Despite bombing key production areas of Britain during the blitz, with London, Manchester, Coventry, Birmingham and even East Lancashire cowering under a hail of German bombs, Hitler abstained from bombing Blackpool because he wanted to preserve it.
Adolf Hitler may have blitzed much of Britain's heritage but Blackpool was spared because he wanted it as a personal playground after the war, new documents suggest.
Many hundreds of soldiers and airmen were billeted to Blackpool which was the biggest RAF recruiting centre over 20,000 American airmen were placed at RAF Warton airfield. With many re-located civil servants and evacuees, it is not surprising that entertainment was much in demand.
Cities including Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheffield, and Southampton were bombed between September 1940 and May 1941. London was bombed over 57 consecutive nights.
While London was bombed more heavily and more often than anywhere else in Britain, the Blitz was an attack on the whole country. Very few areas were left untouched by air raids.
Dresden from the Rathaus (city hall) in 1945, showing destruction. Post-war discussions of whether the attacks were justified, and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in the bombing, have led to the event becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war.
The most heavily bombed cities outside London were Liverpool and Birmingham. Other targets included Sheffield, Manchester, Coventry, and Southampton. The attack on Coventry was particularly destructive.
It happened over a period of 8 months between September 1940 and May 1941. Scotland was bombed over 500 times and 2500 people were killed. Why Was Scotland Bombed? The German air force, called the Luftwaffe, dropped bombs to damage and destroy industrial areas.
The Luftwaffe dropped five high explosive bombs over Perth on June 26 1940 with a further five bombs dropped in fields near Muirdrum the following day. On August 2, the enemy returned to Tayside when 23 high explosive bombs were dropped on the grounds of Linlathen House on the outskirts of Dundee.
Blackpool's major attractions and landmarks include Blackpool Tower, Blackpool Illuminations, Pleasure Beach, Blackpool Zoo, Sandcastle Water Park, the Winter Gardens and Blackpool Tramway (the UK's only surviving first-generation tramway).
Blackpool is a seaside resort town located on England's northwest coast. Known for the Blackpool Tower, Pleasure Beach, illuminations and ballroom dancing, Blackpool is a popular seaside resort. Blackpool is now considered to be a great place of entertainment, but that wasn't always the case.
'Black Poole' eventually evolved into 'Blackpool'. The stream drained Marton Mere and Marton Moss into the sea and close to what we now know as 'Manchester Square'. In the 15th century, the settlement in the area was known as 'Pul'. A map from 1532 calls the area 'the pole howsys alias the north howsys'.
In all, there were 64 air raids on Darwin. Caldwell with his Spitfire on Morotai in December 1944. Broome bombed next. Western Australian town of Broome suffered Australia's second-worst air raid.
The Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan) were some of the most systematic perpetrators of war crimes in modern history.
They were aware that Adolf Hitler had ordered the German military to completely destroy the city in the event of an Allied attack. Paris was considered to have too great a value, culturally and historically, to risk its destruction.
Australian troops were mainly engaged in land battles in New Guinea, the defeat of the Japanese at Wau, and clearing Japanese soldiers from the Huon peninsula. This was Australia's largest and most complex offensive of the war and was not completed until April 1944.
One million Australians, both men and women, served in the Second World War – 500,000 overseas. They fought in campaigns against Germany and Italy in Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, as well as against Japan in south-east Asia and the Pacific.
A city shaped by war
Often called 'Australia's Pearl Harbour', the bombing of Darwin by aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy began on 19 February 1942, killing more than 230 people and destroying ships, buildings and infrastructure.
Despite its neutrality, Ireland experienced several bombing raids: 26 August 1940: Five German bombs were dropped on County Wexford in a daylight raid. One bomb hit the Shelbourne Co-operative Creamery in Campile killing three people. In 1943, the German government paid £9000 in compensation.
Legendary wartime stories such as the London blitz and the Battle of Britain, which was fought in the air principally over the Home Counties, suggest that Scotland played a subsidiary role in the war effort. This is totally untrue. The Scots were huge contributors to the fight against Hitler.
The bombing of British towns and cities began, concentrated on London but extending across much of the country. In June 1940, Cardiff became the first place in Wales to be attacked. The Welsh people were now on the frontline.
By the time the last US bombs fell in April 1973, a total of 2,093,100 tonnes of ordnance had rained down on this neutral country. To this day, Laos, a country of just 7 million people, retains the dubious accolade of being the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita.
During World War II, Buckingham Palace was the target of several German air raids, however it was never bombed. The Palace was not evacuated like many other royal residences, instead the Royal Family stayed in the Palace and showed their steadfastness during the war.
Operation Meetinghouse
On the night of 9–10 March 1945, 334 B-29s took off to raid with 279 of them dropping 1,665 tons of bombs on Tokyo. The bombs were mostly the 500-pound (230 kg) E-46 cluster bomb which released 38 napalm-carrying M-69 incendiary bomblets at an altitude of 2,000–2,500 ft (610–760 m).