Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Bombs brought ‘fire of
Eighty years ago this week, Bath suffered three major air raids in the course of a single weekend, shocking citizens who had no reason to think the Georgian city was of any military importance. Eugene Byrne tells the story
WHETHER from conviction or ambition, journalist Günther Hoenicke had signed up for the Nazi party, and in 1942 was a young Kriegsberichter,a ‘war reporter’ working for the German propaganda machine.
When told he would be going on a bomber flight to England with the Luftwaffe, he was understandably nervous, but the pilot assured him, rightly as it turned out, that he had no cause to worry.
Their designated target, he said, was of no military importance and it would either be lightly defended, or not at all.
Hoenicke was not to be disappointed. His account of the mission was not only broadcast on German radio, but was syndicated to newspapers all over German-occupied Europe under the headline: BATH – FIRE OF ANNIHILATION.
We swoop down from a high altitude and the first flares light the area. Below, the River Avon threads its way. The first small fires are already flaring. Suddenly there is a huge darting flame – a gasometer has blown up. We descend further and see glowing houses beneath us.
A black cloud of smoke hangs over the city: there is almost no wind. We can distinctly recognise the streets, the fires and destruction rage.
Our observer calmly seeks a new target, dropping heavy bombs. More bombers approach and again and again there are explosions as one wave after another passes over the town bringing death and destruction.
So it was that this Nazi hack left us one of the most vivid cockpit views of the German bombing of
Britain in World War II.
Eighty years ago, over the weekend of April 25-27, 1942, Bath suffered three air raids in which 417 people lost their lives and over 1,000 were injured.
Though Britain was two and a half years into the war, the raids were a huge shock to Bathonians. Most of the German air raids on Britain, a period known as the ‘Blitz,’ had been over the winter of 1940-41.
London had sustained the greatest damage and the largest number of casualties, but other industrial centres had been targeted, too. Bristol suffered six major raids and several smaller ones, which by 1942 had claimed over 1,000 lives. Fire crews from Bath had regularly been despatched to Bristol during these raids to help out.
Thus far, Bath had got off lightly. There were a number of isolated incidents in which high explosive and incendiary bombs fell on, or near, the city, causing some deaths, but most, if not all, of these had probably been dropped through navigation errors by aircraft heading for Bristol or other targets.
Bath residents generally felt safe, complacent even. In 1940, one bomb that had fallen on the city but failed to explode was defused and displayed in Parade Gardens as a reminder to locals that it was vital that they observed the blackout regulations and did not show any light from their homes at night.
Bath had a number of war industries: the engineering works of Stothert & Pitt and the Horstmann Gear Company were now producing weapons. Between these and smaller enterprises, as well as the Admiralty buildings at Fox Hill, Bath could be said to have been a military target, but in no way a significant one.
By April 1942, not a single bomb had fallen on the city for a year, while the rest of the country was now seeing a lot less of Hitler’s air force, which was now engaged in a life-and-death struggle on the Russian front.
So when the air raid sirens sounded just before 11pm on Saturday, April 25, most Bath residents assumed that it was just a precaution and any raiders were heading for Bristol. Indeed, one fire crew was immediately sent to Bristol on the assumption that that was where it would be needed.
It was a clear night with a bright
moon – a ‘bombers’ moon,’ as it was called. At around 11.15pm, parachute flares were being dropped by the raiders to illuminate their target even further, but many on the ground found it hard to believe that Bath was being attacked.
After all, why Bath, and why now?
It was because the previous month the RAF had bombed Lübeck, a medieval city on the Baltic coast of north Germany, home to a historic cathedral and many old buildings of heritage value.
Arthur Harris, in charge of RAF Bomber Command, had selected it for an attack that was to be an
experiment in a new area-bombing technique aimed at undermining enemy morale.
The idea was to cause as much devastation as possible over a wide area, using high explosive bombs at first to open up roofs and disrupt emergency services, and to follow these with firebombs.
The result was a firestorm in which thousands of buildings were destroyed and an unknown number of people – thought to be between 300 and 250 – killed.
The Germans retaliated by targeting similarly lightly defended British towns and cities, starting with Exeter on April 23-24 and later taking in Norwich, Canterbury and York, as well as Bath.
After the attack on Exeter, a German official supposedly said, “We shall go out and bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in Baedeker”, referring to the popular German tourist guidebooks. And so these attacks became known as the ‘Baedeker raids.’
The term can be misleading as it suggests that the Nazis were simply picking on places of historic importance, which was only true up to a point.
During 1942, they also staged small or medium raids on towns and cities that would not have merited three stars in Baedeker – places like Middlesbrough, Southampton, Hull and Swansea, which were of industrial, rather than heritage, significance. As indeed was Westonsuper-Mare, an important site of aircraft manufacture, which was attacked in June 1942.
Some 80 German bombers were tasked with the first two Bath raids, most of them having bombed Exe
A black cloud of smoke hangs over the city: there is almost no wind. We can distinctly recognise the streets, the fires and destruction rage. Our observer calmly seeks a new target, dropping heavy bombs. More bombers approach and ... one wave after another passes over bringing death and destruction GÜNTHER HOENICKE
ter the night before. Based in northern France, they were less than two hours’ flying time from their target, though they varied their routes in an attempt to confuse Britain’s air defences and the RAF’s increasingly
effective night fighters.
One was shot down by a twinengined Bristol Beaufighter, equipped with radar in order to find the enemy in the dark, over the Devon coast. Another, hopelessly lost, would later be shot down by a Beaufighter in mid-Wales.
The first bombs fell just after 11pm. On Bristol.
Again, due to navigational error, some of the raiders were in the wrong place. Bristol’s anti-aircraft guns responded with what was probably the biggest barrage the city saw during the entire war, but none of the raiders was hit.
The rest made it to Bath and started their bombing runs at around 11.20pm. Thanks to the moonlight and the parachute flares, they could easily see their target. The first fell on Crescent Gardens and then in a line to the Gasworks, hitting two gasometers. This, presumably, was the explosion that Günther Hoenicke witnessed.
After the aircraft had dropped their bombs, some came down lower to machine-gun the streets to hamper the efforts of firefighters and rescuers.
By just after midnight, the sirens sounded the ‘all clear.’ On the way home, another plane was attacked by a Beaufighter and crashed into the sea before reaching home.
The raiders returned to base and immediately were refuelled and bombed up and were back over Bath at around 4.30am. The first raid had started a number of fires, which made accurate bombing even easier.
No German aircraft were shot down this time, but their losses thus far illustrated how much more efficient Britain’s air defences had become since 1940-41. One plane crashed in Dorset, apparently because its pilot was dazzled by a searchlight.
The following morning, Bath was in shock. Few people had slept, and daylight revealed burning and smouldering buildings and homes, many wrecked beyond repair.
Fire crews were still tackling blazes, while rescue squads – groups specially trained to find survivors trapped under collapsed buildings – worked to seek out and save people. By now, many fire crews had arrived from Bristol and other towns around the region.
Hundreds had been made homeless and were now being looked after in rest centres. The hospitals