Quote:
Originally Posted by tcolvin
An extrapolation from facts is surely infinitely more valuable than the expression of an opinion based on no facts and contrary to some known facts. Is that what you are denying?
Tony
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I'm not "denying" anything, I am
disputing an assumption. Specifically that extrapolation from the case of a particular city yields a valid result for the entire campaign any more that extrapolating from the Great War reliably predicted casualties in the Blitz.
You would have to show that the case of Wilhelmshaven was in some sense average or typical and that could be difficult. One might as well extrapolate from Pforzheim or Darmstadt to demonstrate that the campaign was utterly devastating and firestorms a regular occurrence but I suspect that an altogether more sophisticated approach is needed. For all I know, attacks on coastal targets could have been half as effective as those on inland targets (if X% of bombs fall within a notional circle, for a coastal target half that circle will be water). Did the local soil (Berlin is built on sand for instance) influence the number of UXBs or the propagation of shock waves from explosions? The potential number of variables in immense, I suspect.