I bombardamenti degli alleati su Amburgo nel luglio 1943 furono così intensi da provocare più morti che la bomba atomica di Nagasaki.
La strategia statunitense e inglese mirava, oltre che a distruggere l’apparato industriale e le postazioni militari naziste, a colpire il morale della popolazione civile. Il bombardamento non ebbe gli effetti sperati: la popolazione seppe reagire così come avvenne dopo i bombardamenti tedeschi su Londra, mentre la capacità militare del porto fu presto ripristinata.
Il libro di Keith Lowe Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg 1943, attraverso una grande quantità di testimonianze, descrive l’evento sia dal punto di vista angloamericano che da quello dei cittadini che subirono il bombardamento.
This is a sad, straightforward, well-researched book that gives an account of the bombing of Hamburg in the summer of 1943 from the point of view both of the bombers, English and American, and the Germans who endured it, experiencing the worst fire storm ever produced. More people were killed than at Nagasaki. There were 45,000 dead and 38,000 injured, while a million fled, their homes destroyed. Remarkably, the survivors of Hamburg have never complained. They saw the attack as something brought down on them by the Nazi regime’s manner of making war.
Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed on a combined bombing offensive against Germany earlier that year, at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, knowing that the Allies were not yet strong enough to invade mainland Europe, and believing that it was the only effective way to damage their enemies and work towards establishing supremacy in the air. As well as destroying German industrial and military targets, they intended to break the morale of the civilian population through terror; also to give some support to their Russian allies in the east. There was to be round-the-clock bombing from RAF Bomber Command and the US Air Force. This was in direct contravention of the policy declared by Chamberlain at the beginning of the war, when he told the House of Commons that Britain would “never resort to deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism”. Since then the German bombing of Rotterdam and the Blitz, which killed 20,000 Londoners, had changed the moral landscape.
The people of Hamburg did not expect to be bombed, even when leaflets were dropped telling them they would be, because they believed the English and Americans would want to use their harbour and other facilities once they arrived in Germany. Still, there had been official preparation for an attack. Hamburg, with its very tall houses crammed close together, had experienced many fires in its history. Everyone was trained in fire drill, and there were enough shelters for the whole population. Children were sent away early in the war, but when things seemed safe they returned in large numbers.
Operation Gomorrah was the grisly Old Testament name given by the Allies to their plan (who thinks up these names, you wonder). A new jamming device was to make Germany’s radar-controlled defences almost useless. From July 24 to 30 the British bombed by night and the Americans by day. The unusually hot summer had dried out the buildings of Hamburg, and on the night of the 27th a firestorm like nothing ever seen before engulfed much of the town.
Keith Lowe has collected a great deal of testimony and interviewed many witnesses. An English rear-gunner noted in his diary after his safe return: “If it had been a really clear night the fires would have been visible nearly back to our coast. As it was we could see it nearly half-way back, about 200 miles, and a column of smoke about 20,000 feet, so Hamburg must have had it.” [...]
The poet Wolf Biermann was six years old in 1943, and his father had just been killed in Auschwitz. He was with his mother in Hamburg. During the bombing she hesitated between staying in the basement shelter and running out into the streets. She made the right decision, to run, and so saved their lives. What Biermann remembers most vividly is a small pot of mirabelle jam she had made, the only thing he took with him in his toy bucket. A 12-year-old boy who survived was found alone, carrying his baby brother’s dead body in his suitcase, together with his pet rabbit. Parents would not leave the bodies of their dead children and took them with them as they fled.
Air Chief Marshal Harris’s belief that bombing on this scale would end the war quickly was mistaken. The Germans were stunned for a moment but recovered very fast, and the people of Hamburg proved extraordinarily resilient, just as the blitzed Londoners had done. Much of the harbour had escaped the bombs, and within two months the production of U boats was running near capacity again. AJP Taylor reckoned that the cost of the bomber war was one-third of the entire British economy, though in fact the war was won by slow fighting across land.
Lowe discusses the arguments about the morality of bombing, but the intention of his book is not to blame or excuse, rather to describe; to give us the record of how it was, as far as can be done. By putting together testimony from both sides he makes his point. How can we choose to weep for one side and not for the other? For children and pregnant women burned in the streets or asphyxiated in the shelters, for boys shot down, giving their lives in a just cause. Once you are committed to fighting, you are going to kill the innocent with whatever technology you have developed.
Keith Lowe, Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg 1943, Viking, pp. 512, £25. | |
