I went to Bremen and Hamburg in 1963. Only 18 years after the war. They had been flattened. 40,000 killed in one raid and 750,000 made homeless in Hamburg. No signs of bomb damage. Saw an exhibition in Bremen showing how they had rebuilt the old buildings in the centre brick by brick like giant jigsaws using old tapestries and photographs. There were civilians queued up sorting out the rubble by hand, numbering it and handing it along. You didn’t see that here. It was all done through official channels. Some other cities did it differently. Went to Rotterdam the year after Germany. That had been flattened in the centre. They took a different approach. They demolished the remaining buildings and rebuilt the complete centre from scratch. It was positively gleaming. A contrast to cities like Hull and Liverpool and elsewhere where there were still bomb sites and rubble all over.
Which was the point I was making when I said about planes using the Humber as navigation dumping undropped bombs on the way home as they knew there was something in the vicinity. It was like a drip, drip, drip effect which in some ways was more unnerving than short sharp blitzes. Won’t have been fighters strafing, German fighters could only spend a few minutes over London after crossing 20 miles of the Channel. They couldn’t fly up to Hull or across the North Sea. Possibly ME110 fighter bombers, but more likely bombers strafing. The last person killed by a German bomber in this country was a woman in Hull machine gunned by one. The last conventional bomb dropped on Britain was on Hull as well though there were no casualties.
Don’t ya think the Germans should have made a massive carpet instead to sweep all the rubble under? #justsaying
Just for you City Man https://www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/pre...ice-by-liverpool-owners/ar-AAFCVoR?li=BBoPWjQ
"Wir haben die Gewächshäuser in Cottingham bombardiert, aber es dachte, es wären die gottverdammten Docks!" as they probably said on the flight home.
Seen some clipage of the mock up docks further along the estuary. Some guy ran along lighting the lanterns by hand. I wonder at what point he thought 'hang on', 'I've just tricked them into dropping tonnes of bombs on this bit of estuary that I'm on, and my protection is to sit in a shed on site'.
Yes, there was a documentary on TV a while back about techniques to misguide the enemy. A magician, might have been Harry Blackstone, suggested, in the days when they used rivers and water as navigation aids, sprinkling coal dust on the water to stop the moonlight reflecting which was very effective.
On a slightly different note, there was a programme about modern RAF pilots trying to fly one of the old bombers and dropping a bag of flour on a target in Belgium. They had training for the bomber, and could only use the techniques the originals had. They missed by quite a margin, and that's without taking flak. They finished with massive respect for those that did it for real, not just the bravery, but the skill of flying and navigating it.