Stuttgart
25 July 1944 — Stuttgart
- Date
- 25 July 1944
- Target
- Stuttgart, Germany
- Force dispatched
- 550 aircraft
- Aircraft lost
- 12
Narrative
The second blow of the late-July sequence fell the very next night, when 550 aircraft — 412 Lancasters and 138 Halifaxes — returned to a city already burning from the previous attack. The marking and concentration were the best yet achieved against Stuttgart, and the raid is reckoned the single most successful attack on the city of the entire war, tearing through districts that two years of earlier effort had failed to reach. Twelve aircraft were lost. Coming so soon after the raid of 24 July, it gave the defences and the firefighters no time to recover, and it drove home the destruction that the opening attack had begun. Together with the third raid three nights later, these July 1944 operations finally inflicted on Stuttgart the kind of damage long suffered by the Ruhr cities.
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
111 airmen in this archive died on 25 July 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.
- Sergeant Arthur Ashby (21)
- Flying Officer Richard Gainford Askew (21)
- Flight Lieutenant Raymond Charles Banfield (24)
- Flight Sergeant Alan Osborne Beazley (19)
- Sergeant James Beech (22)
- Flying Officer Frederick Kenneth Beers (26)
- Flying Officer Douglas Payne Billman (21)
- Flying Officer George Bishop (32)
- Wing Commander Charles Harold Brandon (30)
- Flying Officer Reginald Shore Bray (25)
- Flight Sergeant Edward Maines Bryant (20)
- Flight Lieutenant Douglas Maxwell Bull (24)
- Flight Lieutenant Raymond Richard Burgess (27)
- Pilot Officer David Sinclair Campbell (31)
- Pilot Officer Robert Gordon Carter (21)
- Flying Officer George Allan Cashion (23)
- Flight Sergeant Allen Leonard Cheatle (20)
- Flight Sergeant Patrick Joseph Conway (23)
- Flying Officer George Stanley Corry (23)
- Pilot Officer William Denman Croft (20)
- Pilot Officer Nicholas Cushman
- Flight Sergeant Sydney Hartley Davies (23)
- Pilot Officer Robert Dey
- Sergeant Roy Kenneth Dove (20)