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Firebombing is a technique designed to damage a target, generally an urban area, through the use of fire, caused by incendiary devices, rather than from the blast effect of large bombs. In popular usage, any act in which an incendiary device is used to initiate a fire is often described as a "firebombing".
Although simple incendiary bombs have been used to destroy buildings since the start of gunpowder warfare, World War I saw the first use of strategic bombing from the air to damage the morale and economy of the enemy, such as the German Zeppelin air raids conducted on London. The Chinese wartime capital of Chongqing was firebombed by the Imperial Japanese starting in early 1939 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. London, Coventry Blitz, and many other British cities were firebombed during the Blitz by Nazi Germany. Most large German cities were extensively firebombed starting in 1942, and almost all large Japanese cities were firebombed during the last six months of World War II.
This technique makes use of small possibly delivered by a cluster bomb, such as the Molotov bread basket. If a fire catches, it could spread, taking in adjacent buildings that would have been largely unaffected by a high explosive bomb. This is a more effective use of the payload that a bomber could carry.
The use of incendiaries alone does not generally start uncontrollable fires where the targets are roofed with nonflammable materials such as tiles or slates. The use of a mixture of bombers carrying high explosive bombs, such as the British , which blew out windows and roofs and exposed the interior of buildings to the incendiary bombs, is much more effective. Alternatively, a preliminary bombing with conventional bombs can be followed by subsequent attacks by incendiary carrying bombers.
A large part of the success of this particular type of bomb is because of its tendency to start conflagration and cause major damage to houses around it which would traditionally be made using wood and cardboard.
The military tactics of the bomber stream was developed by the RAF to overwhelm the Luftwaffe aerial defenses of the Kammhuber Line during World War II to increase the RAF's concentration in time over the target. But after the lessons learned during the Blitz, the tactic of dropping a high concentration of bombs over the target in the shortest time possible became standard in the RAF as it was more effective than a longer raid. For example, during the Coventry Blitz on the night of 14/15 November 1940, 515 Luftwaffe bombers, many flying more than one sortie against Coventry, delivered their bombs over a period of time lasting more than 10 hours. In contrast, the much more devastating raid on Dresden on the night of 13/14 of February 1945 by two waves of the RAF Bomber Command's main force, involved their bombs being released at 22:14, with all but one of the 254 Avro Lancaster bombers releasing their bombs within two minutes, and the last one released at 22:22. The second wave of 529 Lancasters dropped all of their bombs between 01:21 and 01:45. This means that in the first raid, on average, one Lancaster dropped a full load of bombs every half a second and in the second larger raid that involved more than one RAF bomber Group, one every three seconds.
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) officially only bombed precision targets over Europe, but for example, when 316 B-17 Flying Fortresses bombed Dresden in a follow-up raid at around noon on 14 February 1945, because of clouds the later waves bombed using H2X radar for targeting.Davis p.504 The mix of bombs to be used on the Dresden raid was about 40% incendiaries, much closer to the RAF city-busting mix than the bomb-load usually used by the Americans in precision bombardments.Taylor p. 366. Taylor compares this 40% mix with the raid on Berlin on 3 February where the ratio was 10% incendiaries This was quite a common mix when the USAAF anticipated cloudy conditions over the target.Davis pp. 425,504
In its attacks on Japan, the USAAF abandoned its precision bombing method that was used in Europe before and adopted a policy of Carpetbombing, using incendiaries to burn Japanese-held cities including Wuhan, and the cities of the Japanese home islands. These tactics were used to devastating effect with many urban areas burned out. The first incendiary raid by B-29 Superfortress bombers was against Kobe on 4 February 1945, with 69 B-29s arriving over the city at an altitude of , dropping 152 tons of incendiaries and 14 tons of fragmentation bombs to destroy about . The next mission was another high altitude daylight incendiary raid against Tokyo on 25 February when 172 B-29s destroyed around of the snow-covered city, dropping 453.7 tons of mostly incendiaries with some fragmentation bombs. Changing to low-altitude night tactics to concentrate the fire damage while minimizing the effectiveness of fighter and artillery defenses, the Operation Meetinghouse raid carried out by 279 B-29s raided Tokyo again on the night of 9/10 March, dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries from altitudes of , mostly using the E-46 cluster bomb which released 38 M-69 oil-based incendiary bombs at an altitude of . A lesser number of M-47 incendiaries was dropped: the M-47 was a jelled-gasoline and white phosphorus bomb which ignited upon impact. In the first two hours of the raid, 226 of the attacking aircraft or 81% unloaded their bombs to overwhelm the city's fire defenses.Bradley 1999, pp. 34–35. The first to arrive dropped bombs in a large X pattern centered in Tokyo's working class district near the docks; later aircraft simply aimed near this flaming X. Approximately of the city were destroyed and 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting conflagration, more than the immediate deaths of either the atomic bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Part I: A Failure of Intelligence . Freeman Dyson. Technology Review, November 1, 2006, MIT After this raid, the USAAF continued with low-altitude incendiary raids against Japan's cities, destroying an average of 40% of the built-up area of 64 of the largest cities.
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