The Boy Who Went to War

by Giles Milton

  Now, in the pale glow of the moonlight, Erwin cast his eye towards the south-west, expecting to see the town’s distant roofs and gables bathed in silvery light. As he gazed across the valley, he was shocked by what he saw. He looked again – as if to double-check – and this time he had to pinch himself, scarcely able to take it in. Then, realising that his eyes were not deceiving him and that he and his family were in imminent danger, he ran breathlessly back towards the house.

  ‘Christbaums!’ he gasped as he burst into the dining room. ‘There are christbaums all over Pforzheim!’

  The cosy intimacy in the house was shattered in an instant. Christbaums – Christmas trees – were the magnesium flares used as target markers by Britain’s Royal Air Force. Just ten days earlier, those same flares had lit the skies above Dresden – the prelude to a catastrophic bombardment and firestorm that had reduced the city to rubble and some 25,000 of its citizens to corpses. Erwin had a terrible premonition that the same fate was about to be unleashed on Pforzheim. If so, their own village was also likely to be in danger, for the British raids were notorious for their inaccuracy.

  As if in confirmation of his fears, the whine of the local air-raid siren suddenly pierced the night air.

  ‘Frau Weber quickly went to get the children out of bed,’ explained Marie Charlotte in a letter that she later wrote to her eldest son. ‘Everyone took what they needed – a coat or bag – and Gunhild got the dogs. We all went into the cellar. And then –’ There is a slight pause in the letter, as if she had to collect her thoughts before continuing. ‘And then – all hell was let loose.’

  Some four hours earlier, a young sergeant named Doug Hicks had glanced anxiously at the skies above Lincolnshire before climbing into his Lancaster bomber. It was rare to be taking off in daylight but tonight’s target was a distant one: it lay close to the Black Forest in the south-west corner of Germany. Hicks and his crew were heading for Pforzheim, a provincial market town in the northern part of Baden. It was a place of such insignificance that most of them had never heard of it.

  Even the strategists in the Royal Air Force had hesitated when selecting it as a candidate for bombardment. Some months earlier they had drawn up a list of potential cities to be targeted. Pforzheim fell into the lowest of the five categories.

  Now, on 23 February 1945, Operation Yellowfin had finally been given the green light. Pforzheim’s watch-making industries were believed to be producing precision weapons and needed to be destroyed. They raid would be carried out by 379 aircraft carrying almost half a million high-explosive bombs.

  Among those planes was a Lancaster bomber known by its crew as ‘D for dog’. This was Sergeant Hicks’ aircraft and it was his fifth mission with 505 Squadron. He was the rear gunner, charged with protecting the plane from attack from behind. It was a lonely role: for the next eight or nine hours he would be crouched in a tiny plexiglas turret, staring into the clouds for any signs of enemy aircraft. His only contact with the rest of the crew was through the wireless intercom system.

  All the ground staff assembled outside the Nissen huts to wave the men goodbye. Hicks had just turned eighteen and had no interest in king and country. He and his fellow airmen saw these bombing raids as a big adventure.

  The Lancaster roared down the runway before climbing steadily over the Lincolnshire countryside. It banked slightly as it did so, affording a bird’s-eye view of the airfield at North Killingholme and the little villages of Brocklesby, Great Limber and Croxby Top. The runway steadily contracted until it was nothing more than a pencil-thin line; the surrounding fields shrank to smudged green miniatures.

  As the squadron headed out across the North Sea, Hicks’ thoughts flashed back to his previous mission, just ten days earlier. The same crew had taken part in the bombing of Dresden, unleashing their incendiary bombs with relentless intensity and turning the city into a fireball.

  The Dresden raid had been one of the most devastating of the war. From his position at the rear of the aircraft, Hicks had been stunned by the conflagration ignited by their payload. He had also been struck by the scale of the raid and the number of planes involved, hardly believing that so many could fit into such a tiny area of sky. Now, as his Lancaster once again made its way across Belgium, he could only wonder about the new destruction that they were about to unleash.

  The trip was uneventful and the planes reached Pforzheim exactly on schedule. There had been no anti-aircraft fire from the ground and no encounters with German fighter aircraft. They were flying at 20,000 feet and although it felt icy cold inside the aircraft, the men were wearing their electrically heated suits, which kept them warm enough.

  As the plane circled the target and the tail swung through 180 degrees, Hicks caught sight of little fires on the ground below. These were coming from the magnesium parachute flares that had been dropped by pathfinders – the elite squadrons that located the exact target and sent down flares to mark the ground.

  The Lancaster circled the town once again, descending to 8,000 feet – so low that the town’s larger buildings appeared as looming shadows in the moonlight. Hicks, a Canadian recruit to the Royal Air Force, heard the voice of the master bomber crackle over the radio. The calm voice and pronounced English accent of the pilot were a reassuring. He could almost imagine the pilot describing a polo match as he issued the order to start bombing: ‘Bomb on the red target indicators’ – ‘Good show, men’ – ‘We are right on target’ – ‘Jolly good show’.

  Wolfram’s parents were not the only people to panic when they saw the christbaums light up the sky over Pforzheim. Their close friends – who, like their house guests, were also called Weber – lived just a few hundred yards away in the heart of Eutingen village. They too were at dinner when there was a frantic knocking on their front door. It was the tenant who lived in the apartment above them, wearing nothing but his underwear and clutching his trousers. ‘Go as fast as you can into the cellar,’ he screamed. ‘There are christbaums all over Pforzheim.’

  The family rushed to their basement shelter, which had been lined with straw mattresses and stocked with provisions. Soon after, the earth began to tremble and shake with ominous regularity. Although they were three miles away from Pforzheim, the foundations of their apartment block shuddered from the force of the first explosions. Sigrid Weber said goodbye to her life. She was numb with fear.

  Other friends of Wolfram’s parents would have to endure a more terrifying evening still. Their church friends, the Rodis, lived much closer to the centre of Pforzheim. Although their house lay just outside the phosphorus grid laid out by the British pilots, all of their extended family lived in the heart of town, which now exposed them to the greatest possible danger.

  Martha Luise Rodi had turned on her wireless shortly after 7.30 p.m. and had heard the ominous sound of a ticking metronome – the usual prelude to the announcement of an imminent air raid. Then came the news that there were thirty planes to the west of Pforzheim, crossing the Rhine and flying very low.

  Martha Luise immediately telephoned her mother and sister who lived in a little apartment in Nagoldstrasse, at the bottom of the hill, warning them to take shelter. Shortly after, at about five minutes to eight, the family heard another announcement, alerting them that the planes were marking the city. The last words that they heard were: ‘Bombs are being dropped.’ Then there was silence.

  Martha Luise ushered her children into their shelter as soon as they heard that the city was being marked with flares. With her husband away, her eldest son missing in action and one of her daughters, Ev-Marie, on Reich Labour Service, she felt acutely protective towards her remaining three children.

  However, many local people reacted to the air raid with weary indifference. The sirens sounded every day and yet the bombs always fell elsewhere. There was a feeling that Pforzheim would be spared. After all, it made no strategic sense to bomb a provincial town on the fringes of the Black Forest.

  Among those who ignored the sirens was Ha
nnelore Schottgen. She was returning to Pforzheim after a long stint in the Reich Labour Service and was cycling through the easternmost part of town when she suddenly heard the familiar sound. As she was just fifteen minutes from home, she decided to keep going but was stopped by an air-raid warden and ordered into the nearest public shelter.

  Her arrival was met with much grumbling, for the cellar was already overcrowded. On the point of tears, she went back upstairs and begged the man to let her continue on her way.

  The warden reluctantly agreed to let her get back on her bike but he did so on condition that she take cover as soon as she saw planes overhead.

  As she turned into Kiehnlestrasse, in the centre of town, she was stopped for a second time. A warden ordered her off her bike and into a shelter. ‘Come on, miss,’ he said. ‘You can’t carry on any more. They’ve already sent down the Christmas trees.’

  Hannelore told him she feared being greeted once again by outright hostility, but he reassured her that the girls in this particular shelter were very friendly. ‘You’ll be treated well. Go in quick.’

  As she descended into the cellar, she heard the low rumble of the vanguard planes passing overhead, followed by the sound of flak from the local air defences.

  She was indeed given a warm welcome by those already in the shelter – eight Reich Labour Service girls and a warden – who were huddled over a wireless listening to the news.

  They heard the radio announcer describing the situation as desperate. Suddenly the voice became stronger: ‘Big groups of enemy planes are coming nearer our area.’

  The girls glanced at one another and prayed that the aircraft were heading elsewhere.

  Eight thousand feet above Pforzheim and crouched into the rear turret of his Lancaster, Sergeant Doug Hicks was still listening to the crackling instructions being issued by the master bomber. ‘We are right on target…jolly good show.’

  It was as he heard the words ‘jolly good show’ that the aircraft lurched violently to the left and started a sickening downward spiral. Sparks and flames began streaming past his turret and his intercom went dead. He assumed they had been hit by flak, for he could see tracer fire arcing up from the ground. In fact, the Lancaster had been hit by an incendiary bomb released from a plane flying directly above them.

  Peering out of his turret, Hicks realised that the rear of the plane had also been hit by fire from the ground. He counted six holes in the left side of the tail and another five on the right.

  The pilot was fighting hard to keep the aircraft under control. As it flew over the town at an alarming angle, Hicks got a dramatic panorama of sky and land. The whole target area was a sheet of white light. When he looked upwards into the fire-lit sky, he could see dozens of Lancaster aircraft with their bomb-bays open.

  In the Aïcheles’ hilltop villa, Wolfram’s parents were still sheltering in the cellar. There was a continuous thumping that shook the entire hillside. To Marie Charlotte, it felt as if a giant was punching the floor of the valley with his fist. ‘Bomb after bomb,’ she wrote. ‘The whole house was shaking.’

  At one point during the bombardment, she and her husband crept upstairs and poked their heads outside, only to find that they were scarcely able to breathe. The fire-storm in the valley below was so intense that all the oxygen was being forcibly sucked from the air.

  Marie Charlotte was suddenly very frightened. ‘The air pressure was so strong that the door was flung out of our hands.’ In Dresden, the same suction had wrenched windows and doors from their frames, allowing the fire to spread with unchecked rapacity.

  As Wolfram’s parents stared down into the valley, it seemed to be one luminous sheet of flame. It was mesmerising, even hypnotic. They would have watched for longer, had they not been sent dashing back to the cellar by a stray incendiary bomb that smacked into the damp earth of a neighbouring field, setting it alight.

  At their house on Spichernstrasse, the Rodi children were also crouched in their cellar, hands jammed in their ears in an attempt to block out the deafening thumps. They could not see anything, but they could hear the planes roaring overhead.

  Barbara, just nine years old, was shaking with terror. To make matters worse, the electricity was suddenly cut. Now, all they had for light was a pocket torch.

  Then, incongruously, there was a frantic knocking on their front door. It was Uncle Karl, a cousin of the family, who had run all the way from his house in order to see whether they were still alive.

  He brought a tale of such destruction that it seemed inconceivable anyone in the town centre would survive.

  Sergeant Doug Hicks was thinking much the same thing as his crippled Lancaster bomber circled Pforzheim. With every passing second, another sector of the city exploded into flames. Soon, the scores of individual fires conjoined into one massive conflagration that turned the ground into a spiralling, whitish-gold pool of flame. The bombs being dropped contained a mixture of high explosive and phosphorous incendiary that gave a curiously cold colour to the heat of the fire.

  Hicks, isolated in the tail, was desperately trying to make contact with the pilot but the intercom system remained dead. Convinced that the plane was going to crash-land, he prepared himself for the terrible ordeal of parachuting to the ground, unplugging his electric suit and getting ready to open the turret doors. As he peered into the void, he was brought to his senses by the horrendous sight below him. The entire town was a raging, pulsating fireball. He decided that he would rather ride the aircraft until it hit the earth than jump into the burning hell that was Pforzheim.

  As if to confirm that he had made the right decision, the plane suddenly righted itself and levelled off. Severely damaged, but brought under control by the skill of the pilot, it swung in a westerly direction and headed for home.

  The firestorm that it left behind was awesome, with great tongues of flame leaping and writhing into the winter sky. So bright was the glow, indeed, that it was still visible to Sergeant Hicks when his plane was more than one hundred miles from Pforzheim.

  On the ground, the flames devoured utterly everything in their path. More than 90 per cent of the buildings in the centre of town were now ablaze. As the fire ate through supporting timbers, so the exterior stone façades collapsed in on themselves. In the eye of the firestorm, the temperature approached a staggering 1,600 degrees centigrade – so hot that even metal beams and girders were turned to liquid.

  The firestorm could be heard sucking in oxygen with greedy relish. Then, like a spiteful bellows, it belched out a noxious concoction of sulphur-yellow gases.

  Many of the 17,000 Pforzheimers who would not survive that night were already dead. Pulverised by bombs, crushed by collapsing buildings or starved of oxygen, their end was terrible but mercifully swift. However, in one small cellar in the centre of town, caught in the heart of the firestorm, Hannelore Schottgen was still alive.

  ‘We were sitting there, huddled together. All we could hear was bomb after bomb; screaming and screeching and noises of things breaking down. The whole house seemed to be moving. A bit of ceiling fell down…there was disgusting dust everywhere. More things fell in. Was the house going to collapse on top of us? Was it going to bury us alive?’

  She later recalled her fears as she sat crouched in the cellar. At one point there was a momentary pause in the bombing and a ghostlike voice could be heard on the wireless, announcing that the raid was coming to an end. The girls experienced a moment of elation, but the announcement was swiftly followed by a second one that warned that a far larger formation of planes was now heading their way.

  Up to this point, the girls in the shelter had taken some comfort from the fact that the lights were still working. Now, they suddenly snapped out, plunging the cellar into darkness. The town’s electricity station had received a direct hit. Seconds later, equally abruptly, the wireless went dead. The girls clutched each other, terrified by the prospect of death.

  The bombs and incendiaries were by now causing incalculable dam
age. Entire quarters of the city had collapsed into rubble. Leopoldstrasse, Pforzheim’s busiest street, had received dozens of direct hits and its elegant façades had already collapsed by the time the firestorm took hold. Alone in escaping the destruction was the Golden Adler, a hotel-cum-tavern. Its windows had melted, its roof had collapsed, yet its damaged façade was to remain standing until the end – a lone survivor amid a heap of ruins.

  On Goethestrasse, nothing remained intact. It was a mountain of burning masonry. Museumstrasse lay in rubble. Baumstrasse had ceased to exist. Even the medieval heart of town on the Schlossberg had been lost. By 8.05 p.m. the centre of Pforzheim had already been obliterated, yet less than a quarter of the total quantity of explosives that would be dropped that night had fallen on the town.

  The loss of life was to be disproportionately high because no one had expected Pforzheim to be a target. It was only in the last year of war that shelters had begun to be built, but there were never enough and, when the big raid finally arrived, many people had only their cellars for shelter.

  Hannelore Schottgen was one of thousands who was trapped underground; falling masonry had blocked the entrance to the shelter. ‘The walls were moving and chunks of plaster kept falling into the room. Dust and smoke. We put wet cloths over our mouths and noses.’

  Although the ceiling of the cellar was still holding up, it had been dangerously weakened. ‘We must find a way out,’ said the air-raid warden. ‘The ceiling is not going to bear up for much longer.’

  In total darkness, the man groped for his hammer and began knocking on the wall, listening for the hollow sound that would indicate the exact location of the adjoining cellar.

  ‘He was knocking everywhere, looking everywhere, getting really desperate.’

  As he tapped the walls, the first trickle of smoke began filtering into the cellar. Soon, more and more smoke was pouring in. The girls realised that the building must be burning on top of them. In this they were correct. The streets were a cauldron of fire.