Firestorm : the devastating bombing of Nazi Germany Dvdrip Xvid - NewMov
English | AVI | Mpeg4 | 640x480 | 01:33:23 | 29.970 fps 2631kbps | MP3 128 kbps 48 KHz | 1,7GB
Genre: Documentary
Savant was eager to get his hands on Firestorm because it was directed by the German filmmaker Michael Kloft, the co-director with Kevin Brownlow of the fine documentary The Tramp and the Dictator, and the writer of the superb documentary The Goebbels Experiment. In addition, Firestorm is an in-depth assessment of one of the troubling policies of WW2 that led to the establishment of the Air Force as Americas foremost strategic security enforcer.Firestorm is told largely from the point of view of the victims of the allied bombing. The strategies and policies are discussed at length. The allies were committed to bombing as a long-term terror weapon that initially had little effect on German war production. The film shows the destruction in more detail than anything Ive seen. We all remember film images of German cities reduced to empty brick skeletons, but Firestorm shows color aerial views that seem to last minutes, and cover dozens of square miles of absolute ruin.
The concept of Total War didnt come with machine guns or deadly gas, but with governments willing to extend the violence of war to civilian populations. In Total War all enemy citizens are fair targets. Tens of thousands of non-combatants were killed in single raids simply because it was possible to do so. Experience in England had proven that bombing only stiffened the resolve of civilians to resist, and in any event the German population was incapable of overthrowing their Nazi leaders. Hitler and Goebbels boasted of Vengeance weapons and brought heavy losses to England and Holland with cruise missiles and space-age liquid-fueled rockets. But the allies visited true vengeance on Germany, paying back the aggressor nation a hundred times over.
Klofts film uses voiceover and interviews to record the unpublicized reality of the bombing campaigns. Bombing survivors, most of whom were children during the raids, talk about the orderly rush to the shelters. Historians discuss the way targets were chosen and the division of missions between the British, who flew by night, and the Americans and their daylight raids.
Defenders of bombing policy claimed that the stiff German defense mandated night bombing or high-altitude day bombing, which made discriminating between military and civilian targets impossible. That might be a good argument when the objective was a specific factory or a railroad yard, but in practice entire civic areas were simply carpet-bombed, even cities without organized war industry installations.
The docu goes back to original records to explain the discovery of the phenomenon called a firestorm. The intense heat rising from massed fires causes a hurricane-force draft that feeds oxygen to the center of the conflagration, turning a city into a furnace and asphyxiating even those people protected in air raid shelters. The military planners back in London realized that igniting hundreds of separate fires in a densely populated city could be more efficient than dropping heavy bombs. Magnesium-fed incendiaries were developed and dropped, and the effects recorded so that the munitions experts could make their weaponry more efficient. The notorious eradication of Dresden was not an isolated attack but part of a learning process. By that time, late in the war, enemy resistance in the air was almost nil. The Air Force brass was eager to gather research, for future use.
Firestorm instills a firm idea of the inhumanity of all this organized carnage, and doubtless the men who dropped the bombs would agree -- they interpreted warfare as simply giving the enemy hell in any and all ways possible. Kloft doesnt dwell on images of dead bodies, but those we see certainly have an effect. The show avoids political conclusions and makes no defenses for the Nazi government. Michael Kloft wisely stays within the hard evidence of his film resources and his witnesses, and allows us the freedom to decide for ourselves.
Klofts film uses voiceover and interviews to record the unpublicized reality of the bombing campaigns. Bombing survivors, most of whom were children during the raids, talk about the orderly rush to the shelters. Historians discuss the way targets were chosen and the division of missions between the British, who flew by night, and the Americans and their daylight raids.
Defenders of bombing policy claimed that the stiff German defense mandated night bombing or high-altitude day bombing, which made discriminating between military and civilian targets impossible. That might be a good argument when the objective was a specific factory or a railroad yard, but in practice entire civic areas were simply carpet-bombed, even cities without organized war industry installations.
The docu goes back to original records to explain the discovery of the phenomenon called a firestorm. The intense heat rising from massed fires causes a hurricane-force draft that feeds oxygen to the center of the conflagration, turning a city into a furnace and asphyxiating even those people protected in air raid shelters. The military planners back in London realized that igniting hundreds of separate fires in a densely populated city could be more efficient than dropping heavy bombs. Magnesium-fed incendiaries were developed and dropped, and the effects recorded so that the munitions experts could make their weaponry more efficient. The notorious eradication of Dresden was not an isolated attack but part of a learning process. By that time, late in the war, enemy resistance in the air was almost nil. The Air Force brass was eager to gather research, for future use.
Firestorm instills a firm idea of the inhumanity of all this organized carnage, and doubtless the men who dropped the bombs would agree -- they interpreted warfare as simply giving the enemy hell in any and all ways possible. Kloft doesnt dwell on images of dead bodies, but those we see certainly have an effect. The show avoids political conclusions and makes no defenses for the Nazi government. Michael Kloft wisely stays within the hard evidence of his film resources and his witnesses, and allows us the freedom to decide for ourselves.
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