A good three hours after he took off from England, Henry Chandler had a beautiful view of the Brandenburg region of Germany. From the cockpit of his Boeing B-17, he could see the Havel River in front of him and, to his right behind the aircraft, a light haze over Berlin. Within a few minutes, the 25-year-old pilot was gazing down at the town of Oranienburg from an altitude of some 6,000 meters (20,000 feet).
This was on Thursday, March 15, 1945. The pilot was commanding one of the 612 aircraft of the US Eighth Air Force, which was flying a mission against Oranienburg that day. He dropped 11 bombs on the small town, each weighing 500 kilos (1,100 pounds). In the 45 minutes between 2:51 and 3:36 p.m., a total of 4,977 explosive bombs and 713 incendiary bombs rained down from the sky.
The air raid wasn't targeting the town's roughly 26,000 inhabitants. With its military infrastructure, Oranienburg ranked among the top targets of the American bomber fleet. The railway station was a point of departure for soldiers headed for the Eastern Front. At the nearby Auer Werke, uranium was processed for the Nazi's top-secret nuclear research program. A few hundred meters from there stood the Heinkel Aircraft Works and the main vehicle depot of the SS.
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