Then it was 9 Squadron’s turn. As they approached the Berghof, the flak batteries set into the valley sides were banging away, pumping up streams of accurate flak at the bombers coming in at between 14,000 and 15,000 feet. Flight Lieutenant G. J. Campbell broadcast later on the BBC that he saw a ridge flash below him as his pilot Flying Officer J. Buckley brought him ‘almost dead ahead of the house. I had a perfect run up and released my twelve-thousand pound bomb with the house dead in the sight.’14
Campbell’s Tallboy was fuzed at twenty-five seconds.15 From a Lancaster following close behind, rear gunner Flight Sergeant E. J. Cutting watched ‘a twelve thousand pounder land about a hundred yards from Hitler’s house’.16 There was ‘a terrific flash and though we were flying pretty high we could hear the explosion above the roar of our engines and the whole plane seemed to rock,’ he told radio listeners. Then ‘great piles of earth came shooting up, high into the sky. I thought to myself well, even if that’s a bit short, it must have damaged the place. But just at that moment there was another flash, followed by a huge explosion. One of the other aircraft had planted its twelve thousand pounder bang on the target.’
By now the Main Force squadrons had arrived and the sky over the valley was dangerously crowded with huge aeroplanes. Cutting’s pilot reported at the post-operation debrief that ‘interference from other aircraft was so great’ that he was unable to identify the target on the run-in and was ordered by the master bomber controlling the operation from another Lancaster not to bother making a second effort. Another pilot, Squadron Leader James Melrose, stated that ‘just as the bomb aimer was preparing to drop the bomb, the aircraft was narrowly missed by a bomb from [an] aircraft above, and the target was accordingly overshot and it was impossible to bomb’.17 Fred Whitfield’s main concern was the anti-aircraft fire. The gunners had found their range and ‘the sky was black with flak’.18 The bomb aimer, Phil Jackson, seemed unaware of the shells rocking their kite as he talked Ron Adams in. Then Q-Queenie ‘appeared to leap a thousand feet in grateful thanks for being relieved of five tons of metal’. Relief was brief. A few seconds later he heard a ‘huge bang … we went into a steep dive. The port engine was on fire.’ Then came ‘another almighty bang’ apparently caused by one of the giant bombs hitting the top of the mountain. This blast hurled Q-Queenie upwards, blowing out the flames licking around the engine in the process. Swinging his turret to port Whitfield looked back up the inside of the aircraft for damage and saw jagged holes in the fuselage but the Lancaster flew on unperturbed. As they turned away he had a grandstand view of the Main Force attack.
Their target was the SS barracks, about a hundred yards from the Berghof. From the bellies of the aircraft, 4,000lb, 1,000lb and 500lb bombs tumbled out. Some fell on a hotel next door to the Berghof used for housing visitors, others on the villa of Martin Bormann who had managed to secure a prime spot for his house right next to his master. Emmy Goering was in her bedroom when she heard the first explosion. Her first thought was for her daughter and she ‘ran to Edda’s room but the governess had already taken her to the shelter’, in the cellar of the house.19 Next, she sought her husband and found him shaving, apparently unconcerned. He told her to go to the shelter but said he would not be joining her. When she insisted on staying with him, he relented. Had he not, his story might have ended there. One bomb landed in the swimming pool a few yards from the window of his study. The blast brought down the roof of the villa and collapsed the main staircase.
The bombs fell on innocent and guilty alike. When the sirens sounded school children were ordered to return home. Ten-year-old Irmgard Hunt was hurrying back with her sister Ingrid and friends when they ‘began to hear the droning of bombers overhead’.20 They were given a lift by a passing SS driver who let them out near their house. As the car drove off the first explosions erupted. The noise of the bombs was ‘hellish’. It was followed by ‘an enormous storm-like wind that would have blown me off my feet had I not gripped the rough bark of the nearest spruce and pressed myself against it … We waited for a pause after each explosion to race to the next tree before the blast of air hit us.’
They reached home and crouched with their mother in the basement flinching from the ‘horrendous noise that engulfed us, even in the cellar’. Next day Irmgard and Ingrid walked back to school. ‘As the Obersalzberg came into view we saw the devastation. The plateau had become a chaotic brown-and-black mess of tree stumps that looked like charred matchsticks, dark craters and smoking ruins. “It’s all gone”, I said to myself.’
Half of the SS barracks was demolished. The villas of the elite were wrecked. Emmy Goering had left her jewellery in the house and was relieved when a servant found it among the wreckage. The Berghof had been gutted and the great picture window that had delighted pre-war guests was no more than a hole in the wall. The bombs had killed thirty-one in their usual indiscriminate fashion, with local civilians and foreign slave workers as well as SS troops among the casualties.
The raiders had suffered, too. Two Lancasters were brought down by flak. One crash-landed without casualties. Another, F-Freddie from 619 Squadron, provided a last story of heroism from the RAF’s war. With the machine fatally damaged, the Canadian pilot Wilf DeMarco ordered the crew to jump while he held the aircraft steady. Three got out alive. The other three went down with their skipper.
The bombers landed at their home bases between noon and two o’clock. Because of the battering it had received, Q-Queenie was excused joining the queue of aircraft circling the base and given permission to land at once. Ron Adams made a smooth touchdown and taxied to dispersal where they were met by the ground crew eager to hear their adventures and dispensing cigarettes. After eight hours without a smoke, Fred Whitfield remembered, the first puff ‘was pure nectar’.21 When, in bomber bases up and down the east of England, the crews sat down to be debriefed by station intelligence officers, the same observation was repeated over and over. During the entire eight-hour trip they had not seen a single German aeroplane.
The exploit covered the front pages of the following day’s newspapers. ‘Hitler’s Chalet Wrecked’ was the headline in The Times. The Daily Express lead announced: ‘Hitler Bombed Out – 5-tonners right on der Fuhrer’s house’, adding that ‘Berchtesgaden was the target that every bomber pilot had longed to attack for nearly six years’.
Nobody asked why it had never been hit before now. Nor was the military usefulness of the exercise questioned. The truth was that the Berghof had been mentioned frequently when target lists were being drawn up but had always been rejected. Allied intelligence knew about the deep bomb shelters dug to protect the leadership and reckoned the negative publicity of a failed attempt to finish Hitler was not worth the effort. Later the calculation changed. The fear now was that the bombers might succeed, and the defence of Germany would pass to the hands of someone more competent and rational.
On 25 April 1945, with Hitler’s empire reduced to a few square miles in the heart of a burning city, there was less reason than ever to attack Berchtesgaden with such extravagant force. None was offered. The raid on Hitler’s mountain retreat was an overwhelmingly British operation, in conception and execution, with American aircraft playing only a secondary role. Its purpose was thus symbolic and the message was from Britain to the world. Hitler had started the war, and it was the British alone who had stood out against him. It had taken a great coalition to defeat him but without that initial defiance there might have been no victory. Smashing Berchtesgaden was a reminder of that truth. It was fitting that it was the Royal Air Force that delivered the blow.
2
One afternoon in the middle of the war Group