Nuremberg
16 March 1945 — Nuremberg
- Date
- 16 March 1945
- Target
- Nuremberg, Germany
- Force dispatched
- 341 aircraft
Narrative
By the spring of 1945 Bomber Command roamed over a Germany whose defences were collapsing, and 341 aircraft attacked Nuremberg again on this March night. With the old city already gutted by the January raid, the attack fell on what remained — the southern and industrial districts, the railway facilities, and the war production that the city still carried on amid the ruins. Losses were light in a sky from which the night-fighter force had all but vanished for want of fuel and trained crews. Raids like this one, in the war’s last weeks, were aimed less at breaking a city already broken than at completing the destruction of its capacity to support the German war effort. Within seven weeks the war in Europe would be over and Nuremberg, so battered from the air, would become the seat of the tribunal that judged the regime it had once celebrated.
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
97 airmen in this archive died on 16 March 1945 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.
- Flight Sergeant Vincent James Arnold (23)
- Flight Sergeant Gerard Sydney Barbeler (21)
- Flight Sergeant Raymond Franklin Lindsay Barber (26)
- Pilot Officer Malcolm Melly Barker (19)
- Flight Sergeant Lyle Eugene Bedell (20)
- Flight Sergeant Kenneth William Binder (19)
- Sergeant Asrielis Blumbergas
- Flying Officer Angus Edward Brechin (20)
- Flying Officer Kenneth Stickney Brenton (28)
- Flight Lieutenant Edward George Brown
- Pilot Officer Walter Gordon Brown (20)
- Warrant Officer Gilmour Sydney Catford (27)
- Flight Lieutenant Frank Earl Connors (27)
- Flying Officer Roger Leon Corcoran (21)
- Flying Officer George Alfred Osborn Dauphinee (24)
- Flight Sergeant John Donald Davidson (36)
- Flight Sergeant Mervyn Desmond Sylvester Davis (21)
- Flight Lieutenant Keith William Daymond
- Squadron Leader Philip Alexander Dey (23)
- Flying Officer Ronald Kingston Dorrington (25)
- Flight Lieutenant Frank Edmond Dotten (22)
- Lieutenant George Dunlop
- Corporal Donald Vernon Elliott (23)
- Warrant Officer Ernest Oliver England (25)