World War II Day by Day

Berlin, Germany · March 3, 1945

Round-the-clock bombing operations against Germany began on March 3, 1944, with a U.S. 800‑plane day­light raid that dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on Berlin. On this date in 1945 Amer­i­can bombers mounted a day­light raid on Berlin that left 3,000 peo­ple dead and 100,000 home­less. Luft­waffe bombers reta­li­a­ted, attacking Brit­ain for the first time in seven months. Two weeks later 1,250 Allied bombers made the heav­iest day­light raid of the war on Berlin, dropping 3,000 tons of bombs, while fighting off a swarm of Me 262 Ger­man jets, which made their com­bat appear­ance for the first time. That same day Frank­furt am Main was attacked from the air and 1,000 people were killed. The last Amer­i­can raid on Ber­lin occurred on April 10, 1945, when 1,232 B‑17 Flying For­tresses and B‑24 Libera­tors beat off the largest jet effort of the war: 30 out of 50 Me 262s were shot down. The daily raids on Adolf Hitler’s capi­tal, begun in Febru­ary 1945, were in­creased during the next two months (42,000 sor­ties between March 21 and 24 mainly on Ber­lin) un­til they turned into an al­most in­ces­sant rain of bombs by U.S., Brit­ish, and now Soviet air forces. Despite the bombing, 50,000 Ger­man refugees sought safety in Ber­lin each day in Febru­ary, fleeing west­ward in advance of the Red Army as it swept through the Bal­tic states, East Prus­sia, and Poland. It can be said that the car­pet bombing of Ger­man cities reached its height once the war against the Third Reich had essen­tially been won at the end of 1944. Between Janu­ary 1945 and May, in a bid to dis­rupt rail and river trans­por­ta­tion net­works and put more strain on Ger­many’s dwindling man­power and fuel resources, RAF Bomber Com­mand dropped 191,540 tons of ord­nance on Ger­many to the U.S. Eighth Air Forces’ 188,573 tons. During the Euro­pean air war, a total of 2,770,540 tons of bombs were dropped by the West­ern allies. After the war the U.S. Stra­tegic Bombing Sur­vey esti­mated that a mini­mum of 305,000 peo­ple were killed in Ger­man cities alone due to bombing and esti­mated a mini­mum of 780,000 wounded. Roughly 7,500,000 Ger­man civil­ians were rendered home­less. The bombing campaign cost 160,000 Allied airmen their lives.

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The Allied Air Campaign Over Germany, 1943–1945

Left: One of 100 B-17s dropping ordinance on Focke-Wulf’s 100-acre air­craft manu­fac­turing plant at Marien­burg (today’s Malbork in northern Poland) on October 9, 1943.

Right: Thousands of unidentified victims of the February 1945 bombing of Dresden were stacked in layers over wood and burned in city streets.

Left: Operation Gomorrah, the 8-day and 7-night Allied air attack on Ham­burg beginning in late July 1943, killed 42,600 civil­ians, wounded 37,000, and prac­tically destroyed the North German city on the Elbe River. It caused one million civil­ians to evac­uate. Indus­trial losses were so severe that Hamburg never recovered to full production.

Right: Relatives search through rows of victims of an Allied bombing on Berlin, Septem­ber 23, 1944. Estimates of the number of dead in Berlin from all air raids range from 20,000 to 50,000, with the lower figure more likely. The relatively low figure is partly a testament to the capital’s superior air defenses and shelters.

Left: An aerial photo of Berlin shows the legacy of destruction left by the war. By April 1945 Berlin had become a moonscape of ruined buildings and cratered streets.

Right: Danish journalist Paul von Stemann remembered the end days of Berlin as a time of “dull­ness, anti­ci­pa­tion, fear and con­tin­uous bombing. . . The war seemed per­petual. . . The flowers had gone, the books had been burnt, the pic­tures had been removed, the trees had been broken, there were no birds singing, no dogs barking, no chil­dren shrieking . . . there was no laughter and no gig­gling. . . [The sky] was often effaced by the stinking and greasy carpets of volumi­nous black smoke.” Quoted in Moorhouse, Berlin at War, pp. 346–47.

1944 Newsreel Clips: Bombers over Berlin, Returning Allied POWs, Australian Veterans Parade in Sydney, German POWs in U.S., Italian Refugees in Southern Italy, and Allied Forces in England Get Ready for Normandy Invasion