Six hundred thousand dead civilians, including seventy thousand children - this is the result of the Anglo-American bombing of Germany. Was this large-scale and high-tech massacre caused only by military necessity?
“We will bomb Germany, one city after another. We will bombard you harder and harder until you stop waging war. This is our goal. We will pursue her relentlessly. City after city: Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg - and this list will only grow, ”the British bomber commander Arthur Harris addressed the people of Germany with these words. It was this text that was distributed on the pages of millions of leaflets scattered over Germany.
The words of Marshal Harris were invariably put into practice. Day after day, newspapers issued statistical reports.
Bingen - destroyed by 96%. Dessau - destroyed by 80%. Chemnitz - 75% destroyed. Small and large, industrial and university, full of refugees or clogged with military industry - German cities, as the British marshal promised, one after another turned into smoldering ruins.
Stuttgart - destroyed by 65%. Magdeburg - destroyed by 90%. Cologne - destroyed by 65%. Hamburg - destroyed by 45%.
By the beginning of 1945, the news that another German city had ceased to exist was already perceived as commonplace.
“This is the principle of torture: the victim is tortured until she does what is asked of her. The Germans were required to throw off the Nazis. The fact that the expected effect was not achieved and the uprising did not happen was explained only by the fact that such operations had never been carried out before. No one could have imagined that the civilian population would choose bombing. It’s just that, despite the monstrous scale of destruction, the likelihood of dying under bombs until the very end of the war remained lower than the likelihood of dying at the hands of an executioner if a citizen showed dissatisfaction with the regime, ”reflects Berlin historian Jorg Friedrich.
Five years ago, Mr. Friedrich's detailed study Fire: Germany in the Bomb War 1940-1945 became one of the most significant events in German historical literature. For the first time, a German historian tried to soberly understand the causes, course and consequences of the bomb war waged against Germany by the Western Allies. A year later, under the editorship of Friedrich, the photo album "Fire" was released - more than a poignant document, step by step documenting the tragedy of German cities bombed to dust.
And here we are sitting on the terrace in the courtyard of Friedrich's house in Berlin. The historian coolly and calmly - it seems almost meditating - tells how the bombing of cities took place and how his own house would have behaved if it had been under the bombing carpet.
Slipping into the abyss
The carpet bombing of German cities was neither an accident nor the whim of individual pyromaniac fanatics in the British or American military. The concept of a bomb war against the civilian population, successfully used against Nazi Germany, was only a development of the doctrine of the British Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, developed by him during the First World War.
According to Trenchard, in the course of an industrial war, residential areas of the enemy should become natural targets, since the industrial worker is just as much a participant in the hostilities as a soldier at the front.
Such a concept was in rather obvious contradiction with international law in force at that time. Thus, Articles 24-27 of the 1907 Hague Convention explicitly prohibited the bombing and shelling of undefended cities, the destruction of cultural property, as well as private property. In addition, the belligerent side was instructed to, if possible, warn the enemy about the beginning of the shelling. However, the convention did not clearly spell out a ban on the destruction or terrorization of the civilian population, apparently, they simply did not think about this method of waging war.
An attempt to prohibit the conduct of hostilities by aviation against the civilian population was made in 1922 in the draft of the Hague Declaration on the rules of air warfare, but failed due to the unwillingness of European countries to join the harsh terms of the treaty. Nevertheless, already on September 1, 1939, US President Franklin Roosevelt appealed to the heads of states that entered the war with a call to prevent “shocking violations of humanity” in the form of “deaths of defenseless men, women and children” and “never, under any circumstances, bombard from the air of the civilian population of undefended cities. The fact that "Her Majesty's Government will never attack civilians" was announced in early 1940 by the then British Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain.
Joerg Friedrich explains: “Throughout the first years of the war, there was a bitter struggle among the Allied generals between the supporters of point bombing and carpet bombing. The first believed that it was necessary to strike at the most vulnerable points: factories, power plants, fuel depots. The latter believed that the damage from pinpoint strikes could be easily compensated, and relied on the carpet destruction of cities, on the terrorization of the population.
The concept of carpet bombing looked very advantageous in light of the fact that it was for such a war that Britain had been preparing for the entire pre-war decade. Lancaster bombers were designed specifically to attack cities. Specially for the doctrine of total bombing in Great Britain, the most perfect production of incendiary bombs among the warring powers was created. Having established their production in 1936, by the beginning of the war, the British Air Force had a stock of five million of these bombs. This arsenal had to be dropped on someone's head - and it is not surprising that already on February 14, 1942, the British Air Force received the so-called "Area Bombing Directive".
The document, which granted then Bomber Commander Arthur Harris unlimited rights to use bombers to suppress German cities, said in part: “From now on, operations should be focused on suppressing the morale of the enemy civilian population - in particular, industrial workers.”
On 15 February, RAF Commander Sir Charles Portal was even less ambiguous in a note to Harris: "I think it's clear to you that the targets should be housing estates, not shipyards or aircraft factories."
However, it was not worth convincing Harris of the benefits of carpet bombing. As early as the 1920s, while commanding British air power in Pakistan and then in Iraq, he gave orders to firebomb unruly villages. Now the bombing general, who received the nickname The Butcher from his subordinates, had to test the machine of aerial killing not on the Arabs and Kurds, but on the Europeans.
In fact, the only opponents of the raids on the cities in 1942-1943 were the Americans. Compared to the British bombers, their planes were better armored, had more machine guns and could fly farther, so the American command believed that they were able to solve military problems without the massacre of the civilian population.
“American attitudes changed dramatically after the raid on the well-defended Darmstadt, as well as on the bearing factories in Schweinfurt and Regensburg,” says Joerg Friedrich. – You see, in Germany there were only two centers for the production of bearings. And the Americans, of course, thought that they could strip the Germans of all their bearings with one blow and win the war. But these factories were so well protected that during a raid in the summer of 1943, the Americans lost a third of the machines. After that, they simply did not bomb anything for six months. The problem was not even that they could not produce new bombers, but that the pilots refused to fly. A general who loses more than twenty percent of his personnel in a single sortie begins to experience problems with the morale of the pilots. This is how the school of area bombing began to win."
Nightmare Technology
The victory of the school of total bomb war meant the rise of the star of Marshal Arthur Harris. Among his subordinates, there was a popular story that once the car of Harris, who was driving at an excess of speed, was stopped by a policeman and advised to observe the speed limit: “Otherwise you can accidentally kill someone.” “Young man, I kill hundreds of people every night,” Harris allegedly replied to the policeman.
Obsessed with the idea of bombing Germany out of the war, Harris spent days and nights in the Air Ministry, ignoring his ulcer. For all the years of the war, he was only on vacation for two weeks. Even the monstrous losses of his own pilots - during the years of the war the losses of British bomber aircraft amounted to 60% - could not make him retreat from the fixed idea that had gripped him.
“It is ridiculous to believe that the largest industrial power in Europe can be brought to its knees by such a ridiculous tool as six hundred or seven hundred bombers. But give me thirty thousand strategic bombers and the war will end tomorrow morning,” he told Prime Minister Winston Churchill, reporting on the success of another bombardment. Harris did not receive thirty thousand bombers, and he had to develop a fundamentally new way of destroying cities - the "firestorm" technology.
“Theorists of the bomb war have come to the conclusion that the enemy city is a weapon in itself - a structure with a gigantic potential for self-destruction, you just need to put the weapon into action. It is necessary to bring a wick to this barrel of gunpowder, says Jörg Friedrich. German cities were extremely susceptible to fire. The houses were predominantly wooden, the attic floors were dry beams ready to catch fire. If you set fire to the attic in such a house and knock out the windows, then the fire that has arisen in the attic will be fueled by oxygen penetrating into the building through the broken windows - the house will turn into a huge fireplace. You see, every house in every city was potentially a fireplace - you just had to help it turn into a fireplace.
The optimal technology for creating a "firestorm" was as follows. The first wave of bombers dropped so-called air mines on the city - a special type of high-explosive bombs, the main task of which was to create ideal conditions for saturating the city with incendiary bombs. The first air mines used by the British weighed 790 kilograms and carried 650 kilograms of explosives. The following modifications were much more powerful - already in 1943, the British used mines that carried 2.5 and even 4 tons of explosives. Huge cylinders three and a half meters long poured onto the city and exploded on contact with the ground, tearing tiles from the roofs, as well as knocking out windows and doors within a radius of up to a kilometer.
"Loosened" in this way, the city became defenseless against a hail of incendiary bombs that fell on it immediately after being treated with air mines. When the city was sufficiently saturated with incendiary bombs (in some cases up to 100 thousand incendiary bombs were dropped per square kilometer), tens of thousands of fires broke out simultaneously in the city. Medieval urban development with its narrow streets helped the fire to spread from one house to another. The movement of fire brigades in the conditions of a general fire was extremely difficult. Particularly well engaged were cities in which there were no parks or lakes, but only dense wooden buildings dried up for centuries.
Simultaneous fires of hundreds of houses created a thrust of unprecedented force over an area of several square kilometers. The whole city turned into a furnace of unprecedented dimensions, sucking in oxygen from the surroundings. The resulting thrust, directed towards the fire, caused a wind blowing at a speed of 200-250 kilometers per hour, a giant fire sucked oxygen from bomb shelters, dooming even those people who were spared by the bombs to death.
Ironically, the concept of "firestorm" Harris peeped from the Germans, Jörg Friedrich continues to tell with sadness.
“In the autumn of 1940, the Germans bombed Coventry, a small medieval town. During the raid, they covered the city center with incendiary bombs. The calculation was that the fire would spread to the motor factories located on the outskirts. In addition, fire trucks were not supposed to be able to drive through the burning city center. Harris took this bombing as an extremely interesting innovation. He studied its results for several months in a row. No one had carried out such bombings before. Instead of bombarding the city with land mines and blowing it up, the Germans carried out only a preliminary bombardment with land mines, and the main blow was inflicted with incendiary bombs - and achieved fantastic success. Encouraged by the new technique, Harris tried to carry out a completely similar raid on Lübeck - almost the same city as Coventry. Small medieval town,” says Friedrich.
Horror without end
It was Lübeck that was destined to become the first German city to experience the "firestorm" technology. On the night of Palm Sunday 1942, 150 tons of high-explosive bombs were poured into Lübeck, cracking the tiled roofs of medieval gingerbread houses, after which 25,000 incendiary bombs rained down on the city. The Lübeck firefighters, who understood the scale of the disaster in time, tried to call for reinforcements from neighboring Kiel, but to no avail. By morning the center of the city was a smoking ashes. Harris was triumphant: the technology he had developed had borne fruit.
Harris's success encouraged Prime Minister Churchill as well. He instructed to repeat the success in a large city - Cologne or Hamburg. Exactly two months after the destruction of Lübeck, on the night of May 30-31, 1942, the weather conditions over Cologne turned out to be more convenient - and the choice fell on him.
The raid on Cologne was one of the most massive raids on a major German city. For the attack, Harris gathered all the bomber aircraft at his disposal - including even coastal bombers, critical to Britain. The armada that bombed Cologne consisted of 1047 vehicles, and the operation itself was called the Millennium.
To avoid collisions between planes in the air, a special flight algorithm was developed - as a result, only two cars collided in the air. The total number of losses during the night bombing of Cologne amounted to 4.5% of the aircraft participating in the raid, while 13 thousand houses were destroyed in the city, another 6 thousand were seriously damaged. Still, Harris would be upset: the expected "firestorm" did not occur, less than 500 people died during the raid. The technology clearly needed improvement.
The best British scientists were involved in improving the bombing algorithm: mathematicians, physicists, chemists. British firefighters were giving advice on how to make it difficult for their German counterparts. English builders shared their observations on the technologies of building fire walls by German architects. As a result, a year later, the "firestorm" was implemented in another large German city - Hamburg.
The bombing of Hamburg, the so-called Operation Gomorrah, took place at the end of July 1943. The British military was especially pleased that all the previous days in Hamburg had been unusually hot and dry weather. During the raid, it was also decided to take advantage of a serious technological innovation - the British for the first time risked spraying millions of the thinnest strips of metal foil into the air, which completely disabled German radars designed to record the movement of enemy aircraft across the English Channel and send fighters to intercept them. The German air defense system was completely disabled. Thus, 760 British bombers, loaded to capacity with high-explosive and incendiary bombs, flew up to Hamburg, experiencing almost no opposition.
Although only 40% of the crews were able to drop their bombs exactly inside the intended circle with a radius of 2.5 kilometers around the church of St. Nicholas, the effect of the bombing was amazing. Incendiary bombs set fire to the coal that was in the basements of the houses, and after a few hours it became clear that it was impossible to put out the fires.
By the end of the first day, the execution was repeated: a second wave of bombers hit the city, and another 740 aircraft dropped 1,500 tons of explosives on Hamburg, and then flooded the city with white phosphorus ...
The second wave of bombing caused the desired "firestorm" in Hamburg - the speed of the wind sucked into the heart of the fire reached 270 kilometers per hour. Streams of hot air threw the charred corpses of people like dolls. "Firestorm" sucked oxygen out of bunkers and cellars - even untouched by either bombing or fire, underground rooms turned into mass graves. A column of smoke over Hamburg was visible to residents of surrounding cities for tens of kilometers. The wind of the fire carried the burnt pages of books from the libraries of Hamburg to the outskirts of Lübeck, located 50 kilometers from the bombing site.
The German poet Wolf Biermann, who survived the bombing of Hamburg at the age of six, later wrote: “On the night when sulfur poured from the sky, before my eyes people turned into living torches. The roof of the factory flew into the sky like a comet. The corpses burned and became small - to fit in mass graves.
“There was no question of putting out the fire,” wrote Hans Brunswig, one of the leaders of the Hamburg fire department. “We just had to wait and then pull out the corpses from the cellars.” For many weeks after the bombing, columns of trucks dragged along the rubble-littered streets of Hamburg, taking out charred corpses sprinkled with lime.
In total, at least 35,000 people died during Operation Gomorrah in Hamburg. 12,000 air mines, 25,000 high-explosive bombs, 3 million incendiary bombs, 80,000 phosphorus incendiary bombs, and 500 phosphorus canisters were dropped on the city. To create a "firestorm" for every square kilometer of the southeastern part of the city, 850 high-explosive bombs and almost 100,000 incendiary bombs were needed.
Murder by plan
Today, the very idea that someone technologically planned the murder of 35,000 civilians looks monstrous. But in 1943 the bombing of Hamburg did not evoke any notable condemnation in Britain. Thomas Mann, who lived in exile in London, a native of Lübeck, also burned by British aircraft, addressed the inhabitants of Germany by radio: “German listeners! Did Germany really think that she would never have to pay for the crimes she had committed since her plunge into barbarism?
In a conversation with Bertolt Brecht, who was also living in Britain at the time, Mann spoke even more harshly: "Yes, half a million German civilians must die." “I was talking to a stand-up collar,” Brecht wrote in his diary, horrified.
Only a few in Britain dared to raise their voice against the bombings. For example, the Anglican Bishop George Bell, in 1944, declared: “The pain that Hitler and the Nazis inflicted on people cannot be healed by violence. Bombing is no longer an acceptable way to wage war." For the bulk of the British, any methods of war against Germany were acceptable, and the government understood this very well, preparing an even greater escalation of violence.
In the late 1980s, the German historian Gunther Gellermann managed to find a previously unknown document - Memorandum D 217/4 dated July 6, 1944, signed by Winston Churchill and sent to the Air Force leadership. From a four-page document written shortly after the first German V-2 rockets fell on London in the spring of 1944, it appeared that Churchill had given the Air Force unequivocal instructions to prepare for a chemical attack on Germany: “I want you to seriously consider the possibility use of war gases. It is foolish to condemn from the moral side the method that during the last war all its participants used without any protests from the moralists and the church. In addition, during the last war, the bombing of undefended cities was prohibited, but today it is a common thing. It's just a matter of fashion, which changes just like the length of a woman's dress changes. If the bombing of London becomes heavy, and if the rockets cause serious damage to government and industrial centers, we must be ready to do everything to inflict a painful blow on the enemy ... Of course, it may be weeks or even months before I ask you to drown Germany in poison gases. But when I ask you to, I want 100% efficiency."
Three weeks later, on July 26, two plans for a chemical bombardment of Germany were placed on Churchill's desk. According to the first, the 20 largest cities were to be bombarded with phosgene. The second plan provided for the treatment of 60 German cities with mustard gas. In addition, Churchill’s scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann, an ethnic German born in Britain to a family of German immigrants, strongly advised that German cities should be treated with at least 50,000 anthrax bombs - just the amount of biological weapons ammunition that was in Britain's arsenals. . Only great luck saved the Germans from realizing these plans.
However, conventional ammunition also inflicted catastrophic damage on the civilian population of Germany. “A third of the British military budget was spent on the bombing war. The bomb war was carried out by the intellectual elite of the country: engineers, scientists. The technical course of the bomb war was provided by the efforts of more than a million people. The whole nation waged a bomb war. Harris only stood at the head of the bomber aviation, it was not his "personal war", which he allegedly waged behind the backs of Churchill and Britain, - continues Jorg Friedrich. - The scale of this gigantic enterprise was such that it could only be carried out by the efforts of the whole nation and only with the consent of the nation. If it had been otherwise, Harris would have simply been removed from command. There were also supporters of point bombing war in Britain. And Harris got his position precisely because the concept of carpet bombing won. Harris was the commander of the bomber force, and his boss, Air Force Commander was Sir Charles Portell, and Portell gave instructions back in 1943: 900,000 civilians must die in Germany, another million people must be seriously injured, 20 percent of the housing stock must be destroyed. says: "We have to kill 900,000 civilians! He will be immediately put on trial. Of course, this was Churchill's war, he took the decisions and is responsible for them.”
Raising the stakes
The logic of the bomb war, like the logic of any terror, required a constant increase in the number of victims. If until the beginning of 1943 the bombing of cities did not take away more than 100-600 people, then by the summer of 1943 the operations began to sharply radicalize.
In May 1943, four thousand people died during the bombing of Wuppertal. Just two months later, during the bombing of Hamburg, the number of victims crept up to 40 thousand. The chances for city dwellers to perish in the fiery nightmare increased at an alarming rate. If earlier people preferred to hide from the bombings in the basements, now, with the sounds of air raids, they increasingly ran to the bunkers built to protect the population, but in few cities the bunkers could accommodate more than 10% of the population. As a result, people fought in front of bomb shelters not for life, but for death, and those killed by the bombs were added to those crushed by the crowd.
The fear of being bombed reached its peak in April-May 1945, when the bombings reached their peak intensity. By this time, it was already obvious that Germany had lost the war and was on the verge of surrender, but it was during these weeks that the most bombs fell on German cities, and the number of civilian deaths in these two months amounted to an unprecedented figure - 130 thousand people.
The most famous episode of the bombing tragedy in the spring of 1945 was the destruction of Dresden. At the time of the bombing on February 13, 1945, there were about 100,000 refugees in the city with a population of 640 thousand people.
At 10:00 pm, the first wave of British bombers, consisting of 229 vehicles, dropped 900 tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the city, which set fire to almost the entire old city. Three and a half hours later, when the intensity of the fire reached its maximum, a second, twice as large wave of bombers hit the city, pouring another 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs into the burning Dresden. On the afternoon of February 14, the third wave of attack followed - already carried out by American pilots, who dropped about 400 tons of bombs on the city. The same attack was repeated on 15 February.
As a result of the bombing, the city was completely destroyed, the number of victims was at least 30 thousand people. The exact number of victims of the bombing has not yet been established (it is reliably known that individual charred corpses were removed from the basements of houses until 1947). Some sources, whose reliability, however, is being questioned, give figures of up to 130 and even up to 200 thousand people.
Contrary to popular belief, the destruction of Dresden was not only not an action carried out at the request of the Soviet command (at a conference in Yalta, the Soviet side asked to bomb railway junctions, not residential areas), it was not even agreed with the Soviet command, whose advanced units were in close proximity from the city.
“In the spring of 1945, it was clear that Europe would be the prey of the Russians - after all, the Russians fought and died for this right for four years in a row. And the Western allies understood that they could not oppose anything to this. The only argument of the allies was air power - the kings of the air opposed the Russians, the kings of the land war. Therefore, Churchill believed that the Russians needed to demonstrate this power, this ability to destroy any city, destroy it from a distance of a hundred or a thousand kilometers. It was a show of strength by Churchill, a show of Western air power. That's what we can do with any city. In fact, six months later, the same thing happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” says Joerg Friedrich.
Bomb Kulturkampf
Be that as it may, despite the scale of the tragedy of Dresden, his death was only one of the episodes of the large-scale destruction of the German cultural landscape in the last months of the war. It is impossible to understand the composure with which British aircraft destroyed in April 1945 the most important cultural centers of Germany: Würzburg, Hildesheim, Paderborn - small cities of great importance for German history. These cities were cultural symbols of the nation, and until 1945 they were practically not bombed, since they were insignificant both from a military and economic point of view. Their hour came precisely in 1945. Bomb attacks methodically destroyed palaces and churches, museums and libraries.
“When I was working on the book, I thought: what am I going to write about in the final chapter? Jörg Friedrich recalls. – And I decided to write about the destruction of historical substance. About how historical buildings were destroyed. And at one point I thought: what happened to the libraries? Then I took up the professional journals of librarians. So, in the professional journal of librarians, in the 1947-1948 issue, it was calculated how much of the books stored in libraries were destroyed and how much was saved. I can say that it was the biggest book burning in the history of mankind. Tens of millions of volumes were committed to the fire. A cultural treasure that was created by generations of thinkers and poets.
The quintessence of the bombing tragedy of the last weeks of the war was the bombing of Würzburg. Until the spring of 1945, the inhabitants of this town, considered one of the most beautiful places in Germany, lived in the hope that the war would bypass them. During all the years of the war, practically not a single bomb fell on the city. Hopes increased even more after the American aircraft destroyed the railway junction near Würzburg on February 23, 1945, and the city completely lost even the slightest military significance. A fantastic legend has spread among the inhabitants of the town that young Churchill studied at the local university for some time, so life was granted to the city by the highest decree.
“Such hopes flickered among the population of many German cities that held out until the spring of 1945,” explains Joerg Friedrich. – For example, the inhabitants of Hanover believed that they were not bombed because the English queen comes from a family of Hanoverian kings. For some reason, the inhabitants of Wuppertal decided that their city is known throughout Europe for its zealous Christian faith, and therefore they will not be bombed by those who are at war with the godless Nazis. Of course, these hopes were naive.
The inhabitants of Würzburg were also mistaken in their hopes. On March 16, 1945, the British command considered that ideal weather conditions had created over the city for the emergence of a “firestorm”. At 1730 GMT, the 5th Bombardment Group, consisting of 270 British Mosquito bombers, took off from a base near London. It was the same bombing formation that had successfully destroyed Dresden a month before. Now the pilots had the ambitious goal of trying to surpass their recent success and perfect the technique of creating a "firestorm".
At 20.20, the formation reached Wurzburg and, according to the usual pattern, brought down 200 high-explosive bombs on the city, opening roofs of houses and breaking windows. Over the next 19 minutes, the Mosquitos dropped 370,000 incendiary bombs on Würzburg with a total weight of 967 tons. The fire that engulfed the city destroyed 97% of the buildings in the old city and 68% of the buildings on the outskirts. In a fire that reached a temperature of 2000 degrees, burned 5 thousand people. 90 thousand inhabitants of Würzburg were left homeless. The city, built over 1200 years, was wiped off the face of the earth in one night. The loss of British bombers amounted to two cars, or less than 1%. The population of Würzburg will not reach its pre-war level again until 1960.
With mother's milk
Similar bombings took place at the end of the war throughout Germany. British aviation actively used the last days of the war to train their crews, test new radar systems, and at the same time teach the Germans the last lesson of "moral bombing", brutally destroying everything that they cherished before their eyes. The psychological effect of such bombings exceeded all expectations.
“After the war, the Americans did a massive study of what exactly the consequences of their wonderful bomb war had for the Germans. They were very disappointed that they managed to kill so few people, Jörg Friedrich continues. “They thought they had killed two or three million people, and they were very upset when it turned out that 500-600 thousand died. It seemed to them that it was unthinkable - so few people died after such a long and intense bombardment. However, the Germans, as it turned out, were able to defend themselves in basements, in bunkers. But there is another interesting observation in this report. The Americans came to the conclusion that, although the bombing did not play a serious role in the military defeat of Germany, the character of the Germans - this was said back in 1945! - the psychology of the Germans, the way the Germans behave - has changed significantly. The report said - and it was a very clever observation - that the bombs did not really go off in the present. They destroyed not houses and people not living then. The bombs broke the psychological basis of the German people, broke their cultural backbone. Now fear sits in the heart of even those people who did not see the war. My generation was born in 1943-1945. It has not seen the bomb war - the baby does not see it. But the baby feels the mother's fear. The baby lies in the arms of his mother in the basement, and he knows only one thing: his mother is mortally afraid. These are the first memories in life - the mortal fear of the mother. Mother is God, and God is defenseless. If you think about it, the relative proportion of the dead, even in the most terrible bombings, was not so great. Germany lost 600,000 people in the bombings - less than one percent of the population. Even in Dresden, in the most effective fire tornado then achieved, 7 percent of the population died. In other words, even in Dresden, 93 percent of the inhabitants were saved. But the effect of psychological trauma - the city can be burned with one wave of the hand - turned out to be much stronger. What is the worst thing for a person today? I'm sitting at home, the war starts - and suddenly the city is on fire, the air around me burns my lungs, there is gas around, and the heat, the surrounding world changes its state and destroys me.
Eighty million incendiary bombs dropped on German cities radically changed the appearance of Germany. Today, any major German city is hopelessly inferior to a French or British one in terms of the number of historical buildings. But the psychological trauma was deeper. It is only in recent years that the Germans have begun to reflect on what the bombing war actually did to them - and it seems that the realization of the consequences may drag on for many years.
On the night of August 25, 1940, ten German planes strayed off course by mistake dropped bombs on the outskirts of London. The British responded promptly. The first air raid on Berlin took place on the night of August 25-26, 1940. 22 tons of bombs were dropped on the city. Until September 7, there were only seven raids on the German capital. Each of those night raids was reflected in the official reports of the Wehrmacht High Command. German medium bomber Yu-88.
August 26, 1940: “Enemy aircraft first appeared over Berlin last night. Bombs were dropped on the suburbs." August 29, 1940: “Last night, British aircraft systematically attacked the residential areas of the Reich capital ... High-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped. Many civilians were killed. There were cases of fires, material damage was caused. August 31, 1940: “During the night, British aircraft continued their attacks on Berlin and other targets in Reich territory. Several bombs fell in the city center and in working-class neighborhoods." September 1, 1940: “Last night British aircraft attacked the Ruhr area and Berlin. Bombs were dropped. The damage caused is not significant, none of the military installations were damaged.” September 2, 1940: "Last night, enemy planes again attempted to attack Berlin." September 5, 1940: “Last night, British planes again invaded Reich territory. An attempt to attack the capital of the Reich was repulsed by dense fire from anti-aircraft artillery. The enemy managed to drop bombs on the city in only two areas. September 7, 1940: “Last night, enemy planes again attacked the capital of the Reich. Massive bombing of non-military targets in the city center was carried out, which led to civilian casualties and property damage. Luftwaffe aircraft also began raids on London in large numbers. East London docks were attacked last night with explosive and incendiary bombs. Fires started. The fire was observed in the docks, as well as in the area of the oil storage in Thameshaven. After that, the bomb war against the capitals of the opposing sides began to gain momentum. Now she was on her own. "Blitz" on London was declared an act of retaliation for the raids on Berlin. It began on the night of September 6-7, 1940, that is, five months after the start of an unrestricted bomb war and two weeks after the first bombs were dropped on Berlin. The raids continued uninterrupted until November 13, 1940, with between 100 and 150 medium bombers. The largest bombardment of London took place on September 7, when more than 300 bombers attacked in the evening and another 250 at night. By the morning of September 8, 430 Londoners had been killed, and the Luftwaffe issued a press release stating that over a thousand tons of bombs had been dropped on London within 24 hours. 
The intact dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, with smoke and fire from the surrounding buildings, during the bombing of London by German aircraft on December 29, 1940. (AP Photo / U.S. Office of War Information). This photo is sometimes called a symbol of London's resistance - London survived.
In fact, both sides were not ready for strategic bombing. When the war began in 1939, the RAF had only 488 bombers of all types, mostly obsolete, of which only about 60 were new Vickers: most of the rest did not have sufficient range to strike even on the Ruhr (let alone Berlin), had insignificant armament, and could not carry a significant bomb load. There were no effective sights for bombing, very few bombs that could cause significant damage to the enemy, and even such obvious things as maps of Europe to determine the course to the target and back were in great short supply. Moreover, the difficulty of targeting bombers, at night, at long ranges to accurately attack small targets, was greatly underestimated.
The Vickers Wellington was a British twin-engine bomber, used extensively in the first two years of the war.
Germany by that time had abandoned plans for the production of strategic bombers. Given that German technical resources were already largely committed to other needs, the doctrine of the Luftwaffe was to actively support the army, and taking into account the practical experience of Spain, the German command concentrated on the use of tactical bombers as aerial artillery in support of army operations, and fighters as a means of protecting bombers from enemy fighters. Before the start of strategic bombing, no one thought about creating a long-range fighter that could provide cover for bombers in their raids deep into enemy territory.
German bomber Heinkel He 111 over the docks of London.
According to British data, the first raid on Berlin was carried out by 3 high-speed bombers in the daytime. However, there is no official report on the results of the raid. According to rumors, his goal was to mock Goering, who at that time was supposed to make an appeal to a mass audience. In connection with the raid, Goering's speech was delayed by one hour. Until the end of 1940, another 27 night raids on Berlin were carried out. The largest of them took place in September, when 656 British bombers headed for Berlin, although, of course, not all of them reached the target. After that, there is a trend towards a decrease in the number of bombers involved in such raids. In December, only 289 vehicles took part in the attacks on Berlin, then there was a pause in the British air raids. Air raids on the German capital were mainly carried out by Wellington and Hampden aircraft, the maximum range of which only allowed them to fly to Berlin and back. With a strong headwind, the planes could not reach the target, and they had to lie down on the opposite course. If the pilots were wrong in the calculations, they were sometimes forced to land the cars in the sea. Since at that time there was still no reliable aiming device for bombers that would allow one to confidently hit an individual target in the dark, the number of hits compared to misses was negligible. The main targets of the British aircraft were the building of the Imperial Ministry of Aviation, as well as railway stations. Despite the best efforts of the Royal Air Force pilots, the results of the raids were meager. In September 1940, 7,320 tons of bombs were dropped on South England, including 6,224 tons on London. At the same time, only 390 tons of bombs fell on German territory, including Berlin. The so-called retaliation raid on Berlin on the night of September 23-24, 1940, carried out by 199 bombers, proved to be more effective than usual, although as a result of bad weather conditions, only 84 aircraft reached the target. Since that time, the inhabitants of Berlin began to feel a constant threat over themselves. Due to the fact that at that time there were a large number of diplomatic visits to the capital of Germany, the raids were carried out mainly at night. From the memoirs of Spanish Foreign Minister Serano Sunyer, we know that during his visit to Berlin he had to spend almost every night in the basement of the Adlon Hotel. It seems that this unpleasant circumstance greatly influenced the subsequent political decisions. Sunyer writes: “Civil defense in the rear was established as clearly as air defense at the front. Thanks to this, the German people hardly realized how terrible the war was. The organization clearly allowed to prevent the threat. The bomb war in those days was carried out almost without casualties, but from such a milder form it was more difficult for the civilian population to survive in subsequent events.
Meeting Molotov at the train station in Berlin, November 1940
The German foreign minister was also quite annoyed that he had to conduct important political negotiations with his foreign counterpart in an environment where the conversation was interrupted by deafening bomb explosions. Irritation also grew because he had just recently confidently proclaimed that the war was already almost won. During Molotov's negotiations in Berlin, he did not fail to put a hairpin on his German colleague about the British bombings that took place during official conversations. Official records for the period from September 1, 1939 to September 30, 1940 give this picture of the casualties and destruction inflicted on Berlin: 515 dead and about twice as many injured, 1,617 completely destroyed and 11,477 seriously damaged buildings. According to the British Bomber Command winter directive, issued at the end of October 1940, Berlin is fifth on the list of the main targets for the Royal Air Force, just behind fuel factories, shipbuilding enterprises, transport network facilities and minelaying. It also said that when carrying out attacks on cities, targets should be sought as close as possible to residential areas in order to inflict maximum material damage on the enemy and at the same time demonstrate the power of the Royal Air Force to the enemy. In January 1941, only 195 aircraft took part in the raids on Berlin, and after that the bombing of the two enemy capitals ceased for a while. In January-February 1941, the weather was very bad for flying. In March, activity increased and ports and harbors were now the main target. Then came the last and most difficult stage of the night bombings. In April and May, Coventry was again raided, then Portsmouth and Liverpool. And the peace of London was also disturbed. Then the last terrible chord of the gloomy symphony sounded: on May 10, the anniversary of the German offensive in the West, London was subjected to a powerful raid. 2,000 fires broke out and 150 water mains were destroyed. Five docks were badly damaged and 3,000 people died or were injured. During this raid, the House of Commons (the lower house of the British Parliament) was hit and badly damaged. London street destroyed by bombing.
In fact, it was the end, then it became quiet in London and the sirens no longer tore the nights with their cries. However, it was an ominous silence, and many in England feared that it indicated some new diabolical plot. They were right, but this time it was not directed against England. During the year of the air war, Great Britain lost 43 thousand people killed and 50 thousand seriously wounded during the bombing. But after that, the tasks of the Royal Air Force changed radically - from defense, British aviation moved on to attack. Only two Luftwaffe fighter squadrons remained on the banks of the English Channel, most of the fighters and bombers were concentrated in the East. The raids on Berlin in the second half of 1941 became more frequent.
From August 8 to early September, the bombing of Berlin was carried out by Soviet long-range aviation. On July 27, 1941, Stalin's personal order was given to the 1st mine-torpedo aviation regiment of the 8th air brigade of the Baltic Fleet Air Force under the command of Colonel E. N. Preobrazhensky: to bomb Berlin and its military-industrial facilities. The command of the operation was entrusted to Zhavoronkov S. F., Kuznetsov N. G. was appointed responsible for the outcome.
To strike, it was planned to use long-range bombers DB-3, DB-ZF (Il-4), as well as the new TB-7 and Er-2 of the Air Force and the Air Force of the Navy, which, taking into account the maximum range, could reach Berlin and return back. Taking into account the flight range (about 900 km in one direction, 1765 km in both directions, of which 1400 km over the sea) and the enemy’s powerful air defense, the success of the operation was possible only if several conditions were met: the flight had to be carried out at high altitude, to return back along direct course and have only one 500 kg bomb or two 250 kg bombs on board. On August 2, a sea caravan left Kronstadt in high secrecy and under heavy guard, consisting of minesweepers and self-propelled barges with a supply of bombs and aviation fuel, steel plates to extend the runway, two tractors, a bulldozer, an asphalt compactor, a galley and bunks for the flight and technical staff of the special strike group. Having passed through the mined Gulf of Finland and entering Tallinn, already besieged by the Germans, on the morning of August 3, the caravan approached the berths of Ezel Island and unloaded the cargo.
Pe-8 (TB-7) - Soviet bomber.
On the night of August 3, a test flight was carried out from the Cahul airfield - several crews, having a supply of fuel to Berlin and full ammunition, flew to reconnoiter the weather and dropped bombs on Swinemünde.
On August 4, a special strike group flew to the Cahul airfield located on the island. From August 4 to 7, preparations were made for the flight, household appliances for the flight and technical staff, and the runway was lengthened.
On the night of August 6, 5 crews went on a reconnaissance flight to Berlin. It was established that the anti-aircraft defense is located in a ring around the city within a radius of 100 km and has many searchlights capable of operating at a distance of up to 6,000 m. On the evening of August 6, the crews of the first group of bombers received a combat mission. At 21.00 on August 7, a special a strike group of 15 DB-3 bombers of the Baltic Fleet Air Force under the command of the regiment commander, Colonel Preobrazhensky E.N., loaded with FAB-100 bombs and leaflets. The units were commanded by captains Grechishnikov V.A. and Efremov A.Ya., Khokhlov P.I. flew as a navigator. The flight took place over the sea at an altitude of 7,000 m along the route: Ezel Island (Saaremaa) - Swinemünde - Stettin - Berlin). The temperature outside reached -35 - -40 ° C, because of which the glass of the aircraft cabins and glasses of headsets froze over. In addition, the pilots had to work all these hours in oxygen masks. To maintain secrecy throughout the flight, access to the radio was strictly prohibited.
Three hours later, the flight reached the northern border of Germany. When flying over its territory, aircraft were repeatedly detected from German observation posts, but, mistaking them for their own, the German air defense did not open fire. Over Stettin, the Germans, believing that it was Luftwaffe aircraft returning from a mission, with the help of searchlights, suggested that the crews of Soviet aircraft land on the nearest airfield.
At 01.30 on August 8, five aircraft dropped bombs on well-lit Berlin, the rest bombed the Berlin suburb and Stettin. The Germans did not expect an air raid so much that they turned on the blackout only 40 seconds after the first bombs fell on the city. The German air defense did not allow the pilots to control the results of the raid, the activity of which became so great that it forced the radio operator Vasily Krotenko to break the radio silence mode and report on the completion of the task on the radio: “My place is Berlin! The task was completed. Let's go back to base!" At 4 am on August 8, after a 7-hour flight, the crews returned to the airfield without loss.
In total, until September 5, Soviet pilots carried out nine raids on Berlin, making a total of 86 sorties. 33 planes bombed Berlin, dropping 21 tons of bombs on it and causing 32 fires in the city. 37 aircraft were unable to reach the capital of Germany and attacked other cities. A total of 311 high-explosive and incendiary bombs were used up with a total weight of 36,050 kg. 34 propaganda bombs with leaflets were dropped. 16 aircraft for various reasons were forced to interrupt the flight and return to the airfield. During the raids, 17 aircraft and 7 crews were lost, with 2 aircraft and 1 crew killed at the airfield when they tried to take off with 1000-kilogram and two 500-kilogram bombs on external slings.
On August 29, 1942, the most massive Soviet bomber air raid on Berlin was carried out in all the years of World War II. 100 Pe-8, Il-4 and DB bombers took part in it. On the way back, 7 Pe-8s also dropped bombs on Koenigsberg. This raid was the final chord in a series of Soviet air raids on large German cities and industrial centers in August 1942 and a prelude to the September raids on Germany's satellite countries.
On November 7, 160 RAF aircraft bombed Berlin; 20 of them were shot down. In 1942, only 9 air raid alerts were issued in Berlin. The British Air Force solved this year the problems associated with the survival of England, namely, all efforts were directed against submarines and against the shipyards that produced these boats. Battle for Berlin. November 1943 - March 1944. Britain had the opportunity to deliver massive strikes against Berlin only in the second half of 1943. The prelude to the air attack on Berlin was two air raids on January 30, 1943. On this day Goering and Goebbels made great speeches. The air raids were timed exactly to the beginning of both performances. This had a great propaganda effect, although the material losses of the Germans were insignificant. On April 20, the British raided Berlin to congratulate Hitler on his birthday. The Avro 683 Lancaster is a British four-engine heavy bomber.
"Battle for Berlin" began with a raid on the night of November 18-19, 1943. The raid involved 440 Lancasters, accompanied by several Mosquitos. The heaviest damage to Berlin was inflicted on the night of November 22-23. Due to the dry weather, numerous buildings, including foreign embassies, were damaged as a result of severe fires. The largest raid took place on the night of February 15-16. The raids continued until March 1944. The total losses of Berlin amounted to almost 4,000 people killed, 10,000 wounded and 450,000 people left homeless. 16 raids on Berlin cost England more than 500 aircraft lost. Bomber aircraft lost 2,690 pilots over Berlin and almost 1,000 became prisoners of war. In England, it is generally accepted that the Battle of Berlin was unsuccessful for the RAF, but many British historians argue that "in the operational sense, the Battle of Berlin was more than a failure, it was a defeat." Beginning March 4, the United States launched an air war of attrition in advance of the landings in France. Believing that the Luftwaffe would not be able to avoid fighting while defending the capital, the Americans organized a series of devastating bombardments of Berlin. Losses were heavy on both sides, with the US losing 69 B-17 flying fortresses and the Luftwaffe 160 aircraft. But the United States could make up for the losses, and Germany no longer.
Berlin, autumn 1944, bombing victims.
Then, until the beginning of 1945, Allied aviation switched to supporting the landing troops in France. And a new major raid on Berlin took place only on February 3, 1945. Nearly 1,000 Eighth Air Force B-17 bombers, under the cover of long-range Mustang fighters, bombed the railway system in Berlin. According to intelligence data, the German Sixth Panzer Army was transferred through Berlin to the eastern front. This was one of the few cases when the US Air Force carried out a massive attack on the city center. James Doolittle, commander of the Eighth Air Force, objected. But Eisenhower insisted, since the attack on Berlin was of great political importance in that the raid was carried out to aid the advance of the Soviet troops on the Oder, east of Berlin, and was essential to Allied unity. The bombing caused great destruction and fires that continued for four days. The boundaries of the fire were localized only by water barriers and green areas of parks. German air defense by this time was very weakened, so that out of 1600 aircraft participating in the raid, only 36 were shot down. A large number of architectural monuments were destroyed. Government buildings were also damaged, including the Reich Chancellery, the office of the NSDAP, the headquarters of the Gestapo and the building of the so-called "People's Court". Among the dead was the infamous Ronald Freisler, head of the "People's Court". The central streets: Unter den Linden, Wilhelmstrasse and Friedrichstrasse were turned into heaps of ruins. The death toll was 2,894, the number of injured reached 20,000 and 120,000 lost their homes. Strategic bomber B-17, "Flying Fortress".
Another major raid on 26 February 1945 left 80,000 people homeless. Anglo-American air raids on Berlin continued until April, while the Red Army was outside the city. In the last days of the war, the Soviet Air Force also bombed Berlin, including with the help of Il-2 attack aircraft. By this time, the air defense, infrastructure and civil defense of the city were on the verge of collapse. Later, statisticians calculated that for every inhabitant of Berlin there were almost thirty-nine cubic meters of rubble. Until the end of March 1945, there were a total of 314 air raids on Berlin, 85 of them during the last twelve months. Half of all the houses were damaged and about a third were uninhabitable, as many as 16 km² of the city were just piles of rubble. Estimates of the total death toll in Berlin from air raids range from 20,000 to 50,000. For comparison, the number of deaths in one attack on Dresden on February 14, 1945 and on Hamburg in one raid in 1943 amounted to about 30,000 and 40,000 people, respectively. The relatively low number of casualties in Berlin is indicative of excellent air defense and good bomb shelters.
Air defense tower "Zoo", April 1942.
The Nazi regime was well aware of the political necessity of protecting the Reich's capital from aerial destruction. Even before the war, work began on an extensive system of public bomb shelters, but by 1939 only 15% of the planned 2,000 shelters had been built. By 1941, however, the five huge state bomb shelters were complete and could hold up to 65,000 people. Other shelters were built under government buildings, the most famous being the so-called bunker under the Imperial Chancellery. In addition, many metro stations were used as bomb shelters. The rest of the population was forced to take refuge in their cellars. In 1943, the Germans decided to evacuate people whose presence in Berlin was not dictated by the needs of the war. By 1944, 1.2 million people, 790,000 of them women and children, about a quarter of the city's population, had been evacuated to the countryside. An attempt was made to evacuate all the children from Berlin, but this met with resistance from the parents, and many of the evacuees soon returned to the city (as was also the case in London in 1940-41). A growing labor shortage meant that women's labor was important to preserve for Berlin's industry, so the evacuation of all women with children failed. At the end of 1944, the city's population began to grow again, due to refugees fleeing the Red Army. Although the refugees were officially denied permission to stay in Berlin for more than two days, at least 50,000 managed to stay in Berlin. By January 1945 the population was around 2.9 million, although the German military's demands were limited to only 100,000 men aged 18-30. The other 100,000 needed to clear the city were mainly French "fremdarbeiters" ("foreign workers") and Russian "Ostarbeiters" ("Eastern Workers"). Three huge towers were the key to Berlin's air defense. , on the which contained searchlights and 128mm anti-aircraft guns, as well as a system of shelters for civilians. These towers were in the Berlin Zoo in the Tiergarten, Humboldtshain and Friedrichshain. The towers were increasingly completed by teenagers from the Hitler Youth, as older men were called to the front.
Ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin; destroyed by Allied bombing and preserved as a monument.
June 13, 1944 - the first combat use of the German V-1 cruise missiles, a strike was made on London.
The Germans for the first time in history began air bombardments, they were also the first to launch rocket attacks on cities. In total, about 30,000 devices were manufactured. By March 29, 1945, about 10,000 had been launched against England; 3,200 fell in her territory, of which 2,419 reached London, causing a loss of 6,184 killed and 17,981 wounded. The Londoners called the V-1 "flying bombs" (flying bomb), as well as "buzz bombs" (buzz bomb) because of the characteristic sound emitted by a pulsating air-jet engine.
About 20% of the missiles failed at launch, 25% were destroyed by British aircraft, 17% were shot down by anti-aircraft guns, 7% were destroyed in a collision with barrage balloons. The engines often failed before reaching the target, and also the vibration of the engine often disabled the rocket, so that about 20% of the V-1 fell into the sea. A British report published after the war showed that 7,547 V-1s had been launched into England. The report indicates that of these, 1,847 were destroyed by fighters, 1,866 were destroyed by anti-aircraft artillery, 232 were destroyed by barrage balloons and 12 by the artillery of ships of the Royal Navy.
A breakthrough in military electronics (the development of radio fuses for anti-aircraft shells - shells with such fuses turned out to be three times more effective even when compared with the latest radar fire control for that time) led to the fact that the loss of German shells in raids on England increased from 24% up to 79%, as a result of which the effectiveness (and intensity) of such raids has significantly decreased.
Commemorative plaque on Grove Road, Mile End in London at the site of the fall of the first V-1 shell on June 13, 1944, which killed 11 Londoners
In late December 1944, General Clayton Bissell submitted a report pointing to the V1's significant advantages over conventional aerial bombardment.
They prepared the following table:
| Blitz | V1 | |
| 1. Cost for Germany | ||
| departures | 90 000 | 8025 |
| Bomb weight, tons | 61 149 | 14 600 |
| Fuel consumed, tons | 71 700 | 4681 |
| Aircraft lost | 3075 | 0 |
| Crew lost | 7690 | 0 |
| 2. Results | ||
| Buildings destroyed/damaged | 1 150 000 | 1 127 000 |
| Population loss | 92 566 | 22 892 |
| The ratio of losses to consumption of bombs | 1,6 | 4,2 |
| 3. Cost for England Air force efforts. |
||
| departures | 86 800 | 44 770 |
| Aircraft lost | 1260 | 351 |
| Lost man | 2233 | 805 |
V-1 on launch catapult.
On September 8, 1944, the first combat launch of a V-2 rocket was made in London. The number of missile combat launches carried out was 3225. The missiles hit mostly civilians (about 2700 people died. Hitler did not leave the idea of \u200b\u200bproducing a heavy missile that was supposed to bring retribution to England. By his personal order, from the end of July 1943, a huge production potential was directed to create a rocket, which later received the propaganda name "V-2".
Third Reich Armaments Minister Albert Speer later wrote in his memoirs:
Ridiculous idea. In 1944, for several months, armadas of enemy bombers were dropping an average of 300 tons of bombs per day, and Hitler could rain down on England three dozen rockets with a total capacity of 24 tons per day, which is the equivalent of a bomb load of just a dozen Flying Fortresses. I not only agreed with this decision of Hitler, but also supported it, having made one of my most serious mistakes. It would be much more productive to concentrate our efforts on the production of defensive surface-to-air missiles. Such a rocket was developed back in 1942 under the code name "Wasserfall" (Waterfall).
The first rocket with a combat charge was fired at Paris. The next day they began shelling London. The British knew about the existence of a German rocket, but at first they did not understand anything and thought (when a strong explosion was heard in the Chiswick area at 18:43 on September 8) that the gas main had exploded (since there was no air raid alert). After repeated explosions, it became clear that the gas pipelines had nothing to do with it. And only when, near one of the funnels, an officer from the air defense troops lifted a piece of a pipe frozen with liquid oxygen, it became clear that this was a new Nazi weapon (called by them "weapons of retaliation" - German Vergeltungswaffe). The effectiveness of the combat use of the V-2 was extremely low: the missiles had low hit accuracy (only 50% of launched missiles fell into a circle with a diameter of 10 km) and low reliability (out of 4,300 launched missiles, more than 2,000 exploded on the ground or in the air during launch, or failed in flight). Data on the number of missiles launched and reached their targets vary. According to various sources, the launch of 2,000 rockets, sent in seven months to destroy London, led to the death of over 2,700 people (each rocket killed one or two people).
To drop the same amount of explosives that was dropped by the Americans with the help of four-engine B-17 (Flying Fortress) bombers, 66,000 V-2s would have to be used, the production of which would take 6 years.
The German government announced that London was being bombarded only on November 8th. And on November 10, Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, informed Parliament and the world that London had been under rocket attacks in the past few weeks. According to British estimates, 2,754 civilians were killed and 6,523 wounded by V-2 rockets in London. The accuracy of hits has increased over the years of the war and rocket strikes sometimes caused significant destruction, accompanied by many deaths. So on November 25, 1944, a department store in southeast London was destroyed. 160 people died and 108 were seriously injured. After such annihilating strikes, British intelligence organized a "leak" of falsified information that the missiles were flying over London by 10-20 km. This tactic worked and most of the missiles began to fall in Kent without causing much damage.
The last two rockets exploded on March 27, 1945. One of them killed Mrs. Ivy Millichump, 34, in her own home in Kent.
And this is a V-2 victim in Antwerp, Belgium, 1944.
I shared with you the information that I "dug up" and systematized. At the same time, he has not become impoverished at all and is ready to share further, at least twice a week. If you find errors or inaccuracies in the article, please let us know. My e-mail address: [email protected] I will be very grateful.
Air Marshal Sir Arthur Travis, 1st Baronet Harris, whom even his subordinates called "The Butcher" ("Butcher Harris"), aircraft of the British Air Force scattered over the territory of the country along with millions of bombs (from 1939 to 1945, Anglo-American aircraft dropped them on Germany in the total amount of 1 million 620 thousand tons).
British science at the service of mass murderers
During the Second World War, Arthur Harris was the main ideologue of the strategy of carrying out carpet bombing of German cities (hence his other nickname - "Bomber Harris", - "Bomber Harris"). But the "authorship" of this idea does not belong to him - he only fanatically implemented it. According to Harris, "massive bombardments should have as their goals the destruction of German cities, the murder of German workers and the disorganization of civilized life throughout Germany"
The British concept of a bomb war against the civilian population, applied against Nazi Germany, was only a development of the doctrine of the Marshal of the Royal Air Force during the First World War, Hugh Trenchard, developed by him back in 1915. According to Trenchard, "in the course of an industrial war, enemy residential areas should become natural targets, since the industrial worker is as much a participant in the hostilities as a soldier at the front."
Acting on the well-known principle “the new is the well-forgotten old”, the British physicist of German origin Frederick Lindemann, as a leading scientific adviser to the British government, proposed the concept of “homelessness” of the German workforce through the bombing of German cities. Lindemann's concept was approved by the Cabinet of Winston Churchill, which was partly caused by the inability of the RAF to hit or even simply find targets smaller than cities - initially even finding cities was difficult for them.
The British authorities approached the development of carpet bombing methods thoroughly. A whole scientific consortium was created from venerable mathematicians and physicists, chemists and civil engineers, experienced firefighters and public utilities. In the course of the work, this "synclite" came to the unconditional conclusion that for the mass destruction of the population, it is preferable not to use high-explosive, but incendiary ammunition, since the old German cities, in which half-timbered buildings predominated (a type of building structure made of wooden beams, the space between which is filled with adobe material, brick or also wood) were extremely susceptible to fire. The technology of such bombardments, which received the code name "Firestorm", looked as follows.
The first wave of bombers drops a special type of land mines on the city, the task of which was to create the most favorable conditions for the effective treatment of the target with incendiary bombs. The first air mines carried 650 kg. explosives, but already in 1943 the British used mines containing from 2 to 4 tons of explosives. Cylinders 3.5 meters long spill out onto the city and, touching the ground, explode, sweeping roofs and knocking out windows and doors in houses within a radius of up to a kilometer from the epicenter of the explosion. "Prepared" in this way, the city becomes an ideal target for incendiary bombs.
The development of medieval German cities with their narrow streets contributed to the spread of fire from one house to another. The simultaneous ignition of hundreds of houses created a monstrous thrust over an area of several square kilometers. The whole city became a huge fireplace, sucking in oxygen from the surroundings. The resulting draft, directed towards the fire, caused a wind blowing at a speed of 200–250 km. /hour. The gigantic fire sucked oxygen from the bomb shelters, dooming even those who survived the bombs to death.
Moral Sir Harris
This technology had the only disadvantage: it was ineffective against defensive structures and military enterprises. But it was conceived for the destruction of residential areas! That is, the extermination of the population was not a "side result", as Anglo-American historians claimed after the war. Sir Arthur Harris was appointed to the practical task.
Already on February 14, 1942, the British Air Force received the bombing directive signed by him on the squares. The directive stated:
"From now on, operations should be focused on crushing the morale of the civilian population of the enemy - in particular, industrial workers."
On January 21, 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, which was attended by US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States and Great Britain (I.V. Stalin was also invited, but he could not be present at the meeting responsible for USSR, the moment of the victorious end of the Battle of Stalingrad), it was decided to start strategic bombing of Germany by joint Anglo-American forces. The targets of the bombing were to be not only objects of the military industry, but also the cities of Germany proper.
The operation was codenamed Pointblank (Eng. "Resolute"). Its task was the systematic destruction of the military industry and the economy of Germany, as well as "undermining the morale of the German people." Air strikes were to be carried out around the clock. At the same time, American aircraft were supposed to operate in the daytime, inflicting targeted strikes on military targets, while the British pilots were left with nights, which they used to carpet bomb the cities.
The list of the British Air Ministry included 58 German cities to be destroyed. These bombings were codenamed Moral bombing (English "moral bombing"), since their main goal was to "break the will of the civilian population of the enemy."
Looking ahead, I note that these bombings had the opposite effect. Just as the will of the British people to resist was not broken during the early German bombing of the war, so was the will of the German population not broken by strategic bombing, which was carried out on a much larger scale than the German bombing of Great Britain.
There were no surrender riots in Germany, and German workers continued to keep war production at the highest possible level. The loyalty of German civilians to the Nazi regime, although shaken by the bombings, remained until the end of the war. As the British military theorist and historian, Major General John Fuller of the Armored Forces, noted in his memoirs, "the barbarous destruction of the British-American strategic bombing proved to be of little military and psychological effectiveness."
But back to "The Butcher" Harris.
Senseless and ruthless
On May 27, 1943, Arthur Harris signed order No. 173 on Operation Gomorrah (Operation Gomorrah; “And the Lord rained brimstone and fire from heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah”; Genesis 19:24.). Her target was Hamburg. Omitting the details, I will summarize it.
During the operation carried out by the aviation of Great Britain and the United States from July 25 to August 3, 1943, up to 50 thousand residents of Hamburg died from carpet bombing and the gigantic fire they caused, about 125 thousand people were injured and burned, about a million residents were forced to leave city, 250 thousand city buildings were completely destroyed.
The same fate befell many other large and medium-sized cities in Germany. As the British newspapers then jubilantly wrote, “during the bombing, the city of Bingen am Rhein was destroyed by 96%, Magdeburg by 90%, Dessau by 80%, Chemnitz by 75%, Cologne by 65%”, and so on.
And from the first months of 1945, when this had absolutely no effect on the outcome of the war, the British Air Force set about destroying the most important cultural centers in Germany.
Previously, they were practically not bombed, since they had neither military nor economic significance. Now their time has come.
Bombings destroyed palaces and churches, museums and libraries, universities and ancient monuments. This vandalism can only be explained by the fact that, unlike I.V. Stalin, who said that “Hitlers come and go, but the German people remain,” the allies did not destroy Nazism, but Germany - its roots, history, culture.
On February 13-15, 1945, the British and US Air Forces committed one of the worst crimes in the entire Second World War. The whole city was literally burned by them. This city was Dresden - the cultural center of Germany, which did not have military production.
From a memo to the Royal Air Force issued in January 1945 under the heading "For Official Use":
“Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany, is not much smaller than Manchester. This is the largest enemy center that has not yet been bombed. In the middle of winter, when refugees are heading west and troops need homes to stay and rest, every roof counts. The purpose of the attack is to hit the enemy in the most sensitive place, behind the line of the already broken front, and prevent the use of the city in the future; and at the same time show the Russians, when they come to Dresden, what Bomber Command is capable of.
This is how the destruction of Dresden happened.
At the time of the first bombing on February 13, about 100 thousand refugees and the wounded were in the city with a population of 640 thousand people (in the last months of the war, Dresden was turned into a hospital city).
At 22.09 h. the first wave of British bombers dropped 900 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden, which set the entire old city on fire.
At 01.22, when the intensity of the fire reached its climax, a second wave of bombers hit the city, dropping another 1,500 tons of lighters on the burning Dresden.
Another 9 hours later, the third wave followed: the pilots - this time already American - dropped about 400 tons of bombs on the city in 38 minutes. Following the bombers, fighters appeared, who began to "process" the city from cannons and machine guns. The target of one of the attacks was the bank of the Elbe, where thousands of refugees and wounded from hospitals escaped from the conflagration.
The exact number of victims of the bombings of February 13-14, 1945 has not yet been established. According to the International Research Group of Historians, which worked in 2006-2008, 25 thousand people died as a result of the bombings, of which about 8 thousand were refugees (charred corpses were removed from the basements of houses back in 1947). More than 30,000 more people received injuries and burns of varying severity. The vast majority of casualties and wounded were civilians. The area of the zone of complete destruction in Dresden was four times the area of the zone of complete destruction in Nagasaki.
Lies of the "allies" and a monument to the killer
Contrary to popular belief in the West, the destruction of Dresden - this architectural pearl of Europe - was not only an action carried out at the request of the Red Army command. It was not even coordinated with the command of the Red Army, the advanced units of which approached the city directly.
As follows from the declassified documents of the Yalta Conference, during its work, the Soviet side handed over to the Allies a written request to bombard the railway junctions of Berlin and Leipzig. There were no documented requests for the bombing of Dresden from the Soviet side.
Every year on February 13 at 10:10 pm, church bells ring in East and Central Germany in memory of the victims. After this began to be practiced in the western part of the country after the unification of Germany, the US State Department stated that the bombing of Dresden was carried out at the request of the USSR.
“Most Americans have heard a lot about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but few know that more people died in Dresden than were destroyed in any of these cities,” writes American historian and publicist David Duke. - Dresden had no military significance, and when it was bombed, the war was almost already won. The bombing only strengthened the German opposition and cost more Allied lives. I sincerely ask myself, was the bombing of Dresden a war crime? Was it a crime against humanity? What were the children guilty of, who died the most terrible of deaths - burning alive? .. "
After the end of World War II, bombing methods and Harris himself were criticized, but these bombings were never recognized as war crimes.
In Britain, Sir Arthur Harris was the only military commander not to have received a peerage, although in 1946 he was awarded the rank of Marshal of the Royal Air Force. Due to massive complaints, he was forced to leave for South Africa in 1948, where he died in 1984 at the age of 92.
Unlike many British pilots who felt guilty about what happened and called February 13, 1945 the worst day of their lives, Harris never regretted the bombing of German cities, and even more so did not repent of his deed. Back in February 1945, he wrote about this:
“Attacks on cities, like any other act of war, are intolerable as long as they are not strategically justified. But they are strategically justified, since their goal is to hasten the end of the war and save the lives of Allied soldiers. Personally, I do not believe that all the remaining cities in Germany are worth the life of one British grenadier.
And in 1977, four years before his death, Harris confidently stated in an interview with the BBC: “The bombings prevented more than a million Germans from serving in the front-line units of the Wehrmacht: these people were enrolled in air defense units, or made ammunition for these units, or were engaged in repair work after the bombings.
In 1992, the British veteran organization Bomber Harris Trust, despite the protests of Germany and part of the British public, erected a monument to Sir Harris in London. This monument to the mass murderer still stands to this day, and under police protection - shortly after its installation, "offensive" graffiti began to appear on it, and in order to prevent vandals, the monument is under police control.
It has been documented that during the strategic bombing of Germany by Anglo-American aircraft, vast areas of the country were completely devastated, over 600 thousand civilians died, twice as many were injured or maimed, 13 million were left homeless.
During World War II, air raids were rightfully considered the most destructive. By the memorable date, we decided to collect data on the most terrible bombings of this war.
Attack on Pearl Harbor
2016-05-06 09:24
Pearl Harbor
On December 7, 1941, aircraft carriers under the leadership of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo dealt a crushing blow to the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan went to war against the United States. This operation was just one of more than ten conducted by the Japanese at the same time. They launched a series of coordinated strikes against American and British forces throughout the vast Pacific theater.
Pearl Harbor is currently the largest US naval base in the Pacific and the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet.
During the battle, 4 battleships, 2 destroyers, 1 mine layer were sunk. Another 4 battleships, 3 light cruisers and 1 destroyer were seriously damaged. American aviation losses amounted to 188 aircraft destroyed, another 159 were heavily damaged. The Americans lost 2,403 killed, more than 1,000 aboard the exploded battleship Arizona, and 1,178 wounded. The Japanese lost 29 aircraft - 15 dive bombers, 5 torpedo bombers and 9 fighters. 5 midget submarines were sunk. Losses in people amounted to 55 people. Another - Lieutenant Sakamaki - was taken prisoner. He swam ashore after his midget submarine hit a reef.
Dresden
A series of bombings of the German city of Dresden carried out by the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the United States Air Force took place from February 13 to 15, 1945, during the Second World War. During two night raids, 1,400 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,100 tons of incendiary bombs fell on Dresden. This combination caused a fiery tornado that devastated everything in its path, burning the city and people. According to some reports, the death toll was about 135 thousand people.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
At 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed in an instant by the explosion of the American atomic bomb.
On August 9, 1945 at 11:02 am, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, a second bomb destroyed Nagasaki.
About 140,000 people died in Hiroshima, and about 74,000 in Nagasaki. Over the following years, tens of thousands more died from radiation exposure. Many of those who survived the explosion are still suffering from its effects.
Stalingrad
On August 23, 1942, the 4th Air Fleet of the Luftwaffe Air Corps began a massive bombardment of Stalingrad. According to eyewitnesses, an incalculable number of bombs rained down on the city. Stalingrad resembled a giant bonfire - residential areas, oil storage facilities, steamships and even the Volga, soaked in oil and gasoline, were burning. Enemy aircraft made more than 2,000 sorties that day. The city was reduced to ruins, more than 40 thousand civilians were killed and more than 50 thousand people were injured.
London
On September 7, 1940, at 5 pm, 348 German bombers, escorted by fighters, dropped 617 bombs on London in half an hour. The bombardment was repeated two hours later. All this went on for 57 nights in a row. Hitler's goal was the destruction of industry and the withdrawal of England from the war. By the end of May 1941, over 40,000 civilians, half of them in London, had been killed in bombing raids.
Hamburg
July 25 - August 3, 1943, as part of Operation Gomorrah, the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the United States Air Force carried out a series of bombings of the city. As a result of air raids, up to 45 thousand people were killed, up to 125 thousand were injured, about a million residents were forced to leave the city.
Rotterdam
The attack on Holland began on May 10, 1940. The bombers dropped about 97 tons of bombs, mostly on the city center, destroying everything in an area of approximately 2.5 square kilometers, which led to numerous fires and caused the death of about a thousand inhabitants. This attack was the last stage of the Dutch operation of the Wehrmacht. Holland was unable to defend itself against air attacks and, after assessing the situation and receiving a German ultimatum about a possible bombardment of other cities, capitulated on the same day.
The myth of the strategic bombing of Germany by Anglo-American aircraft
The main myths of the Anglo-American strategic bombing of Germany in 1943-1945 are that they played a decisive role in the collapse of German resistance in World War II. This thesis was actively disseminated during the war years by American and British propaganda, and in the postwar years it became widespread in Anglo-American historiography. An opposite and equally mythological thesis was reinforced in Soviet historiography, which asserted that the Anglo-American bombing of Germany only slightly reduced its military and economic potential.
In January 1943, at the Casablanca Conference, Roosevelt and Churchill decided to begin strategic bombing of Germany with a joint Anglo-American force. The targets of the bombing were to be both objects of the military industry and the cities of Germany. The operation was codenamed Point Blank. Prior to this, British air raids on German cities were of more moral than strategic importance. Now the main hopes were placed on the American B-17 Flying Fortress four-engine strategic bombers. Initially, German aircraft factories, as well as factories for the production of engines and ball bearings, were identified as priority targets. However, on April 17, 1943, an attempt to attack the Focke-Wulf plant near Bremen with 115 bombers ended in failure. 16 aircraft were shot down and 48 damaged. Since the main aircraft factories were located in the south of Germany, bombers were forced to fly there without fighter escort. This made daytime raids too risky due to insufficient fighter cover, and targeted bombing was ruled out during night raids. A raid on Schweinfurt, where there was a plant that produced almost 100% of German ball bearings, and on the center of the aircraft industry Regensburg in Bavaria on August 17, 1943, led to the loss of 60 B-17s out of 377 and 5 Spitfire fighters and P-47 Thunderbolts. The Luftwaffe lost 27 Me-109, Me-110 and FV-190 fighters. About 200 civilians were killed.
The second attack on Schweinfurt on October 14, 1943, led to even more deplorable results. Of the 291 B-17s, 77 were lost. Another 122 vehicles were damaged. Of the 2,900 crew members, 594 were missing, 5 were killed and 43 were wounded. After that, the bombing of targets deep in Germany was postponed until the availability of escort fighters, which could accompany the bombers all the way from the airfield to the target and back.
On January 11, 1944, during the attack of Oschersleben, Halberstadt and Braunschweig, 60 Flying Fortresses were irretrievably lost.
The third raid on Schweinfurt on 24 February 1944 was successful. Thanks to the escort of the P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters with external tanks, only 11 of the 231 B-17s participating in the raid were lost. "Mustangs" were able to fly to Berlin and back. The raid on Schweinfurt was part of the air battle over Germany, which later became known as "Big Week" and lasted from 20 to 25 February. During it, the Anglo-American Air Force, which attacked aircraft industry facilities, lost 378 bombers and 28 fighters, while the Luftwaffe lost 355 fighters and about a hundred pilots. This damage forced the Germans to sharply increase the production of fighters. From now on, they could not even dominate the skies over Germany. This guaranteed the success of the allied invasion of France. From the end of April 1944, the theater of operations was moved to France and the bombing was aimed at disabling the transport infrastructure in order to make it difficult to transfer German reinforcements. As a result of the raids, the total productivity of synthetic fuel plants from April to July decreased from 180,000 tons to 9,000 tons per month. Despite the fact that 200 thousand workers were specially allocated for the restoration of these enterprises, productivity in August was only 40 thousand tons per month, and this level was not raised until the end of the war. Also, as a result of raids, the production of synthetic rubber decreased by 6 times.
Strategic bombing resumed in full force in September 1944 and was now concentrated on synthetic fuel plants and transport infrastructure. As a result, fuel production dropped sharply, and since September 1944 the German army and the Luftwaffe were on starvation rations. Now the German air defense had little to oppose to the Anglo-American bombing. From the end of 1944, due to the depletion of synthetic fuel, German aircraft very rarely took to the air. Arms production in Germany grew until September 1944, and then began to decline due to the impact of strategic bombing. And in 1944, the Luftwaffe consumed 92% of synthetic gasoline and only 8% of conventional, and in the land army, the share of synthetic fuel was 57%. By the time the Anglo-American troops surrounded and occupied the Ruhr in March 1944, its industry was practically paralyzed due to the destruction of the transport infrastructure.
When it turned out that it was not possible to permanently disable aircraft factories and other key industrial facilities in Germany with the help of aerial bombardments, the Anglo-American command decided to switch to area bombing (the so-called "carpet bombing") of large cities in order to undermine the morale of the German population and army. A series of such bombardments hit Hamburg between 25 July and 3 August 1943. More than 50 thousand people died, about 200 thousand were injured. Such a large number of victims was due to the fact that a fiery tornado arose in the city. Berlin, Cologne, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg and other cities were also subjected to carpet bombing.
"Carpet bombing" also continued until almost the end of the war. The largest was the bombing of Dresden on February 23–25, 1945. At least 25 thousand people died then. There are also higher estimates - up to 135 thousand dead. Many of the approximately 200,000 refugees could have perished in the city, although there was no exact count.
The last raid of the Flying Fortresses was made on April 25, 1945. In the future, due to the lack of targets in connection with the occupation of all major German cities by the Allied troops, strategic bombing was stopped.
In total, 593 thousand people became victims of the bombing of Germany within the borders of 1937, including about 32 thousand prisoners of war. About 42 thousand people died in Austria and the Sudetenland. About half a million people were injured. In France, the victims of the Anglo-American bombing were 59 thousand killed and wounded. In England - 60.5 thousand people died as a result of German bombing and shelling with V-1 and V-2 rockets.
In general, the strategic bombing of German cities did not play a decisive role in the outcome of the war, but it must be admitted that their role was significant. They significantly slowed down the growth of the German military industry, forced the Germans to spend significant resources on the restoration of destroyed factories and cities. In the last six months of the war, thanks to the constant destruction of the main factories for the production of synthetic fuel, the Luftwaffe was practically chained to the ground, which, perhaps, brought victory over Germany closer by several months.
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