The Boy Who Went to War (21 page)

Peering out of his turret, Hicks realised that the rear of the plane had also been hit by fire from the ground. He counted six holes in the left side of the tail and another five on the right.

The pilot was fighting hard to keep the aircraft under control. As it flew over the town at an alarming angle, Hicks got a dramatic panorama of sky and land. The whole target area was a sheet of white light. When he looked upwards into the fire-lit sky, he could see dozens of Lancaster aircraft with their bomb-bays open.

In the Aïcheles' hilltop villa, Wolfram's parents were still sheltering in the cellar. There was a continuous thumping that shook the entire hillside. To Marie Charlotte, it felt as if a giant was punching the floor of the valley with his fist. ‘Bomb after bomb,' she wrote. ‘The whole house was shaking.'

At one point during the bombardment, she and her husband crept upstairs and poked their heads outside, only to find that they were scarcely able to breathe. The fire-storm in the valley below was so intense that all the oxygen was being forcibly sucked from the air.

Marie Charlotte was suddenly very frightened. ‘The air pressure was so strong that the door was flung out of our hands.' In Dresden, the same suction had wrenched windows and doors from their frames, allowing the fire to spread with unchecked rapacity.

As Wolfram's parents stared down into the valley, it seemed to be one luminous sheet of flame. It was mesmerising, even hypnotic. They would have watched for longer, had they not been sent dashing back to the cellar by a stray incendiary bomb that smacked into the damp earth of a neighbouring field, setting it alight.

At their house on Spichernstrasse, the Rodi children were also crouched in their cellar, hands jammed in their ears in an attempt to block out the deafening thumps. They could not see anything, but they could hear the planes roaring overhead.

Barbara, just nine years old, was shaking with terror. To make matters worse, the electricity was suddenly cut. Now, all they had for light was a pocket torch.

Then, incongruously, there was a frantic knocking on their front door. It was Uncle Karl, a cousin of the family, who had run all the way from his house in order to see whether they were still alive.

He brought a tale of such destruction that it seemed inconceivable anyone in the town centre would survive.

 

Sergeant Doug Hicks was thinking much the same thing as his crippled Lancaster bomber circled Pforzheim. With every passing second, another sector of the city exploded into flames. Soon, the scores of individual fires conjoined into one massive conflagration that turned the ground into a spiralling, whitish-gold pool of flame. The bombs being dropped contained a mixture of high explosive and phosphorous incendiary that gave a curiously cold colour to the heat of the fire.

Hicks, isolated in the tail, was desperately trying to make contact with the pilot but the intercom system remained dead. Convinced that the plane was going to crash-land, he prepared himself for the terrible ordeal of parachuting to the ground, unplugging his electric suit and getting ready to open the turret doors. As he peered into the void, he was brought to his senses by the horrendous sight below him. The entire town was a raging, pulsating fireball. He decided that he would rather ride the aircraft until it hit the earth than jump into the burning hell that was Pforzheim.

As if to confirm that he had made the right decision, the plane suddenly righted itself and levelled off. Severely damaged, but brought under control by the skill of the pilot, it swung in a westerly direction and headed for home.

The firestorm that it left behind was awesome, with great tongues of flame leaping and writhing into the winter sky. So bright was the glow, indeed, that it was still visible to Sergeant Hicks when his plane was more than one hundred miles from Pforzheim.

On the ground, the flames devoured utterly everything in their path. More than 90 per cent of the buildings in the centre of town were now ablaze. As the fire ate through supporting timbers, so the exterior stone façades collapsed in on themselves. In the eye of the firestorm, the temperature approached a staggering 1,600 degrees centigrade – so hot that even metal beams and girders were turned to liquid.

The firestorm could be heard sucking in oxygen with greedy relish. Then, like a spiteful bellows, it belched out a noxious concoction of sulphur-yellow gases.

 

Many of the 17,000 Pforzheimers who would not survive that night were already dead. Pulverised by bombs, crushed by collapsing buildings or starved of oxygen, their end was terrible but mercifully swift. However, in one small cellar in the centre of town, caught in the heart of the firestorm, Hannelore Schottgen was still alive.

‘We were sitting there, huddled together. All we could hear was bomb after bomb; screaming and screeching and noises of things breaking down. The whole house seemed to be moving. A bit of ceiling fell down…there was disgusting dust everywhere. More things fell in. Was the house going to collapse on top of us? Was it going to bury us alive?'

She later recalled her fears as she sat crouched in the cellar. At one point there was a momentary pause in the bombing and a ghostlike voice could be heard on the wireless, announcing that the raid was coming to an end. The girls experienced a moment of elation, but the announcement was swiftly followed by a second one that warned that a far larger formation of planes was now heading their way.

Up to this point, the girls in the shelter had taken some comfort from the fact that the lights were still working. Now, they suddenly snapped out, plunging the cellar into darkness. The town's electricity station had received a direct hit. Seconds later, equally abruptly, the wireless went dead. The girls clutched each other, terrified by the prospect of death.

The bombs and incendiaries were by now causing incalculable damage. Entire quarters of the city had collapsed into rubble. Leopoldstrasse, Pforzheim's busiest street, had received dozens of direct hits and its elegant façades had already collapsed by the time the firestorm took hold. Alone in escaping the destruction was the Golden Adler, a hotel-cum-tavern. Its windows had melted, its roof had collapsed, yet its damaged façade was to remain standing until the end – a lone survivor amid a heap of ruins.

On Goethestrasse, nothing remained intact. It was a mountain of burning masonry. Museumstrasse lay in rubble. Baumstrasse had ceased to exist. Even the medieval heart of town on the Schlossberg had been lost. By 8.05 p.m. the centre of Pforzheim had already been obliterated, yet less than a quarter of the total quantity of explosives that would be dropped that night had fallen on the town.

The loss of life was to be disproportionately high because no one had expected Pforzheim to be a target. It was only in the last year of war that shelters had begun to be built, but there were never enough and, when the big raid finally arrived, many people had only their cellars for shelter.

Hannelore Schottgen was one of thousands who was trapped underground; falling masonry had blocked the entrance to the shelter. ‘The walls were moving and chunks of plaster kept falling into the room. Dust and smoke. We put wet cloths over our mouths and noses.'

Although the ceiling of the cellar was still holding up, it had been dangerously weakened. ‘We must find a way out,' said the air-raid warden. ‘The ceiling is not going to bear up for much longer.'

In total darkness, the man groped for his hammer and began knocking on the wall, listening for the hollow sound that would indicate the exact location of the adjoining cellar.

‘He was knocking everywhere, looking everywhere, getting really desperate.'

As he tapped the walls, the first trickle of smoke began filtering into the cellar. Soon, more and more smoke was pouring in. The girls realised that the building must be burning on top of them. In this they were correct. The streets were a cauldron of fire.

Even the warden recognised that they were doomed either to be burned alive or to suffocate from the asphyxiating gases. ‘The only thing we can now do is pray,' he said. ‘Come on, let's make a circle.'

The girls drew together and listened as the man praised God. Hannelore pinched herself to see whether she was still conscious. ‘We had given up and were waiting for the end.'

 

On the other side of town, Martha Luise Rodi's mother and sister had also sought refuge in their cellar and were listening to the roar of the flames. For them, as for so many in Pforzheim, the greatest danger was hidden. As the firestorm tore through the old town, it poured forth a cocktail of poisonous gases that seeped into the underground shelters and snuffed out the lives of all those trapped inside.

The two ladies were saved by the quick-thinking owner of the building who had taken shelter with them. He was aware of the hidden danger and insisted they leave the cellar, even though the streets above presented many additional hazards.

Clambering out of the shelter presented considerable difficulties for Martha Luise's mother. With crippled feet, she found it hard to climb up the small ladder. It was even more difficult for her to crawl out through the burning house. They emerged at last to find the entire neighbourhood on fire. However, the two ladies were fortunate that their apartment stood next to the River Nagold, which created a barrier of sorts to the flames.

On the previous day, the river had been in high flood because of all the melting snow, but that very morning, the water level had dropped. They were therefore able to make their way along the muddy banks and eventually reach the Rodi family house.

By this point, Martha Luise and her children had crept into the garden to see the extent of the destruction in the valley below. As they stood there, watching the glow of the town on fire, they became aware of two familiar figures struggling up the hill.

‘I'll never forget the first image of them arriving,' wrote Martha Luise in a letter to her absent daughter. ‘There was a background of flames that filled the sky. Grandmother had her typical silhouette – it was unmistakably her – but the backdrop of flames was extraordinary impressive.'

Hannelore Schottgen had given up all hope of survival. The cellar was by now insufferably hot and smoke was pouring in from the outside. The warden suddenly got his strength back and began to bang on the wall with renewed effort, trying to smash a hole through to the adjoining cellar. As he did so, Hannelore and the others became aware of faint noises through the wall from people next door. ‘We could hear them knocking. A stone gave way, and then a second, and they helped from the other side until the opening was big enough for us to squeeze through.'

No sooner had they reached safety than there was a tremendous crash. The ceiling of the cellar they had just vacated slumped in on itself, bringing down tons of rubble from the building above.

Acutely aware of the dangers of toxic gas, the warden in charge of the new shelter forced open the iron door that led to the street and poked his head outside. ‘Quickly!' he said to the girls. ‘Come immediately, it's burning everywhere. Soon there won't be any air left to breathe.'

The girls were fearful of stepping into the conflagration but the warden insisted. ‘You know that we're not allowed to stay in the cellars when it's burning,' he said. ‘There are no more bombs falling. Come on! Quickly!' Hannelore followed him but the others were too scared and stayed behind.

The sight of the town burning from end to end was deeply shocking. ‘Massive flames everywhere – a sea of fire, like a hot tempest. Walls completely red hot and enormous pieces of rubble that were also red hot.'

Hannelore lost all feeling of orientation; she was concentrating on trying to escape the heat, but wherever she turned, the streets were blocked with burning masonry.

In the midst of the chaos there were incongruous scenes. One side street that had not yet been touched by the firestorm was filling with people trapped by the fire.

Some of them ran towards her, saying: ‘You can't get through here. It's too hot.' She and the warden turned back, only to be met by more refugees milling about in complete despair. ‘There's no way out; there's just heat, heat.' Hannelore was suddenly struck by the awful realisation that they were going to be burned alive.