THIS DAY IN HISTORY
DRESDEN DEVASTATED:
February 13, 1945
On the evening of February 13, 1945, the most controversial episode in the
Allied air war against Germany begins as hundreds of British bombers loaded with
incendiaries and high-explosive bombs descend on Dresden, a historic city
located in eastern Germany. Dresden was neither a war production city nor a
major industrial center, and before the massive air raid of February 1945 it had
not suffered a major Allied attack. By February 15, the city was a smoldering
ruin and an unknown number of civilians--somewhere between 35,000 and
135,000--were dead.By February 1945, the jaws of the Allied vise were closing
shut on Nazi Germany. In the west, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's desperate
counteroffensive against the Allies in Belgium's Ardennes forest had ended in
total failure. In the east, the Red Army had captured East Prussia and reached
the Oder River--less than 50 miles from Berlin. The once-proud Luftwaffe was a
skeleton of an air fleet, and the Allies ruled the skies over Europe, dropping
thousands of tons of bombs on Germany every day.From February 4 to February 11,
the "Big Three" Allied leaders--U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin--met at Yalta
in the USSR and compromised on their visions of the postwar world. Other than
deciding on what German territory would be conquered by which power, little time
was given to military considerations in the war against the Third Reich.
Churchill and Roosevelt, however, did promise Stalin to continue their bombing
campaign against eastern Germany in preparation for the advancing Soviet
forces.An important aspect of the Allied air war against Germany involved what
is known as "area" or "saturation" bombing. In area bombing, all enemy
industry--not just war munitions--is targeted, and civilian portions of cities
are obliterated along with troop areas. Before the advent of the atomic bomb,
cities were most effectively destroyed through the use of incendiary bombs that
caused unnaturally fierce fires in the enemy cities. Such attacks, Allied
command reasoned, would ravage the German economy, break the morale of the
German people, and force an early surrender.Germany was the first to employ area
bombing tactics during its assault on Poland in September 1939. In 1940, during
the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe failed to bring Britain to it knees by
targeting London and other heavily populated areas with area bombing attacks.
Stung but unbowed, the RAF avenged the bombings of London and Coventry in 1942
when it launched the first of many saturation bombing attacks against Germany.
In 1944, Adolf Hitler named the world's first long-range offensive missile V-1,
after Vergeltung, the German word for "vengeance" and an _expression of his
desire to repay Britain for its devastating bombardment of Germany.The Allies
never overtly admitted that they were engaged in saturation bombing; specific
military targets were announced in relation to every attack. It was but a
veneer, however, and few mourned the destruction of German cities that built the
weapons and bred the soldiers that by 1945 had killed more than 10 million
Allied soldiers and even more civilians. The firebombing of Dresden would prove
the exception to this rule.Before World War II, Dresden was called "the Florence
of the Elbe" and was regarded as one the world's most beautiful cities for its
architecture and museums. Although no German city remained isolated from
Hitler's war machine, Dresden's contribution to the war effort was minimal
compared with other German cities. In February 1945, refugees fleeing the
Russian advance in the east took refuge there. As Hitler had thrown much of his
surviving forces into a defense of Berlin in the north, city defenses were
minimal, and the Russians would have had little trouble capturing Dresden. It
seemed an unlikely target for a major Allied air attack.On the night of February
13, hundreds of RAF bombers descended on Dresden in two waves, dropping their
lethal cargo indiscriminately over the city. The city's air defenses were so
weak that only six Lancaster bombers were shot down. By the morning, some 800
British bombers had dropped 1,478 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,182 tons of
incendiaries on Dresden, creating a great firestorm that destroyed most of the
city and killed numerous civilians. Later that day, as survivors made their way
out of the smoldering city, over 300 U.S. bombers began bombing Dresden's
railways, bridges, and transportation facilities, killing thousands more. On
February 15, another 200 U.S. bombers continued their assault on the city's
infrastructure. All told, the bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped 954
tons of high-explosive bombs and 294 tons of incendiaries on Dresden. Later, the
Eighth Air Force would drop 2,800 more tons of bombs on Dresden in three other
attacks before the war's end.The Allies claimed that by bombing Dresden, they
were disrupting important lines of communication that would have hindered the
Soviet offensive. This may be true, but there is no disputing that the British
incendiary attack on the night of February 13-14 was conducted also, if not
primarily, for the purpose of terrorizing the German population and forcing an
early surrender. It should be noted that Germany, unlike Japan later in the
year, did not surrender until nearly the last possible moment--when its capital
had fallen and its Fýhrer was dead.Because there were an unknown number of
refugees in Dresden at the time of the Allied attack, it is impossible to know
exactly how many civilians perished. After the war, investigators from various
countries, and with varying political motives, calculated the number of
civilians killed to be as little as 8,000 to more than 200,000. Estimates today
range from 35,000 to 135,000. Looking at photographs of Dresden after the
attack, in which the few buildings still standing are completely gutted, it
seems improbable that only 35,000 of the million or so people in Dresden that
night were killed. Cellars and other shelters would have been meager protection
against a firestorm that blew poisonous air heated to hundreds of degrees
Fahrenheit across the city at hurricane-like speeds.At the end of the war,
Dresden was so badly damaged that the city was basically leveled. A handful of
historic buildings--the Zwinger Palace, the Dresden State Opera House, and
several fine churches--were carefully reconstructed out of the rubble, but the
rest of the city was rebuilt with plain modern buildings. American author Kurt
Vonnegut, who was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the Allied attack and
tackled the controversial event in his book Slaughterhouse-Five, said of postwar
Dresden, "It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has.
There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground."
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WORLD WAR II
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