Max Demian
It Wandered In From the Wastes
Terror bombing is a strategy of deliberately bombing civilian targets and strafing civilians in order to break the morale of the enemy and make the civilian population of the enemy panic.
The number of killed in allied aerial bomdardments:
Hamburg 45,000
Dresden 35,000 – 45,000
Berlin 49,000
Köln 20,000
Pforzheim 20,000
Magdeburg 15,000
Kassel 13,000
Darmastadt 12,300
Heilbronn 7,500
München 6,300
(Many of the bombed cities have been left out due to a lack of resources I have at my disposal)
During these bombardments the Allies lost 21,000 aircraft and 140,000 men which amounts to one third of total allied losses. On the other hand it is estimated that between 400,000 and 570,000 german civilians had lost their lives.
Bombs dropped on Germany during the war:
1940. 10,000 tons
1941. 30,000 tons
1942. 40,000 tons
1943. 120,000 tons
1944. 650,000 tons
1945. 500,000 tons
Cities upon which the Luftwaffe inflicted severe destruction:
Guernica, 26.4.1937. – few hundreds killed
Warsaw, 24. – 26. September 1939. – 20,000 killed (including artillery bombardment)
Rotterdam, 14.5.1940. – 900 killed
London, August 1940. till March 1945. – 40,000 killed
Coventry, 14.11.1940. – 550 killed
Belgrade, 6./7. April 1941. – 2200 killed
Staljingrad, 23. August 1942. – 40,000 killed
(In total, 61,000 British civilians were killed as a result of German bombardment during WWII)
On the other side of the world, the USAF practiced what was clearly terror bombing against the civilian population of Japan, having in total killed some 337,000 civilians, plus some 165,000 as a result of A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The number of killed in allied aerial bomdardments:
Hamburg 45,000
Dresden 35,000 – 45,000
Berlin 49,000
Köln 20,000
Pforzheim 20,000
Magdeburg 15,000
Kassel 13,000
Darmastadt 12,300
Heilbronn 7,500
München 6,300
(Many of the bombed cities have been left out due to a lack of resources I have at my disposal)
During these bombardments the Allies lost 21,000 aircraft and 140,000 men which amounts to one third of total allied losses. On the other hand it is estimated that between 400,000 and 570,000 german civilians had lost their lives.
Bombs dropped on Germany during the war:
1940. 10,000 tons
1941. 30,000 tons
1942. 40,000 tons
1943. 120,000 tons
1944. 650,000 tons
1945. 500,000 tons
Cities upon which the Luftwaffe inflicted severe destruction:
Guernica, 26.4.1937. – few hundreds killed
Warsaw, 24. – 26. September 1939. – 20,000 killed (including artillery bombardment)
Rotterdam, 14.5.1940. – 900 killed
London, August 1940. till March 1945. – 40,000 killed
Coventry, 14.11.1940. – 550 killed
Belgrade, 6./7. April 1941. – 2200 killed
Staljingrad, 23. August 1942. – 40,000 killed
(In total, 61,000 British civilians were killed as a result of German bombardment during WWII)
On the other side of the world, the USAF practiced what was clearly terror bombing against the civilian population of Japan, having in total killed some 337,000 civilians, plus some 165,000 as a result of A-bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
On the night of July 27, 1943, 728 Allied bombers arrived over the German city of Hamburg at one o'clock in the morning. Ten thousand tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs were dropped on several districts of the city. The late W.G. Sebald explained what followed in his recently published book, On the Natural History of Destruction (2003):
Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning all over the target area, which covered some twenty square kilometers, and they merged so rapidly that only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at one twenty a.m., a firestorm of an intensity that no one had ever before thought possible arose. The fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force.... The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing facades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some canals was ablaze. The glass in the tramcar windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery cellars. Those who fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt.... Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorous flames still flickered around them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size.... Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket.
That night in this one raid alone, more than 45,000 men, women, and children were killed in Hamburg. Half the houses in the city were destroyed, and more than a million Germans had to flee into the surrounding countryside.
It is an enduring image of World War II: brave American flyers wobbling back to England in their shot-up B-17s. We think of old movies such as "Command Decision," in which airmen faced daunting odds to do such strategically crucial things as flattening the German ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt.
Brave they were; midway through the war, the odds of an American being shot down in a 25-mission tour of duty were greater than half.
What was exaggerated, writes Stewart Halsey Ross, was the strategic value of bombing. Not because stopping all ball-bearing production in Germany wouldn't have had strategic value — it would have — but because the bombing didn't stop it. The Schweinfurt raid of 1943 damaged about 10 percent of the ball-bearing machinery there at a cost of 60 airplanes and 599 men.
The four-engined American bombers of World War II were, in fact, mainly weapons of terror. That is not why the first of them was designed. But Ross, who spent two years analyzing bomb-accuracy tests for the U.S. Army Ordinance Corps, argues that that is what they were mainly good for. The Army Air Force generals couldn't say that publicly, but they knew it, acted on it, and got used to it.
The theory sold to the public was that the war could be won quickly from the air by stopping the flow of things like ball bearings. When the B-17 was developed, it was fitted with the Norden bombsight, a much-ballyhooed military secret. (Actually, the Germans stole it in 1938 and didn't think much of it.) In the American desert, where the Norden was tested, it worked. But it required the ground to be visible, the plane to come in at 15,000 feet or lower and fly dead level for the last 10 minutes under the control of the bombardier. Over cloudy Europe, airmen could most often not see the ground; and flying dead level at 15,000 feet was a good way to get shot down.
It was easier to fly at 20,000 feet and unload over a city. The British, who began bombing earlier, quickly switched to night flying, which amounted essentially to pattern bombing. The Americans proudly bombed by day, pretending to be more precise about it, but that the precision, Ross argues, was mostly for show.
Terror bombing had its own justification. It was supposed to "dehouse" workers and thereby disrupt war production. If the German did not have a house, he would not go to work. It was also thought he might riot, and bring his government down. Germans did neither. Bombing did make tens of thousands of people homeless, but people found places to live and arms production continued to increase until the last year of the war.
Bombing started to make a difference in mid-1944, when bombers began to do substantial damage to Germany's factories that made motor fuel from coal. A shortage of fuel kept the Luftwaffe on the ground and ended the panzer advance in the Battle of the Bulge. But by then the war was almost over.
Most of the bombing of Japan was in 1945, and was even more clearly terror-bombing, especially the use of incendiaries against Japan's wood-and-paper houses. That certainly had an effect on Japan's willingness to fight, Ross writes, but the human cost was terrible.
In the far larger air war over Germany, Ross writes, bombing was a matter of grinding down the enemy's supply of planes and pilots — particularly pilots — by having more to waste. "At a fundamental level, the air war from 1939 to 1945 . . . could be compared to the daily butchery in the trenches of France between 1914 and 1918."