beorna

That's a big number for a single unit, if we keep in mind, that the Chinese losses were at around 15-20 millions (including 4-5 million military losses).
I have my doubts here

hop

Because of the firestorm. As to why 1 night caused a firestorm and the others didn't, according to Martin Middlebrook in The Battle of Hamburg, there were several reasons.

First, low humidity and high temperatures in the days before the attack made things more combustible.

Second, the bombing was concentrated in a small area (not very accurate, mind, the bombing was actually centred on a spot 2 miles from the aiming point)

Third, the earlier RAF raid had hit the west of the city. The Gauleiter of Hamburg ordered all the firemen to the west to put out the remaining fires in case they served as a marker for further RAF attacks. The raid that produced the firestorm hit the east of the city, the firemen were not only exhausted after days of effort, damage to the roads meant they had difficulty getting back to the east.

I think it was just a genuine underestimate. From a report investigating the extent and effectiveness of German bombing on London, presented to the War Cabinet:

sylla1

And as you haven´t shared with us any single piece of hard evidence supporting such categorical assessment, let say like some of us all along this thread regarding Hamburg 1943 or Dresden 1945, such a fascinating conclusion must come from instincts or bias, right?

Anyhow, could you share with us your sources on this fascinating conclusion?
Thanks in advance.

sylla1

Actually, our Redcoat has already do so for us.

Unless of course your personal definition of "serious" might be just the support of any low number; being that the case, your request would be inherently oxymoronic...

The obvious reasons why so many authors support wider ranges of estimates had already been pointed out above.
Pretending to olympically ignore the evident limitations for the corpse tally on the field and the equally obvious fact that during a firestorm plenty of corpses were simply calcinated couldn't be any more fallacious...
... a positivist fallacy, to be more specific.
For such obvious limitations and others, the figures from the aforementioned commission could naturally be considered just as the minimal possible extreme of a a wide range of death toll estimations.

What is far more relevant here is the attitude of some posters (fundamentally posting from the UK) relative to the numerical estimations of let say Hamburg 1943 or Dresden 1945; contrary to the natural tendency on the choice of the proudly higher numbers on enemy casualties as evidence of the outstanding performance of the brave men of the Bombing Command (which was BTW the obvious tendency of the earlier British accounts on such bombings) the tendency for the later decades had been to force the lowest possible numbers.
Shame from the own success???

However you may like us to explain such evident and sometimes obsessive tendency, it is clearly unrequired.
5,000 or 500,000 victims of Thunderclap wouldn't make Dresden any more or less a valid military objective, the very point which is so obviously uncomfortable for some posters here.
Thunderclap is a good example of the deliberate terror strategy against the enemy civilian population a la Douhet so enthusiastically justified and promoted by some posters all along this thread (despite its poor objective military results for decades, we might add) for the Allied air forces in the European WW2 in this case (not that there is any scarcity of additional examples) but that would be equally valid for essentially each & any relevant Air Force all around this Planet, from Japan to the Soviet Union to Iraq.

Sicknero

Thanks, good info.

It occured to me this morning that the figure in the Foreign Office booklet could only ever be an estimate, having been printed in 1944 before we had access to German war records.

I found an article from The Independent (September 5th 2010) about this. It gives no sources, but the writer Corelli Barnett seems to be a fairly well respected historian, so I have no reason to doubt his figures, which I would guess are based on post-war information.

He says "When the Blitz came to its end in May 1941, the Luftwaffe had dropped on London alone a total of nearly 14,000 tons of bombs." and, "The Luftwaffe's total of 74,000 tons of bombs dropped on Britain was utterly eclipsed by the nearly two million tons dropped by RAF Bomber Command and the US 8th Air Force by the end of the war in 1945."

Link; Germany's bombs set our cities and homes alight, but we carried on - This Britain - UK - The Independent

May I ask where you found the "Weight of attack.." report? Not in a "show me your sources" spirit, but just because I'd like to read more.

It still intrigues me that the Foreign Office would give such a low estimate in a booklet for British troops. I'd have expected that, in 1944, they would if anything want to overstate the case.

It also occured to me, that if Bomber Command and the British cabinet/war planners were aware that the Blitz was actually having the effect of increasing the determination to fight in the people of Britain (which I'm sure they must have been), then surely it must have occurred to them that it might well have a similar effect on the German population.

Anyway concerning the OP, I'm definitely all for the memorial. Regardless of the morality/effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign (which I do have mixed feelings about, and probably always will have), the fact remains that these men did what they did in good faith, following information and orders given to them by planners and their senior officers, and a huge number of them were killed and maimed in the process. As such they deserve to be remembered, imo.

sylla1

A most valuable source IMHO; thanks a lot for sharing it with us. An interesting point; IMHO this kind of reflections would have been largely neutralized by the only human tendency at war (hardly just any nation) of considering that brave actions are possible fundamentally just from the own side.

CuriousHistorian

Actually "our Redcoat" hasn't. Middlebrook was writing in 1985, not the past decade, and was not writing a detailed analysis. I do not believe you can find a "serious author" in English or German, endorsing a high figure since 2002.

The Historical Commission in fact point out the reasons why bodies would not have been completely destroyed. The person applying olympian ignorance here is you, I'm afraid. You have a determination to ignore the factual evidence in favour of figures that you wish to be true. Who are these authors who support, as opposed to simply note, wider (higher) ranges of figures?

Neither the RAF or the USAAF ever claimed casualty figures as a measure of success. And in the immediate post-war period, both believed the overall German death toll from bombing to have been half that finally established. In his book, Harris quotes the initial USBBS estimate of 300,000.

Thunderclap is indeed a good example. It was a plan, drawn up by the Air Staff, incidentally, not Harris, following a request from Churchill. Its purpose was to to topple the Nazi regime by forcing a crushing blow on moral and a subsquent coup or, possibly, revolt. The model for such an outcome was the events of late 1918 in Germany. The plan was criticised as unlikely to work, and of questionable worth, and was shelved.

Thunderclap was never carried out, but the target cities identified were attacked, mainly as transport targets. When Thunderclap came to light, several historians assumed that these targets had been attacked as part of that plan, particularly given the devestation in Dresden,but this is erroneous. Redoat and Hop have referred to the limited aiming points for the Dresden attack - had it been a Thunderclap attack, the aiming points would have ranged across the city, to maximise the extent of the damage.

My source for this, in pursuit of actually identifying authorative historians as opposed to vagualy referring to "many authors", is Probert's "Bomber Harris: His Life and Times".

amazedkat

google it..

just read it in max hasting's book 'inferno' , please note i said the chinese claim. it's up to them to justify it not me, what is known is the japanese dropped porcelain bombs loaded with cholera and typhoid bacteria on them and millions of chinese people died of these illnesses during the war. more sober historians reckon around half a million people were killed by the program. i reckon the chinese were nearer the mark though.

there you go wiki has a page..

sylla1

Your request is indeed oxymoronic, even naive, if your personal definition of "serious" is for any mysterious reason limited to low numbers... or the self-apology of members of the Bomber Command, for that matter (not exactly one of the "victims" this time either, huh?)

Sources on what?
The amazing physical fact that bodies are incinerated during firestorms?
Or that there were myriad major obstacles for the corpse tally during the last days of the Reich with the Soviets above their heads?

The numbers of the Historical Commission are just the lowest possible figure of a wide range; period.

That said, and as previously pointed out, for all purposes your obsession in proving the lowest possible figure is simply useless.

Again, that wouldn't change the evident non-military nature of the civilian population of Dresden as a target for the obvious terror strategy a la Dohuet, BTW so prevalent among the air forces of the time.

So if you would really like to continue some other decades of your life collecting cherry-picked sources on your known-in-advance fundamentally irrelevant conclusion, be my guest and do your own homework.

Fire_Raven

Nice post. There also had been minimal rain in the preceding weeks which added to the combustibility. The larger fuels(for the fire) would of lost significant amounts of moisture over a prolonged period of heat,low humidity and minimal rain.

A little basic fire behavior for large fires(covering all the bases so not trying to be offensive if some of it is extremely obvious)
The previous bombings started fires in different areas of the city which the firemen were trying to extinguish. When the bombing of the 27th/28th(?) hit, the weather was good so more bombs hit near their targets causing a conflagration in a concentrated area. As the individual fires grew they began to feed off each others heat to rapidly dry out other fuels in the area. This caused the fire to spread beyond the initial individual bomb sites. The fires would then grow together and once they were big enough they formed a convection column(rising hot air) that began to draw in air from around the edges.

Hot air rises, colder air rushes in to take it's place. This would also begin to draw in other nearby fires to consume any unburnt fuel between the big fire and the smaller fire. The fire would grow even larger, more hot air would rise and more colder air would rush into replace and the wind would get stronger and stronger. Which would lead to this:
from BBC's World at War series-Ursula Gray was the witness if reading the cite correctly on wiki.

The fire also consumed vast amounts of oxygen leaving behind carbon monoxide in it's place. People in areas surrounded on fire but not currently burning (cellars,subways, streets etc.) would of died from lack of oxygen in the air or the breathing in of superheated gases that seared the airways causing them to swell shut.

As the temperature of the fire increased, more objects(asphalt in roads,paint along with weakening metal structures like fuel tanks allowing their contents to spill) would of reached their ignition point and added fuel to the fire. It would pull also begin to pull bigger objects into the convection column like pieces of debris,roofing tiles, shutters etc the same way it pulled in the people in the above quote. These items would ignite and could be tossed out of the column in front of the fire to start spot fires in other areas of the city. Eventually these spot fires would be pulled into the main fire consuming the fuel between the spots and the main fire. This cycle of growth would continue until it ran out of sufficient fuel to sustain the fire.