By Linda
Lee Greene, Author & Artist, July 27, 2019
“…In a
puffed-up display of military muscle with which the German High Command wanted
to lodge terror in the hearts of the nations on its radar, in December, 1939 Columbia
Broadcasting System (CBS) journalist William L. Shirer was invited to view the
German fleet on the agreement that he would use his radio microphone to tell
what he had seen. A sizable contingent of the fleet was then at the River Elbe
harbor at Hamburg on Germany’s Atlantic coast, as well as at the Baltic Sea coast
harbor at Kiel. In his best-selling book titled BERLIN DIARY, published in
1941, Shirer stated that his tour guide was one angry ‘Oberleutnant X, a
typical World War II type of officer, monocle and all.’[1]
Through sheets of rain that had reminded Shirer of Liverpool, the officer had
led Shirer through foot-deep puddles onto the Hamburg docks to the location of
several warships. They had spent copious time going through the ‘Admiral Hipper,’
a new 10,000-ton cruiser. He had been shown the ‘Leipzig,’ a smaller cruiser.
Men had been frantically at work on the new 35,000-ton ‘Bismarck.’ It, and its
sister ship, had been top secret.
In the late afternoon of the same
day, the rain had turned to snow and the roads to ice as the Oberleutnant and
Shirer had sped by car to Kiel. Shirer stated in his journal that he had been
surprised to see that almost the entire German fleet had been concentrated at
Kiel Harbor, among them the pocket-battleship ‘Deutschland,’ two cruisers of
the ‘Cologne’ class, both 26,000-ton battleships, and about fifteen submarines.
There had been another three submarines in dry-dock. He had mused to himself
that if only the British knew about the mass of German warships there, and with
the help of a near full moon, the British could destroy the entire German fleet
in one bombing raid on that one night.
Taking a page from Shirer’s journal,
as well as Japan’s playbook at Pearl Harbor of over nineteen months before, in
an attack code named ‘Operation Gomorrah’ in late July, 1943, Allied Forces
bombed Hamburg’s shipyards, U-boat pens, and oil refineries. The raid included
concentrated attacks on civilian and civic infrastructures, which virtually
destroyed most of the city. An estimated 35,000 people were killed and 125,000
wounded. There had been no rain in Hamburg for quite some time prior to the
attack, and the dry conditions exacerbated the effects of the bombings. ‘Fire
and brimstone’ was an apt term for the firestorm that enveloped the city. A
vortex and whirling updraft of super-heated air created a 460 meter (1,509
feet) high funnel of fire. There was no escape for the people or the Nazi
nation-state. It was the inauguration of Germany’s loss of the Atlantic in
World War II.
In Berlin, Germany’s capital, citizen
morale was already low stemming from the air attacks on their city four months
before. Confidence in the ‘Luftwaffe,’ Germany’s aerial warfare forces, to protect them was
slipping away. Berliners could kid themselves no more. Hitler’s bombast was
receiving less play. Hamburg jolted Berliners to the terrible reality that Berlin
was the center of the Allies’ bullseye. In an about face, even the therefore
uncompromising Hermann Goebbels, the Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda, admitted
in a mood report to the people that the outlook for Berlin was dire. The report
listed measures that he urged the people to take, which included the feeble
safeguard of digging protective trenches.
The response
in Berlin was chaos. Orders were issued to women, children, elders, and other
non-essential citizens to evacuate to places less vulnerable to attack. While
over the rest of the summer and into autumn only nuisance strikes occurred, Berliners
knew much worse was in store for them. Like rats jumping from a sinking ship,
they jammed railroad cars, and purloined any other conveyance they could engage
to flee Berlin, including setting out on foot. Bent over with heavy bundles on
their backs, they struggled to salvage some vestige of their lives….”
**Author’s Note…the above is an excerpt of Linda Lee Greene’s
World War II novel, which will be published in late 2019.
Books by Linda Lee Greene are available at Amazon.com.
[1] BERLIN DIARY, THE JOURNAL OF A
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT 1934 – 1941, William L. Shirer, TESS PRESS/Imprint of
Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, Inc. in association with A Common Reader,
p 213 – 215.
