Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places

Place Annihilation: Area Bombing and the Fate of Urban Places
Kenneth Hewitt

The effects and devastation of bombings during World War II is the main focus within this article. Kenneth Hewitt first brings up the type of phrasing used in the descriptions in casualties of war such as "unfortunate" and "unplanned." As well he talks about the way casualties are viewed because of the intentions of those who killed them. An example he gave was of a village called Lidice that was one of the ones that the Germans completely destroyed. The people living there were either killed or taken to concentration camps. Then they altered the land to blend in with the surrounding landscape and even routed a river that ran through it. Because of their intentions this was seen as a travesty but those who called it that did similar damage. The Allies did many carpet bombings that were not very discriminatory killing many civilians and destroying towns. These casualties were just referred to as "sacrifices of war."

Hewitt then goes into how the bombings were done during the war. At first the bombing tactics used in World War II were dense carpet bombings. These used many explosive bombs that were found to not be the most effective. Later they started using incendiary bombs that destroyed many cities and killed many civilians by spreading fires through the cities. These bombings were not just being done to cities with combatants but also noncombatant undefended towns. Japan suffered the most civilian casualties during these bombings than any other country Germany having the second highest casualty count. The incendiary bombings actually caused more destruction in Japan than both atomic bombs that were dropped.

This article gave good information about how scary and destructive war can be. Some may think that it is mostly combatants that are killed and innocent civilian deaths are kept to a minimum. The numbers of casualties from bombings given in this article show just how frighteningly high the casualties were during World War II. It definitely gives a strong argument against war.

Article taken from JSTOR archives:
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 257-284
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of American Geographers