In a doctoral thesis, Ikle suggested that the proponents of airpower had overestimated the relationship between the intensity of aerial bombing and the density of a city’s surviving population. “Ikle was impressed by the amount of urban hardship and overcrowding that people could endure. But there were limits. The tipping point seemed to be reached… Read More
In a doctoral thesis, Ikle suggested that the proponents of airpower had overestimated the relationship between the intensity of aerial bombing and the density of a city’s surviving population. “Ikle devised a simple formula to predict how overcrowded the houses of a bombed-out city might become. If P1 = population of a city before destruction,… Read More
In a doctoral thesis, Ikle suggested that the proponents of airpower had overestimated the relationship between the intensity of aerial bombing and the density of a city’s surviving population. “…the Royal Air Force strategy of targeting residential areas and ‘de-housing’ civilians proved disappointing. The supply of urban housing was much more elastic than expected, as… Read More
In a doctoral thesis, Ikle suggested that the proponents of airpower had overestimated the relationship between the intensity of aerial bombing and the density of a city’s surviving population. “Before the Second World War, British planners had assumed that for every metric ton of high-explosive bombs dropped on a city, about seventy-two people would be… Read More
“In 1949, [Fred Charles] Ikle left his studies in Chicago and travelled through bombed-out Germany. The war hadn’t touched his family directly, and he wanted to know how people coped with devastation on such a massive scale. One of the cities he visited, Hamburg, had suffered roughly the same number of casualties as Nagasaki [target… Read More
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