Fire or Fire - Part One

The fires of World War II carry lessons for humanity

The St. Nikolai Memorial in Hamburg, Germany commemorates the victims of the 1943 firebombing of the city in the ruins of a church destroyed in the attack. Photo by Carmelo Bayarcal

WARNING: This article contains descriptions of graphic violence that occurred during the Second World War. Reader discretion is advised.

PART ONE: LONDON

It was the darkest time of year when they came to set the Second Great Fire of London: the waning days of December, a chill end to a miserable twelve months. One hundred and thirty-six bombers of the Luftwaffe set out from occupied France toward their target, the City of London.¹

It was the night of December 29-30, 1940, almost four months into the conflagration that would come to be called The Blitz. The Luftwaffe carried 100,000 explosive devices, mostly small incendiaries laced with magnesium, designed not to blow buildings apart but to set them aflame. Attached to their bellies were so-called “Jericho trumpets,” devices that produced a trademark whine as the planes reached diving velocity, further terrorizing the civilian population.

London had been struck many times already. Although the Luftwaffe had been forced to run their sorties at night, the outline of the River Thames gleamed in the moonlight, making navigation easier. On its banks were the dockyards and factories of the greatest trading city on earth, still the center of a vast global empire. But London’s long history was also its weakness, for its buildings were mostly old wooden structures. In the center of the City of London stood St. Paul’s Cathedral, the successor to a church destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Surrounding it on all sides were publishing houses, newspaper offices, lawyers, bankers, and record keepers. In short, the sort of people who filled their buildings with paper, and this night, it would burn.

As the Luftwaffe unloaded their incendiaries, fifteen hundred fires started across the city, merging as they jumped from building to building. The primary water-main in the City was punctured by an explosive device, and firefighters struggled to contain the blaze with low water pressure. Soon, the fire was consuming an area larger than that of the Great Fire of London, causing it to be instantly labeled the Second Great Fire of London.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill had given strict orders that St. Paul’s Cathedral must be preserved. So, a crew of volunteers, churchmen, and architects spent the night dragging buckets of water up and down the hundreds of steps leading to the dome observatory, sneaking into hidden passages, attempting to douse the flames before they could grow. Twenty-eight incendiary bombs fell on the church property, one penetrating the dome. Up and down they went with their water, praying and gasping.

The American journalist Ernie Pyle watched the scene unfold from the observatory of the Stock Exchange building nearby. This is his account.

“Into the dark shadowed spaces below us, while we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell. We saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pin points of dazzling white, burning ferociously…The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape—so faintly at first that we weren’t sure we saw correctly—the gigantic dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. St. Paul’s was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions—growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.”²

A famous photo of this moment taken by Daily Mail photographer Herbert Mason is titled “St. Paul’s Survives,” and so it did, even while everything around it was destroyed. One hundred and sixty Londoners perished that night, but throughout the Blitz, casualty figures were lower than the British government had feared earlier in the year. Although tens of thousands of papier-mâché coffins were prepared, the vast majority were never used. Nevertheless, it was the most extreme aerial bombardment a city had ever faced.

But the flames of the Second World War did not stop there.

PART TWO: HAMBURG

For two years, the Royal Air Force tried and failed to deal a similar blow to Germany that the Luftwaffe had inflicted on Britain. They had the disadvantage of having to travel much further to reach German cities, crossing over occupied Low Countries. They also overestimated their own ability to hit targets accurately in an era with more primitive technology. In 1942, Air Marshal Arthur T. Harris was given charge of RAF Bomber Command, and he delivered a stern warning of what was to come.

“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”³

A whirlwind it would be—not only that, but a firestorm on par with that which escorted Elijah to heaven.

In late July 1943, the Royal Air Force and U.S. Air Force jointly launched Operation Gomorrah, named for the Old Testament city consumed by fire and brimstone. The target was the Baltic port city of Hamburg, which had been experiencing high summer temperatures but a decided lack of rain. The British and Americans traded off bombing duties, and on the night of July 27-28, it was the turn of the Royal Air Force.

Less than 200 Luftwaffe bombers had caused the Second Great Fire of London, but this raid involved 787 RAF aircraft. When night fell, the British arrived and began dropping their incendiaries. Batch after batch were hurled into the working class districts of Hamburg, where many of the city’s defense industry workers lived. The aim of the raid was to “de-house” them: a popular euphemism that obscured the true nature of the business.

As fire after fire sprang up in the city’s old medieval structures, something extraordinary happened: a phenomenon that can occur naturally in vast forest fires, but had never prior to World War II been instigated by man. As the fire grew to a tremendous strength, sucking in oxygen at will, it created its own wind pattern. The flaming air began to spin violently, whipping into a 1,500 foot high column with a windspeed of 150 mph. This was a firestorm, a merciless incinerator which devoured everything in its path, sometimes stripping clothes from the backs of Hamburg’s citizens, and sometimes swallowing them whole. As it stole oxygen atoms from the surrounding air, people sheltering in cellars began breathing in carbon monoxide and dying.

The fires and conventional bombs led the city’s chemical stores to be released, and soon the very tar of the roads was on fire, the asphalt appearing to melt and shift. There was nowhere for the people to hide, and the heat was so extreme that even those not directly touched by the firestorm were catching flame. They ran for their lives, heading for the nearby system of canals where they could plunge themselves in the water. Ben Witter, a journalist working in Hamburg at the time, reports what he saw there.

“I went to this area near the docks. It was crossed by canals. People tried to leap down into them out of the flames, but the water was on fire. It’s difficult to explain why the water was burning. There were many ships – small ships moored in the canals. They had exploded and burning oil had been released onto the water. And the people who were themselves on fire jumped into it, and they burnt, swam, burnt, and went under.”⁴

Eight square miles of the city were incinerated and 18,474 people were killed on that night. In total, Operation Gomorrah killed 37,000, wounded 180,000, and destroyed 60% of the city’s houses. It was the heaviest aerial assault humanity had ever delivered. The Allied strategists had intended to deal a killing blow that would force Germany to surrender. But the destruction of its second largest city was not enough to crack the resolve of the Nazi leadership.

The fires would continue.

PART THREE: HIROSHIMA

White.

That was what they remembered. Not the hum of a plane, not the boom of an explosion, but the color white: more brilliantly, perfectly white than anything they had ever seen. A flash that was sudden, unexpected, inexplicable.

The next thing they remembered was where they ended up: flat on their back or pinned under debris. Then came the anguished cries filling the air. Most of them initially thought it was only their neighborhood that had been hit, though by what, they could not say. It was only after stumbling out of their houses and offices that they realized the truth.

The previous night, six U.S. Air Force planes had taken to the air with primary, secondary, and tertiary targets on the Japanese mainland. Three went ahead to observe the weather and report back to the others. When the skies turned out to be clear, they gave the go-ahead directive: head for the city of Hiroshima, the primary target.

Leading the final group of three was the Enola Gay, which carried a weapon so secret, even the occupants of the other planes did not know what it was. The Great Artiste was coming along to take measurements for science. A third plane, later titled Necessary Evil, was tasked with taking photographs.

Some weeks earlier, another group of airmen had made for the Japanese capital of Tokyo, where the military government was refusing to surrender despite the steady advance of U.S. forces from island to island. Throughout the war, the Japanese had prided themselves on never surrendering. Every Japanese soldier and civilian knew their duty: if cornered by the enemy, commit seppuku.⁵ It was the Japanese way, or so they had been taught to believe. This had made the task of the U.S. Pacific Fleet exceedingly difficult and bloody, but even the horrors of Iwo Jima paled in comparison with the firebombing of Tokyo.

Unlike fully industrialized nations with their gigantic factories, the Japanese war industry was a literal cottage affair. Block upon block of wooden huts stretched across the Tokyo suburbs, with people living and working practically on top of one another, and the tiny factories employing a handful of workers each. Due to the oddities of the Japanese jet stream and urban geography, the U.S. airmen were forced to fly at low altitude as they rained incendiaries upon that vast swath of humanity. As the city ignited, the airmen’s nostrils were filled with the smell of burning flesh. The bombing destroyed much of Tokyo and killed around 100,000 people, but the Japanese military governors still preferred suicide to surrender, and the U.S. military leadership was no longer convinced that conventional bombings were less traumatic or destructive.⁶

So, this time, only six planes were sent, one carrying the product of a $2 billion research program: the Manhattan Project. “Little Boy” was a 141-pound nuclear fission weapon filled with highly enriched uranium. The payload was dropped at 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, from a height of 31,000 feet and detonated about 1,900 feet above the center of Hiroshima, a city important to Japan’s war effort but also home to hundreds of thousands of non-combatants. Less than two percent of the bomb’s payload was caught up in the fission reaction, yet a one-mile radius was immediately subjected to total destruction with nearly every structure flattened.

Captain William S. Parsons, who commanded the U.S. Air Force mission and armed the bomb in flight, described what he saw from above. “The whole thing was tremendous and awe-inspiring. After the missile had been released I sighed and stood back for the shock. When it came the men aboard with me gasped ‘My God,’ and what had been Hiroshima was a mountain of smoke like a giant mushroom.”⁷

A nuclear weapon the size of “Little Man” kills in multiple ways. First, there is the force of the initial blast. Then comes a flash of extreme heat which kills on contact. After that, a shower of radioactive fallout and debris descends from the mushroom cloud. Then secondary fires take over, ripping through any remaining structures. In the case of Hiroshima, this led to the creation of a firestorm with a cloud as large as that of the initial explosion. Finally, there is the slower, torturous work of radiation sickness upon those who manage to escape the first four plagues.

The American reporter John Hershey visited Hiroshima after Japan’s surrender and began cataloging the testimonies of those who had witnessed and survived the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. His book based on these accounts, Hiroshima, includes the story of Methodist minister Kiyoshi Tanimoto and what he saw immediately following the nuclear blast.

“From the mound, Mr. Tanimoto saw an astonishing panorama. Not just a patch of [his neighborhood] Koi, as he had expected, but as much of Hiroshima as he could see through the clouded air was giving off a thick, dreadful miasma. Clumps of smoke, near and far, had begun to push up through the general dust. He wondered how such extensive damage could have been dealt out of a silent sky; even a few planes, far up, would have been audible.”⁸

As Mr. Tanimoto stumbled toward the city center, he found a scene of absolute misery on an epic scale.

“He was the only person making his way into the city; he met hundreds and hundreds who were fleeing, and every one of them seemed to be hurt in some way. The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands. Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns—of undershirt straps and suspenders and, on the skin of some women (since white repelled the heat from the bomb and dark clothes absorbed it and conducted it to the skin), the shapes of flowers they had had on their kimonos. Many, although injured themselves, supported relatives who were worse off. Almost all had their heads bowed, looked straight ahead, were silent, and showed no expression whatever. After crossing the Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him.”⁹

Somewhere between 90,000-166,000 people were killed by the attack on Hiroshima, half immediately and the other half over time due to severe burns, radiation sickness, and the like. Even this was not enough to provoke Japan’s surrender. It was only after a second nuclear strike in Nagasaki and the promise of more such attacks to come that Emperor Hirohito finally overruled his generals and sided with the peace party, agreeing to an unconditional surrender. His subjects, who had been prepared to commit seppuku, could not make sense of this turn of events.

With that, the Second World War was over. Yet, it was only in the months and years to come that the world learned the full details of something so horrific, many in the West would come to regard it as the archetypical act of evil—a catastrophe so great, it would be given a name literally meaning “burnt whole.”

The Holocaust.

PART FOUR: AUSCHWITZ

The Jews of Hungary were survivors. The oddity of their geographic position and the political realities of the day ensured that as the German military machine pressed south and east, often murdering Jews on the spot, Hungary was not occupied. For Hungary had joined the Axis powers but chosen not to proceed against the Jews in the same manner as Germany. However, as the war dragged on, realities on the ground changed. The Axis powers suffered heavy losses in the Soviet Union, and Hungary sought to make a peace deal with the Allies. The Nazis therefore invaded Hungary, took over its government, and began deporting its Jews, loading them onto trains that would carry them north.

Never had a transportation system been used with such devastating efficiency—such sinister calculation. From the far reaches of Europe, the boxcars rolled across the tracks, headed for Poland. In one such car, a Hungarian teenager named Elie, his family, and about one hundred other Jews were packed like sardines, forced to travel without food or water.

The claustrophobic experience, lack of sustenance, and anxiety about what might await them at the end of the journey led many to panic. One woman, a Mrs. Schächter, seemed to become delusional. Her loud proclamations angered the others in the car. However, poor Mrs. Schächter was not truly mad but overcome with grief after being separated from her family.

Suddenly, her mood changed. She seemed transfixed by something. “Fire! I see a fire! I see a fire!”¹⁰ she cried. Elie could not see any flames, but her words were nevertheless disconcerting. As the train pressed further along the tracks, Mrs. Schächter once again became animated. “‘Jews, listen to me,’ she cried. ‘I see a fire! I see flames, huge flames!’”¹¹

When the train finally ceased its progress at Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Elie confronted a sight now familiar to generations who have heard the tales: a man in an SS uniform standing with a baton in hand, flicking it to the right, the left, right, right, right, left. Elie’s mother and sisters were sent in one direction, while he and his father were sent in the other. This momentary action—the simple flick of a wrist—had determined their fate even as it would more than a million others.

As he was herded from one part of the camp to the other, Elie took in this new world, and what he saw filled him with horror: a chimney. From the brick cylinder rose a pillar of smoke, pumping and spouting, sending an eternal stream of darkness into the air. Soon, Elie would conclude that “chimney” was the only word with real meaning in that place.¹²[10] His whole understanding of the world changed that first night, by which time the others on his boxcar had completed their journey from the gas chamber, to the crematorium, and finally into the air. He was changed forever.

“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.”¹³[11]

In the approximately two years that it was in operation, 1.3 million prisoners were brought to Auschwitz by the European rail network. 1.1 million of them were murdered: 960,000 Jews, 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and as many as 15,000 others. Never had humanity devised such a lethal and efficient killing machine. But as necessary to the operation as the cyanide that filled the gas chambers was the element of fire, for it was fire that consumed the bodies, rendering them into ash, making their disposal simple, hygienic, and perhaps most importantly, harder to detect.

For those few who survived their stay in Auschwitz, its fires often consumed not only their loved ones, but their faith. Confronted with the height of human evil, they could no longer believe in a good God. Indeed, they could no longer believe in God at all.

As Elie Wiesel, a later Nobel Peace Prize winner, wrote so poignantly, the horrors of Auschwitz had “murdered” his God.

PART FIVE: THEODICY

Why have I taken you on this tour of misery?

Because those fires mean something to me. I could have told you about dozens of others. The Second World War had many defining features, but I will always see it as a thing of fire. Not only Elie Wiesel, but every human who has lived since that global conflagration has had to reckon with what it means. The smallest fire has the power to destroy, but the fires kindled between 1939 and 1945 destroyed people’s trust in humanity. They also caused many to reconsider whether God exists, and if he exists, how he could possibly be good.

Jürgen Moltmann was a German conscript in that conflict. Drafted at only age sixteen, Moltmann was assigned to an anti-aircraft battery in Hamburg on the night of the great firestorm. In 1945, he surrendered to the first British soldier he encountered and spent three years in various POW camps, where he first started reading theological books. After his release, he became a world-renowned theologian. His most famous work, The Crucified God, directly addressed what Christianity meant after the horrors of the Second World War. His emphasis on a God who suffered and died was clearly driven by his status as a German coming to grips with terrific guilt, as well as a man who had witnessed horrors.

While I may not agree with all of Moltmann’s theological views, he was absolutely on the right track. The Second World War was a moment of revelation. While the evils that occurred then are by no means banished from our world and have made themselves known in various ways throughout human history, the specter of those fires places a unique burden on our collective psyche.

All theology must now be conducted in light of those flames. All humanity must be understood in light of such evil. And God himself must answer for the flames he allowed to burn.

How could a sovereign God permit such monstrous suffering? How do we understand a God who made a world of fire? How could we ever call him good?

My task is to address those questions. In the next article in this series, I will turn to the words of Scripture to examine what it says about fire.

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1. The City of London is the proper name for a specific portion of the modern metropolis roughly consisting of those portions that were within the old medieval walls. By the 20^th century, it contained few residential dwellings but many offices, including the nation’s primary newspapers on Fleet Street, the headquarters of Lloyd’s bank, the Old Bailey, and the London Stock Exchange.

2. “St Paul’s Survives by Herbert Mason – Iconic Photograph,” Amateur Photographer, https://amateurphotographer.com/iconic-images/st-pauls-survives-by-herbert-mason-iconic-photograph/. Accessed 27 November 2024.

3. “Strategic Offensive Against Germany – Remarks for Royal Air Force Films London,” Air Marshal Arthur T. Harris, 3 June 1942. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0911keeperfile/. Accessed 27 November 2024.

4. Interview with Ben Witter. “Whirlwind: Bombing Germany - September 1939-April 1944.” The World at War, written by Charles Douglas-Home, directed by Ted Childs, studio, 1973.

5. Seppuku was originally a term for a ritual suicide practice undertaken by Japanese nobles over extreme matters of honor and shame, typically carried out with a carefully placed stab to the belly followed quickly by a beheading by the person’s “second.” The word later came to describe a variety of suicide processes undertaken by Japanese persons.

6. The preceding paragraph draws upon information obtained from an interview with historian James M. Scott, author of Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, The Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb: “Episode 507 - The Firebombing of Tokyo,” We Have Ways of Making You Talk, 5 September 2022. Produced by Harry Lineker. Hosted by James Holland and Al Murray.

7. “Super-fortress crew tell their story,” The Guardian, 8 August 1945. Archived at https://www.theguardian.com/century/1940-1949/Story/0,,127716,00.html. Accessed 27 November 2024.

8. Hershey, John. Hiroshima, Vintage Books Edition (New York: Alred A. Knopf, 1989), 18.

9. Ibid, 29.

10. Wiesel, Elie. Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 24.

11. Ibid, 25.

12. Ibid, 39.

13. Ibid, 34.