nothing could prevent them from dropping thousands of tons
of fire bombs. They uncaged in this ancient Hanseatic port an
awful new phenomenon of war, the “fire storm.” The artificial
hurricane whipped out the window panes, tore off roofs, and
catapulted people, trees, and even railway cars into the heart of
the infernal flames. The fires flashed through whole streets in
seconds, generating blast-furnace temperatures that melted
glass, glazed bricks, and reduced every organic and animate ob-
ject to ashes, after mercifully poisoning them first with invisible
gases.
Göring’s blood ran cold as he read the first teleprinter
messages. He sent Bodenschatz to Hamburg. Gauleiter Karl
Kaufmann told him that twenty-six thousand bodies had al-
ready been counted mostly those of women and children.
(The night’s final death toll would exceed forty-eight thou-
sand.) In Berlin, Speer and Milch were heard soberly proclaim-
ing that Germany had “finally lost the war.” Toward midday on
the twenty-eighth, Göring had his adjutant Brauchitsch phone
Milch: “The Reichsmarschall notifies the field marshal that the
main effort is to be focused forthwith on the defense of the
Reich.”
The next morning they met in Berlin, then Göring and
Milch took to Hitler a formal proposal for the introduction of a
refined version of Herrmann’s “free-lance” night-fighting sys-
tem guiding entire squadrons of fighters into the RAF
“bomber stream,” which ironically could now be located the
more easily by its own cascades of aluminum foil. During the
following night, in the third British attack of the Operation
Gomorrah series, Herrmann’s pilots brought down eighteen of
the twenty-eight bombers that were destroyed. In its own small
way it seemed like a turning point in the air war.
All Germany waited for the next fire storm. “Things can’t