The Allied Bombing of Würzburg

On March 16, 1945, the British Royal Air Force bombed the city of Würzburg in Germany. They dropped almost 600 tons of bombs on the city. More than 4,000 people died, and the inner city with its half-timbered buildings was destroyed. Churches, schools, hospitals and houses -- above all houses -- were reduced to rubble, and the fires were still burning three days later.

Würzburg wasn't an industrial or military center, but the RAF wasn't targeting industry at this point. They were aiming squarely at civilians. They wanted to destroy entire cities and the people in them, and so they leveled Würzburg -- and Dresden and Köln and Hamburg and many, many more.

Some say the bombings were immoral and motivated by vengeance. Others say the Germans had it coming. The reality is, of course, more nuanced. I'm working on a longer piece about the bombing, but it's hard for me to think about it with any detachment. The statistics and the photos of the rubble are abstractions now. The intervening year have stripped them of their power. But I think about my mother, who was only five at the time. She's eighty now, but she still remembers her father coming home bloodied from the bombs.