The Great Raid

**The Great Raid** was a German aerial bombing attack on New York City that took place during World War II on the morning of May 8, 1945. Though largely unsuccessful in achieving its aims, the Raid did result in the destruction of much of Harlem along with the Statue of Liberty, and motivated subsequent American advances westward into Belgium and the Netherlands.

## Background

During the attempted D-Day landings of June 1943, the Luftwaffe had utterly failed to defend the French coast, having largely been defeated in the war for the skies by the U.S. Air Force. The once-powerful Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief Hermann Goering was blamed for the failure, and lost much of his power within the German bureaucracy as half of his administrative responsibilities were stripped from him. Determined to regain his bureaucratic prestige, Goering began planning an operation to impress Adolf Hitler by launching a daring raid on American soil.

### Planning

   Goering clandestinely recruited prominent engineer Albert Speer to design a long-range bomber suitable for the task of bombing New York City. Wanting to share in the glory of a successful attack on mainland America, Speer complied, designing a long-range bomber which he designated the Junker Ju-190. SS second-in-command Reinhard Heydrich, also wanting to profit from the operation, loaned staff members to Goering to build the planes while also working on an engine that could sustain continuous flight for 15 hours.

Carefully concealed from Hitler's higher-ups, the project commenced. Construction of the Ju-190s began illicitly in Poland in late 1943; by March of 1945, an engine was developed that could sustain flight for 15 continuous hours. Although it was far from ideal (15 hours was only the engine's maximum range, and it was liable to fail long before then), Goering was satisfied with the state of the project, and ordered Heydrich's men to complete the fifty-three bombers as quickly as possible.

## The Raid

53 Ju-190s were scheduled to take off at 5:00 PM from a Luftwaffe base near Bordeaux. However, seven of the planes failed to take off due to technical issues. Of the 46 bombers that managed to leave ground, ten developed mechanical problems and crashed into the Atlantic; almost all of the crew members drowned, as the U-Boats meant to pick them up failed to arrive (Karl Donitz, Admiral of the German Navy, having purposely withheld them in order to further embarrass Goering's operation). The remaining 36 planes continued westward along the 45th parallel before reaching the coast of New England and veering south toward New York City.

The planes were detected by radar soon after entering American airspace at 6:00 on the morning of May 8. Air force officials initially assumed the presence of aircraft on the radar screens to be an aberration, but it was none other than Barry Goldwater, a veteran Colonel of Sicily and Normandy, who convinced his superiors to send the fifty available American fighters out to hunt the Germans. All but five of the Ju-190s were shot down and crashed into Long Island Sound. One pilot managed to drop his bomb load before crashing, destroying a warehouse and causing an industrial fire that would kill five and do millions of dollars' worth of property damage.

Only the five planes under the command of SS Oberst (Colonel) Otto Remer managed to slip past the Air Force and approach New York City undeterred. However, as they neared Manhattan around 7:45 AM, they were set upon by the U.S.S. *Massachusetts*, which had been under repair at the Brooklyn Docks since 1944 and was just leaving drydock. Three of the five planes in Remer's squadron were crippled by the *Massachusetts'* anti-aircraft guns and crashed, while Remer's own plane was badly wounded. Out of the original 53 planes, only one managed to drop its bombs on New York City, and it missed its mark by a longshot, destroying the Aurora Theater in Harlem instead of the intended targets of Wall Street, the Brooklyn Naval Yards and Gracie Mansion (the mayor's residence).

However, it would be Remer who would do the most damaged. Seeing that his damaged craft was gliding toward Bedloe's Island, Remer used what control he still had over his faltering plane to ram it directly into the concrete base of the Statue of Liberty. Every bomb on board detonated simultaneously, killing Remer as it brought down the aged copper statue, destroying an iconic symbol of America.

## Aftermath

By 8:00 on the morning of May 8, 1945, the Great Raid was over. The Statue of Liberty was annihilated, though it would be rebuilt by September of 1952 (Thomas Dewey, who was Governor of New York during the Raid, would consecrate the rebuilt Statue in 1952 as President of the United States). The bombs that fell on the Aurora Theater caused a fire that destroyed most of Harlem, killing a few hundred New Yorkers and rendering several thousand homeless.

   The Germans greatly exaggerated the event in official propagandistic accounts, claiming that the planes had totally destroyed New York rather than failing completely to hit any of their intended targets. Despite this, American propagandists also made use of the raid; just before the Raid, American troops had made the first successful European landing of the war in West Flanders, and news of an attack on American soil only enraged the American troops into advancing faster. By May 22, Antwerp and Brussels had both fallen to the Americans, and the momentum would carry through for several months, fueling further gains.

### Effects

After the attack, President Robert Taft immediately moved to bolster the air defense network on the eastern seaboard. Secretary of War Thomas Wagner resigned after failing to prevent the raid; Taft replaced him with O.S.S. chief William Donovan, who ordered general Curtis LeMay to take revenge on the Germans by firebombing Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg and Wilhelmshaven into rubble as he had been doing to several other cities in the Low Countries.

The destruction forced much of New York's black population to resettle in other neighborhoods, where the proximity between them and the Jewish population destabilized race relations in the city for years to come and contributed significantly to the onset of the Barrio Riots that would sweep the nation in 1951.