Twenty second operation Politz

PPopeKMJ18010064.jpg

Title

Twenty second operation Politz

Description

Handwritten note giving brief details of the operation with a relevant newspaper cutting titled '1000 'plane raid' and one map.

Temporal Coverage

Language

Type

Format

One handwritten note and three newspaper cuttings on an album page.

Rights

This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal.

Contributor

Identifier

PPopeKMJ18010064

Transcription

[underlined]
Twenty Second Operation
POLITZ
Friday Night. February 9th 1945.
Airborne 10hrs 15mins
[/underlined]

After an attack by 1000 aircraft of R.A.F. Bomber Command, the U.S. Eighth Air Force flew out again to-day to hammer Germany.
Main night target was the synthetic oil plant at Politz, a small town north of the Baltic port of [inserted] “ [/inserted] Stettin, [inserted] “ [/inserted] which Marshal Zhukov’s flying columns are nearing rapidly.
This is one of the two largest synthetic oil plants in Germany, and it specialises in the production of aviation petrol.
The attack was made by two strong forces of Lancasters with an interval of two hours between them.
Visibility was good and large fires and explosions were seen.
Shortly before dawn, Lancasters also attacked the marshalling yards at Hohenbudberg, between Krefeld and Duisburg, to destroy rolling stock and to block lines leading to the battle area.
Great Weight
Halifaxes dropped a great weight of bombs on the synthetic oil plant at Wanne-Eickel, which had been patched up after previous bombings and was probably producing about a quarter of its normal output.
In the nights operations at least three enemy airplanes were destroyed. Sixteen of our airplanes are missing.
Squadrons of Mosquitoes attacked Berlin.
Day target for the Americans has not yet been announced, but German radio traced them as far as Magdeburg, 70 miles south-west of Berlin., where there are oil refineries, engineering works, and a big electrical power station.
When the day raiders went out Achtung radio began interrupting its programmes with warnings every few minutes. The bombers were reported coming in from three directions – over Heligoland Bay, over Holland, and north of Brussels – and then heading over Central Germany in an 80-mile stream.
This afternoon the German radio also reported bombers over Lower Austria: another formation was heading for Saxony, and a third for Franconia (Northern Bavaria)
And later still a 160-mile bomber stream was reported returning from Saxony.

[map with additional ‘1000’ PLANE RAID’ cutting]

Citation

“Twenty second operation Politz,” IBCC Digital Archive, accessed March 28, 2024, https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/collections/document/9417.

Item Relations

This item has no relations.