Operation Nuremberg raid

On the night of 30/31 March 1944 Bomber Command sent 795 aircraft — 572 Lancasters, 214 Halifaxes and 9 Mosquitos — against Nuremberg, and lost 95 of them: the heaviest toll of any night in its history. Sixty-four Lancasters and thirty-one Halifaxes failed to return, almost one bomber in eight, and a further handful were written off in crashes back over England. More than 540 airmen were killed in a single night and over 150 taken prisoner.

The plan depended on cloud that never came. Crews crossed a Europe lit by a near-full moon under a clear sky, their engines drawing long condensation trails that marked each aircraft for the fighters below. A long, straight leg towards the target let the German controllers feed their night-fighters onto the bomber stream at the radio beacons code-named Ida and Otto, and for the best part of an hour the route became a running massacre: of the 95 lost, some 82 went down on the way in and around the target. Winds far stronger than forecast scattered the stream and wrecked the navigation, so that the bombing, when it came, was badly spread — much of it falling in open country or on the wrong town altogether, with comparatively little damage done to Nuremberg for so terrible a price.

The raid effectively ended the winter offensive that had centred on Berlin, and confirmed that deep penetrations under a full moon could no longer be afforded; within weeks the heavy squadrons were turning to targets in France ahead of the coming invasion. The squadrons, aircraft and crews that flew this night — among them Pilot Officer Cyril Barton, whose Halifax of No. 578 Squadron earned him a posthumous Victoria Cross — are recorded in the order of battle linked from this page.