Blitz bomb sites

[tr1ckey66]

Came across this site and found it really interesting.


http://bombsight.org/#15/51.5050/-0.0900


This kind of brings home how terrifying the blitz was. One apparently landed not 200 yds from my house, and I live in Orpington!


Anyway, thought it may interest a few on here.


Paul

[aaron]

I have a book with newspaper clippings from the blitz

[PaulTRose]

now that is a very interesting website!!


thanks for sharing, i shall enjoy reading that


shame its london only tho

[Ian M]

You can also see aerial photos of London and other large cities after bombings on Google earth you just need to turn the clock back to the dates available.


Ian m

[ojays]

We have had a blitz map website for several years here in Hull.


'A Town In The North East Of England Was Bombed Yesterday'


This is how the second most bombed city after London was described.


They didn't want the scale of the bombing and damage done to be generally known, or the Germans to know how successful they were.


http://www.rhaywood.karoo.net/bombmap.htm


THE HULL BLITZ


A BOMBING MAP and a


TESTAMENT to FORTITUDE


Gregg

[Ian M]

one 100 yards either side of my mum and dads house but they moved there first in 1960


Ian M

[stona]

It sounds heartless, particularly when considering the effect and suffering of the bombings of places like Hull, but the concentrations are such as to be relatively ineffective. Both the Luftwaffe and RAF realised early in the war that the most effective way to destroy a city was to burn it, a concept which would have been familiar to Alexander the Great as he burned Persepolis.


To do this from the air you need to create a firestorm, and to do this you need a huge concentration of bombing, mostly incendiary, in time and space.


The Luftwaffe, with its smaller bombers could never achieve the required concentration in time. The could achieve the concentration in space, as at Coventry, but the nature of the attack that went on all night as the bombers shuttled back and forth to re-arm at their bases in France, precluded a concentration in time.


The RAF could achieve both in ideal conditions, most famously at Hamburg and Dresden.


We shouldn't forget that casualties to bombing in the UK were consistently higher than those in Germany until 1944 when the increase in weight and accuracy of allied bombing dramatically increased German casualties. In the end between 50% and 60% of the urban area of Germany was obliterated.


It would be interesting to see a 'Blitz map' of Berlin, which was never really destroyed. The actress Hildegard Knef visited London shortly after the war and in her memoir she wrote that people pointed out bomb sights or unroofed houses to her. In Berlin, where she had spent most of the war, people pointed out a building that had a roof.


Estimates vary, but about 600,000 people mostly civilians, were killed by bombing in Europe in WW2.


Cheers


Steve

[tr1ckey66]

It would be interesting to see a 'Blitz map' of Berlin, which was never really destroyed. The actress Hildegard Knef visited London shortly after the war and in her memoir she wrote that people pointed out bomb sights or unroofed houses to her. In Berlin, where she had spent most of the war, people pointed out a building that had a roof.

It's hard not to paraphrase Arthur 'Bomber' Harris at this point...


'...they sowed the wind, and now, they are going to reap the whirlwind.'


Bombing civilian populations is never acceptable and would definitely be considered a war crime now.


NB. The blitz map does differentiate between incendiary and high explosive bombs.


Cheers Paul

[stona]

Bombing civilian populations is never acceptable and would definitely be considered a war crime now.


Cheers Paul

Probably Paul, but I think that the use of 'war crime' to characterise the strategic bombing campaigns of WW2 (not just Bomber Command's) is emotive and a little unwise.


Whatever the targets, intentional or otherwise, the campaigns were carried out with a strategic military objective. They were to deny the Axis powers the means to continue to wage war. As soon as those powers stopped fighting the bombing campaigns stopped. In the case of Bomber Command's campaign against Germany, the Nazi regime and the German people were doing everything in their power to kill British, American and other people.


Nazi war crimes, and that's what they were, are something else. They are crimes committed against people who for the most part had no means of harming Germany or the German people. Furthermore they were largely committed for ideological reasons with no military objective whatsoever. It is an important distinction.


Steve

[tr1ckey66]

Whatever the targets, intentional or otherwise, the campaigns were carried out with a strategic military objective. They were to deny the Axis powers the means to continue to wage war. As soon as those powers stopped fighting the bombing campaigns stopped. In the case of Bomber Command's campaign against Germany, the Nazi regime and the German people were doing everything in their power to kill British, American and other people.

I agree Steve. My 'War Crime' statement was referring to modern conflict.

[stona]

I agree Steve. My 'War Crime' statement was referring to modern conflict.

And you'd be absolutely right. The only conceivable way such large numbers of civilian casualties could be inflicted in a modern conflict would be by an all out war, rather than the so called 'low intensity' conflicts so common place today. Such a conflict might well end up being a nuclear conflict in which the casualties might number millions, not hundreds of thousands. It's a scenario that I and many here grew up with, yet seems ludicrous to younger generations Neither of my daughters got the film 'Dr Strangelove' because neither understood the context!


Cheers


Steve

[Guest]

Probably Paul, but I think that the use of 'war crime' to characterise the strategic bombing campaigns of WW2 (not just Bomber Command's) is emotive and a little unwise.
Whatever the targets, intentional or otherwise, the campaigns were carried out with a strategic military objective. They were to deny the Axis powers the means to continue to wage war. As soon as those powers stopped fighting the bombing campaigns stopped. In the case of Bomber Command's campaign against Germany, the Nazi regime and the German people were doing everything in their power to kill British, American and other people.


Nazi war crimes, and that's what they were, are something else. They are crimes committed against people who for the most part had no means of harming Germany or the German people. Furthermore they were largely committed for ideological reasons with no military objective whatsoever. It is an important distinction.


Steve

I totally agree. For those who criticise the intense bombing by "Bomber" Harris, how else could the Allies have stopped the war? So long as Hitler retained the ability to fight, he would have continued. It was a good thing that the Normandy landings happened no later than they did because the V2 rocket, undefendable, was very near activation and the only way to stop them was boots on the ground. Those boots on the ground would have been impossible without a weakened Hitler.


I'm not a historian, but I have read a lot and think the above is generally correct.


There was a very interesting article in my newspaper recently saying that a newer generation of German historians are looking at the end of WWII as a liberation rather than a defeat! This was on the grounds that the German people, having got caught up in a vicious dictatorship with no escape (it's another question how that happend), suffered terribly during the war and I think it can be seen that VE Day brought some of that suffering to and end and allowed re-construction (as indeed it did in Britain). A friend has a German step-father. When once asked why he continued as a civilian to help the Nazi war effort (for example by working in a munitions factory) he replied "So what do you think I should have done?", no doubt if said at the time with a backward glance at the Nazi official waiting to deport him and his family, or worse. And we could ask the same question of ourselves in the same situation. I think it useful to think of Germany during WWII as two separate populations: the German People and the Nazis.

[eddiesolo]

All war is a crime-I know that 90% of us build or have built some form or other of war machine, myself included. But throughout history, one thing is a dead cert, it is that humans thrive on greed and petty issues to cause problems with each other.


Mistakes of the past are never heeded, we, as a species, just do not want to live in peace. The billions spent and material waste in creating weapons could have served us so well in other ventures...it is a real shame.


I am bitter as I lost a good friend's brother in the Falklands conflict and my mate was never the same again, my great uncle was killed when he was trapped in the tail of a Lancaster-all though I never knew him, I imagine a 19 year old lad, trapped in the dark, spinning, g-forces stopping you from trying to get out, the wind howling, the noise of other aircraft and bombs...how long did his fall last and what were his thoughts in that time? My Grandmother lived in Hull and came across a small glove in the rubble of some ruined house, she picked it up only to find it was a childs hand. All so sad, yet willing to join up and 'do their bit'.


One day, we may well learn.


Si.

[flyjoe180]

As much as European bombing campaigns capture the historical limelight for such things, it pales in comparison to the effects and statistics of the US fire bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities.


The European bombing campaigns by the RAF and USAAF also tied up huge amounts of German resources in ammunition, aircraft, weapons, personnel and the logistics that go to feeding those systems. Resources that would otherwise have been thrown against the Soviet Union and made an invasion of Europe from the West much more difficult than it was.

[Guest]

All war is a crime-I know that 90% of us build or have built some form ........
Si.

I agree, with the comment that it is men that are overwhelmingly the main culprit.


Edit: I don't think it will change. We now have Putin who, I believe, has aggression as his priority, and China and Japan are starting to square up. Japan has recently renounced its no-rearmament clause in its constitution (which was imposed by the allies in 1945). Still, I will be dead before this gets too bad. (I like to look on the bright side of life!)