Britain retaliated with its own night strategic bombing campaign, which built up from RAF Bomber Command's tiny beginnings in 1940 to truly massive strength by the end of the war.
The effects of strategic bombing were very poorly understood at the time and grossly overrated. Particularly in the first two years of the campaign, few understood just how little damage was caused and how rapidly the Germans were able to replace lost productional despite the obvious lessons to be learned from the United Kingdom's own survival of the Blitz.
Mid-way through the air war, it slowly began to be realized that the campaign was having very little effect. Despite an ever-increasing tonnage of bombs dispatched, the inaccuracy of delivery was such that any bomb falling within five miles of the target was deemed a "hit" for statistical purposes, and even by this standard, many bombs missed.
Indeed sometimes in post raid assessment the Germans could not decide which town, (not the installation in the town) had been the intended target because the scattering of bomb craters was so wide.These problems were dealt with in two ways: first the precision targeting of vital facilities (ball-bearing production in particular) was abandoned in favour of "area bombing".
In 1942, Professor Lindemann, the British government's leading scientific adviser with a seat in the Cabinet, presented a seminal paper to the Cabinet advocating the area bombardment of German cities in a strategic bombing campaign. It was accepted by the Cabinet and Air Marshal Harris was appointed to carry out the task. It became an important part of the total war waged against Germany.
Lindemann's paper put forward the theory of attacking major industrial centres in order to deliberately destroy as many homes and houses as possible. Working class homes, very often in cultural-historical imported midival city centers, with its predomiantly wooden Fachwerk-Style buildings, were to be targeted because they had a higher density and fire storms were more likely. This would displace the German workforce and reduce their ability to work.
His calculations showed that the RAF's Bomber Command would be able to destroy the majority of German houses located in cities quite quickly.
The plan was highly controversial even before it started, but the Cabinet thought that bombing was the only option available to directly attack Germany (as a major invasion of the continent was years away), and the Soviets were demanding that the Western Allies do something to relieve the pressure on the Eastern Front.
Few in Britain opposed this policy, but there were three notable opponents in Parliament, Bishop George Bell, and the Labour MPs Richard Stokes and Alfred Salter.
Harris, who ran the bombing campaign, said that for want of a rapier, a bludgeon was used. He felt that much as it would be far more desirable to deliver effective pin-point attacks, as the capacity to do simply did not exist, and since it was war, it was necessary to attack with whatever was at hand.
The first true practical demonstrations were on the 24 March 1942, when 234 aircraft bombed with incendaries the ancient Hanseatic port of Lübeck. This target was picked not because it was an important military target, but in fact because it was unimportant, lightly defended and, in Harris' words 'built more like a fire lighter than a city'. The ancient timber structures burned well, and the raid destroyed most of the town centre. A few days later, Rostock suffered the same fate.
However, the most startling, awesome examples of carpet bombing were the 'Thousand Bomber Raids'. Bomber Command was able by organization and drafting in as many aircraft as possible to assemble very large forces which could then attack a single area, overwhelming the defences.
The aircraft would be staggered so that they would arrive over the target in succession, the "bomber stream". On 30 May 1942, between 00:47 and 02:25 hours, in Operation Millennium 1,046 aircraft dropped over 2,000 tons of high explosive and incendaries on the medieval town of Cologne and burned it from end to end. The devastation was total. The fires could be seen 600 miles away at an altitude of 20,000 feet. Three thousand three hundred houses destroyed, 10,000 damaged.
Twelve thousand separate fires raged destroying 36 factories, damaging 270 more and leaving 45,000 people with nowhere to live or work. Only 384 civilians and 85 soldiers were killed, but thousands left the city. Bomber Command lost 40 aircraft.Two further Thousand-bomber raids raids were executed over Essen and Bremen, but neither so utterly shook both sides as the scale of the destruction at Cologne.
The effects of the massive raids using a combination of Blockbuster bombs and incendiaries created firestorms in some cites. The most extreme examples of which were caused by Operation Gomorrah (Hamburg, 45,000 dead), the attack on Kassel (10,000 dead),the attack on Darmstadt (12,300 dead), the attack on Heilbronn (8,500 dead), the attack on Pforzheim (21,260 dead, 31,7 % of all inhabitants), and the attack on Dresden (35,000 dead).
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