The Firebombing of Dresden
“You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in that firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” The Firebombing of Dresden Germany in WWII was the most deadly bombing raid ever. There is no military excuse that can account for the death of so many people, let alone the civilians that populated Dresden on the 13th of February. These people did not die in a necessary evil; they died as a result of military pride.
Over the course of two days in the winter of 1945, 35,000 to 135,000 people were killed during the bombing raid on Dresden Germany. On the 13th of February, 1945 at 10:14 a.m. local time, one thousand four hundred seventy eight tons of high explosives and one thousand one hundred eighty two tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on Dresden Germany by 796 Avro Lancaster and 9 De Havilland Mosquito RAF airplanes over the tiny window of two minutes. There was a 3 hour pause in between the first and second bombing waves that was designed to have firefighters, medics and civilians that were taking shelter underground come out and into the open. The second wave dropped more than 1800 tons of bombs from 529 Lancaster bombers with greater accuracy because of fairer weather. The final air raid came at 12:17 p.m. on the 14th 771 tons of munitions were dropped at the rough target of the railway yards in the center of the city by USAAF B-17 bombers. More than 700,000 bombs were dropped on an estimated 1,200,000 people; one bomb for every two people.
The result of 3,900 tons of bombs being dropped on an urban area of 15 square kilometers is the closest mankind has ever come to recreating hell, except that by playing Saint Peter, those responsible had judged the entire city to be worthy of flame and torture.
“We did not recognize our street any more. Fire, only fire wherever we looked. Our 4th floor did not exist anymore. The broken remains of our house were burning. On the streets there were burning vehicles and carts with refugees, people, horses, all of them screaming and shouting in fear of death. I saw hurt women, children, old people searching a way through ruins and flames.”
What the 3,900 tons of explosives and incendiaries achieved was the largest firestorm ever created. A firestorm occurs when a large amount of fires are concentrated in one area causing the air above the central point of the area to superheat and rise very rapidly. This causes a vortex where cool air is sucked into the bottom of the central point at extremely rapid speeds to fuel the fire, creating a sort of tornado at ground level, picking up trees, debris, and human bodies and sucking them into the heart of the flame.
The firestorm in Dresden was a complete success. The bombing waves were specifically designed by RAF bomber command to create an inferno like this, modeled after the earlier accidental firestorm in Hamburg. Explosive bombs were dropped first, tearing the buildings, homes and apartments into shreds, and exposing their medieval, Saxon wooden frames. Then Phosphorous and Napalm bombs were dropped, akin to pouring gasoline on a bonfire.
“There were a lot of fire bombs and canisters of phosphorous being dumped everywhere. The phosphorus was a thick liquid that burned upon exposure to air and as it penetrated cracks in buildings, it burned wherever it leaked through. The fumes from it were poisonous. When it came leaking down the basement steps somebody yelled to grab a beer (there were some stored where we were), soak a cloth, a piece of your clothing, and press it over your mouth and nose. The panic was horrible. Everybody pushed shoved and clawed to get a bottle.
I had pulled off my underwear and soaked the cloth with the beer and pressed it over my nose and mouth. The heat in that basement was so severe it only took a few minutes to make that cloth bone dry…
…I tried bracing myself against a wall. That took the skin off my hands – the wall was so hot.”
There have also been many accounts of p51 Mustang fighters strafing people escaping the city. Hell had been brought upon the refugees, the wounded, and the women and children of Dresden successfully.
Dresden at the time of the bombing was a hospital-city. Refugees and wounded soldiers from the eastern front, fleeing the horrors of the Red Army, and those from bombed out cities like Berlin and Gorlitz, had flocked to Dresden, which had no military worth (other than a rail hub, that was working again in less than a week) , and had not been heavily bombed previously. Dresden was unoccupied by any military unit and was completely unprotected, not containing a single flak cannon. It was listed as having a few factories in the surrounding area, that made cockpit parts for Messerschmitt fighters, but by 1945, the Luftwaffe were almost completely gone. Why then was it so thoroughly torched?
The decision to bomb Dresden was part of a larger bombing campaign called Operation Thunderclap, which was finalized in late January 1945, with the stated intention of disrupting German troop movements and communications to the eastern front. Its publicly understood objective was to allow Stalin’s Red Army to advance more quickly into Germany.
“Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also far the largest unbombed built-up the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium. The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive, what Bomber Command can do.”
Winston Churchill was an avid supporter of Operation Thunderclap before the bombing of Dresden, and it seems that there was as much political motivation behind the raid as military motivation. The Yalta Conference was coming up and was planned to happen a day after the Dresden bombing was completed. There, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin would carve out Europe’s future political boundaries. It seems as if Churchill wanted the meeting to take place in light of the recent bombing; as if it were a trophy he could brandish in front of Stalin. As it happened the Dresden bombing didn’t take place right before the Yalta Conference because of poor weather. Churchill gave it the green light anyway. After the bombing, he distanced himself from the entire Thunderclap campaign.
After the war the Soviet occupation of East Germany and America’s nuclear preoccupation allowed the Dresden Firebombing to slip under the radar. It was largely forgotten. It took The Destruction of Dresden published in 1963, by David Irving, to bring an account of what happened in Dresden. But the book that finally brought the public eye to Dresden was Slaughterhouse-Five, written by Kurt Vonnegut, a POW in WWII Germany who survived the Firebombing.
Slaughterhouse-Five was a piece of literature that focused mostly on the destructiveness of war and the prevalence of fate, and only touched on the actual events in Dresden. In it Vonnegut refers to the Firebombing of Dresden frequently and uses it as his chief example of how war is irrational and the most destructive thing humans do, but he does not go into detail on the events. Vonnegut seems to ask the reader to do their own research, and come up with their own conclusion on the matter. What he does do is highlight the reason why the Firebombing of Dresden is one of the worst war crimes committed in recent history. Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, makes this conclusion when he emerges from his shelter, “It was like the Moon”
“Nobody talked much as the expedition crossed the moon. There was nothing appropriate to say. One thing was clear: Absolutely everybody in the city was supposed to be dead, regardless of what they were, and that anybody that moved in it represented a flaw in the design. There were to be no moon men at all.”
The US and British militaries knew the civilian situation in Dresden. It had not been heavily bombed before. There were no flak cannons, no significant military presence of any sort. Saying that the factories (that were outside of the major bombing area) and rail yards (that were working again in a few days) were an excuse for covering 15 square kilometers in fire is like using a stick of dynamite to kill an ant hill. 135,000 civilians burned to death on February 13th and 14th 1945, because of military pride.
