The Valour and the Horror

Hermann Kroger was more experienced. He was a foreman and the leader of the fire fighting team in a small coffee factory in the Wendenstrasse, also in Hammerbrook but closer to the centre of the main bombing area. After the alarm had sounded, he had ordered all the fire hoses to be rolled out. When this was done, he had posted four men in various parts of the factory, one on each floor, and taken the other five down to the shelter, outside the doors of which stood their mobile fire pump.

Then came this hail of bombs and we all had the impression that our factory was being constantly hit. The building next door certainly got a direct hit and our own building went up and down like a lift but we found out later that we were only hit by incendiary bombs and phosphorus. Five minutes after the opening of the bombing, two men came down from the upper storeys and said that they would be killed if they stayed upstairs any longer. After ten minutes, a third man came back, absolutely frantic. Then the fourth man, Hartmann, came in. We all stayed on the steps of the shelter ready to leap into action when the bombing stopped and get the motor pump going from the yard.

Suddenly, there came a rain of fire from heaven. We tried to get out to the pump but it was impossible. The air was actually filled with fire. It would have meant certain death to leave the shelter and it would have been impossible under these circumstances to save the factory, even if we could have reached the pump. Also, we couldn't open the doors without endangering the neighbours who had come into the shelter. The fire around us became even more concentrated. Smoke seeped into the shelter through every crack. Every time you opened the steel doors, you could see fire all around'.

The joinery works next door had also caught fire. There was not sufficient water in the cellar so we used Minimax hand fire&endash;extinguishers to try to hold back the fire. Then a storm started, a shrill howling in the street. It grew into a hurricane so that we had to abandon all hope of fighting the fire. It was as though we were doing no more than throwing a drop of water on to a hot stone. The whole yard, the canal, in fact as far as we could see, was just a whole, great, massive sea of fire.

'A storm ... a hurricane ... a sea of fire.' Everything experienced in the Battle of Hamburg before this time had been seen in other bombed cities, although not often on the same scale. But what coffee&endash;factory foreman Hermann Kroger saw, in his little corner of Hammerbrook, was a small part of a completely new and most horrific result of aerial bombing. This 'storm of fire' later became the subject of intense scientific study and it was concluded that not even the most severe natural fires, such as forest fires, ever reached the intensity of the occurrence experienced in eastern Hamburg during the early hours of Wednesday, 28 July 1943. The German word 'Feuersturm' was immediately coined and brought into use to describe this phenomenon; that word was recorded in the main log of events being kept by the Hamburg Fire Department a little over one hour after the storm started. The English word 'firestorm' is a simple and adequate translation.

Courtesy : The Battle of Hamburg