ハンブルグを10日間爆撃し続けたゴモラ作戦から80年。その詳細を英語で

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

The main cause of death that night was suffocation. Thousands of people sheltering in the city’s tenement basements asphyxiated as the oxygen was slowly sucked out of their lungs by the greedy fire above. They were baked a brownish color by the intense heat.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

There was a third RAF raid on Hamburg two nights after the firestorm. This destroyed the suburb of Barmbek, but for technical reasons did not generate a second inferno. During it however a department store collapsed and 370 people sheltering in the basement beneath were killed.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

A final raid on August 2/3 was scattered by thunderstorms and did little damage. Overall, no-one knows for sure how many people died in Hamburg during Operation GOMORRAH. Between 37-42,000 seems the most reliable range.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

For Bomber Command, it was a triumph. H2S had done its job. Thanks to WINDOW, operational losses had been fewer than 3 percent, far better than in the Ruhr. The Air Ministry’s Director of Intelligence reveled in “the complete wipe-out of a residential area by fire.”

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

The effect on Hamburg was complicated. One million people trekked out the city in the immediate aftermath of the raids. Almost 2/3 of housing stock was damaged or destroyed. The Nazi leadership was horrified by the scale of the devastation and worried about the morale effect.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

But Bomber Command was not in a position to follow up GOMORRAH with further immediate massive raids and so Hamburg slowly but steadily recovered over the remainder of the year in terms of industrial output. The trekkers returned to the city.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

In terms of killing German civilians, which was Bomber Command’s explicit strategy by 1943 (though never stated in quite such unequivocal terms as that) GOMORRAH represented its single most effective week of the entire war, greater than Dresden in February 1945.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

The industrial effort required to create a heavy bomber force powerful enough to carry out a GOMORRAH was intense. The bombing effort consumed something like 5 percent of all the United Kingdom’s wartime GDP.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

As Len Deighton noted, a Lancaster bomber contained “55,000 separate parts. Over three miles of electrical wiring, generators enough to light a hotel, hydraulics enough to lift a bridge … fuel capacity enough to take it to a European town, and bomb-load enough to destroy it.”

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

This would have been impossible without Britain’s ability to utilize its global network of resources, labor, and money. Putting a Lancaster over Hamburg at night was an expression of the power of 20th century worldwide industrial capitalism, the power used to win the war.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

For that reason alone GOMORRAH ought to be remembered as being the quintessential expression of Britain’s strategy during the Second World War, a war which is endlessly remembered, sanctified, and alluded to in popular discourse.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

But of course no such thing will happen this July. Earlier this year the King visited Hamburg and visited St Nikolai church to lay a wreath along with the German president. That is the extent of public recognition of the raid in Britain in 2023.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

The problem, of course, is that area bombing was a (possibly) exceptionally effective strategy the effects of which – a massive civilian death toll – people would prefer not to dwell upon when remembering ‘the good war’.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

The sole pop culture monument to Bomber Command is the 1955 film The Dam Busters, a minor episode in the Ruhr campaign which featured a totally uncharacteristic precision-bombing attack not on workers housing but on a morally neutral target set.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

A more reflective, sophisticated understanding of the war would involve putting GOMORRAH at the center of British memory where it belongs, and accounting for its consequences – economic, political, and moral – in the fullest sense. This is not going to happen any time soon. End. pic.twitter.com/LY8t4iqbI3

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Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

Addendum: a few people have mentioned the Battle of the Atlantic and the counterfac of redirecting heavy bombers to closing the mid-Atlantic ‘Air Gap’ as a better use of British resources. I’m unpersuaded by this and I’ll explain why. pic.twitter.com/wqEjJZL5eM

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Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

GOMORRAH took place in July 1943 after the Battle of the Atlantic was effectively won, so the issue wrt that is moot. The question is whether redirecting bombers in 1941 or 1942 would have made the outcome of the convoy war different.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

First problem is that there just weren’t many heavy bombers in 1941 or 1942, period. Aircraft production of 4-engine heavies lagged behind quotas for most of the period. Only in 1943 was production potential finally achieved.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

Second problem is that most heavy bombers were not very well suited to the VLR (very long range) reconnaissance role required to patrol the mid-Atlantic air gap. The Lancaster in particular would have needed extensive rethinking. This would have meant more delays.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

Third problem is that the Admiralty wasn’t asking for VLR bombers for the Air Gap anyway. They wanted bombers to aggressively patrol the Bay of Biscay to hunt and sink U-Boats.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

Which is fine, except … through 1941 and most of 42 they were pretty bad at it. What you needed to make such patrolling work was centimetric ASV radar (similar to H2S) which didn’t become widely available until 1943.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

Fourth problem is that the VLR bomber wasn’t really the key to the Air Gap. The key was the escort carrier supplemented by surface craft with HF-DF (high frequency direction finding) aids. Again, these didn’t become available in large numbers until 1943.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

Counterfacs about sending bombers to North Africa etc. run into similar problems. As Normandy showed, the heavies weren’t actually much use for close air support. What they were useful for was … strategic bombing.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

It’s arguable that Britain should never have invested so much in the heavy bomber before 1942. However, it had, and that created a path dependency that had to be respected. Britain had made its bet by midwar and had to stick with it, for good or bad.

Alan Allport @Alan_Allport

Whether strategic bombing was carried out using the right methods is a different argument, maybe for another day. End. pic.twitter.com/oZbYkFHtad

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