Monthly Archives: September 2015

The Blitz, 75 years in retrospect and perspective

7th of September, 1940 – on this month, it is 75 years since London (and other major United Kingdom cities) started bearing the brunt of the of the Nazi-German ‘Blitz’, a series of massive bombings of industrial facilities, but more known for its purposeful targeting of the civilian populace, aimed at demoralizing the population up to the expected invastion (operation Zeelöwe / Sea Lion) of the island.

While the loss of life was great, with well over 44,000 lives perished, the devastation of the cities was likewise massive. The effect of the Blitz however was the opposite of the intended demoralisation; it galvanised the popular spirit of the war effort under Winston Chuchill’s resistance of the Nazi war machine, which eventually was smashed and the totalitarian system and ideology behind it, utterly crushed.

However the British were not the only ones to suffer the terror of war atrocities – as the tides of war turned, the Allies were increasingly raiding the Nazi production capacity, and one centre of such was Hamburg. The city was air-raided over the span of a week in late July 1943, with terrible conseqences – over 42,000 dead due to firestorms due to incendiary bombs igniting the dry lands, resulting in the formation of a enormous firey vortex that did not only torch the housing like a blast furnace, but claimed lives by the absolute horror of its victims being sucked into the vortex due to the underpressure created by the superheated air rising rapidly into the skies.

Likewise, the raid of Dresden in Feburary 1945 – 70 years ago – was an example of wartime terror, claiming up to 25,000 lives.

In the Sino-Pacific theatre, there was the Rape of Nanking / Nanjing which claimed at he very least 40,000 lives and untold human suffering due to unrestrained rape of it inhabitants at the hands of the Japanese. Conversely, the American firebombing of Tokyo, considered the most destructive conventional air raid in history with at least 88,000 dead and over a million left homeless, the raids on Japan culminating in the Nukes over Nagasaki and Hiroshima with its over 100,000 dead, are likewise examples of the enormuous bloodshed and destruction inherent to war. (Additionally, compare these casualty counts to the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, military and civilian, in the embittered and supremely intense fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa).

In war, there will be variations of the brutality on the different sides, but there are no single party that are exempt from perpetrating atrocities.

Link

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