Is it true that firestorms (as in the weather phenomenon) that occurred during the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden were deliberate outcomes and not just a happenstance result of fire bombing? Postwar accounts, especially Allied sources, seem to allude to this, though not all firebombings resulted in firestorms.
Did war planners really have both the understanding of the combustion physics and meteorological prerequisites that would be needed to deliberately spark these specific kinds of conflagrations?
>The weather, unusually hot and dry for this part of Germany, provided near perfect atmospheric conditions for what turned into a city-consuming cyclone of fire. Within twenty minutes after the raid began, a column of turbulent, heated air rose more than two and a half miles into the night sky. Superheated air raced through the city at speeds in excess of 150 miles per hour, sending terrified people scurrying to air raid cellars, their shirts and dresses lit up like torches. Inside the shelters, thousands suffocated as the voracious fire sucked oxygen out of the atmosphere. The bodies of other victims were baked and reduced to ashes by radiant heat. “It was as though they had been placed in a crematorium, which was indeed what each shelter proved to be,” said a secret German report. “The fortunate were those who jumped into the canals and waterways and remained swimming or standing up to their necks in water for hours until the heat should die down.” That night, the oily water in the industrial canals caught fire and people trapped there “became insane,” said one witness.
>In shelters hit by fire sticks - small, highly lethal incendiary bombs - children “yelled like animals,” reported a witness. “One woman next to me took a knife and cut her child’s wrists. Then she cut her own, and slipped down on her, calling out: ‘Darling, my darling, we shall soon see Daddy now.’”
>The brains of fire victims fell from their burst temples and tiny children “lay like fried eels on the pavement. Even in death,” said a witness, “they showed signs of how they must have suffered—their hands and arms stretched out as if to protect themselves from that pitiless heat.”
>The fire storm, the first ever created by bombing, was a deliberate act, achieved by a lethal combination of high-explosive and incendiary bombs. Enormous 4,000-pound blast bombs were then dropped into the inferno to blow craters in the roads in order to impede the firefighters.
>>28297348
Damn son.
War is some shit.
>>28297348
Sauce for the gander.
>drop a shitload of ordnance
>oh but we didn't mean for the entire city to catch on fire :^)
>>28297277
They weren't deliberate outcomes but accidents. Brits tried hard as fuck to replicate Hamburg firestorms but wasn't able to.
>>28297348
and people talk shit on nukes
>>28298199
Apparently the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused a firestorm as well, but Nagasaki did not.
>>28298199
Hamburg and Dresden caused like 30k to 50k deaths, which is quite low compared to a fucking nuke.
>>28298609
The first was your traditionnal Japanese city, with mostly houses made of wood, paper and a heavy roof, whose heating was provided via a coal-fired stove. The second was an industrial town.
>>28298853
Tokyo firebombings killed more (although with more shots) than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
>>28297277
The long answer is: I'd have to dig out the eight-page thesis I did on Dresden in high school and walk you through the corporate cultures of British and American air commanders, what they hoped to achieve logistically by hammering the fuck out of a target ONCE instead of coming back every six weeks and losing more airplanes, etc.
The short answer is no. By the second day they knew it was a clusterfuck, but literally couldn't stop.
Someone would have to be the biggest shill in the world to deny that they were anything other than intentional.
Churchill explicitly admitted at several points in his memoirs that the RAF was intentionally targeting civilians.
>wheraboos sperging about m-muh dresden
>never mention the blitz
karma's a bitch
>>28299148
I don't think anyone is saying the indiscriminate firebombing wasn't intentional.
The question is about the firestorm event which killed with radiant dry heat and suffocation. A thermal column feeding a fire so large that it produced winds of flame strong enough to suck up objects like a tornado.
>>28299192
to be fair, the blitz never caused a literal column of fire two and a half miles into the sky
>>28298980
>Tokyo firebombings killed more (although with more shots) than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Tokyo firebombings actually killed fewer people than the nukes despite taking place over several years and in a far more densely populated city.
>>28299438
You reap what you sow, just like the Japanese
>>28300204
>he thinks the Japanese were nuked to inflict as large of casualties as possible and not for the exact opposite reasons
>>28300221
>Japanese were nuked because here's this neat piece of ordnance that delivers more bang for the buck.
>>28299192
Honestly I know this isn't a popular opinion on 4chan but I view ww2 germany (post 1939) the same way I view the fucking covenant from halo.
Seriously fuck those niggers
The victims in the shelters weren't cremated- they were cooked. The floors of the bunkers were covered with a couple of inches of body oil from their dead bodies being subjected to such high heat in a low-oxygen environment. The german fire teams called it "bunker water'
Most of the folks who died outdoors passed out due to carbon monoxide, then were overtaken by the fire.
The allies knew it. "They have sewn the wind, and now they shall reap the whirlwind". That's a pretty straight-forward explanation by Bomber Harris- and he was right. The German citizens were invited to join the Jews in the ovens.
>>28300496
Gee, I wonder why :^)
>>28301396
>le jew meme
I'm french catholic
>>28299449
>taking place over several years
This statement alone demonstrates why you should never post on this website.
>>28300204
This is pretty much the justification for every terrorist attack ever.
