WW2 - Week 264 & le Havre

Hi guys. I usual, week 264 is a pretty well made episode : keep on the good work.

But if I may, you missed a not well-known episode this week. The German army did not surrender on its own from le Havre : the British destroyed nearly all the city (estimation range around 82% of the city), and almost on civilian areas only - the German garrisons were not really targeted. This happened after the Wehrmacht asked the evacuation of the civilian population after refusing to surrender. The complete obliteration of the city (most destroyed in all France) caused it to be entirely rebuild later – which accidently made it recently added on UNESCO’s Word Heritage for the architecture used. This is why it was one of the very few places where the “liberators” weren’t acclaimed like in other places (quite the contrary actually). The scars among the population can be seen up to this day, most of the population not willing to talk about what happened those days.

On the strategic level, this is pretty interesting too since le Havre was dimmed too fortified to be taken “normally”, but held the one deep port that was so desperately needed by the allies to push on. Taken it could have change their timetable – including Market-Garden – and even if they would not be home for Christmas, the allies on the western front would probably had meet their eastern counterparts farther east.

And on a very accessory note, if those bombs were more reliable, my grand-father would have passed when just a child, so I’m quite glad this one bomb did not go off. :slight_smile:

I guess if he’d be able to gather reliable documentation this could be an interesting topic for Spartacus for a few minutes in War against humanity. Although in French and pretty incomplete, here is a link on Wikipedia if you’d wish to explore this further.

Bombardement du Havre — Wikipédia (wikipedia.org)

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