Carpet bombing, also known as saturation bombing, is a large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. The phrase evokes the image of explosions completely covering an area, in the same way that a carpet covers a floor. Carpet bombing is usually achieved by dropping many unguided bombs.
The first carpet bombing from air in history was the Bombing of Barcelona. 1,300 people were killed in 3 days, March 16–18, 1938
On 14 May 1940 at 1:22 pm, in the Rotterdam Blitz, German bombers set the entire inner city on fire with incendiary bombs, killing 814 inhabitants
Wesel was 97% destroyed before it was finally taken by Allied troops in 1945
B-52F releasing its payload of bombs over Vietnam
In international humanitarian law and international criminal law, an indiscriminate attack is a military attack that fails to distinguish between legitimate military targets and protected persons. Indiscriminate attacks strike both legitimate military and protected objects alike, thus violating the principle of distinction between combatants and protected civilians. They differ from direct attacks against protected civilians and encompass cases in which the perpetrators are indifferent as to the nature of the target, cases in which the perpetrators use tactics or weapons that are inherently indiscriminate, and cases in which the attack is disproportionate, because it is likely to cause excessive protected civilian casualties and damages to protected objects.
The Bombing of Dresden (13–15 February 1945) killed an estimated 25,000 people and is often regarded as a case of indiscriminate air attack.
Demonstrators at the May 2008 Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster Munitions that produced the Convention on Cluster Munitions.
Big Bertha. Shells for the 42 cm guns were generally 1.5 m long and weighed between 400 and 1,160 kg.
The photo Bloody Saturday shows a burned and terrified baby following an aerial attack during the Battle of Shanghai.
