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Was The Allied Bombing Of German Cities Justified
the German lines to get to Berlin. This way losses were relatively light. In January 1943 Harris was given permission to go on a sustained assault on German cities. These cities included Berlin, Hamburg, Dusseldorf and Cologne. It was shown that 23 German cities had more than 60 percent of their built-up area destroyed; 46 had half of it destroyed . Most of these cities had little military importance and as for the breaking of morale it was shown that the more the British bombed the more determined the German civilians became.
In the area bombing campaigns 1,350,000 tons were dropped on Germany within its 1937 boundaries, in stark contrast, Germany dropped a total of 74,172 tons of Bombs on Britain . These were bombings of London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Plymouth, Bristol, Glasgow, Southampton, Coventry, Hull, Portsmouth, Manchester, Belfast, Sheffield, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff . This resulted in 60,000 British civilian deaths compared with the 500,000 to 600,000 German deaths . Even with all this bombing by Britain and later America, the German war engine was still going strong. It was strong enough to withstand this battering while still producing arms and men. What did have a drastic effect on Germany was the attack on Russia that turned into a disaster. It was this single event that started the downfall of the Third Reich. The British conditions were improving though, with the bombing of Pearl Harbour by the Japanese the Americans and their huge industry has been brought into the war against Germany.
Part C
British Terror Bombing Of German Civilians written by Dr. A.R. Wesserle was a letter written in response to a documentary on the bombing campaigns of the Germans and the Allies. It was written by a German who was in one of the cities that was bombed at the end of the Second World War, because of this the writing naturally has a huge emotional bias.
The article was written in March 1981, it was not written that long ago so that a majority of the information should be still accurate, although new discoveries might have been made about this period of the war that contradicts the information presented because it is twenty-two years old. It has a large number of facts and figures on death tolls, cities bombed and dates that all have sources and were not just remembered. There is a lot of information on the Allies and what they did and the damage they inflicted on the German people, but the German bombing efforts on the Allies is only mentioned twice and was played down, so it made it seem that the Allies were the aggressors and the Germans were the poor defenceless people. Generally it is a good source because of the research done and the sources given, also because it gives a German’s point of view. Although, when hoping to extract historical facts from the article, one has to sift through a huge amount of emotional language.
The next source was a documentary by the BBC [next page]