The Night 787 Bombers Erased Germany's Second City

WW2, from the records. https://warshelf.com/ July 27, 1943. Hamburg has been dry for weeks, and the evening is one of the hottest of the year. Three nights earlier, Bomber Command blinded German radar with strips of foil called Window, and the city's firemen have been working ever since with broken mains and blocked streets. Just before one in the morning, 787 bombers start dropping into a patch of working-class tenements two miles long and a mile wide. First the blast bombs, then eleven hundred tons of incendiaries. Within half an hour the separate fires have joined into one. The wind at street level reaches 240 kilometres an hour, asphalt melts, and in the cellars people fall asleep where they sit. From the air, the crews can see it from the North Sea. They don't know what a firestorm is. About twenty thousand die that night. Speer warns that six more like it would stop German production. Within five months Hamburg's industry is back to eighty percent.