Devastation was spread over roughly 12 sq miles (31 sq km).

This tremendous damage, coupled with the relatively small loss of aircraft, led Allied commanders to consider Operation Gomorrah a success. The attack on Hamburg, Germany's second largest city, would be known as Operation Gomorrah, after the biblical city wiped out by fire and brimstone. Specific industrial targets were mostly abandoned.

Concentrated, unchecked fires linked up to turn parts of Hamburg into a furnace. Or to phrase it differently, what really happened at Sodom and Gomorrah? Henni Klank and her family escaped in a boat packed with traumatised women and children, and had a last glimpse of the city covered in smoke "as if to hide the horror". Already stretched fire crews were overwhelmed. On May 27, 1943, Harris signed Bomber Command Order No. Researchers find SARS-Cov-2 survives for longer than thought - but only under certain conditions. The campaign was the first operation to feature coordinated bombing between the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Force, with the British bombing by night and the Americans conducting precision strikes by day.

But for all the cost, what was the effect on Nazi Germany's war effort? Strung out from the previous day's bombing, and with the city's infrastructure demolished, German fire crews were unable to effectively combat the raging inferno.

Beginning on July 24, 1943, Operation Gomorrah was a coordinated bombing assault on the city of Hamburg, Germany which reduced much of the city Hamburg to rubble. By the following year Bomber Command had enough aircraft, a single-minded leader in Arthur Harris and the technical knowledge to carry this plan out.

Much of Hamburg was not rebuilt for decades and, although partially preserved, St Nicholas' Church was left as a shell. I remember saying to the navigator, who was engrossed with his charts: 'For Christ's sake, Smithy, come and see this. Operation Gomorrah: Firebombing of Hamburg. Commencing on the night of July 24, 1943, the bombing continued until August 3. In the immediate wake of the raids, over two-thirds of Hamburg's population fled the city.

"And demands to protect the home front had a practical impact, in diverting arms from the battlefields, and a psychological impact, by raising questions on the fronts about was happening to loved ones at home," he says. Gomorrah - with eight days of bombing by the RAF and USAAF from 24 July - would prove these theories. An area of about 4 sq miles (10 sq km) - roughly equivalent to the area of London from Kings Cross to the Thames, Hyde Park Corner to the Tower of London - was incinerated.

24-25 July: Night raid by about 790 RAF bombers. It was a joint British-American venture. ", Flying Officer Trevor Timperley said: "The blaze was unimaginable. Tens of thousands of strips of aluminium paper were launched from planes, creating a snowstorm of reflected radar signals and effectively blinding the fearsome German defences. A million of the 1.7m population fled. The streets were burning, the trees were burning and the tops of them were bent [by the wind] right down to the street. Lot, if you have read earlier in Genesis, is Abraham's nephew. Other aircrews reported being able to feel the heat, getting soot over their aircraft and even the smell of roasting flesh. With oxygen becoming so thin candles were fading, they broke down a cellar wall to escape.

"At this moment something snapped in a neighbour and, caught up in a panic, he took his bed cover and wanted out. In 1941 it was calculated it took five tonnes of bombs to kill one German. Mr Lowe says: "Experience and extensive testing had shown a mix of high explosives and incendiaries was the most destructive combination. "We were soberly thinking of the drama of mothers looking for their children and vice versa. Wikipedia states 42,600 civilians killed and 37,000 wounded, "virtually destroying most of the city". "Although many arms factories and refineries were operational again in early 1944, demoralisation and destruction remained a long-term problem that also weakened war production. In 1942 a decision was taken by the War Cabinet and the Air Staff to destroy all of Germany's cities with populations over 100,000, targeting "the morale of the enemy civil population - in particular the industrial workers". Operation Gomorrah was the codename for an American/British bombing of Hamburg in Germany during the last week of July 1943, causing mass destruction and mass deaths. 173 authorizing the operation to move forward. "But Hamburg is on a completely different level - it is more comparable with what happened in Nagasaki.". Packed apartment blocks became shells within minutes. "When listening to those horror stories we no longer broke into cheers as we did during the air raid itself.

The other was a system known as "Window." As part of a sustained campaign of strategic bombing during World War II, the attack during …

Wikipedia states 42,600 civilians killed and 37,000 wounded, "virtually destroying most of the city". In a way it would be understandable - if you can't hit, say, an aircraft factory alone, you can try and hit anything around it. Harris was triumphant. The centenary of the RAF not only coincides with the 75th anniversary of one of its most famous missions - the Dambusters - but also with one of its most controversial.

Dr Malte Thiessen, professor of contemporary European history, says: "News of the attacks ran like wildfire. The phenomenon matched the apocalyptic name of the operation. In the next few hours, a new word was added to the dictionary of war - firestorm (feuersturm). You'll never see the like of it again!'. The next day, another American attack destroyed the city's power plant. Air raids were nothing new. To aid in the operation's success, RAF Bomber Command decided to debut two new additions to its arsenal as part of Gomorrah.

Air raids were nothing new. But Gomorrah in July 1943 would be on a new and terrible scale - unmatched by any other single Allied air attack in Europe during World War Two.

50-70 bombers per raid. And the RAF had a secret weapon - codenamed Window.

"But Hamburg raised for me for the first time the ethics of bombing. Wood, fabric and flesh blazed.

", The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites. Learn … The majority of German casualties occurred as the result of the firestorm. At the height of the raid 16,000 apartment buildings, with frontages of 133 miles (214km), home to nearly 450,000 people, were ablaze.

Even devastating raids like Dresden, in the last days of the war, saw fewer people killed. There were also many other bombings of Hamburg during the war. "I struggled to run against the wind in the middle of the street... we couldn't go on across [the road] because the asphalt had melted. Keith Lowe, author of Inferno, a book about the attack, said: "There is in the UK a tendency to equate what happened in Hamburg and Dresden with what happened in London and Coventry.

Operation Gomorrah was an aerial bombing campaign that occurred in the European Theater of Operations during World War II (1939-1945).

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