Hamburg
29 July 1943 — Hamburg
- Date
- 29 July 1943
- Target
- Hamburg, Germany
- Force dispatched
- 777 aircraft
- Aircraft lost
- 28
Narrative
Two nights after the firestorm, Bomber Command returned to Hamburg on 29/30 July 1943, the third of the four heavy raids of Operation Gomorrah. Some 777 aircraft were dispatched against a city already half-destroyed and still burning, and again the marking drew a concentrated attack — this time into the eastern residential districts of Barmbek, Wandsbek and Uhlenhorst that had largely escaped the night of the firestorm. Fresh areas of housing were burnt out and the exodus of survivors from the city became a flood, with well over a million people eventually fleeing Hamburg. Twenty-eight aircraft failed to return; the German night-fighter and flak defences, thrown into confusion by “Window” days before, were beginning to recover their effectiveness. The raid drove home the relentlessness of the assault: Hamburg was being attacked faster than it could bury its dead or fight its fires.
Sortie details (which aircraft from which squadron, which crew flew, the outcome) will populate this page once the TNA AIR 27 squadron-diary importer arrives.
The fallen
264 airmen in this archive died on 29 July 1943 or the day that followed. For a raid of this kind these are overwhelmingly the night's losses, though a death-date match is not by itself proof an individual flew this operation.
- Pilot Officer Ernest Frank Allwright (22)
- Flying Officer Charles Beatty Anderson (27)
- Flying Officer David James Anderson (33)
- Flying Officer Liston Anderson (32)
- Squadron Leader Charles Frederick Andrew
- Flight Sergeant Wallace Gale Arlidge (20)
- Leading Aircraftman Kenneth Sydney Arnold (21)
- Sergeant Denis James Audley
- Flying Officer Ralph Cameron Baillie
- Warrant Officer Class II William Balduff (26)
- Sergeant Frederick Ball (22)
- Flying Officer Ronald George Ballantine (22)
- Flying Officer Joseph Wallace Bancroft (22)
- Aircraftman 2nd Class James Hector Banks
- Sergeant Dennis Barker (22)
- Sergeant Ernest Thomas Barry (22)
- Flight Sergeant David Henderson Bates
- Sergeant Donald John Beesley (20)
- Sergeant Ernest Bell (21)
- Flying Officer John Bennett (27)
- Flight Sergeant Thomas Edward Bent (21)
- Pilot Officer Colin Muir Binnie (21)
- Flying Officer Eric Gordon Birkbeck (23)
- Warrant Officer Class II Albert Lloyd Bjarnason (22)