The Allied bombing of Hamburg during World War II included numerous attacks on civilians and civic infrastructure. As a large city and industrial centre, Hamburg's shipyards, U-boat pens, and the Hamburg-Harburg area oil refineries were attacked throughout the war.
RAF Bomber Command controlled the Royal Air Force's bomber forces from 1936 to 1968. Along with the United States Army Air Forces, it played the central role in the strategic bombing of Germany in World War II. From 1942 onward, the British bombing campaign against Germany became less restrictive and increasingly targeted industrial sites and the civilian manpower base essential for German war production. In total 364,514 operational sorties were flown, 1,030,500 tons of bombs were dropped and 8,325 aircraft lost in action. Bomber Command crews also suffered a high casualty rate: 55,573 were killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew, a 44.4% death rate. A further 8,403 men were wounded in action, and 9,838 became prisoners of war.
Gee, sometimes written GEE, was a radio navigation system used by the Royal Air Force during World War II. It measured the time delay between two radio signals to produce a fix, with accuracy on the order of a few hundred metres at ranges up to about 350 miles (560 km). It was the first hyperbolic navigation system to be used operationally, entering service with RAF Bomber Command in 1942.
Air Vice Marshal Donald Clifford Tyndall Bennett, was an Australian aviation pioneer and bomber pilot who rose to be the youngest air vice marshal in the Royal Air Force. He led the "Pathfinder Force" from 1942 to the end of the Second World War in 1945. He has been described as "one of the most brilliant technical airmen of his generation: an outstanding pilot, a superb navigator who was also capable of stripping a wireless set or overhauling an engine".
The Pathfinders were target-marking squadrons in RAF Bomber Command during World War II. They located and marked targets with flares, which a main bomber force could aim at, increasing the accuracy of their bombing. The Pathfinders were normally the first to receive new blind-bombing aids like Gee, Oboe and the H2S radar.
H2S was the first airborne, ground scanning radar system. It was developed for the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command during World War II to identify targets on the ground for night and all-weather bombing. This allowed attacks outside the range of the various radio navigation aids like Gee or Oboe, which were limited to about 350 kilometres (220 mi) of range from various base stations. It was also widely used as a general navigation system, allowing landmarks to be identified at long range.
Oboe was a British bomb aiming system developed to allow their aircraft to bomb targets accurately in any type of weather, day or night. Oboe coupled radar tracking with radio transponder technology. The guidance system used two well-separated radar stations to track the aircraft. Two circles were created before the mission, one around each station, such that they intersected at the bomb drop point. The operators used the radars, aided by transponders on the aircraft, to guide the bomber along one of the two circles and drop the bombs when they reached the intersection.
H2X, officially known as the AN/APS-15, was an American ground scanning radar system used for blind bombing during World War II. It was a development of the British H2S radar, the first ground mapping radar to be used in combat. It was also known as the "Mickey set" and "BTO" for "bombing through the overcast" radar.
Gee-H, sometimes written G-H or GEE-H, was a radio navigation system developed by Britain during World War II to aid RAF Bomber Command. The name refers to the system's use of the earlier Gee equipment, as well as its use of the "H principle" or "twin-range principle" of location determination. Its official name was AMES Type 100.
The Butt Report, released on 18 August 1941, was a report prepared during World War II, revealing the widespread failure of RAF Bomber Command aircraft to hit their targets.
Precision bombing is the attempted aerial bombing of a target with some degree of accuracy, with the aim of maximising target damage or limiting collateral damage. Its strategic counterpart is carpet bombing. An example would be destroying a single building in a built up area causing minimal damage to the surroundings. Precision bombing was initially tried by both the Allied and Central Powers during World War I, however it was found to be ineffective because the technology did not allow for sufficient accuracy. Therefore, the air forces turned to area bombardment, which killed civilians. Since the War, the development and adoption of guided munitions has greatly increased the accuracy of aerial bombing. Because the accuracy achieved in bombing is dependent on the available technology, the "precision" of precision bombing is relative to the time period.
Operation Bellicose was an attack by Avro Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force on a German radar factory housed in the former Zeppelin Works at Friedrichshafen and the Italian naval base at La Spezia. It was the first shuttle bombing raid in the Second World War and the second use of a Master Bomber. In early June 1943, a Central Interpretation Unit photo interpreter identified a stack of ribbed baskets at the Zeppelin Works. After Winston Churchill viewed the photos at RAF Medmenham on 14 June, No. 5 Group RAF received the surprise orders on 16 June to attack Friedrichshafen during the next full moon.
The Battle of Berlin was a bombing campaign against Berlin by RAF Bomber Command along with raids on other German cities to keep German defences dispersed. Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) Bomber Command, believed that "We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF come in with us. It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war".
Operation Hydra was an attack by RAF Bomber Command on a German scientific research centre at Peenemünde on the night of 17/18 August 1943. Group Captain John Searby, commanding officer of No. 83 Squadron RAF, commanded the operation, the first time that Bomber Command used a master bomber to direct the attack of the main force. Hydra began the Crossbow campaign against the German V-weapon programme. The British lost 215 aircrew and 40 bombers, and killed several hundred enslaved workers in the nearby Trassenheide forced labour camp. The Luftwaffe lost twelve night-fighters and about 170 German civilians were killed, including two V-2 rocket scientists. Prototype V-2 rocket launches were delayed for about two months, testing and production was dispersed and the morale of the German survivors was severely affected. However, the impact of this British operation on German V-weapon production was apparently lumped together with subsequent Allied attacks on Peenemünde as "not effective" in the 1945 "Summary Report" of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The Germans had already started to disperse the manufacturing of the V-2 in 1942, for example to Raderach near Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance.
The Stabilised Automatic Bomb Sight (SABS) was a Royal Air Force bombsight used in small numbers during World War II. The system worked along similar tachometric principles as the more famous Norden bombsight, but was somewhat simpler, lacking the Norden's autopilot feature.
The Battle of the Ruhr was a strategic bombing campaign against the Ruhr Area in Nazi Germany carried out by RAF Bomber Command during the Second World War. The Ruhr was the main centre of German heavy industry with coke plants, steelworks, armaments factories and ten synthetic oil plants. The British attacked 26 targets identified in the Combined Bomber Offensive. Targets included the Krupp armament works (Essen), the Nordstern synthetic oil plant at Gelsenkirchen and the Rheinmetal–Borsig plant in Düsseldorf, which was evacuated during the battle. The battle included cities such as Cologne not in the Ruhr proper but which were in the larger Rhine-Ruhr region and considered part of the Ruhr industrial complex. Some targets were not sites of heavy industry but part of the production and movement of materiel.
No. 109 Squadron RAF was an aircraft squadron of the Royal Air Force.
Group Captain Thomas Gilbert "Hamish" Mahaddie, was a Scotsman who served in the Royal Air Force (RAF). As a youth he was selected for an apprentice programme and was trained as an RAF ground crew "metal rigger". He had earned his wings and reached the rank of sergeant pilot by the outbreak of the Second World War. In his second tour he was selected to be a member of the newly formed "Pathfinder Force". At the end of his second combat tour he was brought onto Air Vice Marshal Don Bennett's Headquarter Staff in the position of "Group Training Inspector". In this position he selected, recruited and trained aircrews to serve in the Pathfinder Force. Within the span of two years from the start of the war Mahaddie had risen in rank from sergeant to group captain. Following the war he continued to serve in the RAF until 1958. Out of the service he worked as an electronics consultant for the Armed Services, and as an aircraft consultant for the film industry. His most remarkable accomplishment in the film industry was the procurement of aircraft, crews and service personnel for the film Battle of Britain (1969).
The Bombardment of Mailly-le-Camp was an RAF raid against a German panzer training center located in northern France undertaken during the night of 3/4 May 1944. The mission was a part of the "softening up" campaign Bomber Command conducted prior to the D-Day invasion. The operation was assigned to No. 5 Group, which was joined by No. 1 Group. Estimated a lightly defended target, confusion in the mission plan and communication problems led to the force being held up at the assembly point, where German night fighters slipped in among the bombers. Though the bombers succeeded in destroying the training camp, the victory was achieved at a heavy price.
