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Thanks for the picture, but as it cannot be seen here that a whole city is burning - it could be any house anywhere - I think there might be better alternatives. Get-back-world-respect 12:22, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)
As was already noted at the Dresden bombing talk page, there are thousands of pages on the internet claiming that area bombings killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in WWII were war crimes or crimes against humanity. 84.59.88.9 23:56, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
See Talk:Bombing of Dresden in World War II for more in this issue. -- Philip Baird Shearer 14:41, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
NOTE ON THE COMMENT ABOVE: You are sick and perverse. You cannot justify killing people because others killed more. If the topic of war crimes is going to be debated here, then we should not draw comparisons, only evidence.
to chrisred (irealize now what red stands for):
check for the DEUTSCHE WOCHENSCHAU. its a collection of videos concerning the life in germany during the war. in many of them you can see hitler visiting the devastated cities. do some research. im not pro nazi but i dislike when people try to make a point valid by "theorizing". -the rallies stopped when the war begun (this is widely known for those who read a bit of european history). - the VERGELTUNGWAFFEN project was speed up after Hitler visited many of the burned-to-the-ground german cities. -none of your points are valid because you havent made any SERIOUS research on the subject. you cant find everything on the net. i bet you just searched for "hitler, ruins". (by the way google, and altavista ban usually sites containting photos of hitler, so the best source for photos are books)
dont get moral on us, take your stalin mask off and quit listening to radio guevara and you will find the truth someday-
Konstantin
Goebbels had an ongoing feud with Goering, so his statements are a bit trendy . there is a famous video showing Goering visiting a ruined city (probably Hamburg). he is being driven around by his chauffer on a mercedez benz kompressor. you can see him crying (yes, cocodrile tears) and people talking to him.. in the video you can also see the famous "UNSERE MAUERN RAUCHEN ABER UNSERE HERZEN NICHT" sign hanging from the cracked walls of a collapsed building.
Goebbels was "loved" by the german people because he was one of the few who visited most of ruined cities. Fºor security reasons, or whatever Hitler didnt visit as many cities as him. And Goering visited just a few (with not other intention than to save his own ass)
i remember you that history is about facts not about personal trendy opinions. so what do you want to prove? that he didnt give a shit for civilians? well thats already proved. (neither did any of your heroes, HARRIS, CHURCHILL, ROOSVELT) but i dont see any merit in trying to distort the truth just because you "think" that a man like hitler would not bother to visit ruined cities and to assist the suffering people.
By the way the heavy bombing of Germany started in 1944 (thtat is the indiscriminate bombing against civilians).
thats the problem with you people. you are too fanatic to an ideology. (i guess you would describe Stalin as a "sensitive well-intentioned freedom lover statesman)
read books. they will help you.
KONSTANTIN
Kiddo, As far as i know Köln, Hamburg, and the Ruhr district were technically industrial and economic targets. Thats what they were blasted.
TO QUOTE MYSELF:
"By the way the heavy bombing of Germany started in 1944 (that is the indiscriminate bombing against civilians). "
Obviously the allies (Britan in this case) started to bomb german cities as early as 1939. but the systematic bombing of german cities with the purpose of terrorizing the population started in 1944. DO YOU GET IT BOY?. one thing is to bomb FACTORIES, OR OIL REFINERIES and another one is to bomb cities for the sake of TERROR. THATS CALLED TERROR BOMBING. ARE WE GETTING THE MESSAGE? THE TERROR BOMBING THEORY WAS DEVELOPED IN THE FINAL YEARS OF THE WAR.
your source is only one book. that what makes your points invalid.
one of the best books (although not the most complete) about the third reich is Allan Bullocks, "A STUDY IN TYRANNY". read it.
read book"s" kiddo (emphasis on "plural")
KONSTANTIN
There is no winner in war, only a means to the end of it. Its only long afterwards where the armchair generals will decide if the end justifed the means. 146.145.129.63 20:36, 24 July 2006 (UTC)Buggsbuny 24 July 2006
There should be something better than this "Official website of the film Asche-1945 (free to download) with a different point of view concerning the bombing of civilians.". Pukkie 09:41, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
For further reading, I would like to suggest Jörg Friedrich's book "The Fire: The bombing of Germany, 1940-1945" (Columbia University Press, New York, 2006). Having read the book, I find it to be a frank and well-documented description of the motivations behind and the results of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command's "morale bombing" campaign during the Second World War.
MisterCat
09:08, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
I should also like to suggest the following book, an account written by an eye-witness shortly after the bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and recently published in English:
MisterCat 09:46, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
This britsh area bombing directive nr. 42 lead to a systimatical attacking of the geman civil populatiuon. the british attacks were concentrated on workingclass quarters and midivael citycenters. The goal was pure terror against civilians. The amount of civilian loses were enormous. In Hamburg (55.000 dead, in Dresden betwenn 25.000 and 35.000 dead, in Pforzheim 20.277 dead ,31,4 % of all inhabitants, in Darmstadt 12.500 dead, 66.000 homeless out of former 110.000 inhabitants, Kassel 10.000 dead, Heilbronn 6500 dead, Würzburg 8500 dead etc. Churcill, Harris, Lindmann and many other bristish politicians and military personell was not sentenced for his warcrimes after the war.-- Kastorius 16:27, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Apparently, not only civilians or strategic target were the object of these bombing raids. From a 2001 article by Miles Glendenning, buildings and topographical surveys manager with the National Monuments Record of Scotland:
"This paper is not concerned with the issue of socalled terror bombing of civilians, or with air attacks in support of army campaigns, such as the allied bombing of Caen or the German bombing of Rotterdam. We are solely concerned here with deliberate 'cultural bombing', and the way in which that interacted with the concern for Heimatschutz and the citymonument. The first deliberate mass bombing of a historic city was the Royal Air Force attack which incinerated over 80 per cent of the timberbuilt Hanseatic old town of Lubeck on Palm Sunday, 28 March 1942. This attack by over 200 heavy bombers was ordered by the South African commander of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, as an experiment, to test whether bombing timberframed buildings could start an inferno large enough to be used as an easy aiming point for later waves of bombers: "I wanted my crews to be well blooded, as they say in fox hunting, to have a taste of success for a change".
'Bomber' Harris's motive thus merely seems to have been one of philistine utilitarianism; but the emotional hold of the Heimatschutz philosophy in Germany led to public outrage at the destruction of Lubeck, and calls for revenge attacks targeted precisely against the English architectural heritage. On 14 April, Hitler issued an order for the deliberate bombing of historic cities, the socalled Baedeker raids named after the guidebooks used to select the targets. The first raids hit Exeter, Bath and York, where the Guildhall was gutted: the German radio announced that "Exeter was a jewel; we have destroyed it".7
That, however, was something of an exaggeration. The fact that the German air force only had light tactical bombers meant that these retaliations could only be on a pinprick scale, compared with what was inexorably coming in the opposite direction. For example, as the attackers headed for Bath, a massive formation of RAF bombers crossed their path heading for another Hanseatic city, Rostock, where threequarters of the medieval Old Town was flattened. At a meeting three days later, Hitler raged against the destruction of Rostock, and Goebbels recorded that "he shares my opinion absolutely that cultural centres, health resorts and civilian centres must be attacked now. There is no other way of bringing the English to their senses. They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk after you have first knocked out their teeth". But - quite apart from the fact that 'Bomber' Harris was not himself an Englishman ( NONSENSE! Harris was born in England to English parents, although he spent much of his youth in Rhodesia (not South Africa. Do some research 2A00:23C5:5C87:F000:A442:D60B:9AD5:E75F ( talk) 08:02, 13 May 2020 (UTC)) most of the historic teeth being knocked out in this surreal competition continued to be German ones. In May 1942, in Operation Millennium, over 1,000 bombers rained incendiaries on Cologne, predictably using the Cathedral and the Old Town as their aiming point, and destroyed over 13,000 houses. In July 1943, in 'Operation Gomorrah' - the name itself says a lot - the week-long fire raid on Hamburg, over one-third of all buildings in the city were destroyed, including most of the historic centre and its churches, and the university library with its 800,000 volumes."
I'll try to find the link to this article - if folks are interested -and post it here. Kanitz 22:41, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
The discreption of the Mahnmal St. Nikolai is misused to blame Britain in a very bad way - I will try to change that... Citius Altius Fortius 06:45, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
Surely the Allies must have formulated some goals for the operation, and I think they should be mentioned in the article.-- Cancun771 ( talk) 13:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
These sites: [ [2]] and [ [3]] have videos, about this bombing. Agre22 ( talk) 02:52, 1 September 2008 (UTC)agre22
Hi All. IMHO, this article should cover in detail more than "Operation Gomorrah" which was only one of the several attacks on this city. There is a lot of information about "Operation Gomorrah" and it is notable enough to deserve its own wikiarticle, which I begun drafting.
Additionally, the wikilink to
Operation Gomorrah currently redirects to this article (ie: "Bombing of Hamburg in World War II"), so its kind of recursive! (this article is linking to itself).
Please if anyone has a sound reason to disagree, let me know.
Thanks and regards,
DPdH (
talk)
09:57, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Additionally, it'd be interesting to include details of other relevant bombing attacks on Hamburg. Can anyone please help with this task?
Thanks & regards,
DPdH (
talk)
02:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I have a german book >>Hans Brunswig: Feuersturm über Hamburg<<(470 pages), written by the main firefighter at that time, about all air attacks on Hamburg, offical lists about time of alarm, time of attack, viewed airplains, viewed bombs, casualties, fotos etc etc. You can find the 11th edition everywhere by internet, costs about 15 euro. mfg from german wiki - Drdoht ( talk) 01:23, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
For anyone interested in seeing what bomb-damaged Germany was like in around 1945, then there is an RAF film on YouTube that shows a sequence of shots taken from the air, including several of Hamburg, including the submarine slips where several partly-completed U-boats are visible;
[7] - part 1
[8] - part 2
The relevant section is near the end of part 2 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.82.120 ( talk) 13:53, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
The entire "Aftermath" section is completely identical to the same section on the following web page: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II#2. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Awrootbeer1123 ( talk • contribs) 21:57, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
Say no more Was Hamburg bombed? - yes Did lots of Civilians die? - yes There is not a lot else to say except, fill in details, or the NPOV rule would force deletion!!! Petebutt ( talk) 08:37, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
This article is laden with errors. I just corrected the sentence The furious winds created by the firestorm were rumoured to have the power to sweep people up off the streets like dry leaves and.
The Firestorm-phenomenon is very well researched and it is not a "rumour". It sucks cars, uprooted trees and of course people up into the air into the Firestorm centre, this applies for both assaults on Hamburg and Dresden. I have corrected this gross mistake, and added:
Some people who tried to walk along, they were pulled in by the fire, they all of the sudden dispappeard right in front of you (...) You have to save yourself or try go get as far away from the fire, because the draught pulls you in. , from a BBC-documentation of 1973. PeterBln ( talk) 17:19, 9 September 2010 (UTC) PeterBln ( talk) 20:04, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
The article states "The attack during the last week of July, 1943, Operation Gomorrah, created one of the greatest firestorms raised by the RAF and United States Army Air Force in WWII, killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 in Hamburg and practically destroying the entire city." For the deaths and wounded, statistics have been quoted in the introductory section, but for the destruction of buildings, instead of statistics, the journalistic phrase that I have placed in cursive has been used. Further on in the article, it states "Dwellings destroyed amounted to 214,350 destroyed out of 414,500". So, it would seem that "practically destroying half the city" (or perhaps 51.7%) might well be more accurate. On the other hand, perhaps "the entire city" is referring to the centre of Hamburg, but, if so, this is not clear in this paragraph, and other articles in Wikipedia refer to the whole of Hamburg as the city. Coyets ( talk) 17:03, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
What is often lost in discussions of Area Bombing (as politicized as it has become) is the historical context from which it developed. The British found early in the war that daylight attacks were too costly and decided, to reduce their own losses, to bomb mostly at night. Well, given the technological limitations of the 1939/1940 time frame that we're dealing with here, it begs the question, "what kind(s) of targets could be hit at night?" The only practical answer at the time was an entire city. Not a factory, not a shipyard, not a railyard, but a whole city. Even with the great technological strides that Bomber Command was able to eventually apply to it's campaign, the only target you could reliably hit at night, even at the end of the war, was a city. Too many people seem to project current military capabilities backwards into time and thus either place unrealistic expectations on 1940s technology, capabilities, and doctrine, or they make moralizing statements about the "should haves" and "could haves" regarding total war; second-guessing people that actually had to make decisions based on what they knew at the time and what they could reasonably accomplish. For those interested in tabulating the human costs of such decisions, keep in mind that NOT bombing Germany would have had real and dire human consequences, too. 172.190.80.79 ( talk) 21:43, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
From the article (in two different places) "Operation Gomorrah killed 42,600 people and left 37,000 wounded." These are precise figure, please can we have a citation to the source from whence they come. -- PBS ( talk) 02:02, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
Both of the german and english language wp-articles share a lack of evidence that there is still no full access to the relevant parts of the contemporary British military archives. In the past (I mean, it was 1995 or 2005), there was a decision by the British Ministry of Defense, to extend the classification of some of the relevant documents to the middle of the 21st. century. Can anyone provide a source to this? Maybe someone can help with: service responsible, date, publication source, date or condition that will let the "classification as secret" expire. -- 91.3.217.219 ( talk) 15:06, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
I can find this phrase existing back in the article as far as 2005, but a search for it online delivers wiki-mirrors and what looks like straight quotations from Wikipedia or at least very close phrasing to this article. No books turn up with the phrase that predate its use in Wikipedia. I wonder if the National archives did the same, it is after all a glossary and not an analysis of the contents of the archives? GraemeLeggett ( talk) 12:01, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
What is a "DISNEY mission"? This term is used in the section titled "Timeline", third from the last row in the table. I can find nothing, despite searching everywhere, including the referenced info by McKillop, Jack (2 July 2004), United States Army Air Forces in World War II: Combat Chronology of World War II, U.S. Federal Depository Library Program Electronic Collection (FDLP/EC) Archive. My online searches are complicated by many spurious matches with irrelevant things such as the mission statement of the Disney corporation. Possibly "DISNEY" is an acronym for some historical weapon system or wartime strategy? 50.168.166.112 ( talk) 01:02, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
...the overlay says that the planes took off "on airdomes in England". Is that "from aerodromes in England" or am I missing something? While there are (nowadays) things called "airdome", I can't see the connection with planes, nor do I see how one might take off "on" sth — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.15.66.160 ( talk) 18:36, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
Is it likely that the "unusually warm weather and good conditions" resulted in the bombing being "highly concentrated around the intended targets"? The sentence is also too long and needs to be broken up. Royalcourtier ( talk) 03:07, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
The constant bickering on the 'talk section' of this page in particular is very worrisome to me. i cannot regard the information as professional. bickering and fighting about what happened and the intentions behind it as well as some poeple actually trying to minimize the atrocities blame shifting it on hitler. excuse me? thats not very professional. i cannot possibly use this source as a good source to learn from. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A03F:26C7:1E00:BD19:F151:6157:35AC ( talk) 18:23, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
In this article, we have a description of Operation Gomorrah firebombing creating a firestorm so severe that asphalt roads ignighted and updrafting winds were strong enough to literally pull people into the sky like leaves. The chief illustration of this destruction is the image of the Eilbek district (thumbnail included for reference), currently captioned as taken in 1944 or 1945 (up to 2 years after the events of July 1943). This image, however, clearly shows a park packed with building-size adult trees and undamaged foliage. A firestorm with flames reaching 300 meters into the sky, at 800 C, hot enough for asphalt to combust somehow spares leaves and wood? The roads can't possibly have acted as firebreaks: individual blocks would be intact if that were so.
It seems that either the date attributed to this photo or the grandiose firestorm claims (attacked elsewhere on this talk page) are incorrect; certainly they are incongruous with each other.
Tofof ( talk) 02:43, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
https://www.spiegel.de/einestages/operation-gomorrha-guenter-lucks-ueber-den-hamburger-feuersturm-a-1212888.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.112.89.235 ( talk) 16:08, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
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Hello! This is to let editors know that File:Bombing of Hamburg.ogv, a featured picture used in this article, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for July 27, 2023. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2023-07-27. For the greater benefit of readers, any potential improvements or maintenance that could benefit the quality of this article should be done before its scheduled appearance on the Main Page. If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Adam Cuerden ( talk)Has about 7.9% of all FPs 23:14, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
The bombing of Hamburg in World War II by the Allies included numerous attacks on German civilians and civic infrastructure. As a large city and industrial centre, Hamburg's shipyards, U-boat pens and oil refineries were attacked throughout the war. In late July 1943, as part of a campaign of strategic bombing, the Allies launched Operation Gomorrah, an eight-day bombing campaign in Hamburg. In particular, during the 27/28 July raid carried out by the Royal Air Force (RAF), concentrated bombing created one of the largest firestorms of the war. Operation Gomorrah killed more than 37,000 people and destroyed 60% of the city's houses. An unexpected consequence of the raid was the reallocation of some German resources away from the fighting fronts. Large numbers of anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft were redeployed back to Germany, so aiding the Allies in their conduct of the ground war. This United States propaganda newsreel (above), released in August 1943, covers the Eighth Air Force's bombing of Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah. The newsreel's narrator states that Hamburg is "Germany's principal seaport and number-one war center" and that the bombing caused "devastation of war plants", but does not mention the deliberate destruction of entire residential neighborhoods. The intent was to reduce German industrial production for the war effort by making workers homeless – an opinion based on study of the effect on British factories of German bombing during the Blitz. This aerial photograph (below), taken by an RAF officer, shows part of the Hamburg district of Eilbek after this dehousing campaign; it was probably taken after the end of the war and certainly after rubble and other debris had been cleared.
Recently featured:
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Adam Cuerden ( talk)Has about 7.9% of all FPs 23:14, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
This picture is inadequately captioned in the article. As above, this will be a picture of the day in July.
The problem is that the caption does not explain that we are seeing the firebombed area some time after the raids. The streets and buildings have been carefully cleared of rubble and other debris. The clue to this is that the photograph is taken from an aircraft with a strutted high wing. (We know that it was taken by an RAF photographer.) Such an aircraft would not be over Hamburg until, at the earliest, after it had been captured by the Allied ground forces. So this is after cleanup over the period July 1943 to at least May 1945. I don't think the captions saying "Aftermath in the Eilbek district of Hamburg" is particularly useful.
The above criticism may be suggested to be WP:OR. This is where we meet the collision between what is acceptable on Commons and what is OK in Wikipedia. I suggest that this is an example of where the rules of Wikipedia are not absolute, and an informed editor's opinion allows a caption that tests WP:OR but gives a better article.
I suggest that a better caption would be something like:
the empty shells of firebombed houses in Hamburg after rubble and debris had been cleared away
Any thoughts on this?
I note that
User:Nick-D had similar comments on the picture's interpretation in the discussion at
Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Aftermath of the Bombing of Hamburg
ThoughtIdRetired (
talk)
10:59, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
"The other bombardment groups attacked the Conti rubber plant in Hanover. " personally I have never heard that company called Conti, always continental. So I had to check if the name had changed. Turns out of the several ways to refer to the company this is the colloquial (Germany only?) name. I would rather see this article refer to it by the official name, but since it involves link editing I refrained from just changing it. 46.15.193.159 ( talk) 10:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
This is the
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This article is written in British English, which has its own spelling conventions (colour, travelled, centre, defence, artefact, analyse) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus. |
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Thanks for the picture, but as it cannot be seen here that a whole city is burning - it could be any house anywhere - I think there might be better alternatives. Get-back-world-respect 12:22, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)
As was already noted at the Dresden bombing talk page, there are thousands of pages on the internet claiming that area bombings killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in WWII were war crimes or crimes against humanity. 84.59.88.9 23:56, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
See Talk:Bombing of Dresden in World War II for more in this issue. -- Philip Baird Shearer 14:41, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
NOTE ON THE COMMENT ABOVE: You are sick and perverse. You cannot justify killing people because others killed more. If the topic of war crimes is going to be debated here, then we should not draw comparisons, only evidence.
to chrisred (irealize now what red stands for):
check for the DEUTSCHE WOCHENSCHAU. its a collection of videos concerning the life in germany during the war. in many of them you can see hitler visiting the devastated cities. do some research. im not pro nazi but i dislike when people try to make a point valid by "theorizing". -the rallies stopped when the war begun (this is widely known for those who read a bit of european history). - the VERGELTUNGWAFFEN project was speed up after Hitler visited many of the burned-to-the-ground german cities. -none of your points are valid because you havent made any SERIOUS research on the subject. you cant find everything on the net. i bet you just searched for "hitler, ruins". (by the way google, and altavista ban usually sites containting photos of hitler, so the best source for photos are books)
dont get moral on us, take your stalin mask off and quit listening to radio guevara and you will find the truth someday-
Konstantin
Goebbels had an ongoing feud with Goering, so his statements are a bit trendy . there is a famous video showing Goering visiting a ruined city (probably Hamburg). he is being driven around by his chauffer on a mercedez benz kompressor. you can see him crying (yes, cocodrile tears) and people talking to him.. in the video you can also see the famous "UNSERE MAUERN RAUCHEN ABER UNSERE HERZEN NICHT" sign hanging from the cracked walls of a collapsed building.
Goebbels was "loved" by the german people because he was one of the few who visited most of ruined cities. Fºor security reasons, or whatever Hitler didnt visit as many cities as him. And Goering visited just a few (with not other intention than to save his own ass)
i remember you that history is about facts not about personal trendy opinions. so what do you want to prove? that he didnt give a shit for civilians? well thats already proved. (neither did any of your heroes, HARRIS, CHURCHILL, ROOSVELT) but i dont see any merit in trying to distort the truth just because you "think" that a man like hitler would not bother to visit ruined cities and to assist the suffering people.
By the way the heavy bombing of Germany started in 1944 (thtat is the indiscriminate bombing against civilians).
thats the problem with you people. you are too fanatic to an ideology. (i guess you would describe Stalin as a "sensitive well-intentioned freedom lover statesman)
read books. they will help you.
KONSTANTIN
Kiddo, As far as i know Köln, Hamburg, and the Ruhr district were technically industrial and economic targets. Thats what they were blasted.
TO QUOTE MYSELF:
"By the way the heavy bombing of Germany started in 1944 (that is the indiscriminate bombing against civilians). "
Obviously the allies (Britan in this case) started to bomb german cities as early as 1939. but the systematic bombing of german cities with the purpose of terrorizing the population started in 1944. DO YOU GET IT BOY?. one thing is to bomb FACTORIES, OR OIL REFINERIES and another one is to bomb cities for the sake of TERROR. THATS CALLED TERROR BOMBING. ARE WE GETTING THE MESSAGE? THE TERROR BOMBING THEORY WAS DEVELOPED IN THE FINAL YEARS OF THE WAR.
your source is only one book. that what makes your points invalid.
one of the best books (although not the most complete) about the third reich is Allan Bullocks, "A STUDY IN TYRANNY". read it.
read book"s" kiddo (emphasis on "plural")
KONSTANTIN
There is no winner in war, only a means to the end of it. Its only long afterwards where the armchair generals will decide if the end justifed the means. 146.145.129.63 20:36, 24 July 2006 (UTC)Buggsbuny 24 July 2006
There should be something better than this "Official website of the film Asche-1945 (free to download) with a different point of view concerning the bombing of civilians.". Pukkie 09:41, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
For further reading, I would like to suggest Jörg Friedrich's book "The Fire: The bombing of Germany, 1940-1945" (Columbia University Press, New York, 2006). Having read the book, I find it to be a frank and well-documented description of the motivations behind and the results of the Royal Air Force Bomber Command's "morale bombing" campaign during the Second World War.
MisterCat
09:08, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
I should also like to suggest the following book, an account written by an eye-witness shortly after the bombings of Hamburg in 1943 and recently published in English:
MisterCat 09:46, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
This britsh area bombing directive nr. 42 lead to a systimatical attacking of the geman civil populatiuon. the british attacks were concentrated on workingclass quarters and midivael citycenters. The goal was pure terror against civilians. The amount of civilian loses were enormous. In Hamburg (55.000 dead, in Dresden betwenn 25.000 and 35.000 dead, in Pforzheim 20.277 dead ,31,4 % of all inhabitants, in Darmstadt 12.500 dead, 66.000 homeless out of former 110.000 inhabitants, Kassel 10.000 dead, Heilbronn 6500 dead, Würzburg 8500 dead etc. Churcill, Harris, Lindmann and many other bristish politicians and military personell was not sentenced for his warcrimes after the war.-- Kastorius 16:27, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
Apparently, not only civilians or strategic target were the object of these bombing raids. From a 2001 article by Miles Glendenning, buildings and topographical surveys manager with the National Monuments Record of Scotland:
"This paper is not concerned with the issue of socalled terror bombing of civilians, or with air attacks in support of army campaigns, such as the allied bombing of Caen or the German bombing of Rotterdam. We are solely concerned here with deliberate 'cultural bombing', and the way in which that interacted with the concern for Heimatschutz and the citymonument. The first deliberate mass bombing of a historic city was the Royal Air Force attack which incinerated over 80 per cent of the timberbuilt Hanseatic old town of Lubeck on Palm Sunday, 28 March 1942. This attack by over 200 heavy bombers was ordered by the South African commander of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, as an experiment, to test whether bombing timberframed buildings could start an inferno large enough to be used as an easy aiming point for later waves of bombers: "I wanted my crews to be well blooded, as they say in fox hunting, to have a taste of success for a change".
'Bomber' Harris's motive thus merely seems to have been one of philistine utilitarianism; but the emotional hold of the Heimatschutz philosophy in Germany led to public outrage at the destruction of Lubeck, and calls for revenge attacks targeted precisely against the English architectural heritage. On 14 April, Hitler issued an order for the deliberate bombing of historic cities, the socalled Baedeker raids named after the guidebooks used to select the targets. The first raids hit Exeter, Bath and York, where the Guildhall was gutted: the German radio announced that "Exeter was a jewel; we have destroyed it".7
That, however, was something of an exaggeration. The fact that the German air force only had light tactical bombers meant that these retaliations could only be on a pinprick scale, compared with what was inexorably coming in the opposite direction. For example, as the attackers headed for Bath, a massive formation of RAF bombers crossed their path heading for another Hanseatic city, Rostock, where threequarters of the medieval Old Town was flattened. At a meeting three days later, Hitler raged against the destruction of Rostock, and Goebbels recorded that "he shares my opinion absolutely that cultural centres, health resorts and civilian centres must be attacked now. There is no other way of bringing the English to their senses. They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk after you have first knocked out their teeth". But - quite apart from the fact that 'Bomber' Harris was not himself an Englishman ( NONSENSE! Harris was born in England to English parents, although he spent much of his youth in Rhodesia (not South Africa. Do some research 2A00:23C5:5C87:F000:A442:D60B:9AD5:E75F ( talk) 08:02, 13 May 2020 (UTC)) most of the historic teeth being knocked out in this surreal competition continued to be German ones. In May 1942, in Operation Millennium, over 1,000 bombers rained incendiaries on Cologne, predictably using the Cathedral and the Old Town as their aiming point, and destroyed over 13,000 houses. In July 1943, in 'Operation Gomorrah' - the name itself says a lot - the week-long fire raid on Hamburg, over one-third of all buildings in the city were destroyed, including most of the historic centre and its churches, and the university library with its 800,000 volumes."
I'll try to find the link to this article - if folks are interested -and post it here. Kanitz 22:41, 10 November 2006 (UTC)
The discreption of the Mahnmal St. Nikolai is misused to blame Britain in a very bad way - I will try to change that... Citius Altius Fortius 06:45, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
Surely the Allies must have formulated some goals for the operation, and I think they should be mentioned in the article.-- Cancun771 ( talk) 13:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
These sites: [ [2]] and [ [3]] have videos, about this bombing. Agre22 ( talk) 02:52, 1 September 2008 (UTC)agre22
Hi All. IMHO, this article should cover in detail more than "Operation Gomorrah" which was only one of the several attacks on this city. There is a lot of information about "Operation Gomorrah" and it is notable enough to deserve its own wikiarticle, which I begun drafting.
Additionally, the wikilink to
Operation Gomorrah currently redirects to this article (ie: "Bombing of Hamburg in World War II"), so its kind of recursive! (this article is linking to itself).
Please if anyone has a sound reason to disagree, let me know.
Thanks and regards,
DPdH (
talk)
09:57, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
Additionally, it'd be interesting to include details of other relevant bombing attacks on Hamburg. Can anyone please help with this task?
Thanks & regards,
DPdH (
talk)
02:43, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I have a german book >>Hans Brunswig: Feuersturm über Hamburg<<(470 pages), written by the main firefighter at that time, about all air attacks on Hamburg, offical lists about time of alarm, time of attack, viewed airplains, viewed bombs, casualties, fotos etc etc. You can find the 11th edition everywhere by internet, costs about 15 euro. mfg from german wiki - Drdoht ( talk) 01:23, 29 November 2009 (UTC)
For anyone interested in seeing what bomb-damaged Germany was like in around 1945, then there is an RAF film on YouTube that shows a sequence of shots taken from the air, including several of Hamburg, including the submarine slips where several partly-completed U-boats are visible;
[7] - part 1
[8] - part 2
The relevant section is near the end of part 2 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.82.120 ( talk) 13:53, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
The entire "Aftermath" section is completely identical to the same section on the following web page: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II#2. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Awrootbeer1123 ( talk • contribs) 21:57, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
Say no more Was Hamburg bombed? - yes Did lots of Civilians die? - yes There is not a lot else to say except, fill in details, or the NPOV rule would force deletion!!! Petebutt ( talk) 08:37, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
This article is laden with errors. I just corrected the sentence The furious winds created by the firestorm were rumoured to have the power to sweep people up off the streets like dry leaves and.
The Firestorm-phenomenon is very well researched and it is not a "rumour". It sucks cars, uprooted trees and of course people up into the air into the Firestorm centre, this applies for both assaults on Hamburg and Dresden. I have corrected this gross mistake, and added:
Some people who tried to walk along, they were pulled in by the fire, they all of the sudden dispappeard right in front of you (...) You have to save yourself or try go get as far away from the fire, because the draught pulls you in. , from a BBC-documentation of 1973. PeterBln ( talk) 17:19, 9 September 2010 (UTC) PeterBln ( talk) 20:04, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
The article states "The attack during the last week of July, 1943, Operation Gomorrah, created one of the greatest firestorms raised by the RAF and United States Army Air Force in WWII, killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 in Hamburg and practically destroying the entire city." For the deaths and wounded, statistics have been quoted in the introductory section, but for the destruction of buildings, instead of statistics, the journalistic phrase that I have placed in cursive has been used. Further on in the article, it states "Dwellings destroyed amounted to 214,350 destroyed out of 414,500". So, it would seem that "practically destroying half the city" (or perhaps 51.7%) might well be more accurate. On the other hand, perhaps "the entire city" is referring to the centre of Hamburg, but, if so, this is not clear in this paragraph, and other articles in Wikipedia refer to the whole of Hamburg as the city. Coyets ( talk) 17:03, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
What is often lost in discussions of Area Bombing (as politicized as it has become) is the historical context from which it developed. The British found early in the war that daylight attacks were too costly and decided, to reduce their own losses, to bomb mostly at night. Well, given the technological limitations of the 1939/1940 time frame that we're dealing with here, it begs the question, "what kind(s) of targets could be hit at night?" The only practical answer at the time was an entire city. Not a factory, not a shipyard, not a railyard, but a whole city. Even with the great technological strides that Bomber Command was able to eventually apply to it's campaign, the only target you could reliably hit at night, even at the end of the war, was a city. Too many people seem to project current military capabilities backwards into time and thus either place unrealistic expectations on 1940s technology, capabilities, and doctrine, or they make moralizing statements about the "should haves" and "could haves" regarding total war; second-guessing people that actually had to make decisions based on what they knew at the time and what they could reasonably accomplish. For those interested in tabulating the human costs of such decisions, keep in mind that NOT bombing Germany would have had real and dire human consequences, too. 172.190.80.79 ( talk) 21:43, 14 May 2011 (UTC)
From the article (in two different places) "Operation Gomorrah killed 42,600 people and left 37,000 wounded." These are precise figure, please can we have a citation to the source from whence they come. -- PBS ( talk) 02:02, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
Both of the german and english language wp-articles share a lack of evidence that there is still no full access to the relevant parts of the contemporary British military archives. In the past (I mean, it was 1995 or 2005), there was a decision by the British Ministry of Defense, to extend the classification of some of the relevant documents to the middle of the 21st. century. Can anyone provide a source to this? Maybe someone can help with: service responsible, date, publication source, date or condition that will let the "classification as secret" expire. -- 91.3.217.219 ( talk) 15:06, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
I can find this phrase existing back in the article as far as 2005, but a search for it online delivers wiki-mirrors and what looks like straight quotations from Wikipedia or at least very close phrasing to this article. No books turn up with the phrase that predate its use in Wikipedia. I wonder if the National archives did the same, it is after all a glossary and not an analysis of the contents of the archives? GraemeLeggett ( talk) 12:01, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
What is a "DISNEY mission"? This term is used in the section titled "Timeline", third from the last row in the table. I can find nothing, despite searching everywhere, including the referenced info by McKillop, Jack (2 July 2004), United States Army Air Forces in World War II: Combat Chronology of World War II, U.S. Federal Depository Library Program Electronic Collection (FDLP/EC) Archive. My online searches are complicated by many spurious matches with irrelevant things such as the mission statement of the Disney corporation. Possibly "DISNEY" is an acronym for some historical weapon system or wartime strategy? 50.168.166.112 ( talk) 01:02, 29 October 2014 (UTC)
...the overlay says that the planes took off "on airdomes in England". Is that "from aerodromes in England" or am I missing something? While there are (nowadays) things called "airdome", I can't see the connection with planes, nor do I see how one might take off "on" sth — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.15.66.160 ( talk) 18:36, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
Is it likely that the "unusually warm weather and good conditions" resulted in the bombing being "highly concentrated around the intended targets"? The sentence is also too long and needs to be broken up. Royalcourtier ( talk) 03:07, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
The constant bickering on the 'talk section' of this page in particular is very worrisome to me. i cannot regard the information as professional. bickering and fighting about what happened and the intentions behind it as well as some poeple actually trying to minimize the atrocities blame shifting it on hitler. excuse me? thats not very professional. i cannot possibly use this source as a good source to learn from. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A03F:26C7:1E00:BD19:F151:6157:35AC ( talk) 18:23, 1 June 2017 (UTC)
In this article, we have a description of Operation Gomorrah firebombing creating a firestorm so severe that asphalt roads ignighted and updrafting winds were strong enough to literally pull people into the sky like leaves. The chief illustration of this destruction is the image of the Eilbek district (thumbnail included for reference), currently captioned as taken in 1944 or 1945 (up to 2 years after the events of July 1943). This image, however, clearly shows a park packed with building-size adult trees and undamaged foliage. A firestorm with flames reaching 300 meters into the sky, at 800 C, hot enough for asphalt to combust somehow spares leaves and wood? The roads can't possibly have acted as firebreaks: individual blocks would be intact if that were so.
It seems that either the date attributed to this photo or the grandiose firestorm claims (attacked elsewhere on this talk page) are incorrect; certainly they are incongruous with each other.
Tofof ( talk) 02:43, 27 August 2017 (UTC)
https://www.spiegel.de/einestages/operation-gomorrha-guenter-lucks-ueber-den-hamburger-feuersturm-a-1212888.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.112.89.235 ( talk) 16:08, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
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Hello! This is to let editors know that File:Bombing of Hamburg.ogv, a featured picture used in this article, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for July 27, 2023. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2023-07-27. For the greater benefit of readers, any potential improvements or maintenance that could benefit the quality of this article should be done before its scheduled appearance on the Main Page. If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Adam Cuerden ( talk)Has about 7.9% of all FPs 23:14, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
The bombing of Hamburg in World War II by the Allies included numerous attacks on German civilians and civic infrastructure. As a large city and industrial centre, Hamburg's shipyards, U-boat pens and oil refineries were attacked throughout the war. In late July 1943, as part of a campaign of strategic bombing, the Allies launched Operation Gomorrah, an eight-day bombing campaign in Hamburg. In particular, during the 27/28 July raid carried out by the Royal Air Force (RAF), concentrated bombing created one of the largest firestorms of the war. Operation Gomorrah killed more than 37,000 people and destroyed 60% of the city's houses. An unexpected consequence of the raid was the reallocation of some German resources away from the fighting fronts. Large numbers of anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft were redeployed back to Germany, so aiding the Allies in their conduct of the ground war. This United States propaganda newsreel (above), released in August 1943, covers the Eighth Air Force's bombing of Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah. The newsreel's narrator states that Hamburg is "Germany's principal seaport and number-one war center" and that the bombing caused "devastation of war plants", but does not mention the deliberate destruction of entire residential neighborhoods. The intent was to reduce German industrial production for the war effort by making workers homeless – an opinion based on study of the effect on British factories of German bombing during the Blitz. This aerial photograph (below), taken by an RAF officer, shows part of the Hamburg district of Eilbek after this dehousing campaign; it was probably taken after the end of the war and certainly after rubble and other debris had been cleared.
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Adam Cuerden ( talk)Has about 7.9% of all FPs 23:14, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
This picture is inadequately captioned in the article. As above, this will be a picture of the day in July.
The problem is that the caption does not explain that we are seeing the firebombed area some time after the raids. The streets and buildings have been carefully cleared of rubble and other debris. The clue to this is that the photograph is taken from an aircraft with a strutted high wing. (We know that it was taken by an RAF photographer.) Such an aircraft would not be over Hamburg until, at the earliest, after it had been captured by the Allied ground forces. So this is after cleanup over the period July 1943 to at least May 1945. I don't think the captions saying "Aftermath in the Eilbek district of Hamburg" is particularly useful.
The above criticism may be suggested to be WP:OR. This is where we meet the collision between what is acceptable on Commons and what is OK in Wikipedia. I suggest that this is an example of where the rules of Wikipedia are not absolute, and an informed editor's opinion allows a caption that tests WP:OR but gives a better article.
I suggest that a better caption would be something like:
the empty shells of firebombed houses in Hamburg after rubble and debris had been cleared away
Any thoughts on this?
I note that
User:Nick-D had similar comments on the picture's interpretation in the discussion at
Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/Aftermath of the Bombing of Hamburg
ThoughtIdRetired (
talk)
10:59, 25 May 2023 (UTC)
"The other bombardment groups attacked the Conti rubber plant in Hanover. " personally I have never heard that company called Conti, always continental. So I had to check if the name had changed. Turns out of the several ways to refer to the company this is the colloquial (Germany only?) name. I would rather see this article refer to it by the official name, but since it involves link editing I refrained from just changing it. 46.15.193.159 ( talk) 10:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)