On the night of 30 March 1944, RAF Bomber Command sent 795 heavy bombers to Nuremberg. Ninety-six of them never came home. In a single night, in a few hours over Germany, more than 500 young airmen were killed — the worst night the Command suffered in the entire war. Veterans who lived through it never forgot the one thing that doomed them: the moon.

It should have been a routine deep raid at the tail of the gruelling Battle of Berlin. Instead it became a massacre, and a lesson written in the wreckage of Lancasters and Halifaxes scattered across the route to the target.

A forecast that failed

The plan gambled on weather. Bomber Command hoped high cloud would screen the bombers on the way in while the target stayed clear for marking. But before take-off a weather-reconnaissance Mosquito reported the opposite: the protective cloud probably would not form, and Nuremberg itself might be covered. The raid went ahead anyway.

The airmen climbed into a crystal-clear night lit by a bright moon. Worse, the cold air turned every engine's exhaust into a long white contrail. Nearly eight hundred bombers drew streamers across the sky, each one an arrow pointing straight at the aircraft ahead. For the German night-fighter crews, it was the easiest hunting of the war.

The BBC Timewatch account of the raid.

The long slaughter to the target

The killing began early, along the leg between two turning points where German controllers funnelled their fighters into the stream. Bombers fell in twos and threes, then faster — blazing shapes tumbling out of the moonlight. So many aircraft were exploding that some crews were told the fireballs were German "scarecrow" shells, dummy pyrotechnics meant to mimic a dying bomber and sap morale. The men who saw their friends go down knew better.

By the time the survivors reached Nuremberg, the raid was already a disaster, and the bombing itself went wrong too. Strong winds scattered the force; markers fell in the wrong places; much of the load missed the city entirely, some of it hitting Schweinfurt by mistake. Great cost, little result.

One man's Victoria Cross

Amid the carnage came an act of extraordinary devotion. Pilot Officer Cyril Barton's Halifax was hit hard on the way in, losing an engine and its communications. In the confusion three of his crew baled out on a misread signal. Barton flew on alone, bombed the target, and nursed the crippled bomber all the way back across the North Sea on three engines. Out of fuel over the English coast, he crash-landed to save his three remaining crew — and was killed doing it.

A Nuremberg veteran remembers the night.

The Nuremberg moon

The Nuremberg raid effectively ended Bomber Command's long, costly winter offensive against Germany's cities by night. It proved that even the mighty bomber stream could be butchered when the sky betrayed it, and it hardened the case for the diversions, spoofs and escort tactics that would follow.

For the men who survived, the memory attached itself to something as simple and beautiful as moonlight. Long after the war, when the moon rose in its waxing crescent, Bomber Command veterans would fall quiet and call it a "Nuremberg moon" — the light that once turned an ordinary raid into the worst night of their lives.

The BBC's account of the bombing of Germany and the Nuremberg disaster.

Sources: Wikipedia (Nuremberg raid); Martin Middlebrook, The Nuremberg Raid; Australian War Memorial; IBCC Digital Archive; London Gazette.