The Bomb Sight Project

34 Replies to “The Bomb Sight Project”

1. It would be very interesting to see a map of the rockets fired at Israel and the map of Israel’s much more restrained reprisals.

2. I agree Sean….I expect a lot more dispersion/concentration than this map.
   Actually I am amazed at how efficiently the Greater London area was bombed….a signal example of teutonic efficiency.
   Old pictures of Berlin from above. I always assumed showed how shock waves extended to damage area or fire filled in the spaces in between hits…now I wonder.

3. Have started my re-read of “Is Paris Burning”. The Germans were very methodical.
   Fascinating to realize that there were 250,000 communist ready to go in a Paris uprising. De Gaulle rightly concerned that the communist would gain control of Paris and thusly a post-war France.

4. “The Germans began their attack of Great Britain in July 1940. At first they targeted airfields, but soon switched to bombing general strategic targets, hoping to crush British morale. Unfortunately for the Germans, British morale stayed high and the reprieve given to British airfields gave the British Air Force (the RAF) the break it needed.”
   Cheers
   Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
   1st Saint Nicolaas Army
   Army Group “True North”

5. Should keep this map handy when some lefty peacnik starts talking about Desden.

6. Here’s something similar, although not quite as spiffy, with the dots representing “(victims of) purges of Moscow residents in 1930s-50s… on a house-by-house level of detail”.
   Link.

7. “Before 1941, Berlin, at 950 kilometres (590 miles) from London, was at the extreme range attainable by the British bombers then available to the RAF. It could be bombed only at night in summer when the days were longer and skies clear—which increased the risk to Allied bombers. The first RAF raid on Berlin took place on the night of 25 August 1940; 95 aircraft were dispatched to bomb Tempelhof Airport near the centre of Berlin and Siemensstadt, of which 81 dropped their bombs in and around Berlin,[8][9] and while the damage was slight, the psychological effect on Hitler was greater. The bombing raids on Berlin prompted Hitler to order the shift of the Luftwaffe’s target from British airfields and air defences to British cities, at a time when the British air defences were critically close to collapse. It has been argued that this action may have saved the British from defeat.”
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Berlin_in_World_War_II
   Guernica certainly is the most infamous of the early German bomber attacks on civilians. The Luftwaffe’s bombing of Rotterdam apparently led to the Brits taking the gloves off, and going after infrastructure in the Ruhr, with civilian casualties. Berlin followed.
   Totally off topic, but I recently learned that the Mongols butchered 40 million souls in their conquest period. That’s about the same as the Nazis, except that the Mongols did it with Iron Age weaponry…

8. I was born in London in ’38 and lived there through some of the Blitz. That’s a really scary picture of what we went through.

9. Listen, don’t mention the war!
   I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right.
   So! It’s all forgotten now, and let’s hear no more about it. So, that’s two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering, and four Colditz salads

10. It was perhaps good for Neville Chamberlain that he died before he saw the results of his appeasement strategy. Why is it so many people stubbornly refuse to believe in the inate depravity of mankind. Oh yes, a public education system infused with feminism and secularism.

11. In reading the story, I was amazed that Glasgow only experienced 5 raids. But that was enough to demolish my family’s several real estate assets, which dramatically altered my family’s financial state (ain’t no insurance for war damage).
    I guess one has to chalk it up to Teutonic efficiency.

12. It was perhaps good for Neville Chamberlain that he died before he saw the results of his appeasement strategy. Why is it so many people stubbornly refuse to believe in the inate depravity of mankind. Oh yes, a public education system infused with feminism and secularism.

13. Bruce said “In reading the story, I was amazed that Glasgow only experienced 5 raids. But that was enough to demolish my family’s several real estate assets, which dramatically altered my family’s financial state (ain’t no insurance for war damage).
    My grandfathers house in Glasgow was also destroyed in a raid. He was blind and his four oldest were fighting in Europe at the time so they couldn’t help. I have no sympathy for the folks in Dresden.

14. Just finished re reading the first two volumes of Churchills memoirs of the war. The first describing the folly of the British and French governments is a wonderfully cautionary tale. The second describing the blitz is about the results of the first. Read ’em and weep for the 50 million people who died. For no reason except stupidity.

15. I think Chamberlain gets a bad rap. If Britain had gone to war at the time of the Munich crisis they would have fought the battle of Britain without radar and with biplanes, and lost. In the late 30’s Britain was working hard at rearming their armed forces that had basically been disbanded after WW1.

16. The reason that Dresden is a sore point is the myth that it was an ‘open city’. A few cities including Paris, Rome, Naples and Athens were declared open cities in WWII. Essentially when the invading army showed up, the defenders left the city because to defend it would bring about it’s destruction. This was not the case with Dresden as it was far behind the front lines. Dresden wasn’t bombed until late 1944 because there were other, juicier targets so people thought it would remain unscathed. A lot of refugees were concentrated in the city as a result.
    Actually, the Germans invented the concept of bombing civilian populations long before Guernica. In WWI Zeppelin raids against London began in 1915 and Gotha bombers joined them in 1917. There was also the Paris Gun that was specifically designed to bombard Paris from 80 miles away to demoralize the French into surrender.
    Sasquatch your observations are correct, blast and fire were used to destroy German cities. The standard load for Bomber Command was a 4,000lb ‘cookie’ a thin shelled high-explosive bomb, and eight or more 250lb incendiary clusters. Most German houses were stone or brick with slate shingles which made them very difficult to ignite. The blast from the 4000lb bomb would blow the slate shingles off many houses in the area making them vulnerable to the incendiary bombs which fell slowly due to small parachutes. The incendiaries would then start the houses on fire.

17. I visited Dresden six years ago, and was impressed by how careful the bombing had been. It was mostly confined to the region between the (fairly large) railway station and the bridge over the Elbe. Pretty strategic, I would say. We stayed about 2 km from the centre, and our host (a Dresdner though born after the war) said that indeed in his suburb at least the only thing bombed had been a barracks (and maybe the local Leitz factory?). Certainly the Frauenkirche was destroyed, but has been rebuilt to become the world’s youngest Baroque church. Presumably the art works (Dresden has one of the world’s great art collections) had been removed. Anyway, the Sistine Madonna of Raphael appears undamaged, and the several fine pieces by Duerer. Other buildings in the same area such as the State Opera had not been destroyed – I cannot say how badly damaged they were.
    I do not mean to make light of human casualties – mediaeval cities had high concentrations of people near their cores – and Dresden is now a rather open city in the sense of being uncluttered.
    The most lasting, psychological, damage was done by the Communists. Recovery from that is far from complete.

18. How many more marks on the map would there have been, if England had not fought back.
    You know what I mean….sort of how we “fight” our “wars” in this day and age. With one hand tied behind our backs.

19. minuteman 8:04 pm.
    You do stand alone in your analysis, well almost.
    During the war which I remember from the first day to the last, morale was recognized as a vital factor. George Orwell took part in the morale building and it’s employment. Orwell conceded it was necessary to deal in lies and subterfuge to defeat Hitler.

    The statistics show that at the time of Munich, the British Royal Airforce had six all metal fighter planes active. 1000 were on the drawing boards. The actual strength was planes built of plywood and canvas. Over 4000 of them. Those planes were delivered to the RAF in the interim period between 1938 Munich and 1939 London.

    We will really never know the state of mind of Adolf Hitler when he was threatened over his march to the Sudatenland. Even Mussolini blustered that he would mass troops on the border to aid a withdrawal.

    The high ranking Nazis were interogated by the Americans post war. It seemed to me that they told the Americans just what they wanted to hear. If what they claimed was true, Hitler was unerved and anxious about Britain and France. Those who blame Neville Chamberlain can then, with justification, say that an ultimatum would have ended Hitler’s territorial advance.

    On the other hand, as you point out, Hitler would have gone to war, the air war was almost non-existent. Molders, the top German air ace had 187 kills against European airmen. French, Dutch, Belgian and Polish. No wonder, they had plywood and canvas planes against the all metal German fighter planes.

    I repeat that we have no way of knowing whether an ultimatum by Chamberlain would have detered Hitler. It was the same Chamberlain that gave the ultimatum in 1939. Hitler arguably possibly did not believe Chamberlain. Chamberlain was not his own man then and was directed by Churchill and his four man group.

20. Neville Chamberlain, though suckered by Adolph Hitler, did not let up on weapons development and procurement.
    We must remember that the Third Reich was also building up its armaments and the General Staff did not consider Germany ready for war with France+England
    in 1939.
    My own view is that an early war (say in 1935) would have been nasty but would have fallen far short of a world war. War in 1938 would have been worse, but probably still better than what did happen. In particular, the French might have joined in, and the French forces were considerable. On the attack, they might have been effective. Certainly the General Staff feared having to fight the English and French together. After all, they had been beaten by that combination, and as the General Staff noted, the military situation had not improved since 1918.
    However, the strategic, operational, and tactical innovations by Guderian, von Mansfield, and von Rundstedt in armoured deep penetration warfare neutered the French before they got going.

21. I forgot to thank Kate for this trip back to memory lane. Now all I have to do is to find out if I can access the original application and type in the areas I lived in at that time. I lived 15 miles north west of London’s centre, until sent up to Yorkshire August 1940.

    I could hear the crump, crump of bombs at night, but to my continuing surprise, I saw but naught on my way to school next morning. To access that map would settle arguments that still remain about Ruislip, Middlesex and the bombs- or lack thereof.

    A Polish manned RAF bomber crashed next door to the school on a sunday, All crew killed. The time we kids got there all there all could be seen was a big oil patch and a kid found a Polish cap badge.

22. ..and 68 years later Germany has finally won the war, now that the UK has decided to just make themselves a province of the EU under Germany’s rule.

23. ..and 68 years later Germany has finally won the war, now that the UK has decided to just make themselves a province of the EU under Germany’s rule.

24. “You must understand that this war is not against Hitler or National Socialism, but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all, regardless of whether it is in the hands of Hitler or a Jesuit priest.”
    Winston Churchill – 1940
    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VBkkF…
    “The blood of every single Englishman is too valuable to be shed, our two people belong together racially and traditionally – this has always been my aim even if our Generals can’t grasp it.”
    Adolf Hitler (1940, after allowing the British to escape at Dunkirk)
    Page 326 – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Churchill-Hitler…

25. An ammunition train blew up where I lived (in a suburb of Manchester) but our house only suffered a cracked window. My parents left it that way until we left the house postwar as the superstition was if you replaced it you got the next bomb! I was too young to remember, but I know the family endured a V-1 raid while sitting in the backyard bomb shelter and when I started school I used to walk by the bombsites. Civvies were on the front lines in that conflict and were not “collateral damage”.

26. I had the great pleasure of meeting a woman who was a teacher during the Blitz. She told me how she survived it- what she did during and after, who was affected, and so on. It really takes one aback when you hear how someone who was there lived through it all.

27. I was touring Europe on a BMW back in the early ’70’s and stopped in at a shop that sold Barbour clothing as I wanted a Barbour Jacket for riding. I bought the coat (and goggles that had a demo pair with a .22 short bullet imbedded in one lens that did not come through. Really bullet proof.) and during the chat he climbed up a ladder in the shop and pulled down a very, very dusty box and sold me a pair of Silk Glove Liners, originally for pilots during the war. When I asked what it was like during the Blitz, he said “Wonderful!! Absolutely wonderful!! The spirit of the people was magnificent and a joy to be a part of.”

28. Five of the 10 newest comments on the article are along the “England deserved it/did much worse to German civilians” vein. I’m not sure if I should be gratified that the US isn’t unique in inciting hatred from apologists for totalitarians, or disturbed at how deep and wide spread that particular form of insanity is.

29. There is a great tv series out of Britain called “Wartime Farm”. A real eye opener of how things were during the war and how ingenuity kept things going. You engineers and gear heads will love it.

30. That should be “every known” bomb.
    They are still finding them.
    Also as to the whole “bombing thing”… the bombing of “non military assets” ( e.g. Civilians , residential areas, how ever you care to phrase it) was specifically and explicitly prohibited by the Hague convention to which all the major participants, ‘cept the Soviet Union, were parties to.
    In their OWN WORDS both the Germans _and_ _Allies_ broke both the letter and spirit of that convention and should rightly have been prosecuted for war crimes. ( And don’t tell me “they started it”
    And the sad thing was that neither strategic bombing campaign against civilian targets accomplished their goals to any measurable extent, and even the Allied Air campaign against Germany’s industry can only be described as “generally useless” (German war production did not noticeably decrease it’s rate of growth until 1944) with honorable exceptions for taking out some harbors, oil refineries and such.
    The tactical bombing campaign, on the other hand, was extremely effective, including the use of heavy bombers at the Falaise Gap, and drove the Germans to distraction.

31. The Haig convention, like all contracts survives/is valid only until one party breaches the contract.
    Yeah well, defending Chamberlain by citing the aircraft production between Munich and 1939 has caveats.
    The Luftwaffe at the time of Munich was a far cry from the massive air fleet of 1939. It is debatable if the Luftwaffe of the Munich Crisis enjoyed the qualitative/quantitative edge compared to the Luftwaffe of 1939. 90+% of the modern aircraft the Luftwaffe had in 1939, had been received AFTER the Munich Crisis.
    The success of the vaunted Bf109 over Spain, was more a reflection of the Condor Legion’s “finger four tactic” (an inovation only abandoned in the jet age). The tough (goofy looking IMHO) Soviet Polikarpov I-16, properly flown, was more than capable…sweeping all before it prior to the entrance of the German Condor Legion.
    During the Battle of France, an RAF officer was credited with a brace of BF109’s, flying an obsolescant Glouster Gladiator (biplane).
    Over Poland the commander of Goering’s Zerstorer Wing was severely injured engaging an obsolete Polish Parasol winged fighter.
    Strategic Bombing did tremendous damage to both German and British industry. In Germany’s case, dispersion of industry by Albert Speer was a big factor in Germany’s war production.
    What is mis-labeled as tactical bombing, attacks on rail, canal traffic did have an immense effect on delivery of munitions/weapons systems but IMHO that is strategic not tactical. IMHO this was not tactical….tactical would indicate air-support of the ground war….including heavy bomber attacks on fortifications, reinforcements and vehicle/troop formations.
    German reaction to Allied fighter sweeps (Rubarbs) was to avoid daylight train movements….but then the fighters hunted the locomotives in their daylight lairs….railway tunnels becoming then the only safe refuge….bridges then coming under attack.

32. Further checks on German air ace Molders reveal he had about 100 known kills. Some of these were against all metal planes during the battle of Britain. I had seen the figure somewhere of 187.
    Still the number of inferior aircraft numbered over 70 that he shot down. These were planes which used fabric for covering. Some RAF bombers were fabric types early on in the air war. Easily shot down.

33. Since this map is of the locations of known bombs, shouldn’t it be the Bomb Site project?
    Of course, if they’re relying on documents, then maybe it’s the Bomb Cite project.

34. If you look at the upper left of the map you will see a dot in Gerrards Cross. I used to play in that crater with my mates when I was a little boy. In our back garden we had a bomb shelter that dated from the Blitz.
    For a great take on the Blitz check out John Boorman’s movie Hope and Glory. It chronicles those days in a funny and moving way.