Berlin had suffered some small air raids since 1940, but neither British nor Soviet air forces had the capacity to inflict serious damage until later in the war. In fact, there was only one air raid on Berlin in 1942, though the British, using Halifax and Lancaster heavy bombers, were able to launch devastating raids on some cities in western Germany. In May 1942, a 1,000-plane raid devastated Cologne.
Some small raids hit Berlin using light bombers (the de Havilland Mosquito) in early 1943, coinciding with the tenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship. On 1 March, the Royal Air Force launched its largest raid on Berlin in the war to that point, utilizing 302 bombers dropping a combination of high explosive bombs, incendiary bombs, and (for the first time) eighteen-hundred kilogram “blockbusters,” so called because one could level a city block. Altogether, the RAF dropped over nine hundred tons of explosives on Berlin, more than twice what the Luftwaffe had dropped on London on the worst nights of the Blitz.
Damage was heaviest in the southwest of Berlin, where fires raged for three days due to incendiary bombs. Damage was also heavy in the city center and included serious damage to St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. Ironically (or perhaps appropriately), Herman Goering’s Air Ministry building was hit and some 200 rooms were damaged in this Luftwaffe Day air raid. Approximately 500 Berliners perished, another 2,000 were injured, and some 100,000 became homeless. SS “Mood Reports” indicated that the raid had seriously undermined the morale of the civilian population in Berlin. Even Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels privately conceded that the city center “looked like a mess.”
Source Roger Moorhouse, Berlin at War, pp. 307-309