Bombing Germany The Final Phase

During 1942 and 1943 the striking power of RAF Bomber Command was transformed by the arrival of heavy bombers, advanced navigation and blind bombing systems, and new tactics to concentrate the bombers over the target and swamp the German defences. By October 1944 most of Germany's cities were in ruins, yet the bombing continued to intensify, reaching unprecedented levels in the final seven months of the air campaign. The value of further area raids was questioned during the opening months of 1945, yet the Allies destroyed the remaining cities in a bid to hasten the end of the war. The handful of German cities still largely unscathed in early February 1945 included Dresden, which was obliterated on 13 February. Ten days later, the South German city of Pforzheim was destined to suffer the same fate.This book commemorates the efforts of the aircrew members who risked their lives, consolidating a host of intriguing first-hand accounts. It also considers Pforzheim as a representative community under National Socialist rule. The city's survivors remember the horror of the raid and its aftermath, including eventual occupation by French Colonial troops and, subsequently, American forces. Tony does an admirable job of presenting historical context when considering actions in times of extreme trauma and his narrative offers an intriguing, engaging and poignant evocation of the closing months of Bomber Command's war.

In the final phase of the World War II, the Allies launched a bombing campaign that inflicted unprecedented destruction on Germany. This work attempts to document life under the Allied bombing, and renders the annihilation of cities such as Dresden.

During 1942 and 1943 the striking power of RAF Bomber Command was transformed by the arrival of heavy bombers, advanced navigation and blind bombing systems, and new tactics to concentrate the bombers over the target and swamp the German defences. By October 1944 most of Germany's cities were in ruins, yet the bombing continued to intensify, reaching unprecedented levels in the final seven months of the air campaign. The value of further area raids was questioned during the opening months of 1945, yet the Allies destroyed the remaining cities in a bid to hasten the end of the war. The handful of German cities still largely unscathed in early February 1945 included Dresden, which was obliterated on 13 February. Ten days later, the South German city of Pforzheim was destined to suffer the same fate.??This book commemorates the efforts of the aircrew members who risked their lives, consolidating a host of intriguing first-hand accounts. It also considers Pforzheim as a representative community under National Socialist rule. The city's survivors remember the horror of the raid and its aftermath, including eventual occupation by French Colonial troops and, subsequently, American forces. Tony does an admirable job of presenting historical context when considering actions in times of extreme trauma and his narrative offers an intriguing, engaging and poignant evocation of the closing months of Bomber Command's war.

In the final phase of World War II, Germany suffered destruction by bombing of an unprecedented scale. Beginning in 1942 and continuing to the last months of the war, the Allies carried out extensive bombing of German cities with its main target on industrial sites. The attacks virtually destroyed a number of cities including Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Essen, Freiburg, and Dortmund and left large parts of Berlin and Munich in ruins. The number of civilians killed in these bombings is estimated at anywhere between 420,000 and 570,000. For a long time, Germans avoided public discussions of these events. Recently, however, things have started to change.

Inspector general of fire prevention for Germany during World War 2 joins the Allies who question the bombing of enemy cities.

This book is the only full-scale account of the strategic air offensive against Germany published in the last twenty years, and is the only one that treats the British and the Americans with parity. Much of what Levine writes about British operations will be unfamiliar to American readers. He has stressed the importance of winning air superiority and the role of escort fighters in strategic bombing, and has given more attention to the German side than most writers on air warfare have. Levine gets past a simple account of what we did to them and describes the target systems and German countermeasures in detail, providing exact yet dramatic accounts of the great bomber operations--the Ruhr dams, Ploesti, and Regensburg and Schweinfurt. The book is broad-guaged, touching many matters, from the development of bombing doctrine before the war to the technical development of the Luftwaffe and the RAF, jets and V-weapons, to the role of the heavy bombers in supporting land and sea operations. Levine stresses the impact of bombing on the war, and generally endorses the strategic air campaign as worthwhile and effective. But he concludes that many mistakes were made by the Allies--both the British and the Americans--in tactics, the development of equipment, and in the selection of targets. Levine sees strategic bombing as a powerful tool that was often misused, particularly when the doctrine of area bombing flourished. Scholars, students, and buffs interested in World War II and/or the history of aviation will find this study of great interest.

National Bestseller An enlightening and utterly convincing re-examination of the allied aerial bombing campaign and of civilian German suffering during World War II–an essential addition to our understanding of world history. During the Second World War, Allied air forces dropped nearly two million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying some 60 cities, killing more than half a million German citizens, and leaving 80,000 pilots dead. Much of the bombing was carried out against the expressed demands of the Allied military leadership. Hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly. Focusing on the crucial period from 1942 to 1945, and using a compelling narrative approach, Fire and Fury tells the story of the American and British bombing campaign through the eyes of those involved: military and civilian command in America, Britain, and Germany, aircrew in the sky, and civilians on the ground. Acclaimed historian Randall Hansen shows that the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, was wedded to an outdated strategy whose success had never been proven; how area bombing not only failed to win the war, it probably prolonged it; and that the US campaign, which was driven by a particularly American fusion of optimism and morality, played an important and largely unrecognized role in delivering Allied victory.

A “meticulously documented” account that covers the RAF’s controversial attempt to end World War II by the aerial bombing of Berlin (Kirkus Reviews). The Battle of Berlin was the longest and most sustained bombing offensive against one target in the Second World War. Bomber Command Commander-in-Chief, Sir Arthur Harris, hoped to wreak Berlin from end to end and produce a state of devastation in which German surrender was inevitable. He dispatched nineteen major raids between August 1943 and March 1944—more than ten thousand aircraft sorties dropped over thirty thousand tons of bombs on Berlin. It was the RAF’s supreme effort to end the war by aerial bombing. But Berlin was not destroyed and the RAF lost more than six hundred aircraft and their crews. The controversy over whether the Battle of Berlin was a success or failure has continued ever since. Martin Middlebrook brings to this subject considerable experience as a military historian. In preparing his material he collected documents from both sides (many of the German ones never before used); he has also interviewed and corresponded with over four hundred of the people involved in the battle and has made trips to Germany to interview the people of Berlin and Luftwaffe aircrews. He has achieved the difficult task of bringing together both sides of the Battle of Berlin—the bombing force and the people on the ground—to tell a coherent, single story. “His straightforward narrative covers the 19 major raids, with a detailed description of three in particular, and includes recollections by British and German airmen as well as German civilians who weathered the storm.” —Publishers Weekly

Essay from the year 2003 in the subject History of Germany - National Socialism, World War II, grade: 2, University of Westminster (School of Social Science, Humanities & Languages), course: Total War: A Military History of the Second World War 1939-1945, language: English, abstract: The Strategic Bombing Offensive of the Allied Forces was one of the great military operations against Hitler-Germany. Despite of the meaning of the Strategic Bombing Offensive its significance and efficiency to the final victory over Hitler-Germany was always a topic of controversy. This controversy about the significance and efficiency of the Strategic Bombing Offensive to the final victory over Hitler-Germany took not just place under the contemporaries of the Second World War as Winston Churchill and his military advisers. This controversy is still alive, eg in the argumentations of historians as Richard Overy 1 and Noble Frankland 2 . In the following essay will be considered the efforts and results of the Strategic Bombing Offensive from 1939 to 1945. It will be discussed the efficiency of the Allied bombing to conclude finally the significance of the Strategic Bombing Offensive to the victory over Hilter-Germany. For this purpose shall be considered various primary sources as the Butt Report, the Singleton Report and the British and American surveys about the Strategic Bombing Offensive. Beside own points of view, shall be opposed the arguments of Richard Overy and Noble Frankland, the two opinion leaders of this historical subject. The Strategic Bombing Offensive is to understand as the strategic planning’s and operations of the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force against the Hitler-Germany between 1939 and 1945. Since 1943, the entry of the US 8th Air Force and later the US 25th Air Force in the Strategic Bombing Offensive is this operation as well known as Combined Bombing Offensive. The Strategic Bombing Offensive was "aimed at destroying an enemy’s war capacity through destroying war production" 3 but also aimed w ere the infrastructure and the moral of the German population. The first considerations about a strategic bombing war goes back to the First World War, however this topic went to a real issue in late 1937 when the British Bomber Command got the order to plan the destruction of the economy of its most potential enemy, Hitler-Germany. Despite of this effort, virtually less was done as the war broke out in September 1939. The Bomber Command possessed about 488 light bombers, which did not fulfill the needs. Based on the lack of range and carrying capacity of bombs the demands of a realistic destruction of Germany were not practical. [...]