He was an aircraft fitter stationed on a training base at RAF Defford in May 1942. I was born in cologne 30.05. Lieutenant General James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle was also a gentleman who rarely used harsh language, but when they gave him the battle order for a mission to be flown on February 3, 1945—a mission to Berlin—Doolittle reportedly uttered an expletive or two. Inside a B-17 you needed oxygen to breathe and heated clothing to resist the sub-zero temperature and then, only then, you also needed to be able to fight. Yet the mission was both a turning point in U.S. strategy and a continuation (since 1942) of a kind of warfare that had never been seen before and would never be witnessed again, carried out on a scale that seems, today, almost too much to imagine. Flying Officer Manser took violent evasive action, turning and descending to under 1,000 feet. 30th May 1942: RAF launch the first 1000 bomber raid I was convinced that a force of 250-300 aircraft was wholly inadequate to saturate the then existing defences of a major industrial town of half a million or more inhabitants. It was expected that the devastation from such raids might be enough to knock Germany out of the war or at least severely damage German morale. My uncle, Flt Sgt W Lewis J Young didn’t make the last photograph. It was their testimony that led to the award of the V.C. New British Grant tanks attack in the desert, Rommel renews his attack on the Gazala line, 3 November 1944: Maximum Effort: USAAF send a 1000 B-17s to bomb Berlin, 31 October 1944: RAF Bomber Command revisits Cologne – again, The Holocaust and the 'average' German - Page 19 - Historum - History Forums, 4th May 1943: The battle of the Ruhr hots up. Des Lauriers always surprised himself by being calm just after wake-up for a big mission. Required fields are marked *. So on the 30th May 1942 the RAF launched the first of the ‘thousand bomber’ raids, a devastating attack on the city of Cologne in which more than a 1000 aircraft were deployed. Cologne had been the target The British did that, at night. In the event they were not needed – but the aircraft fell victim to flak. The previous day, a crewmate had kidded him about his waist size in a way that may not have been meant badly but was not well received. It began at 3 am with a flashlight in the face and the word “Up!” mouthed by a charge of quarters (CQ) moving through the Nissen hut with a clipboard. With a wartime population that had mushroomed from three to five million and with an area of 1,600 square miles, Berlin was rated as the sixth largest city in the world. To Doolittle, that sounded a lot like bombing a city. Soon, the aircraft became extremely difficult to handle and, when a crash was inevitable, Flying Officer Manser ordered the crew to bale out. [1] The term was a propaganda device, whereby Arthur Harris reached the number of bombers by including not only bombers that were currently operational as part of RAF Bomber Command, but also aircrews from Operational Training Units to accumulate a force of 1,000 bombers as a demonstration of the RAF's power. He had begun to demonstrate the destructive power of his force, with the relatively modest success at Lubeck which had led to the the German retaliation of the‘Baedecker’ raids. Thanks to scores of nocturnal visits by the RAF and a half dozen daytime incursions by Doolittle’s men, the city was partly a desert of rubble and detritus in which everyday services like running water and electricity were strained to the limit, yet it had at least one cabaret that catered to the Nazi military elite and a fully functioning opera house. Flying Officer Manser held on his dangerous course and bombed the target successfully from a height of 7,000 feet. We especially felt the cold. At this critical moment, Flying Officer Manser once more disdained the alternative of parachuting to safety with his crew. He had finished his first tour as a Wop /AG on 9 Squadron (Wellingtons), and was sent to Wellesbourne for his rest period. Moreover, Spaatz reminded Doolittle that Berlin was not a new destination for American bombers and that legitimate targets lay within Adolf Hitler’s capital—Gestapo headquarters, the Air Ministry, railroad facilities, a panzer army on the move, etc. On the 30th May 1942, there was a buzz around the airfield at Defford. But Americans didn’t bomb cities. Today’s journey into the cold, blue vastness above Europe was Des Lauriers’s 12th mission. Des Lauriers and Fredette, who bunked down a few hundred feet apart in different squadrons and were not acquainted, were thinking about flying conditions. 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