Same in Germany. Happened fairly regularly when I had to come to the office every day that a road was blocked because they found a WW2 bomb when they dug new underground parking garages.
Guess bombing civilians wasn’t a good idea. Sorry about that
Alas, this has never stopped to be part of warfare. When was the last war where bombing civilians (intentionally or as "collateral damage") was not happening?
I had thought an example could be the Falklands War, but the Argentine soldiers booby trapped some civilian homes once they knew they were going to lose.
These are very different. Yeah, yeah, I know, "tell that to the mother who lost her child", but you would much rather be a civilian in a war in which the military is not intentionally targeting you.
So, when was the last war of which civilians did not die at all? Maybe the Cod Wars between the UK and Iceland.
I did not claim they were not different. Your last sentence is broadening the scope considerably. I was talking about bombing civilians. But still, it is hard to come up with wars where that did not happen (which does not make it any less horrible).
It's ridiculous that civilized nations have strict rules for war. There should be no war.
Except there is war and no one has yet figured out a way not to have war. Given the reality of war, we are profoundly lucky to live in an era where civilized nations have agreed on rules for war, and many of those rules forbid the intentional targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure.
This is unprecedented. And fragile. There are uncivilized nations which do not follow those rules. They find the idea of not targeting civilians quaint at best. They love those rules, only because those rules hamstring their enemies, not themselves. They happily target civilians. Not coincidentally, these are the most venal, corrupt and incompetent of nations, and fortunately they are handily beaten by their moral betters, rules notwithstanding.
Still, implying as you did that one is like the other is confused, at best. On principle I disagree with conflating the two kinds of civilian deaths: collateral damage (unironic, no scare quotes) and intentional atrocity are not the same. Conflating the two gives aid and comfort to bad actors, to morally confused souls who support uncivilized nations in their adventurism.
> I did not claim they were not different.
I claimed only that you conflated them, and you did, quite casually. The stakes are too high for that.
I reject your notion that I have to add a detailed paragraph about those two different ways civilians get bombed, when my point was that they are getting bombed, practically always.
Also, "collateral damage" is on a spectrum, in my opinion. How much collateral damage is acceptable before you can call it an atrocity in itself? So, that is much less of a black-white distinction as it seems to be in your statement.
Of course "collateral damage" (with scare quotes) is on a spectrum as is "consent". Those with sinister motives make sure to emphasize this "spectrum" in order to diffuse and confuse its meaning. They also reject the necessity to be precise with their terms.
Collateral damage (no scare quotes) on the other hand, like consent (no scare quotes), has a very precise and important meaning with real, binary values. A civilian death is either collateral or intentional. Consent is either knowingly given or withheld.
Let's live in a world where these distinctions are clear.
The Paris Gun would seem to qualify as an attempt to bomb civilians in WW1.
>...When the guns were first employed, Parisians believed they had been bombed by a high-altitude Zeppelin, as the sound of neither an airplane nor a gun could be heard. They were the largest pieces of artillery used during the war by barrel length, and qualify under the (later) formal definition of large-calibre artillery.
>...The German objective was to build a psychological weapon to attack the morale of the Parisians, not to destroy the city itself.
>...The projectile flew significantly higher than projectiles from previous guns. Writer and journalist Adam Hochschild put it this way: "It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of 40 km (25 mi) at the top of its trajectory. This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where the shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth. For the first time in warfare, deadly projectiles rained down on civilians from the stratosphere"
Uhh, just yesterday when Iran only bombed Israel's military installations and Mossad Headquarters
The whole of the past year Hezbollah also saved it's high quality missiles (the ones that would make it past the Iron Dome) for targeting military structures.
They also hit a school building a few hundred meters from my parents house. No military building anywhere in town.
As for Hezbollah - they definitely destroyed a lot of civilian houses with missiles that passed Iron Dome. The whole area is empty of civilians, which is why there often weren't casualties.
A year ago, Iranian militias staged an attack on civilians - which this strike on Israel by Iran was retaliation for Israel killing the leaders of Iranian proxies as Israel’s retaliation. Hence part of a war that started with an intentional attack on civilians.
While the bombing in WW2 did at times deliberately target civilians, also they were incredibly bad at dropping the bombs in the right place.
They regularly conducted bombing raids at night in almost complete darkness, with a guy looking out the top of the plane with a sextant measuring the ___location of stars to decide when to drop the bombs. So anything within, say, 3 miles of a tank factory was at risk of being bombed.
Improved technology had a great impact in this area, because if 90% of your bombs are missing the target, a perfect targeting system is like having 10x as many planes.
Yet, with modern technology russians are bombing apartment blocks, theaters, hospitals. That is the famous Russian culture: war crimes at a large scale.
Plenty of such places in Italy too, in the Desenzano lake it's easier to find WW2 memorabilia than to avoid it.
We've learned at school that more people died to bombs in Italy post WW2 than during the war itself, it wasn't even close. I remember in the 2000s a single year made around 6 victims.
Most of the bombs are really at sea and lakes, and we still have around 250000 to a million unexploded bombs on our territory.
Most would not explode, but some are very dangerous because the triggers are the only parts that corrode and get ruined more easily thus making the bombs unstable.
"At the current rate of clearance it is a conservative estimate that the Département du Déminage will still be finding these weapons nine hundred years from now."
There are a lot of photos, really bad. You'd think people would have learned but in current events Gaza has had 4x the ordnance dropped on it (in about 1/5 the land area).
Prague is a really good example of a major European city that was relatively untouched in the war. And it shows. Lots and LOTS of historical buildings and a very "old European" feel through a lot of the city.
Imagine earnestly believing Hitler did the whole London bombing thing, which utterly crippled the Luftwaffe and seriously hurt how useful they were in the rest of the war, out of military necessity.
Also the bombing of Dresden being out of the ordinary for the war is Russian fiction. Stalin begged for Dresden to be bombed, we have the letters to the Americans to back that up.
You don’t have to struggle. There are plenty of videos and photos of that time that you can check out. Also if you visit London you can go around and see a bunch of buildings they haven’t rebuilt and just left them in semi destroyed state as monuments
> Also if you visit London you can go around and see a bunch of buildings they haven’t rebuilt and just left them in semi destroyed state as monuments
I lived in London for 20 years and never knew or saw anything like that?
The main thing you notice when you walk around London is the old/new mix. If you see a concrete monstrosity, nestled next to a Victorian/Edwardian/Elizabethan building, you're probably guaranteed that the newer building was built on top of a bomb site.
London bomb sites used to be frequent enough that they were backgrounds in 50s - 60s TV, such as The Professionals, but current economic success conditions have meant they've all been built over.
Yeah sorry I was specifically referring to Christchurch Greyfriars. Basically it was as the article said, I was staying in the area (near uh a pub Samuel Pepys I believe) and was walking around and that was definitely one of the things that caught my eye. Maybe such things aren’t as common as I thought
I spent a bit of time in Budapest, something like 80% of the buildings were damaged during WWII and neglected behind the iron curtain afterwards. Even walking around today it is very common for a building to have a restored facade but a lot of historical damage on the sides.
My mum and dad were teenagers during the war and did fire-watching, notoriously avoided if at all possible (they said) so given to anyone biddable or old. It got a bit hair-raising according to my dad, he stood in a doorway near Imperial College watching a plate glass sheet decide if it was going to fall on him or into the building. Walking through labs with bombs dropping was .. intense.
If you had an "anderson shelter" in your garden you were lucky. Many poor working class families got a "morrison shelter" which was basically a steel table you could use in a dining room or kitchen and then hide under. In some ways more convenient I guess? (Anderson shelters got cold and damp)
He was bombed out of a house in Stepney. They lost everything. I can't decide if he missed more the entire collection of the first 50 penguin books, or a lump of melted glass he scavanged from the fire of crystal palace in the 1930s: these are the two things he remembered in the 60s and 70s talking about it.
He was studying electrical engineering and maths at university by the end of the war and so not called up. He said they trained in how to manage live power cables with wooden "tongs" and were part of rescue crews when buildings collapsed. My mum was tracing maps for D-Day, and packing munitions and my Aunt did technical drawing on the "mulberry harbour" concrete caissons floated over to the beaches for D-Day.
A good read on the blitz would be "the people's war" by Angus Calder, which in large part is made up from "mass observation" recruited/organised diaries kept during the period, and donated to the University of Sussex. My mum kept one of them.
A standing joke in Architecture circles is that the greater london council destroyed more Wren churches in London than the Blitz. UCL used to say the basements where compsci was sited were kindly dug by the Germans.
Postwar housing was a mess. My aunt lived in a 5 story block of flats in Paddington she got on a long lease as bomb damaged property, my Uncle bought into commercial premises around Farringdon in a deal which demanded he do structural repairs immediately. There was a huge housing shortage and for years you could still see the pre-fabricated houses around Lambeth Palace which were a godsend of temporary housing but persisted into the 60s. Stepney where my dad grew up was a wreck, anywhere around the docks basically. It was a patchwork.
The pseudo-documentary film "Fires were started" by Humphrey Jennings has some iconic footage of the dock firestorm (not to be compared with Dresden, but it was severe) You would recognise the shots of the fronts of builings collapsing and firemen holding hoses wearing brodie helmets.
Comparisons are evil. Coventry was really badly affected and the modern day cathedral stands next to the wreck of the original gothic one. It's like the Kaiser Wilheim spire in Kurfürstendamm in Berlin, a very pale shadow of the reality at the time. Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Rotterdam were all significantly worse affected than London in the end, but to anyone in London I doubt it felt like it. The bombing in Japan was on an altogether different scale.
I can't imagine the record keeping to provide the data for this. And of course, they have weasel words at the bottom: "The National Archives give no warranty to the accuracy, completeness or fitness for purpose of the information provided"
[1] http://bombsight.org/#13/51.5008/-0.0536