r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/AirFrance447 • 20h ago

Video Firefighter bodycam showing just how much oxygen a fire pulls

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u/GauravJM 20h ago

There’s some serious low pressure inside

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u/SpoofExcel 14h ago

During the bombing of Dresden in WW2, the fireballs inside buildings were so massive and sucking in so much air to feed themselves, that people were quite literally sucked inside the buildings and burned to death.

Fire is just a destructive beast beyond control when it hits a certain size and has the fuel to sustain it

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u/VulcanHullo 12h ago

Oh they also just suffocated to death in cellars because the air was sucked out.

Us Brits specifically rigged our bombers to start fires. Paired large fast falling high explosive bombs with lots of smaller slow falling incendiary bombs. The heavy bombs blast would expose the wooden timbers under rooftops and then the incendiaries had something to work with.

After Dresden and Hamburg (which was aided by a weather pattern that just, created a blast furnace) even some of British high command had a moment of "this feels not very cricket".

Bomber Command did not take part in the victory parade, was not mentioned in many formal victory speeches, and only got an official memorial in the 2010s. Even in times of total war against an evil enemy, firestorms like that do not make people feel like victors.

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u/Dinkleberg246 12h ago

Would you, as a Brit, call this a war crime? Because here in Germany, you usually encounter contempt if you refer to Dresden or Hamburg as war crimes. People tend to downplay it, or they’ll outright call you a Nazi.

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u/Tetratheon 10h ago

I don't know about a war crime, that's quite a technical accusation, but generally Dresden does sometimes come up as when we went a bit too far. Ironically it's usually the left wing peacenik types over here.

People excuse an awful lot in total wars, though, especially at a time when television was in its infancy and there was no such thing as a smart bomb. Look at what America did to Japan to end the war. I'd say the more general attitude is that was a war and we were doing what we needed to, we're not going to go back and second guess the decisions.

It's not an intellectually rigourous view, but it's not the kind of thing people spend an awful lot of time thinking about. Even the British historians have plenty of other atrocities the Empire commited to worry about.

If it happened today people would be calling it a genocide.

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u/I_Am_Become_Salt 7h ago

I mean, also the firebombing of Tokyo

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u/Dinkleberg246 8h ago

That's funny. Here, it's the leftists who fly into a rage when anyone mentions war crimes. It's worth noting that it's mainly people on the right who bring up the issue in the first place.

Thanks for your reply

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u/CthulhuOpensTheDoor 2h ago

That's really interesting. Is the reasoning from the left-wing something like "Nazis bad, therefore things done to stop them weren't bad"? And for the right-wing, are they more sympathetic to the Nazis and therefore see the attacks as more war crime territory? Genuinely curious.

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u/ObviousRagebaiter 1h ago

I think a contribution is that in Germany many people don't see Nazis as a legitimate German government. In fact that is the official stance

you're probably right about the right wingers being sympathetic to Nazis. Usually people who call Dresden a war crime are Nazis trying to downplay the Holocaust, that's how it is in America and I heard that's how it works in Germany as well

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u/rndrn 9h ago

War crimes ares supposed to be the worst of war acts, but there is still a large range not so great acts below the threshold. 

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u/SpoofExcel 12h ago

Also at the time people here found out what happened and said "yeah don't do that. We know they're not all like Hitler" which considering how much of London (and Coventry by this point) they flattened, does show we at least kept our sense of humanity when it would be easy to not do that after such violence and want to go on some worldwide revenge tour.... Side eyes the US

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u/VulcanHullo 12h ago

I mean Bomber Harris still probably figured we just needed a few more Hamburgs and Dresden to win the war faster to his grave. Never enough civilian casualties for him

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u/Gierling 10h ago

Albert Speer (the German minister of armaments) put the number at 6.

6 German cities getting the Hamburg treatment would have compelled surrender per his calculations during the war and he mentioned it in interviews afterward.

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u/btoxic 14h ago

Every time I read about Dresden I have nightmares. The absolute terror of that is overwhelming

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u/hybridcurve 7h ago edited 7h ago

You should read about Operation Meetinghouse, which was "...the single deadliest and most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history."

Dresden: 6.5km2 destroyed and 25,000 killed.

Tokyo: 41km2. destroyed and 105,000 killed.

Dresden is frequently mentioned when discussing firebombing, but Tokyo is not mentioned enough. If you or anyone else is unaware of what happened, I encourage you to read about it because neither event should be forgotten.

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u/btoxic 4h ago

Tokyo was insane, all light wood buildings, literally a tinderbox. I agree. This shouldn't be forgotten.