On the night of July 27, 1943, 728 Allied bombers arrived over the
German city of Hamburg at one o'clock in the morning. Ten thousand
tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs were dropped on several
districts of the city. The late W.G. Sebald explained what followed in
his recently published book, On the Natural History of Destruction
(2003):
Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning all over the target
area, which covered some twenty square kilometers, and they merged so
rapidly that only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had
dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could
see. Another five minutes later, at one twenty a.m., a firestorm of an
intensity that no one had ever before thought possible arose. The
fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to
itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force....
The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm
lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire
advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground,
and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind
collapsing facades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like
a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over a hundred and
fifty kilometers an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms
like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some canals was ablaze.
The glass in the tramcar windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the
bakery cellars. Those who fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with
grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting
asphalt.... Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little
phosphorous flames still flickered around them; others had been
roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal
size.... Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes
by the heat, which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the
remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away
in a single laundry basket.
That night in this one raid alone, more than 45,000 men, women, and
children were killed in Hamburg. Half the houses in the city were
destroyed, and more than a million Germans had to flee into the
surrounding countryside.
On the night of July 27, 1943, 728 Allied bombers arrived over the
German city of Hamburg at one o'clock in the morning. Ten thousand
tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs were dropped on several
districts of the city. The late W.G. Sebald explained what followed in
his recently published book, On the Natural History of Destruction
(2003):
Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning all over the target
area, which covered some twenty square kilometers, and they merged so
rapidly that only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had
dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could
see. Another five minutes later, at one twenty a.m., a firestorm of an
intensity that no one had ever before thought possible arose. The
fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to
itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force....
The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm
lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire
advertising billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground,
and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind
collapsing facades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like
a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over a hundred and
fifty kilometers an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms
like rolling cylinders of fire. The water in some canals was ablaze.
The glass in the tramcar windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the
bakery cellars. Those who fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with
grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting
asphalt.... Horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little
phosphorous flames still flickered around them; others had been
roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal
size.... Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes
by the heat, which had risen to a thousand degrees or more, that the
remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away
in a single laundry basket.
That night in this one raid alone, more than 45,000 men, women, and
children were killed in Hamburg. Half the houses in the city were
destroyed, and more than a million Germans had to flee into the
surrounding countryside.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COMM.10.5.03.HTM
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