DRESDEN BOMBING 1945

[Stanley]

ALTMARKT

On Shrove Tuesday 1349, the Altmarkt of Dresden, the Old City Square, was filled with the smoke and flames of burning pyres, The Margrave of Meissen had ordered all the city's Jews to be burned, probably on a charge of spreading the plague. This veritable auto-da-fe is described in the Chronicum Parvum Dresdense.'

Six hundred years later, at 10 pm on the evening of another Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 1945, Dresden's Old City was illuminated by a phosphorescent Primary Flare dropped by a high-flying pathfinder plane of 83 Squadron RAF. The Altmarkt had been selected as the base-point of the Target Area of the most destructive bombing raid in Europe's history.

Despite the public stance, which affirmed that only military and industrial targets were selected, both the RAF and the USAF had followed the German Luftwaffe into a strategy of indiscriminate 'area bombing', In a bitter controversy over the priorities of the Allied Bombing Offensive, the advocates of area bombing, led by Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris, had won out. The technique was to send massed fleets of heavy bombers repeatedly against one city, and to wreak a crescendo effect of devastation. As Harris was to boast: 'We shall take out one German city after another, like pulling teeth.' The first 1,000-bomber Raid was launched against Cologne on 31 May 1942. But the desired effect was not fully achieved until the night raid on Hamburg on 27/28 July 1943, when the resultant firestorm killed over 40,000 people.

Dresden, the capital of Saxony, had reached 1945 virtually intact. The medieval Altstadt was ringed by elegant squares and boulevards, lined with Renaissance and Baroque monuments. The Royal Palace, the Georgenschloss, dated from 1535. The Catholic Hofkirche (1751) commemorated the Saxon Elector's conversion to Catholicism. The Protestant Frauenkirche (1742) had been built to deplore it.

Dresden was now selected for a Main Force Raid in response to Soviet requests for Allied air support. The city was the main reception centre for hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the Soviet advance, and for their relief teams, mainly young women.

Ten minutes after the Primary Flare was dropped, the first wave of 529 Lancasters began to arrive from the south-west on a flightpath of 68 degrees. Undeterred by flak or fighters, they dropped a lethal cocktail of high explosive blockbusters and incendiary clusters. Within 45 minutes, the firestorm was raging. Dresden's ancient heart, and everyone in it, was consumed.

In the morning, as relief columns approached on the ground, a second wave of 450 Flying Fortresses of the 1st Air Division of the US Strategic Air Force arrived. Fighter escorts strafed anything that moved.



Huge discrepancies divide estimates of the damage. The British Bombing Survey reported 1,681 acres totally destroyed. The post-war Dresden Planning Report counted 3,140 acres 75% destroyed. The local Abteilung Tote or 'Death Bureau' reported 39,773 identified dead by May 1945. This figure did not account for missing or unregistered persons, unrecorded burials, or the contents of numerous mass graves. It must be reckoned an absolute minimum. The chief of the Bureau later ventured an estimated total of 135,000 deaths. A British historian has suggested a range of 120-150,000. No one knows how many uncounted corpses were disposed of behind the SS cordons, as an endless stream of carts fed the pyres blazing once again on the Altmarkt.

The strategic impact of the raid appears to have been slight. Trains were running through Dresden within two days. Vital war factories, such as the electronics plant at Dresden- Neusiedlitz, were unscathed. The Red Army did not arrive until 18 May.

An information battle ensued. An Associated Press report, later disowned, announced 'Allied air-chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror-bombings of German population centres.' A Nazi communiqué agreed: 'SHAEF war criminals have cold-bloodedly ordered the extermination of the innocent German public.' In the House of Commons, on 6 March 1945, Richard Stokes MP asked 'Was terror-bombing now part of official government policy?' The official reply was: 'We are not wasting time or bombers on purely terror tactics’.

At 10.10 pm on 13 February 1946, church bells tolled in remembrance throughout the Soviet Zone of Germany. Of all Dresden's churches, only the solitary shell of the Frauenkirche, with its shattered cupola, was still standing. On that same day, ex-Air Marshal Harris boarded a ship at Southampton in a bowler hat, bound for a civilian career abroad. Though he received a belated knighthood in 1953, he was not honoured like his peers until a monument was unveiled in London's Strand on 31 May 1992. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the raid on Cologne. The Oberburgermeister of Cologne lodged a public protest: 'In my view, it makes no sense to commemorate war heroes like Arthur Harris', he wrote, ‘although he fought on the right side and for the right cause.'

Anticipating Dresden's own anniversary in 1995, Germany's President Herzog reflected further. The bombing of Dresden, he said, 'was an example ... of the brutalisation of man in war ... History written by individual nations in which each one selects what he has done well cannot be allowed to continue. If we really want to unify this Europe, then history must be unified as well.'

[Extract from ‘EUROPE’ by Norman Davies. Published by Pimlico, 1997. Pages 414/415]
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Extract from RAF official diary

13/14 February 1945

Operation Thunderclap

The Air Ministry, had, for several months, been considering a series of particularly, heavy area raids on German cities with a view to causing such confusion and consternation that the hard-stretched German war machine and civil. administration would break down and the war would end. The general name given to this plan was Operation Thunderclap, but it had been decided not to implement it until the military situation in Germany was critical. That moment appeared to be at hand. Russian forces had made a rapid advance across Poland in the second half of January and crossed the eastern frontier of Germany. The Germans were thus fighting hard inside their own territory on two fronts, with the situation in the East being particularly critical. It was considered that Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz - all just behind the German lines on the Eastern Front now - would be suitable targets. They were all vital communications and supply centres for the Eastern Front and were already packed with German refugees and wounded from the areas recently captured by the Russians. As well as the morale aspect of the attacks. there was the intention of preventing the Germans from moving reinforcements from the West to face the successful Russian advance. The Air Ministry issued a directive to Bomber Command, at the end of January. The Official History. describes how Winston Churchill took a direct hand in the final planning of Operation Thunderclap - although Churchill tried to distance himself from the Dresden raid afterwards. On 4 February, at the Yalta Conference, the Russians asked for attacks of this kind to take place, but their involvement in the process only came after the plans had been issued. So, Bomber Command was specifically requested by the Air Ministry, with Churchill's encouragement to carry out heavy raids on Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig. The Americans were also asked to help and agreed to do so. The campaign should have begun with an American raid on Dresden on 13 February but bad weather over Europe prevented any American operations. It thus fell to Bomber Command to carry out the first raid.

Dresden: 796 Lancasters and 9 Mosquitoes were dispatched in two separate raids and dropped 1,478 tons of high explosive and 1, 182 tons of incendiary bombs. The first attack was carried out entirely by No 5 Group, using their own low-level marking methods. A band of cloud still remained in the area and this raid, in which 244 Lancasters dropped more than 800 tons of
bombs, was only moderately successful, The second raid, 3 hours later, was an all-Lancaster attack by aircraft of Nos 1, 3, 6 and 8 Groups, with No 8 Group providing standard Pathfinder marking. The weather was now clear and 529 Lancasters dropped more than 1,800 tons of bombs with great accuracy. Much has been written about the fearful effects of this raid. Suffice it to say here that a firestorm, similar to the one experienced in Hamburg on July 1. 1943,
was created and large areas of the city were burnt out. No one has ever been able to discover how many people died but it is accepted that the number was greater than the 40,000 who died in the Hamburg firestorm and the Dresden figure may have exceeded 5 0,000. Bomber Command casualties were 6 Lancasters lost, with 2 more crashed in France and 1 in England.

311 American B- 17s dropped 771 tons of bombs on Dresden the next day, with the railway yards as their aiming point. Part of the American Mustang-fighter escort was ordered to strafe traffic on the roads around Dresden to increase the chaos. The Americans bombed Dresden again on the 15th and on 2 March but it is generally accepted that it was the RAF night raid which caused the most serious damage.


SCG/13 February 2005

[Stanley]

We are all busy criticising Israel for its policies in Gaza. We would do well to look at some of our actions when engaged in what we saw as a struggle for survival.