The Allied firebomb raid on the German city of Dresden in 1945 was one of the most devastating events of the Second World War.
By the beginning of 1945, it seemed as if the war in Europe was coming to an end. The Soviets were advancing rapidly towards Germany from the east, and the Allied forces who had landed at Normandy were approaching from the west.
British and American air forces, meanwhile, were systematically destroying German cities with massive bombing raids. The Allied bombing campaign had begun years earlier, when it had been the only effective way for Germany to be attacked. It provoked a lot of debate between the Allies: the Americans wanted to do daylight “precision bombing” against pinpoint industrial and military targets, while the British wanted to do night-time “area-bombing” which would destroy large sections of German cities. Officially, neither side wanted to intentionally target civilian areas, but harsh reality soon clouded that policy. The British knew that their night raids could not be accurate enough to hit specific ground targets, and came to accept that all of their raids would kill a lot of civilians in the surrounding areas. They justified this first by asserting retaliation for the Nazi Blitz on London’s civilians, and then by declaring that German civilians were a legitimate military target since they were running the war factories that were keeping the Nazis in the field. The Americans, meanwhile, found that their much-vaunted Norden bombsight was nowhere near as precise as they declared it to be, and their bombing strikes were not, in the end, any more accurate than the British had been (photography showed that almost half of all of the American bombs missed their target by more than five miles). The Americans were, in effect if not in stated intent, simply carpet-bombing cities, and eventually they also accepted the argument that German civilians and factory workers were legitimate targets. For several years, then, German cities had been subjected to round-the-clock bombing, with the US Army Air Corps sending B-17s during the day and the RAF sending Lancasters at night.
For the most part, though, the cities in eastern Germany were being spared. This was partly because most of German industry was located in the western areas near the Ruhr, and partly because the eastern cities were further away—at least four hours one-way–which exposed the bombers to greater danger from Luftwaffe fighters.
Therefore, by 1945 cities in the east like Dresden and Leipzig had only been subject to sporadic air attack. There were only small-scale raids on Dresden in October 1944 and in January 1945, both of which had been diverted from other more important targets due to bad weather, and had killed about 600 people. As a result, some officials in Dresden had convinced themselves that their city, with its large number of historic medieval buildings and cathedrals, would be spared from Allied bombers. The German military pulled out nearly all of the city’s anti-aircraft guns and night fighters and re-assigned them to other areas that were considered to be more important. Thus, Dresden had few air defenses, and virtually no civil-defense preparations for air raids such as bomb shelters or firebreaks.
But in January 1945, with most of the Ruhr industrial targets already leveled and with the Luftwaffe fighter force largely destroyed, cities in eastern Germany became more practical targets, and Winston Churchill proposed a large-scale air raid on Dresden as a way to help Stalin’s advance. At this time, Dresden was the seventh-largest city in Germany and the biggest one that was still intact. The city had around 100 different war factories, and though none of these were very significant, Churchill hoped that an air raid would destroy the local railroad network and produce a mass of refugees which would clog the remaining roads and railways and disrupt the flow of Nazi supplies and troops to the eastern front, thereby lessening the pressure on the approaching Soviets. The raid would be a joint action by British and American air forces and would send four waves of attackers over two days, involving around 1300 bombers. Stalin was told of the impending raid on February 4, at the three-power conference in Yalta.
The first wave of bombers, made up of American B-17s, was supposed to have struck on the afternoon of February 13, but bad weather prevented them from taking off, and the planned raids did not begin until that evening with 250 British Lancaster night-bombers, who reached the city at around 10pm. The second wave of 530 Lancasters arrived at around 1am. In total, they dropped 1800 tons of bombs, roughly half of which were incendiaries.
The effects were tremendous. The extensive fires slowly converged into one immense flaming mass engulfing the center of the city, which produced an unusual phenomenon called a “firestorm”. The rising hot air created a partial vacuum which then sucked in the surrounding air, feeding the flames in a blast-furnace effect and producing extraordinarily high temperatures that melted the asphalt streets and incinerated the victims. It also sucked all the air out of the underground bomb shelters, suffocating the occupants.
At daylight on February 14th, the third and fourth waves, consisting of American B-17s, arrived. Once again the weather was bad, and in the clouds some of the B-17s missed their target and mistakenly bombed several nearby cities including Prague and Pilsen. The rest hit Dresden again, aiming through the clouds and smoke by radar.
The final attacks on the city, on February 15, were unplanned, and resulted when 200 American B-17s who had been assigned to hit Leipzig were instead diverted to Dresden because of continuing cloudy weather. They dropped their bombs onto the smoldering ruins.
Allied raids on Berlin were each producing around 5,000 civilian deaths. Over the next few days in Dresden, however, local police and SS officials would count roughly 19,000 bodies and estimate that another 6,000 had been buried in the rubble. Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels shot out news releases declaring the attack to be a war crime upon a defenseless non-military cultural center that was packed with civilian refugees, and cited an exaggerated death toll of over 200,000. Over time this was increased to 500,000. These propaganda figures were repeated in western media after the war, but subsequent investigations by historians have all tended to converge on a figure of around 25,000 to 35,000 civilian deaths.
The horrific destruction resulting from the firestorm, however, shocked even the Allies. Weeks after the raid, Churchill wrote in a memo to the RAF: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” Some in the American press began to refer to the raid as a “terror bombing”, and several post-war writers (most famously Kurt Vonnegut, who had been captured by the Nazis during the Battle of the Bulge and was being held as a POW in Dresden at the time of the raid) have concluded that the fire-bombing was a “war crime”—an unnecessary attack on an unimportant target at a time when Germany was already defeated and near surrender.
Even today, the Dresden raid has been at the center of the continuing debate around the morality, necessity, and effectiveness of the entire Allied bombing campaign.
Hidden History 