Swinemnde
20 Lancasters of 617 Squadron again found their target covered by cloud and returned without bombing. No aircraft lost.
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POTSDAM
500 Lancasters and 12 Mosquitoes of 1, 3 and 8 Groups. This was the first time that Bomber Command 4-engined aircraft had entered the Berlin defence zone since March 1944 but the approach, across parts of Germany recently captured by Allied troops, and the Cuxhaven diversion led to only 1 Lancaster being lost; it was shot down by a night fighter.
This was the last raid of the war by a major Bomber Command force on a German city. The aiming point was the centre of Potsdam and the intention was to destroy the local barracks (depot of the old German Guards regiments) and the railway facilities. The attack was reasonably successful and severe damage was caused in Potsdam but bombs also fell in the nearby northern and eastern districts of Berlin. No information is obtainable from Potsdam (now in Eastern Germany) but a figure of 5,000 dead has been mentioned. This high figure, if true, was caused by the fact that the people of this community had seen Berlin and not themselves bombed so often that they failed to take proper cover when the sirens sounded.
Minor Operations: 24 Lancasters and 4 Mosquitoes in a diversion raid to Cuxhaven, 62 Mosquitoes to Berlin and 10 to Wismar, 54 R.C.M. sorties, 50 Mosquito patrols. No aircraft lost.
Total effort for the night: 716 sorties, 1 aircraft (0.1 percent) lost.
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MINOR OPERATIONS
106 Mosquitoes to Berlin, 8 to Oranienburg airfield and 4 to Lechfeld airfield, 27 R.C.M. sorties, 19 Mosquito patrols. 1 Mosquito of 100 Group lost.
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- Potsdam raid. Page 696, delete lines 4 to 8 inclusive and replace with the following:
Information recently in from Potsdam, formerly in East Germany, shows that the number of dead was 1,593, not 5,000 as given by the former Communist authorities, who attempted to attribute victims of Red Army street fighting and artillery bombardment to the R.A.F. The bombing toll was still a high one, partly due to the fact that the people of this community had seen Berlin and not themselves bombed so often that they failed to take proper cover when the sirens sounded.
by Martin Middlebrook
In 1979, an article was published in the New Yorker magazine and in Britain's Daily Telegraph Magazine which aroused much interest among former Bomber Command aircrew. The author of the article was Freeman Dyson, who had served as a civilian scientist in the Operational Research Section at Bomber Command Headquarters in 1944. In his article Dyson described how a colleague had collected statistics on the number of men known to have baled out of bombers shot down over Europe to survive and become prisoners of war. From these statistics, his colleague had submitted reports to his superiors giving his conclusion that, because of the comparative inaccessibility and poor location of its escape hatches, the Lancaster produced the poorest survival rate of the heavy bombers in service at that time. Dyson and his colleague were both disappointed that no modifications were made to improve the Lancaster's escape hatches before the war ended.
The articles provoked some correspondence in various publications, much of it from loyal ex-Lancaster men protesting at the criticism of this beloved aircraft. These men, however, missed the main point. No one disputed that the Lancaster was the safest aircraft to fly and suffered the lowest casualties. What Dyson and his colleagues were contending was that, once shot down, the Lancaster was more difficult to escape from than the other four-engined types, the Stirling and the Halifax.
By coincidence, a visitor to my home at the time of the publication of this article had been the Education Officer at Bomber Command Headquarters in 1944 and he remembers the report being submitted. He said that he remembers the case being put, but heard it said that the large number of Lancasters then in squadron service could not be modified, partly for technical reasons, partly because the resulting dislocation would produce an unacceptable loss of operational effort. Similarly, the future production of Lancasters was not to be modified because the necessary re-tooling of factories would cause too much reduction in the flow of new Lancasters.
This subject is only raised here because I happen to have detailed figures on survival rates from the loss of 213 four-engined bombers from six Bomber Command night operations - the four raids of the Battle of Hamburg in July/August 1943, the Peenemnde raid, and the Nuremberg raid of
