US Bombing of Germany and Japan in WWII At the end of World War II, the Allied Forces shifted tactics. Now they started bombing from low altitude to urban areas. This new form of bombing involved dropping of high-explosive bombs to break windows and incendiary bombs to start fires. Throughout eleven days the British and American forces bombed Hamburg, Germany, multiple times in a campaign codenamed "Operation Gomorrah." The associate carried out a similar campaign against Dresden, Germany, during three days in February 1945, while the German army was retreating. Previous bombing raids had been conducted against the railroad classification yards in Dresden, but this targeted the inner city. On the morning of 14 February, the bombing produced a firestorm same as the one in Hamburg, with temperatures reaching 2,700 degrees F (1422°C). German sources have the number of people killed between 25,000 to 35,000. The attack destroyed over 90 percent of the center of the city. In the Pacific Theatre, similar bombing raids were conducted against the major cities in Japan. Operation “Meetinghouse”, conducted on 9-10 March 1945, killed between 90,000 …show more content…
The US was, like the rest of the world, soldiering on towards end of a dark period of human that had seen the single most costly conflict in history, and they chose to adopt a stance that seemed to limit the amount of casualties in the war, by significantly shortening it with the use of atomic weapons. It was certainly a reasonable view for the USA to take, since they had suffered the cost of more than 418,000 lives, both military and civilian. To the top rank of the US military the 135,000 death toll was worth it to prevent the “many thousands of American troops [that] would be killed in invading Japan” – a view attributed to the president himself. This was a grave consequence taken seriously by the US. Ordering the deployment of the atomic bombs was an hateful act, but once they were certainly justified in