For this post, I have brought together a few sources to produce a basic map of the World War II Allied Strategic Bombing campaign in Germany below. This map uses a modern-day map of Germany, though the locations of these cities have not changed. The data for this map comes from the United States Strategic…
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Project #4: Did Allied Strategic Bombing become more effective over time?
As mentioned in a previous post, the use of new technology such as White Phosphorus likely did increase the damage dealt by fire raids in later years of the war. Could we see a clear improvement in effectiveness over time with total damage as well? For this post, I am comparing two specific HE and…
Digital Project #3: Visualizing Data on Dresden’s Destruction
As shown in my prior post, comparing the amount of bombs dropped on Dresden to other cities leads to some interesting and unexpected conclusions. See the chart below. This chart shows that Dresden was hit mostly by high explosive (HE) bombs, and all three cities that I have collected data on were attacked with a…
Dresden’s bombing Compared
For this post, I am again stating that the people who died in Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and in any city hit by strategic bombing on all sides of the war, were people. Reducing their experiences to statistics is not the purpose of this or any project I will publish on this site. We must remember…
Sourcing Data on the Bombings
A quick note before I write about statistics; these were people, not numbers. As I write about strategic bombing, percentages of destroyed cities, population loss, and other statistics, we, as in historians and the reader, cannot forget that these statistics represent people, their deaths, terror, and lived experience. To fully understand the damage dealt to…
The Second World War and Depopulation in Saxony
The state of Saxony is home to Dresden as well as two other major industrial cities, those being Leipzig and Chemnitz which were also targeted by allied bombing raids. My aim in this post is to look at the population damage that Dresden suffered, as a first step to researching the damage done to other…
Early Research into the Firebombing
From the beginning of my research into the Dresden Firebombing and its results, I have, until recently, been unsure as to what exactly should be my focus. My search brought me to a couple of interesting findings, the first of which are in the form of two maps made before and after the war. The…
Why Dresden?
Dresden is a very interesting city for a number of reasons. It is located in East Germany and was part of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) until reunification. It was decimated at the end of World War II by Allied bombing raids in one of the most devastating non-nuclear attacks in world history. Its population…