On this Anzac Day, 60 years and 8 months after the air raids on Königsberg, we remember the Australian airmen killed in those raids.

The RAF air raids on Königsberg were carried out over the nights of Saturday 26th/Sunday 27th August 1944, and again over Tuesday 29th/Wednesday 30th August 1944. Large numbers of RAAF air crew on secondment to the RAF were among the crews of the planes. During the air raids a total of 48 Australian airmen were killed (www.ww2roll.gov.au). The numbers of injured have not been identified.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 28th August 1944 that “A great force of R.A.F. heavy bombers, including Lancasters with Australian crews, last night flew to within 100 miles of the Russian front to launch a major attack on Konigsberg, capital of East Prussia, starting huge fires. Twenty nine bombers are missing”. It reported again on 31st August 1944 that “Very strong forces of R.A.F. heavy bombers last night attacked Stettin and Konigsberg. Konigsberg, principal East Prussian port, plays a considerable part in supplying the German forces defending East Prussia. 1,200 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on Stettin … an hour after the attack saw smoke from large fires rising to a height of five miles. Forty-one aircraft were lost”.

The flight to the target city, cloaked in secrecy, was safer than the return to England. The 8 deaths on the first raid to Königsberg were over the North Sea and Germany, while on the return there were twelve in an arc over Denmark, the North Sea and the English Channel. The two deaths on the second raid were over Germany, while on the return there were 26 spread over East Prussia, Germany, the Baltic Sea, the North Sea and ‘North West Europe’. While the Germans may not have anticipated the second raid so soon after the first, they scattered the homebound raiders over a wider area and were able to inflict greater casualties on them – 54% of all Australian deaths came during this second return flight to England.

The Australian airmen came from every mainland state, with just over a third remembered on local honour rolls in New South Wales, about a quarter each in Victoria and Queensland and the remainder in Western Australia and South Australia. Some regions were particularly hard-hit by these deaths, notably suburban Sydney (25%), Inner City Melbourne (20%), Mid West NSW (10%), Far North Queensland (10%) and the Lower Hunter Valley (8%). They were overwhelmingly (85%) aged between 19 and 23, with the remainder in their late 20s or early 30s.

Two of the dead had been decorated for bravery (Flight Lieutenant Lyons DFM and Flight Lieutenant Wilkinson DFC), and the loss of such experienced airmen was felt within the RAAF, especially as the air war was the main scene of Australian involvement in Europe by this time. The impact within Australia of these 48 deaths can also be understood by two vignettes: only two of these men are buried in known graves, and one of them had apparently been destined for greatness. The body of Flying Officer Kenneth Hutchins, an apprentice fitter from Hurstville NSW, was recoved from a beach in northern Germany, and later interred in the Kiel War Cemetery. The body of Flight Sergeant Simon Solomons of Coogee NSW, and a violinist in the ABC Symphony Orchestra in Sydney, was found on a Swedish beach and interred in the Malmo Jewish Cemetery, where he remains to this day. In 1939 the Orchestra had been reformed under the leadership of Sir Bernard Heinze and was on the threshold of becoming a national institution, but was then seriously depleted by the conscription of musicians such as Solomons. The potential musical greatness of Simon Solomons was never to be realised. The other 46 men have no known resting place.

As the Königsbergers wandered around their shattered city, distraught and shocked at their losses, tears also flowed in the south. From tiny hamlets and country towns to the streets of the suburbs and the city lights, families received the news of the loss of their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers with similar distress and shock. About 100 Königsbergers were killed by the raids for every Australian airman killed making the raids. In grief they were unknowingly bound; the 'achievements' or otherwise of the Königsberg firestorm rarely articulated, with air raid itself seemingly consigned to a mere footnote in the histories of the air war in Europe.

The Roll of Honour below lists the Australian airmen killed in the raids, with their age when killed, and the local honour roll on which they are recorded.

Killed flying to Königsberg on the night of Saturday 26th August 1944
Billing, Albert Norman James – 21 – Port Melbourne, Vic
Boatswain, James Attewood – 22 – Canowindra, NSW
Bucirde, Reginald John – 23 – Melbourne, Vic
Connolly, Daryl Owen – 28 – Ashfield, NSW
Hutchins, Kenneth Millett – 19 – Hurstville, NSW
Leigh, James Standish – 29 – not known
Pavey, Kevin Ambrose – 19 – Williamstown, Vic
Smith, Leslie Joseph – 29 – Melbourne, Vic

Killed returning from Königsberg in the early morning of Sunday 27th August 1944
Baxter, William Samuel – 23 – Nathalia Numerkah, Vic
Carrier, William John – 21 – not known
Dyer, Bruce Douglas – 20 – Merewether, NSW
Fischer, David Ralston – 23 – Melbourne, Vic
Hawkes, Frank Sidney – 33 – Hurstville, NSW
Jackson, Allen Stewart – 20 – Toowoomba, Qld
Keys, Noel Richart – 23 – not known
McCurdy, Thomas Neil – 27 – not known
Moran, William John – 21 – Milsons Point, NSW
Mullins, Raymond James – 22 – Sutherland, NSW
Tennent, Keith George – 22 – Rockhampton, Qld
Webber, Athol Grant – 19 – West Maitland, NSW

Killed flying to Königsberg on the night of Tuesday 29th August 1944
Mahar, Maurice John – 20 – Minalton, SA
Shoesmith, George Arthur – 21 – Boyup Brook and Bunbury, WA

Killed returning from Königsberg in the early morning of Wednesday 30th August 1944
Adcock, Thomas – 24 – Douglas Shire, Qld
Barrett, Noel Charles – 22 – Melbourne, Vic
Brady – Alan John – 23 – Essendon, Vic
Clarke, Thomas Kenneth – 22 – Newcastle, NSW
Dodd, Thomas Henry – 27 – Marrickville, NSW
Griffin, Felix Ivor – 22 – Lidcombe, NSW
Harding, Robert Edward – 19 – Hunters Hill, NSW
Heath, Laurence David – 21 – Gunnedah, NSW
Hiscock – William Warren – 22 – St. Kilda, Vic
Jamieson, Thomas George – 24 – Cardwell, Qld
Laidler, Gordon James – 20 – not known
Lyons DFM, Kenneth Marcus Denbigh – 33 – Rockhampton, Qld
McLean, Robert Hudson – 23 – Cairns, Qld
McWhinney, Joseph – 25 – Lane Cove, NSW
Parker, Ralf – 21 – Molong, NSW
Perrie, James William – 21 – not known
Peut, Robert Henry Christopher – 20 – Julia Creek, Qld
Powers, David Kingsley – 20 – Kew, Vic
Roe, Morris James – 22 – Brisbane, Qld
Ryan, Terence Russell – 23 – Trangie, NSW
Sandell, David John – 21 – Killara, NSW
Solomons, Simon Stanley – 22 – Sydney, NSW
Taylor, Neville Alfred – 20 – Toowoomba, Qld
Ware, Jack Beaumont – 25 – Woodville, SA
White, Frederick William – 28 – Bairnsdale, Vic
Wilkinson DFC, John Hudson – 30 – Rutherglen, Vic

For King and Country : Lest We Forget

Monday 9th April 1945 – The day of the Fall. Despite the hysterical urgings of Hitler, General Lasch knew that he could not fight on. Beseiged in the city centre at his headquarters in the Paradeplatz in front of the university, the city smashed and burning all around him, men, weapons and ammunition rapidly running out, the remaining townsfolk shocked and cowed, he knew the time had come. Envoys were sent out, parleys were held, and at 9.00am General Lasch and Red Army officers Janovsky and Kruglov signed a surrender document in the Paradeplatz bunker. At the 9th hour of the 9th day, it was all over. Half an hour later the fighting stopped, and some 50,000 German soldiers surrendered as the Red Army entered the ruins of the city. Hitler sentenced Lasch to death in absentia and detained and tortured his family. The people waited in the void, thinking the nightmare might be over. Sadly, the real nightmare was just about to begin.

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The fears of the Königsbergers, continually raised since the air raids and then Nemmersdorf, compounded by the consistent stories that filtered into the city of rape, killing, looting and terror inflicted upon the civilian population by the Red Army as it swept through Poland and Eastern Germany were fully realised during the invasion of the city, and then during the occupation.

Sunday 8th April 1945 – The day before the Fall. The 3rd Byelorussian Front is pressing in upon the city from the north and the south. The bombardment is relentless, the sky is dark and thick with smoke, the noise deafening. The second position has been smashed wide open and the third position has also been breached on the south, with the Red Army now on the south bank of the Pregel. The cathedral and Kneiphof Island are directly on the front line, and the southern suburbs and the Sudbahnhof has been taken. The city's defenders have tried a counter-attack to break out to Gross Holstein at the river mouth, but have failed and are now falling back towards the city centre. The third and final position follows the old city walls and gates, and although the northern suburbs have also fallen to the invaders the northern parts of the old city are holding out under merciless attack. The castle, the university, the shopping strip along The Steindamm, the parklands, the closely built streets, they're all burning, exploding. The 200 000 Königsbergers left in the city are huddled in their cellars and air raid shelters, beseiged, fearful and waiting while their defenders under General Lasch fight a loosing battle.

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Five and half years before, the fury of World War Two had erupted in September 1939 when German forces invaded Poland and Danzig. Six months earlier Memel had been re-annexed to Germany, and within weeks of the invasion of Poland, Danzig and West Prussia were also re-annexed. East Prussia was geographically re-united with Germany. At the same time the Soviet Union invaded and occupied eastern Poland and later Lithuania, and Königsberg became once again a frontier town, with the Soviet borders between 100 – 200 kilometres away to the north east. Two years later the invasion of the USSR began, and German forces drove north and eastwards into Lithuania and Byelorussia (Belarus), moving the frontier endlessly eastwards and away from the city. Königsberg became an important centre for distributing troops and supplies, and because of its distance from either front it remained safe from direct air attacks.

The mood began to change in early 1943 as victories began turning to defeats after the failure to capture Stalingrad and the retreat from North Africa. At about the same time a concentration camp was being established at Stutthof, at the western end of the Frisches Haff. The curtain was rising on the madness that was soon to descend.

In July 1944 the city celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Albertus University, one of the oldest in Germany and in Europe. The philosopher Kant, the physicist Bessel and many other of its professors with a world reputation were remembered, and a special postage stamp was issued to commemorate the anniversary. It was probably the last celebration held in the city of the city's heritage.

The war came directly and visciously eight weeks later over two terrible nights in August 1944. Waves of RAF bombers, with their British, Australian, New Zealander and Canadian crews, pounded the city over the night of Saturday 26th/Sunday 27th August, and again over Tuesday 29th/Wednesday 30th August, creating huge firestorms and bringing destruction to much of Königsberg's old city. The castle was severely damaged, as was the cathedral, and the medieval old town of narrow streets and picturesque timbered buildings and Hanse warehouses burnt for days. Some 4 500 Königsbergers perished in the raids.

As the townsfolk began to recover from the air raids, news of the Red Army's brief occupation of two East Prussian border districts hit the city in October 1944. The village of Nemmersdorf was occupied for several days, during which the civilian population was violently and deliberately tortured and then massacred. Foreign press were invited to view the massacres, and the Nazi propaganda authorities spread the news far and wide hoping to stiffen resistance to the invaders.

By Christmas 1944, however, refugees were pouring into the damaged city as the Red Army began its push into East Prussia. Soon they were nearing the gates of Insterberg, only 80 kilometres east of the city. Cannon fire could be heard, and Soviet planes were begining to strafe the city. New Years Day 1945 was bleak. The weather was bitterly cold, one of the coldest on record. Long convoys, or treks, of refugees began snaking out of Königsberg and other East Prussian towns, crossing the frozen Frisches Haff to Pillau and the seaward side of the Frisches Nehrung, where one of the largest seabourne evacuations of the war was underway. Other Königsbergers decided to stay, although in March many were evacuated into the countryside and the resort towns on the Samland coast, leaving the city in the hands of its defenders under the command of General Lasch. Hitler declared the city a fortress, never to be surrendered, while Gauleiter Koch (the chief Nazi functionary in East Prussia) berated the refugees as cowards and traitors before fleeing himself. Soviet planes straffed and bombed the treks, and the roads were soon lined with abandoned and destroyed household goods and the bodies of refugees. The ice on the Frisches Haff was frequently shattered by enemy fire, and unknown numbers of people drowned in the freezing waters. Refugee ships were under constant attack by Soviet submarines and ships, with over 7 000 people drowning in the sinking of one ship alone. During March the ice began to melt and the trek became even more hazardous. Unknown numbers of Königsbergers and East Prussians were already dieing on the treks, but the flight continued to grow.

Saturday 7th April 1945 – two days before the Fall – the Red Army attack has begun in earnest after four days of bombardment. The breach of the first position is growing wider in the north-west as the 3rd Byelorussian drive towards Gross Holstein on the Frishes Haff coast, and also begin to breach the second position's minefields and barricades on the edges of the northern suburbs. On the south the second position is also being breached as the Byelorussians drive towards the southern suburbs.

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Twenty five years before, one of the most momemtous outcomes of the Great War was the rebirth of Poland, which included the old Polish province of West Prussia. This formed the hinterland of Danzig, and its re-incorporation into the Polish state 146 years after the first partition of Poland again separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Danzig was also separated from Germany as a Free City under a League of Nations mandate to provide a neutral port for both Polish and German trade. Plebiscites were held in the southern districts of East Prussia (Masuria and Marienwerder) to determine their future national alignment: in 1922 a vote of 97% favoured remaining in Germany. North of Königsberg the city of Memel was also under a League of Nations mandate until the new Lithuanian army occupied the city in 1923 and annexed it to Lithuania.

By the mid 1920s, after five years of turmoil since the Indian summer of 1918, including the period of hyper-inflation, Königsbergers could begin to feel some sense of peace, however isolated. Sea and rail links were re-restablished with Germany, and new air links were established. The city's economy struggled, but this was to some extent countered by the annual Deutsche Ostmesse ('East fair'), a huge trade fair held on a specially designed site in Königsberg between 1920 and 1941.

North of the city, the Samland coast and the Kurische Nehrung had been something of a bohemian retreat since the early 1900s. The Niddener Künstlerkolonie (artist colony) was established in the 1920s by Impressionist painters such as Ernst Mollenhauer at Nidden, a fishing village on the Kurische Nehrung, and other artists in the area included the painter Max Pechstein and the epic novelist Thomas Mann, the sculptor Herman Brachert at Georgenswalde, and the painter and photographer Käthe Koller at Rauschen. The Nazis considered Impressionist art 'degenerate', and most of the Niddener or Kurische artists, as they were sometimes known, were banned from exhibiting their work during the fascist period.

An underlying discontent that had simmered since the autumn of 1918 was manifested when the Nazi Party took control of the East Prussian government in a coup in 1932 following victories in some local elections. Hitler dissolved all state governments in 1934, and established the same centralised, repressive machinery of fascist government in the state as elsewhere in Germany.

Friday 6th April 1945: three days before the Fall. The city is under constant attack. The Red Army broke through the northern side of the outer belt yesterday, taking Fuchsberg and Neuhausen-Tiergarten, and also on the southern side of the outer belt where Heidevaldburg on the Frisches Haff and Alternberg have fallen. Today the first position, a series of trenches about 6-7 kilometres from the city centre, is also breached on its north-western corner. A long north-south lake is contining to protect the city's eastern flank, but the western window to the sea is quickly closing.

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Twenty six years before, the German victory on the eastern front in March 1918 promised Königsberg increased wealth and status, but it was a false dawn. Eight months later the collapse of the western front during October 1918, the mutiny of the German fleet on 29 October and the abdication of the Kaiser on 9 November encouraged a collapse of central authority and the outbreak of local revolutions inspired by the Bolshevik coup in Russia. Workers & Soldiers Soviets seized local authorities in the west, then the south, Berlin on 9 November, and spreading into eastern industrial cities such as Breslau, Poznan and Königsberg on 10 November. Mercantile Danzig was one of the few cities to escape the wave of local revolutions. (Kinder & Hilgemann, The Penguin Atlas of World History, Vol. II, Penguin, London 1978: 130-131)

Parliamentary leaders in Berlin negotiated with the various parties to hold elections for a national assembly, and began to reassert central authority and take back the cities. By December the revolution in Königsberg had come to an end, but the legacy of Imperial flight and revolutionary response was to produce a bitter harvest. (Kinder & Hilgemann, The Penguin Atlas of World History, Vol. II, Penguin, London 1978: 130-131)

Evidence of the uprising may have been revealed 65 years later by Soviet archaeologists searching for the elusive Amber Room. Jelena Storozhenko reported in 1984 that, following ten years of searching, one of the things uncovered was “…under the floor of a private house in the centre of the city we found dead bodies, a coffin and a red flag on which was the hammer and sickle. Perhaps this flag dates from the Revolution period of 1918, when Soviet workers rose up for the first time against East Prussia. Maybe then this workers' flag flew over Königsberg.” Clearly, the interpretation of the relics is shaped by the 'sovietising' of the city's history, and the fate of the relics is not stated, although they may still be in the custody of the KGB archives in Moscow, but the find hints at the ways in which central authority was reasserted in the city. (Scott-Clark & Levy, The Amber Room, Atlantic Books, London 2004: 303-304)

Wednesday 4th April 1945 – Five days before the Fall. The 3rd Byelorussian Front of the Red Army has almost surrounded the city on the north, east and south. Only the Pregel River channel into and through the Frisches Haff remains open. Aircraft from the Soviet Baltic Fleet are straffing and bombing the city as Red Army artillery bombard the city’s outer defensive ring some thirteen to fourteen kilometres from the city centre.

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Seventy four years before, the German Empire (Deutsche Reich) was proclaimed in 1871, uniting the northern and southern German states into one nation. The King of Prussia was crowned Emperor (Kaiser) as Wilhelm I. Unification followed the victory of the Prussians in a brief war with France. Königsberg, a thousand kilometres to the east, was unaffected by the war but prospered in the new empire. Prussia had taken the Danzig hinterland a century before in the first partition of Poland in 1772, geographically joining East Prussia for the first time to 'the Reich', or metropolitan Germany, but unification seemed to make the link permanent, and economic development soon followed.

Köningsberg was never the glamorous ‘Konigin von der Ostsee’ (Queen of the Baltic) that Danzig was, but it was the capital of the largest state in the federation and the seat of imperial coronations. The harbour was a major outlet for Russian exports of grains and hemp, and an important international market for grains, hemp, flax, hides and other agricultural products. The building of a canal linking the harbour to the sea overcame problems with silting and shifting shoals in the Frisches Haff, and allowed the harbour to operate ice-free all year round. The development of the railway systems made the city a central hub on the rail lines between Germany and Russia and around the south-eastern Baltic. Industrial development included paper manufacturing and large printing plants, based upon the regions extensive forests, shipbuilding and train repairs and maintenance, brewing, machine building, making musical instruments, amber working (for which it was the world centre), and fishing.

The creation of an industrial working class and mercantile middle class also lead to the development of seaside resorts such as Rauschen and Cranz on the Samland coast at the turn of the 20th century. The Albertus University, founded in 1544, had a well established reputation in the arts such as philosophy and music, and the sciences such as physics and mathematics, and there were several other colleges and institutes of higher education in the city. The city had been founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Order, and its strategic defence role was enhanced during the Imperial period with the completion in 1905 of major new naval and military fortifications.