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|title=Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943

|author=Keith Lowe

|date=February 2007

|isbn=978-0670915576

}}

As a German city, port and industrial centre, Hamburg was very heavily bombed many times by the RAF and USAAF over the course of World War II. During the main series of raids in July 1943, a firestorm was created that killed about thirty thousand people. In that dreadful week in July, probably forty-five thousand Hamburgers died, although we shall probably never know the full tally. The series of raids was codenamed Operation Gomorrah and its architect was the RAF's Air Chief Marshall, Arthur "Bomber" Harris. It was the biggest assault in aerial warfare that had ever been attempted. Over 9,000 tons of bombs were dropped, many of them incendiaries rather than high explosives, and with the weather conditions on the night of the firestorm, they created a furnace in which temperatures reached over 800 degrees centigrade. People were literally cooked inside air raid shelters and even the roads burst into flame.