Talk:Bombing of Foggia

Article

I think that it's important to keep this article alive because of the 20,298 civil casualties, which make Foggia one of the most destroyed cities of World War II, with one third of its population being killed. A recent article by german historians says that Dresda, the most bombed german city of the WWII, had around 19,000 casualties: less than Foggia. Is one of the mayor objectives in southern Italy for Operation Husky not worthy of being taken into consideration? Is this tragedy of over twenty thousand casualties not worthy of being written on an encyclopedia? Your call. -- by the creator of this page.

Oppose deletion.I don't have a problem with keeping the article. However, in its current form it is written in an emotive non-encyclopaedic style with no citations to support the facts as stated. In particular, the article seems to use "casualties" and "deaths" in an interchangable sense when casualties normally refer to dead and injured. The original author of this article is clearly not of native English tongue but should not be penalised for that. A non-Anglo-Saxon input to WWII articles should be encouraged to provide balance. In this context, the Air Raid on Bari is arguably no more notable but receives substantial coverage possibly because the casualties were Allied?
While I would be happy to copy edit the article into a more encyclopaedic style, I am not prepared to do this until the facts are supported by citations. I have no appropriate reference sources in my library, so this must be done by someone else. Stephen Kirrage ^{talk - contribs} 10:31, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your very educated reply. I will search for citations and photos as soon as possible. The main problem is that most of them are from italian articles and books — all verified in the italian wiki version of this page — but I think that history can't be changed according to different languages. As you justly said it's a good thing to have contributes from people of different countries as it helps in building a more complete and better balanced wiki. Best regards. -- by the creator of this page.

These casualty figures for Foggia appear to be total killed and wounded, not fatal casualties only. London was bombed more often than any other European city and about 20,000 Londoners were killed by bombing and missile attacks during the entire war. The worst raid of the war for Turin was on the night of 12-13 July 1943, when 792 were killed and 914 injured in an attack by 295 Lancasters. Figures for individual raids on Milan are not available, but 1,174 Milanese were killed in air raids during 1943 and it is thought that most of these deaths occurred on the night of 12-13 August, in an attack by 321 Lancasters and 183 Halifaxes. So the figures for Foggia given here are too high to be fatal casualties only, especially considering the relatively small US bomber forces that seem to have been involved and the fact that, even at long range, RAF Lancasters delivered heavier loads than the US bombers. Khamba Tendal (talk) 14:20, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

The figures for the number of deaths, to put it bluntly, is nonsense. The following quotation is my rough translation of the article in the Italian Wikipedia. I suggest tidying it up and importing it to this article. 'From the end of May to mid-September 1943, Foggia and the adjacent areas suffered fourteen air raids: of these, two were minor actions (31 August and 10-11 September) and one in particular (25 August) was the worst suffered by the town. However, there are no precise figures on casualties among the civilian population, which had been caught up in military operations. In the collective memory and, consequently, in some official sources, the number of 20 000 dead has been imposed: that is to say, a third of the inhabitants at that time. This is an estimate not supported by archival sources and certainly exaggerated, given the relative distance between the built-up areas and the airstrips, the primary objectives (even more than the railway station) of the repeated Allied attacks. The only certainty is that the dead were numerous – “a few thousand”. 'In 1954, according to estimates made by the municipality, the summary estimate of about 20 000 dead was confirmed on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of the Ossuary Chapel that was to house the remains of the victims; the project to proceed with an exact count of the bodies present in the mass graves was never completed, partly due to the fact that the work on the Chapel lasted for 13 years]. On the other hand, according to Istat (an official Italian statistical body), in the province of Foggia there were 607 deaths due to war causes and of these only 249 until 8 September.'