Stuttgart
1 March 1944 — Stuttgart
- Date
- 1 March 1944
- Target
- Stuttgart, Germany
- Force dispatched
- 557 aircraft
- Aircraft lost
- 4
Narrative
A force of 557 aircraft — Lancasters and Halifaxes with Pathfinder Mosquitoes marking — returned to Stuttgart on the first night of March 1944. The bombing reached further into the city than many earlier attacks, and among the buildings destroyed was the New Palace, the great eighteenth-century royal residence at the heart of Stuttgart; around 125 people were killed. Only four aircraft were lost, another strikingly cheap deep penetration that owed much to diversion and jamming. The raid was part of the steady intensification of the Stuttgart campaign in early 1944, as Bomber Command brought larger forces and better technique to bear on a city that had defied it for two years. The destruction of the New Palace was a mark of how the attacks were at last reaching the historic centre rather than spilling into the surrounding hills.
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
83 airmen in this archive died on 1 March 1944 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.
- Lieutenant Allison (29)
- Flight Sergeant James Victor Avery (22)
- Flight Sergeant Robert Minton Baker (23)
- Sergeant Donald Edward Barton (23)
- Flight Sergeant Ronald Barnard Basford (20)
- Sergeant Philip Charles Bates (21)
- Flight Sergeant Alfred Gordon Beeston (22)
- Pilot Officer Joseph Herve Theodore R. Bertrand (19)
- Flight Sergeant Leonard Eric Bignall (22)
- Flying Officer William Egbert Trevor Bladen (22)
- Pilot Officer Elbert Cyril Bousquet (19)
- Flying Officer Walter Dawson Carl Boyd (24)
- Sergeant George Wilson Brass (25)
- Sergeant Patrick Brosnan (24)
- Flight Lieutenant Kenneth Allan Buckley (24)
- Sergeant James McLeod Campbell
- Corporal Jack Manning Carter (28)
- Second Lieutenant Cockburn (19)
- Pilot Officer Frederick John Cooke (22)
- Sergeant William Henry Cooksey (23)
- Sergeant Charles Edward Cote (22)
- Flying Officer Alexander Crozier (23)
- Flight Sergeant Hiram Tom Davies (20)
- Sergeant James Ernest Dix (38)