Talk:Bombing of Hamburg in World War II

message: Thanks for the picture, but as it cannot be seen here that a whole city is burning - it could be any house anywhere - I think there might be better alternatives. Get-back-world-respect 12:22, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Picture

message: There should be something better than this "Official website of the film Asche-1945 (free to download) with a different point of view concerning the bombing of civilians.". Pukkie 09:41, 24 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Further reading?

message: Apparently, not only civilians or strategic target were the object of these bombing raids.  From a 2001 article by Miles Glendenning, buildings and topographical surveys manager with the National Monuments Record of Scotland:
"This paper is not concerned with the issue of socalled terror bombing of civilians, or with air attacks in support of army campaigns, such as the allied bombing of Caen or the German bombing of Rotterdam. We are solely concerned here with deliberate 'cultural bombing', and the way in which that interacted with the concern for Heimatschutz and the citymonument. The first deliberate mass bombing of a historic city was the Royal Air Force attack which incinerated over 80 per cent of the timberbuilt Hanseatic old town of Lubeck on Palm Sunday, 28 March 1942. This attack by over 200 heavy bombers was ordered by the South African commander of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, as an experiment, to test whether bombing timberframed buildings could start an inferno large enough to be used as an easy aiming point for later waves of bombers: "I wanted my crews to be well blooded, as they say in fox hunting, to have a taste of success for a change".
'Bomber' Harris's motive thus merely seems to have been one of philistine utilitarianism; but the emotional hold of the Heimatschutz philosophy in Germany led to public outrage at the destruction of Lubeck, and calls for revenge attacks targeted precisely against the English architectural heritage. On 14 April, Hitler issued an order for the deliberate bombing of historic cities, the socalled Baedeker raids named after the guidebooks used to select the targets. The first raids hit Exeter, Bath and York, where the Guildhall was gutted: the German radio announced that "Exeter was a jewel; we have destroyed it".7
That, however, was something of an exaggeration. The fact that the German air force only had light tactical bombers meant that these retaliations could only be on a pinprick scale, compared with what was inexorably coming in the opposite direction. For example, as the attackers headed for Bath, a massive formation of RAF bombers crossed their path heading for another Hanseatic city, Rostock, where threequarters of the medieval Old Town was flattened. At a meeting three days later, Hitler raged against the destruction of Rostock, and Goebbels recorded that "he shares my opinion absolutely that cultural centres, health resorts and civilian centres must be attacked now. There is no other way of bringing the English to their senses. They belong to a class of human beings with whom you can only talk after you have first knocked out their teeth". But - quite apart from the fact that 'Bomber' Harris was not himself an Englishman ( NONSENSE! Harris was born in England to English parents, although he spent much of his youth in Rhodesia (not South Africa. Do some research 2A00:23C5:5C87:F000:A442:D60B:9AD5:E75F (talk) 08:02, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: This article seems to rely on an assumption that the aim of the RAF's bombing was to destroy cultural symbols. As this was not the case, the basis of this article seems unsound.IxK85 13:09, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: SYSTEMATICAL ATTACK ON CULTURAL SYMBOLS

message: The discreption of the Mahnmal St. Nikolai is misused to blame Britain in a very bad way - I will try to change that... Citius Altius Fortius 06:45, 12 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Memorialization

message: Surely the Allies must have formulated some goals for the operation, and I think they should be mentioned in the article.--Cancun771 (talk) 13:58, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Goals

message: These sites: [] and [] have videos, about this bombing.Agre22 (talk) 02:52, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: For an overview of the British and US bombing campaigns then YouTube has the The World at War episodes on the bombing in the Whirlwind programme here:   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.40.253.164 (talk) 18:59, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There's the relevant part on the Hamburg bombing here:   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.71.28 (talk) 20:35, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There's Albert Speer appearing in a 1977 BBC programme The Secret War episode; 'To See for a Hundred Miles', talking about the bombing of Hamburg on YouTube here:   — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.4.57.101 (talk) 21:07, 1 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Videos

message: Hi All. IMHO, this article should cover in detail more than "Operation Gomorrah" which was only one of the several attacks on this city. There is a lot of information about "Operation Gomorrah" and it is notable enough to deserve its own wikiarticle, which I begun drafting.  Additionally, the wikilink to Operation Gomorrah currently redirects to this article (ie: "Bombing of Hamburg in World War II"), so its kind of recursive! (this article is linking to itself).  Please if anyone has a sound reason to disagree, let me know.  Thanks and regards, DPdH (talk) 09:57, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Article scope

message: For anyone interested in seeing what bomb-damaged Germany was like in around 1945, then there is an RAF film on YouTube that shows a sequence of shots taken from the air, including several of Hamburg, including the submarine slips where several partly-completed U-boats are visible;
 - part 1
 - part 2
The relevant section is near the end of part 2  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.82.120 (talk) 13:53, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Hamburg post-1945 film

message: The entire "Aftermath" section is completely identical to the same section on the following web page: http://wapedia.mobi/en/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II#2.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Awrootbeer1123 (talk • contribs) 21:57, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Very unlikely, as Wapedia almost exclusively copies Wikipedia not the other way round.Petebutt (talk) 08:37, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Plagiarism?

message: Say no more
Was Hamburg bombed? - yes
Did lots of Civilians die? - yes
There is not a lot else to say except, fill in details, or the NPOV rule would force deletion!!!Petebutt (talk) 08:37, 6 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV

message: This article is laden with errors. I just corrected the sentence
 The furious winds created by the firestorm were rumoured to have the power to sweep people up off the streets like dry leaves and. 
The Firestorm-phenomenon is very well researched and it is not a "rumour". It sucks cars, uprooted trees and of course people up into the air into the Firestorm centre, this applies for both assaults on Hamburg and Dresden. I have corrected this gross mistake, and added:
Some people who tried to walk along, they were pulled in by the fire, they all of the sudden dispappeard right in front of you (...) You have to save yourself or try go get as far away from the fire, because the draught pulls you in.  , from a BBC-documentation of 1973.
PeterBln (talk) 17:19, 9 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Firestorm

message: The article states "The attack during the last week of July, 1943, Operation Gomorrah, created one of the greatest firestorms raised by the RAF and United States Army Air Force in WWII, killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 in Hamburg and practically destroying the entire city." For the deaths and wounded, statistics have been quoted in the introductory section, but for the destruction of buildings, instead of statistics, the journalistic phrase that I have placed in cursive has been used. Further on in the article, it states "Dwellings destroyed amounted to 214,350 destroyed out of 414,500". So, it would seem that "practically destroying half the city" (or perhaps 51.7%) might well be more accurate. On the other hand, perhaps "the entire city" is referring to the centre of Hamburg, but, if so, this is not clear in this paragraph, and other articles in Wikipedia refer to the whole of Hamburg as the city. Coyets (talk) 17:03, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: 1945 Pathe News un-issued films of aerial shots of Hamburg here:   and here: — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.24.208.91 (talk) 18:48, 26 July 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification needed of the phrase ''practically destroying the entire city'' 

message: From the article (in two different places) "Operation Gomorrah killed 42,600 people and left 37,000 wounded." These are precise figure, please can we have a citation to the source from whence they come. -- PBS (talk) 02:02, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: OK I've found the edit that added the numbers and it was sourced. But since then it has been moved further away from the numbers. -- PBS (talk) 02:15, 1 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Even thoug we might have a citation, the numbers are wrong. Especially the number of woundet is far to low!2A02:8109:B00:5AB8:B98C:D98C:56B2:AA5F (talk) 19:23, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

text: I was just looking at a discrepancy between the death tool to this, on the firestorm article. It is in the City Firestorms section of the page. Both this article on the bombing of Hamburg, and the entry in that table on the Firestorms article cite the same book, but with different death tolls. I do not own the book, and was wondering... which one needs correcting? Bombing of Hamburg, or Firestorms? The quote in the intro to the Hamburg Bombing here is "killing an estimated 35,000 civilians and wounding 125,000 more in Hamburg", while on the table in Firestorms it states the death toll was "46,000 dead. A firestorm area of approximately 4.5 square miles (12 km2) was reported at Hamburg." I thought I bring this up here considering it is generally about the Bombing of Hamburg. Can anyone give a correct number, and which article do we fix? If I had the book, I wouldnt even be here asking, I'd fix it myself. Halp? D: Thanks. SageSolomon (talk) 02:33, 17 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Killed 42,600 and left 37,000 wounded 

message: Both of the german and english language wp-articles share a lack of evidence that there is still no full access to the relevant parts of the contemporary British military archives. In the past (I mean, it was 1995 or 2005), there was a decision by the British Ministry of Defense, to extend the classification of some of the relevant documents to the middle of the 21st. century. Can anyone provide a source to this? Maybe someone can help with: service responsible, date, publication source, date or condition that will let the "classification as secret" expire. --91.3.217.219 (talk) 15:06, 9 August 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: The holding-back of certain documents is not necessarily due to nefarious or suspicious motives. Often it is simply due to the relevant documents containing information that would either cause distress to living relatives of those concerned - some reports may describe deaths of aircrew and other personnel in graphic and distressing manner, or that the documents may contain operational information that could prove useful to a future enemy. For every document that is to be released it is necessary to ensure that it contains no private personal information - due to the Data Protection Act, and that it also does not provide information on tactics, etc., that are still useful today - as an example, some of these were still in use by the V bomber force throughout the Cold War. For documents that contain this sort of data, it is necessary to manually redact such information, and this is a very time consuming, and labour intensive, and therefore costly, process. So often it is simpler and cheaper to retain the classified nature of the whole document.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 10:16, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incompleteness of sources / limited accessibility of British military archives 

message: I can find this phrase existing back in the article as far as 2005, but a search for it online delivers wiki-mirrors and what looks like straight quotations from Wikipedia or at least very close phrasing to this article. No books turn up with the phrase that predate its use in Wikipedia. I wonder if the National archives did the same, it is after all a glossary and not an analysis of the contents of the archives? GraemeLeggett (talk) 12:01, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Let's remove it. Wasn't Hiroshima the Hamburg of Japan? Binksternet (talk) 12:27, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

text: Re; 'DISNEY' see here: Disney bomb. The Disney bomb was intended for use against hardened concrete structures so the USAAF missions referred-to were presumably aimed at U-boat pens or similar.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.24.215.81 (talk) 00:26, 18 December 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hiroshima of Germany 

message: ...the overlay says that the planes took off "on airdomes in England". Is that "from aerodromes in England" or am I missing something?
While there are (nowadays) things called "airdome", I can't see the connection with planes, nor do I see how one might take off "on" sth  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.15.66.160 (talk) 18:36, 16 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: It should be ' ... from aerodromes ...', so it's probably an error in the original labelling.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.149.173.13 (talk) 16:27, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re Film footage of the bombing of Hamburg 

message: Is it likely that the "unusually warm weather and good conditions" resulted in the bombing being "highly concentrated around the intended targets"?  The sentence is also too long and needs to be broken up.Royalcourtier (talk) 03:07, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bombing was not "highly concentrated" due to warm weather? 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello! This is to let editors know that :File:Bombing of Hamburg.ogv, a featured picture used in this article, has been selected as the English Wikipedia's picture of the day (POTD) for July 27, 2023. A preview of the POTD is displayed below and can be edited at Template:POTD/2023-07-27. For the greater benefit of readers, any potential improvements or maintenance that could benefit the quality of this article should be done before its scheduled appearance on the Main Page.  If you have any concerns, please place a message at Wikipedia talk:Picture of the day. Thank you! Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.9% of all FPs 23:14, 3 July 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Featured picture scheduled for POTD 

message: "The other bombardment groups attacked the Conti rubber plant in Hanover. " personally I have never heard that company called Conti, always continental. So I had to check if the name had changed. Turns out of the several ways to refer to the company this is the colloquial (Germany only?) name. I would rather see this article refer to it by the official name, but since it involves link editing I refrained from just changing it. 46.15.193.159 (talk) 10:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  colloquial naming