Peshtigo fire 1871 (forgotten)

 
Peshtigo fire

Peshtigo, Wisconsin, US Territory, North America fire 1871

PeshtigoFireExtend.png
Extent of wildfire damage
Location    Peshtigo, Wisconsin
Coordinates    45.05°N 87.75°W
Coordinates:    45.05°N 87.75°W
Statistics
Cost    Unknown
Date(s)    October 8, 1871
Burned area    1,200,000 acres (490,000 ha)
Cause    Small fires whipped up by high winds in dry conditions
Deaths    1,500–2,500 (estimated)
Map
Peshtigo fire is located in Wisconsin
Peshtigo fire
Two pieces of lumber that survived the fire

The Peshtigo fire was a very large forest fire that took place on October 8, 1871, in northeastern Wisconsin, United States, including much of the southern half of the Door Peninsula and adjacent parts of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The largest community in the affected area was Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The fire burned approximately 1,200,000 acres (490,000 ha) and is the deadliest wildfire in recorded history,[1] with the number of deaths estimated between 1,500[1] and 2,500.[2]

Occurring on the same day as the more famous Great Chicago Fire, the Peshtigo fire has been largely forgotten, even though it killed far more people.[3][4] Several cities in Michigan, including Holland and Manistee (across Lake Michigan from Peshtigo) and Port Huron (at the southern end of Lake Huron), also had major fires on the same day.

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In any event, no external source of ignition was needed. There were already numerous small fires burning in the area from land-clearing operations (and other such sources) after a tinder-dry summer.[6][26] These fires alone generated so much smoke that the Green Island Light was kept lit continuously for weeks before the main fire started.[27] All that was needed to generate the firestorm, as well as other large fires in the Midwest, was a strong wind from the front, which had moved in that very evening.[26]

     ••••   •••   ••••

The combination of wind, topography and ignition sources that created the firestorm, primarily representing the conditions at the boundaries of human settlement and natural areas, is known as the "Peshtigo Paradigm".[29] The condition was closely studied by the American and British military during World War II to learn how to recreate firestorm conditions for bombing campaigns against cities in Germany and Japan. The severe bombing of Tokyo by incendiary devices resulted in death tolls comparable to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[29]

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source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peshtigo_fire
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7
Peshtigo
Fire in the Forest

Wp Peshtigo

Most people reading this will be familiar with the Great Chicago Fire that killed hundreds and destroyed 4 square miles of Chicago, Illinois. However, most people don’t know that on the very same day a far worse fire occurred, in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. The October 8, 1871, Peshtigo Fire in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, is the conflagration that caused the most deaths by fire in United States history. On the same day as the Peshtigo and Chicago fires, the cities of Holland and Manistee, Michigan, across Lake Michigan, also burned, and the same fate befell Port Huron at the southern end of Lake Huron. By the time it was over, 1,875 square miles of forest had been consumed and twelve communities were destroyed. Between 1,200 and 2,500 people are thought to have lost their lives.

The fire was so intense it jumped several miles over the waters of Green Bay, and burned parts of the Door Peninsula, as well as jumping the Peshtigo River itself to burn on both sides of the inlet town. Surviving witnesses reported that the firestorm generated a tornado that threw rail cars and houses into the air. Many of the survivors of the firestorm escaped the flames by immersing themselves in the Peshtigo River, wells, or other nearby bodies of water. Some drowned while others succumbed to hypothermia in the frigid river.

Jamie Frater

Jamie is the founder of Listverse. When he’s not doing research for new lists or collecting historical oddities, he can be found in the comments or on Facebook where he approves all friends requests!


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source:
        https://listverse.com/2010/12/28/10-unforgettable-stories-history-forgot/
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Bombing of Dresden in World War II


Dresden from the Rathaus (city hall) in 1945, showing destruction.

The bombing of Dresden was a British-American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, during World War II. In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air

Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.[1] The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed more than 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city centre.[2] An estimated 22,700[3] to 25,000[4] people were killed.[a] Three more USAAF air raids followed, two occurring on 2 March aimed at the city's railway marshalling yard and one smaller raid on 17 April aimed at industrial areas.

Immediate German propaganda claims following the attacks and postwar discussions[5] of whether the attacks were justified have led to the bombing becoming one of the moral causes célèbres of the war.[6] A 1953 United States Air Force report defended the operation as the justified bombing of a strategic target, which they noted was a major rail transport and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort.[7] Several researchers claim that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas outside the city centre.[8] Critics of the bombing have asserted that Dresden was a cultural landmark while downplaying its strategic significance, and claim that the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and not proportionate to the military gains.[9][10][11] Some have claimed that the raid constituted a war crime.[12] Some, mostly in the German far-right, refer to the bombing as a mass murder, calling it "Dresden's Holocaust of bombs".[13][14]

source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
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source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_disasters_by_death_toll
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News

Worst fire largely unknown
By Greg Tasker

October 10, 2003

THE BALTIMORE SUN

PESHTIGO, Wisconsin - Every school boy and girl knows the tale of how Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern in a Chicago barn, igniting one of the most famous fires in American history.

But few outside Wisconsin, it seems, are familiar with the story of another, more horrific fire that occurred on the same warm autumn night in October 1871.

While Chicago's business district burned, a firestorm raged in the northern Wisconsin woods, killing eight times as many people and destroying 2,400 square miles - about 1.5 million acres of woods, farms and villages, including the booming lumbering town of Peshtigo, just northwest of Green Bay. The area that burned was twice the size of Rhode Island.

"Everybody's heard about the Chicago fire, and that got all the publicity at the time," says Ruth Wiltzius, a volunteer at the Peshtigo Fire Museum whose great-grandfather perished while trying to escape. "Peshtigo was a backwards lumber town then - who had ever heard of it? Chicago was the big city. Which one was going to get more attention?"

More than 130 years later, Peshtigo (pronounced PESH-ti-go) remains the worst forest fire in the nation's history and one of its worst natural disasters.

The death toll - perhaps up to 2,500 people - was higher than either the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the 1889 Johnstown flood, two disasters far more familiar to most students of American history.

And although recent books, including Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People and the Deadliest Fire in American History, lure the curious to the Peshtigo Fire Museum, the episode remains a historical footnote.

"I think Peshtigo is cursed. The fire's not widely known and the town doesn't publicize it," says Bill Lutz, a co-author of Firestorm at Peshtigo. "Why is this story not known? You see endless stories about Johnstown. What happened at Peshtigo makes Johnstown look like a birdbath."

Lutz, an English professor at Rutgers University, says the magnitude of suffering and terror that began on the night of Oct. 8 might be too much for the public to embrace. In the inferno, temperatures reached as high as 1,800 degrees; survivors recounted watching family, friends and strangers burst into flames.

"Fires are normally very fascinating to people, but people seem resistant to Peshtigo. Maybe Peshtigo is on such a large scale that people can't comprehend it," says Lutz, who, with co-author Denise Gess, used diaries, newspaper accounts and weather reports to re-create the catastrophe in Firestorm at Peshtigo.

The same elements that fanned the Chicago fire created the Peshtigo firestorm. The winter and summer of 1871 had been unusually dry. Fires burned across the Upper Midwest as farmers cleared land for crops and grazing. Lumbermen burned brush and debris as they felled white and red pines, "one tree so big it could provide enough lumber to build one or one and one-half houses," Lutz says.

In northern Wisconsin, workers were clearing a path for a railroad line from Milwaukee to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Debris was left to burn by the wayside. Days before the fire, the smoke on Green Bay was so dense that fog horns blew steadily and ships had to navigate by compass during the day.

"Forest fires were very common then," Lutz says. "People had the attitude at the time that they could conquer nature. Forests were to be cut down, cleared and used. Fires were part of that process."

All the elements needed to create a disaster came together on Oct. 8. A cold front had moved in from the West, bringing ferocious winds that fanned small prairie fires across the region. These small fires combined into one huge blaze until a blowup occurred.

And then a tornado of fire burst from the forest upon Peshtigo, a community of wood-frame buildings and at least 1,700 residents on the Peshtigo River. The firestorm swept through town, tossing houses more than 100 feet in the air, throwing railroad cars around and uprooting trees. Fires burned everywhere. Smoke darkened the skies as far away as Ohio and Baltimore.

"For all intents and purposes, those people must have thought the world was on fire that night," says Peggy Harrand, a volunteer at the fire museum, which is housed in a church, the first building constructed after the blaze.

The stories of survivors and witnesses are grim, indeed.

"The fire turned sand into glass," Lutz says. "The air burned hotter than a crematorium and the fire traveled at 90 mph. I read an account of a Civil War veteran who had been through some of the worst battles of the war. He described the sound - the roar - during the fire as 100 times greater than any artillery bombardment.

"The fire melted a train. You couldn't run away from it. And like any fire or tornado, it did bizarre things."

He recounts the story a man who, after watching his wife burn, slit the throats of his three children and then himself. In the end, the fire skipped over the family.

A 21-year-old man fleeing the blaze realized he couldn't outrun it and stabbed himself several times in the chest with a penknife. The fire skipped him, and he lived; the penknife hadn't struck deep enough.

Another man hanged himself on the bucket chain of a well. Wiltzius's great-grandfather was killed when he got caught under a burning tree while trying to escape with his youngest daughter. He was five miles west of Peshtigo.

People who fled to the Peshtigo River for safety had to keep ducking into the water. The air was so hot it set hair on fire and singed exposed body parts. Many who went into the river with babies lost them. Terrorized residents also had to deal with debris, horses, cows and other animals struggling to survive in the river. And the water was ice cold.

"It's another paradox of the fire. The myth is the water was hot, too. But a fast-moving fire isn't going to heat water," Lutz says. "People who went into their wells for safety didn't boil to death. Well covers burned and collapsed onto them, killing them. "A lot of people heard the sounds and, thinking it was a tornado, went to their storm cellars. They were cooked in their cellars. They found bodies and body parts for years."

Firefighters know Peshtigo. The combination of wind, topography and fire that created the firestorm is known as the Peshtigo Paradigm. The elements that created it were studied and recreated by the American and British military during World War II for the fire bombings of German and Japanese cities.

"It's amazing," Lutz says. "I read a Japanese account of what the fire bombing was like in Tokyo. If you took out three or four words, you were describing Peshtigo."

The world might have forgotten, but Peshtigo hasn't.

Its small and unpolished museum displays artifacts that survived the fire. In the cemetery next door, a mass grave site contains the remains of 350 unidentified fire victims. The graves of other victims are scattered throughout the cemetery.

No one knows for sure how many died - population records were destroyed in the fire, and no one knew how many new immigrants lived there, attracted by the lumbering industry.

Every year on the fire's anniversary, a candlelight memorial service is held in front of the former church. Robert "Cubby" Couvillion, historian for the Peshtigo Historical Society, recounts some details of the fire. The bells toll, and then the museum closes for the season.

"I end by saying that today Peshtigo has beautiful wide shaded trees, well-kept lots and nice homes," Couvillion says.

"But beneath the town's streets are layers of ashes of the city and many of its people. Nobody now recalls the faces of those people. There are very few who even remember the names. But we need to remember what happened here and the people who died on the streets of Peshtigo 132 years ago."

Copyright © 2021, The Baltimore Sun, a Baltimore Sun Media Group publication


source:
        http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Farticles.baltimoresun.com%2F2003-10-10%2Fnews%2F0310100309_1_firestorm-chicago-fire-fire-museum
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The Bombing of Tokyo (東京大空襲, Tōkyōdaikūshū) was a series of firebombing air raids by the United States Army Air Forces during the Pacific campaigns of World War II. Operation Meetinghouse, which was conducted on the night of 9–10 March 1945, is the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1] Of central Tokyo 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) were destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.[1]

The US first mounted a seaborne, small-scale air raid on Tokyo (the "Doolittle Raid") in April 1942. Strategic bombing and urban area bombing began in 1944 after the long-range B-29 Superfortress bomber entered service, first deployed from China and thereafter the Mariana Islands. B-29 raids from those islands began on 17 November 1944, and lasted until 15 August 1945, the day of Japanese surrender.[2]

Over 50% of Tokyo's industry was spread out among residential and commercial neighborhoods; firebombing cut the whole city's output in half.[3] Some modern post-war analysts have called the raid a war crime due to the targeting of civilian infrastructure and the ensuing mass loss of civilian life.[4][5]

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Operation Meetinghouse

Main article: Bombing of Tokyo (10 March 1945)

A residential section Tokyo that was destroyed following Operation Meetinghouse, the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March 1945

On the night of 9–10 March 1945,[16] 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). The M-69s punched through thin roofing material or landed on the ground; in either case they ignited 3–5 seconds later, throwing out a jet of flaming napalm globs. A lesser number of M-47 incendiaries were also dropped: the M-47 was a 100-pound (45 kg) jelled-gasoline and white phosphorus bomb which ignited upon impact. In the first two hours of the raid, 226 of the attacking aircraft unloaded their bombs to overwhelm the city's fire defenses.[17] The first B-29s to arrive dropped bombs in a large X pattern centered in Tokyo's densely populated working class district near the docks in both Koto and Chūō city wards on the water; later aircraft simply aimed near this flaming X. The individual fires caused by the bombs joined to create a general conflagration, which would have been classified as a firestorm but for prevailing winds gusting at 17 to 28 mph (27 to 45 km/h).[18] Approximately 15.8 square miles (4,090 ha) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died.[19][20]  A grand total of 282 of the 339 B-29s launched for "Meetinghouse" made it to the target, 27 of which were lost due to being shot down by Japanese air defenses, mechanical failure, or being caught in updrafts caused by the fires.[21]

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source:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
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 Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017

p.24
Ivy Mike, a 10.4-megaton hydrogen bomb
Eniwetok atoll, vaporizing the island of Elugelab and creating, “a blinding white fireball three miles across”, as Richard Rhodes described it.
Ivy Mike was a test of the world's first thermonuclear weapon,


p.164
Boi Loi forest, which the Vietcong had been using as cover.

p.165
experiments in using forest fire as a weapon,
code-named
  Sherwood Forest
  Hot Tip I and II
  Pink Rose
“The country doesn't burn well”, deadpanned Craig Chandler, a Forest Service employee who worked on the ARPA project.
After three failed attempts, the forest fire as a weapon project was discarded.

  (The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )
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