In late February 1945, my mother was a 15-year old living in southern Germany. Her father (my Opa, or grandfather) was away at war, stationed in Silesia as the senior NCO of a POW camp. And one night, the British Lancaster bombers arrived, and her city, Reutlingen, was set alight. Screaming in terror in her basement with my Oma and sister, my mother finally lost it. She climbed the stairs, shaking from the bomb blasts and ignoring her mother’s cries to stop her. My mother ran out of the now-damaged, yet amazingly not in flames, home, and bolted into the street, slipping on the wet cobblestones from the ice that had now melted after a recent snowfall. Looking down the street, she saw her neighborhood as a “wall of fire.”
At that point, my mother, believing she was losing her mind, began laughing hysterically.
In the middle of February 1945, over 1,000 American and British bombers dropped thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on Dresden, Germany, a city packed with refugees fleeing the Soviet assault through Poland. The raid, dubbed “Operation Thunderclap,” destroyed old Dresden, and killed at least 25,000 people. However, the number is probably much higher than that, with the German government trying to downplay the disaster for political reasons. Bodies were piled up in the city square to be cremated, so as to prevent an outbreak of disease.
On 10 March 1945, over 300 heavy American B-29 bombers unloaded incendiaries on much of Tokyo. This raid, part of “Operation Meetinghouse,” killed well over 100,000 people. When the incendiary bombs impacted, they were designed to scatter small bomblets that exploded as flaming orbs, setting alight anything nearby. People, attempting to flee the bombing, died of asphyxiation in bomb shelters, or were literally swept off the ground by the resulting windstorm and hurled into the flames. Many people found refugee in the canals within the city, but one group, sheltering in a school swimming pool, boiled to death. At times, the heat exceeded 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and people’s clothes burst into flames (most Japanese wore rayon, which has a flashpoint around 570 degrees Fahrenheit). It drove people to madness.
Small wonder why my mother went berserk on that February night.
Just a few weeks later, on the night of 23 February 1945, my mother, looking northwest, watched flames leaping into the air above the trees as Pforzheim burned under another British raid. Pforzheim was 35 miles away.[1]
The firebombing raid on Tokyo was premeditated for some time. Indeed, Redstone Arsenal in Alabama (where I was once the post historian) tested many of these incendiary bombs on a mock village dubbed “Little Tokyo.” And both Tokyo and Dresden were not the only cities firebombed during World War II. Hamburg, Germany was firebombed in 1943… in what was ironically called “Operation Gomorrah”… and over 37,000 died.
And all of this history brings me to today, and the featured photos at the top of this article. When I saw the photo on the left, of Los Angeles in flames, my first mental image was Dresden (pictured on the right) and Tokyo. But unlike the latter, Los Angeles is being burned out as a consequence of the stupidity and cupidity of the very government that was supposed to protect the people living there.
It was if the United States and Britain unleashed their own bombers on New York City and London during World War II. Indeed, Los Angeles was firebombed… not by the evil “Putler” of Russia or Xi of China, or even by the dastardly Kim of North Korea.
Essentially, Los Angeles was firebombed by its own government.
I accuse….
Russ Rodgers has several books published on Amazon.
If you enjoyed this article, then please REPOST or SHARE with others; encourage them to follow AFNN. If you’d like to become a citizen contributor for AFNN, contact us at managingeditor@afnn.us Help keep us ad-free by donating here.
Substack: American Free News Network Substack
Truth Social: @AFNN_USA
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/afnnusa
Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/2_-GAzcXmIRjODNh
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AfnnUsa
GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/AFNN_USA
CloutHub: @AFNN_USA
[1] In a strange twist of fate, I met a bombardier of a Lancaster who flew that mission. He was a guest speaker at the high school I taught at, and I found it listed in his flight log that he brought along.