"Operation Gomorrah was RAF Bomber Command's attempt in 1943 to obliterate Hamburg, Germany's great northern port city. The bombers returned night after night, pulverising what was already rubble, whipping up a terrible firestorm and creating a holocaust so appalling that rescuers could only watch, helpless, from outside the city. An estimated 42,000 people died and 22 square kilometres of the city were incinerated."--Jacket.

Bestselling Martin Middlebrook's classic account of the battle for Hamburg: a description of a text book campaign, where the British Bomber Command got everything right.

In July 1943 a series of heavy bombing raids virtually destroyed the North German city of Hamburg. In one night alone, some 40,000 people were killed largely as a result of the terrible firestorm. To this day controversy rages as to the morality of these attacks and their consequences. With his trademark thoroughness Martin Middlebrook has delved deep into the archives to uncover the facts. As ever he draws on copious eyewitnesses and participants a total of 547 British, American, and German. The testimonies of the Hamburg survivors are particularly revealing and harrowing providing a first hand description of what it was like to be subjected to prolonged and intense air attack. Paradoxically while Hamburg was arguably Bomber Command's greatest achievement it remains its - and Air Marshal Harris - most criticized. Often overlooked was the USAAFs role and this together with the contribution to the failure of German air defenses of a new device, Window, are fully covered. Firestorm Hamburg is a masterly description of a major air campaign and the author's aim of achieving a better understanding of the background, conduct, and results is fully realized. He does not shirk from studying the moral dilemma.

W. G. Sebald completed this extraordinary, important and controversial book before his untimely death in December 2001. It is a harrowing study of the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment in World War II, and an examination of the silence in German literature and culture about this unprecedented trauma. On the Natural History of Destruction is an essential and deeply relevant study of war and society, suffering and amnesia. Like Sebald’s novels, it is studded with meticulous observation, moments of black humour, and throughout, the author’s unmatched intelligence and humanity.

"This is an interesting, informative, and important work. Overall, the quality of the essays is very high, and the focus of the book is on a topic of great importance." Stephen Nathanson, Northeastern University. --

This text tells the horrific story of the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 that left the city in ruins, told by the people who dropped the bombs and those who were there.

In the final phase of the World War II, the Allies launched a bombing campaign that inflicted unprecedented destruction on Germany. This work attempts to document life under the Allied bombing, and renders the annihilation of cities such as Dresden.

“An essential part of the literature of World War II.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post From acclaimed World War II historian Richard Overy comes this startling new history of the controversial Allied bombing war against Germany and German-occupied Europe. In the fullest account yet of the campaign and its consequences, Overy assesses not just the bombing strategies and pattern of operations, but also how the bombed communities coped with the devastation. This book presents a unique history of the bombing offensive from below as well as from above, and engages with moral questions that still resonate today.

Why some Americans built fallout shelters—an exploration America's Cold War experience For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy—"to dig or not to dig," as Business Week put it at the time—forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being. Given the much-touted nuclear threat throughout the 1960s and the fact that 4 out of 5 Americans expressed a preference for nuclear war over living under communism, what's perhaps most striking is how few American actually built backyard shelters. Tracing the ways in which the fallout shelter became an icon of popular culture, Kenneth D. Rose also investigates the troubling issues the shelters raised: Would a post-war world even be worth living in? Would shelter construction send the Soviets a message of national resolve, or rather encourage political and military leaders to think in terms of a "winnable" war? Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in fascinating detail—including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbor the entire United States Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon—One Nation, Underground goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.