A Thousand Bombers On Bremen

History's largest air raid

I want you to imagine that you’re a 19 year-old from the British countryside. It’s summertime. Freshly-baked apple tarts cool off on the windowsill. You sneak out with an older friend to celebrate the start of summer with a cheeky pint at the local pub. Everything is as it should be. One moment you’re attending church with your family, the next moment Churchill is commanding you to fly across the North Sea to fight against millions of war-hardened Nazis. You’ve never even met a German. Tough luck kid.

War ravages across Europe and you’re fresh meat. You’re in command of a Wellington, a British bomber built like a tank with metal wings. Designed to withstand heavy enemy fire while you drop two-ton bombs from the sky, and pray. You fly so high it gives you a small chance to break past anti-aircraft artillery lighting up the sky from underneath cloud cover (emphasis on small). Bullets slam through the plane body, barely missing your body. Everyone is yelling. It smells of fresh puke and burnt motor oil. You’ve been told to take out a factory and your navigator tries to guide you to the target. A target you can’t fucking see because you’re tens of thousands of feet in the air… in the dark of night. The smell of apple tarts is long gone, friend, replaced with the sweat of the British lads accompanying you to bomb the hell out of a thousand year-old German town.

Welcome to the air raids on Bremen. One of the largest fleet of bombers the world had ever seen.

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To start: Why Bremen? What did this northern city of a half million people and charming brick buildings hold of significance to the allies?

Check out this map. See that red circle? That’s Bremen. Notice anything about its location? It’s close to water, right?

Bremen was built right on the Weser river, which conveniently connected the city to the vast North Sea. The Nazis, hellbent on conquering Europe, obviously had to supply their armies. No supplies, no blitzkrieg. Simple. They used the city’s ports and extensive railways as a hub to send arms, vehicles and boats to their advancing armies in Europe. Bremen was a vital piece of war infrastructure that the Germans would do anything to protect, and the Brits knew that.

So what happens when you have a city perfectly designed to move war toys? You build more toys. By the outbreak of the war Bremen had emerged as an industrial powerhouse. Pumping out warships and aircrafts that brought them one step closer to world dominance. This included the Focke-Wulf plant, which manufactured the Fw 190. The Fw 190 was a single-engine fighter plane that outmaneuvered the early Spitfires that the Brits flew at the time. This was becoming a real pain in the ass for Allied air forces:

Then to the north of the city, right on the river, you had a consortium of eight shipbuilders led by a company named AG Weser. Through incredible feats of engineering they manufactured world class submariners and destroyer warships. Machines with only one purpose: to make the enemy bleed.

Bremen had slowly become the Nazis’ beating war heart and the allies wanted nothing more than to clog her arteries.

Welcome to the Thousand-Bomber Raids

Designed to be a merciless show of power, the Royal Air Force (RAF) took every bomber it had (and borrowed what it didn’t) to strike mortal fear into the hearts of German leadership. Sure they wanted to attack with brute force to destroy key war targets like those shipyards above. But really they wanted to wage psychological war. They wanted to send a big “Fuck You” to Hitler. One thousand bombers assembled in a single raid was enough to make any enemy commander feel a little apprehension. Can you blame them?

These raids had a huge cost to organize so we only saw three of them throughout WW2.

30–31 May 1942 The 1st thousand-bomber raid, Operation Millennium, saw 1,047 aircraft dispatched in a narrow formation to destroy Cologne from above. 1455 tons of bombs decimated 3000+ buildings.

1–2 June 1942 The 2nd thousand-bomber raid had 956 aircraft dispatched over Essen but the target was obscured and bombing proved ineffective

Then lastly, the raid over Bremen. Operation Millennium II. The last time the world saw a thousand planes grouped together in one single attack.

At nightfall of the 25th the attacks started. 1,067 aircrafts total. Comprised mostly of

472 Wellingtons

Fitted with one ton bombs

And 220 Halifaxes & Lancaster heavy bombers designed for maximum explosive payloads

The Germans defended themselves with anti-aircraft guns strategically positioned around Bremen lighting up the night sky with fire. They had also developed a sophisticated radar-guided defense system, making the air raid incredibly dangerous for Allied airmen.

142 aircrafts snuck past piercing shells coming from German ground troops to bomb the Focke-Wulf factory. The bombs did their job and blew an assembly shop to smithereens. Followed by serious damage to 6 more buildings.

20 light bombers then attacked the shipyards. All of this while evading gunfire from specially designed German night fighters.

At the end of the day 572 houses were completely destroyed and over 6000 were damaged. 85 souls were lost with about 500 servicemen suffering serious injury

The result of all of this fighting? Millennium II was overall considered a limited success. Apart from the Focke-Wulfe factory little effective damage was inflicted to the German war machine. Poor weather and tons of cloud cover prevented the allies from making a bigger impact.

The RAF lost 48 aircraft, about 5% of the force committed to the raid. These losses came with the deaths of many brave airmen. Young lads with a full life ahead of them.

Going forward, this raid contributed to the Allied policy of large area bombing, aiming to cripple German war production and demoralize German civilians. Over the longer term, this approach would become controversial due to the many civilian casualties that come with targeting dense urban areas. The Thousand Bomber Raid on Bremen was a true show of Allied air power, helping win the war and bringing peace back to the world, but at what cost?

By the end of the war over 600,000 German civilians were killed by allied bombings.

While war can be fought for good, there is nothing good about war.

Till next post.

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