Between 1940 and 1945 sustained aerial bombing gutted the centres of dozens of European and Asian cities, from the 1940 raids on Rotterdam and Coventry to the firestorms over Hamburg and Dresden and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Warsaw was deliberately razed by German forces after the 1944 uprising, losing the great majority of its built fabric. The destruction levelled historic street patterns, housing stock and industry across whole districts in a matter of hours or days. The scale was unprecedented because cities themselves had become strategic targets in total war.
The flattened cores offered planners a rare 'tabula rasa' that legitimised wholesale modernist reconstruction rather than piecemeal repair. Reconstruction decisions of the late 1940s and 1950s reshaped the form, density and road networks of much of urban Europe and Japan for generations.