Firebombing is a
bombing
technique designed to damage a target, generally an urban area,
through the use of
fire, caused by
incendiary devices, rather than from the
blast effect of large bombs.
The tactic originated during
World War
II with the use of
strategic
bombing to destroy the ability of the enemy to wage war.
London,
Coventry and many other British cities were
firebombed during
the Blitz.
Many German cities,
such as Hamburg
, were
extensively firebombed starting in 1942. Almost all of the
Japanese cities were firebombed during the last six months of World
War II.
This technique makes use of small
incendiary bombs (possibly delivered by a
cluster bomb such as the
Molotov bread basket). If a fire
catches, it could spread, taking in adjacent buildings that would
have been largely unaffected by a high explosive bomb. This is a
more effective use of the payload that a bomber could carry.
The use of incendiaries alone does not generally start
uncontrollable fires where the targets are roofed with nonflammable
materials such as tiles or slates. The use of a mixture of bombers
carrying high explosive bombs, such as the British
blockbuster bombs, which blew out windows
and roofs and exposed the interior of buildings to the incendiary
bombs, are much more effective. Alternatively, a preliminary
bombing with conventional bombs can be followed by subsequent
attacks by incendiary carrying bombers.
Tactics
Early in World War II many British cities were firebombed.
Two
particularly notable raids were the Coventry Blitz on 14
November 1940, and the blitz on London
on the night of 29 December/30 December 1940, which
was the most destructive raid on London during the war with much of
the destruction caused by fires started by incendiary bombs.
During the Coventry Blitz the Germans pioneered several innovations
which were to influence all future strategic bomber raids during
the war. These were: The use of pathfinder aircraft with electronic
aids to navigate, to mark the targets before the main bomber raid;
The use of high explosive bombs and air-mines (
blockbuster bombs) coupled with thousands
of incendiary bombs intended to set the city ablaze. The first wave
of follow-up bombers dropped high explosive bombs, the intent of
which was knock out the utilities (the water supply, electricity
network and gas mains), and to crater the road - making it
difficult for the fire engines to reach fires started by the
follow-up waves of bombers. The follow-up waves dropped a
combination of high explosive and incendiary bombs. There were two
types of incendiary bombs: those made with
magnesium and
iron powders,
and those made of
petroleum. The
high-explosive bombs and the larger
air-mines were not only designed to hamper the
Coventry fire brigade, they were also intended to damage roofs,
making it easier for the incendiary bombs to fall into buildings
and ignite them. As
Sir Arthur
Harris, commander of the
RAF
Bomber Command, wrote after the war:
The development of the
tactical
innovation of the
bomber stream by
the RAF to overwhelm the
German aerial defenses of the
Kammhuber Line during World War II would have
increased the RAF's concentration in time over the target, but
after the lessons learned during the Blitz, the concentration of
dropping bombs over the target in the shortest time possible became
standard tactic of the RAF because it was known to be more
effective than spreading the raid over a longer time period.
For
example during the Coventry Blitz on the night of 14/15 November
1940, 515 Luftwaffe bombers many flying more than one sortie against Coventry delivered their bombs in a
raid that lasted more than 10 hours, while in contrast the much
more devastating raid on Dresden, Germany
on the night of 13/14 of February 1945 by the two
waves of the Bomber Command's
main force, the first wave released their first bomb at 22:14, with
all but one of the 254 Avro Lancaster
bombers releasing their bombs within two minutes, and the last one
releasing at 22:22. The second wave of 529 Lancasters
dropped all of their bombs between 01:21 and 01:45. This means that
in the first raid that on average one Lancaster dropped a full load
of bombs every half a second and in the second larger raid that
involved more than one RAF bomber Group, one every three
seconds.
The
United States Army Air
Force (USAAF) officially only bombed precision targets over
Europe, but for an unusual example, when 316 B-17 Flying Fortresses bombed Dresden
in a
follow-up raid at around noon on the 14 February 1945, because of
cloud the later waves bombed using H2X
radar for targeting.Davis p.504 The mix of bombs to be
used on the Dresden raid was about 40% incendiaries, much closer to
the RAF city-busting mix than the 100%
high-explosive bomb-load
usually used by the Americans in precision bombardments.Taylor p.
366. Taylor compares this 40% mix with the
raid
on Berlin on February 3rd where the ratio was 10% incendiaries
This was quite a common mix when the
Army
Air Force anticipated cloudy conditions over the target.Davis
pp. 425,504
In its attacks on Japan the
Army Air
Force eventually abandoned its policy of high-altitude
precision bombing, and it used a mix of incendiaries and high
explosives to burn Japanese cities to the ground. These tactics
were used to devastating effect with many urban areas burned out.
The first
raid using low-flying B-29
Superfortress bombers carrying incendiary bombs to drop on Tokyo
was on the
night of 24-25 February 1945 when 174 B-29s
destroyed around fifty square mile (150 km²) of the city.
Changing their tactics to expand the coverage and increase the
damage, 279 B-29s raided on the night of 9-10 March, dropping
around 1,700 tons of bombs. Approximately 16 square miles (41 km²)
of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to
have died in the resulting
firestorm, more
than the immediate deaths of either the
Hiroshima or
Nagasaki,
Japan atomic bombings. Another
example is the
Bombing
of Kobe, Japan on 17 March 1945, 331 B-29 bombers launched a
firebombing attack against the city. Of the city's residents,
80,841 were confirmed to have been killed in the resulting
firestorms, which destroyed an area of three
square miles and included 21% of Kobe's urban area. At the time,
the city covered an area of
14 square
miles (36 km²). More than 650,000 people had their
homes destroyed, and the homes of another one million people were
damaged.
Popular culture
See also
Notes
- *
- Taylor, Fredrick; Dresden Tuesday 13 February 1945,
Pub Bloomsbury (First Pub 2004, Paper Back 2005). ISBN
0-7475-7084-1. Page 118
- Freeman Dyson. Part I: A Failure of
Intelligence. Technology Review, November 1 2006, MIT
References
,
firestorm.
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