18 Fire in WW II

Chapter 18 – Fire in WWII THE COLD WAR: WHO WON?
8 December 2010
CHAPTER 18
FIRE IN WORLD WAR II
Mass fires, both intentional and accidental, have
always played a role in warfare. In WWII, fire bombing
became a major contributor to damage in both Europe
and Japan. Some sixty five Japanese cities suffered
losses of roughly half their structures from USAAF
firebombing. Similar devastation was caused in earlier
firebombing in Germany by the British RAF.
The Role of Fire in Warfare
Fire has always played a dominant role in warfare, even in
ancient wars. Invaders invariably torched cities, burned villages
and systematically set fire to crops. In times of crisis, whether it
is earthquake, civil strife or other disruption, fire generally
increases damage, whether as intended by a combatant force or
as an incidental result of the chaos engendered by natural
disruption or human conflict.
Moscow burned as Napoleon entered, but it is not clear how
much of the fire was set by French troops. Napoleon did order
the Kremlin torched. Evacuees left the city largely unattended, so
when fires broke out, they were not always fought successfully.
In addition, the mayor of Moscow made efforts to deny the French
supplies and shelter, and ordered the city burned, which, in those
years, was dominated by wooden structures.
Most great cities of the past have been burned during time
of war, some repeatedly – Rome, Berlin, London, and Moscow –
even Washington. British troops burned the White House and the
67
Chapter 18 – Fire in WWII THE COLD WAR: WHO WON? 8 December 2010
Capitol during the War of 1812 (Fortunately, at the time, rain

inhibited the burning of the rest of Washington.) During almost
any conflict, fire is capable of destroying buildings and their
contents more easily and completely than is practical by any
other means. Although fire played a dominant role in the damage
done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, long before nuclear weapons
were invented, fire was a major aspect of warfare.
World War II – Aerial Bombardment – German Experience
In WWII the role of fire became central to the aerial
bombardment of first England, then Germany and finally Japan.
In July and August of 1940, the Germans attacked London and
other cities in England with high explosive bombs. The British
civil defenders noted that fires resulting from the bombing did
more damage than was caused by the direct bomb blast. In the
confusion and stress, the fires often spread to adjacent buildings,
and sometimes coalesced into large-scale conflagrations. The
effectiveness of intense raids on cities was dramatically
demonstrated by a 10-hour German raid on Coventry in
November of 1940, when some 60,000 structures were destroyed
or damaged, most of them by fires that spread.
Perhaps because of the chaos created by antiaircraft fire and
Spitfire defenders, the German attacks were rather indiscriminate
attacks against London and other English cities. The German
raids were seldom effective against key military installations, but
the fires often caused serious damage to homes as well as
sometimes to the intended industries.
68
World War II – Aerial Bombardment – British Experience

When the British were able to respond with aerial attacks on
Germany, the Royal Air Force (RAF) soon began nighttime raids in
an effort to minimize their losses to German antiaircraft and
fighter defenses. Since nighttime navigation was difficult before
the advent of radar, the RAF planners developed a system
employing expert lead navigators and bombardiers to guide their
growing armadas of bombers. Following these experienced crews
in formation to the right cities and then to the most important
targets within those cities, nighttime raids became more effective
and enjoyed higher accuracy and fewer bomber losses than
previously. Still, their accuracy was not very great. The RAF raids
became “carpet bombings” as opposed to the “pin-point”
bombing attempted by the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF), which
began with daylight air raids on Germany from bases in England
in late 1942.
Opinions outweighed facts, and from Churchill on down, the
stated aim was to destroy German morale as well as put German
war industries out of business1. In retrospect, the logic seems
flawed, since the German aerial attacks on England for the most
part galvanized the British spirit and determination to confront
and defeat the Axis powers, and did little to delay or inhibit the
British war effort. (It made them mad!) Perhaps something of the
same attitude prevailed with the Germans when their cities were
attacked. At any rate, even in the late stages of the air war, when
repeated heavy attacks were being made on Berlin and nearly
69
every other urban area in the Nazi country, most Germans found
themselves too busy fighting fires and repairing damage to
quarrel about their leadership or the conduct of the war. In a
book about Goebbles, the author quotes the Berlin Police
Commissioner:
The terror of the bombings forged men together.
In rescue work there was no time for men to ask one
another who was for and who against the Nazis. In the
general hopelessness people clung to the single
fanatical will they could see, and unfortunately Goebbels
was the personification of that will. It was disgusting to
see it, but whenever that spiteful dwarf appeared,
people still thronged to see him and felt beatified [sic] to
receive an autograph or a handshake from him.2
Still, many allied leaders felt that most of the German people
would be discouraged by the devastation brought by the air war,
and that most were hoping the air raids would lead to an early
end to the conflict.
British reconnaissance photography in 1941 showed that
nearly eighty percent of British bombs were falling more than five
miles from their intended targets, and over the heavily defended
Ruhr only one bomb in ten landed within ten miles of its intended
target. Since fully a third of the British war effort was going into
strategic bombing, but causing such poor results in attacking
German industries, the doctrine was altered to attacks on
urban/industrial centers instead of specific installations or military
targets 3.
One inadvertent example that illustrated the effectiveness of
the RAF tactic can be found in the effort to destroy the submarine
70
pens in Bremerhaven. German submarines were sinking many of

the ships bringing aid to England from America. Since the
elimination of the German submarine production was of the
highest priority, the RAF scheduled frequent heavy attacks on the
sub pens in Bremerhaven. In addition, since Bremerhaven was
close to the English Channel, bombers that failed to find their
targets elsewhere in Germany would drop them on the sub pens
on their way home. Consequently, the Germans had constructed
massive concrete covers, often five meters (16 ft.) thick, over the
sub pens, so that such bombing attacks were not very effective.
One raid, however, missed the harbor estuary along which
the protected submarine construction pens were lined up. The
bombers missed by only a quarter of a mile to one side of the
waterway. But those errant bombs fell on the crowded
apartments that housed the shipyard workers adjacent to the
shipworks. As a result, those dwellings were completely burned
out. For lack of shelter, many of the submarine construction
workers then fled to the countryside and were no longer able to
attend to their jobs building submarines. It was well into in the
war, and the Germans were not able to mount the effort to rebuild
those living quarters destroyed by the fires. In effect, the
bombing of the apartments, although in error, may have been
more effective in stopping the submarine production than any of
the direct attacks on the protected sub pens.
Six months after the war in Europe, I visited the
area in Bremerhaven adjacent to those infamous
submarine pens, and was struck by the remaining total
71
devastation in the mile-long strip of burned-out

apartments – just empty windows in isolated masonry
walls or an occasional lonely chimney still standing.
The most significant change for the Royal Air Force came
when they converted their bomb loads from exclusively explosive
bombs to a mix with firebombs. It was all in an effort to cause
greater damage and make their nighttime air raids more
effective. They observed that even the largest explosive bombs
could not cause serious damage beyond a few tens of meters
from each point of detonation. The damage from firebombs, on
the other hand, was potentially far-reaching, as fires often spread
from building to building throughout a chaotic urban area, and
frequently such fires coalesced into a mass fire, devastating really
large areas, often leaving 40 to 60 percent of an attacked city
completely burned out.
As the British aerial bombardment of German cities
progressed, the RAF used a mix of 60% explosive bombs (by
weight) to 40% firebombs. The explosives were dropped to break
through the tile roofs of German buildings so that the following
firebombs might fall into attics or more ignitable interior spaces.
The explosives also created rubble in the streets, which impeded
the approach of fire fighters and their equipment.4 In addition,
dropping explosive bombs during and after the incendiaries were
delivered also helped to keep the firefighters in shelters until the
fires got well started. Also, because of the tile roofs and masonry
construction in many German cities, most types of firebombs
were designed to penetrate roofs and reach combustible interiors.
72
Early in the air war, German cities in the east of the country
were beyond the reach of Allied bombers. And their fighter
escorts were unable to make the long flights to those more
distant cities, leaving the long-range bombers at the mercy of the
German antiaircraft and fighters. So Berlin and many eastern
German areas escaped attack until later in the air war.
Eventually, fighter aircraft, especially the USAAF P-51s, when
equipped with auxiliary fuel tanks to extend their range, were
able to escort the bombers and protect them on their missions to
Berlin and beyond.
Because of their earlier success with firebombing, the British
expectation was that they could burn Berlin as they had other
cities in the Ruhr and elsewhere in western Germany. But, even
with ever more intensive firebombing of Berlin as the war
progressed, the Berlin raids never succeeded in generating mass
fires.
“Promising the British people that "Berlin will be
bombed until the heart of Nazi Germany ceases to
beat," Sir Arthur Harris (whose enthusiasm for bombing
civilians dated back to the Third Afghan War in 1919)
[31] unleashed the RAF's heavy bombers on 18
November. In a new strategy that the Germans called
Bombenteppich or "carpet bombing," the Lancasters,
flying in dangerously tight formations, concentrated
their bomb loads on small, densely populated areas.
Mission performance was measured simply by urban
acreage destroyed. Explosive with the deliberate aim of
killing firefighters, rescue workers, and refugees
followed up incendiary attacks. In line with the
Churchillian doctrine of targeting Weimar's Red belts to
73
maximize discontent, the famous KPD stronghold of

Wedding was thoroughly pulverized and set afire.”5
So repeated Berlin raids of increasing intensity continually

failed to create large-scale fires that would spread and destroy
everything within the fire area and downwind of it. However,
doubling the density of firebombs delivered to a given area of
Berlin still failed to cause mass fires or result in much firespread.
And even with night raids, the RAF was losing as much as 5% of
their bombers each night, as they were forced to fly in tight
formation over their targets to increase the density of fire-starts
in a chosen area. As the war progressed, German antiaircraft
guns improved, as did their night fighter aircraft.
Then, by 1943, the German defenders began using radar to
guide their guns and fighters. In addition, the Nazis conscripted
vast numbers of firefighters – as many as 10,000 in some cities.
They formed wide firebreaks within major cities by clearing away
all structures in paths through and around city centers. With
increased efforts and knowledge learned from the continuous
bombing, German experts managed rapid recovery of many war-
related industries as they surveyed bomb damage.
“Yet as Harris himself had to acknowledge to
Churchill, the RAF's all-out effort "did not appear to be
an overwhelming success." For one thing, Goebbels,
the city's real ruler, mounted a brilliant defense with
his flak towers, squadrons of deadly nightfighters, and
fire brigades conscripted from all over Germany. Five
percent of Harris's aircrews were shot out of the sky
every night, an unsustainable sacrifice for Bomber
Command. Moreover, despite terrible damage to the
74
slums, the real machinery of power and production in

Berlin remained remarkably undamaged. The
Americans, who had broken the Japanese codes, found
no reports of crippling damage in intercepted wires
from Japan's embassy in Berlin. Strategic bombing
analysts, for their part, marveled at the ability of the
city's industries "to produce war material in scarcely
diminished quantities almost up to the end."6
One reason for the lack of success in Berlin was that the
building density in Berlin was too low to support easy fire spread
from building to building. Another reason was that much of the
construction was newer and better than in most of old German
city centers. Modern building practices led to more effective
firewalls and fire resistant construction. A further reason for the
persistent lack of RAF and USAAF success was that, after being
under air attack for years, the German cities had generated
vigorous and effective fire fighting measures.7 As a consequence,
increasingly more and more fires had to be started by the
attackers in order to overwhelm those active firefighters and to
generate a mass conflagration. Each raid had to start more fires
than the firefighters could extinguish, and had to include enough
high explosive bombs to force the fire fighters to take shelter long
enough for the fires to get started and to interfere with their fire
fighting activity.
Still, mass fires never proved to be possible in Berlin. No
matter how heavy the raid or what kinds of firebombs were
dropped, no major firestorm ever developed.
As reported in Horatio Bond’s book 8, Fire in the Air War, one
American expert, James K. McElroy, an engineer from the National
75
Fire Protection Association, working with the British and American

analysts during WWII, identified the prevalence of parapets
extending through the tile roofs of Berlin as being influential in
preventing the spread of fire. These stone extensions above the
roofs indicated masonry interior walls below that made fire spread
from house to house unlikely. McElroy managed to predict with
some accuracy the limits of firespread for future raids by studying
aerial photographs of the cities to be attacked and identifying the
intervening parapets above the roofs. In order to achieve the
damage expected from such massive raids, one or more fires must
start in nearly every building.
However, two spectacular examples of firebombing
effectiveness resulted from raids on Hamburg in the summer of
1943 and a raid on Dresden the night of 13 February 1945. In
both cases, mass fires were created that consumed virtually all
combustibles and killed many citizens within large areas
destroyed by fire – areas that included portions of the most
densely built-up sections of those cities. Once such mass fires
developed, parapets and firewalls ceased to matter, since winds
and high temperature air swirling around and through all
structures and crossing streets and open areas and causing the
ignition of everything combustible within the whole of the
bombed areas and farther down wind.
Hamburg
In addition to a hot dry spell in the weeks before the night
raids on Hamburg, the RAF was aided by the first use of “chaff”,
76
i.e., thin aluminum foil strips dropped by the lead bombers to

confound the relatively new use of radar by the Germans. The
radars were blinded by reflections from the drifting and slowly
falling aluminum foil and so interfered with the radar guidance of
the German night fighters and antiaircraft gun crews.
The series of RAF and USAAF raids on Hamburg, beginning at
the end of July in 1943, (eight nights of RAF raids and 4 days of
U.S. 8th Air Force bombing) was the heaviest air assault on any
German city up to that time. In Hamburg the resulting mass fires
completely burned out 55 to 60 percent of the city and damaged
9, 10, 11
an area of some 30 square miles.
The massive fires destroyed between 250,000 and 300,000
dwelling units and left from 750,000 to a million Germans
homeless.12 Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people
died, many of them in air raid shelters where they suffered either
from carbon monoxide poisoning or from being “cooked” in the
intense heat in their basement shelters. Many of those were
imprisoned under the burning embers from the collapsed
buildings above them. In addition, some of them were said to
have drowned in a flooded subway tunnel under one of the harbor
estuaries – the tunnel that was serving as a bomb shelter – when
a bomb, landed in the harbor estuary and pierced the subway
tube.
The Hamburg raids spanned several days and involved some
3,000 aircraft dropping more than 9,000 tons of bombs. One raid
on the night of July 27th 1945 employing some 739 aircraft was
77
the most devastating. The RAF raids that day and night most
confounded and overwhelmed the firefighters with attacks on the
center of Hamburg as well as peripheral areas.13 The result was
the now-infamous “firestorm”. The intense and nearly
simultaneous burning led to the consumption of everything
combustible in the fire area. The inferno generated high winds (~
150 mph) and very high air and smoke temperatures in the
streets (~ 1500 degrees Fahrenheit).14 The asphalt in the streets
burst into flames, and people in those streets were sucked further
into the inferno with their clothing torn away and their bodies
burned and charred. It was estimated that some 80% of the
casualties were due to carbon monoxide poisoning for people who
sought shelter in basements. Long after the fires subsided, the
heaps of ruins and ashes remained hot. Such intense fires
generated high winds that toppled trees dried out and charred
foliage and tore away roofs, thus exposing more combustible
interior material.
Perhaps for the first time, the German High Command was
greatly impressed by the devastation in Hamburg. In regard to
the Hamburg holocaust, Hans Speer told USSBS interrogators
after the war:
“I reported for the first time orally to the Fuehrer that if
these aerial attacks continued, a rapid end of the war
might be the consequence.” 15
Hamburg, being just across the English Channel, was

another easy alternate target, so bombers often unloaded on it or
78
Bremen and Bremerhaven on their way home. Hamburg was

bombed some 69 other times during the course of the air war.
Dresden
Some analysts wished to credit the hot, dry weather in the
days preceding the British raids on Hamburg as aiding the fire
spread, but, a year and a half later, as a result of a night-time RAF
firebomb raid, Dresden burned just as fiercely in midwinter with
snow on the ground. And in many of the other German cities,
great fires occurred even during periods of rain or snow.
The fact is that these intense urban fires tended to create
their own environment, setting up local air temperatures,
humidity and winds on a citywide scale much as a bonfire does on
a smaller scale. Smoke, embers and hot air rise fiercely above
the burning fuel, and air rushes in at the base of the fire to feed
the flames and re-supply oxygen to the air in the rising column of
smoke, ash and hot air. Ultimately, with such intense and large
fires, wet fuel quickly dries out in the overpowering heat, and
rain, snow, sleet or other moisture in the atmosphere is diverted
by the violent dynamics of a rising column of smoke, hot air and
embers of vast dimensions. In the intense heat of such large
fires, wet wood was dried in a matter of minutes, and rain or snow
slowed fire spread only initially and momentarily or at the
periphery after a mass fire was established.
When the US Air Force P-51 long-range fighters arrived in
England, they were able to accompany and protect American
daylight bomber raids deeper into Germany, to Berlin and
79
beyond, and so the RAF and USAAF were able to carry the air war
deeper to eastern German cities.
On 13 February 1945, the British RAF bombers attacked
Dresden in a night raid. It was after a snowstorm. For some
reason, that night, German fighters were not sent aloft to
challenge the British bombers, and antiaircraft batteries were not
activated, so the lead bombardiers and the following flights had
no distraction or interference as they flew over the target. Led to
the city’s old center by an expert pathfinder navigator, the
firebombs fell in a high concentration over an old part of the city
of Dresden. That section of the city was crowded with old
multistory buildings along narrow streets. The resulting holocaust
in Dresden was unusually fierce, and cold air and snow made little
difference. On the following day, a raid by USAAF bombers found
Dresden still in flames or ashes after a firestorm of intensities not
created since the Hamburg holocaust of more than a year
previous.
Perhaps because the German authorities believed that
Dresden had, for most of the war, no important war-related
industries or functions, they had not built adequate air defenses
nor had they provided adequate shelters for the populous.
Consequently, the citizens were left largely without fire-fighting
resources or air raid shelters.
In an aside, the difficulty in bombing the selected targets
was illustrated by that USAAF raid the day after. Most of the
American bombers got to Dresden in spite of the fact that the
80
pathfinder aircraft that were to lead them to the city got lost.
They thought they had Dresden in their sights, but bombed
Prague in Czechoslovakia instead. In fact, cloud cover and bad
weather were frequent causes of confusion for bombing raids in
both Germany and Japan throughout World War II. Near the end
of the war, radar began to help see through the obscuring clouds,
but those early radars were still far from perfected.
A further exacerbation to the tragic loss of life in Dresden
that night and the USAAF raid the next day was the fact that the
city was crowded with refugees fleeing from the advancing Soviet
Army. At the time, the Russians were fighting the retreating
German army in the eastern part of the city. In fact some
evidence suggests that Stalin had requested the British and
American attack on the city of Dresden, since it lay on the Soviet
Army’s path to Berlin. Stalin had met with Churchill and
Roosevelt at their Yalta Conference, a meeting that ended just
two days before the Dresden raid. Dresden’s rail yards and an air
base were important logistics centers for the struggling Germans.
Nevertheless, targeting the old center of the city of Dresden
made little sense as a strategic objective for the British and
Americans and even the Soviets. It was an ancient cultural
center, previously not considered of great strategic significance
by German defenders or by the Allied attackers. Its rail yards had
previously been bombed by the RAF or the USAAF in a daylight
raid on 7 October 1944 and again on 16 January 1945. But in the
81
absence of other previous raids on the city center, the local

firefighters may not have been adequately trained or prepared.
Perhaps also, the RAF, having dedicated their effort to city
fires, chose to direct the fire raid on that part of the city most
susceptible to mass fire. In any case, the uncontested bombing
runs on the night of 13 February 1945 allowed vast numbers of
incendiaries to fall on that part of the old city and to start an
overwhelming number of fires, fires that rapidly amalgamated
into a single holocaust.16 But the railroads, rail yards and air
bases remained operational. The claim at the time that hundreds
of thousands died in Dresden was made by Josef Goebel’s
propaganda sources, but deaths proved to be less than a tenth of
Goebel’s asserted loss.
Analysis of Bombing Effectiveness
In the evolution of WWII strategic bombing, the tonnage of
bombs delivered in a single raid rose dramatically, and the kinds
of bombs changed from small high explosive bombs to
blockbusters weighing as much as ten tons. In the final months of
bombardment in Europe, in March 1945, Allied bombers dropped
more than 230,000 tons of bombs – that is 230 kilotons, the
explosive equivalent of a good-sized modern nuclear bomb. Of
course, the damage done by the HE and firebombs was far
greater than a single nuclear bomb of 230 KT (or even multi-
megatons) could create, since the former conventional weapons
were widely distributed over many susceptible targets and spread
over more than sixty large urban areas.
82
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS)

Summary Report for the European Campaign17 stated that more
than 3,600,000 dwelling units in the forty-nine larger cities in
Germany were destroyed –mostly by fire. It is estimated that that
number represented nearly 20 percent of all German urban
dwellings.
Horatio Bond states that incendiaries were, ton for ton,
nearly five times as effective as high explosive bombs on
residential districts, smaller industrial areas and commercial
properties. Out of more than fifty German cities attacked with
firebombs, an average of 39 percent of their residential units
were damaged or destroyed.18
The spread of fire contributed much to the damage done by
air raids in most industrial cities bombed. Although the Germans
mounted intensive fire-fighting efforts, their best efforts were
useless within the mass fire area once multiple fires were ignited
and had coalesced. But fire-fighting efforts did often limit further
spread at the firestorm periphery to only about one more block.
As Bond put it in his book Fire and the Air War:
“ …No case was observed where a fire spread
much more than a block from where it started if there
were any fire fighting facilities at all available. Fire
fighting, however, was confined simply to the buildings
on the fringe of the fire and even this took all of the
available manpower and equipment.”19
Traditional German construction of homes in old cities had

long ago provided insurance against fire spread where residences
abutted one another.
83
I found it remarkable in my travels through several bombed-

out cities in Germany immediately after the war to see so many
instances where multistory houses that abutted one another in
crowded urban areas had survived unburned while the adjacent
homes, separated only by a solid masonry wall had been totally
gutted by fire. The stone or masonry walls between buildings
generally extended above the roofline and together with the tile
roofs had been quite effective in preventing fire spread. In many
cases, the homes on either side of a surviving building were left
as empty shells with gaping vacant windows and doors and with
only masonry exterior walls still standing.
This may be a tribute to early German attention to fire safety
in construction centuries ago when active measures of fire
fighting were less effective than these passive fire-spread
measures. So, by WWII, it meant that the intensity of firebombing
had to put at least one incendiary device into nearly every
dwelling to insure full coverage, in the absence of a fire storm.
The solid walls between homes, extending a few feet above
the roofline as the parapets that McElroy observed in his study of
aerial photographs in WWII20, indeed often served as effective
firebreaks. Sometimes fires failed to amalgamate and the spread
of large-scale fires was limited by these passive construction
measures. The fact that such firewalls and roofline parapets were
so effective was, of course, no accident of building practice. In
previous centuries when many of these old cities had been built,
active fire fighting, in the absence of modern water mains and
84
powerful pumps, was seldom very effective. So, passive

measures to limit fire damage and firespread were very
important.
On the other hand, by the time of WWII and the air war, and
during those years of combating air raid fires, the German fire
fighting skills, equipment and manpower grew to be quite
impressive. Even so, the RAF fire raids often overwhelmed the
best of these German defenses. With so many firebombs dropped
in so many parts of the city and in such a short time, putting out
incipient fires proved impossible even for the most well trained
cadre.
To further disrupt German firefighting, the RAF bombers
began to include delayed-fused explosive bombs in order to
discourage firefighters immediately after an attack, thus allowing
fires to merge and spread, unimpeded by firefighting crews
In the following table, Bond lists 34 German cities that
sustained heavy fire damage and extensive burned-out areas
(population in thousands). At the time of his writing (1946),
information about East German cities was not always available.
The wartime population of these cities may have varied
considerably from that listed in the table below (in thousands).
For instance, Dresden was crowded with refugees fleeing from the
Soviets, who were advancing from the east at the time of the fire
raid that destroyed that city.21
The scornful judgment of some defeated German Generals
may have been right. Their claim was that their defeat was not
85
so much due to superior tactics or strategy on the part of the

Allies but solely due to the overwhelming manpower, logistics and
materiel support.
City Pop City Pop City Pop
(1,000s)
Berlin 4,420 Manheim- 446 Kassel 228
Ludwigshafen
Hamburg 1,760 Bremen 440 Karlsruhe 190
Munich 885 Duisburg 438 Augsberg 190
Cologne 757 Nürenberg 425 Krefeld 171
Leipzig 707 Stettin 396 Mainz 152
Essen 672 Wuppertal 386 Münster 142
Dresden 633 Magdesburg 353 Wilhelmshaven 132
Frankfort 560 Homberg 320 München- 123
am Main Gladback
Düsseldorf 539 Genselkirchen 318 Darmstadt 109
Dortmund 537 Bochum 312 Osnabrück 105
Stuttgart 503 Kiel 302
Hannover 473 Brunswick 230
Table 14-1 German Cities Suffering Incendiary Attacks22
Whether true or not, they may have largely discounted the
American demonstrated ability in managing wartime industries
and logistics. There is considerable merit in the U.S. ingenuity
that made that success possible, and Generals on both sides had
ample opportunity to blunder, but both American and German
industry accomplished heroic tasks in support of their military
forces – as did the British, also.
Fire versus High Explosive Bombing
The principal argument by USAAF planners of raids on
European targets was that fire was largely unpredictable, and that
HE bomb damage was more certain and so to be preferred in
attacking targets of strategic significance. But Fire Engineer
James K. McElroy and Major Forrest J. Sanborn, both working with
86
the joint analysis group at Princess Risborough north of London,

proved that they could predict with reasonable accuracy the
combustibility of an industrial structure as well as its contents.23
However, McElroy and Sanborn had no luck in convincing the
USAAF Generals in Europe. The Headquarters of the 8th Air Force
was within ten miles of the Princess Risborough location, but they
had to go through three levels of bureaucracy and they met
resistance at each level in order to reach the command staff.
Throughout the European campaign, they never overcame the
USAAF objections to firebombing. However, their efforts
eventually influenced the air war in Japan in a major way.
McElroy, in a chapter in Bond’s book relates something of his
experience at the Princess Risborough facility:
“There, 35 miles from London, I was to work many
months. The place was a blind. The buildings were
used by the British Forest Products Research
Laboratory. Inside the fence I found that a joint British-
American group were doing what was called "third
phase target analysis work." At another secret location
the first phase reports were made by studying aerial
photographs which gave the British Air Staff, within
twenty-four hours, some knowledge as to the damage
that had been done in a previous raid. There was a
second phase analysis of aerial photographs of the
same raid in which the time limit was forty-eight hours.
We, at Princes Risborough, had a longer time, if we
needed it, to do a very careful and detailed third phase
analysis on the effectiveness of all types of weapons, on
all types of targets.
The British had long been applying the defensive
lessons as they learned them to offensive air operations
under the Research and Experiments Department of the
Ministry of Home Security. Marc Peter, Jr., Attaché for
87
the U. S. Office of Civilian Defense at the American

Embassy, was in charge of the American personnel in
this joint British-American effort. He, through the
American Embassy, was responsible for obtaining the
participation of American architects, engineers and
economists in the joint effort. He arranged for Horatio
Bond to go over in December, 1942. Both Major
Sanborn and I followed to join those already working at
Princes Risborough and round out the group with the
addition of professional fire protection experience.”24
The following table compares the fire consequences for the
two Cities of Hamburg and Dresden with broadly similar fire raids
on Stuttgart, Wuppertal, Kassel, Darmstadt and Berlin.
CITY Hamburg Dresden Stuttgart Wuppertal Kassel Darmstadt Berlin
DATE July 43 Feb 45 Sept 44 May 43 Oct 43 Sept 44

# A/C 3,000 1,000 500 240
Population 630 +
(1000s) 1,760 refugees 503 386 228 109 4,420
Deaths
(1000s) >50 25-35 2 9 8
HE (tons) 1,300 900 900 400
OIL (tons) 500 400 300 -
Magnesium 600 650 800 600
(tons)
Percent
Destruction 55-60 60-80 30 70 60-70
Area
Burned (sq. 8 10 23 4
mi.)
# Dwellings
destroyed 250 24 20
(1000s)
Firestorm Yes Yes No No Yes Yes No
Table 14-1. Nature of Large Firebomb Attacks on German Cities in
WWII.25
It is interesting to note that Wuppertal experienced such

relative devastation and yet did not suffer a firestorm. A number
of factors, similar to the lack of firestorm in the Berlin raids,
played a role. Such factors as low building density, modern
88
construction details, and even intensity of fire starts and area

covered by the bombing. Relatively open areas in cities often
played a significant role – areas such as rail yards, parks,
waterways, even wide streets. But the statistics fail to explain
such matters as why Kassel suffered only 30 percent damage
even though it experienced a firestorm.
Comparable devastation was rained on more than 40 other
German cities. According to Bond26, attacks on 49 of the principal
cities resulted in the loss of 39 percent of all German residential
units.
George Stanbury, a British scientist who has made extensive
studies of the consequences of fires in England and Germany
during WWII, offers the following table as “…based on sound trials
and operational experience of the weapons concerned.”
Type of Tons Number Building Minimum No.
Weapon Dropped of s Of Fires Lit
Bombs Hit
Explosive 102 >100
Magnesium 48 27,000 >8,000 >1,600
4 lbs.
Gel 40 3,000 >900 >800
30 lbs.
Total 190 >9,000 2,500
Table 14-3. British RAF Fire Experience (WWII)27
World War II – Aerial Bombardment – American Experience
Ever since Billy Mitchell, in a dramatic demonstration,
dropped a bomb down the smokestack of a Navy ship in the early
1920s, the Army aviators were intent on developing and
promoting “precision bombing”. By WWII, still striving for high
accuracy, they had acquired the Norden Bombsite that was to
89
compensate for having to fly faster and at ever-higher altitudes.

It could be adjusted for winds and bomb characteristics, and had
greatly increased the bomber accuracy in stateside trials. But it
required visual sight of the target and a straight and level flight
prior to bomb release, two factors that were seldom possible in
combat flights over Germany.
USAAF pilots strove to fly higher and faster to avoid anti-
aircraft gunfire and also to delay the approach of defending
German fighter aircraft that would climb to encounter the
attacking bombers. But such tactics made high accuracy
bombing very difficult, since falling bombs drifted off target,
influenced by the different winds at different altitudes not all of
which can be accounted for in the bomb sight adjustments.
This disparity in bombing philosophy between the USAAF and
the British RAF persisted throughout the war in Europe. The
Americans were set on selective bombing of key German war
industries. The British, after failing to succeed at precision
bombing in European weather, became intent on maximizing
damage and disruption to German cities with the objective of
interfering with their economy and bringing it to a chaotic halt.
Although the American Army Air Force concentrated on using high
explosive (HE) bombs on strategic targets, they too became
convinced that fire damage was important, and began to include
in their bomb loads incendiary or firebombs. Still, their principal
objective was to strike German targets critical to support of the
Nazi Wehrmacht.
90
The Allied aerial attacks on Germany did serious damage to

more than 60 cities, and involved some 28 thousand airplanes.
The USSBS Summary Report for the European War28 stated that
all together some 2.7 million tons of bombs were dropped on
Germany during the air war. The same paragraph also states that
“More than 18,000 American and 22,000 British planes were lost
or damaged beyond repair”, which is much more than the 28,000
total aircraft losses mention earlier. Also stated in the same
paragraph is the loss in air action of nearly 80,000 American
airmen and 80,000 British fliers.
At the beginning of U.S. involvement in WWII, our Air Forces
had only one model of an incendiary bomb, a 4-pound magnesium
bomb with a propensity for duds. However, Horatio Bond
describes five U.S. incendiary weapons as listed below:
Bomb Weight Fuel Wt. of Heat Striking Penetra- No. in
(lbs.) fuel (1000s velocity tion in Cluster
(lbs.) BTU) (ft/sec) concrete
(inches)
M-50 3.6 Magnesium 1.1 13 475 4 110
M-69 6.2 Gelled 2.6 44 225 3 38
gasoline
M-74 8.4 “goop” 2.8 38 250 3 38
M-47 70 40 670 760 5 -
M-76 473 175 2210 ~1000 12 -
Table 15-2. USAAF Incendiary weapons used in Europe during
WWII.29
This list of American firebombs suggests that eventually our
USAAF developed some interest and some capability in causing
fire damage. Note that all were designed to penetrate more than
roof tiles, and most were intended to be delivered in large
numbers to confound firefighters. The magnesium firebombs
91
could not be extinguished with water, and the fires ignited by

gelled gasoline, or “goop”, incendiaries were also nearly
impossible to put out.
Ineffectiveness of “Precision Bombing”
The US Air Forces, however, continued to persist in bombing
in daylight raids aimed at “precision” bombing of “key” industries
or military targets, using mainly high explosive bombs. But the
U.S. Eighth and Ninth Air Forces soon found they were not doing
well. Their loss rate of bombers on many daylight raids remained
unacceptably high. And, like the early RAF raiders, relatively few
of their bombs were damaging the intended targets. The German
antiaircraft guns and German fighter defenses were just too
disruptive to allow the USAAF to conduct accurate bombing runs
over their designated targets. Use of the highly touted Norden
Bombsite required a straight and level flight prior to bomb release
as well as a clear view of the target area, but such restricted
flying made the bombers easy targets for antiaircraft fire and
German fighters. Cloud cover and often the smoke from prior
(British) night raids prevented visual observation of the selected
targets, further reducing their hoped-for accuracy. Airborne radar
was relatively new and had not yet been able to aid bombardiers
by allowing them to see their targets through the smoke and
clouds.
Throughout the European air war, the War Department and
the USAAF still did not embrace the notion of killing civilians. But,
on the other hand, selective and “precision” bombing was not
92
getting the job done. To make their effort even less successful,
key German industries were recovering from the air attacks quite
rapidly, and their production was not being cut off, nor even
reduced for long.
Six months after the war’s end, I was stationed in Bremen to
manage the communications on the airfield. Bremen airfield,
after the war, was the entry point into Occupied Germany for the
USAAF. When the British troops reached the Bremen Airfield,
they found the Folcke-Wolf aircraft factory adjacent to the field in
ruins – nothing but twisted steel and broken concrete. Yet there
on the taxiway were two FW-190 fighter aircraft in final assembly
stages.
To avoid the frequent bombing raids on the airfield, the
Germans had dismantled and redistributed the factory machinery
throughout the city of Bremen. A lathe in this basement, and a
milling machine across the street, repeated all over the city,
managed to make airplane parts. Only for final assembly and fly-
off were these partial assemblies carted out to the airfield, and
hastily bolted together to be flown off runways that were a
checkered mess of hastily filled craters.
In contrast, the British night-time fire raids started so many
fires that near the end of the air war Germany cities were still
being devastated by fire even with thousands of German
firefighters actively fighting those fires in the major cities during
and after each raid. Heroic efforts may have limited fire spread
outside the bombed area, but little of the German firefighting
93
effort or planning proved effective in protecting unburned

structures located inside the targeted area if it led to a firestorm
or a fully engaged conflagration. On the other hand, as
mentioned, German active firefighting managed generally to limit
further fire spread to about one block beyond the mass fires or
the areas already burning.30
After the war, the newly formed U.S. Air Force commenced a
study in its Physical Vulnerability Branch to document the fire
damage caused by bombing in Europe. This postwar study30
demonstrated that, in general, one parameter – that of
“proximity” – had dominated the firespread behavior in German
cities. These Air Force researchers found that firespread
depended critically on the separation distance between the
nearest burning structure to any adjacent unburned building.
Other factors such as building type, building contents, window
protection, etc. mattered, but no factor was as important in fire
spread as the simple matter of how far apart a structure was from
its burning neighbors or from a fire front.
However, even wide firebreaks were often ineffective, since
incendiaries most frequently landed on both sides of the
firebreak. In a way, the construction of firebreaks aided the intent
of the attacks, which was to cause destruction and interfere with
vital wartime activity. And once a large-scale conflagration was
underway, its intensity often allowed flames, cinders and
radiation to span even the widest firebreak.
94
British and American Efforts at Bombing Effectiveness

Analysis
Marc Peter, Jr., a Swiss-born architect by profession, and a
professor at MIT, had headed the group of British and American
analysts in England during WWII. Their work was considered
highly secret and sensitive. They studied the effectiveness of air
bombardment of German cities by the British and by the U.S.
Army Air Forces. Marc Peter’s group undertook a Physical
Vulnerability Study, and worked under the auspices of the British
Ministry of Home Security in a research unit identified as RE 8
(Research and Experiment Department, Section 8). They studied
the blast and fire damage from explosive bombs and from
firebombs, and how resistant various types of buildings were to
blast or fire damage. Among others, Marc had worked with the
American Fire expert, James McElroy, and came to appreciate the
role of fire in the damage done both in England under German
attacks, and in particular, the fire damage being accomplished by
the RAF in raids on Germany
Marc Peter’s group had analyzed the American (Eighth and
Ninth Air Forces) and British heavy bomber and fighter-bomber
raids in 1943-1945. He studied how resistant various types of
buildings in urban areas were to bomb damage. Charged with
finding ways to improve the efficiency of the bombing in
destroying German targets, the group studied the influence of
such variables as:31
Bomber altitude (Flying high helps to avoid antiaircraft fire
and German fighter planes, but leads to too wide a
95
dispersion of the bombs over a target, which diminishes

the effectiveness of a raid.)
Flight size (Smaller flights could seldom drop enough
incendiary bombs to start enough fires to overwhelm the
local firefighters, which is one reason for the raids
involving hundreds of bombers. Another factor is that
large flights overwhelm defenses and so lose fewer
bombers to antiaircraft fire and German fighter aircraft.)
Target size (Larger targets were easier to hit but often
harder to damage, e.g., Berlin.)
Target hardness (Inherent resistance to blast and/or fire
damage is not always easy to predict prior to a fire raid or
even to assess in post-attack evaluations).
Lead bombardier accuracy (They studied the effectiveness
and limitations to having lead bombardiers with proven
accuracy records guide and cue the formations that
followed them.)
Bomber crew training (They looked at how much training and
practice is essential in mission success.)
Weapon (bomb) type (Are blockbusters better pound-for-
pound than more and smaller bombs? Which kinds of
firebombs are most effective?)
The amount and the level or extent of damage desired (Is it
better to insist on complete destruction of a key target or
to settle for partial destruction to more targets?)
One other concern of Marc Peter’s group was to find what
would constitute the best shelters for the British civil defense
program. But their main role was in analyzing the air war in
Germany. They analyzed the relative effectiveness of both HE and
incendiary bombing. raids.
Marc Peter’s joint U.S. and British group worked for two
years without the USAAF taking seriously the effectiveness of
firebombing. But much of their analysis eventually and indirectly
96
influenced the transition that led to the devastating fire raids on

all the major Japanese cities.
After the war, and after a brief return to the Boston area
where he had been a professor before the war, Marc Peter went to
work in Washington, D.C. at the Pentagon. Then, in 1950, at the
invitation of Charlie Hitch, who had worked under him during the
war in England, Marc came to The RAND Corporation (in Santa
Monica) to join in research sponsored by the U.S. Air Force.
I met Marc at Rand in the fall of 1951 at RAND. I was hired
to work in the Nuclear Energy Division. Marc had a charming
British accent, a full head of white hair, five daughters, and an
energetic and enthusiastic manner. Years later, when Marc Peter
retired and returned to his native Switzerland, he left me a box of
his wartime papers that he felt reluctant to throw away. I had
come to respect Marc and I valued his judgment, so I hung on to
that box of notes and papers for the next four decades. I kept
that box even after I had shipped all of my own collection of
documents concerning Nuclear Weapons Effects, amounting to
some 10,000 documents, to a government warehouse in
Albuquerque for storage and possible access for posterity. I
suspect that, for lack of funds for cataloging and archiving, my
library will stay boxed and stacked until some efficient
bureaucrat decides the space could be better used for something
else, and so has them tossed.
And, now that I am sorting through my remaining old files, I
am moved to look into Marc Peter’s box. I found a bit of history
97
and some potential insight into the thinking and planning that
guided those enormous armadas of bombers over Europe during
WWII. Even then, the question was raised as to why the USAAF
failed to credit fire and incendiary weapons with effectiveness in
the Air War against Germany.
Recently, I learned of the interest one of Marc Peter’s
daughters had in his papers, so, via a mutual friend, I sent them
off to her in Switzerland (after copying for myself some of the
more obviously interesting ones).
A few assorted statistics regarding the WWII air war in
Europe are gleaned from a somewhat controversial account by a
German writer, Jörg Freidrich, in a book entitled The Fire: 32
Some 635,000 German civilians died as a result of the
attacks on German cities.
The most used incendiary weapon was a 4-lb cigar-shaped
liquid-fueled bomb – 80 million of them were dropped.
The RAF crews lost some 55,000 during those attacks.
Nearly two thirds of the bomber crews failed to survive their
required thirty combat missions.
World War II – U. S. Army Air Force Air Raids on Japan
In the early months of 1945, while the aerial bombardment
of Germany was reaching its peak, the bombardment of Japanese
cities by the big new B-29 bombers had also begun on a large
scale. At first, in late 1944, these bombers had to fly long
distances from bases in China, but after American forces retook
the Philippines and occupied the Marianas, raids on the Japanese
98
home islands were staged from Tinian in the Marianas. The

islands of Wake and Iwo Jima, for which the U.S. Marines paid
such a high price, provided emergency landing fields for damaged
bombers or those in need of refueling. Immediately after capture
of the island of Tinian, the Navy engineers were tasked to build
six long runways and associated airfield facilities on the Island.
Under the newly appointed commander, General Curtis
LeMay, these USAAF bomb raids soon carried almost entirely
firebombs and delivered them at low altitude to cities in Japan.
Even so, those flights involved round trips of more than 3,000
miles.
But it is interesting how such drastic changes in tactics come
about. In spite of mounting evidence, American and British
analysts in England had been largely unsuccessful in convincing
the USAAF leaders and planners of the greater effectiveness of
using firebombs and creating destructive fires. That was in the
face of the fact that the British RAF had been demonstrating the
superiority of fire raids in destroying important wartime targets in
Germany for several previous years. The commanders of the U.S.
Eighth and Ninth Air Forces in England had remained determined
to pursue “precision bombing” and avoid “mass murder”, all the
while that bad weather and intense antiaircraft and German
fighter interference made daylight precision bombing nearly
impossible and very costly in lost aircraft and crews. The U.S.
analysts, working with their British counterparts in the research
facilities of the British Home Office, were never able to fully
99
convince the USAAF commanders and operational planners that

firebombing would accomplish more than that accomplished with
explosive bombs.
So how did the air war in Japan come to rely on incendiary
weapons? In large measure, it was McElroy from the National Fire
Protection Association who had been helping in England to
analyze the bombing effectiveness (working with Marc Peter, Jr.).
He had been recalled from England, together with Major Forrest J.
Sanborn, to Washington in 1944 to help plan for the Air War in
Japan.33 McElroy, and the Joint Army-Navy Target Group he was
working with, convinced a young Air Force General, Lauris
Norstradt, an aid to the Commander of the Twentieth Air Force,
General “Hap” Arnold, that incendiary weapons could be most
effective in attacking Japanese cities. This was in the winter of
1944 or spring of 1945, at a time when Air Forces in the Pacific
were getting prepared to wage air war on the Japanese homeland.
From that encounter, Norstradt together with the aerial
maps and fire analyses provided by McElroy and Sanborn went
directly to an Air Force Officer, Colonel Curtis LeMay, who had just
been recalled from India and put in charge of bombing the
Japanese home islands. LeMay was soon promoted to General
and began restructuring the attacking force of B-29 bombers
based on Tinian in the Marianas. He subsequently took several
steps that changed the Pacific Air War dramatically. With the
encouragement of the analysts’ conclusions and finding that
Japanese air defenses were largely ineffective at low altitudes,
100
General LeMay stripped his B-29s of their gunners and guns

(except for the tail gunners), thus accommodating greater bomb
loads. Then he flew these new big bombers at low altitudes (five
to fifteen thousand feet) in attacks on Japanese cities, dispensing
large numbers of firebombs in nighttime raids. However, in
keeping with official Air Force policy, operating in the daytime,
some of his bombers still attacked key Japanese industries.
The low altitude delivery allowed bombs to be more closely
spaced and more accurately delivered. It had been determined
earlier by analysts of fire raid effectiveness that unless enough
firebombs were dropped in the attacked area, individual local
firefighters could snuff them out before structural fires
developed, so it became imperative to drop large numbers of
incendiaries in a short time on the target area. But that forced
careful phasing and timing of bombers over targeted city areas.34
One of the consequences of these new tactics was that some
of the late-arriving B-29s often experienced trouble flying through
the severe updrafts over fiercely burning areas that had been lit
by previously dropped firebombs. It is not clear how many lost
bombers were victims of the violence in these turbulent fire
plumes.35
Perhaps the first really successful firebombing raid by
LeMay’s B-29s was on 3 February 1945 against the city of Kobe.
About half the factories in the city were seriously damaged, and
production was cut in half at a major shipyard.36
Tokyo Raids
101
The famous and much earlier Doolittle raid on Tokyo, on 18

April 1942, with 16 B-25s flown from a Navy carrier deck, while a
bold symbolic gesture, was hardly little more than a token raid,
and caused little lasting damage. It was on 23 February 1945,
nearly three years later, that the first raid from Tinian made it to
Tokyo with a small B-29 bomber fleet that approached the city at
high altitude (30,000 ft.). Counting on their experience in Europe,
they aimed to avoid damage from Japanese fighters and
antiaircraft fire by flying at high altitude with multiple guns and
gunners aboard the bombers, but they had no fighter escorts
because of the long flight from Tinian.
However, winds aloft blowing between the bombers and the
city below made the bombs miss their important strategic targets
90% of the time, even with the use of the famous Norden
bombsite. That February 1945 raid led to a burn of only about
one square mile of the city, a city with an urban area of some 213
square miles. (It must have been discouraging to the flight crews
to know that only one in ten of their bombs fell near enough to
their intended targets to cause meaningful damage.)
The relatively small number of bombers in that first raid
since the Doolittle raid, and the greater dispersion of bombs when
dropped from great height, contributed to rather limited damage.
Local fire fighting had been relatively successful in suppressing
fire starts and in limiting the spread of fire beyond the attacked
area. In fact, Tokyo fire fighters were so confident that they
102
would be able to suppress fires from any future raids, that their
leaders informed the Emperor of their confidence.
But then, less than two weeks later, on 10 March 1945, the
air war in Japan really had a significant new beginning with
another larger B-29 raid on Tokyo. LeMay, having found that
Japanese air defenses were largely ineffective, had his B-29s
descend to low altitude and to drop mostly incendiary bombs. A
fleet of more than 300 B-29s firebombed an area of about a third
of Tokyo. The fires started by this raid merged to create a
massive fire that spread before the wind and burned completely
some 15 square miles of Tokyo (about 40% of the central city)
and also spread into the adjacent city of Yokohama in one huge
uncontrollable fire front. In this latter raid, the active firefighters
were completely overwhelmed and largely ineffective. This first
large-scale low-altitude raid concentrated on an area that covered
less than a third of the city of Tokyo, but the conflagration, driven
by surface winds, spread into another third of the city. That one
raid unloaded 1,667 tons of incendiaries on the city. Some 125
Japanese firefighters were killed or wound as a result of the raid.37
Describing the onset of the new fire raid tactics, Commander
Orville J. Emory, USNR from the Office of Chief of Naval
Operations wrote in a chapter of Bond’s 1946 book:
“The B-29 saturation incendiary raids, which
began in March 1945, did not follow the pattern
expected by the Japanese. The B-29s did not fly over
Japanese cities in formation, but came singly and in
groups of three at low levels from all directions at
intervals of 20 to 45 seconds and continued the
103
operation from one-and-a-half to three hours.

Consequently, thousands of fires were burning in all
parts of the cities almost simultaneously.
Communications systems were knocked out, water
pressure in mains dropped to near zero, fire fighters,
fire stations, and even large areas, were surrounded by
converging flames. The smoke was so dense that even
firemen who knew the cities well became lost. This
condition caused tremendous confusion among the
people attempting to find safe areas. Auxiliary firemen
became more concerned in attempting to protect their
own properties or in escaping burning areas than in
operating as an organized fire-fighting unit. With the
communications systems out of operation and
messengers unable to get through to the various fire
stations, the fire companies operated in a haphazard
manner, losing much of their apparatus because [they
were] surrounded by fire and unable to move out of an
involved area, owing to their limited gasoline supply.
The tremendous fires caused near panic, which was
intensified when a few high explosives were
interspersed with the incendiaries. Even firemen left
their equipment to seek shelter when high explosive
bombs were dropped. The devastating raids, beginning
in March 1945, broke the fighting spirit on the home
fire-fighting front. Auxiliary police and fire units
discontinued drills and professional firemen were
discouraged and blamed the military for their fire
losses and failure.”38
At the beginning of the raid, the surface winds were about

four miles per hour, but that was enough to drive the fire into
unburned and un-bombed areas. As the many ignitions
coalesced, the fire became more intense, and, as the spreading
fires continued to merge, the winds picked up. One estimate was
that more than 80,000 persons lost their lives.38 People running
104
for refuge looked for protection in the canals and rivers, but soon
the canals were full of people. Those who did not drown were
showered with burning embers, sparks and smoke. Fire-fighting
equipment proved totally inadequate.
In all, some 22 USAAF bombers were lost. Of course, the
fact that American wartime industry and U.S. military logistics
managed to get hundreds of new B-29s and millions of incendiary
bombs thousands of miles across the ocean to newly constructed
airfields on these remote Western Pacific islands in time of war is
a tribute to more than just the brave crews of LeMay’s bombers.
Then, two days later, the B-29s attacked Nagoya also at low
altitude, destroying two square miles of that city.
Only four days after the first successful Tokyo attack at low
altitude, a similar raid was made on Osaka (Japan’s second
largest city). The destruction was equally impressive with some
sixty percent of the city burned out. Then, a week after the
devastating Tokyo raid, the bombers returned to attack Kobe and
destroyed more than 70,000 homes, leaving a quarter of a million
people homeless. 40 Within ten days, a some 31 square miles of
urban area were obliterated.
A month later, another raid was made on Tokyo with further
destruction of buildings and property. But fewer lives were lost,
since residents were able to avoid the fires by retreating to the
previously burned over areas, and many citizens had already
been evacuated or voluntarily left the devastated city. Before
the attacks on Tokyo, the population of the greater Tokyo area
105
was about 7.5 million, but by war’s end with casualties, people
fleeing and being evacuated, the population was reduced to the
order of only 3.5 million.41 The destruction or dislocation and
dispersal of four million citizens certainly brought the war home
to the Japanese leaders and surely contributed to their ultimate
decision to seek its end.
In some ways, the air war on Japan was similar to that on
Germany, in that cloud cover and bad weather often limited
bombing success. The destruction of the Japanese aircraft engine
plant (Nakajima Musashino) took 14 missions and the loss of 58 B-
29s. Then, with clear weather, a single raid managed to
thoroughly demolish the Mitsubishi Tamashima assembly plant.42
But in the Japanese air campaign, the USAAF change in
tactics from pinpoint bombing to fire bombing of entire cities led
to vastly greater destruction of large fractions of Japanese cities,
culminating in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Needless to say, many war-essential industries and military
facilities were destroyed in the process.
The Switch to Firebombing
It is not clear how much the analysts for the Japanese air war
were aware of the history of large-scale fires in Japan.
History shows that Japan had had a number of great fires in
its past, suggesting the inadequacy of fire-fighting facilities and
the combustible nature of much Japanese construction. Some
fires, such as the 1923 Tokyo fire were the result of earthquake
106
disruption, but repeatedly great fires developed that defied the

fire-fighting capabilities of the time.
Japanese City Year of Fire
Tokyo 1720, 1923, 1932
Nigata 1925
Yamanaka 1931
Hokadate 1934
Takaoka 1938
Muramatsu 1946?
Table 15-3. Large Japanese City Fires (other than those of WWII)43
In the night-time fire raids, General LeMay’s crews flew over
the targets at relatively low altitudes, dropping incendiaries
exactly where they should be most heavily concentrated to cause
an overwhelming number of fire starts. Still, coordinating such
long flights and large armadas of aircraft and concentrating a
high enough density of firebombs on vulnerable sections of the
attacked cities was a daunting task, requiring careful scheduling
of aircraft in the air and over the target.
Once the fires became sufficiently intense, the multitude of
fire starts overwhelmed Japanese fire fighting efforts, facilitating
unimpeded fire spread and leading to the rapid amalgamation of
individual fires. It sometimes resulted in awesome and
unstoppable fire fronts or firestorms. If the surface winds were
strong, then the fires spread downwind, but with little surface
wind, firestorms developed like super-sized bonfires, and the
violence of the air sucked in at the surface to feed the rising
column of smoke and hot air would overwhelm local winds. Often
this inward-directed airflow somewhat limited further firespread
107
beyond the area already involved. On the other hand the fire-
induced high winds insured that everything combustible within
the burning area would be completely consumed. And often,
large firebrands were carried aloft to drop out into unburned
areas well beyond the fire perimeter.
By the war’s end, some sixty-five other Japanese cities had
been attacked, causing 40 to 60 percent destruction of the built-
up area in each. Still, in keeping with Air Force prime objectives,
these fire raids were alternated with daylight attacks on
important military targets, using mostly high explosive bombs.
Accuracy from these low altitude raids (at 5,000 to 15,000 ft)
rose to a level where 30 to 40 percent of the bombs landed within
one thousand feet of the designated targets.
The USSBS report on the air war in the Pacific lists the
tonnage of bombs dropped as follows:
Targets Tonnage Dropped
Urban Areas 104,000
Aircraft Factories 14,150
Oil Refineries 10,600
Airfields 8,115
Arsenals 4,700
Various Industries 3,500
Table 15-4. Tonnage dropped on Japanese Targets44
As the fire raids continued in the first half of 1945, the
Japanese increased their fire-fighting efforts. They began to clear
wide strips through cities in order to create firebreaks. But these
were often of little value when large-scale fires developed that
could spread across wide-open spaces or when bombing raids
108
dropped incendiaries on both sides of the firebreaks. In fact, at

the time of the Hiroshima attack, many people who got burned by
the thermal radiation from the bomb were out in the open
working on a large firebreak in that city. Records show that in the
process of creating these firebreaks, the Japanese demolished
some 350,000 buildings. 45
While national leaders and military commanders reap the
credit for success of campaigns or suffer the consequences for
failure, it is often the hard work and persuasive argument on the
part of the unsung analysts that brings about real advances in
effectiveness. While the joint analysis teams in England never
fully convinced the USAAF to embrace fire bombing in the
European campaign, it was the experience and persuasive powers
of technologists like Major Sanborn and fire engineer McElroy that
helped shape the nature and effectiveness of the subsequent
attacks on Japan. Had McElroy and Sanborn not convinced the
analysts back in Washington, first in the Navy and subsequently
in the Army Air Force, and had they not gained the attention of
General Lauris Norstradt on General Arnold’s staff for the
Twentieth Air Force, the convincing arguments and instructions
for firebombing in Japan might not have reached LeMay’s staff
and might not have been successfully adopted. In November
1944, heeding McElroy’s arguments, General Norstradt sent a
representative out to General LeMay on the other side of the
Pacific, and, ultimately, the whole Japanese aerial bombardment
campaign changed dramatically.
109
Many Japanese civilians were discouraged by the intense

USAAF bombing of so many of their cities. But, the Japanese
leaders continued preparing to fight throughout their homeland
right up until the war ended. And that was despite the intense
firebombing that had destroyed so much of the 63 largest
Japanese cities in the six months before the end.
Fire in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from Atomic Bombings
In all, in the last six months of the war, virtually all the major
cities in Japan were attacked and burned. After the cities of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were struck by the atomic bombs in early
August 1945, only one more city, Kumugaya was attacked by a
conventional firebomb raid.
Roughly half of each of those two cities attacked with atomic
bombs was burned out. In those cities, the extent of fire damage
was much the same as, or greater than, that in the other more
than sixty cities attacked with conventional firebombs. But, with
the atomic attacks, there was a great deal of blast damage, as
well. In addition, there were many victims who died of lethal
nuclear radiation exposure.
Perhaps, the biggest difference from the standpoint of the
U.S. Air Force operations in those atomic attacks was that instead
of a raid by hundreds of B-29s with vast preparations and
complex flight arrangements and thousands of airmen at risk, the
attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki involved one bomber together
with two observation aircraft.
110
In the broader scheme of things, however, those two atomic

bombings created only a small fraction of the damage inflicted on
Japanese cities. In the prior six months of the bombing of Japan,
conventional firebombing destroyed 175 sq. mi. of Japanese
cities, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the loss of about 5
sq. mi. (~ 3% of the total destruction).46
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey47

The USSBS was conceived and promoted by senior Army Air
Corps officers. Until the Air Force became a separate Service in
1947, the commissioned officers in the Air Force were designated
as in the “Army Air Corps”, but enlisted men and non-
commissioned officers were in the AAF – the “Army Air Forces”.
By promoting this strategic bombing survey, these Air Corps
Officers hoped to demonstrate the important role their airplanes
and airmen were playing in the war, and that the Air Force part of
the Army deserved to be established as a separate military
service, distinct from the Army and Navy.
President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the Strategic
Bombing Survey, and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
implemented it in 1944, while WWII was still in progress in both
Europe and the Pacific. In appointing a distinguished and
respected group of civilians to conduct this comprehensive
bombing survey, the instigators had not only hoped for an
unbiased assessment of the effectiveness of aerial bombardment,
but for support of their recommendation for establishing a U.S. Air
Force, separate from the Army.
111
The Survey Group was to study the air war that was still
going on in Europe as well as the anticipated aerial bombardment
of Japan. The Japanese campaign did not seriously begin until
late February 1945. By that time, islands like Tinian had been
captured and airfields constructed that would allow large numbers
of the new B-29 bombers to reach the Japanese homeland.
Perhaps it was coincidental to the primary purpose of the
bombing survey, but these Air Corp Officers evidenced the same
desire as the Air Force planners to not appear as “mass
murderers”. The planners had insisted that they were able to
destroy important military targets from the air without also
devastating large parts of surrounding or nearby cities and their
civilian populations.
The USSBS reports, issued in classified form after the war,
thoroughly documented the air war in Europe and in Japan, but
retained the same tendency to discount the effectiveness of fire
and firebombing. Even so, they did devote considerable attention
to the effects of fire. In that regard, it is unfortunate that their
investigative teams did not include many fire damage experts,
and did not make obvious use of the expertise accumulated
within the analysis staffs both in England and the Pacific, with the
exception of Major Sanborn, who did serve on the USSBS staff.
Among the reported findings, Maj. Sanborn listed eleven
tactical factors that influenced firebombing effectiveness: 48
1. Daylight raids are more successful than night raids.
(Better visibility leads to greater accuracy.)
112
2. Multiple aim points get better distribution and more fires.

(Overwhelming local firefighters is enhanced by
widespread fire starts.)
3. Attack at right angles to wind is best. (Smoke and flames
are carried away from the flight path of subsequent
bombers.)
4. Low altitude attacks are more successful than high
altitude raids. (Dropping from 35,000 ft. causes too
much dispersion, and winds aloft often cause bombs to
miss targets altogether.)
5. Effectiveness is less if an attack lasts more than two
hours. (Too much time for firefighters to snuff out
incipient fires?)
6. Close intervalometer settings are least successful. (Each
bomber’s fire bombs would fall too close together,
causing too high a density of incendiaries Intervalometers
time the release of the firebombs to spread out their
distribution as they fall.)
7. Two hundred tons [of incendiaries] per square mile are as
good as denser bombing. (After large-scale fires are
started, more incendiaries are not needed.)
8. Large targets get more damage than small targets for the
same bomb load. (Duh!)
9. Small incendiaries are more effective than large ones on
ton for ton basis. (In most cases, all that is needed is a
match, not a flaming torch or a bonfire.)
10. Adding up to 10% HE bombs has no effect on damage.
(Incendiaries used were able to penetrate tile roofs without the
help of explosives. But did this finding suggest that explosive
bombs failed to deter firefighters?)
11. Successive and psychological attacks [add to
effectiveness?]
Sanborn also listed the following ground factors:

1. Built-upness. (A following chart indicates the
influence of built-upness on the effectiveness of
firebombing.)
113
2. Building combustibility. (In areas where most buildings

are of reinforced concrete, fires are less likely. (Again:
Duh!)
3. Wind. (The March 1945 Tokyo fire was spread by
surface wind, causing fire damage to more than twice the
area attacked. Where natural surface winds exceeded 10
mph, firespread is likely to be more devastating.)
4. Fire fighting is not effective except at the fire periphery.
(In the midst of a firestorm, little can be done to protect
property or abate the inferno. Firefighters learned to
retreat to the periphery and concentrate on limiting
spread to unaffected areas.)
5. Rain is only slightly effective in limiting spread.
(Moisture and humidity are of initial importance, but after
many small fires have burned for a few tens of minutes,
unburned material gets dried out and becomes more
flammable.)
6. Firebreaks are too easily spanned by firebombs to be of
much significance. (In addition, when surface winds bend
flames and smoke plumes over unburned areas,
firebreaks just aren’t wide enough to stop firebrands,
embers, sparks and even flames from bridging the gap.)
7. Mass fires cause more casualties and greater damage,
but lead to less firespread. (An advancing fire front can
burn a wider downwind area, but can usually be outrun.
However, caught inside an intense firestorm, people have
little opportunity to escape, even though the inwardly
rushing winds that a firestorm generates tend to limit
subsequent spread.)
In addition, the density of occupancy was clearly related to

the damage created, there being a clear correlation between the
two; the more compact or crowded, the more likely is fires spread
and more damage. This may be just another aspect of the drop in
probability of spread with increasing separation between
114
buildings or structures, but occupancy also implies clutter and the

presence of more flammable matter.
Percent of Damage Relative to Occupancy of Zones
Zone Use Built-upness (%) Percent
burned
Dense Residential 45 72
Medium Residential 31 46
Mixed Residential & 35 44
Manufacturing
Manufacturing 41 22
Storage 38 22
Sparse Residential 16 20
Transportation (rail yards) 14 15
Table 15-5. Fire Susceptibility vs. Occupancy 49
The Role of Fire in Warfare
Horatio Bond, as a prominent Fire Engineer, found great
resistance to the notion that fire damage was predictable and
useful in war fighting. Yet, by the end of WWII, he states that
“…both Britain and the United States were fully
committed to a policy of destroying enemy cities by
fire.”50
Although he confesses that
“During the entire war, it was necessary for those
of us familiar with fire destruction to try to keep a
constant pressure on the air forces and their scientific
advisers to get on with the business of exploiting fire
attack to bring about the end of the war. …Many
persons, particularly Americans, were inclined to put a
low estimate on the total or cumulative effects of
widespread fire destruction in cities. We had to deal
with this point of view throughout the war. [Even
though Japanese] …civilian casualties in the six months
of the fire attacks were nearly twice the Japanese
military casualties in 45 months of war. This was one of
the great pressures to surrender.” 51
115
Unfortunately, this same organizational reluctance persisted

into the nuclear age, as fire remained an often-neglected
consequence of nuclear warfare. In her well-researched book The
Whole World on Fire,52 Lynn Eden demonstrates the distortions
that can persist in the thinking within organizations, using as an
example this particular issue: the neglect of fire damage in
warfare. Her attention is directed to the exclusion of fire effects
from nuclear warfare planning and analyses. But I believe the
omission can be traced to the earlier experience of the neglected
potential for fire damage in WWII, which Eden also identifies in
her book. Nevertheless, to this day, the impression in the minds
and plans of those responsible for military operations still is that
fire damage is inherently unpredictable and unreliable and so can
be properly omitted from war planning. But that is wrong, in my
mind. Since more than a hundred cities suffered severe losses
due to fire in WWII, one might assume that the evidence was in,
and that fire has a place of some considerable importance in
warfare.
And there is no incendiary device that burns brighter than an
airburst nuclear weapon.
Japanese Fire Balloon Attacks on North America
An ingenious and ambitious effort to retaliate for the
notorious Doolittle raid on Tokyo (1942) was mounted by the
Japanese to carry explosive and incendiary bombs to western
North America. The effort culminated in the launching between
November of 1944 until May of 1945 of more than 9,000-balloon
116
weapons53 from the eastern seaboard of Japan, north of Tokyo.

These balloons, once released, would rise into the high altitude jet
stream and arrive over the western U.S. in about three days.
These weapons carried mostly incendiary and some explosive
bombs and were elaborately devised to stay in the jet stream
both day and night. These bombs were designed to self-destruct
to prevent retrieval and discovery.
Only 285 of these balloon-borne bombs were observed or
found, but it is estimated that perhaps a thousand of them
reached America54, spread from Alaska to Mexico and as far east
as Michigan and Iowa55. They were largely ineffective because
they were totally inaccurate. Furthermore, the U.S. government
prevailed upon the news media to suppress wide coverage of the
balloon sightings and landing events so as not to encourage the
Japanese. Even so, local news outlets noted some of the
incidents.
The only fatalities due to these firebomb balloons were five
teenage children and a minister’s wife on a fishing trip in southern
Oregon56. Finding a grounded but unexploded balloon, and trying
to explore it, they inadvertently set it off, killing all but the
minister himself who was following a short distance behind the
group. By some accounts, these six deaths are the only ones in
the continental U.S. due to enemy attack during WWII.
The U.S. Geological Survey did a nice bit of detective work
on the ballast sand from one of the unexploded balloons, and
discovered that the ballast sand and its microscopic mineral and
117
marine life traces came from beaches north of Tokyo. 57 With that
information, the Air Force targeteers found, from aerial
photographs, the industrial plants that were generating the
hydrogen for the balloons. After the B-29s destroyed two of the
three plants, the balloon operation was terminated in April 1945.
By that time, Japanese troops had been forced out of all their
captured territories, and were fighting in Okinawa using
Kamikazes to attack the U.S. Navy ships. The isolated and
ineffective attacks on a distant continent must have appeared
fruitless and not very meaningful by that time.
However, some coincidence may be noted in the fact that on
March 10, 1945, one Japanese balloon descended near the
Hanford reactor site. It caused a power interruption that
endangered the reactor cooling system and threatened the
continued production of plutonium for the bomb to be dropped on
Nagasaki five months later.58
In retrospect, it is surprising that more damage and injury
did not occur from the possible 1000 balloon bombs that reached
America. Their design included high explosive bombs as well as
incendiaries. In one case, near Hayfork in northern California,
some 40 miles west of Redding, a Japanese balloon was spotted
by local citizens. It was descending, and became lodged on the
crown of a dead fir tree. The hydrogen-filled gas bag exploded,
but the payload survived with one HE bomb and four incendiaries
aboard.59
118
The following chapter deals with the fires created by nuclear

weapons – an issue not completely resolved by the end of the
Cold War.
□
References Chapter 18 – Fire in WWII
1. http://msqr.us/articles/firebomb.xml?&page=5 [Churchill’s stated aim of

the air war against Germany]
[p. 579]
2. Berlin Police Commissioner von Helldorf, as quoted in the book Goebbels,
by Ralf Reuth, (p. 335) New York, 1993. [German citizens too busy
making repairs to quarrel over leadership?]
[p. 580]
3. Ponting, Clive, (formerly Assistant Minister of Defense under Thatcher,
Professor of Politics, University of Swansea, Wales), Armageddon, Random
House, NY, 1995, p. 151. [RAF switches from HE to firebombs]
[p. 580]
4. Bond, Horatio (editor), Fire in the Air War, National Fire Protection
Association, 1946, p.84. [Rubble and disruption from HE bombs inhibits
and interferes with
fire fighting efforts.) [p. 582]
5. Messinger, Charles, “Bomber Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive,
1939-1845, New York, p.15 [Air War believed will defeat Nazi Germany].
[p. 583]
6. Read, Anthony & David Fisher, The Fall of Berlin, London, 1992.
[p. 585]
7. http://msqr.us/articles/firebomb.xml?&page=5 (Many German fire
fighters) [p. 585]
8. Bond Horatio, Fire and the Air War, National Fire Protection Association,
1946, p. 125 [Why didn’t Berlin suffer a mass fire?]
[p. 585]
9. Ibid., p. 81 [Hamburg fire raids, summer 1943] [p.
587]
10. Miller, C. F., Summary of Damage Inflicted by Air Raids on the City of
Hamburg in the Period July 25 to August 3, 1943, Stanford Research
Institute, Menlo Park, California, NRDL-TRC-68-30. [With Appendices 1
through 19 for the Hamburg Police President’s Report on the Large Scale
Air Attacks on Hamburg, Germany in WWII, prepared for OCD, December
1968. [p. 587]
11. Miller, C. F. & J. W. Kerr, Field Notes on WWII German Fire Experience,
SRI Project No. Mu-5070, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA,
October 1965. [p. 587]
119
12. http://en.wikipedia,org/wiki/OperationsGomorrah [~ 1 million homeless

in Hamburg] [p. 587]
13. loc. cit. [Hamburg firefighters overwhelmed by massive attack]
[p. 487]
14. loc. cit. [Temperatures reached 1500 deg. F, winds 150 mph]
[p. 588]
15. US Government, United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS),
Summary Report (European War), September 1945, p. 3 [Speer:
firebombing could lead to rapid end of war]
[p. 588]
16. Taylor, Frederick, Dresden, Harper-Collins, 2004. [Devastating fire] [p.
592]
17. USSBS, p. 1 [More than 3.6 million dwellings destroyed in 49 German
cities attacked.)] [p.
593]
18. Bond, p. 80 [Firebombs about five times as effective as explosives], p. 78
[The forty-nine attacked German cities lost an average of 39% of
residential units] [p. 593]
19. Ibid., p. 96 [Firespread limited at periphery of fire] [p.
593]
20. Ibid., p. 125, (Firespread limiting effect of parapets) [p.
594]
21. Ibid., p.86, [34 German cities attacked by fire] [p.
595]
22. Ibid., p. 135, [McElroy – 300,000 killed in Dresden]
[p. 596]
23. Ibid., p. 130, [Predictability of fire damage] [p.
597]
24. Ibid., p. 123, [McElroy experience at bomb damage assessment
[p. 598]
25. Ibid., p. 87 [49 German cities attacked with loss of 39 % of dwellings]
[p. 598]
26. Ibid., p. ? [solid walls & roof parapets – 39% of residences lost
[p. 599]
27. Stanbury, George British (RAF) fire experience WWII [p.
599]
28. USSBS Summary Report (European War), p.1. [2.7 million tons dropped
on Germany] [p. 601]
28. Bond, p. 75 [List of U.S. firebomb types] [p.
601]
29. Ibid., p. 96 [Spread limited by fire fighting at periphery about one block]
[p. 601]
30. Wolverton, John M, Fire Spread in Urban Areas, Physical Vulnerability
Division, Deputy Director of Targets, Technical Memorandum No. 16,
PVTM-16, AF-68816 Washington D.C., Directorate of Intelligence,
120
Headquarters US Air Force, 30 September 1955. [Firespread depends

most on separation distance.] [p. 604]
31. Marc Peter, Jr., private communication [personal papers left with me] [p.
605]
32. Friedrich, Jörg, The Fire, translated from German by Allison Brown,
Columbia University Press, 2006.
[p. 608]
33. Bond, pp. 133 [How firebombing got to the Pacific War.]
[p. 608]
34. Ibid., p. 142 [Raids carefully planned and phased over targets to start
many fires and overwhelm fire fighting efforts]
[p. 611]
35. Ibid., p. 146 [Turbulence over target fires dangerous for following crews]
[p. 611]
36. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II [p.
611]
37. Ibid., p. 156 [One hundred and twenty five Japanese firefighters were
killed or missing after the March 1945 Tokyo raid]
[p. 613]
38. Ibid., p. 164 [Fire attacks phased/spread to confound mitigation efforts]
[p. 614]
37. Ibid., p. 165 [March 1945 Tokyo raid results in about 80,000 lives lost]
[p. 614]
38. Ibid., p. 167 [Osaka raid, four days after Tokyo raid, left 70,000 homes
lost and a half million homeless]
[p. 615]
39. Ibid., p. 155 [Prewar Tokyo population ~ 7.5 million; postwar ~ 3.5
million] [p. 615]
40. Ibid., p. 139 [Precision bombing of an aircraft engine factory failed for
fourteen missions and 58 B-29s lost because of cloud cover, while a
single raid in clear weather wiped out the target]
[p. 616]
41. Ibid., p. 147 [Past large Japanese city fires] [p.
617]
42. USSBS, Summary Report (Pacific War), United States Strategic Bombing
Survey, p.17, July 1946. [Bomb tonnage dropped on Japan]
[p. 618]
43. Bond p. 162 [350,000 buildings razed for firebreaks in Japanese cities]
[p. 619]
44. Ibid., p. 137 [Firebombing destroyed 175 sq. mi. of Japanese cities] [p.
621]
45. USSBS Summary Reports: USSBS, The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on
Hiroshima, Japan, Volume II, The United States Strategic Bombing Survey,
May 1947 [purpose and aims of survey]
[p. 621]
121
46. Bond, p. 174 [Tactical and ground factors influencing fire] [p.
622]
47. Ibid., p. 177 (Fire susceptibility versus occupancy)
[p. 625]
48. Ibid., p. 188 (U.S. and U.K. both committed to policy of destroying enemy
cities by war’s end) [p.
625]
49. Ibid., p. 90 (There were twice as many civilian casualties as military
casualties in Japan)
[p. 625]
50. Eden, Lynn, Whole World on Fire, Cornell University Press, 2004, (Ch. 2)
[Bureaucratic tendentiousness and failure to make changes] [p.
625]
51. http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Lighter_than_air/Airships_in_WWII/
LTA10.htm [impact of Japanese incendiary balloons]
[p. 626]
52. Rogers, J. David, How Geologists Unraveled the Mystery of Japanese
Vengeance Balloon Bombs in World War II, p.2
http://web.umr.edu/~rogersda/forensic_geology/Japanese%20vengenance
%20bombs%20new
[p. 627]
53. loc. cit., p. 6 [balloons reached as far east as Michigan and Iowa] [p.
627]
54. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon, p.4 [the only balloon fatality] [p.
627]
55. Rogers p.2 [Discovery of source of balloons] [p.
627]
56. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon, p.5
[Power failure at Hanford due to balloon] [p. 628]
57. http://www.militarymuseum.org/Hayfork.html
[One surviving balloon payload] [p.
628]
Carrier, G., F. E. Fendell, and P. S. Feldman, Firestorms, Jounal of Heat Transfer, Vol. 107, pp
19-27, 1985.
Himmelwright, A. L. A., The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, The Roebling Construction
Company, New York, 1906.
Irving, D., Destruction of Dresden, London, William Kimber & Co., Ltd, 1963.
Kobe: Japan Chronicle Office, The Great Earthquake of September 1st, 1923, a record from the
Reports of the “Japan Chronicle” of the Destruction of Yokohama and Tokyo and the other
ravages wrought, Kobe, Japan, 1923.
Metson, G., (ed.), The Halifax Explosion December 6, 1917, McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited,
Toronto, 1978.
122
Middlebrook, M., The Battle of Hamburg, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1981.
Miller, C. F., Summary of Damage Inflicted by Air Raids on the City of Hamburg in the Period
July25 to August 3, 1943, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, NRDL-TRC-68-
30, July 1968.
Miller, C. F., Appendixes 1 through 19 to the Hamburg Police President’s Report on Large
Scale Air Attacks on Hamburg, Germany in WWI, prepared for OCD by Stanford Research
Institute, December 1968.
Miller, C. F., and J. W. Kerr, Field Notes on World War II German Fire Experience, Stanford
Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, SRI Project No. MU-5070, October 1965.
Morris, J. V, Fires and Firefighters, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Massachusetts, 1953.
NFPA, Fire Analysis Division, The Deadliest U. S. Fires and Explosions of the 1900s, FIRE
Journal, National Fire Protection Association, Boston, Massachusetts, May/June 1988.
NFPA, Conflagrations in America Since 1900, National Fire Protection Association, Boston,
Massachusetts, 1951.
Pyne, S. J., Fire in America, A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire, Princeton
University Press, 1982.
Rothermel, R. C., A Mathematical Model for Predicting Fire Spread in Wild Land Fuels,
Research Paper INT-115, USDA Forest Service Inter-mountain Forest and Range Experiment
Station, Ogden, Utah, 1972.
Rothermel, R. C., How to Predict the Spread an Intensity of Forestland Range Fires, General
Technical Report INT-143, USDA Forest Service Intermountain Forest and Range Experiment
Station, Ogden, Utah, 1983.
Sheahan, J. W., and G. P. Upton, The Great Conflagration: Chicago, Union Publishing
Company, Chicago, Illinois, 1872.
Smith, D, Dennis Smith’s History of Firefighting in America - 300 Years of Courage, The Dial
Press, New York, New York, 1978.
123

18 Fire in WW II

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Descrição original:

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

18 Fire in WW II

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Chapter 18 – Fire in WWII THE COLD WAR: WHO WON?

Capitol during the War of 1812 (Fortunately, at the time, rain

World War II – Aerial Bombardment – British Experience

pens in Bremerhaven. German submarines were sinking many of

devastation in the mile-long strip of burned-out

maximize discontent, the famous KPD stronghold of

So repeated Berlin raids of increasing intensity continually

slums, the real machinery of power and production in

Fire Protection Association, working with the British and American

i.e., thin aluminum foil strips dropped by the lead bombers to

Hamburg, being just across the English Channel, was

Bremen and Bremerhaven on their way home. Hamburg was

absence of other previous raids on the city center, the local

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS)

Traditional German construction of homes in old cities had

I found it remarkable in my travels through several bombed-

powerful pumps, was seldom very effective. So, passive

so much due to superior tactics or strategy on the part of the

the joint analysis group at Princess Risborough north of London,

the U. S. Office of Civilian Defense at the American

DATE July 43 Feb 45 Sept 44 May 43 Oct 43 Sept 44

It is interesting to note that Wuppertal experienced such

construction details, and even intensity of fire starts and area

compensate for having to fly faster and at ever-higher altitudes.

The Allied aerial attacks on Germany did serious damage to

could not be extinguished with water, and the fires ignited by

effort or planning proved effective in protecting unburned

British and American Efforts at Bombing Effectiveness

dispersion of the bombs over a target, which diminishes

influenced the transition that led to the devastating fire raids on

home islands were staged from Tinian in the Marianas. The

convince the USAAF commanders and operational planners that

General LeMay stripped his B-29s of their gunners and guns

The famous and much earlier Doolittle raid on Tokyo, on 18

operation from one-and-a-half to three hours.

At the beginning of the raid, the surface winds were about

disruption, but repeatedly great fires developed that defied the

dropped incendiaries on both sides of the firebreaks. In fact, at

Many Japanese civilians were discouraged by the intense

In the broader scheme of things, however, those two atomic

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey47

2. Multiple aim points get better distribution and more fires.

Sanborn also listed the following ground factors:

2. Building combustibility. (In areas where most buildings

In addition, the density of occupancy was clearly related to

buildings or structures, but occupancy also implies clutter and the

Unfortunately, this same organizational reluctance persisted

weapons53 from the eastern seaboard of Japan, north of Tokyo.

The following chapter deals with the fires created by nuclear

References Chapter 18 – Fire in WWII

1. http://msqr.us/articles/firebomb.xml?&page=5 [Churchill’s stated aim of

12. http://en.wikipedia,org/wiki/OperationsGomorrah [~ 1 million homeless

Headquarters US Air Force, 30 September 1955. [Firespread depends

Você também pode gostar