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In Antony Beevor’s book, The Battle for Spain, he writes of Germany’s, perhaps the world’s, top tactical air force commander, Wolfram von Richthofen in these terms:

Richthofen, a cousin of the famous Red Baron air ace, was a hard, arrogant man, disliked by German and Spanish officers alike. He was to become infamous as the destroyer of many towns and cities: Durango and Guernica in Spain, then Rotterdam, Belgrade, Canea and Heraklion in Crete, followed by many cities in the Soviet Union, most notably of all, Stalingrad, where 40,000 civilians were killed.

I get the feeling that Antony Beevor almost has a personal hatred of Wolfram von Richthofen – perhaps because he sees him as the man who came up with the concept of terror bombing. Beevor left out of his list one of von Richthofen’s most famous city bombing raids, Warsaw, perhaps the first raid described as a terror bombing in World War II. At the time, the bombing of Warsaw was classified as a terror bombing.

Were these attacks terror bombings or were they something else?

Tag words: Antony Beevor; The Battle for Spain; Wolfram von Richthofen; Warsaw Uprising; James S. Corum; Junkers Ju 52; Douglas C-47; Douglas DC 3; Communism; Nazism; Stalingrad; Bombing of Dresden; Bombingof Hamburg; Josef Goebbels; Vasily Grossman; A Writer at War;