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The British bomber crews had intended to bomb the Haagse Bos ("Forest of the Hague") district where the Germans had installed V-2 launching facilities that had been used to attack British cities. However, the pilots were issued with the wrong coordinates, so the navigational instruments of the bombers had been set incorrectly.
The cause of the disaster was not made clear at the time, as the British government did not want enemy governments and military to know the extent of the disaster. There had been staff shortages, a management position had remained empty for a year, and 189 inexperienced Italian prisoners of war were working in the mines at the time of the accident.
A list of strategic bombing over the United Kingdom in World War II includes the towns and cities that received significant aerial destruction from 1940 to 1942 in the United Kingdom. After mid-1944 the Luftwaffe would struggle to defend their own skies.
The bombing of Dresden was a joint British and American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 772 heavy bombers of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons ...
After World War II, the United States developed the 43,000-pound (20,000 kg) T12 demolition bomb, which was designed to create an earthquake effect. Given the availability of nuclear weapons with surface detonating laydown delivery , there was little or no development of conventional deep penetrating bombs until the 1991 Gulf War .
The first British atomic bomb was successfully tested in Operation Hurricane on 3 October 1952. [60] Britain thereby became the third country to test nuclear weapons. [61] The first Blue Danube atomic bombs were delivered to Bomber Command in November 1953, [62] although the V bombers to deliver them to their targets were not available until 1955.
The offensive was the last large-scale bombing campaign against England using conventional aircraft, and thenceforth only the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rockets – the pioneering examples of cruise missiles and short-range ballistic missiles respectively – were used to strike British cities.
Operation Outward was a British campaign of the Second World War that attacked Germany and German-occupied Europe with free-flying balloons. It made use of cheap, simple balloons filled with hydrogen and carrying either a trailing steel wire to damage high voltage power lines by producing a short circuit , or incendiary devices to start fires ...