Operation Gomorrah was the military codename for a series of air raids conducted by the Royal Air Force on the city of Hamburg beginning in the end of July 1943. It was at the time the heaviest assault in the history of aerial warfare and later called Hiroshima of Germany by British officials.

The operation was originally formulated by British Air Marshal Arthur Travers Harris ("They have sewn the wild wind and shall now reap the whirlwind") and was actually a joint effort between the RAF Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Force (specifically 8th Air Force Bomber Command), who combined to create an "around-the-clock" bombing mission spanning 3 days and 2 nights--the Americans conducting the daylight raids with the British following after nightfall. Harris signed the order for the operation "Bomber Command Order No. 173" on May 27th.

The operation was conducted almost a month later. On July 24th at approximately 0:57AM the first bombing started (night, RAF), lasting almost an hour. A second raid (daylight, US Air Force) was conducted at 2:40PM. A third raid was conducted in the morning of the 26th. The night attack of July 27th, 0:20AM was extremely light, only two bomb drops were reported. That attack is often not counted when the total number of Operation Gomorrah attacks is given. There was no day raid on the 27th.

In the night of July 27/28, short before midnight 739 aircrafts attack Hamburg (other sources talk about 800 aircrafts). Owing to unusually warm weather, along with the deliberate planning of the raids (which trapped the city's firefighters in the bombed-out center of the city by following-up with incendiary bombing of the periphery), the bombings culminated in the spawning of the so-called "Feuersturm" (firestorm). Quite literally a tornado of fire, this phenomenon created a huge outdoor blast furnace, containing winds of up to 150 mph (240 km/h) and reaching temperatures of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit (800 degrees Celsius). It caused street asphalt to burst into flame, cooked people to death in air-raid shelters, sucked pedestrians off the sidewalks like leaves into a vacuum cleaner and incinerated some eight square miles (21 km²) of the city. Most casulties (40,000) of Operation Gomorrah were suffered this night.

In the night of July 29/30 Hamburg was again attacked by more than 700 aircrafts. The last raid of Operation Gomorrah was conducted on August 3rd.

Operation Gomorrah occasioned at least 50,000 deaths and left over one million German civilians homeless. Approximately 3,000 aircrafts were deployed in total, 9,000 tons of bombs droped. 250,000 houses destroyed. Hamburg was air raided 69 more times until the end of WWII.

See also

• Bombing of Tokyo in World War II
• Bombing of Warsaw in World War II

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