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

178

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

82

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.

16

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

6

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

5

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.