1940 - 1945

Berlin was subject to 363 air raids during the Second World War. It was bombed by the RAF Bomber Command between 1940 and 1945, by the USAAF Eighth Air Force between 1943 and 1945, and the French Air Force between 1944 and 1945. It was also attacked by aircraft of the Red Air Force, in 1941 and particularly in 1945 as Soviet forces closed on the city. As the bombings continued, more and more people fled the city. By May 1945, 1.7 million people (40% of the population) had left.

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When the Second World War began in 1939, the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, issued a request to all sides that they confine their air raids to military targets. The French and the British agreed to abide by the request, with the provision that this was...

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"upon the understanding that these same rules of warfare will be scrupulously observed by all of their opponents".

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This policy was abandoned on the 15th May 1940, two days after a German air attack on Rotterdam. The RAF was given permission to attack targets in the Ruhr, including oil plants and other civilian industrial targets that aided the German war effort. The first RAF raid on the interior of Germany took place on the night of 10th – 11th May on Dortmund.

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Before 1941, Berlin, at 590 miles from London, was at the extreme range attainable by the British bombers then available. It could be bombed only at night in summer when the days were longer and skies clear -which increased the risk to Allied bombers.

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The first RAF raid on Berlin took place on the night of 25th August 1940; 95 aircraft were dispatched to bomb Tempelhof Airport near the centre of Berlin and Siemensstadt, of which 81 dropped their bombs in and around Berlin, and while the damage was slight, the psychological effect on Hitler was greater. The bombing raids on Berlin prompted Hitler to order the shift of the Luftwaffe's target from British airfields and air defences to British cities, at a time during the Battle of Britain when the British air defences were becoming exhausted and overstretched.

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During 1940 there were more raids on Berlin, all of which did little damage. The raids grew more frequent in 1941, but were ineffective in hitting important targets. The head of the Air Staff of the RAF, Sir Charles Portal, justified these raids by saying that to...

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"to get four million people out of bed and into the

shelters was worth the losses involved"

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On the 7th November 1941, Sir Richard Peirse, head of RAF Bomber Command, launched a large raid on Berlin, sending over 160 bombers. 21 were shot down or crashed, and again little damage was done due to bad weather. This failure led to the dismissal of Peirse and his replacement by Sir Arthur Travers Harris, who believed in both the efficacy and necessity of area bombing. Harris said:

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"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

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At the same time, new bombers with longer ranges were coming into service, particularly the Avro Lancaster, which became available in large numbers during 1942. During most of 1942, however, Bomber Command's priority was attacking Germany's U-boat ports. Only in 1943 did Harris have both the means to put his belief in area bombing into practice.

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The RAF Battle of Berlin

The Battle of Berlin was launched by Harris in November 1943, a concerted air campaign against the German capital, although other cities continued to be attacked to prevent the Germans concentrating their defences in Berlin. Harris believed this could be the blow that would break German resistance. "It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft," he said. "It will cost Germany the war." By this time he could deploy over 800 long-range bombers on any given night, equipped with new and more sophisticated navigational devices. Between November 1943 and March 1944, Bomber Command made 16 massed attacks on Berlin.

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The first raid of the battle took place on November 18th-19th 1943. Berlin was attacked by 440 Avro Lancasters aided by four Mosquitos. The city was under cloud and the damage was not severe. The second major raid was on the night of November 22nd-23rd 1943. This was the most effective raid by the RAF on Berlin. The raid caused extensive damage to the residential areas west of the centre, Tiergarten and Charlottenburg, Schöneberg and Spandau. Because of the dry weather conditions, several firestorms ignited damaging or destroying many buildings including the Ministry of Munitions, the Waffen SS Administrative College, the barracks of the Imperial Guard at Spandau and several arms factories.

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On December 17th, extensive damage was done to the Berlin railway system. By this time cumulative effect of the bombing campaign had made more than a quarter of Berlin's total living accommodation unusable.

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The 16 raids on Berlin cost Bomber Command more than 500 aircraft, with their crews killed or captured. This was a loss rate of 5.8%, which was above the 5% threshold that was considered the maximum sustainable operational loss rate by the RAF.  At these rates Bomber Command would have been wiped out before Berlin. It has been largely acknowledged that the Battle of Berlin was a failure; for the RAF. Historians have stated that...

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 "in an operational sense the Battle of Berlin was

more than a failure, it was a defeat"

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In 1943, the U.S. Army and the Standard Oil company built a set of replicas in western Utah, of typical German working class housing estates, "German Village", which would be of key importance in acquiring the know how and experience necessary to carry out the firebombings on Berlin. It was done with the assistance of Erich Mendelsohn, a Jewish architect of structures in Berlin who fled the Nazis in 1933.

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In February 1944, USAAF 8th Air Force commander, Maj. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, implemented a major change in fighter defense of USAAF strategic bomber formations that had bolstered the confidence of U.S. bomber crews. Until that time, Allied bombers avoided contact with the Luftwaffe; now, the Americans used any method that would force the Luftwaffe into combat. Implementing this policy, the United States looked toward Berlin. Raiding the German capital, the USAAF reasoned, would force the Luftwaffe into battle. Consequently, on the 4th March, they launched the first of several attacks against Berlin. Fierce battles raged and resulted in heavy losses for both sides; 69 B-17s were lost on the 6th March but the Luftwaffe lost 160 aircraft. The Allies replaced their losses; the Luftwaffe could not.

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At the tail end of the Battle of Berlin the RAF made one last large raid on the city on the night of 24th-25th March, losing 8.9% of the attacking force, but due to the failure of the Battle of Berlin, and the switch to the tactical bombing of France in support of the Allied invasion of France, RAF Bomber Command left Berlin alone for most of 1944.

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1500 bombers of the Eighth Air Force, protected by some 1000 fighters attacked the Berlin railway system on the 3rd February 1945 in the belief that the German Sixth Panzer Army was moving through Berlin by train on its way to the Eastern Front, thinking the Sixth Panzer Army would use the Tempelhof railyards for the move. This was one of the few occasions on which the USAAF undertook a mass attack on a city centre.

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The bombing was so dense that it caused a city fire spreading eastwards, driven by the wind. The fire lasted for four days until it had burnt everything combustible in its range to ashes and after it had reached waterways, large thoroughfares, and parks that the fire could not jump over. Due to the exhaustion of German supplies the German anti-aircraft defense was under-equipped and weak so that out of the 1,600 US aircraft committed, only 36 were shot down and their crews taken as prisoners-of-war.

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Another raid on the 26th February 1945 left another 80,000 people homeless. Raids continued until April, when the Red Army was outside the city. In the last days of the war the Red Air Force also bombed the city. By this time Berlin's civil defences and infrastructure were close to collapsing but civilian morale held.

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After the capture of Berlin, Soviet General Nikolai Bersarin said, referring to the Red Army's artillery and rocket bombardment, that:

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"the Western Allies had dropped 65,000 tons of

explosives on the city in the course of more than two

years; whereas the Red Army had expended 40,000 tons

in merely two weeks"

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Later, statisticians calculated that for every inhabitant of Berlin there were nearly 39 cubic yard of rubble.

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