London fairly regularly has WWII unexploded bombs to deal with. When you look at all the bombs dropped [1] on the city, it's hardly surprising!
Guess bombing civilians wasn’t a good idea. Sorry about that
Right back atcha. Let's learn from this and stay friends!
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?
Right, it was always bad and continues to be bad.
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.
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.
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.
>...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"
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-air-raids-that-shook-brit...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower...
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.
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.
"Haunting" is right.
Edit: The easiest way I found to see photos and video is in Getty's archive: https://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/image?family=editorial&...
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.
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.
It's quite beautiful.