On a dark night seventy-one years ago today the RAF bombed Berlin for the first time, shocking Hitler and causing him to order the Luftwaffe to cease bombing British airfields and air defenses and undertake the Blitz. These night-time bombing raids destroyed more than a million homes in London alone and accounted for more than 40,000 civilian casualties. The RAF retaliated at Berlin and Mannheim and ultimately appropriated the Luftwaffe's techniques, greatly magnifying their scale in concert with the USAAF, in the horrific firebombings of Dresden in 1945.
In the pictured diagram one can see the devastating effect of high explosives distributed in a carpeting pattern over civilian targets. The devastation is total, what isn't immediately destroyed by TNT is consumed by ensuing fires. The concussive force alone of many of these bomb blasts was enough to cause buildings not immediately in the path of explosive destruction to leap their foundations and land off axis relative to the street grid. Far and wide throughout cities attacked in this manner scenes like the one pictured were to be found. Once vibrant cities were now populated by a numbed populace unable to flee and accustomed to sleeping out of doors or in underground transit stations as they attempted to reconcile heretofore unknown destruction and loss. Modern air warfare had truly begun, its legacy damning civilian populations the world over to this day.
