Air defence versus Home defence

Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Oct 3, 2020
Member Type
Interested in Language
Native Language
Greek
Home Country
Greece
Current Location
Greece

GoesStation

No Longer With Us (RIP)
Joined
Dec 22, 2015
Member Type
Interested in Language
Native Language
American English
Home Country
United States
Current Location
United States
In the phrase "Home Defence Executive", "home" doesn't mean "house". It means "homeland".
 

Skrej

Key Member
Joined
May 11, 2015
Member Type
Native Language
English
Home Country
United States
Current Location
United States
Homes aren't particularly resilient. They can easily be destroyed just by blast shock-waves - just watch some videos of the explosion and aftermath of the Beirut fertilizer explosion back in August.

As for more solid concrete structure - old WW II bunker busters could penetrate up to 14 feet of reinforced concrete with perfect drop (although that was under optimal drop conditions. Modern ones will penetrate 2 meters of reinforced concrete easily without requiring such pristine drop conditions.

There there's this bad boy in the works - able to penetrate up to 200 feet underground. So you're not even safe in a cave...
 

PeterCW

Senior Member
Joined
Apr 1, 2020
Member Type
Interested in Language
Native Language
British English
Home Country
England
Current Location
England
Homes aren't particularly resilient. They can easily be destroyed just by blast shock-waves - just watch some videos of the explosion and aftermath of the Beirut fertilizer explosion back in August.

As for more solid concrete structure - old WW II bunker busters could penetrate up to 14 feet of reinforced concrete with perfect drop (although that was under optimal drop conditions. Modern ones will penetrate 2 meters of reinforced concrete easily without requiring such pristine drop conditions.

There there's this bad boy in the works - able to penetrate up to 200 feet underground. So you're not even safe in a cave...

The WW2 bombs weren't meant to penetrate concrete at all, they were supposed to penetrate the ground beside the bunker and destroy it from underneath. I recommend Paul Brickhill's book The Dam Busters, now out of print but available on Kindle.
 

Charlie Bernstein

VIP Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2009
Member Type
Other
Native Language
English
Home Country
United States
Current Location
United States
. . . It is fair to say that houses are very difficult to kill. They are resilient to all kinds of attacks, epecially bombing a house made out of concrete. It's outright suicide. . . .
A house is not a home.

And as you see in post #2, the writer wasn't talking about houses, anyway.

What did you mean by "raging home"?
 
Last edited:

Tdol

No Longer With Us (RIP)
Staff member
Joined
Nov 13, 2002
Native Language
British English
Home Country
UK
Current Location
Japan
Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the head of Bomber Command in World War II, said that the destruction of homes and the creation of waves of refugees was not a side-effect of the bombing of factories- it was baked into the DNA of the carpet bombing of cities. Coventry was subjected to a fierce bombing. Harris saw that the bombers had failed because they did not burn the city to the ground. He saw why - it was a technical issue to do with the size of bomber aircraft - and set about burning German cities to the ground. The destruction rained down on Hamburg and Tokyo goes against your theory. They generated a firestorm in Hamburg that raged half a kilometre into the sky, with technology from the 1940s. They can probably do worse today.
 

Charlie Bernstein

VIP Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2009
Member Type
Other
Native Language
English
Home Country
United States
Current Location
United States
. . . They generated a firestorm in Hamburg that raged half a kilometre into the sky, with technology from the 1940s. They can probably do worse today.
That has to be the understatement of the century.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top