliminating the historical traces of war damage?”
Massive work was made to exchange the facade stones as well as a removal of post-war provisories, but not the projectile impacts. The final result is a mixture of two periods, with a facade full of holes in a secured and cleaned building.
It costs approx. €2.5 million and ended in the Autumn of 2013.
[Close view of one of the several graffities which ‘adorn’ the building before the 2009-restoration project.]
[And compare it with a 2013-year view…Notice at upper right that the missing stone cornice of the facade seen in previous image has been retrofitted during the restoration project, and the overall condition is more clean.]
In this image taken in 1947 by photographer Harry Croner can be seen the surviving building at Berlin Am Kupfergraben after the war’s fire and destruction with Pergamonmuseumand its entrance at left. Notice the ruined dome of the Stadtschloss in the background.
This week we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the start of the “Berlin Luftbrücke”. When the Soviets blockade Berlin on the night of 24 June 1948, the only way to supply the city from West Germany was by plane.
US President Truman and the National Security Council (NSC) formally stated America’s determination to remain in Berlin. They named it “Operation Vittles”, and began on 26 June with the landing of a Douglas C-47 Skytrain in Tempelhof.
American and British airmen made a risky non-stop work flying across Soviet East Germany in unarmed airplanes, and there was also a large supply of ex-Luftwaffe airplane mechanics available right in Berlin. Pilots from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa also joined the ranks.
The Allies used hundreds of transport and cargo airplanes from RAFTransport Command and the USMilitary Air Transport Service, and even private operators aid on the effort with their aircraft and cargo trucks. They included civilians as well as military personnel. Some facilities and airfields were improved to accomplish the operation, the old Berlin Tempelhof too, with the construction of a new runway and landing strip to the south of the airfield. A long distance radar was installed on the main building of the airport to guide the aircrews to West Berlin. Even a new air base was built, airport Tegel, with the French authorities ordering the construction of a 2428 m (7,966 ft) long runway, as Tempelhof was not big enough to accommodate all relief aircraft.
[Berlin’s Neukölln children watching from a pile of rubble an American transport Douglas C-54 in her final approach to landing at Flughafen Tempelhof.]
Why is the Berlin Airlift related to the bombing of the city during the war? The same young men that 3 years before flew through Flak and enemy fighters every day and night to bomb the Third Reich’s capital now make the same trip but to carry milk, coal and food to the blocked city. Many former US bomber pilots volunteered for duty in the Air transport command in the new born-USAF. This is how former enemies became friends in the Cold War.
[Here, three US airmen check the cargo load inside a C-47 Skytrain during the Berlin Airlift. Notice they even wear their WW2-era flying jackets, the patch on the shoulder on the men at extreme right identifies him as a China-Burma-India veteran.]
[Old foes become friends: the Handley Page Halifax, one of Bomber Command’s heavy bombers that raided and attacked Berlin during 1943-1944, joined in the combined effort to save the blocked city. This is G-ALEF ‘Red Eagle’ an ex-military plane now in civilian hands from the Eagle Aviation Company at Wunstorf, West Germany during the Berlin Airlift, 1948].
[An American Douglas C-124 Globemaster II, a massive-size cargo airplane, moments before landing at Flughafen Tempelhof. The Globemaster II entered service with the USAF in 1950, designed with the lessons learned from the Berlin blockade and airlift, so this pic was taken a few years later of the Berlin Luftbrücke operation. Notice that the last meters of the landing pattern were overflying several cemeteries at Leinestraße in Neukölln.]
[A group of curious Berliner kids and a woman with her little child are looking on as the cargo load is being lowered from a big US Air Force Douglas C-74 cargo plane, the only one used on the #berlinluftbrücke, as it was on trials. This photo was taken at Gatow airfield, on 19 August 1948. Note that some of the kids are barefoot, a post-war common sight in the defeated Germany.]
At the end, with almost 278,000 flights, more than 2.3 million tons of freight was transported, feeding 2 million people by air with 1500 flights landed in Berlin every day with enough cargo to supply the city indefinitely.
31 US airmen and 40 British lost their lives during the Berlin airlift, and on 20 July 1949 the US Congress awarded the Medal for Humane Action to members of the US Army, Air Force, and Navy who served in support for at least 120 days during the period 26 June 1949 through 30 September 1949. Lest we forget.
[The breaking of the blockade of Berlin by the Allied airlift of 1948-1949. Produced by British Movietone News, GB, 1949.]
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Source:
Harrington, D. Pioniere der Luftbrücke. Nishen Kommunikation, Berlin 1998.
[Armourers from No 97 Squadron preparing MC-bombs on their trolleys to be loaded onto a Lancaster bomber on July 1943 at RAF Waddington.]
The limited and inadequate arsenal of bombs composed of the high explosive GP (general purpose) bombs (10-15% detonation failure rate) made British Bomber Command to develop a new range of explosives: these weapons were the Medium Capacity (MC) Bombs, which had improved metal to explosive ratios and also proved more reliability and generally exploded on impact, unless fitted with delayed action fuses. Basically, higher explosive into lighter cases to obtain a greater blast.
The analysis of the destruction inflicted by Luftwaffe’s bombers over Britain, particularly by the Germans’ SC (Spreng Cylindrische) series of bombs (usually filled with a mixture of 40% amatol and 60% TNT), with their higher charge to weight ratios and destructive power, marked the new requirement.
[This is a German SC 2500 ‘Max’ bomb (5,000-lb/2,300 kg), the biggest one of this series, ready to be loaded in a Heinkel He 111H-5 medium bomber at a Luftwaffe airfield during the final phase of the Battle of Britain in 1940. Due to its massive size, this weapon had to be carried externally attached to a reinforced ETC2000 bomb rack.]
The first bombs dropped on an air raid were high explosive bombs, to shook the people and lead the way to the incendiaries, the actual fuse of the destruction into the streets. Vast swaths of fire engulfed the town, and then the RAF attacked again with their MC-bombs, a last punch of destruction to spread fire and keep firefighters away and to avoid wardens and police officers to drawn out and assist the city and their people. The roads and streets, and water pumps were destroyed and harassed by craters and blows, incapacitating the workforce.
[This crater was made by an explosive bomb dropped by Bomber Command into downtown Berlin in October 1940.]
The 500-lbs MC (227 kg) bomb was first introduced into the Command’s inventory at the end of 1941, the bomb contained twice as much explosive of Amatol than its GP equivalent and became a mainstay for bombing operations due to its much greater blast effect. As the war progressed, the Air Ministry scientific advisors and experiments made by Solly Zuckerman (a scientific advisor to the Allies on bombing strategy) found that blast effect rather than penetrative power was more important in destroying buildings.
[Men from No 77 Squadron, based at RAF Elvington look on as the message ‘we hope this hurts’ is chalked onto a 500-lb MC bomb prior to their fourth attack, on Berlin on 30 January 1944.]
However, they still lacked aluminized explosive like German bombs, which would have rise the effect more than three times. By March 1943, 19 firms were producing bomb bodies nearly at 18,000 a month and the MC bombs formed the main bulk of destruction tonnage dropped by Bomber Command on Germany, with the heavy 1,000-lb version being introduced in the spring of 1943 as a very effective weapon and about a quarter of a million were produced by the end of the war. It became the standard British bomb.
[Armourers prepare to load 500-lb MC bombs into De Havilland Mosquito B IV, DZ483GB-R, of No 105 Squadron RAF at Marham, Norfolk, in preparation for a night raid on Berlin by aircraft of No 2 Group in 1942-43. At this time, Mosquitoes, flying alone in the dark, usually carried a bomb load consisted of four 500 MC, an explosive ‘present’ sent just to disrupt and keep the head of the enemy down.]
[MC‘1000-pounders’ bombs, await in their trolleys to be loaded into this No 76 Squadron Merlin-engined Halifax heavy bomber, W7805/MP-M, at Linton-on-Ouse, Yorkshire on April 3, 1943. This bomber failed to return to England that night, during the bombing of Essen, one of the 24 aircraft lost. W7805 was probably hit by Flak, four men of her crew perished on the crash.]
[..and the sight after being loaded in the bomb-bay. Here, we can see the usual load for industrial demolition, factories, railyards, dockyards (know as ‘Abnormal’), loaded in the bomb-bay of an Avro Lancaster of No 9 Squadron RAF at Bardney, Lincolnshire, before a night raid on Stettin. ‘Abnormal’ consisted of 14 x 1,000-lb MC high-explosive bombs. When RAF Bomber Command bombed Berlin the target wasn’t her factories, the aim was to destroy the city and the people’s morale, so only a few part of the attacking force carried this type of load during those raids, mainly some of the Pathfinders and the last squadrons to be scheduled over the target, with a mix of instantaneous (nose-armed) and long-delay (tail-armed) fusing-bombs.]
The explosive bombs shook everything around and fill the target with destruction, noise and dust into the streets. It is estimated that during the attacks on the Hauptstadt during the Winter 1943-44 by British Bomber Command, 9,390 Berliners civilians were killed. The city resisted and their defences inflicted a severe blow to the enemy campaign, but moral fell to a minimum.
[A shocked but alive family is helped by a young member of the Luftwaffe through the rubble on a street in Berlin from a demolished building, following Allied air raids during 1944.]
During the war 758,408 tons of high explosive were despatched on Bomber Command aircraft, and would drop some 253,800 1,000-lb MC bombs along with 403,000 500-pounders.
The research done by the USSBS (The United States Strategic Bombing Survey) and John Fahey’s paper indicate that on average, it cost the British Government £1.00 per 23.4-lb of HE bomb weight purchased. At this price, the total value of high explosive bombs despatched to targets by Bomber Command during the strategic air offensive was £72,599,749, but it is important to indicate that these figures were just the guesses of economic experts, due to the impossibility of getting reliable information.
This table shows, by type, the number of MC bombs dropped by RAFBomber Command during World War 2. Source: Burls, Nina. RAF bombs and bombing. ROYALAIRFORCEHISTORICALSOCIETY. Journal 45. 2009.
Air Ministry. RAF Armament Volume I: Bombs and Bombing Equipment. 1954.
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey. Air Studies Division Report: The Economic Effects of the Air Offensive Against German Cities, USSBS.
Bowman, Martin W. Nachtjagd, Defenders of the Reich 1940-1943. Pen & Sword Aviation. 2016.
Bowman. Martin W. Voices in Flight: the heavy bomber offensive of WW2. Pen & Sword Aviation. 2014.
Bowman, Martin W. Voices in Flight: RAF Night Operations. Pen & Sword Aviation. 2015.
Boyd, David.
1000lb Medium Capacity Bomb. <http://www.wwiiequipment.com>
Burls, Nina. RAF bombs and bombing. ROYALAIRFORCEHISTORICALSOCIETY. Journal 45. 2009.
Fahey, John. Britain 1939 – 1945: The economic cost of Strategic Bombing. University of Sidney. 2004.
Falconer, John. Bomber Command Handbook. The History Press. 1998.
Friedrich, Jörg. Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945. Propylaen Verlag, Zweigniederlassung der Ullstein. 2002.
Overy, Richard. The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945. Allen Lane. 2013.
The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939-1945 – The Official Report of the British Bombing Survey Unit (Introduction by Sebastian Cox). Frank Cass. 1998.
This is a British 1000-pounder (500 kg) MC bomb from 1944 today at Berlin Mitte. Thousands of people around Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof (the main railway station in the city) were evacuated last week to allow disposal experts to defuse an unexploded World War II explosive dropped by Bomber Command and unearthed on a building site. It is one of the 253,800 bombs of this type dropped by RAF bombers during 1939-45 in all war fronts.
In 2011 it was estimated that over 5,500 unexploded bombs or weapons from the war that need to be defused are uncovered each year. The daily average is 15, most of them aerial bombs.
[Haus Vaterland (“Fatherland House”) burns following a night raid on 22/23 November 1943 by British RAF bombers.The building was a pleasure palace on the southwest side of Potsdamer Platz. At left, a S-Bahn signal post.]
Incendiaries (IB), usually small-sized weapons, were carried in an aircraft bomb-bay using Small Bomb Containers (SBCs) and were packed into clusters. The device was not aim able and once dropped often became effected by cross winds. This resulted in incendiary attacks become widespread downwind of the target and also lead to other bombers being struck by falling bombs. Incendiary bombs function on impact. The heavy reliance of Bomber Command on highly inaccurate incendiaries shows that fire-raising was a major weapon in the strategic air offensive.
[British armourers preparing fire-bombs (of 4-lb incendiaries Magnesium) into Small Bomb Containers (SBCs) at RAF Marham, Norfolk.]
[Vickers Wellington B Mark IC (W5690, GR-W) of No 301 Polish Bomber Squadron awaits a mixed load of incendiaries and 500 pounds-GP bombs on trolleys at RAF Hemswell before a night sortie over Germany, July 1941.]
The mainstay of the Command’s incendiary devices was the 4-lb Magnesium (IB) bomb. RAFBomber Command dropped 80 million of these small incendiary bombs during World War II. In May 1943 efforts were made to develop a delivery device for the ‘four pounder’IB which would allow for them to be aimed and therefore more accurate during the raids.
[A member of the Luftschutz (Reich Office for Air Protection) holds a stick-type incendiary bomb dropped by British bombers during a night raid in Berlin, March 1941. It seems to be a red nose colored 4-lb (1.8 kg) incendiary bomb made from magnesium and thermite.]
[A British 4-lb. Mk IV type incendiary bomb (“Brandbombe”). Top: complete device, nose is red colored. Middle: dud found without the tin plate tail, Bottom: the remains after burning. This bomb was made from magnesium in a hollow body made from aluminium with a cast iron/steel nose and filled with thermite incendiary pellets. It could burn for up to ten minutes. Its size was 54.35 cm long. This one was dropped over Würzburg in 1945.]
In April 1941, 12 million incendiaries were ordered for the rest of the year and 36 millions for 1942, but because of magnesium shortages, production just reached ‘only’ 2.2 million in the ninth months of 1941, and 11.8 million in 1942, but these figures were more than enough for a force not yet converted fully to mass incendiary bombing. This very large numbers of production had enormous requirements on the Britain’s war effort.
[The bomb load most commonly used for ‘area’ bombing raids in the bomb-bay of an Avro Lancaster of No 57 Squadron RAF at Scampton, Lincolnshire. Her deadly cargo consisted of 12 SBCs each loaded with incendiaries, in this case, 236 x 4-lb incendiary sticks. In the centre can be seen a 4,000 impact-fused HC bomb (‘Cookie’).]
[As war progressed, RAFBomber Command used several types of containers to drop Incendiary bombs. These are Cluster Projectile 500-lb No.14 Mk I falling on Germany. Two 500-lb incendiary
clusters plunge toward their target over Kiel. At left, one of the containers has broken and scattered the incendiaries like match sticks. The other big bomb has not yet broken but will do so momentarily. They were Dull red overall, one of the tensioning straps painted bright red and each one contained two fagots of 53 bombs each, a total of one hundred and six 4-lb incendiary bombs. Later, Cluster Projectile 500-lb No.17 Mk II tailed bombs and US-made cluster containers were used too.]
The other main type of incendiary-bomb dropped by Bomber Command was the 30-lb J-Type IB phosphorous. The Germans considered this a ‘morale weapon’ because it was impossible to extinguish with water due to its benzon-gel and was stronger than 4-lb IB. Regardless of its short life span of this type of bomb on the war over 400,000 were dropped.
[The other British main fire-weapon: the 30-lbs. J-Type IB phosphorous.]
[This still from a film shows a 30-lb incendiary bomb exploding over the centre of a factory taken from Avro Lancaster, DV380AJ-N, of No 617 Squadron RAF, flown by the Squadron commander, Wing Commander G L Cheshire, during the low-level marking of the Gnome-Rhone aero-engine factory at Limoges, France, on the night of 8/9 February 1944. On this occasion, the incendiary bomb was used however as a precision target marker at night for the incoming main bomber force but shows to good effect how an IB explodes, Cheshire tried his low-level marking techniques on this raid, leading 12 Lancasters of the Squadron to the target.]
Handley Page Halifaxes usually carried the main bulk of incendiary bomb load on Bomber Command missions, so when they’re hold on reserve after high losses over Berlin in Fall 1943 the British offensive lost a high percent of fire destruction.
Breakdown, by type, of incendiary bombs dropped by RAFBomber Command during World War 2. Source: Burls, Nina. RAF bombs and bombing. ROYALAIRFORCEHISTORICALSOCIETY. Journal 45. 2009.
By 1944, the percent of total incendiary bomb load in a city attack by BC was around 70 percent and this support the claims made by Arthur Harris that the incendiary bomb was the most significant type of munition deployed by Bomber Command.
Of the total percent of bombs despatched by Bomber Command during the war 20.5 % (196,256 tons) were incendiary bombs. The economic cost to Britain of manufacturing incendiary bombs for BC was approximately £73 million, which means that those weapons cost slightly more than 50 percent of the total cost spent on bombs during the entire period of the campaign.
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Source:
Air ministry. RAF Armament Volume I: Bombs and Bombing Equipment. 1954.
Air Studies Division Report: The Economic Effects of the Air Offensive Against German Cities, USSBS.
Bolan, G T. The development of British incendiary bombs during the period of the 1939-45 World War. Armaments Design Establishment Technical Report. Ministry of Supply. December 1946. <http://bulletpicker.com/pdf/Development%20of%20British%20Incendiary%20Bombs.pdf>
Bowman, Martin W. Nachtjagd, Defenders of the Reich 1940-1943. Pen & Sword Aviation. 2016.
Bowman. Martin W. Voices in Flight: the heavy bomber offensive of WW2. Pen & Sword Aviation, 2014.
Bowman, Martin W. Voices in flight: RAF Night Operations. Pen & Sword Aviation. 2015.
Fire, as Bomber Command well knew, was the biggest destroyer of property.
On 23 September 1941, Britain’s Air Staff produced a report detailing the effectiveness of German incendiary attacks on Britain and recommending that fire be a central feature of Bomber Command attacks. The key lesson to be learned from the 1940 German ‘Blitz’ (as it was to become known in Britain the air bombing campaign, September 1940-May 1941) was that concentrated use of incendiary bombs was the most effective form of annihilation.
In 1941, approximately just 12 percent of the total bomb loads despatched consisted of incendiary bombs. The response was the ‘Incendiary Plan Unison’ ,issued on 25th October 1941 and first tested against the city of Lübeck on March 1942. That year the figure raised to a 42 percent of the bomb-load.
The RAF had to develop the required technique to burn out an entire city and the method was copied from the German raids and largely improved by British scientifics and physicists. The combined work of the Research and Experiments Department and the Air Warfare Analysis Section to estimate the nature of bomb damage and the vulnerability of German buildings made an essential contribution to what bombing could achieve. Led by Dr Reginald Strading, and with German-born Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann among these top-men, this statistical research group produced from September 1940 accurate figures for air warfare operations from the damage done by Nazi bombs, and applied them into German cities in future attacks in terms of lives lost and houses destroyed.
New chemicals weapons and reactions had to be created to allow new Bomber Command fire-rising tactics and this let to a change in Britain’s industries and set as the most urgent problem to develop the technology to find an entire city at night and poor weather (mainly navigation aids).
[Death from above: A British RAF four-engined bomber -a Short Stirling, overflies the firestorm during the bomb run on a night mission against a German city.]
Germans had well knowledge about fire-bombs and their destruction capabilities, as they had employed them in large numbers against Britain during the ‘Blitz’ attacks in 1940-41, and although well prepared for a fire-air attack, the defences and fire-fighting equipment of Berlin and other main Reich cities were well overwhelmed by the massive size of the RAFBomber Command offensive.
In total around 110,000 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped during the ‘Blitz’ on England by Hitler’s Luftwaffe, twice the number of explosive weapons dropped. Fire was the biggest threat during the campaign and 95,000 Britons were drafted into the Auxiliary Fire Service.
[The ’Blitz’: Buildings burning n Manchester after a German air raid on the night of 23 December 1940.]
Meanwhile, on Germany during inter-war years several drills were instructed as more evident became the idea that air power and air-raids against civil population and towns would be the main form of attack in the incoming war.
[Two shots of a Luftschutz fire brigade during an air raid drill in Berlin, circa 1941, training techniques to extinguish an incendiary bomb.The paper bags with sand should be burnt so that the content then smothers the fire.]
A colour footage of a demonstration to deal with a firebomb, during a Luftschutz event at Cardinalplatz in Köpenik (Berlin) before the war.
[Video credit: AKH Archive (Nr M1965)].
This is a German newsreel film from civil defence showing how to deal with these new fire-threat, in this case the British 30-lb bomb, in the event that an incendiary device lands on an apartment building.
[Video credit: this film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive.]
The main objective of the use of incendiary bombs in a carpet-bombing was to create a Firestorm. Fortunately for Berliners, the German capital was too big in size (the third largest city in the world) and was a more modern city than Hamburg or London, with more wider residential districts and there are more open spaces. Berlin blocks of flats were also of sounder construction. Even the powerful RAF Bomber Command was ineffective in burning out such a large city from end to end. Instead, smaller cities like Hamburg, Dresden or Hanover would suffer this aerial punishment of fire.
The success of the Hamburg raids (‘Operation Gomorrah’) in July 1943, a textbook example of the incendiary attack planning, confirmed the theory of the superiority of incendiary over high-explosive bombs and impressed the Americans.
[This is a vertical photograph taken from 19,000 feet during a night raid on Hanover, showing an Avro Lancaster, silhouetted by the many incendiary fires below. That night 3,932 buildings were totally destroyed, and more than 30,000 damaged in varying degree, by the intense conflagration in the central and south central districts of the city resulting from this attack.]
[The deadly effects of incendiaries. Burnt out buildings and few roofs intact.- Part of a British vertical photographic-reconnaissance aerial taken over Berlin showing an area immediately south of the Tiergarten (at left) and east of the Zoological Gardens. Lützowplatz is at centre, surrounded by a considerable area of buildings gutted by incendiary fires resulting from repeated raids by Bomber Command aircraft.]
Detailed evidence from Britain “blitzed” cities suggested that incendiary bombs had five times the destructive potential of heavy explosive per ton. It was estimated that an initial salvo of 30,000 4-lb incendiaries had to be dropped in 20 minutes as a minimum to produce a firestorm. High explosive was needed only to reduce water supply and ventilate the attacked buildings.
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Sources and bibliography:
Air ministry. RAF Armament Volume I: Bombs and Bombing Equipment. 1954.
Bowman, Martin W. Nachtjagd, Defenders of the Reich 1940-1943. Pen & Sword Aviation. 2016.
Bowman, Martin W. Voices in Flight: the heavy bomber offensive of WW2. Pen & Sword Aviation, 2014.
Bowman, Martin W. Voices in flight: RAF Night Operations. Pen & Sword Aviation. 2015.
Fahey, John. BRITAIN 1939-1945: THEECONOMICCOSTOFSTRATEGICBOMBING. University of Sidney. 2005.
Falconer, John. Bomber Command Handbook. The History Press. 1998.
Friedrich, Jörg. Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945. Propylaen Verlag, Zweigniederlassung der Ullstein. 2002.
Harris, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur. Despatch on War Operations 23 February 1942 to 8 May 1945. London, Air Ministry, 1945.
Overy, Richard. The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945. Allen Lane. 2013.
Price, Alfred. Kampfflieger. Bombers of the Luftwaffe Volume Three January 1942-September 1943. Classic Publications. 2005.
Smith, J Richard & Creek, Eddie. Kampfflieger. Bombers of the Luftwaffe Volume Two July 1940-December 1941. Classic Publications. 2004.
When British Bomber Command went to war in 1939 it found itself equipped with a very limited and inadequate arsenal of bombs.
General Purpose GP Bombs: The high explosive GP (general purpose) bombs, developed from 1935, were the initial arsenal Bomber Command had to carry destruction to Third Reich soil and people, but these had an ineffective performance and their explosive-to-weight ratio was low.
During the first three years of the war, RAF bombers usually flew with a small bomb cargo. In the case of Bomber Command attacking German industries and cities, the normal load was 500-lb (227 kg) and 250-lb GP (114 kg) bombs for hard targets and 40-lb bombs in containers for ‘soft’, plus the 20-lb (F) anti-personnel fragmentation bomb used mainly on tactical missions. For the 20-lb and 40-lb bombs, purpose-made packing pieces secured the individual bombs as a cluster within each partition. This early series of HE bombs used an explosive mix called ‘Amatol’, a mixture of TNT and ammonium nitrate.
[Groundcrew of a Polish Air Force bomber squadron, very likely of No. 300 Squadron, scribbling their best wishes to the enemy on a 500-lb GP bomb at RAF Hemswell, 15 August 1941. The inscription in Polish reads: ‘Warszawiacy Berlinowi-From Varsovians for Berlin’. The squadron bombed Berlin for the first time on March 21, 1941.]
The initial British trio of bombers -Wellington, Whitley and Hampden- were hampered by their small capacity of the bomb-bays and by the fact of being twin-engined planes, the more ton of bombs loaded means less fuel capacity. Berlin was at 950 kilometres (590 miles) from London in the very extreme range of RAF ‘twins’. For example, the max bomb-load of a Vickers Wellington was 4,500 lb (2,041 kg) of bombs, but this figure was reduced to only half when the type attacked Berlin to be able to reach it.
The size of bomb-bays in RAF aircraft and the perceived chance of a hit were both real considerations in this early period. During 1940, use of the smaller ordinance (over 2,000 20-lb F; over 26,000 40-lb GP; nearly 62,000 250-lb GP) far outstripped that of the 500-lb GP (just over 20,000).
[Armourers fit fuzes to 250-lb GP bombs on their trolleys, prior to loading into Handley Page Hampden Mark I, P1333EA-F, of No 49 Squadron RAF at Scampton, Lincolnshire. P1333 was lost returning from a raid on Merseburg, Germany on 17 August 1940.]
At the beginning of the war, HE (high explosive) bombs were considered the best weapon to use, with incendiaries employed in small numbers as a harassment measure; but the change in the bombing tactics from industrial targets to civilian and ‘area’ targets led the way to a mixed load comprising a much higher ratio of incendiary bomb to HE during the final years of the conflict.
[WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) driving a Fordson tractor pulling a train of full GP-bomb trolleys at RAF Mildenhall. In those early days of the conflict, RAF bombs were painted in a light tan colour, later orange yellow and finally dark green.]
The 250-lb and 500-lb GP bombs were extensively used in 1941 yet, until the more capable high explosive bombs were developed and brought into use. All these bombs became available in quantities too large for the existing bomber force in use; the RAF had the bombs but not enough bombers to use them against the Reich. For example, in October 1941 there were unused stocks of 121,000 tons of bombs at Britain depots.
[RAF armourers wait for the conclusion of an engine test on Short Stirling Mark I, OJ-N, of No 149 Squadron, parked at the end of the south-east runway at Mildenhall, Suffolk, before loading her with 250-lb GP bombs for a night raid on Essen, Germany. Each bomb has been fitted with a shackle to enable it to be winched into position in the Stirling’s high bomb-bay.]
[Bomb bursts straddle the machine workshops in the naval arsenal as another stick of 500-lb GP-bombs falls toward the target area during a daylight raid on shipping and installations by Venturas of No 21 Squadron RAFon Brest, France.]
This table shows, by type, the number of General Purpose bombs dropped by RAFBomber Command during World War 2. Source: Burls, Nina. RAF bombs and bombing. ROYALAIRFORCEHISTORICALSOCIETY. Journal 45. 2009.
The GP-bombs had a high detonation-failure rate (10-15%) and the introduction of the heavy four-engined bombers such as the big Short Stirling just augmented the ton of explosives dropped on the Third Reich, not the effectiveness of the raids.
In conclusion, during 1940-41 RAFBomber Command was inadequate to destroy such a large city like Berlin was and tried to grow the number of raids against the capital, all of which did little damage. This led to two vital changes: the development of the more potent MC and HC bombs, and the introduction from mid 1941 of the new heavy four-engined bomber force.
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Sources and bibliography:
Air ministry. RAF Armament Volume I: Bombs and Bombing Equipment, 1954
Bowman, Martin W. Nachtjagd, Defenders of the Reich 1940-1943. Pen & Sword Aviation, 2016
Bowman. Martin W. Voices in Flight: the heavy bomber offensive of WW2. Pen & Sword Aviation, 2014
Bowman, Martin W. Voices in flight: RAF Night Operations. Pen & Sword Aviation, 2015
Boyd, David. 1000 lb Medium Capacity Bomb. <http://www.wwiiequipment.com>
Falconer, John. Bomber Command Handbook. The History Press.
Overy, Richard. The Bombing War: Europe, 1939-1945. Allen Lane.
In the corner where Unter den Linden meets Friedrichstraße, there is a house with more than 85 years of history in Berlin. Today, this building stands as one of the original places of the city and a survivor of the Allied bombing raids and war fightings.
[Unter den Linden Nr 22 Ecke Friedrichstraße 155-156 during the days of the Third Reich. At left corner, the Haus der Schweiz. At right, the famous Viktoria Hotel and Café, 1939-40. Note Friedrichstr. Bhf in the background.]
The house was built during 1934-1936 by Swiss architect Ernst Meier-Appenzell with a clean façade, an arcade and rectangular windows, in a monumental building style. The client was the “Haus der Schweiz GmbH”, to which the Swiss bank Leu, the Swiss bank and the Swiss Federal Railways had joined forces. Like many Swiss companies, they had considerable sums of German Reichsmark.
Since these were classified by the Nazis as “Sperrmark”, however, a transfer of the money into Switzerland would have been associated with considerable price losses. Instead, the three companies bought a plot of land on the corner of Friedrichstraße/ Unter den Linden and had a six-storey business and office building built there - “at the first business location of the Reich capital”. The property was intended as a financial investment, but served at the same time also quite representative purposes.
The building had the lettering Haus der Schweiz, prominently displayed on both sides of the façade, as well as a Wilhelm Tell figure. The bronze sculpture, however, is not William Tell, but his son Walther. Supposedly a trick of the builder: because the Nazis did not want to tolerate a representation of the freedom fighter and Swiss national hero himself, they trained just now his son with a crossbow and an apple. On the other hand, the Nazis could not say anything - and the Swiss national pride was still respected. In the spring of 1936, the builders themselves became the first tenants to enter the ”Haus der Schweiz”.
[Dark times at Unter den Linden: Nazi and Italian banners along the Berlin avenue during state the visit of Italian Fascist leader Mussolini to Berlin in September 1937. The red buses belonged to the Käse’s Rundfahrten Rieseburo.]
[A view of the Unter den Linden building in 1939 just before the Second World War.]
[View northwards in to Friedrichstraße. Right: Café Viktoria, left: Haus der Schweiz, circa 1940. Above the arcs can be read in capital lettering ‘Schweizer Verkehrsbüro’ (“Swiss Tourist Office”).]
In the shops on the ground floor, the Swiss Tourist Office opened a branch (Schweizer Verkehrsbüro), where citizens could book train journeys to Switzerland.
During the war, this zone was severely damaged by Allied bombings, the building was hit on the evening of 9/10 April 1941 during the raid made by RAF British bombers which affected many areas in Mitte including the famous Staatsoper den Linden. Some bombs hit this area on February 3, 1945, during the massive US air strike on Berlin, with serious damage to adjacent buildings including the famous Hotel Viktoria next to the Swiss House.
Years later, the Soviet offensive in the city inflicted more damage, but thanks to the modern construction method, this building survived the bombing of Berlin at the end of war as the only one in the area relatively intact.
[The famous corner Unter den Linden Ecke Friedrichstraße in a colour picture taken in 1939.]
[This image shows that same corner after the war’s end. The Viktoria-Café placed at the right corner was totally wiped out by bomb damage during the final two years of the conflict, especially on February 3rd, 1945, attack. The Swiss building has survived the bombing of Berlin relatively intact.]
[Another view of Berliners working on the debris after the war in front of the Haus der Schweiz at Friedrichstraße/corner Unter den Linden. Notice that the Tell bronze sculpture has survived barely intact.]
[Berlin after World War II - 1946: cars and people move again over Unter den Linden, with the ruins of the Victoria and the Haus der Schweiz as a mute reminder of the bombings and battles.]
The employees of the Swiss companies, which until 1945 had had their headquarters in the house, had largely fled in the turmoil of the last years of the war from Berlin, but the house remained the property of the “House of Switzerland GmbH”.
[The remains of the building just after the war’s end. Notice the splinter shells from the battle on the arcade and façade, and the Russian military police armed with rifle assigned to traffic control.]
When Berlin was divided by two, while the DDR government expropriated the owners of many surrounding buildings, the “Swiss house (…) was administered by the Berlin state housing administration (…) as a foreign property”, as can be seen from a 1952 official note. Apparently, the DDR government did not want to mess with Swiss banks. Nevertheless, they used the house for their own purposes. Among others, the Ostberliner Sparkasse, the German Foreign Trade Bank and a HO food market moved into the shops. The upper floors were rebuilt in the early 1950s for the “Coordination and Control Center for Agriculture, Forestry and Water Management”.
[Reconstruction of the Swiss building, now sited in the new DDR - East Berlin, began in the 1950s. This image is dated on December 8th, 1950.]
In 1994, a Swiss jeweler opened a branch in the completely renovated Haus der Schweiz, which has since been listed as a historic monument, given it an entirely new interior design.
The Armstrong Whitworth Whitley was one of the three ‘strategic’ bombers types with which Britain went to war in September 1939. The Whitley was conceived as a night ‘heavy’ bomber and was RAF’s first monoplane bomber and the first one to penetrate on Germany airspace.
With a crew of five men, and powered by two Rolls-Royce Merlin X engines, the Whitley was capable of 230 mph (370 km/h) at 16,400 ft (5,000 m) and was bombed with up to 7,000 lb (3,175 kg) of bombs in the fuselage and 14 individual cells in the wings.
[An in-flight view of Whitley Mk.V T4131, ‘EY-W’ from No 78 RAF Squadron during 1941. Note row of bombs painted on the fuselage nose to indicate numbers of missions flown over the Third Reich.]
Following the outbreak of war in September 1939, the Whitley participated in the first RAF bombing raid upon Reich territory and remained an integral part of the early British bomber offensive until the introduction of four-engined RAF bombers namely the Short Stirling or the Lancaster. Already an outclassed design when the war started, in 1942 it was retired from first-line bombing sorties. This two-engine bomber equipped Bomber Command’s 10, 51, 58, 78 and 102 Squadrons, all from No 4 Group.
It participated, along with Hampdens and Wellingtons in the first British-attack over Berlin on the night of 25 August 1940. And during the next 6 months, the Whitleys would be on first line delivering bombs by night to the Reich capital.
[Artist Paul Nash made this watercolour and chalk drawing of Berlin’s RAF first attack from a set of photographs that Air Ministry sent to him. It shows an aerial view of four Whitley bombers in flight over a target area of Berlin. It was made in January 1941.]
With 1,814 Whitleys built, they flew a total of 8,996 operations with Bomber Command, with 9,845 tons of bombs dropped and 269 of them were lost in action.
[An Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bomber being readied for another sortie over Germany. It belongs to No 58 Squadron and is seen at RAF Linton on Ouse dispersal.]
[The Nash and Thompson Type FN4 rear turret of an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bomber of No 102 Squadron RAF at Driffield, Yorkshire, 8 March 1940. It was armed with four ,303 in Browning machine-guns to protect the plane against night-fighters.]
[Armstrong Whitworth Whitley Mark V of No 77 Squadron RAF rests in the grass at Driffield, Yorkshire, April 1940. Notice how broad was the wing. The Whitley featured a large rectangular-shaped wing; its appearance led to the aircraft receiving the nickname “the flying barn door”.]
[Luftwaffe crews and German civilians inspecting the wreckage of Whitley bomber T4170 ‘GE-T’ from No 58 RAF Squadron. This aircraft, flown by F/O Jack Champness crew, was shot down near Westerwede, Germany in their way to bomb Berlin on the night of 14/15 November 1940. The Whitley was hit by flak from the 3./Flak Regiment 26; all five crewmembers were killed and buried at Worpswede until 1947. That night, Bomber Command lost 10 aircraft -the worst night since the war began.]
[A crew of No 78 Squadron, Royal Air Force, watch as engine adjustments are made to an Armstrong Whitworth Whitley bomber Z6743 before they take off for a raid from Middleton St George, Durham.]
Berlin was also bombed by the Soviets, years before the final Red assault over the city in 1945.
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the largest offensive in History at the time, and German forces quickly advanced through the vast steppe towards Moscow, the main target. As soon as 19 July, Hitler had issued his ‘War Directive No 33’, decreting the attack of Moscow by bombers of Luftflotte 2 in reprisal for the raids on Bucharest and Helsinki.
But “Klara Zetkin” —the Luftwaffe’s codename for Moscow- was heavily defended and the bombings were poor. After the Nazi attack of the capital on July 21/22, 1941, when the Germans dropped a total of 104 tonnes of HE bombs and 46,000 incendiaries for over 5 hours, Stalin ordered immediate retaliation against the Reich capital.
[The Kremlin under the attack of the Luftwaffe, July 1941.]
On the evening of 7August 1941, 15 Ilyushin DB-3T torpedo bombers of the Baltic Fleet operating from an island airstrip off the Estonian coast struck Berlin after travelling a distance of more than 600 miles (1,000 km). All returned safely. While the damage caused by the twin-engined bombers was negligible (each carried fewer than 1,000 pounds of bombs), the Kremlin propaganda machine was quick to trumpet the success of the raids.
[Berlin being bombed by Soviet airplanes in 1941.]
Later, at dusk on 10August 1941, a formation of VVS (Voyenno-Vozdushny Sili, or Red Air Force) Yermolayev Yer-2 medium bombers and 14 of Stalin’s prized four-engine Petliakov Pe-8 formed up over Pushkino Airfield in Leningrad for the raid on Berlin. The planes were to be joined over the city by two full squadrons of Ilyushin Il-4 bombers flying fromEstonia. Unfortunately for the Soviets, the mission was cursed with misfortune from the start, several Pe-8s had to abort due to engine problems and one of the heavily loaded Pe-8 crashed immediately upon take off. The bombing was a total disaster. More attacks followed, with minor damage.
[The big size Pe-8 four engined was the only strategic bomber built by the Soviets during the war, but the unreliability of her engines and low numbers built (93) made the bomber a failure in action.]
By late 1941, the Wehrmacht was so close to Moscow that Stalin was forced to forget strategic bombing, apart from a 100-bombers raid on 29 August 1942 (minor damage), until 1945.
[The Ilyushin DB-3 medium long-range bomber. During World War Two, 1,528 were built.]
[Yevgeny Preobrazhensky, Commander of the Soviet Baltic Fleet’s 1st Mine-Torpedo Aviation Regiment, and pilot Pyotr Khokhlov before leaving the aerodrome to conduct an air-raid over Berlin during August 1941.]
Naval DB-3s flew a total of 10 sorties over Berlin before their base at Saaremaa had to be evacuated in the face of imminent German capture. The final attack was made on the night of September 4-5. A total of 86 naval aircraft participated in the raids, of which 33 were reported to have reached Berlin, while others bombed secondary targets, including Stettin, Königsberg, Danzig, Swinemünde and Libau. Daylight bombing was even tried, but met with no success and was cancelled.
The Soviet bomb ton dropped over Berlin is less than 1% of the total for the Allies during Second World War.
[Berlin, July 1945. Four years later, Berliners (who survived the bombings and war) would see Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) much closer everyday. A vast painting portrait of the Soviet leader presided Unter den Linden next to Brandenburger Tor in the aftermath of the war, with a memorial and Red banners, at the exact point today is placed the big Christmas Tree.]
[Berlin, July 1945: one more view of Stalin’s portrait, this time seconds before you overpass Brandenburger Tor and enter Unter den Linden avenue. Note poster at right column to inform you are leaving the British sector.]
