Battle of Britain

[sidelock123]

Which nation Britain or Germany was the first to attack/bomb each others civilian targets first escalating the war and removing the chance of any peace treaty between the two nations?

[jno]

I read somewhere, but have not been able to confirm, that British bombers accidentally released a load over a non-military area and the Germans responded with bombing of civilian targets. I wouldn't swear that there were any peace treaties in the air, though, even if this is true.

[BayBoy1]

I think it may have been the other way around ,, I thought a German bomber was returning from a mission and a bomb was trapped in the bomb bay .,, and the crew released the bomb over London.,Then England responded and Bombed Berlin ????

[jno]

could be - maybe there's someone out there who has the facts to hand.

[R1Geezer]

There may have been smaller incidents but the blitz was in 1940. The bombing of German cities started much later than that. The blitz started after Hitler abandoned invasion after the Battle of Britain. Harris said that the they had sowed the wind, the whirlwind was reaped later.

[ABerrant]

24th August 1940 a German Bomber formation disregarded orders and unloaded bombs over non-military areas of London in their haste to return back to France. Churchill immediately ordered reprisal attacks on non-military German targets in Berlin. Hitler retaliated by ordering a blitz campaign of bombing start on London. The rest is history!

[jno]

ah, thanks for that, ABerrant, and BayBoy was right too.

[sidelock123]

24 August 1940, about eleven at night, when a handful of German bombers dropped a handful of bombs on the east end of London.

Today the casual reader might ask why bombing London should be comment worthy. After all, that is what the Germans did with panache through much of the war. But Hitler had always, prior to this attack, claimed that he would not bomb London without provocation. In fact, Hitler had a superficially civilised attitude to the bombing of civilian targets (with the important rider that they belonged to the short list of countries that he believed were ‘civilised’). He, later, in the war was to rave about the ‘barbaric’ allied bombing of German cities: in his political testament, written on the day before his death, he even talked (with a straight face) of the ‘hundreds of thousands of women and children… burned and bombed to death in their cities’.

Hitler admired Britain, he even had something of an inferiority complex in relation to that country, and did not want to escalate the war with the British Empire in 1940.

So why did Hitler order the Luftwaffe to bomb London on the night of April 24/25 1941?

Well, the easiest answer to that question is that he did not. Instead, a trail of German bombers dropped their bombs on London getting the wrong target in the dark.

[DrFilth]

the raids on manchester began in aug 1940

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KnJVZBlfjg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KnJVZBlfjg

[jake-the-peg]

There were bombing raids by German Zeppelins on civillian targets in WWI

Most notably on a pub in Holborn called the Dolphin

http://londonist.com/...s_on_london_mappe.php

[jno]

there used to be a plaque somewhere down Farringdon Rd marking the site of a Zeppellin attack; I don't know if it's still there. And as someone pointed out on another thread, the Germans had practised over Guernica.

All the same, it does seem the escalation into area bombing was gradual and unintentional; classic example of things going randomly in the fog of war.

[VHG]

Of course the Germans had already shown their disregard for civilan targets and cities by heavily bombing Rotterdam in May 1940.

So we should not feel at all guilty about bombing any German cities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_Blitz

[jno]

VHG, even that Wiki report says much of the bombing was the result of poor communications. But they were actually trying to capture Rotterdam, not just spread terror, so wouldn't those just be normal military tactics similar to besieging a castle in the middle ages?

[VHG]

>jno VHG, even that Wiki report says much of the bombing was the result of poor communications

Poor communications or not, they still did it.

If they had not sent bombers over Rotterdam with the intention of dropping the bombs then the poor communication would ot be an issue.

[jake-the-peg]

So VHG by that logic it would have been ok for us to round up German civillians and gas them in shower blocks because the Nazis did that to the Jewish population.

Is that how it works?