A British Halifax bomber after the Nuremberg raid was shot down and crashed at Stickgrass near Delmenhorst on its way to the city. The bodies and wreckage of the dead crew of British soldiers littered the surrounding area. The wreckage and corpses of this tragic battlefield were photographed and published by the Germans. 795 bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) were involved in the war effort during the Nuremberg raid on March 30, 1944, and about 95 were lost. This was more than about 11% of the bombers engaged. Many more aircraft crashed, damaged by fighter bombardment and blasts. Five hundred and forty-five British soldiers were killed, about one hundred and fifty more were taken prisoner, and a large number of the wounded were reported missing. The Nuremberg raid was the largest loss of aircraft by British bombers in a single operation. The damage to Nuremberg, the target, was relatively minor.
The British bombed the city at night with light bombs. Cities and towns were targeted and collapsed with large amounts of explosives. Although munitions industries and military facilities were damaged, it was an indiscriminate terrorist bombing of civilians to demoralize the Germans. By March 1944, British bombs had been dropped on German cities in large numbers. Cities such as Mannheim, Cologne, and the capital Berlin had already been targeted, leaving behind a large amount of smoky rubble and many civilian casualties.
Nuremberg, a city of about 150,000 people, was certainly a military target, but not a military city that would become an important fighting force for the German army. As Hitler's famous meeting place before the war, he regarded it as the spiritual center of Nazism. The Nuremberg raid was to be the last of the massive urban air raids by the Royal Air Force before the near future Normandy landings.
The Germans were able to clearly see the British bombers coming over the Belgian coast from the moonlight and the plane clouds. More than 200 German fighter planes were urgently launched to intercept them, and the Royal Air Force was effectively ambushed. The German fighters attacked the British bombers from below. The German fighters shot at the fuselage of the bomb-laden British bombers, tearing off both wings carrying heavy fuel. The German night fighters continued to shoot down the British bombers. They lost sight of their target and disappeared into the clouds. Their formation was broken and they were knocked off course by crosswinds. Some were shot down in the nearby farming village of Lauf. About 150 bombers dumped their payloads in the field. Under heavy anti-aircraft fire from the ground, many of the bombers crashed away from the city. On the return journey, British bombers continued to be targeted by German fighters and anti-aircraft guns. The formation was broken up and the bombers were heavily scattered. Several bombers crashed along the way, either due to battle damage or running out of fuel.
The Germans recorded the urban damage in Nuremberg as about 133 dead (about 75 in the city), about 412 wounded, about 198 houses completely destroyed, about 3,804 damaged, and about 11,000 homeless. The number of fires was about 120 large fires and 485 medium and small fires. Industrial damage was minor with railroads cut off, three large factories heavily damaged and about 96 industrial buildings destroyed.
The greatest damage to Nuremberg occurred in an air raid on January 2, 1945, when some 521 British bombers dropped some 6,000 high-explosive bombs and about one million incendiary bombs on the city. More than about 1,800 of the population were killed and about 100,000 people were left homeless. Nuremberg's old town was almost completely destroyed and the entire city was badly damaged. the air raids ended on April 11, 1945, and American troops occupied Nuremberg on April 20.
