| Original caption: “Hamburg, Germany. After the 1943 air raids, the port of Hamburg was strewn with sunken ships, like this Norwegian tramp, which was one of the 2,900 destroyed in the port.” Dampfschiff (“Steamship”) Nierstein, launched in 1940 at Trondheim, was a 2,102 Gross Register Ton (GRT) tramp steamer ordered by Springwell Shipping Co. Limited, London, as the Springsound. The Nazi invasion of Norway in April 1940 allowed the Germans to seize the ship on the ways. Launched September 17, 1940, as Steamship Nierstein, by the Leiter der Abteilung für Seeschiffahrtsfragen des Reichsverkehrsministerium (“Head of the Department for Maritime Affairs of the Reich Ministry of Transport”) Max Waldeck (October 25, 1878 – April 22, 1970). The ship was assigned to the Deutsche Dampfschifffahrts-Gesellschaft Hansa (“German Steamship Company Hansa”). The ship was towed to Fredrikstad, Norway, on February 24, 1943, for final outfitting and delivered to Hansa on April 2, 1943. Hansa renamed the steamship “Haakon Jarl” after the ruler (circa 937 – 995) of Norway from circa 975 to 995. SS Haakon Jarl was sunk in Hamburg on July 23, 1943. Towed back to Fredrikstad in November 1943, the ship was laid up until February 1947. Almost 3,000 wrecks lay in the Port of Hamburg and in the river. Of 1,108 quay cranes, 878 were destroyed or severely damaged. Of 15 floating cranes, 9 were operable. Of the 21 floating grain elevators, 8 were reused. The July 1943 attack and subsequent bombings saw 305 kilometers (190 miles) of track, 67.8 percent of the harbor railway network, destroyed. 70 bridges, 42.4 percent of Hamburg crossings, and 57.6 percent of the Landungsbrücken Piers were destroyed or unusable. Of the warehouses and warehouses of the Hamburger Hafen- und Lagerhaus-Aktiengesellschaft (“Hamburg Port and Warehouse Company”), only 30 percent survived the war undamaged. In 1943, Hamburg, Germany, was home to numerous manufacturing plants and transportation centers, including the Blohm and Voss shipyards, which built the U-boats that threatened the very existence of Great Britain. RAF Bomber Command’s Air Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris determined the northern German city a worthy target. Planning to strike this center of industry, Harris ordered a 10-day campaign targeting the city, code-named “Operation Gomorrah,” a reference to the biblical rain of ruin and fire coming from above. Originally planned for July 22, the raid was delayed for 2 days due to cloud coverage; by the 24th, the skies had cleared. That evening, starting at approximately 2200 Hours, 791 British bombers took off under the cover of darkness. For the residents of Hamburg, this was only the beginning. More raids were to come. With the afternoon sun finally breaking through, 123 American B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers arrived over the city. The American approach to strategic bombing differed significantly from the British. The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) adhered to a doctrine of daylight precision, aiming to avoid area bombardment and strike only designated military and strategic targets. Hoping to avoid the moral quagmire of mass atrocities, the USAAF professed great faith in its Norden Mk XV bombsight. However, flying without fighter escort and clearly visible to German radar and day fighters, the American formations were quite vulnerable. Still, the 6 bomb groups continued to their targets: the city’s shipyards and the Klockner aircraft engine factory. Flying in clear air with unlimited visibility, the American formation approached the mouth of the Elbe River as German fighters rose to meet the bombers. Flying through the Luftwaffe defenses, the bombers made it to the city without a loss, although that was not the only obstacle. German Fliegerabwehrkanonen (antiaircraft guns, or Flak) opened fire upon the formations, taking their toll on the planes. Thwarting the precision-targeting effort, the smoke from the previous night’s conflagration made it difficult to locate designated targets. A break in the smoke allowed bombardiers to sight a different shipyard in the area, but the engine factory remained obscured. The groups assigned to the factory target held their bombs until later, hitting a rail yard at Heide as a target of opportunity. On July 25, 1943, the Blohm & Voss submarine yards were well and truly hit, and dock installations in the area were also damaged. The tool store, smithy, and the construction shops were blanketed with bombs, and their own power station was destroyed. The liner Der Vaterland was under construction when the war began, but work ceased on her when the Government turned the yards over entirely to munitions. The partly built was moved to the Steinwarder wharf and used as a timber yard, chiefly for storing poles and posts for building the stocks and slipways. A direct hit by a 500-pound (226-kilogram) bomb raised the bow out of the water and ignited the timber, which, for some reason, was allowed to burn itself out. Another bomb hit the steamship General Artigas, which was berthed close by in Kuhwerderhafen and was being used as a training school by the Navy. The Americans claimed only a near miss, though the Germans say she sank. 2 floating docks were hit; 1 of them sank, and the other keeled over. Howaldtswerke, another government-owned factory, was, like its big brother to the north, employed in submarine construction. Here, a few bombs did scattered damage, but the worst was to come on the morrow, when the whole factory was blanketed with bombs, causing severe destruction, including fire damage. Maschinenfabrik Augsburg und Nürburg (MAN), a manufacturer of diesel engines, received direct hits, and 2 floating docks were extensively damaged. It was a bad day for submarines: scheduled production for August and September was 58 boats, of which only 43 were completed, and that was achieved only after an enormous rescue operation by companies outside Hamburg. As later combat boxes of American bombers released their cargoes further south, bombs straddled the Neuhöfer Canal, and fires were started in an oil storage depot. A large explosion, which signaled the end of a tank that would no longer hold oil, brought an instant feeling of satisfaction to the American crews. On July 26, the damage was in the same area, but the main concentration was at Howaldtswerke, where IBs caused extensive fire damage. MAN, which also suffered heavily, received a direct hit on the aircraft assembly hangar and 3 on the boiler-house, and the power station was severely damaged. 1 floating dock was sunk, and another received a direct hit. A 3rd floating dock was sunk in the Stucken yards. Blohm & Voss escaped almost completely. The merchant vessel Leuna was set on fire, and 4 acres of warehouses in Hansa Hafen were burnt out, including Hansa Mühle, whose stocks of soya oil, soya beans, and sunflower seeds burned so fiercely that adjoining warehouses were set on fire within a short space of time. Kleine Grasbrook was a congested industrial area to the east of Blohm & Voss, and there it was more difficult to miss a factory of importance than to hit 1. The entire area was a patchwork of railway sidings that suffered extensive damage. 2 gas holders in the municipal gasworks were hit. Großadmiral Karl Dönitz (September 16, 1891 – December 24, 1980), Oberbefehlshaber der Kriegsmarine (“Commander-in-Chief of the Navy”), visited Blohm & Voss to view the damage to the U-Boat shipyards on August 17, 1943. By September 1946, 20 of the 100 deep-water births at the Landungsbrücken Piers in the Port of Hamburg were cleared of debris. The Port of Hamburg was capable of unloading 40 percent of the cargo that was unloaded before the war. The Edmonton Journal reported on September 21, 1946, “The chief sights of interest in the harbor are not the shipping, which is small, but the horrible, mangled remains of the submarine pens and slipways; the wreck of the steamship Robert Ley, which was one Hitler’s Strength-Through-Joy holiday steamers; the fleet of unallocated German steamers awaiting disposal as reparations; and the masses of crates and cranes containing parts of dismantled factories being shipped as reparations to Russia.” SS Haakon Jarl was renamed “Sven Jarl” in 1947. The ship was repaired and placed in service as a Mediterranean tramp steamer. On January 16, 1948, 9 of her crew were killed when the ship struck a mine left over from World War II. Sven Jarl sank near the mouth of the river Evinos. She is on the bottom, on her port side, at a maximum depth of 42 meters (137 feet). | |
| Image Filename | wwii0986.jpg |
| Image Size | 667.50 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2928 x 2156 |
| Photographer | |
| Photographer Title | Economic Cooperation Administration |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | November 1, 1943 |
| Location | |
| City | Hamburg |
| State or Province | Hamburg |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-286-ME-6(6) |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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