Together with many hundreds of flight-candidates I was stationed for almost a year in occupied France, and the prospect of receiving a place at a flying school appeared very small. On my first leave home I arrived on the morning of July 23rd 1943 in Hamburg. Naturally we were very pleased to see each other again.

On the first evening at home we spoke among other things of the risk of Allied bomb attacks on Hamburg. My father planned to rent a room, for my mother and himself in Bad Oldesloe, and to travel to work from there. That sounded very sensible. My little brother Harro, three years younger than I, was at that time with his class at Wandsbeker High School evacuated to a KLV-camp in Hungary, like most children in Hamburg. I had at that time slept only one single night at home. On the very next night, from the 24th to the 25th July 1943 the first of the dreaded large scale attacks on Hamburg took place.

My parents always went to the allocated shelter in the cellar of the two-storey house next door. The top of the room, which to a large part lay under the earth, had been additionally supported with beams, and the windows were barricaded with sandbags. Our house however, in which six parties lived, had no cellar. There was however, a small somewhat deeper room in each of the ground-floor flats, which had been planned originally as a pantry, but had not been used for that. The other occupants of our house went to one of these rooms during air-raid-warning although these rooms were notparticularly safe and not even declared as shelters.

This well-adjusted routine went on also on the night of July 25th. After we had quickly dressed I ran with my parents in the house next door. Naturally we were expecting the enemy aircraft to overfly Hamburg as they had done so often in the past. Together with my father and our neighbour I stayed in the garden for the first five minutes. But as the fire of the heavy flak became more intensive and we also heard in the meantime the roaring of the engines of many planes, we also went into the cellar.

There we sat--8 people--and waited. These were anxious minutes. Suddenly a sound that we did not recognize startled us: the howl of falling bombs. It seemed to us as if bombs thrown in series were coming near us. A bomb struck at some distance, then a second from the same direction, already really near us. As we heard the third bomb howling down near us, all our hearts stopped beating. No one moved, no one said anything. The unavoidable had to come.

And there it was: A yell of many voices mixed with the detonation of thebombs and the falling down of the ceiling. Although the ceiling had been supported it broke down through the force of the wrecked house.Simultaneous with the detonation it became completely dark. I felt a strong blow on the head. Seconds before it had be so loud, now it became so quiet. I could still hear bombs and anti-aircraft guns, but not directly in theneighbourhood. I sat directly beside a door in a corner of the room; that probably saved my life. With panic-stricken fear I listened into the darkness and cried for my mother and father who a few moments before had been sitting only a few meters away. But I only heard the soft trickle of debris.When I could think again I noted something heavy, probably a beam, lying on my head. It couldn't be moved since the one end, or probably the bigger part, apparently lay under the debris. My legs from the upper thigh were also surrounded by debris. Using my entire strength, I managed to get out. Whether I reached the open air through an open door or a hole in the wall I don't know. Suddenly I stood in the garden of the house whose entire upper part did no longer exist.

I had to get help.The house next door, the one in which we lived , was burning on the second floor. I saw no people. I did not recognise Löwenstraße, a street I had been so familiar with. I ran a distance of 50 meters to the police station. Nobody was there. I remembered that a head office in Horst Wessel Street (now Schädlerstraße) was in charge of all activities. What should I do now, I really didn't want to go too far away. Then I ran anyway. Between Claudius and Schillerstraße I fell into a giant bomb crater, however I stumbled further, reached the Horst-Wessel-Straße and reported, that the house we had been in had collapsed and that there were 7 people still in the ruins.

I was taken by a policeman to the cellar of an emergency-doctor station. I probably looked terrible. Blood ran over my face, my clothes were in shreds, and I was at the end of my tether. As I, with stitched wounds and bandaged head, came to, I heard someone call "Gerhard". It was our neighbour, she also survived by being beside or in a door and had found her way up to here. Among sobs she called again and again: "All the others are dead, all the others are dead".

As soon as I was in the position again to stand up, I made my way back to Löwenstraße. The attack was over. Hamburg lay there as if the city had been felled by a mighty blow. Before the city could recover it was hit by more strikes during the following days and nights. These strikes turned Hamburg into a landscape of rubble never seen before on such a big scale.

As I came into our part of Löwenstraße I saw a troop of technical emergency assistants spraying water on a still-burning mountain of ruins. The house in which we lived was burnt down to half its size, but still stood on its foundations. From a woman I heard that all the people had been able to leave the house uninjured. Completely stunned I wandered around and asked allpossible people again and again, if no people out of the house next door had been rescued. Each said to me that all the people in the cellar had been buried alive and burnt. As it turned out later, that were exactly the facts. My parents were dead too. Two neighbours confirmed later that at the recovery they had identified the bodies of my parents. At the beginning of August I was again on my way back to France. Prior to this I had written a letter to my brother's teacher in Hungary and asked him to gently break the news of our parents' death to my younger brother Harro.

I spent the rest of my leave in the hospital in Wandsbek-Gartenstadt, where my wound was taken care of and I was also admitted to a ward, although my headwound should actually not necessarily have had in-patient treatment. On the next day the hospital was hit and shortly after that transferred to Buchholz. I was also taken there.

In the meantime I had reported myself to the military command in Hamburg, had my air force gear made up by the air force barracks in Hamburg-Rissen, and had contacted my uncle who was stationed in Bergedorf. My uncle had lived next door in the same apartment on Löwenstraße, but had been able to get his wife and two small daughters and himself to safety. At the beginning of August I was again on my way to France. I had just written a letter previously to my brother's teacher in Hungary and asked him to gently break the news of the death of our parents as soon as possible to my brother Harro.

Then at long last, and by chance, I was flying. At the end of 1943 there was a nephew of an air force general in my company. This general arranged at that time the transfer of his nephew to a pilot school. While most of the flying candidates in 1944 were shifted to the " finer points of ground fighting" in the east, I belonged to a small group that travelled at the end of December 1943, together with the nephew of the general, to the flying school A10 in Warnemünde .

During the next months I learned to fly alone. There was: dealing with dangerous situations in the air, overland flight, the beginnings of formation and instrument flying, and even aerobatics! In a small aeroplane at 3000m it was more beautiful for a young flier than to climb and practise easy and more difficult aerobatic figures?

I felt, as the accelerator which I held in my left hand, was easily pushed to the front. Then the control column, which I kept grasping in my right hand, pushed to the left. Simultaneously I moved my right foot on the rudder a bit to the front. Now the steering column was pushed forward, the feet in the meantime were again beside each other. The horizon in front of me had placed itself upside down. Where the earth was previously, that is, below, was now the sky. And the earth was now above me. Slowly the joy-stick slid, always remaining left, again from the front back to the middle, while my left foot now moved to the front. Immediately the two feet stood beside each other, the joy-stick was in the middle and the plane flew in the original position. The pilot teacher explained again the individual phases of the just-ended slow or steered roll, that he steered and I just felt. I could not quite imagine, that I could ever do it alone-- looping was stillrelatively simple at that.Two or three weeks later I had also already learned how such rolls must be flown: the flight path must at the same time, even for the critical observer on the ground and despite the many movements with the rudders, show no great rolling motions. I learned to fly on the good old "Bücker Bestmann", which was used at that time besides other models, at the A-School.

Our flying unfortunately didn't last long. After the basic training at the A-School I was transferred to the B-School, which belonged to the airport at Deiningen near Nördlingen, and then to Magdeburg where, at the Magdeburg-East Airport, my flying career first came to an end. From the fall of 1944 there was still only theory, because there was no fuel available for our aircraft.

Translated from the German by John Milloy,Can. (nimso@aol.com)

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© 2001 Gerhard Lange