German civilians were firebombed in World War II

We spent three days earlier this year in Lübeck, Germany, a city of 220,000, about forty minutes by train to the northeast of Hamburg. The old city, or alstadt, is an egg-shaped island a few kilometres in from the Baltic Sea. The old town, surrounded by the Trave River and a canal, is small, densely populated, and easily walkable. It is post-card scenic and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site.

We were impressed by how old it appeared. In the thirteenth century and later, Lübeck was the most important city in the Hanseatic League. That was an alliance of free cities whose merchant class organized trading forays into the neighbouring Baltic and Nordic territories. What we did not know was that while Lübeck is indeed old, most of its buildings have been rebuilt. They were heavily bombed by the Allies on Palm Sunday in March 1942.

Church bells melted

Coincidentally, we also arrived in Lübeck during Easter week. On Sunday, we went to St. Mary’s Lutheran church, a cavernous Gothic Basilica built in the thirteenth century. After the service we stayed to look around. A room at the back of the church contains the melted and twisted remains of bells that collapsed into the church’s nave during the bombing. A photo on a nearby wall shows the church in flames with its roof collapsing on that night in 1942. I was reminded of Norte Dame Cathedral in Paris after the fire in 2019.

Area Bombing Directive

The bombing of Lübeck marked a deliberate escalation in aerial warfare. Previously, the rules of conflict, at least in theory, held that bombing should be concentrated on military and industrial targets, or other strategic sites. Those attacks were likely to kill some civilians, but that was not their intended purpose.

In February 1942, a month before the raid on Lübeck, the British war cabinet issued an Area Bombing Directive ordering the Royal Air Force (RAF) to attack civilians. The Americans went through much the same debate with similar results. The war tacticians believed that bombing homes and neighbourhoods in Germany and Japan would be even more effective than destroying factories or shipyards. They believed that targeting civilians would also demoralize the population and shorten the war.

Payback to the Germans

The Area Bombing Directive was also payback to the German military for its bombing and missile attacks upon cities such as London, Coventry, and Liverpool in Great Britain in 1940 and 1941. More than 40,000 civilians were killed by Luftwaffe bombing during the war years, almost half of them in London. The Germans were ruthless but ultimately they possessed less air capacity than the Allies.

Lübeck an ideal target

Lübeck was the first German city attacked under the Area Bombing Directive. It was a not major centre, so it was not well defended. With its many timbered medieval buildings it was an ideal target.

The attack was a dress rehearsal for what was to come in the much larger industrial and port city of Hamburg. Between July 24 and August 3, 1943, Allied air forces attacked the city in a campaign called Operation Gomorrah. The name was chosen deliberately. Gomorrah was one of two Canaanite cities whose destruction is recorded in the Bible. The other was Sodom.

Preparing a firestorm

The RAF devised a bombing technique that used a combination of the usual highly explosive bombs, but followed up with incendiaries, which created an intense firestorm annihilating both people and buildings. Nothing had been left to chance, as I was to discover while reading Fire Weather, an excellent book by John Vaillant describing the wildfire that destroyed most of Fort McMurray in 2016.

Vaillant wanted to better understand what he called the “ultra rapid combustion” of the house fires that occurred when fire in the forest spread into Fort McMurray. He contacted a Seattle-based expert named Vyto Babrauskas, who told him that the best analogy to what happened in Fort McMurray would be the “Hamburg firestorm.”

Vaillant used that information in his book. But he also discovered that the chemical research arm of Standard Oil worked with the US and British military to examine how to make bombing attacks as lethal as possible. The military spared no detail. They hired expat German architects, Hollywood designers, and staff from the Harvard Architectural School to recreate typical houses lived in by German workers.

In the spring of 1943, model structures were built and test bombed in Great Britain and in Utah. Vaillant writes, “Generating a firestorm was not a serendipitous by-product, it was the over-arching goal.” He added that Hamburg’s “tight, high-walled streets were transformed into canyons of fire.” 

The raids on Hamburg alone killed an estimated 44,000 people and injured around 37,000 others. The intense heat and winds arising from it swept people off the streets and into the inferno. The number of civilian dead from Allied bombing in all of Germany during the war reached 600,000. The attacks did not crush German moral. Despite the deadly raids the Germans continued to fight for two more years.  

Canadian pilots involved

There were Canadian pilots involved in the German bombing raids. Stationed in England, they flew under the banner of the RAF. In the early 1990s, a team of Canadian documentarists produced a trilogy called The Valour and the Horror. One of the pieces, called Death by Moonlight, dealt with the firebombing of Hamburg.

The documentary described what it called “a deliberate plan for the annihilation of the civilian population.” It said that the pilots were not told about the secret decision to bomb civilians. They flew in huge, lumbering planes and dropped their payload from great heights.

Leaders, including Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt continued to claim, falsely, that they were bombing only military and industrial targets. They did not inform the Canadian government about the change in tactics.

Bombing crews decimated

German civilians were not the only casualties. Germany had sturdy air defences that inflicted heavy damage on the bombing crews. Of an estimated 125,000 Allied pilots and crew, almost half were killed. The Royal Canadian Air Force admits that 10,000 of them were Canadians. The knowledge among pilots that so many planes were being shot down created a heavy mental toll, but those pilots admitting fear or guilt were branded as cowards and sent away.

Awkward meeting in Germany

The documentarists took with them to Europe two of the Canadian pilots who were young men in 1943. Ken Brown and Doug Harvey were introduced to two elderly women. They were also young in 1943 and survived the Hamburg bombing.

It was an awkward meeting but not unfriendly. Brown and Harvey said they flew at high altitudes and did not know that they were bombing civilians. They appeared genuinely embarrassed when confronted, even if gently, with eye-witness accounts of incinerated corpses and bodies burned to ash.

Documentarists criticized

Death by Moonlight caused a storm of its own. The Royal Canadian Legion was furious, claiming that the heroic reputation of Canadian pilots had been stained. The documentary’s producers were summoned to appear before a Senate committee in parliament, and the reception was harsh. They were accused of fabrication and distortion.

But time and historical research have demonstrated that Allied leaders did plan and order a firestorm attack on Hamburg, Lübeck and other German cities. Canadian pilots, unwittingly or not, were involved.  In 2024, the documentary’s producer Arnie Gelbart, who had been verbally pummeled at the Senate committee, received the Order of Canada with glowing comments on his life’s work.

A dark precedent

The bombing of Lübeck, Hamburg, and other German cities established a dark precedent for the future of aerial warfare. There was once at least some reflection on the ethics of deliberately targeting civilians. That time is long past.

Almost daily, the television news shows Russian missiles hammering the residential areas of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. The Israelis have bombed Gaza into a moonscape, targeting schools, hospitals, communications towers, and newsrooms, not to mention the homes of Palestinians.

War is hell in a way that most of us cannot fully understand. Yet countries, including Canada, are rushing to produce and acquire all manner of lethal equipment. Is this the world as it is? If so, it is a world gone tragically wrong.