List of strategic bombing over Germany in World War II

A list of strategic bombing over Germany in World War II includes all cities and towns in Germany attacked by RAF Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force.

History

Defence of Germany

German defensive strategy of their country, and neighbouring occupied countries, against strategic bombing was conducted by the Defence of the Reich.

In February 1944, the RAF and USAAF air raids of Big Week notably limited the offensive capability of the Luftwaffe, from which it would never recover. On the first day of Big Week, 127 German fighters were shot down for the loss of one P-51 Mustang fighter. 434 German fighter pilots were killed in February 1944, which was 17% of the total, and many were the more-experienced fighter pilots.

The German air defence had advanced radar and was often impenetrable, or only penetrable at great cost; only aircraft such as the de Havilland Mosquito could completely outwit the German defences; the Mosquito was almost impossible to shoot down, being able to outrun most German fighter aircraft too, and it carried no discernible defensive armament. Around fifteen German cities were firebombed, in which destruction of the cities was almost total; the temperatures created in the firestorm were huge. Many north-western German cities were bombed in late 1943 in the Battle of the Ruhr.

Destruction

Approximately 410,000 German civilians were killed in the strategic bombing.[1] This failed to achieve the goal of breaking civilian morale and inducing mass panic, and had at best a minor effect in hastening the defeat and surrender of Germany. Within the 1937 borders of Germany, industrial capacity was greater at the end of the war than at the beginning. British and American raids often deliberately targeted the highly flammable medieval and early modern city centres, which had no military value. The raids intensified in the final months of the war, when Germany’s defeat was effectively inevitable.

This destruction of historic architecture and other treasures was unparalleled in modern European history; it exceeded by a large multiple the cumulative destruction the Luftwaffe inflicted on cities in other parts of Europe. For example, Britain suffered less than one tenth of the damage during the Battle of Britain and the later V-1 and V-2 missile attacks — less damage in fact than Allied bombs caused to French cities and civilian lives between 1940 and 1944. Hitler’s orders to destroy Paris ahead of the advancing Allies were ignored by his officers on the ground. The closest parallel of the Allied attacks on German cities is perhaps the razing of Warsaw by German forces after the failed Warsaw Uprising of 1944; in the case of Warsaw as well as of many of the ca. 1000 German cities targeted from the air, the attackers attempted a form of cultural genocide by wiping out the physical manifestation of a people’s past, of the accumulated works of many generations.

Strategic bombing
Darmstadt after the firebombing of 11 September 1944

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  • Bombing of Kassel in World War II; the raid on 22 October 1943 resulted in a firestorm, destroying 23 square miles; the Kassel Mission by the USAAF occurred on 27 September 1944, and was one of the largest air battles between the Luftwaffe and the USAAF, and 118 American aircrew were killed, of which 11 were murdered after parachuting to safety

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See also

References
  1. University of Exeter
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