Impact of The Attack
Forty B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 8th American Air Force dropped about 152 tons of bombs on many populated areas of Prague. The carpet-bombing hit Vyšehrad, Zlíchov, Karlovo náměstí, Nusle, Vinohrady, Vršovice and Pankrác. The bombing resulted in the deaths of 701 people and the wounding of 1,184. About a hundred houses and historical sites were totally destroyed and another two hundred were heavily damaged. All the casualties were civilians, and not one of the city's factories, which might have been of use to the Wehrmacht, was damaged.
Many homes and national sites were destroyed. Some of Prague's most famous modern buildings, like the Dancing House or the Emauzy church, were constructed in locations where the bombs destroyed existing buildings.
The pilot of the lead bomber was Harold Van Opdorp, a Czech citizen "born and bred in the city" of Prague. Two members of his family were among those killed as a result of a direct attack.
Read more about this topic: 1945 Bombing Of Prague
Famous quotes containing the words impact of the, impact of, impact and/or attack:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)
“If the federal government had been around when the Creator was putting His hand to this state, Indiana wouldn’t be here. It’d still be waiting for an environmental impact statement.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)