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An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

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Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#61

Post by olavk »

tomjen3 wrote: post #49
afarrell wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a separate discussion about the argument that the allies should have bombed the lines to the death camps: I've been bewildered for a decade how anyone proposes that they could have done any damage to a 1.4 meter wide target made of two steel beams lying on the earth. At least, any damage that could not have been repaired in half a week.

You don't blow up just any track: you blow up bridges because they take so much more time to build or repair. As for the targeting: you have to go really low. British bombers attacked the gestapo hq in Copenhagen by going so low that their bombs were dropped into the sides of the building (consequently, although that wasn't the plan, a number of prisoners who had been housed in cells in the top floor managed to escap…

Part of the Copenhagen story is that the first planes hit the Gestapo HQ with the bombs, but one of the planes hit a tower, dropped the bombs over a random street and then crashed into a girls school. The following planes then bombed the crash-site (the school) since they saw the smoke and thought it was the target. Precision bombing was incredible risky.

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#62

Post by Crito »

olavk wrote: post #60
Crito wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have your bombing run at an angle to the rails, not parallel or perpendicular. Like the RAF did with Operation Black Buck in the Falklands. Anyway, what I've usually heard is that they should have bombed the camps themselves, not the rail lines leading to them. That's not what I personally think, but that's what I've heard others talk about.

Bombing the camps would have killed the prisoners. Extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau was built in connection with the concentration camp Auschwitz, so it would have been impossible to bomb without killing camp prisoners. Now something like Treblinka was purely a "killing factory" with no prisoners held for more than a few hours before they were killed. In that case bombing everything would probably have sav…

The argument is (and again, it is not mine) that it would have been better to kill everyone currently in the camp, if it meant that the camp was taken out of commission for the future. The holocaust survivor I first heard this from was talking specifically of Auschwitz.

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#63

Post by [deleted] »

Crito wrote: post #62
olavk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bombing the camps would have killed the prisoners. Extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau was built in connection with the concentration camp Auschwitz, so it would have been impossible to bomb without killing camp prisoners. Now something like Treblinka was purely a "killing factory" with no prisoners held for more than a few hours before they were killed. In that case bombing everything would probably have sav…

The argument is (and again, it is not mine) that it would have been better to kill everyone currently in the camp, if it meant that the camp was taken out of commission for the future. The holocaust survivor I first heard this from was talking specifically of Auschwitz.

[deleted]

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#64

Post by empiricus »

bweitzman wrote: post #48
empiricus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see any possible reason for the distribution to be Poisson. It should be completely random, but the representation on the map is too regular.. Looks like the apparent regularity is an artifact of the way the data is filtered for display on the map for some scales; if I zoom out/in the fully random distribution becomes more visible.

Poisson distributions are completely random, so I'm guessing you mean either a uniform or normal distribution. failrate is making a reference to the Thomas Pynchon novel "Gravity's Rainbow", in which the Poisson distribution of the bombing of London is a major plot point. And I do believe the author is correct by claiming it is a Poisson distribution, since we are talking a number of events per km^2.

Thanks, I see now. I was thinking that Poisson distributions look like distributions generated by Poisson disk sampling (with which I was more familiar).

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#65

Post by kuschku »

kaybe wrote: post #44
jstalin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also heard that WWI munitions are routinely found in France still, with farmers still getting killed occasionally.

The topic even has its own wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest

And there are more interesting articles related to it, like https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge_%28s%C3%A9quelles_d...

(Try using Google Translate if you don’t understand french – the english article just is far too short)

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#66

Post by kuschku »

scottmcdot wrote: post #38

How do they know where the bombs were dropped?

All sides in the war took pictures while dropping bombs.

So, each country that got hit during WWII is evaluating those pictures nowadays to find non-detonated bombs – leading to lots of maps of where bombs fell.

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#67

Post by olavk »

willyt wrote: post #27
sytelus wrote: post #11

It looks like they didn't spared places like Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, London bridges and so on. How did these things survived then? I can't tell at all if these were re-build after WWII.

Partly because Hitler ordered that specific cultural sites shouldn't be targeted. Partly because a lot of buildings in London actually were destroyed then rebuilt close enough to what they were that most people can't tell the difference. For example the whole south side of Fleet Street was reduced to rubble near Temple Bar but you wouldn't know it now.

Hitler might have made that order, but that doesn't mean that WWII bombers were actually able to bomb with such precision that they could deliberately avoid hitting specific buildings. Especially since the bombings happened at night! The blitz was "strategic bombing" which basically means a large area is bombed in order to destroy and and kill as much as possible - not target specific buildings.

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#68

Post by dba7dba »

kristopolous wrote: post #13
dba7dba wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few hundred. By balloons launched from Japanese subs off coast of Northwest US. No accurate record available because the discoveries were strictly kept as secrets.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/photos/0... secrets in 1943 perhaps ... not now though.

Not a secret now of course. I'm saying because it was kept secret at that time, not good records were kept.

Re: An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz

#69

Post by olavk »

Crito wrote: post #62
olavk wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bombing the camps would have killed the prisoners. Extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau was built in connection with the concentration camp Auschwitz, so it would have been impossible to bomb without killing camp prisoners. Now something like Treblinka was purely a "killing factory" with no prisoners held for more than a few hours before they were killed. In that case bombing everything would probably have sav…

The argument is (and again, it is not mine) that it would have been better to kill everyone currently in the camp, if it meant that the camp was taken out of commission for the future. The holocaust survivor I first heard this from was talking specifically of Auschwitz.

I understand the sentiment, but deliberate bombing a prisoners camp (which btw. also have a number of your own captured soldiers) in order to destroy the facility? In any case a camp could quickly be rebuilt somewhere else, much more complex installations like airplane factories were moved around and continued to operate despite heavy bombing.
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