From February 13 to the 15, the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) and the British Royal Air Force (RAF) sent 1,300 bombers in four raids that plummeted Dresden with more than 3,900 explosive incendiary bombs that killed between 18,000 and 250,000 people, depending on whom you believe.
Beginning in 1941, it had been the policy of the Allied air forces to bomb entire cities and towns. This practice, known as area bombing, was supposed to cause the German civilian morale to breakdown.
Dresden had been Spared from Attacks
Because Dresden, the capital of the state of Saxony, was a cultural center, filled with museums and celebrated buildings such as the historical Zwinger Museum and Palace as well as the Frauenkirche Cathedral, it was safe from air attack until December 1944.
But by early 1945, the Soviets were advancing upon the city. Even though they were part of the joint opposition to the Nazis, the Allied leaders wanted to caution the Soviets about violating agreements for post war Europe. The Soviets had gotten used to fighting the German army, which was by then nearly defeated. Washington and London intended to show them what an equivalent and perhaps greater military force could do.
Other possible reasons of why Dresden was bombed could have been simply that it was a German city and the Allies were at war with Germany; there were over 110 factories producing many military important articles and that it was an important transportation and communications center.
The main problem with the attack is that at the time the city was flooded with refugees trying to escape the Soviets, whose desire for vengeance and reported atrocities against Germans had scared the German population. As many as 600,000 refugees were there, doubling the population of Dresden.
Weapons and Weather Combined for Tragedy
Among the ammunition the heavy bombers, British Lancasters and American B-17s, used were large number of incendiary bombs which created a firestorm that consumed 15 square miles of the city center. People suffocated, got stuck to the melting asphalt in the streets or simply burned like cinders. Even though the tonnage of bombs dropped was not as high as in other cities, weather conditions and the old, wooden buildings of Dresden’s downtown contributed to the holocaust. Some estimates ensure that it got as hot as 3,600 F.
Right away, the Nazi war propaganda used the raid as a tool to accuse the Allies of atrocities. On their defense the British and the Americans pointed to the strategic importance of the city. None-the-less, even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, an earlier proponent of the bombing of German cities, revised his position, emphasizing the need to ascertain the real strategic value of the targets and whether any attack would help to end the war faster.
It is generally now understood that the number of dead was toward the low end of the estimates. However, many revisionist versions of history, including that of neo-Nazi groups, allege that the victims of the bombers' fighter escort strafing in the outskirts of the city are not included in the official versions and that those deaths bring the figures to the high end.
His experiences as a prisoner of war in Dresden during the attacks were the basis for Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 science-fiction, antiwar novel Slaughterhouse Five.
While it was part of East Germany, Dresden remained largely un-restored. But since the unification of Germany, many buildings, including the Zwinger Palace, the Saxony state opera house known as the Semperoper and the Frauenkirche Cathedral have been restored to their former grandeur and Dresden is once more the “Florence on the Elbe.”
Sources
U.S. Air Force Official Report on Dresden
RWC101
Ivan Castro - Ivan Castro, a former reporter for The Miami Herald, is a free lance writer specializing in History and Archeology.
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