25. The Lancasters Put a Serious Hurting on German Cities
On strategic bombing raids, Avro Lancasters usually carried a mix of large high explosive bombs, such as 2000 lbs bombs or 4000 lbs and heavier “blockbusters”, plus clusters of smaller incendiaries. The idea was that the big bombs would tear open buildings, then the incendiaries would start fires in their now well-ventilated innards. The blockbusters would hopefully have also ruptured the city’s water mains, making firefighting difficult or impossible. That allowed individual fires to coalesce into larger conflagrations that, if conditions were ripe, could produce firestorms in which hurricane-strength walls of flame and whirling tornadoes of fire would sweep and dance through cities. Such conflagrations could kill tens of thousands by burning them to cinders or, as the stories-high inferno sucked oxygen out of the air, by asphyxiating those whom the flames had not touched.
Lancasters were capable of great precision by WWII standards. Equipped with ground-mapping radar, by 1944 they could bomb at night with higher accuracy than American bombers could during the day. In the runup to D-Day, Lancasters accurately bombed communications and transportation targets such as bridges and rail yards. In addition to strategic bombing, Lancasters were used by the 617 Squadron, “The Dam Busters”, immortalized in the book and movie of the same name, for special operation aerial attacks, such as breaching the Ruhr dams in 1943. Lancasters flown by the 617 Squadron also sank the battleship Tirpitz in 1944 with 12,000 lbs “Tall Boys”, and were used in Operation Manna towards war’s end, a mercy mission that dropped food into Holland to avert widespread starvation.
