During World War II, the whole of Europe was in a complete disaster. Germany conquered many European countries and tortured numerous numbers of Jews to death. The cruelty, ruthlessness and inhumanity of Germans took place in everywhere of Europe. To put this to an end, the Americans and the British decided to defeat Germany by bombing one of the largest cities in Germany, which had a mass artillery production as well as a rich cultural center called, “Florence on the Elbe” (Hickman). The firebombing of Dresden was known as a military bombing. The British and United States Air Force bombed it on February 13 to February 15, 1945 in World War II. They dropped 3900 tons of firebombs in Dresden. (). Due to the large number of firebombs, the city was in a firestorm, which destroyed 15 square miles of land. There were more than 300,000 civilians burned alive. Thus, the bombing of Dresden was a monstrous and evil attack on the people of Dresden which weakened the morale of the German people by diminishing their ability to produce goods, destroying their infrastructure and killing many of the citizens.
In order to weaken Germans and to demoralize them, the Americans and the British dropped thousands of firebombs on the Dresden. Their intention was to destroy Dresden’s industrial areas, which was the largest remaining industrial sites, inclusive of over hundred factories in various sizes. (Hickman). Moreover, it possessed the facility of producing poison gas, artillery, and aircraft components. Rail hub was also targeted which was running north - south to Berlin, Vienna and east-west Munich so that the aggressiveness of Hitler would be
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laid back. As soon as their airstrike got started, the firebombs were dashed into the industrial zo...
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...all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from” (Metzger).
People tried to escape from the fire, unfortunately, the strong heated wind pull them back to the burning places. Depressingly, there were between 35,000 to 135,000 people killed. (Hickman).
Although the bombing of Dresden created Hitler surrender and end the World War II in Europe, these has been controversy upon Britain and America’s decision of using firebombs among the public. Even though several years have passed and the German has accomplished the rebuilding of Dresden, civilians from the city still expose an English accent and they give a dirty look to them. Some people clearly described it as a terror attack, which should be considered as a war crime and people who authorized to use those kinds of fire weapons are war criminals.
Why the Major Cities of Britain were Bombed by the Germans in 1940 and 1941
An article from the Evening Standard, published on the 13th January 1941, states that ‘Seventeen women and children who were trapped in the basement of a London house damaged by a bomb....
high winds. Many of the people were burned and buried in the smashed up bricks
The fire, which began on October 8, 1871, spread so quickly it was unmanageable. One of the reasons the fire became so irrepressible is that the firefighters were already exhausted from having fought a fire the day before. The firemen underestimated the potential of this fire when they first responded to it. As a result of the fire the previous day, the firefighters’ equipment, including the fire hose, was not in the best condition. Furthermore, the hose that was available was in short supply (Murphy 30).
Hamburg was largely responsible for the production of German U-boats. Subsequently it was the target of numerous air raids. In an attempt to protect the fragile industry, three huge anti-aircraft artilleries were built.
...h deployed an air attack on the development site. Production needed to be moved, so it was. A new site was developed underground. The workers were slave laborers from Nazi concentration camps. Conditions were inhumane, causing 10% of the workers to die every month. With workers coming from concentration camps, production was ramped up, but it was rushed. So, just over 4,000 V-2’s were produced in 1944 (Sheehan). Now it was time to launch the bombs. The allies quickly realized that they had nothing in their arsenal to defend against the V-2’s (Klam). About 1,000 V-2’s were launced at England, about half landed in London, killing 9,000 Londoners (Sheehan). In all over 4,300 V-2’s were deployed between September 6, 1944 and March 27,1945. Their targets included London, Southeast England, Antwerp and other. Many hit targets while others exploded prematurely (Gatland).
Mrs. Rayfield wrote a great article about the devastation left over after this massive fire. I found that her accounts were very detailed and had good pictures to go along with them. I decided to use this source in my essay because she also showed the good effect that the fire had on the city not only the bad. She had a complete different point of view.
After Truman decided to bomb Japan, they had to plan it out. They first had to decide where to release the bomb. They ended up choosing Hiroshima, Japan and Nagasaki, Japan as their two locations. Hiroshima was a significant military city in the war. It confined two army headquarters and was Japan’s communication center (World War 2 Atomic Bomb 1). Hiroshima was also a huge industrial city and had not been bombed before so it would let Japan see the wrath of the United States (Koeller 1). The planning and actual event of the bombing went great. On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 in the morning the bomb was dropped. The bomb that landed in Hiroshima was called the “Little Boy” (World War 2 Atomic Bomb 2). The bomb ended up killing about 170,000 people. 70,000 people died the first day and 100,000 people died in the next few months due to the radioactivity of the bomb and burns fro...
Many questionable methods were used to defeat the opposing sides in the war, such as the 3-day bombing of Dresden, which resulted in numerous deaths, mass destruction, and a huge devastation amongst the citizens in the city during the attack. Details about such things are left out of textbooks, and as a result, some people believe that WWII was a flawless victory, and a thing to be celebrated. However, such is not the case. WWII was not a good war for America, and was filled with many
17,440 people out of the total population of 93,000. A fire burned most of the city and
Hundreds of people died that day. A good portion of the women who worked at the factory died from the fire, while the others decided to jump out of the building to their death. At the end of the day, the families who had suffered a loss due to the fire received at most $75 as compensation. The corporation learned nothing from the disaster. However, this was an eye opener for some of the journalists who wanted to make a change.
" The air was blue with smoke and this plus the tremendous heat from the boilers drew off the oxygen. Everyone suffered from the headaches and men who'd lived outdoors all their lives passed out because they couldn't breathe." (Findley, 58)
"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a complete treatise on the World War II bombing of Dresden. The main character, Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women. During the February 13, 1945, firebombing by Allied aircraft, the prisoners take shelter in an underground meat locker. When they emerge, the city has been levelled and they are forced to dig corpses out of the rubble. The story of Billy Pilgrim is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived the firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number of deaths in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes sums up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: 'Be kind. Don't hurt. Death is coming for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back through salty eyes than the Deity that destroyed those cities of the plain in order to save them.' The reviewer concludes that 'Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book we need to read, and to reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital to the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions.New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees larger reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact which may be the fairest example of American cultural change. . . . Shunned as distastefully low-brow . . . and insufficiently commercial to suit the exploitative tastes of high-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazine and pulp paperback circulation. Then in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, which so perfectly caught America's transformative mood that its story and structure became best-selling metaphors for the new age. '"Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut 'avoids framing his story in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.
shelling and artillery fire. Everyday the city was hit by some 4,000 shells. Targets included hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, synagogues, libraries, and museums.
When the “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima in less than a second it the fireball had consumed 900 feet of land. The damage only got worse from there on. As time ticked by two-thirds of Hiroshima’s buildings were destroyed and a black rain fell down on places untouched by the bomb. Black rain is dirt, dust, soot and highly radioactive particles that were sucked into the air at the time of the fireball. At this point America knew what is was doing yet they continued to wreck Japan. When the second bomb, “Fat Man”, was dropped on Nagasaki the terror was just the same. In seconds 40 percent of Nagasaki was in ruins. Not only did it blow apart everything in sight, but it also haunted the crops and lives for years after the bomb. “Two years after the bombing plants growing at ground zero presaged the frightening