Terror bombings of WWII

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.
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."
 
The point is

Bunnies.gif


Bunnies! =:3
 
I apologize for not having the time to finish off the post I started. The thing I wanted to address is that quite likely the allied persistence to bomb German cities only led to the lengthening of the war, not to it’s shortening. If they had concentrated their efforts on taking out airstrips, naval yards, industrial infrastructure, etc. they could have done a far greater impact. And yet in the last nine months of the war (when the Luftwaffe started crumbling from devastating attrition) during which more than the half of all bombs ever dropped on Germany were delivered, the Allies only intensified their bombardment of urban areas. For instance, Essen was bombarded (though it had already been leveled to ground) under the pretext that there was a "possibility!" of industry forming there in the future. Then they bombed Bonn (which hadn't suffered any bombardment till then) just to test out the new navigation system (or so they say). Würzburg, Freibrug, Heilbronn, Nurnberg, Hildesheim, Mainz, Parderborn, Magderburg, Halberstadt, Worms, Pforzheim, Trier, Potsdam and Dresden had all suffered severe bombardment during the last days of war. Maybe then it is true that allied bombers were nothing else then terror machines, not good for anything else than bombing large urban areas. No wonder they tried to keep the bombing campaigns out of the discussions in the war crime trials in Nürnberg since the german bombardment would've been in danger of fading out from all the atrocites the allies commited.
 
Max-

A couple of things here.

Before the Second World War, British strategic doctrine against Germany was to threaten them with strategic bombing from afar, and thus avoid the danger of a long war of entrenchment and attrition as in World War 1. Likewise, bombing was done by both sides during the war. While today we may think of carpet bombing of civilian areas as a war crime, that notion was somewhat idealistic at the time. Likewise the notion of submarine warfare.

For more on this see Jeff Legro's book, Cooperation under Fire- at amazon-

Furthermore, the idea of terrorizing the other side into either deterrence or to compell them to act became part of nuclear doctrine for all major countries. The notion being that if you destroy urban centers you cause significant social, political and economic damage- enough to deter the other from initiating war.

And while that might seem horrific to you and most people, truth is that we haven't had a nuclear war yet, partially because the theory works.

While I am also aware of the argument that by destroying civilian cities, the allies allowed the Germans to more effectively utilize their labor for war production, it is still a difficult division between what are civilian targets and military targets during periods of total war like World War 2. Certainly the Russians are more aware of this considering what the Germans did to their civilian populations, and what the Russians did to Germans in revenge. An economy that can be turned towards war production may seem a valuable target.

Also if this is a bash against US policy, let's also not forgot that Bomber Harris was a Brit, and the US was against nighttime raids against civilian targets for a longer period than the Brits. Did the Brits have reason for a little "payback?" Yeah, the Blitz.

And let's also be clear that terror has always been a tactic in warfare. War involves a psychological assault on a target. Civilians who support a regime through political participation or economic support or by providing the bodies that become cannon fodder are somehow less "guilty" because they wear a uniform? That's always been one of the big questions about the law of war.
 
Don't forget the time the English were trying to bomb a German city and by accident bombed the Dutch city of Nijmegen instead.

Nijmegen and Rotterdam are the two cities I've lived in all my life. Funny, I'm a bombed-city kind of guy.

PS: you can tell they were bombed because they have ugly downtowns.
 
Actually my mom's folks got bombed too, and they were in Switzerland. Apparently the allies mistook one of Switzerland's northern cities for a German one.... Ooops!
 
My ancestral castle was bombed to pieces, because it had a nazi field HQ stationed in it.

I win.
 
I have first-hand experience with (non-carpet) bombardments. The city I reside in (the Croatian capital) as well as my hometown were target of a few aerial attacks. I distinctly remember four occasions - first three happened in 1991, while the last one was in 1995.

1. A JNA plane dropped a bomb beside the Catholic church in my hometown. Now, this type of bomb was nicknamed "Sow" and was one of the largest, most destructive bombs JNA possessed. It caused quite a bit of damage it did.

2. A Mig-21 hit a skyscraper a few blocks from where I lived with an air-to-ground missile. The impact caused such trembling that windows on our apartment cracked. It was pretty damn frightening.

3. This one took place about a kilometer from where I was located at that time, but I still heard (and felt) it very distinctly, and it was breaking news on TV that day. Namely, JNA fighters destroyed the home of the Croatian government. (Un)fortunately, no state officials were inside at that time.

4. In May 1995, as an act of reprisal for a recent Croatian military operation, enemies fired several cruise missiles carrying cluster bombs at the center of the Croatian capital. I was there when it happened, but not close enough to actually see anything. This type of warhead, prohibited by international law, doesn't cause much material damage, but it ejects dozens of small bombs known as "bells" which scatter around the site. These "bells" explode when tampered with and are ideal for killing civilians, especially children who unwittingly pick them up (which was obvious the goal of this heinous attack). No, I didn't pick up a "bell".
 
Kharn said:
Jebus said:
My ancestral castle was bombed to pieces, because it had a nazi field HQ stationed in it.

I win.

No. No you don't.

Yes I do.

I could be living in a friggin' castle now, you know. Instead, I'm living in a goddamn house like the rest of you plebejans...
 
We surrendered before anyone could bomb anything. Then one day, the Allies bombed Prague because they had mistaken it for Dresden.
 
One of the first things that shocked me when the NATO campaign against Serbia began was how the night sky looked in Belgrade:

Belgrade.jpg


Yes, it looks like very crapy fireworks but it's actually anti-aircraft defense (PVO). Besides that, everything else about that first night was terrifying to me. The sound of the siren, the bomb (fallout?) shelter, the panicking people, and just wondering about what i might see when i come out of the shelter.

I spent the next couple of weeks in a small town (Loznica) on the Bosnian border with my grandparents since my mom believed it would be safer there (she needed to stay in the capital to take care of stuff regarding our passports). The only thing that was bombed there was a military complex in the nearby mountain. It didn't cause any damage to the town, but the explosion did wake me and i definitely felt the ground shaking.

I returned to Belgrade two days before me and my mom were going to leave for Budapest. I spent my last night in Serbia in my apartment. That night an office building nearby was hit. The windows didn't crack but everything in the apartment was shaking. Since my apartment was on the 11th floor, the hit felt extra strong.


About 1 or 2 hours later (5am), we took a cab to the bus station. As we were driving we passed the building that was hit. This is one of the last things i seen before leaving Serbia (haven't been back since i left that day):

belgrade%20office.jpg


Slamák, you actually posted this photo in the order in that image game thread a couple of months ago. It brought back a lot of memories.

On may 7th 1999, NATO bombed the Chinese embassy of Belgrade, located a block away from my building. By this time i was already in Chicago, but just hearing about something like that really made me wonder about a million scenarios that could have happened.

Oh, i also found this photo:
505beograd8fw.jpg


I don't know what was bombed in this photo or when, but that gate-type building (GENEX) is a very symbolic part of my neighborhood. You can actually see this building, at the exact same angle as in the photo, from my balcony.
 
Ratty said:
I have first-hand experience with (non-carpet) bombardments. The city I reside in (the Croatian capital) as well as my hometown were target of a few aerial attacks. I distinctly remember four occasions - first three happened in 1991, while the last one was in 1995.

...

4. In May 1995, as an act of reprisal for a recent Croatian military operation, enemies fired several cruise missiles carrying cluster bombs at the center of the Croatian capital. I was there when it happened, but not close enough to actually see anything. This type of warhead, prohibited by international law, doesn't cause much material damage, but it ejects dozens of small bombs known as "bells" which scatter around the site. These "bells" explode when tampered with and are ideal for killing civilians, especially children who unwittingly pick them up (which was obvious the goal of this heinous attack). No, I didn't pick up a "bell".

A few corrections are in order... the missiles fired on Zagreb were by no chance cruise missiles – I doubt JNA had any; they were fired from mobile MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System). JNA had Scud type ballistic missiles capable of being equipped with cluster warheads, though I have no info if, and where they were used. Additionally, cluster bombs are not banned by international laws - on the contrary they're used to this day, especially so by the US military.

What Are Cluster Bombs?
Modern cluster bombs are of two main types-those delivered by air and those delivered by surface artillery or rockets (including artillery projectiles and multiple rocket launchers). The bombs are designed to disperse submunitions (often called "grenades" in surface-delivered weapons and "bomblets" in air-delivered weapons) over a large area, thereby increasing the radius of destructive effect over a target. Typical targets for cluster bombs would include troop concentrations, airfields, and air defense units.
The large number delivered increases the density of explosives in the target area, with submunitions designed to strike every few feet or so. They saturate an area with explosives and tiny flying shards of steel. Depending on the type, bomblets can be dispersed to areas as large as the size of several football fields. An air attack typically disperses thousands of submunitions within a small space; a common target area for a single weapon under optimal conditions covers an area of roughly 100 x 50 meters.
Air-delivered cluster bombs are composed of a large dispenser with attached fins (called the tactical munitions dispenser, or TMD, in the newest systems); fuzes and electronic devices to control, spin, and direct the weapon during fall; and submunitions or bomblets. The bomblets themselves are of a variety of designs and shapes. Once released, cluster bomb units (CBUs) fall for a specified amount of time or distance before the dispenser opens and dispenses the submunitions, allowing them to cover a wide-area target. Depending on the type, the submunitions are activated by an internal fuze, and can detonate above ground, at impact, or in a delayed mode. Existing versions of submunitions do not incorporate self-destruct or self-deactivating mechanisms.
Modern air-delivered cluster bombs can be set to determine height of burst and the dispersal pattern. As the aircraft drops the TMD, tail fins open and stabilize the bomb body. At the selected time or altitude, the dispenser begins to spin, the spin rate determining the dispersal pattern. As the bomblets fall and disperse, they arm in different ways depending on their design.

Use of CBU-87s and other Cluster Bombs in Kosovo
U.S., British and Dutch aircraft dropped more than 1,765 cluster bombs containing more than 295,000 cluster bomblets during the NATO air campaign in Yugoslavia from March to June 1999. During Operation Allied Force, the U.S. dropped about 1,100 CBU-87s (each containing 202 submunitions), the United Kingdom dropped about 500 RBL-755 cluster bombs (each containing 147 submunitions), and the Netherlands dropped 165 CBU-87s.
The U.N. Mine Action Coordination Center (MACC) reported that NATO provided the locations of 333 cluster bomb strike areas. On the basis of the clearance rate by March 2001 of unexploded cluster bomblets, the MACC estimated that around seven percent of the CBU-87's bomblets and eleven percent of the BL-755's failed to explode on impact. According to the MACC, more than 20,000 bomblets remained after the war, and the bomblets "are in a highly sensitive state, and can explode as a result of being moved or picked up. This volatile condition means that NATO-dropped CBU are a major part of the mine/UXO problem in Kosovo." In its June-September 2000 quarterly report, MACC wrote, "During the previous quarter, it had been recognized that CBU were a major contributing factor to incidents involving civilians. In particular, CBU incidents generally involved groups of younger people, often with very tragic results."
The MACC has also noted, "The CBU problem is exacerbated by the fact that many bomblets have penetrated the ground and some have been found up to 50 centimeters below the surface. This means that CBU strike areas must be subjected to sub-surface clearance using detection equipment before the area can be declared free of UXO."
Human Rights Watch criticized NATO for use of cluster bombs in Kosovo, particularly in or near populated areas. Human Rights Watch believes there were nine to fourteen cluster bomb attacks resulting in civilian casualties during the conflict, causing an estimated ninety to150 civilian deaths, or 18 to 30 percent of all civilian deaths, even though cluster bombs represented just 6 percent of weapons expended in the air war. A NATO air strike involving cluster bombs on an airfield in Nis on May 7 went off target, hitting a hospital complex and adjoining civilian areas. On April 24, five boys were reported to have been killed and two injured when what was evidently a cluster bomb submunition exploded near the village of Daganovic.
The civilian toll due to cluster bombs was even greater following the end of the conflict. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, from June 1999 through May 2000, there were at least 151 casualties due to cluster bomblets, including fifty dead and 101 injured. The ICRC notes that the actual number of CBU casualties is likely higher because there were 108 incidents in which the cause of injury was unknown. The MACC has reported that in the year 2000, there were twenty-four CBU casualties, and that as of late October 2001, successful clearance operations resulted in just one cluster bomb incident since August 2000.

Department of Defense Justifications
The Pentagon primarily justifies use of cluster bombs based on the perceived effectiveness of the weapon. In fact, the utility, reliability, and effectiveness of different types of cluster bombs and submunitions varies tremendously. But the Pentagon has also offered up rebuttals to some of the other criticisms that have been made regarding cluster bombs.

Initial Failure Rates - The Department of Defense will sometimes claim that the initial failure rate of most cluster munitions is not much different from other munitions, such as gravity bombs, mortar rounds, or artillery shells. Human Rights Watch is unaware of a serious or comprehensive study of this matter. Regardless, however, the initial failure rate of cluster munitions, whether equal to or greater than other munitions, is a special problem because of the large number of submunitions used, and their particular volatility. When each bomb contains hundreds of bomblets, and hundreds of thousands of bomblets are used in a campaign (as in Kosovo) or even millions of bomblets (as in the Gulf War), even a small initial failure rate can quickly translate into a major humanitarian problem.
Moreover, the current initial failure rate for even advanced U.S. cluster munitions, like the CBU-87, is clearly far too high to be acceptable. Estimates of the initial failure rate range from 2 percent to 30 percent or more, depending on conditions. The best data on this has been gathered in Kosovo, where, as noted above, U.N. clearance experts estimate a 7 percent initial failure rate for the CBU-87 bomblets.
While not saying so directly, the U.S. military has acknowledged that the initial failure rate on cluster bombs is too high. On January 10, 2001, then-U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen issued a memorandum stating:
It is the policy of the DoD [Department of Defense] to reduce overall UXO [unexploded ordnance] through a process of improvement in submunition system reliability - the desire is to field future submunitions with a 99% or higher functioning rate. Submunition functioning rates may be lower under operational conditions due to environmental factors such as terrain and weather….
The Services may retain "legacy" submunitions until employed or superseded by replacement systems in accordance with the above policy. The designation "legacy" would apply to submunition weapon acquisition programs reaching Milestone III prior to the First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2005.
The Services shall evaluate "legacy" submunition weapons undergoing reprocurement, product improvement, or block upgrades to determine whether modifications should be made to bring them into compliance with the above policy.
The Services shall design and procure all future submunition weapons in compliance with the above policy. A "future" submunition weapon is one that will reach Milestone III in FY 2005 and beyond.
[Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Memorandum for the Secretaries of the Military Departments, Subject: DoD Policy on Submunition Reliability (U), January 10, 2001]
The volatility of cluster bomb duds also makes them more dangerous than many other types of unexploded ordnance. Again, Human Rights Watch is not aware of specific studies comparing UXO volatility, but the testimony of clearance personnel, such as that cited above regarding Kosovo, gives an indication of the special dangers posed by cluster bomblets.
CBUs vs. Other Weapons - Department of Defense and other U.S. officials will sometimes claim that cluster bombs pose less danger to civilians than alternative weapons that might be used, noting for example that the explosive power of unitary munitions (such as bombs and artillery shells) could cause far more collateral damage. However, this argument ignores the documented inability to ensure cluster bomblets stay within the confines of the intended target area, and does not take into account the ever-greater precision (and smaller warheads) of unitary munitions, which results in less and less civilian impact.

There was action here in Split as well, especially during the retreat of the JNA navy (Split was the main Yugoslav navy base). Though they allowed themselves to be engaged in short range artillery exchange and consequently suffered heavy damage and were forced to lift the blockade and ignominiously retreat to their bases in Montenegro, while still taking artillery pounding from the nearby islands they were passing on their way to Boka Kotorska. In addition, we suffered daily air-raids, though eventually, after having numerous Migs shot down, they gave up. Truth be told, we were more terrorized than actually hurt, since the number of casualties was rather low (but hardly insignificant). It took a long time to shake off those screaming air-rade sirens out of my head; one moment you’re in the playground with a bunch of kids, everybody laughing - the other you’re running as fast as you can to the closest bomb shelter available, pandemonium everywhere, your ears baffled by the sirens, anxiety climbing up your throat of not knowing what was to happen. Fortunately, nothing did happen - in my neighborhood, at least. I was 8 years old then, but to this day remember those sleepless nights as if they’re unfolding this very moment…though now I can easily control any emotions that seem to surface along with the images and sounds...
 
Specialist said:
Sorry, but what's JNA?
Yugoslav People's Army - the military force of the socialist Yugoslavia. Majority of generals and officers of JNA were Serbs by nationality and its central headquarters were located in Belgrade, so it was easy for Milosevic and his accomplices to manipulate JNA and use it against the seceding republics. Many officers and troopers deserted and joined the budding armed forces of Slovenia and Croatia instead, so JNA suffered a subsequent military, logistical and moral collapse in 1991 and retreated from Croatian soil. Its Serbian contigent evolved into what would later be known as VJ - Army of Yugoslavia.

KQX said:
Isn't that the building that formerly housed the Central Committee of SFRJ? It sure took a lot of bombardment during the NATO campaign.[/quote]
 
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