Over the course of eleven days in the summer of 1943, Allied bombers conducted six major air raids on Hamburg. Historians have since called this sustained period of bombing 'The Battle of Hamburg'. The citizens and historians of that city, however, called it 'die Katastrophe'. Bombing raids on German cities were far from simple affairs. Flying bombers into German territory was notoriously dangerous, and bad weather and the German night-fighter defence could often cause greater damage to the attackers than to the targets on the ground. However, this was one campaign where everything went according to plan: in less than two weeks Hamburg's internal economy was in disarray, and the city's morale was all but destroyed. In this volume, the well-known military historian Martin Middlebrook shows what happened when Bomber Command got everything right. He tells the stories of the British, American and Australian crews who flew the missions, of the Luftwaffe pilots who fought against them in the air, and of the terrified civilians on the ground, forced to endure a sustained bombing campaign.
Following his first book, The First Day on the Som
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