Hamburg

27 July 1943 — Hamburg

Date
27 July 1943
Target
Hamburg, Germany
Force dispatched
787 aircraft
Aircraft lost
17

Narrative

The second major raid of Operation Gomorrah, on the night of 27/28 July 1943, produced the most lethal single night of the strategic air war against Germany. A force of 787 aircraft — 353 Lancasters, 244 Halifaxes, 116 Stirlings and 74 Wellingtons — was sent against Hamburg in hot, dry summer weather, with the city’s water mains and fire services already strained by the great raid three nights before. The bombing fell with unusual concentration into the densely built working-class districts east of the centre. There the heat of countless fires, drawing in air at hurricane force, fused into a single firestorm: a column of flame that generated winds strong enough to uproot trees and suck people into the blaze, with temperatures reported as high as 1,000 degrees. Around 40,000 people died in Hamburg over the course of Gomorrah, the great majority of them on this one night. The bomber loss was strikingly light by the standards of the period — only 17 aircraft, a little over two per cent — a reprieve owed largely to “Window”, the metallised paper strips first used days earlier, which blinded the German radar-directed defences. Hamburg showed both the appalling destructive power Bomber Command had achieved and the decisive value of the electronic war being waged in the night sky.

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

161 airmen in this archive died on 27 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.

See all 161 who died on 27 July →

Source: Wikipedia — Bombing of Hamburg in World War II →