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Article: To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Parameters
- Article date:
- March 22, 2004
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 U.S. Army War College. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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To Destroy a City: Strategic Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II. By Hermann Knell. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2003. 373 pages. $32.50.
Hermann Knell was a 19-year-old living in the crowded old medieval town of Wurzburg, Germany, on the night of 16-17 March 1945 when hundreds of Allied bombers paid a lethal visit. In one night, the bombers killed more than 5,000 people and flattened 92 percent of the city's structures, leaving 90,000 Wurzburgers homeless. To Destroy a City combines Knell's personal memoir of that night and a discourse on the "why" of it. Germany's collapse was imminent and its major industrial cities lay in ruins. "Why," ...