What do we know about the war in the West? And in the Pacific? Was there a war in Africa? Who bombed Australia? In these matters we are laymen. The ancient Romans are well known. We know the Egyptian pyramids like the back of our hand. And here, as if a history textbook was torn in half. It got stuck on the Great Patriotic War. And the Second World War, as it was not. The Soviet ideological machine drove past these events. There are no books or films. Even historians did not write dissertations on these topics. We did not participate there, which means there is nothing to spread about it. The states have lost memory of the Union's involvement in the war. Well, in retaliation, we are silent about a war other than our own, the Soviet-German one.

Erasing white spots in the history of the Second World War, let's talk about one of its stages - the blitz bombing of Great Britain.

The bombing of the Island was carried out by Germany from September 7, 1940 to May 10, 1941, as part of the "Battle of Britain". Although the "blitz" was directed at many cities across the country, it began with the bombing of London and continued for 57 consecutive nights. By the end of May 1941, more than 43,000 civilians had died in bombing raids, half of them in London. A large number of houses in London were destroyed or damaged. 1,400 thousand people lost their homes. The largest bombing of London took place on September 7, when more than 300 bombers attacked the city in the evening and another 250 at night. Large-caliber bombs caused significant damage to dams and other hydraulic structures that enclose the Thames. Over a hundred significant damage was noted, threatening to flood low-lying parts of London. To prevent a catastrophe, city utilities carried out regular restoration work. In order to avoid panic among the population, the work was carried out in strict secrecy.

Despite the fact that the authorities in London have been preparing bomb shelters since 1938, they were still in short supply, and most of them turned out to be just "dummy". Some 180,000 Londoners fled the bombings on the Underground. And although the government initially did not welcome such a decision, people simply bought tickets and waited out the raids there. Photos of cheerful, singing and dancing people in the subway, which censorship allowed to publish, cannot tell about the closeness, rats and lice that they had to deal with there. And even subway stations weren't safe from a direct bomb hit, as was the case at Bank Station, when more than a hundred people died. So most Londoners just crawled under the covers at home and prayed.

May 10, 1941 London was subjected to the last powerful air raid. 550 Luftwaffe bombers dropped about 100,000 incendiary and hundreds of conventional bombs on the city within a few hours. There were more than 2 thousand fires, 150 water mains and five docks were destroyed, 3 thousand people died. During this raid, the parliament building was badly damaged.

London was not the only city that suffered during the bombing of aircraft. Other important military and industrial centers such as Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Clydebank, Coventry, Exeter, Greenock, Sheffield, Swansea, Liverpool, Hull, Manchester, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Nottingham, Brighton, Eastbourne, Sunderland, and Southampton have endured heavy air raids and suffered a large number of casualties.

The raids were carried out by forces from 100 to 150 medium bombers. In September 1940 alone, 7,320 tons of bombs were dropped on South England, including 6,224 tons on London.

By the early summer of 1940, the British authorities had decided to evacuate children from big cities as potential targets for bombing into the countryside. In a year and a half, two million children were taken out of the cities. Londoners' children were settled in estates, country houses, sanatoriums. Many of them remained away from London throughout the war.

The British army helps in clearing the city

Fighting a fire after an air raid. Manchester. 1940

Meanwhile, Stalin and Hitler were dividing Europe. The USSR and Germany put into practice the agreements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Without a minute of failure, right on schedule, dozens of echelons with grain, metal, oil, gasoline, cotton, and so on went into the millstones of the Nazis. It was from our metal that the bombs that fell on Britain were cast, it was our bread that the German aces ate before flying to the island. This fuel was poured into the tanks of Luftwaffe bombers. But we were silent about it then, we are silent today.

Of course, the British, along with the Allies, took revenge on the Nazis, and quite cruelly. Carpet bombings of German cities are still terrifying in their consequences. This is our next article.

According to official data published by the German government in 1962, during the years of World War II, Anglo-American bomber aircraft dropped 2.690 million tons of bombs on continental Europe, of which 1.350 million tons - on Germany, 180 thousand tons - on Austria and Balkans, 590 thousand tons - for France, 370 thousand tons - for Italy, 200 thousand tons - for various purposes in Bohemia, Slovakia and Poland. Luftwaffe aircraft dropped 74,172 tons of bombs on British targets.

AFTER "EAGLE ATTACK"

On August 13, 1940, in accordance with the plan "Adlerangriff" ("Eagle Attack"), Germany launched an air offensive against Great Britain. After several bombs were accidentally dropped on London on August 24, the British retaliated by retaliating against Berlin. On September 6, Hitler ordered the bombing of British cities to begin. Particularly devastating was the raid on Coventry on November 14, 1940, during which 554 people were killed and 865 were wounded. In total, during the war during the raids on this city in 1940-1942. 1236 people died.

The British responded with massive raids on German military installations and cities. Prime Minister W. Churchill promised: "We will turn Germany into a desert." Under his pressure, on October 30, 1940, the headquarters of the British Air Force adopted a directive that provided for night air strikes on oil refineries and massive bombing of German cities. This directive, according to the British military historian B. Liddell Garth, "actually recognized the idea of ​​indiscriminate bombing." Note that the decisions of the British government on the issue of "carpet" bombing at first were not brought to the attention of even Parliament.

In November 1941, a Unison list was drawn up in England, which included 19 large German cities to be destroyed and arranged according to the degree of "flammability". The main bet was made not on high-explosive bombs, but on incendiary ones, because. it was they who caused large-scale fires and led to the greatest devastation in cities. In 1942, US aviation joined the Royal Air Force in the European theater of operations. In the opinion of the leaders of the Western allies, the actions of bomber aircraft should be regarded as a kind of replacement for the second front in Europe, the opening of which was so insistently requested by the Soviet leadership. This idea was also intensively introduced into the consciousness of the world community.

On February 14, 1942, the British Bomber Command received Churchill's directive, the main idea of ​​which was to "bomb Germany out of the war." When asked what exactly it means to "bomb out", the prime minister replied: "It means that if Germany does not stop the war, it will be charred from edge to edge." B. Liddell Hart in his work "The Second World War" emphasizes that from that moment "intimidation unconditionally became the clearly expressed policy of the British government." Night-time carpet bombing was officially recognized as the main method of combat by British bombers. Unlike the British, the American command relied on targeted bombing during daylight hours. Subsequently, US aviation did not adhere to this rule so firmly.

After the raids on the industrial cities of the Ruhr basin turned out to be ineffective, it was decided to strike at other cities in which there were flammable objects - old wooden houses and buildings, and in addition, there was a weak air defense system. With these criteria in mind, among others, Lübeck and Rostock were selected. The most successful, according to the British aviation command, was a massive raid on Lübeck on the night of March 29, 1942. 300 tons of bombs were dropped, half of them incendiary.

At the beginning of 1942, Air Marshal A. Harris, commander of the RAF Bomber Aviation, developed the "Plan 1000", under which in May-June 1942 about 1000 bombers carried out devastating night raids on Cologne, Essen and Bremen. Mostly residential areas were destroyed. So, during the raid on Essen, the Krupp factories located in it did not suffer at all.

Harris set a goal: to significantly increase the number of bombers and destroy at least 50 major German cities. In 1942, Berlin, Emden, Dusseldorf, Wilhelmshaven, Hamburg, Danzig, Kiel, Duisburg, Frankfurt, Schweinfurt, Stuttgart, Warnemünde, etc. were subjected to air raids. However, the impact of the raids on the industry and economy of Germany was extremely insignificant - the production of weapons was steadily increasing. The morale of the German population also failed to undermine. In this regard, the modern English historian and former pilot R. Jackson writes: "The strategic offensive of the British bomber command against Germany during the first three years of the war ended in complete failure."

"DIRECT FIRE"

In 1943, a new stage of Allied strategic bombing began in Europe. On January 21, at a conference in Casablanca, the directive of the OKNSh CCS 166/1/D "On strengthening the joint air offensive against Germany" was adopted. Its main goal: "The consistent and growing destruction and disorder of the military, industrial and economic system of Germany and the undermining of the morale of the German people to such an extent that their ability to armed resistance will inevitably weaken." The conference managed to settle differences over the tactics of bombing: the 8th US Air Force under the command of Lieutenant General A. Eaker was to carry out targeted bombing of industrial facilities in the daytime, and the British bomber aviation, led by A. Harris, was to carry out night massive bombardments in areas. From now on, air raids were to be carried out around the clock. From the beginning of February to the end of June 1943, British bombers made 52 massive night raids on German cities.

In early June, on the basis of the mentioned directive, a plan was developed for the "United Bomber Offensive from the British Isles" under the code name "Pointblank" ("Direct fire"). As part of this plan, on August 17, the Americans launched targeted attacks on large ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt and Regensburg. As a result, the output of products, which are extremely important for completing military equipment, decreased by 38%. According to German Minister of Armaments A. Speer, "we continued to be saved by the fact that British aircraft continued to randomly bomb other cities."

According to the Pointblank plan, from July 25 to August 3, 1943, Operation Gomorrah was carried out - a massive multi-day raid on the second largest city in Germany - Hamburg. 3095 British and American bombers participated in it. 8621 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, 2/3 of which were incendiary. After the bombing, the fire raged in the city for several more days, and the column of smoke reached 6 km. According to a post-war report by the British Strategic Bombing Survey, the city was 55% to 60% destroyed, with 75% to 80% of that destruction due to fire. According to various sources, from 46 thousand to 100 thousand people died, over 200 thousand were injured, burned and maimed. 750 thousand people were left homeless. Until the end of the war, another 69 raids were made on this city.

According to official British data, by November 1943, 167,230 tons of bombs had been dropped on 38 major German cities, and about 8,400 hectares of built-up area (25% of the total area subjected to raids) had been destroyed. However, the level of German production continued to grow, mainly due to the skillful reorganization and dispersal of enterprises. On November 18, 1943, the "battle for Berlin" began, which continued until March 1944, although the city was subsequently subjected to repeated air strikes. 33 massive raids were carried out on the capital of the Third Reich by the forces of 10 thousand bombers, 50 thousand tons of bombs were dropped.

After providing preparations for Operation Overlord (the Allied landing in Normandy, which began on June 6, 1944), the Anglo-American bomber aviation resumed the strategic offensive against Germany. Cities were still among the main targets. Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Freiburg, Heilbronn and others were destroyed. According to B. Liddell Garth, from April 1944 to May 1945, British British bomber aircraft dropped 53% of their bombs on urban areas and only 14% on oil refineries and 15% on transport facilities.

It is surprising why, until the spring of 1944, the German chemical industry, which supplied the Wehrmacht with artificial liquid fuels, oils, synthetic rubber, and explosives, was practically not attacked. As a result, Germany was able in 1943 to increase the production of artificial liquid fuel by 256% compared to 1938, gunpowder and explosives - by 333%, synthetic rubber - by 2240%!

In this connection, I would like to touch upon such a topic as the close ties of the largest British and especially American corporations with German capital and industry. This is described in detail in the book of the American historian C. Higham "Deals with the Enemy: Exposing the Nazi-American Monetary Collusion of 1939-1949." There is evidence that the branches of these corporations in Germany and the countries occupied by it continued their activities and carried out Hitler's military orders during the war years. According to some historians, this is why the allied aviation "didn't try very hard" to strike oil refineries and some other industrial enterprises of the enemy.

The bombing operations of England and the United States acquired a special scope in the last four months of the war - from January to April 1945. At the same time, in January-early February 1945, Soviet troops carried out a number of major strategic offensive operations and moved irresistibly to the west, liberating city after city. The fascist bloc in Europe has completely disintegrated. It became obvious that the collapse of Germany was a foregone conclusion.

At this time, the military-political leadership of the United States and Great Britain decided to carry out an operation under the code name "Thunderclap" ("Thunderclap"). It provided for a series of massive strikes against the largest cities in Germany in order to create panic and chaos among the civilian population in order to force the Nazi command to announce immediate surrender. At the beginning of 1945, cities in eastern Germany were chosen as targets: Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz. On the official website of the Royal Air Force of Great Britain, this choice of targets is explained as follows: “At that time, the most critical situation developed on the Eastern Front, and in order to help the advancing Soviet troops, it was decided to launch airstrikes precisely on these cities - major transport hubs. evacuation of German troops and refugees from the east and would make it difficult to transfer reinforcements from the Western Front to the Eastern.

The first raid on Dresden, hitherto not experiencing the horror of massive bombing, began late in the evening on February 13, 1945.

805 British bombers in two stages dropped 1478 tons of high-explosive and 1182 tons of incendiary bombs on the capital of Saxony. On February 14, 311 American "Flying Fortresses" took part in a daytime raid, dropping 771 tons of bombs on the city, having railway marshalling yards as their main target. The next raids on the city by American bombers took place on February 15 and March 2. It is generally accepted that the greatest damage was caused by the first English attack.

As a result, the ancient city was reduced to ruins. Not without reason, after the atomic strikes on Japanese cities, it, like Hamburg, began to be called the "German Hiroshima." 13 sq. km of the historical center of the city, 27 thousand residential and 7 thousand public buildings were destroyed, including the most ancient monuments of culture and architecture. The camp for Soviet and allied prisoners of war located in the city was also almost completely destroyed. The exact number of victims of the bombing of Dresden, apparently, will never be established. According to official data from the historical department of the Royal Air Force of Great Britain, the number of victims exceeded 50 thousand people.

"BOMBER - SAVIOR OF CIVILIZATION"?

For more than 60 years now, among military historians, the controversy about the military expediency and justification of striking at Dresden has not subsided. The "Historical Analysis of the Dresden Bombings of February 14-15, 1945", prepared by the US Air Force Historical Department, as well as the report of the Historical Department of the Royal Air Force of Great Britain, states that, firstly, the raids were carried out "in accordance with the request of the Soviet command to strike on the railway complex Berlin-Dresden-Leipzig", allegedly voiced at the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945). Secondly, our allies in the anti-Hitler coalition believe that the strikes against Dresden were fully justified, since it was a "legitimate military target", and "the supreme allied command and the Soviet side were interested in these strikes."

However, the question arises: why, instead of delivering targeted strikes on railway tracks and marshalling yards (according to official American data, the accuracy of bombing at the end of the war was at least 70%), it was necessary to raze the entire city to the ground? The opinion that Dresden was a "legitimate target" from a military point of view is also supported by the well-known English historian F. Taylor in the book "Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945". However, he believes that this did not justify the total destruction of the city. Other historians, and among them the overwhelming majority of Russians, believe that there was no military need for such a large-scale attack on Dresden. These raids could in no way have a decisive influence on the imminent outcome of the war.

But what information we find in documents from the British archives. First, the assertion that the decision to raid Dresden was made in response to Stalin's request in Yalta does not stand up to scrutiny. According to the documents, already on January 26, 1945, the Chief of Staff of the British Air Force Ch. Portal, under pressure from Churchill, announced the possibility of "delivering a powerful massive strike on a number of large cities" in the eastern part of Germany: Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig. On the same day, Deputy Chief of Staff of the RAF Air Marshal N. Bottomley, in a telephone conversation with Harris, demanded "to undertake such attacks as soon as possible" in order to "take advantage of the confusion that most likely reigns in these cities in connection with the successful Russian offensive." The next day, Air Minister A. Sinclair informed the Prime Minister about these negotiations and the course of preparations for Operation Thunderbolt.

Secondly, it is quite obvious that this "thunderbolt" was by no means intended to help the advancing Soviet troops. The official justification for the operation stated: “The main purpose of such bombing is directed primarily against the morale of the civilian population and serves psychological purposes. tank factories, aircraft manufacturing enterprises, etc.".

Among historians, the following opinion is also widespread: the bombing of Dresden pursued a rather political goal. As the end of the war approached, anti-Soviet sentiments began to intensify among the Anglo-American leadership. In an effort to downplay the decisive contribution of the USSR to the defeat of the enemy, as well as to demonstrate their air power in order to "intimidate the Kremlin", the allies dealt an apocalyptic blow to Dresden, and after it to many other cities retreating to the Soviet zone of occupation. For example, the American researcher A. McKee writes about this in the book "Dresden, 1945: Hellfire": "The main reasons for the air raid were political and diplomatic: to show the Russians that ... the United States is a superpower that owns weapons of terrible destructive power ".

There is also such an opinion: massive raids were undertaken with the aim of retribution for the destroyed English cities in 1940 and the punishment of the entire German people for the fascist atrocities during the war years. It is clear that the thesis about the guilt of all Germans without exception and the need to punish them is very doubtful. The people were slandered by powerful Nazi propaganda, and only a few realized the criminality of fascist ideology and philosophy. In this matter, the Nuremberg Tribunal dotted all the "i", which unequivocally stated that not the entire German people, but only the main war criminals of the European Axis countries and Nazi organizations, are subject to trial and punishment. One can only speak of the moral responsibility of all Germans, which is recognized by the public opinion of modern Germany.

The Nuremberg verdict is unequivocal and not subject to revision. Just as the devastating bombardments by the German Luftwaffe of Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Belgrade, the cities of England and many thousands of cities and towns on the territory of the Soviet Union and other countries are not to be forgotten and deserve the most severe condemnation. The question is different: is it possible to become like an aggressor in achieving your goals? The American historian P. Johnson called the destruction of Dresden "the greatest Anglo-American moral catastrophe of the entire war against Germany." Approximately the same opinion is shared by another Western researcher F.J. Veal in the book "On the Road to Barbarism: The Development of the Theory of Total War from Sarajevo to Hiroshima".

It is known that immediately after the end of the war, the practice of terrorizing the civilian population from the air was condemned by the general world community and the vast majority of politicians and the military, including in the United States and Great Britain. Only a few continued to believe, in the figurative expression of the former Assistant Secretary of State for the Air Force, J. Speight, that "the bomber is the savior of civilization." But the lessons of history, unfortunately, are quickly forgotten. Very soon, the leadership of the United States and a number of other NATO countries again turned their eyes to the bomber as a "savior of civilization" in order to achieve their geopolitical goals and forcibly implant misunderstood "democratic values." Civilians in the cities of North Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq have experienced what the residents of Hamburg and Dresden experienced more than 60 years ago.

During World War II, air raids were rightfully considered the most destructive. By the memorable date, we decided to collect data on the most terrible bombings of this war.

Attack on Pearl Harbor
2016-05-06 09:24

Pearl Harbor

On December 7, 1941, aircraft carriers under the leadership of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo dealt a crushing blow to the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Japan went to war against the United States. This operation was just one of more than ten conducted by the Japanese at the same time. They launched a series of coordinated strikes against American and British forces throughout the vast Pacific theater.

Pearl Harbor is currently the largest US naval base in the Pacific and the headquarters of the US Pacific Fleet.

During the battle, 4 battleships, 2 destroyers, 1 mine layer were sunk. Another 4 battleships, 3 light cruisers and 1 destroyer were seriously damaged. American aviation losses amounted to 188 aircraft destroyed, another 159 were heavily damaged. The Americans lost 2,403 killed, more than 1,000 aboard the exploded battleship Arizona, and 1,178 wounded. The Japanese lost 29 aircraft - 15 dive bombers, 5 torpedo bombers and 9 fighters. 5 midget submarines were sunk. Losses in people amounted to 55 people. Another - Lieutenant Sakamaki - was taken prisoner. He swam ashore after his midget submarine hit a reef.

Dresden

A series of bombings of the German city of Dresden carried out by the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the United States Air Force took place from February 13 to 15, 1945, during the Second World War. During two night raids, 1,400 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,100 tons of incendiary bombs fell on Dresden. This combination caused a fiery tornado that devastated everything in its path, burning the city and people. According to some reports, the death toll was about 135 thousand people.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

At 8:15 am on August 6, 1945, Hiroshima was destroyed in an instant by the explosion of the American atomic bomb.

On August 9, 1945 at 11:02 am, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, a second bomb destroyed Nagasaki.

About 140,000 people died in Hiroshima, and about 74,000 in Nagasaki. Over the following years, tens of thousands more died from radiation exposure. Many of those who survived the explosion are still suffering from its effects.

Stalingrad

On August 23, 1942, the 4th Air Fleet of the Luftwaffe Air Corps began a massive bombardment of Stalingrad. According to eyewitnesses, an incalculable number of bombs rained down on the city. Stalingrad resembled a giant bonfire - residential areas, oil storage facilities, steamships and even the Volga, soaked in oil and gasoline, were burning. Enemy aircraft made more than 2,000 sorties that day. The city was reduced to ruins, more than 40 thousand civilians were killed and more than 50 thousand people were injured.

London

On September 7, 1940, at 5 pm, 348 German bombers, escorted by fighters, dropped 617 bombs on London in half an hour. The bombardment was repeated two hours later. All this went on for 57 nights in a row. Hitler's goal was the destruction of industry and the withdrawal of England from the war. By the end of May 1941, over 40,000 civilians, half of them in London, had been killed in bombing raids.

Hamburg

July 25 - August 3, 1943, as part of Operation Gomorrah, the Royal Air Force of Great Britain and the United States Air Force carried out a series of bombings of the city. As a result of air raids, up to 45 thousand people were killed, up to 125 thousand were injured, about a million residents were forced to leave the city.

Rotterdam

The attack on Holland began on May 10, 1940. The bombers dropped about 97 tons of bombs, mostly on the city center, destroying everything in an area of ​​approximately 2.5 square kilometers, which led to numerous fires and caused the death of about a thousand inhabitants. This attack was the last stage of the Dutch operation of the Wehrmacht. Holland was unable to defend itself against air attacks and, after assessing the situation and receiving a German ultimatum about a possible bombardment of other cities, capitulated on the same day.

It is now known for certain that during the Second World War, the Anglo-American deliberately bombed peaceful German cities. The statistics of the consequences of the "air war" gives the following data: in all age groups, losses among women exceed those among men by approximately 40%, the number of dead children is also very high - 20% of all losses, losses among older ages are 22%. Of course, these figures do not mean that only the Germans became victims of the war. The world remembers Auschwitz, Majdanek, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and another 1,650 concentration camps and ghettos, the world remembers Khatyn and Babi Yar... It's about something else. How did the Anglo-American methods of warfare differ from the German ones, if they also led to the mass death of the civilian population?

Churchill's go-ahead

If you compare pictures of the lunar landscape with photographs of the space that was left of the German city of Wesel after the bombing of 1945, then it will be difficult to distinguish between them. Mountains of uplifted earth, interspersed with thousands of huge bomb craters, are very reminiscent of lunar craters. It is impossible to believe that people lived here. Wesel was one of 80 German target cities subjected to total bombardment by Anglo-American aircraft between 1940 and 1945. How did this "air" war - actually a war with the population - start?

Let us turn to the previous documents and individual "programmatic" statements of the first persons of the states that participated in the Second World War.

At the time of the German invasion of Poland - September 1, 1939 - the entire world community knew the document "Rules of War", developed by the participants in the Washington Conference on Arms Limitation in 1922. It says literally the following: “Aerial bombardments for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, or destroying and damaging private property of a non-military nature, or causing harm to persons not taking part in hostilities, are prohibited” (Article 22, Part II).

Moreover, on September 2, 1939, the British, French and German governments announced that "strictly military targets in the narrowest sense of the word" would be bombed.

Six months after the outbreak of war, speaking in the House of Commons on February 15, 1940, the British Prime Minister Chamberlain confirmed the earlier statement: “Whatever others do, our government will never vilely attack women and other civilians just to to terrorize them."

As a result, the humane concept of the leadership of Great Britain lasted only until May 10, 1940 - the day Winston Churchill came to the post of Prime Minister after Chamberlain's death. The next day, at his go-ahead, the British pilots began to bomb Freiburg. Assistant Secretary of Air J. M. Speight commented on this event: “We (the British) began bombing targets in Germany before the Germans began bombing targets in the British Isles. This is a historical fact that has been publicly acknowledged ... But since we doubted the psychological impact that the propaganda distortion of the truth that it was we who launched the strategic offensive could have, we did not have the courage to publicize our great decision taken in May 1940. We should have announced it, but of course we made a mistake. This is a great decision." According to the well-known English historian and military theorist John Fuller, then "it was at the hands of Mr. Churchill that the fuse was triggered, which caused an explosion - a war of devastation and terror, unprecedented since the Seljuk invasion."

British bomber aviation was in a clear crisis. In August 1941, Cabinet Secretary D. Butt presented a report proving the absolute ineffectiveness of bomber raids that year. In November, Churchill was even forced to order Bomber Commander Sir Richard Percy to limit the number of raids as much as possible until the concept of using heavy bombers was worked out.

The Debut of the Possessed

Everything changed on February 21, 1942, when Air Marshal Arthur Harris became the new commander of the RAF Bomber. A lover of figurative expressions, he immediately promised to "bomb" Germany out of the war. Harris suggested abandoning the practice of destroying specific targets and bombing city squares. In his opinion, the destruction of cities should undoubtedly undermine the spirit of the civilian population, and above all the workers of industrial enterprises.

The use of bombers thus underwent a complete revolution. Now they have become an independent tool of war, not requiring interaction with anyone. Harris, with all his indomitable energy, began to turn bomber aircraft into a huge machine of destruction. He quickly established iron discipline and demanded the unquestioning and prompt execution of all his orders. "Tightening the screws" was not to everyone's taste, but this was the least of Harris's worries - he felt the powerful support of Prime Minister Churchill. The new commander categorically demanded that the government provide him with 4,000 heavy four-engine bombers and 1,000 high-speed Mosquito-type fighter-bombers. This would give him the opportunity to keep up to 1 thousand aircraft over Germany every night. With great difficulty, the ministers of the "economic" bloc managed to prove to the frantic marshal the absurdity of his demands. English industry simply could not cope with their implementation in the foreseeable future, if only because of the lack of raw materials.

So on the first "raid of a thousand bombers", which took place on the night of May 30-31, 1942, Harris sent everything he had: not only a few Lancasters, but also Halifaxes, Stirlings, Blenheims , Wellingtons, Hampdens and Whitleys. In total, the diverse armada consisted of 1,047 vehicles. At the end of the raid, 41 aircraft (3.9% of the total) did not return to their bases. This level of loss alarmed many then, but not Harris. Subsequently, among the British Air Force, the losses of bomber aircraft were always the largest.

The first "thousand raids" did not lead to noticeable practical results, and this was not required. The raids were of a "combat training" nature: according to Marshal Harris, it was necessary to create the necessary theoretical basis for bombing and reinforce it with flight practice.

The whole of 1942 passed in such "practical" exercises. In addition to German cities, the British bombed the industrial sites of the Ruhr several times, targets in Italy - Milan, Turin and La Spezia, as well as German submarine bases in France.

Winston Churchill assessed this period of time as follows: “Although we gradually achieved the accuracy we needed so much at night, the German military industry and the moral strength of the resistance of its civilian population were not broken by the bombing of 1942.”

As for the socio-political resonance in England regarding the first bombings, for example, Lord Salisbury and Bishop George Bell of Chichester repeatedly condemned such a strategy. They expressed their opinion both in the House of Lords and in the press, focusing the attention of the military leadership and society as a whole on the fact that strategic bombing of cities cannot be justified from a moral point of view or according to the laws of war. But such sorties nevertheless continued.

In the same year, the first formations of American Boeing B-17 and Flying Fortress heavy bombers arrived in England. At that time, these were the best strategic bombers in the world, both in terms of speed and altitude, and in terms of armament. 12 Browning heavy machine guns gave the crew of the Fortress a good chance to fight off German fighters. Unlike the British, the American command relied on targeted bombing in daylight. It was assumed that no one could break through the powerful barrage fire of hundreds of B-17s flying in close formation. The reality turned out to be different. Already in the first "training" raids on France, the squadrons of the "Fortresses" suffered significant losses. It became clear that no result could be achieved without strong fighter cover. But the Allies were not yet able to produce long-range fighters in sufficient numbers, so that the bomber crews had to rely mainly on themselves. In this way, aviation operated until January 1943, when the Allied conference was held in Casablanca, where the main points of strategic interaction were determined: to military resistance.

On June 2, speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill declared: "I can report that this year German cities, harbors and centers of war industry will be subjected to such a huge, continuous and cruel test that no country has experienced." The commander of the British bomber aviation was instructed: "Start the most intensive bombing of industrial targets in Germany." Subsequently, Harris wrote about it this way: "Practically I got the freedom to bomb any German city with a population of 100 thousand people or more." Without delaying the matter, the English marshal planned a joint air operation with the Americans against Hamburg, the second most populous city in Germany. This operation was called "Gomorrah". Its goal was the complete destruction of the city and its reduction to dust.

Monuments to barbarism

In late July - early August 1943, 4 night and 3 day massive raids were carried out on Hamburg. In total, about 3,000 Allied heavy bombers took part in them. During the first raid on July 27, from one in the morning, 10,000 tons of explosives, mainly incendiary and high-explosive bombs, were dropped on densely populated areas of the city. For several days, a firestorm raged in Hamburg, and a column of smoke reached a height of 4 km. Even the pilots felt the smoke of the burning city, it penetrated into the cockpits of aircraft. According to eyewitnesses, asphalt and sugar stored in warehouses were boiling in the city, glass was melting in trams. Civilians burned alive, turning to ashes, or suffocated from poisonous gases in the basements of their own houses, trying to hide from the bombing. Or they were buried under the ruins. In the diary of the German Friedrich Reck, sent to Dachau by the Nazis, there are stories about people who fled from Hamburg in nothing but pajamas, lost their memory or became distraught with horror.

The city was half destroyed, more than 50 thousand of its inhabitants died, over 200 thousand were injured, burned and crippled.

To his old nickname "bomber" Harris added another - "Nelson of the Air". So he was now called in the English press. But nothing pleased the marshal - the destruction of Hamburg could not decisively bring the final defeat of the enemy closer. Harris calculated that the simultaneous destruction of at least six of the largest German cities was required. And for this there was not enough strength. Justifying his "slow victories", he declared: "I can no longer hope that we will be able to defeat the largest industrial power in Europe from the air, if for this I am given at the disposal of only 600-700 heavy bombers."

British industry could not replace the losses of such aircraft as quickly as Harris wished. Indeed, in each raid, the British lost an average of 3.5% of the total number of participating bombers. At first glance, it seems to be a little, but after all, each crew had to make 30 sorties! If this amount is multiplied by the average percentage of losses, then we get 105% losses. Truly deadly math for pilots, scorers, navigators and shooters. Few of them survived the autumn of 1943...

(Comments:
sv: "Taking into account the Theory of Probability, in addition to mathematics, you need to be friends with logic! The task is extremely simple, and what does Bernoulli have to do with it? 3.5% of aircraft die in one flight. Each crew makes 30 sorties. The question is - how many chances does the crew have to survive? Even if we assume that 99.9% of aircraft die with each sortie and at the same time make 1000 sorties, even if it is scanty, but the chance to survive will always remain.. That is, 100% (especially 105%) losses are nonsense, from a logical point of view. And the solution to this problem is elementary. With one sortie, the chance to survive is 96.5%, i.e. 0.965 With 30 sorties, this number must be multiplied 30 times (raised to the 30th power We get - 0.3434. Or, the chance to survive is more than one third! For the 2nd World War, this is very decent and only cowards did not fly ... "

dust: "The author was clearly not good at math at school. His idea of ​​multiplying the number of losses (3.5%) of British bombers by the number of sorties (30) I would say is stupid. Writing that the probability turned out to be 105% is somewhat not serious. In this example, probability theory tells us that we need to apply the Bernoulli formula. Then the result is completely different - 36.4%. Also, not happy for the KVVS pilots, but not 105% =)))) "

And here is the other side of the barricades. The famous German fighter pilot Hans Philipp described his feelings in battle as follows: “It was a joy to fight with two dozen Russian fighters or English Spitfires. And no one thought at the same time about the meaning of life. But when seventy huge "Flying Fortresses" fly at you, all your former sins stand before your eyes. And even if the lead pilot was able to gather his courage, then how much pain and nerves were needed to make every pilot in the squadron cope with himself, right down to the very newcomers. In October 43, during one of these attacks, Hans Philipp was shot down and killed. Many shared his fate.

Meanwhile, the Americans concentrated their main efforts on the destruction of important industrial facilities of the Third Reich. On August 17, 1943, 363 heavy bombers attempted to destroy ball bearing factories in the Schweinfurt area. But since there were no escort fighters, the losses during the operation were very serious - 60 "Fortresses". Further bombardments of the area were delayed for 4 months, during which the Germans were able to restore their factories. Such raids finally convinced the American command that it was no longer possible to send bombers without cover.

And three months after the failures of the Allies - November 18, 1943 - Arthur Harris began the "battle for Berlin." On this occasion, he said: "I want to incinerate this nightmarish city from end to end." The battle continued until March 1944. 16 massive raids were carried out on the capital of the Third Reich, during which 50 thousand tons of bombs were dropped. Almost half of the city turned into ruins, tens of thousands of Berliners died. “For fifty, a hundred, and perhaps more years, the ruined cities of Germany will stand as monuments to the barbarism of its conquerors,” Major General John Fuller wrote.

One German fighter pilot recalled: “I once saw a night raid from the ground. I stood in a crowd of other people in an underground metro station, the ground trembled with each explosion of bombs, women and children screamed, clouds of smoke and dust came through the mines. Anyone who did not experience fear and horror should have had a heart of stone." At that time, a joke was popular: who can be considered a coward? Answer: a resident of Berlin who volunteered for the front ...

But still, it was not possible to completely destroy the city, and Nelson Air came up with a proposal: “We can completely demolish Berlin if the American Air Force takes part. This will cost us 400-500 aircraft. The Germans will pay with defeat in the war." However, Harris's American colleagues did not share his optimism.

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with the commander of the bomber aviation was growing in the British leadership. Harris's appetites increased so much that in March 1944, Secretary of War J. Grigg, presenting the army's budget draft to Parliament, said: “I take the liberty of saying that as many workers are employed in the manufacture of heavy bombers alone as in the implementation of the plan for the entire army ". At that time, 40-50% of British military production worked for one aircraft, and to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of the main scorer meant to bleed the ground forces and navy. Because of this, the admirals and generals, to put it mildly, did not treat Harris too well, but he was still obsessed with the idea of ​​"bombing" Germany out of the war. But with this just nothing worked. In addition, in terms of losses, the spring of 1944 was the most difficult period for British bomber aircraft: on average, losses per flight reached 6%. On March 30, 1944, during a raid on Nuremberg, German night fighters and anti-aircraft gunners shot down 96 out of 786 aircraft. It was truly a "black night" for the Royal Air Force.

The British raids could not break the spirit of resistance of the population, and the American raids could not decisively reduce the output of German military products. All kinds of enterprises were dispersed, and strategically important factories were hidden underground. In February 1944, half of the German aircraft factories were subjected to air raids for several days. Some were destroyed to the ground, but production was quickly restored, and the factory equipment was moved to other areas. The production of aircraft continuously increased and reached its maximum in the summer of 1944.

In this regard, it is worth noting that in the post-war report of the American Office for the Study of the Results of Strategic Bombing there is a surprising fact: it turns out that in Germany there was a single plant for the production of dibromoethane - for ethyl liquid. The fact is that without this component, which is necessary in the production of aviation gasoline, not a single German aircraft would have flown. But, oddly enough, this plant was never bombed, just no one thought about it. But destroy it, the German aircraft factories could not be touched at all. They could produce thousands of planes that could only be rolled on the ground. Here is how John Fuller wrote about this: “If, in our technical age, soldiers and airmen do not think technically, they do more harm than good.”

under the curtain

In early 1944, the Allied Air Force's main problem was solved: Fortresses and Liberators were defending the excellent Thunderbolt and Mustang fighters in large numbers. Since that time, the losses of the Reich air defense fighter squadrons began to increase. There were fewer and fewer aces, and there was no one to replace them - the level of training of young pilots was depressingly low compared to the beginning of the war. This fact could not but reassure the allies. Nevertheless, it became increasingly difficult for them to prove the expediency of their "strategic" bombing: in 1944, the gross industrial output in Germany was steadily increasing. A new approach was needed. And he was found: the commander of US strategic aviation, General Carl Spaatz, proposed to focus on the destruction of synthetic fuel plants, and the chief marshal of British aviation Tedder insisted on the destruction of German railways. He argued that the bombing of vehicles is the most real opportunity to quickly disorganize the enemy.

As a result, it was decided to bomb the transport system first and the fuel plants second. From April 1944 Allied bombing did become strategic for a short time. And against their background, the tragedy in the small town of Essen, located in East Frisia, went unnoticed. ... On the last day of September 1944, due to bad weather, American planes could not reach one military factory. On the way back, through a gap in the clouds, the pilots saw a small city and, in order not to return home with a full load, decided to get rid of it. The bombs hit the school exactly, burying 120 children under the rubble. It was half the children in the city. A small episode of the great air war... By the end of 1944, the German railway transport was practically paralyzed. The production of synthetic fuel fell from 316,000 tons in May 1944 to 17,000 tons in September. As a result, neither aviation nor tank divisions had enough fuel. A desperate German counter-offensive in the Ardennes in December of the same year bogged down in large part because they failed to capture Allied fuel supplies. The Germans just got up.

In the autumn of 1944, the Allies faced an unexpected problem: there were so many heavy bombers and cover fighters that there were not enough industrial targets for them: they couldn’t sit idle. And to the full satisfaction of Arthur Harris, not only the British, but also the Americans began to consistently destroy German cities. Berlin, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Freiburg, Heilbronn were subjected to the strongest raids. The apogee of the massacre was the destruction of Dresden in mid-February 1945. At this time, the city was literally flooded with tens of thousands of refugees from the eastern regions of Germany. The massacre was started by 800 British bombers on the night of February 13-14. 650,000 incendiary and high-explosive bombs were dropped on the city center. During the day, Dresden was bombed by 1,350 American bombers, the next day by 1,100. The city center was literally wiped off the face of the earth. In total, 27 thousand residential and 7 thousand public buildings were destroyed.

How many citizens and refugees died is still unknown. Immediately after the war, the US State Department reported 250,000 deaths. Now the generally accepted figure is ten times less - 25 thousand, although there are other figures - 60 and 100 thousand people. In any case, Dresden and Hamburg can be put on a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “When the fire from the burning buildings broke through the roofs, a column of hot air about six kilometers high and three kilometers in diameter rose above them ... Soon the air heated up to the limit, and that’s all, what could ignite was engulfed in flames. Everything burned to the ground, that is, there were no traces of combustible materials, only two days later the temperature of the conflagration dropped so much that it was possible to at least approach the burnt area, ”an eyewitness testifies.

After Dresden, the British managed to bomb Würzburg, Bayreuth, Zoest, Ulm and Rothenburg - cities that have survived from the late Middle Ages. Only in one town of Pforzheim with a population of 60 thousand people during one air raid on February 22, 1945, a third of its inhabitants were killed. Klein Festung recalled that, being imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he saw the reflections of the Pforzheim fire from the window of his cell - 70 kilometers from it. Chaos settled on the streets of the destroyed German cities. The Germans, who love order and cleanliness, lived like cave dwellers, hiding in the ruins. Disgusting rats scurried around and fat flies circled.

In early March, Churchill urged Harris to end the "area" bombing. He literally said the following: “It seems to me that we need to stop the bombing of German cities. Otherwise, we will take control of an absolutely destroyed country.” Marshal was forced to comply.

"Guaranteed" peace

In addition to eyewitness accounts, the catastrophic consequences of such raids are confirmed by many documents, including the conclusion of a special commission of the victorious powers, which immediately after the surrender of Germany investigated the results of the bombing on the spot. With industrial and military facilities, everything was clear - no one expected a different outcome. But the fate of German cities and villages shocked the members of the commission. Then, almost immediately after the end of the war, the results of the "areal" bombing could not be hidden from the "general public". In England, a real wave of indignation arose against the recent "hero bombardiers", the protesters repeatedly demanded that they be brought to justice. In the United States, everything was treated quite calmly. But such information did not reach the broad masses of the Soviet Union, and it would hardly have become timely and understandable. There were so many of their own ruins and their own grief that it was up to someone else’s, to “fascist” - “so that it was empty for them all there!” - there was neither strength nor time.

How merciless this time is ... Literally after a few months after the war, her victims turned out to be useless. In any case, the first persons of the powers that defeated fascism were so preoccupied with the division of the victorious banner that, for example, Sir Winston Churchill hastened to officially disclaim responsibility for Dresden, for dozens of other German cities wiped off the face of the earth. As if nothing had happened and it was not he who personally made the decisions about the bombing. As if, when choosing the next victim city at the end of the war, the Anglo-American command was not guided by the criteria of "lack of military facilities" - "lack of air defense systems." The generals of the allied armies took care of their pilots and planes: why send them to where there is an air defense ring.

As for the hero of the war, and later the disgraced Marshal Arthur Harris, he immediately after the military battle began to write the book "Strategic Bombing". It came out already in 1947 and was sold in a fairly large circulation. Many were wondering how the "chief scorer" would justify himself. The author did not do this. On the contrary, he made it clear that he would not allow all responsibility to be dumped on himself. He did not repent of anything and did not regret anything. Here is how he understood his main task as commander of bomber aviation: “The main objects of the military industry should be looked for where they are in any country in the world, that is, in the cities themselves. It should be especially emphasized that, except in Essen, we never made any particular plant the object of the raid. We have always considered the ruined enterprise in the city as an additional good luck. Our main goal has always been the city center. All old German cities are most densely built up towards the center, and their outskirts are always more or less free from buildings. Therefore, the central part of the cities is especially sensitive to incendiary bombs.”

US Air Force General Frederick Anderson explained the concept of all-out raids this way: “Memories of the destruction of Germany will be passed from father to son, from son to grandson. This is the best guarantee that Germany will never start another war again." There were many such statements, and all of them seem even more cynical after reading the official American Strategic Bombing Report of September 30, 1945. This document, on the basis of research conducted at that time, says that the citizens of German cities lost their faith in a future victory, in their leaders, in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all they wanted the war to end.

They increasingly resorted to listening to “radio voices” (“black radio”), to discussing rumors and actually found themselves in opposition to the regime. As a result of this situation, a dissident movement began to grow in the cities: in 1944, one out of every thousand Germans was arrested for political crimes. If German citizens had the freedom to choose, they would have long ago ceased to participate in the war. However, under the conditions of a tough police regime, any manifestation of discontent meant: dungeons or death. Nevertheless, a study of official records and individual opinions shows that during the last period of the war, absenteeism increased and production declined, although large enterprises continued to work. Thus, no matter how dissatisfied the people of Germany were with the war, “they did not have the opportunity to openly express it,” the American report emphasizes.

Thus, the massive bombing of Germany as a whole was not strategic. They were only a few times. The military industry of the Third Reich was paralyzed only at the end of 1944, when the Americans bombed 12 factories producing synthetic fuel and disabled the road network. By this point, almost all major German cities had been aimlessly destroyed. According to Hans Rumpf, they took the brunt of the air raids and thus protected industrial enterprises until the very end of the war. “Strategic bombardments were aimed mainly at the destruction of women, children and the elderly,” emphasizes the major general. Out of a total of 955,044 thousand bombs dropped by the British on Germany, 430,747 tons fell on cities.

As for Churchill's decision on the moral terror of the German population, it was truly fatal: such raids not only did not contribute to victory, but even pushed it back.

However, for a long time after the war, many well-known participants continued to justify their actions. So, already in 1964, retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Ira Eaker spoke as follows: “I find it difficult to understand the British or Americans, weeping over the dead from the civilian population and not shedding a single tear over our valiant soldiers who died in battles with a cruel enemy. I deeply regret that British and American bombers killed 135,000 inhabitants of Dresden in a raid, but I do not forget who started the war, and I regret even more that more than 5 million lives were lost by the Anglo-American armed forces in a stubborn struggle for complete destruction of fascism.

English Air Marshal Robert Sondby was not so categorical: “No one will deny that the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy. It was a terrible misfortune, such as sometimes happen in wartime, caused by a cruel set of circumstances. Those who authorized this raid did not act out of malice, not out of cruelty, although it is likely that they were too far removed from the harsh reality of military operations to fully comprehend the monstrous destructive power of aerial bombardments in the spring of 1945. Was the English air marshal really so naive as to justify the total destruction of German cities in this way. After all, it is “cities, not piles of ruins, that are the basis of civilization,” wrote the English historian John Fuller after the war.

You can't say better about the bombings.

The birth of the doctrine

The very use of the aircraft as a means of warfare was a truly revolutionary step at the beginning of the 20th century. The first bombers were clumsy and fragile-looking structures, and flying them to the target, even with a minimal bomb load, was not an easy task for pilots. There was no need to talk about the accuracy of hits. In the First World War, bomber aircraft did not gain much fame, unlike fighters or ground-based "wonder weapons" - tanks. Nevertheless, the “heavy” aviation had supporters and even apologists. In the period between the two world wars, perhaps the most famous of them was the Italian General Giulio Due.

In his writings, Douai tirelessly argued that one aircraft could win a war. The ground forces and the navy must play a subordinate role in relation to it. The army holds the front line and the navy defends the coast while the air force wins. First of all, cities should be bombed, and not factories and military installations, which are relatively easy to redeploy. Moreover, it is desirable to destroy cities in one raid, so that the civilian population does not have time to take out material values ​​​​and hide. It is necessary not so much to destroy as many people as possible, but to sow panic among them, to break them morally. Under these conditions, enemy soldiers at the front will think not about victory, but about the fate of their loved ones, which will undoubtedly affect their fighting spirit. To do this, it is necessary to develop bomber aviation, and not fighter, naval or any other. Well-armed bombers themselves are able to fight off enemy aircraft and deliver a decisive blow. Whoever has the most powerful aircraft will win.

The "radical" views of the Italian theorist were shared by very few. Most military experts believed that General Douai overdid it by absolutizing the role of military aviation. Yes, and calls for the destruction of the civilian population in the 20s of the last century were considered outright bad manners. But be that as it may, it was Giulio Due who was among the first to understand that aviation gave the war a third dimension. With his "light hand", the idea of ​​​​unrestricted air warfare firmly settled in the minds of some politicians and military leaders.

Losses in numbers

In Germany, bombings killed, according to various estimates, from 300 thousand to 1.5 million civilians. In France - 59 thousand killed and wounded, mainly from Allied raids, in England - 60.5 thousand, including victims from the actions of rockets "Fau".

The list of cities in which the area of ​​destruction amounted to 50% or more of the total area of ​​buildings (oddly enough, only 40% fell to Dresden):

50% - Ludwigshafen, Worms
51% - Bremen, Hannover, Nuremberg, Remscheid, Bochum
52% - Essen, Darmstadt
53% - Cochem
54% - Hamburg, Mainz
55% - Neckarsulm, Soest
56% - Aachen, Münster, Heilbronn
60% - Erkelenz
63% - Wilhelmshaven, Koblenz
64% - Bingerbrück, Cologne, Pforzheim
65% - Dortmund
66% - Crailsheim
67% - Giessen
68% - Hanau, Kassel
69% - Düren
70% - Altenkirchen, Bruchsal
72% - Geilenkirchen
74% - Donauwörth
75% - Remagen, Würzburg
78% - Emden
80% - Prüm, Wesel
85% - Xanten, Zulpich
91% - Emmerich
97% - Jülich

The total volume of the ruins was 400 million cubic meters. 495 architectural monuments were completely destroyed, 620 were so damaged that their restoration was either impossible or doubtful.

ctrl Enter

Noticed osh s bku Highlight text and click Ctrl+Enter

It is now known for certain that during the Second World War, Anglo-American aircraft deliberately bombed peaceful German cities. The statistics of the consequences of the “air war” give the following data: in all age groups, losses among women exceed those among men by approximately 40%, the number of dead children is also very high - 20% of all losses, losses among older ages are 22%. Of course, these figures do not mean that only the Germans became victims of the war. The world remembers Auschwitz, Majdanek, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and another 1,650 concentration camps and ghettos, the world remembers Khatyn and Babi Yar... It's about something else. How did the Anglo-American methods of warfare differ from the German ones, if they also led to the mass death of the civilian population?

Churchill's go-ahead

If you compare pictures of the lunar landscape with photographs of the space that was left of the German city of Wesel after the bombing of 1945, then it will be difficult to distinguish between them. Mountains of uplifted earth, interspersed with thousands of huge bomb craters, are very reminiscent of lunar craters. It is impossible to believe that people lived here. Wesel was one of 80 German target cities subjected to total bombardment by Anglo-American aircraft between 1940 and 1945. How did this “air” war, in fact, a war with the population, start?

Let us turn to the previous documents and individual "programmatic" statements of the first persons of the states that participated in the Second World War.

At the time of the German invasion of Poland - September 1, 1939 - the entire world community knew the document "Rules of War", developed by the participants in the Washington Conference on Arms Limitation in 1922. It says literally the following: “Aerial bombardments for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population, or destroying and damaging private property of a non-military nature, or causing harm to persons not taking part in hostilities, are prohibited” (Article 22, Part II).

Moreover, on September 2, 1939, the British, French and German governments announced that "strictly military targets in the narrowest sense of the word" would be bombed.

Six months after the outbreak of war, speaking in the House of Commons on February 15, 1940, the British Prime Minister Chamberlain confirmed the earlier statement: “Whatever others do, our government will never vilely attack women and other civilians just to to terrorize them."

As a result, the humane concept of the leadership of Great Britain lasted only until May 10, 1940 - the day Winston Churchill came to the post of Prime Minister after the death of Chamberlain. The next day, at his go-ahead, the British pilots began to bomb Freiburg. Assistant Secretary of Air J. M. Speight commented on this event: “We (the British) began bombing targets in Germany before the Germans began bombing targets in the British Isles. This is a historical fact that has been publicly acknowledged ... But since we doubted the psychological impact that the propaganda distortion of the truth that it was we who launched the strategic offensive could have, we did not have the courage to publicize our great decision taken in May 1940. We should have announced it, but of course we made a mistake. This is a great solution." According to the well-known English historian and military theorist John Fuller, then "it was at the hands of Mr. Churchill that the fuse that triggered the explosion - a war of devastation and terror, unprecedented since the Seljuk invasion" went off.

After eight British raids on German cities, the Luftwaffe bombed London in September 1940 and Coventry on 14 November. According to the author of the book "Air War in Germany", Major General Hans Rumpf, it is this raid on the center of the British aircraft engine industry that is considered to be the beginning of an all-out air war. Then, in addition to the plant, half of the city buildings were destroyed to the ground, several hundred civilians died. Official German propaganda called this raid a "giant aerial bombardment", which greatly helped the official British propaganda, which accused the Luftwaffe of "barbarism." After that, the German bombing stopped somewhat, and the British until the beginning of 1942 were engaged in so-called "precision" bombing, which was carried out mainly at night. The impact of these raids on the German economy was extremely insignificant - the production of weapons not only did not decrease, but also steadily increased.

British bomber aviation was in a clear crisis. In August 1941, Cabinet Secretary D. Butt presented a report proving the absolute ineffectiveness of bomber raids that year. In November, Churchill was even forced to order Bomber Commander Sir Richard Percy to limit the number of raids as much as possible until the concept of using heavy bombers was worked out.

The Debut of the Possessed

Everything changed on February 21, 1942, when Air Marshal Arthur Harris became the new commander of the RAF Bomber. A lover of figurative expressions, he immediately promised to "bomb" Germany out of the war. Harris suggested abandoning the practice of destroying specific targets and bombing city squares. In his opinion, the destruction of cities should undoubtedly undermine the spirit of the civilian population, and above all the workers of industrial enterprises.

The use of bombers thus underwent a complete revolution. Now they have become an independent tool of war, not requiring interaction with anyone. Harris, with all his indomitable energy, began to turn bomber aircraft into a huge machine of destruction. He quickly established iron discipline and demanded the unquestioning and prompt execution of all his orders. "Tightening the screws" was not to everyone's taste, but this was the least of Harris's worries - he felt the powerful support of Prime Minister Churchill. The new commander categorically demanded that the government provide him with 4,000 heavy four-engine bombers and 1,000 high-speed Mosquito-type fighter-bombers. This would give him the opportunity to keep up to 1 thousand aircraft over Germany every night. With great difficulty, the ministers of the "economic" bloc managed to prove to the frantic marshal the absurdity of his demands. English industry simply could not cope with their implementation in the foreseeable future, if only because of the lack of raw materials.

So on the first "raid of a thousand bombers", which took place on the night of May 30-31, 1942, Harris sent everything he had: not only a few Lancasters, but also Halifaxes, Stirlings, Blenheims , Wellingtons, Hampdens and Whitleys. In total, the diverse armada consisted of 1,047 vehicles. At the end of the raid, 41 aircraft (3.9% of the total) did not return to their bases. This level of loss alarmed many then, but not Harris. Subsequently, among the British Air Force, the losses of bomber aircraft were always the largest.

The first "thousand raids" did not lead to noticeable practical results, and this was not required. The raids were of a "combat training" nature: according to Marshal Harris, it was necessary to create the necessary theoretical basis for bombing and reinforce it with flight practice.

The whole of 1942 passed in such "practical" exercises. In addition to German cities, the British bombed the industrial sites of the Ruhr several times, targets in Italy - Milan, Turin and La Spezia, as well as German submarine bases in France.

Winston Churchill assessed this period of time as follows: “Although we gradually achieved the accuracy we needed so much at night, the German military industry and the moral strength of the resistance of its civilian population were not broken by the bombing of 1942.”

As for the socio-political resonance in England regarding the first bombings, for example, Lord Salisbury and Bishop George Bell of Chichester repeatedly condemned such a strategy. They expressed their opinion both in the House of Lords and in the press, focusing the attention of the military leadership and society as a whole on the fact that strategic bombing of cities cannot be justified from a moral point of view or according to the laws of war. But such sorties nevertheless continued.

In the same year, the first formations of American Boeing B-17 and Flying Fortress heavy bombers arrived in England. At that time, these were the best strategic bombers in the world, both in terms of speed and altitude, and in terms of armament. 12 Browning heavy machine guns gave the crew of the Fortress a good chance to fight off German fighters. Unlike the British, the American command relied on targeted bombing in daylight. It was assumed that no one could break through the powerful barrage fire of hundreds of B-17s flying in close formation. The reality turned out to be different. Already in the first "training" raids on France, the squadrons of the "Fortresses" suffered significant losses. It became clear that no result could be achieved without strong fighter cover. But the Allies were not yet able to produce long-range fighters in sufficient numbers, so that the bomber crews had to rely mainly on themselves. In this way, aviation operated until January 1943, when the Allied conference was held in Casablanca, where the main points of strategic interaction were determined: to military resistance.

On June 2, speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill declared: "I can report that this year German cities, harbors and centers of war industry will be subjected to such a huge, continuous and cruel test that no country has experienced." The commander of the British bomber aviation was instructed: "Start the most intensive bombing of industrial targets in Germany." Subsequently, Harris wrote about it this way: "Practically I got the freedom to bomb any German city with a population of 100 thousand people or more." Without delaying the matter, the English marshal planned a joint air operation with the Americans against Hamburg, the second most populous city in Germany. This operation was called "Gomorrah". Its goal was the complete destruction of the city and its reduction to dust.

Monuments to barbarism

In late July - early August 1943, 4 night and 3 day massive raids were carried out on Hamburg. In total, about 3,000 Allied heavy bombers took part in them. During the first raid on July 27, from one in the morning, 10,000 tons of explosives, mainly incendiary and high-explosive bombs, were dropped on densely populated areas of the city. For several days, a firestorm raged in Hamburg, and a column of smoke reached a height of 4 km. Even the pilots felt the smoke of the burning city, it penetrated into the cockpits of aircraft. According to eyewitnesses, asphalt and sugar stored in warehouses were boiling in the city, glass was melting in trams. Civilians burned alive, turning to ashes, or suffocated from poisonous gases in the basements of their own houses, trying to hide from the bombing. Or they were buried under the ruins. In the diary of the German Friedrich Reck, sent to Dachau by the Nazis, there are stories about people who fled from Hamburg in nothing but pajamas, lost their memory or became distraught with horror.

The city was half destroyed, more than 50 thousand of its inhabitants died, over 200 thousand were injured, burned and crippled.

To his old nickname "bomber" Harris added another - "Nelson of the air." So he was now called in the English press. But nothing pleased the marshal - the destruction of Hamburg could not decisively bring the final defeat of the enemy closer. Harris calculated that the simultaneous destruction of at least six of the largest German cities was required. And for this there was not enough strength. Justifying his "slow victories", he declared: "I can no longer hope that we will be able to defeat the largest industrial power in Europe from the air, if for this I am given at the disposal of only 600-700 heavy bombers."

British industry could not replace the losses of such aircraft as quickly as Harris wished. Indeed, in each raid, the British lost an average of 3.5% of the total number of participating bombers. At first glance, it seems to be a little, but after all, each crew had to make 30 sorties! If this amount is multiplied by the average percentage of losses, then we get 105% losses. Truly deadly math for pilots, scorers, navigators and shooters. Few of them survived the autumn of 1943

And here is the other side of the barricades. The famous German fighter pilot Hans Philipp described his feelings in battle as follows: “It was a joy to fight with two dozen Russian fighters or English Spitfires. And no one thought at the same time about the meaning of life. But when seventy huge "Flying Fortresses" fly at you, all your former sins stand before your eyes. And even if the lead pilot was able to gather his courage, then how much pain and nerves were needed to make every pilot in the squadron cope with himself, right down to the very newcomers. In October 43, during one of these attacks, Hans Philipp was shot down and killed. Many shared his fate.

Meanwhile, the Americans concentrated their main efforts on the destruction of important industrial facilities of the Third Reich. On August 17, 1943, 363 heavy bombers attempted to destroy ball bearing factories in the Schweinfurt area. But since there were no escort fighters, the losses during the operation were very serious - 60 "Fortresses". Further bombardments of the area were delayed for 4 months, during which the Germans were able to restore their factories. Such raids finally convinced the American command that it was no longer possible to send bombers without cover.

And three months after the failures of the allies - on November 18, 1943 - Arthur Harris began the "battle for Berlin". On this occasion, he said: "I want to incinerate this nightmarish city from end to end." The battle continued until March 1944. 16 massive raids were carried out on the capital of the Third Reich, during which 50 thousand tons of bombs were dropped. Almost half of the city turned into ruins, tens of thousands of Berliners died. “For fifty, a hundred, and perhaps more years, the ruined cities of Germany will stand as monuments to the barbarism of her conquerors,” Major General John Fuller wrote.

One German fighter pilot recalled: “I once saw a night raid from the ground. I stood in a crowd of other people in an underground metro station, the ground trembled with each explosion of bombs, women and children screamed, clouds of smoke and dust came through the mines. Anyone who did not experience fear and horror should have had a heart of stone." At that time, a joke was popular: who can be considered a coward? Answer: a resident of Berlin who volunteered for the front

But still, it was not possible to completely destroy the city, and Nelson Air came up with a proposal: “We can completely demolish Berlin if the American Air Force takes part. This will cost us 400-500 aircraft. The Germans will pay with defeat in the war." However, Harris's American colleagues did not share his optimism.

Meanwhile, dissatisfaction with the commander of the bomber aviation was growing in the British leadership. Harris's appetites increased so much that in March 1944, Secretary of War J. Grigg, presenting the army's budget draft to Parliament, said: “I take the liberty of saying that as many workers are employed in the manufacture of heavy bombers alone as in the implementation of the plan for the entire army ". At that time, 40-50% of British military production worked for one aviation, and to satisfy the ever-increasing demands of the main scorer meant to bleed the ground forces and navy. Because of this, the admirals and generals, to put it mildly, did not treat Harris too well, but he was still obsessed with the idea of ​​"bombing" Germany out of the war. But with this just nothing worked. In addition, in terms of losses, the spring of 1944 was the most difficult period for British bomber aircraft: on average, losses per flight reached 6%. On March 30, 1944, during a raid on Nuremberg, German night fighters and anti-aircraft gunners shot down 96 out of 786 aircraft. It was truly a "black night" for the Royal Air Force.

The British raids could not break the spirit of resistance of the population, and the American raids could not decisively reduce the output of German military products. All kinds of enterprises were dispersed, and strategically important factories were hidden underground. In February 1944, half of the German aircraft factories were subjected to air raids for several days. Some were destroyed to the ground, but production was quickly restored, and the factory equipment was moved to other areas. The production of aircraft continuously increased and reached its maximum in the summer of 1944.

In this regard, it is worth noting that in the post-war report of the American Office for the Study of the Results of Strategic Bombing there is a surprising fact: it turns out that in Germany there was a single plant for the production of dibromoethane - for ethyl liquid. The fact is that without this component, which is necessary in the production of aviation gasoline, not a single German aircraft would have flown. But, oddly enough, this plant was never bombed, just no one thought about it. But destroy it, the German aircraft factories could not be touched at all. They could produce thousands of planes that could only be rolled on the ground. Here is how John Fuller wrote about this: “If, in our technical age, soldiers and airmen do not think technically, they do more harm than good.”

under the curtain

In early 1944, the Allied Air Force's main problem was solved: Fortresses and Liberators were defending the excellent Thunderbolt and Mustang fighters in large numbers. Since that time, the losses of the Reich air defense fighter squadrons began to increase. There were fewer and fewer aces, and there was no one to replace them - the level of training of young pilots was depressingly low compared to the beginning of the war. This fact could not but reassure the allies. Nevertheless, it became increasingly difficult for them to prove the expediency of their "strategic" bombing: in 1944, the gross industrial output in Germany was steadily increasing. A new approach was needed. And he was found: the commander of US strategic aviation, General Carl Spaatz, proposed to focus on the destruction of synthetic fuel plants, and the chief marshal of British aviation Tedder insisted on the destruction of German railways. He argued that the bombing of transport is the most real opportunity to quickly disorganize the enemy.

As a result, it was decided to bomb the transport system first, and the fuel plants second. From April 1944 Allied bombing did become strategic for a short time. And against their background, the tragedy in the small town of Essen, located in East Frisia, went unnoticed. On the last day of September 1944, bad weather prevented American planes from reaching a military factory. On the way back, through a gap in the clouds, the pilots saw a small city and, in order not to return home with a full load, decided to get rid of it. The bombs hit the school exactly, burying 120 children under the rubble. It was half the children in the city. A small episode of the great air war... By the end of 1944, the German railway transport was practically paralyzed. The production of synthetic fuel fell from 316,000 tons in May 1944 to 17,000 tons in September. As a result, neither aviation nor tank divisions had enough fuel. A desperate German counter-offensive in the Ardennes in December of the same year bogged down in large part because they failed to capture Allied fuel supplies. The German tanks just stood up.

Carnage from friends in arms

In the autumn of 1944, the Allies faced an unexpected problem: there were so many heavy bombers and cover fighters that there were not enough industrial targets for them: they couldn’t sit idle. And to the full satisfaction of Arthur Harris, not only the British, but also the Americans began to consistently destroy German cities. Berlin, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Freiburg, Heilbronn were subjected to the strongest raids. The apogee of the massacre was the destruction of Dresden in mid-February 1945. At this time, the city was literally flooded with tens of thousands of refugees from the eastern regions of Germany. The massacre was started by 800 British bombers on the night of February 13-14. 650,000 incendiary and high-explosive bombs were dropped on the city center. During the day Dresden was bombed by 1,350 American bombers, the next day by 1,100. The city center was literally razed to the ground. In total, 27 thousand residential and 7 thousand public buildings were destroyed.

How many citizens and refugees died is still unknown. Immediately after the war, the US State Department reported 250,000 deaths. Now the generally accepted figure is ten times less - 25 thousand, although there are other figures - 60 and 100 thousand people. In any case, Dresden and Hamburg can be put on a par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “When the fire from the burning buildings broke through the roofs, a column of hot air about six kilometers high and three kilometers in diameter rose above them ... Soon the air heated up to the limit, and all that could ignite, was engulfed in flames. Everything burned to the ground, that is, there were no traces of combustible materials, only two days later the temperature of the conflagration dropped so much that it was possible to at least approach the burnt area, ”an eyewitness testifies.

After Dresden, the British managed to bomb Würzburg, Bayreuth, Zoest, Ulm and Rothenburg - cities that have been preserved since the late Middle Ages. Only in one town of Pforzheim with a population of 60 thousand people during one air raid on February 22, 1945, a third of its inhabitants were killed. Klein Festung recalled that, being imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, he saw the reflections of the Pforzheim fire from the window of his cell - 70 kilometers away. Chaos settled on the streets of the destroyed German cities. The Germans, who love order and cleanliness, lived like cave dwellers, hiding in the ruins. Disgusting rats scurried around and fat flies circled.

In early March, Churchill urged Harris to end the "area" bombing. He literally said the following: “It seems to me that we need to stop the bombing of German cities. Otherwise, we will take control of an absolutely destroyed country.” Marshal was forced to comply.

"Guaranteed" peace

In addition to eyewitness accounts, the catastrophic consequences of such raids are confirmed by many documents, including the conclusion of a special commission of the victorious powers, which immediately after the surrender of Germany investigated the results of the bombing on the spot. With industrial and military facilities, everything was clear - no one expected a different result. But the fate of German cities and villages shocked the members of the commission. Then, almost immediately after the end of the war, the results of the "areal" bombing could not be hidden from the "general public". In England, a real wave of indignation arose against the recent "hero bombardiers", the protesters repeatedly demanded that they be brought to justice. In the United States, everything was treated quite calmly. But such information did not reach the broad masses of the Soviet Union, and it would hardly have become timely and understandable. There were so many of their own ruins and their own grief that it was up to someone else’s, to “fascist” - “so that it was empty for them all!” I didn't have the energy or the time.

How merciless this time is ... Literally after a few months after the war, her victims turned out to be useless. In any case, the first persons of the powers that defeated fascism were so preoccupied with the division of the victorious banner that, for example, Sir Winston Churchill hastened to officially disclaim responsibility for Dresden, for dozens of other German cities wiped off the face of the earth. As if nothing had happened and it was not he who personally made the decisions about the bombing. As if, when choosing the next victim city at the end of the war, the Anglo-American command was not guided by the criteria of "lack of military facilities" - "lack of air defense systems." The generals of the allied armies took care of their pilots and planes: why send them to where there is an air defense ring.

As for the hero of the war, and later the disgraced Marshal Arthur Harris, he immediately after the military battle began to write the book "Strategic Bombing". It came out already in 1947 and was sold in a fairly large circulation. Many were wondering how the "chief scorer" would justify himself. The author did not do this. On the contrary, he made it clear that he would not allow all responsibility to be dumped on himself. He did not repent of anything and did not regret anything. Here is how he understood his main task as commander of bomber aviation: “The main objects of the military industry should be looked for where they are in any country in the world, that is, in the cities themselves. It should be especially emphasized that, except in Essen, we never made any particular plant the object of the raid. We have always considered the ruined enterprise in the city as an additional good luck. Our main goal has always been the city center. All old German cities are most densely built up towards the center, and their outskirts are always more or less free from buildings. Therefore, the central part of the cities is especially sensitive to incendiary bombs.”

US Air Force General Frederick Anderson explained the concept of all-out raids this way: “Memories of the destruction of Germany will be passed from father to son, from son to grandson. This is the best guarantee that Germany will never start another war again." There were many such statements, and all of them seem even more cynical after reading the official American Strategic Bombing Report of September 30, 1945. This document, on the basis of research conducted at that time, says that the citizens of German cities lost their faith in a future victory, in their leaders, in the promises and propaganda to which they were subjected. Most of all they wanted the war to end.

They increasingly resorted to listening to “radio voices” (“black radio”), to discussing rumors and actually found themselves in opposition to the regime. As a result of this situation, a dissident movement began to grow in the cities: in 1944, one out of every thousand Germans was arrested for political crimes. If German citizens had the freedom to choose, they would have long ago ceased to participate in the war. However, under the conditions of a tough police regime, any manifestation of discontent meant: dungeons or death. Nevertheless, a study of official records and individual opinions shows that during the last period of the war, absenteeism increased and production declined, although large enterprises continued to work. Thus, no matter how dissatisfied the people of Germany were with the war, “they did not have the opportunity to openly express it,” the American report emphasizes.

Thus, the massive bombing of Germany as a whole was not strategic. They were only a few times. The military industry of the Third Reich was paralyzed only at the end of 1944, when the Americans bombed 12 factories producing synthetic fuel and disabled the road network. By this point, almost all major German cities had been aimlessly destroyed. According to Hans Rumpf, they took the brunt of the air raids and thus protected industrial enterprises until the very end of the war. “Strategic bombardments were aimed mainly at the destruction of women, children and the elderly,” emphasizes the major general. Out of a total of 955,044 thousand bombs dropped by the British on Germany, 430,747 tons fell on cities.

As for Churchill's decision on the moral terror of the German population, it was truly fatal: such raids not only did not contribute to victory, but even pushed it back.

However, for a long time after the war, many well-known participants continued to justify their actions. So, already in 1964, retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Ira Eaker spoke as follows: “I find it difficult to understand the British or Americans, weeping over the dead from the civilian population and not shedding a single tear over our valiant soldiers who died in battles with a cruel enemy. I deeply regret that British and American bombers killed 135,000 inhabitants of Dresden in a raid, but I do not forget who started the war, and I regret even more that more than 5 million lives were lost by the Anglo-American armed forces in a stubborn struggle for complete destruction of fascism.

English Air Marshal Robert Sondby was not so categorical: “No one will deny that the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy. It was a terrible misfortune, such as sometimes happen in wartime, caused by a cruel set of circumstances. Those who authorized this raid did not act out of malice, not out of cruelty, although it is likely that they were too far removed from the harsh reality of military operations to fully comprehend the monstrous destructive power of aerial bombardments in the spring of 1945. Was the English air marshal really so naive as to justify the total destruction of German cities in this way. After all, it is “cities, not piles of ruins, that are the basis of civilization,” wrote the English historian John Fuller after the war.

You can't say better about the bombings.

The birth of the doctrine

The very use of the aircraft as a means of warfare was a truly revolutionary step at the beginning of the 20th century. The first bombers were clumsy and fragile-looking structures, and flying them to the target, even with a minimal bomb load, was not an easy task for pilots. There was no need to talk about the accuracy of hits. In the First World War, bomber aircraft did not gain much fame, unlike fighters or ground-based "wonder weapons" - tanks. Nevertheless, the “heavy” aviation had supporters and even apologists. In the period between the two world wars, perhaps the most famous of them was the Italian General Giulio Due.

In his writings, Douai tirelessly argued that one aircraft could win a war. The ground forces and the navy must play a subordinate role in relation to it. The army holds the front line and the navy defends the coast while the air force wins. First of all, cities should be bombed, and not factories and military installations, which are relatively easy to redeploy. Moreover, it is desirable to destroy cities in one raid, so that the civilian population does not have time to take out material values ​​​​and hide. It is necessary not so much to destroy as many people as possible, but to sow panic among them, to break them morally. Under these conditions, enemy soldiers at the front will think not about victory, but about the fate of their loved ones, which will undoubtedly affect their fighting spirit. To do this, it is necessary to develop bomber aviation, and not fighter, naval or any other. Well-armed bombers themselves are able to fight off enemy aircraft and deliver a decisive blow. Whoever has the most powerful aircraft will win.

The "radical" views of the Italian theorist were shared by very few. Most military experts believed that General Douai overdid it by absolutizing the role of military aviation. Yes, and calls for the destruction of the civilian population in the 20s of the last century were considered outright bad manners. But be that as it may, it was Giulio Due who was among the first to understand that aviation gave the war a third dimension. With his "light hand", the idea of ​​​​unrestricted air warfare firmly settled in the minds of some politicians and military leaders.

Losses in numbers

In Germany, bombings killed, according to various estimates, from 300 thousand to 1.5 million civilians. In France - 59 thousand killed and wounded, mainly from Allied raids, in England - 60.5 thousand, including victims from the actions of rockets "Fau".

The list of cities in which the area of ​​destruction amounted to 50% or more of the total area of ​​buildings (oddly enough, only 40% fell to Dresden):

50% - Ludwigshafen, Worms
51% - Bremen, Hannover, Nuremberg, Remscheid, Bochum
52% - Essen, Darmstadt
53% - Cochem
54% - Hamburg, Mainz
55% - Neckarsulm, Soest
56% - Aachen, Münster, Heilbronn
60% - Erkelenz
63% - Wilhelmshaven, Koblenz
64% - Bingerbrück, Cologne, Pforzheim
65% - Dortmund
66% - Crailsheim
67% - Giessen
68% - Hanau, Kassel
69% - Düren
70% - Altenkirchen, Bruchsal
72% - Geilenkirchen
74% - Donauwörth
75% - Remagen, Würzburg
78% - Emden
80% - Prüm, Wesel
85% - Xanten, Zulpich
91% - Emmerich
97% - Julich

The total volume of the ruins was 400 million cubic meters. 495 architectural monuments were completely destroyed, 620 were so damaged that their restoration was either impossible or doubtful.