1 Harris, Bomber Offensive, for this and what follows.
2 Ibid.
3 Cited in Abigail Chantler, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Aesthetics (Routledge, 2006).
4 An interesting essay by Patrick Wright – ‘Dropping Their Eggs’ in the London Review of Books, 23 August 2001 – explores how the RAF’s Hugh Trenchard deployed that startling phrase to describe how bombs would fall on city centres before the end of the First World War.
5 Malcolm Smith, ‘“A Matter of Faith”: British Strategic Air Doctrine Before 1939’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 15 (July 1980).
6 The anxieties surrounding the possibilities of city bombing are explored in Overy, The Bombing War.
7 As discussed in Philip K. Lawrence, Modernity and War: The Creed of Absolute Violence (Macmillan, 1997).
8 As cited in Hew Strachan, ‘Strategic Bombing and the Question of Civilian Casualties up to 1945’, in Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden 1945 (Pimlico, 2006).
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Stewart Holbrook, ‘The Peshtigo Fire’, American Scholar, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1944), is an extremely atmospheric retelling of the catastrophe. See also ‘Nature’s Nuclear Explosion’, in Denise Gess and William Lutz, Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History (Holt, 2003).
13 Philip G. Terrie, ‘“The Necessities of the Case”: The Response to the Great Thumb Fire of 1881’, Michigan Historical Review, vol. 31, no. 2 (Fall 2005).
14 Ibid.
15 A fascinating piece on the earthquake can be found in The Smithsonian magazine at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-japan-earthquake-of-1923.
16 J. Charles Schencking, ‘The Great Kanto Earthquake and the Culture of Catastrophe and Reconstruction in 1920s Japan’, Journal of Japanese Studies, Summer 2008.
17 The Smithsonian, as note 15.
18 Ibid.
19 Churchill wrote this in a speculative piece about future weaponry in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1924.
20 Strachan, ‘Strategic Bombing’.
21 Ibid.
22 Harris, Bomber Offensive.
23 Remarkably, a recording of Mann’s broadcast can be found at www.dialoginternational.com/dialog_international/2012/12/listen-germany-thomas-mann-on-the-firebombing-of-lubeck.html.