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THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
APOCALYPSE 1945
The Destruction of Dresden
F
FOCAL POINT
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Educated at
Imperial College of Science & Technology and at University College
London, he subsequently spent a year in Germany working in a steel
mill and perfecting his fluency in the language. Among his thirty books
the best-known include Hitler’s War, The Trail of the Fox: The Life of FieldMarshal Rommel, Accident, the Death of General Sikorski,The Rise and Fall of
the Luftwaffe and Göring: a Biography. He has translated several books by
other authors. He lives in Grosvenor Square, London, and is the father
of five daughters.
In he published his first English language book, The Destruction of
Dresden. Translated and published around the world, it became a bestseller in many countries. The present volume, Apocalypse , revises
and updates that work on the basis of information which has become
available since .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
LUFTWAFFE HOSPITAL
AIR ZONE COMMAND XVI
() DRESDEN A.
GENERAL-WEVER-STRASSE.
I think it is February 13, 1945.
My darling, darling wife,
I doubt that this letter will ever reach you; these are probably the last words and
thoughts I shall ever write to you.
Apparently I was brought to Dresden earlier yesterday. Tonight there have been
two air-raids, one after another. Now everything around me and above me is on fire.
The hospital I’m in has been evacuated, and is empty. Outside I can hear a fire-storm
raging, like the one in Hamburg. The whole building has been abandoned long ago. Everybody ran off when it caught fire. I am curious to know how many of them will survive,
and where they’ve gone to. Everything around my bed is on fire; smoke and sparks are
making breathing almost impossible.
It is peaceful here in the cellar. There is one candle giving out a little light. It is going
to get very hot in here too. At the moment, I am just lying here in the cellar which is
still cool, smoking my last rescued cigarette, and thinking of all the things one ought
to think of in ones last minutes alive. There’s nothing I can do but wait, and write these
words…
Perhaps you will then sense somehow, even if this letter does not reach you and
you find yourself alone, that my last conscious thoughts were with you and my mother.
Yours, V.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Copyright © Focal Point, London
Internet edition Copyright © Focal Point, London
http://www.fpp.co.uk/bookchapters/Dresden
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be
made without written permission. Copies may be downloaded from our website for
research purposes only. No part of this publication may be commercially reproduced,
copied, or transmitted save with written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil
claims for damages.
The Destruction of Dresden was first published in Great Britain by William Kimber &
Co. Ltd , in a revised and updated edition in by Corgi Books Ltd, and by
Papermac, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, in . The present work Apocalypse has been thoroughly revised and expanded on the basis of materials available since . Source notes are still in draft form. Researchers are advised that
figures for the final deathroll in Dresden still vary widely, and may be lower than this
author originally stated.
Printed edition published by FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS, Duke Street, London WM DJ
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Irving, David John Cawdell
Apocalypse . The Destruction of Dresden
. World War, – – Aerial operations
. Dresden (Germany) – Bombardment,
ISBN –––
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
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Contents
They Have Sown the Wind .......................................................... 7
Bomber Command Gets its Teeth .............................................. 22
Fire-Storm................................................................................ 36
A Second Firestorm .................................................................. 55
The Sabre and the Bludgeon ..................................................... 74
Dresden the Virgin Target .......................................................... 89
Thunderclap ........................................................................... 110
The Plan of Attack .................................................................. 133
The Plate-Rack Force Arrives .................................................. 151
A City on Fire ......................................................................... 168
The Triple Blow Complete ...................................................... 187
Ash Wednesday ....................................................................... 202
The Victims ............................................................................ 220
Abteilung Tote ........................................................................ 234
Anatomy of a Tragedy ............................................................. 255
They Shall Reap the Whirlwind ................................................ 271
The Reaction of the World ....................................................... 295
A Serious Query ..................................................................... 310
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Part One
DRESDEN: THE PRECEDENTS
They Have Sown the Wind
A
IR HISTORIANS trace the earliest roots of the area offensive against Germany to
the events of May , .
Prior to this date, aerial attacks had been delivered by the Royal Air Force
only against capital ships, bridges, or gun installations, more from respect of the
superiority of the German Luftwaffe than from considerations of international law.
Warships in the Kiel Canal had been attacked as early as September , but it
was not until the night of March –, that the R.A.F. dropped its first bombs
on German soil, bombing a seaplane base on the island of Sylt; three days earlier the
Luftwaffe had raided the Orkney Islands, killing a British civilian. ‘Up to that time,’
the Air Ministry noted in June , ‘the R.A.F. had avoided the bombing of targets
which might have involved the civilian population.’
The Royal Air Force had continued to restrict its operations over Germany to
‘nickelling’ – dropping leaflets on the Reich, a pursuit which continued up to the
evening of May , , the day when Hitler’s invasion of France and the Low
Countries began; it was also the day on which Neville Chamberlain, a pronounced
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
opponent of the use of the bomber as a weapon of terrorisation, was replaced by a
less inhibited British prime minister.
Just before four P.M. on that warm but cloudy afternoon three twin-engined aircraft flying at an altitude of around five thousand feet appeared out of the cumulonimbus clouds over Freiburg-im-Breisgau in south-western Germany; each dropped
a stick of bombs and departed swiftly. Most of the hundred-pound bombs exploded
very wide of their original aiming point, the fighter airfield: only ten fell on the
airfield, while thirty-one, including four which did not explode, fell within the city
limits to the west; six fell near the Gallwitz barracks, and eleven fell on the Central
Station. Two of the bombs fell on a children’s playground, in Kolmar-Strasse. The
Polizei-Präsident – the official responsible for civil defence in every German city –
reported fifty-seven fatal casualties, comprising twenty-two children, thirteen women,
eleven men, and eleven soldiers.
The German propaganda ministry was swift to exploit this incident. The official
D.N.B. news agency stated that night: ‘Three enemy aircraft today bombed the open
town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, which is completely outside the German Zone of
Operations and has no military objectives’; the agency added that the German Air
Force would answer this ‘illegal operation’ in a like manner. ‘From now on any further systematic enemy bombing of the German population will be returned by a
five-fold number of German planes attacking a British or French town.’
The Freiburg raid was surrounded in immediate mystery. The French, accused of
having executed the attack, insisted that they were innocent, although a Potez
aircraft had been seen in the area; satisfied by this plea, the British Foreign Office
published a clear warning that they regarded the German allegation as ‘mendacious’;
they suspected an attempt at prefabricating a justification for a Luftwaffe (German
air force) assault on allied towns: while recalling that on September , they had
given an assurance to the President of the still, nominally, neutral United States that
the Royal Air Force had been given orders prohibiting the bombing of civilian
populations – an assurance which it must be stated the British prime minister up to
May , had scrupulously observed – the British government now publicly
proclaimed that it reserved the right to take whatever action it considered appropri-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
ate in the event of German air raids on civilian populations.
Thus the Cabinet on its very first day of office under Mr Winston Churchill, the
new prime minister, was able to dispose of Mr Chamberlain’s public guarantee to
respect German civilian lives, a guarantee which could well have proved embarrassing in the offensive against Germany that was to ensue.
v
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Four days after the Freiburg affair, the Luftwaffe launched one of its most ill-famed
air raids of the Second World War, during the critical land battle for Rotterdam.
While, like the mysterious attack on Freiburg, this raid does not fall within the concept of an area attack, any account of the prelude to the bombing war would be
grossly incomplete without a sober description of the Nazis’ Rotterdam raid, given
the role it played in forming British public opinion towards the later overwhelming
attacks of the Royal Air Force on German towns. Mr Churchill himself afterwards
referred in his memoirs to ‘the long prepared treachery and brutality which culminated in the massacre of Rotterdam, where many thousands of Dutchmen were slaughtered,’ and in subsequent official documents he claimed that as many as thirty thousand had died in the attack.
His statistics were less than exact, as historical research has proven. Although many
of the most important Luftwaffe records were destroyed in an accidental fire at
Potsdam on the night of February –, , the origins and nature of the Rotterdam attack of May , can be clearly reconstructed.
By May , , three days into Hitler’s invasion of Holland, his nd Airborne
Division with four hundred troops were encountering severe difficulties at the position where they had landed on the tenth, to the north-west of Rotterdam; reinforcements from the th Panzer Division and the th Infantry Regiment had penetrated the city as far as the Maas bridge – captured on the very first day of the offensive by Nazi paratroops in the face of Dutch attempts to demolish it; the bridge was
a Dutch defence keystone. At . p.m. on th May Lieutenant-Colonel von
Cholchitz – later commandant of Paris, but in still commanding the th In-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
fantry Regiment’s troops, sent a deputation to the Dutch city’s commandant, to
demand its immediate surrender.The latter, Colonel Scharroo, refused to negotiate,
and every indication was that during the night the Dutch would shell the German
positions.The nd Airborne Division, beleaguered on the other side of Rotterdam,
appealed for an air strike against the Dutch artillery before this bombardment could
occur.
In spite of the urgent need for such a tactical air strike, the eventual orders actually
issued for the air operations against Rotterdam expressed a decidedly different intent:‘Resistance in Rotterdam is to be crushed with all means,’ General von Küchler,
th Army Commander, ordered XXXIX Korps at : P.M. on May .‘If necessary
the destruction of the city is to be threatened and carried out.’ Luftflotte , Kesselring’s
bomber group, allocated Kampfgeschwader (bomber wing) for the Rotterdam
operation, and on the evening of the thirteenth a KG. liaison officer, Colonel
Lackner, was dispatched to the Seventh Air Division operations room to collect the
target map, ‘on which the Dutch defensive zones which had to be destroyed by saturation bombing were drawn in.’
On the same evening the th Panzer Division’s interpreter was ordered to frame
an ultimatum to the Dutch Commandant in the following terms: ‘The resistance
offered to the advancing German Army compels me to inform you that in the event
that resistance is not ceased at once, the total destruction of the city will result. I
request you, as a man of responsibility, to use your influence to avoid this. As a sign of
good faith, I request you to see an intermediary. If within two hours I receive no
answer, then I will be forced to employ the severest means of destruction. (Signed)
SCHMIDT. O.C., German troops.’ This was the bluntest possible threat, but it was
apparent that General Schmidt, the XXXIX Korps Commander, hoped that the Dutch
would see reason and capitulate.
The Dutch commander however saw no reason for such precipitate action. His
communications with his commander-in-chief were intact and northern Rotterdam
was still securely in Dutch hands.
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THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Not until : P.M. on the next day, May , did the German intermediary return,
the Dutch having detained him in an attempt to win time; they had been hoping for
a British airborne landing with reinforcements but this did not materialise. Since
Scharroo had however mentioned that he would send a plenipotentiary at two P.M. to
negotiate, General Schmidt had no alternative but to postpone the air strike planned
for three P.M.:‘Attack postponed on account of negotiations,’ he radioed to the headquarters of Luftflotte . ‘Return the aircraft to Take-off Alert.’
On the airfields at Quakenbrück, Delmenhorst, and Hoya in northern Germany
some one hundred aircraft of KG. had already been briefed to attack the areas still
offering resistance in Rotterdam, flying in two bomber streams. Their flying-time to
Rotterdam would be about ninety-five to one hundred minutes; with the German
intermediary’s return long overdue the coded signal to attack had been given as early
as noon; in the meantime the nd Airborne Division continued to radio desperately
for air support.
KG. was instructed to attack ‘according to plan’ unless it saw red signal flares
proclaiming the last minute surrender of Rotterdam. At : P.M. the two formations took off, with the first Gruppe (squadron) on the left and the second on the
right. At the same time, the Dutch, still playing for time, indicated that as General
Schmidt’s message was not signed and did not indicate his rank they were not prepared to accept it; the Dutch messenger, a Captain Backer, was however instructed
to ascertain the German surrender conditions. Forty precious minutes passed while
the paratroop general Student formulated the conditions with Generals Schmidt and
Hibicki, commander of the th Panzer Division. By then it was five minutes to the
zero hour set for the postponed air strike against Rotterdam, and it was found to be
no longer possible to relay the recall-signal to the Heinkel bombers as they had reeled
in their trailing aerials on crossing the Dutch frontier. General Wilhelm Speidel dispatched a swift fighter aircraft, piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Rieckhoff, to overtake
and head off the bomber formations, but without success.
As soon as he heard the approaching bombers, Schmidt ordered the firing of red
signal cartridges as pre-arranged to signal that the attack was ‘scrubbed’.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
‘I had been concentrating on looking out for any red lamps,’ the commander of the
first Gruppe of KG., attacking Rotterdam from the south, later related.‘My bombaimer had clearly identified the aiming point and was dictating his readings over the
radio. When he reported that he would have to release the bombs if we were not to
overshoot the target – very important with German troops so close – I gave the
order for their release, dead on three o’clock. Just then I saw two pitiful little red
signal-cartridges arching up, instead of the expected red signal-lamp. We could not
hold back the bombs because the bomb release was fully automatic, nor could the
two other aircraft in my leading flight:They dropped their bombs as soon as they saw
mine go down. But my radio operator’s signal got through just in time for the other
aircraft.’ Of the one hundred He. bombers, only forty heard the signal to abort
in time; the rest delivered a very concentrated attack on the designated aiming points
in Rotterdam.
Right at the start of the raid, the main water supply was smashed, and as earlier
tactical air raids had largely drained the canal system, the weak local fire-service
proved unable to cope with the spreading fires, especially as one of the buildings
most severely damaged was a margarine factory, from which streams of burning oil
emerged. It is worth commenting that the Germans, in keeping with the nature of an
air raid on gun positions, had used no incendiaries. Ninety-four tons of bombs had
been dropped – , hundred-pound and one hundred and fifty-eight -pound
bombs – a figure which compares unfavourably with the close to nine thousand tons
of high explosive and incendiaries dropped on the inland Ruhr port of Duisburg
during the triple blow of October , , for example.
At : P.M. Rotterdam capitulated, the commandant protesting bitterly that the
surrender negotiations were in hand before the air strike had begun. Four hours later
General Winkelmann, the Dutch commander-in-chief, broadcast that ‘Rotterdam,
bombed this afternoon, suffered the fate of total war. Utrecht and other towns would
soon have shared its fate. We have ceased to struggle.’
As a tactical, close-support raid the assault had been overwhelming; as a strategic,
‘terror-raid’ the attack could not have obtained its objective more dramatically. The
German military leaders protested until the end that the raid had been purely tacti-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
cal in its aims. At the Nuremberg tribunal in there was this brief exchange on
the subject:
SIR DAVID MAXWELL-FYFE: ‘Was not your purpose to secure a strategic advantage
by terrorising the people of Rotterdam?’
KESSELRING: ‘That I can deny with the clearest conscience; we only had one task:
to provide artillery support for Student’s troops.’
The German High Command’s communiqué of May , announced with
unbecoming effrontery that ‘under the pressure of German dive-bombing attacks
and the imminent tank assault on the city, Rotterdam has capitulated and thereby
saved itself from destruction.’
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By war-time standards the casualties were not large: some people had been
killed including a large number of civilians in fires which had ravaged over · square
miles of the most important part of the city; the conflagration was still burning in
some areas when hastily organised German fire-fighting regiments under General
Hans Rumpf arrived some days later.The fires had destroyed twenty thousand homes
making , people homeless.
With the fall of the rest of Holland it remained to Britain and her allies only to reap
what profit they could from the ruins of Rotterdam. On July the first shots were
fired in what was to become a virulent propaganda war in the air: the Royal Netherlands Legation in Washington issued a colourful statement, on which Mr Churchill
appears to have relied in his memoirs: ‘When Rotterdam was bombed,’ the statement protested, ‘the Dutch Army’s capitulation had already been handed to the German High Command.The crime against Rotterdam was a deliberate, fiendish assault
on unarmed, undefended civilians. In the seven-and-a-half minutes that the planes
were over the city, , people died – , unoffending men, women and children per minute.’ The statement also described how ‘the final ghoulish touch to this
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
man-made inferno of death was that the Germans made aerial motion pictures of
their handiwork.’
Whether the raid against Rotterdam was a tactical operation or – as was claimed at
the post war Nuremberg tribunal – solely designed to terrorise the civilian population, the blow was not forbidden under the terms of Article of the Hague
Convention, to which both Britain and Germany were signatories: Rotterdam was
not an undefended town. More will be said about this aspect of the area offensive –
the aspect of international law – when we come to analyse the Dresden raids of
.
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The commander-in-chief of R.A.F. Fighter Command was convinced that the
Luftwaffe could not be defeated over the Continent; the enemy bomber and fighter
formations should, he felt, somehow be enticed or provoked into daylight battle
over the British Isles, within reach of Britain’s superior short-range fighter defences.
With this requirement in mind, the R.A.F. launched its first attacks on targets east of
the Rhine on the evening that the Rotterdam raid was announced to the world; less
than twenty-five of the ninety-six bombers despatched even claimed to have found
their targets. Hermann Göring did not divert one fighter from operations supporting the Battle for France. Only after France had fallen, and after the R.A.F. had
repeatedly attacked the German mainland, did the Führer direct the Luftwaffe’s attention to industrial targets in and around London.
As the nights drew longer, on the night of August – a Blenheim bomber was
actually shot down over Berlin. Damage was minimal. Six nights later Mr Churchill
sent a large force of bombers to attack Berlin, ostensibly as a reprisal for a Luftwaffe
raid on London on the night before. (After the war was it revealed in the Of⁵cial
History of the Defence of the United Kingdom that these first German bombs had
been ‘unintentionally’ dropped on the east end of London, causing no casualties,
during a raid on a Thames-side refinery by the Luftwaffe.) In Dresden the sirens
sounded for the first time in a year of war as the eighty-one British bombers ap-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
proached central Germany. In Berlin, after the shock of the first bombs since
had ebbed away, the immediate reaction was deprecatory; the Berlin correspondent
of the responsible New York Herald Tribune blithely reported: ‘No trace of British
Raids in Berlin.’The Times expressed anger that the American correspondents in
Berlin had sent ‘only brief despatches, minimising the effects of the latest raid’ back
to their New York offices: ‘All the really exciting news about the attack was in the
London despatches.’
On August – British bombs killed ten Berliners. In spite of the failure of the
R.A.F. even in the nights following to inflict more serious injury on the Reich capital, this new air assault provided the Führer, still fresh from the triumph of his offensive in the west, with the provocation he had been seeking. Speaking on September at the Palace of Sports in Berlin he declared, ‘If they threaten to attack our
cities, then we shall rub out theirs.’ Undeterred, the R.A.F. launched more raids on
Berlin. On the fifth they killed fifteen people. After lunching with Hitler on the sixth
Goebbels recorded in his diary: ‘The Führer is fed up. He clears London for bombing. It is to begin tonight.’
On the afternoon of September , three days after Palace of Sports threat, and two
weeks after the first R.A.F. assault on Berlin, the Luftwaffe appeared in strength over
London for the first time in a daylight raid: bombers escorted by several fighters
pounded oil stores and dock installations along the lower reaches of the Thames with
a total of tons of high explosive and incendiaries.
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The dubious evaluations of the R.A.F.’s night attacks on Germany by neutral correspondents actually living within the target cities should have been recognised by
the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command of the time, Sir Charles Portal; these
foreign news reports were available to him, even if not to the general public in the
United Kingdom, and they were couched unanimously in the clear and unmistakable
terminology of failure.
The Air Ministry itself was, however, apparently undismayed by these warning
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
signs, even when the enemy Propaganda Ministry developed the most effective ploy
of conducting American correspondents round all the areas ‘destroyed’ in the British
communiqués. Thus when the Air Ministry’s news service intemperately claimed
that Hamburg was ‘practically in ruins’ in August , Goebbels sent two planeloads
of neutral journalists to see for themselves that Hamburg was undamaged. The
New York Herald Tribune ran a telling headline, ‘Nazis call Hamburg “Pulverisation”
False: Exhibit City to Foreign Writers to Prove it.’ In the same month Goebbels
arranged similar tours of inspection for Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, both ‘smashed’,
and thirty six major oil-dumps and Krupps,‘bombed disastrously’, (still August ).
The month ended with the R.A.F. attacks on Berlin which attracted the contemptuous coverage in the NewYork newspapers to which reference has already been made.
Convincing though these reports from inside Germany were, they found currency
neither with Sir Charles Portal as commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, nor
with Sir Richard Peirse, then Deputy Chief of Air Staff and soon to become commander-in-chief on Portal’s appointment as Chief of Air Staff. Peirse on the contrary
had the utmost confidence in the efficiency of R.A.F. Bomber Command, as he wrote
to the Prime Minister on September : ‘I think there is little doubt that the reason
for the effectiveness of our night bombing is that it is planned and relentless until the
particular target is knocked out or dislocated,’ he suggested, ‘whereas German night
bombing is sporadic and mainly harassing.’
One of the few senior officers at High Wycombe who did not share this boundless
optimism was Sir Robert Saundby; he was profoundly sceptical of the claims made
by bomber crews. At the headquarters of Bomber Command, he has described, there
was a map covered with red and black squares, the former being known oil plants in
existence, the latter, black squares being those that the R.A.F. had ‘flattened’. On an
inquiry from Saundby, the officer in charge of the map explained that as statistics had
demonstrated that one hundred tons of bombs would destroy half an oil plant, each
of these plants marked in black, having received two hundred tons, must have been
destroyed; the officer knew that they had been hit, he added, ‘because those were the
orders of the aircrews’.To this, Sir Robert Saundby replied caustically, ‘You have not
dropped two hundred tons of bombs on these oil plants; you have exported two
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hundred tons of bombs, and you must hope that some of them went down in Germany’.
In these, the early days of Bomber Command, this remark must have deeply shocked
the officer concerned; but it illustrates clearly the realistic attitude which Bomber
Command’s senior officers would have to adopt if the Command was to survive.
A typical ‘black square’ would have represented the Ilse Bergbau Synthetic Oil
Refinery at Ruhland, close to Dresden, attacked by Bomber Command on the night
of November –, : ‘The great plant, identified by its six tall chimneys, was
showered with incendiary bombs by the first arrivals, and the red glow of the many
fires they started aided following raiders to pin-point their objectives. Direct hits
with high-explosive bombs were scored among the refinery buildings, and across the
base of the chimney stacks, causing violent explosions, the force of which could be
felt in the aircraft thousands of feet above. At the end of an hour’s attack, great fires
giving off dense clouds of black smoke were blazing in the re⁵nery area, and could be
seen by the last of the raiders for twenty minutes after they turned on their
miles’ flight back to England.’ All this was in spite of cloud ‘rising unbroken to more
than , feet.’ Dresden itself was ‘also bombed for the first time,’ with large fires
in the city’s main railway junctions, and heavy damage to the gas, water and power
installations, in an attack lasting from : until nearly . P.M.’ Although Dresden’s sirens did sound at : A.M., in fact no bombs fell.’
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If both Portal and Peirse cherished unrealistic illusions about the ability of their
rank-and-file airmen to navigate accurately by the stars to distant, pin-point targets,
German scientists harboured none. As early as March documents captured
from crashed German bombers had shown that the aircraft had been relying on a
device code named Knickebein, radio-beams for accurate navigation by night; when
the R.A.F.’s No Wing, an ad hoc Radio Counter Measures organisation established
under Wing Commander E B Addison, developed means of deflecting these beams,
the Luftwaffe aircraft switched to a new system on the night of November –,
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, involving a new beams system code named X-Gerät, by means of which fireraising aircraft could release showers of incendiaries accurately over the aiming point,
setting the city on fire – in this case Coventry – followed by the main force of bombers which then had little difficulty in identifying the target.The final development by
the Germans in the early radio-beam war was the introduction in February of
Y-Gerät: A radio signal beamed out from a German ground station was picked up by
the bomber’s equipment and transmitted back to the ground station; the time-lapse
provided an accurate measure of the aircraft’s exact location over England. Introduced as Oboe in R.A.F. Bomber Command squadrons two years later, this technique was to provide one of the most powerful target finding weapons in its arsenal
from the Battle of the Ruhr onwards.
The deployment and technical equipment of the German pathfinder squadron
known as Kampfgruppe was in every way an object lesson for Bomber Command. By the light of the fires started by the Heinkels of K.Gr. , navigating by XGerät beams, the remaining bomber squadrons were more easily able to find their
targets and aiming points: thus in the rather unrealistic target-assignments for the
Coventry raid of November I./LG. was allocated the Standard Motor Company together with the Coventry Radiator and Press Company; II./KG. was to
attack the Alvis aero-engine works; I./KG. the British Piston Ring Company; II./
KG. the Daimler Works; and K.Gr. the city’s gas holders. Out of German
aircraft despatched, arrived over Coventry and dropped tons of high explosive and incendiary canisters.
The raid cost three hundred and eighty lives among the city’s population, far fewer
than in Rotterdam. But there was a second object lesson which R.A.F. Bomber Command learned from Coventry – that by far the greatest long-term damage to industrial production was occasioned by the destruction of water and gas mains and
electric power supplies.True, the raids had severely damaged twenty-one important
factories, of which twelve were directly connected with the aircraft industry; but it
was the paralysis of public services caused by incidental bomb damage elsewhere
which resulted in the total stoppage of nine other vital factories which would otherwise have been operating very soon after the raid.
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This unexpected phenomenon was to become the fundament of R.A.F. Bomber
Command’s future area offensive. The equivalent of thirty-nine days’ industrial production had been lost in Coventry, not so much by direct damage to factories as by
the collateral damage to the city centre. Moreover, experts advised the British government that if the Luftwaffe had repeated its attacks on two or three consecutive
nights, the city would have been more easily identified with the fires from the previous attack still burning, and it might have been put out of action permanently. Like
the British the Germans were however still finding their wings in the air war; thus
they deliberately extenuated the Coventry attack from : P.M. until nearly six
A.M. next morning; while conversely the R.A.F. reduced the average length of its
most successful raids on German towns to only ten to twenty minutes by the end of
the war, resulting in an overwhelming of the target areas with fire bombs which the
German fire-services were unable to master.
There is in fact little doubt that, had the German bombers attacking Coventry
been charged with predominantly incendiary loads, and had they been routed over
the target area in close concentration like the great No Group attacks on Brunswick, Dresden, and other cities, and had moreover the attack been aimed, as was the
case with Dresden, solely at the mediæval centre of Coventry rather than at arms
factories on the periphery, then a fire-storm might have been generated in the British
Midlands city with at least a comparable loss of life; this was, however, one opportunity which the Germans missed. Only once, recalled Sir Arthur Harris later, did a
Luftwaffe raid ever approach fire-storm conditions: during an unusually heavy fireraid on London, when the Thames was running a neap tide, the hoses of the London
fire brigades had been unable to reach down to the river surface. ‘So often the factor
which converted an otherwise routine attack into a major catastrophe was just a
freak of nature,’ he observed, alluding perhaps to the heatwave which had sealed the
fate of Hamburg in the summer of .
For the time being the air ministry, faced with catastrophes like Coventry, when
the ground defences could claim only one bomber and the fighters none at all, could
only hope for better times, and publish comforting reports for the British population
like that which appeared as the main story in all leading London newspapers five days
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
later: KRUPPS SMASHED BY R.A.F. BOMBS, the headlines ran; and the year of was
still not at an end.
Air Ministry, ‘Note on the Bombing of Open Towns’, Jun , (Imperial War Museum, Lon-
don).
Dr Anton Hoch – an incorruptible German historian who is still sorely missed – wrote the
definitive study of the Freiburg raid in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, /.
The Times, May , .
Ibid., and Manchester Guardian, May , .
My account is largely based on the fine study based on German archives by the Bonn university
historian Dr Hans-Adolf Jacobsen,‘Der deutsche Luftangriff auf Rotterdam,’ published in Wehrwissenschaftliche Rundschau, Frankfurt/Main, May . – See too Report of International Military Tribunal
(Nuremberg), vol.xi, p. (Mar , ) and pp. et seq. (Mar , ).
Statement of General Lackner to Jacobsen. He used the word Bombenteppiche, ‘carpet bombing.’
The Air Ministry Historical Branch’s account of the Rotterdam raid (Grand Strategy, United Kingdom
Military Series, Vol. II, p.ff.) is erroneous and tendentious in some respects.
Report of International Military Tribunal , vol.ix, p., Mar , . – The western allies were
hardly in the position to accuse ex-Reich Marshal Göring in this respect. As recently as April ,
General Allen, commanding the th U.S. Infantry Division, had given the people of Halle the
choice between ‘SURRENDER OR LIQUIDATION: Complete destruction faces your city. Either Halle is surrendered unconditionally, or totally destroyed.’ U.S. Aerial Leaflet CT.; for other examples, cf.
also U.S. Aerial Leaflet WG. for details of a similar ULTIMATUM
TO
PEOPLE OF AACHEN on Oct ,
.
NewYork Times, Jul , .
Churchill’s telephone directive to RAF Bomber Command soon after nine A.M. on Aug is in Air
Ministry papers, PRO file AIR./. The Völkischer Beobachter headline on Aug read, ‘London
dresses up attack on Berlin as a “reprisal”.’
NewYork Herald Tribune, Aug , .
The Times, Sep , . – Unfortunately, there appears to have been no American correspondent
in Stuttgart, some miles from Berlin; although there was no plan to raid the city that night,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
between : A.M. and : A.M. some twenty aircraft did bomb Stuttgart, killing five and injuring
four civilians in the Untertürkheim district. – Information from the Stuttgart Statistical Office.
Dr Joseph Goebbels diary, Aug –. Goebbels ministerial conference, Aug ; Louis Lochner,
letter, Aug , (Franklin D Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y: John Toland papers, box ).
NewYork Herald Tribune, Aug , .
Sir Robert Saundby to the author.
Air Ministry Bulletin . – A previous ‘first-ever’ raid executed on Dresden on Sep ,
was reported in Air Ministry Bulletin , when ‘railway sidings were attacked and two hits were
obtained on a goods train.’ Once again the sirens did sound, but no bombs were recorded. Cf. also
Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, vol., col., for a claim to have twice attacked Dresden.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Bomber Command Gets its Teeth
F
BOMBER COMMAND and Mr Churchill the truth about the failure of their
offensive hitherto did not dawn slowly, but was revealed to them suddenly
and unambiguously on the date that Mr David Bensusan-Butt, the private secretary to Churchill’s adviser Professor Frederick Lindemann, reported back to Bomber
Command: August , . Soon after Christmas , Mr Butt had by chance
come across R.A.F. Medmenham’s collection of bombing photographs and as a direct consequence of his report to the Professor he received the commission of analysing them statistically.
The Butt Report presented in melancholy detail the evidence that what the neutral
press had been proclaiming for a year about the impotence of the British bomber
force was true. Of all aircraft recorded as having attacked their targets, only onethird had in fact bombed within five miles; on well-defended inland targets like the
Ruhr industrial complex, the success rate sagged to below one-tenth within five
miles. It was clearly unrealistic to require Bomber Command to attempt precision
night attacks until electronic equipment like that used by the Luftwaffe bomber squadrons was available at least to a part of the Command’s aircraft.
Mr Churchill was however anxious in these months to support the now beleaguered Soviet Armies in the only way open to him, and on July , Air ViceMarshal Sir Norman Bottomley, the deputy Chief of the Air Staff, had issued the first
of his many directives to the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, at that time
still Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse. This read as follows:
OR
I am directed to inform you that a comprehensive review of the enemy’s
present political, economic and military situation discloses that the weakest
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
points in his armour lie in the morale of the civil population and in his inland
transportation system.
The main effort of the bomber force, until further instructions, was to be directed towards dislocating the German transportation system and to destroying the
morale of the civil population as a whole. Peirse was left in no doubt as to how he
was to achieve this. As primary targets for attack he was allocated Cologne, Duisburg,
Düsseldorf and Duisburg-Ruhrort,‘all suitable for attack on moonless nights, as they
lie in the congested industrial towns, where the psychological effect will be the greatest.’
We must first destroy the foundations upon which the [German] war
machine rests – the economy which feeds it, the morale which sustains it,
the supplies which nourish it, and the hopes of victory which inspire it.
The above extract from the Chiefs of Staff memo, July , , heralded the
approach of what became known as the Area Bombing Offensive. The January
Casablanca Directive was in fact barely more than an extension in bolder language of
this policy.
The Command was ill-prepared for an area offensive even by the end of ;
although the air ministry had planned the construction of the four-engined heavy
bomber as early as , it had not put in hand the manufacture of the instruments
which were to guide it or the bombs which it was to drop.
When the R.A.F. entered the war its bombs were still based on patterns and
explosives – and on at least one occasion, the British raids on Stuttgart in July ,
the aircraft of some squadrons were dropping weapons. Experience gathered
during the Spanish Civil War had suggested that the blast waves from bombs could
kill at a great distance from the detonation itself; for this reason, during the early
months of the war Bomber Command had no bombs more massive than -pounders available, and there was little incentive to develop larger weapons. The Germans
had not made this mistake, and by they were regularly using explosives en-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
hanced with simple aluminium additives which virtually doubled their blasting power
– a fact not unknown to the British defence experts, who however failed to pass it on
to those designing ammunition for Bomber Command.
The discrepancy was noted by a leading Admiralty expert on Operational Research, the physicist Professor Patrick Blackett: ‘Static detonation trials,’ he would
write,‘showed that the British General Purpose bombs then in use were about half as
effective as the German light-case [i.e. blast] bombs of the same weight. In the ten
months from August to June the total weight of bombs dropped on the
United Kingdom was about , tons; the number of persons killed was ,,
giving · killed per ton of bombs.’ Thus, reasoned Blackett, given the proven lower
efficiency of the R.A.F. as well as its inferior weapons, it might hope to kill ·
Germans per ton of British bombs dropped. As he had already shown that ‘the loss of
industrial production ... and civilian casualties ... were about proportional,’ he implied by his calculations that a continuation of the R.A.F.’s area offensive was futile, a
view which was already widely popular among Admiralty circles.
Macabre experiments conducted in late by Professor Solly Zuckerman and
which first came to the public notice as the result of a Question in the House of
Commons, tended to bear this out. Zuckerman demonstrated that German bombs,
weight for weight, were about twice as efficient as British bombs. But that was not
all: by detonating standard British -pound General Purpose bombs among live
goats staked out at various angles in a deep pit, Zuckerman was able to deduce that
‘the lethal pressure for man’ was between four- and five-hundred pounds per square
inch; an examination of air-raid experiences in British cities suggested that this estimate was of the right order. Previously, the lethal pressure had been believed to be
as low as five pounds per square inch. Zuckerman empirically estimated the pressure necessary to cause minimal pulmonary damage in man at seventy pounds per
square inch; referring to a survey conducted by Professor J D Bernal of casualties in
German air raids on British towns, Zuckerman concluded that only a small percentage of people were close enough to the bursting bombs to receive direct injuries
from the blast wave.
It is worth noting that although Zuckerman also investigated the splinter effects
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
of bombing (by firing high velocity steel balls into rabbit’s legs), no scientists on
either side of the conflict appears to have investigated the lethality of bombs from the
aspect of smoke- and monoxide-poisoning, which were to result – in the raids analysed in this work – in about seventy percent of Germany’s fatalities.
But if Professors Blackett and Zuckerman expected the Air Staff to heed their
pessimistic calculations, and divert industrial resources to an attack on the enemy’s
submarines – both scientists were noted opponents of the area offensive – they were
disappointed. Their calculations, and many others by similarly inclined scientists,
were used only as an argument for more powerful weapons and better instrumentation of Bomber Command.
v
v
v
It was essential that production of light-case blast bombs begin as soon as possible, in order to approach the efficiency of the German weapons. Towards the end of
the first five-hundred pound medium capacity bombs, of forty percent explosive content, came into service. The primary weapon of the area offensive was however to be the high capacity bomb, of eighty percent explosive content – thin-walled
’blockbusters’ the size and shape of domestic boilers, produced in four-thousand,
eight-thousand, and finally twelve-thousand pound sizes.
While Professors Blackett and Zuckerman had decisively dismissed the possibility of inflicting serious damage on the German populace, Mr Churchill had consulted a different oracle: he had asked Professor Lindemann, who had had the persistent failure of R.A.F. Bomber Command before him since his secretary’s melancholy discovery of Christmas , to propound a bombing policy by which Britain
could effectively assist her new ally in the East.
Lindemann’s final report, dated March , , suggested that there was little
doubt that an area bombing offensive could break the spirit of the enemy provided
that it was aimed at the working-class areas of the fifty-eight German towns with a
population of more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. ‘Each bomber will in its
lifetime drop about forty tons of bombs,’ reasoned Lindemann. ‘If these are dropped
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
on built-up areas, they will make about , to , people homeless.’ Between
March and the middle of it should be possible to make about one-third of
the whole German population homeless, provided that industrial resources were
concentrated on this campaign.
The Lindemann minute was passed to Professor Blackett and another eminent
scientist, Professor Henry Tizard, for comment; both of them were former naval
officers, and both dismissed the calculations as being seriously in error. They suggested that Lindemann was overestimating the success of an area bombing offensive
by six and five times respectively. Both were overruled.
The bombing policy which Lindemann advocated did not require many changes
in Bomber Command’s tactics. As recently as February , Bomber Command
had been reminded in the most unmistakable language that its primary purpose was
to attack Germany’s residential areas. ‘Ref the new bombing directive,’ Sir Charles
Portal had scribbled in pencil to his deputy the following day, ‘I suppose it is quite
clear that the aiming-points are to be the built-up areas, not , for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories where these are mentioned?’ This was to be made quite
clear. Portal emphasised, if it was not already understood. This, then, was the policy
of destroying residential areas which awaited Sir Arthur Harris when he arrived at
Bomber Command’s underground headquarters at High Wycombe to take up his
new appointment as commander-in-chief on February , . The Casablanca
Directive of a year later merely reiterated the area bombing policy in bolder and
more concrete terms. There can be no more eloquent proof of Harris’ innocence of
having personally initiated the policy of the area bombing of civilian residential areas.
As Elizabeth Corwin pointed out in an elegant little study for the University of
California in Los Angelese in , this policy was effectively concealed from the
public by the British government until March when it was exposed by C P
Snow in a slim volume entitled Science and Government. It was then admitted the
following September in the Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive against
Germany.
With the new tactics impressively demonstrated in the fire-raising raid on Lübeck
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
on the night of March –, and in four incendiary attacks on the Baltic port
of Rostock a month later, it seemed that Professor Lindemann’s theory was correct;
in a fit of candour the British Broadcasting Corporation reported that at Rostock the
R.A.F. had ‘destroyed a large number of workmen’s houses’, a report which provoked an indignant Question from an Independent Labour M.P. in the House of
Commons, about whether it ‘was necessary to destroy workers’ dwellings in order
to impede or disorganise the German war effort?’ The Government supplied him
with a non-committal reply.
v
v
v
By the beginning of , therefore, Bomber Command was in the position where
its area offensive against Hitler’s industrial cities, could be joined. The Casablanca
Directive of January , had defined the part which R.A.F. Bomber Command
was to play in securing victory over the Axis powers: Sir Arthur Harris was to aim at
the ‘progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and
economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a
point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’
Now, too, for the first time in the war Bomber Command had the weapons and
instruments with which to put this Directive into effect. The Telecommunications
Research Establishment had developed a revolutionary new navigation device, an
airborne radar operating on the ·-centimetre wavelength known by its codename
HS; this threw an almost television-like picture of the topography below onto a
radar display inside an aircraft.
So far indeed had the use of this device progressed that by February the
Germans were already in possession of their first captured HS and were learning its
wonders, assisted by a co-operative ex-Pathfinder Force prisoner, dangerously fast.
(By May , the Berlin electronics firm Telefunken had plans for the mass-production of clones of the heart of the HS, the vital LMS. magnetron, at the rate of ten
per week.)
The British bombers would soon have other target finding devices too. Trials of
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Oboe had come to a successful conclusion; this was a new computer-linked radiorepeater device for Mosquitoes based on Germany’s Y-Gerät but operating on
the shorter wavelengths in which British technology was superior. It was not until
January , that a crashed Mosquito near Cleve provided the vital missing clues
which would enable German scientists to interfere with the beams.
A successful raid by British Commandos on Bruneval in northern France had
provided Britain with vital data about the Germans’ -centimetre Würzburg earlywarning radar and in the year since then British scientists had devised a countermeasure, known as Window – strips of aluminium foil – of the correct dimensions and
stiffness to blind or clog the enemy’s radar defences.
More important perhaps than these mechanical innovations was the favourable
climate of public opinion towards the bombing offensive which now existed in England. In all of his public pronouncements the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald
Sinclair, had been careful to stress that Bomber Command was bombing only military objectives; he and other politicians had decried as absurd any suggestion that
their heroic bomber crews were executing deliberate attacks on residential or working-class housing areas.
This deliberate deception was perhaps the most egregious fraud perpetrated on
the British public throughout the war; a hundred thousand airmen knew and recognised that their aircraft were being dispatched night after night with the deliberate
intention of setting fire to Germany’s cities, knew that since December , the
aiming points had invariably been in the heart of the civilian housing areas.
Inevitably, rumours of the truth did leak out. Early in a Bombing Restriction Committee made its appearance in London with an address in Parliament Hill,
but attempts by Labour Members of Parliament to have its leaflets banned and its
members interned came to nothing. The real attack on bombing policy, from the
highest governmental and religious quarters in the United Kingdom, was to be delayed until the late autumn of ; by that time three of the most devastating and
bloody air raids on Germany had already been executed.
The first target which was to experience the full force of Bomber Command, its
aircrews fresh and the bomb-aimers undeterred by ground defences, was the twin
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
city of Wuppertal, at the eastern end of the Ruhr, on which disaster fell on the night
of May –, . It was the first time that one air raid had killed several thousand
people – burning most of them alive.
The target was an extended, oblong town formed by the union in of the
adjacent towns of Elberfeld and Barmen in the narrow Wupper Valley. Wuppertal
was important as a dormitory area for other Ruhr cities, as well as a centre for the
manufacture of ball bearings in the G. & J. Jäger plant, which featured prominently
as target GZ. in Sir Arthur Harris’ notorious ‘Bombers’ Bædeker’. Five other
important industrial plants were situated in the city, including a major I.G.
Farbenindustrie chemical works, the Bemberg artificial silk factory, and the central
gas-works supplying , people. None of these individual factories was however the aiming point for the attack; Harris had, after all, been ordered to make the
aiming point the ‘built-up areas’ of the cities, and this he proceeded to do with
Wuppertal.The bomber crews were issued with a target map of Wuppertal-Elberfeld
printed in red and grey, with the usual concentric rings centring on the city’s No
Electricity Power Plant; this target map, (g)(i), had been prepared from another
target plan dated.The bomb aimers for this attack were however instructed
to ignore the printed concentric rings and the target at their centre, brightly marked
in orange; they were to mark instead a heavy cross in pencil over the grey (residential) area of Wuppertal-Barmen at the eastern end of the city, which was the bombaimers’ designated aiming point in the event that the Oboe-equipped Mosquito markers did not arrive.
Air Marshal Saundby explains that it was common for details like military targets,
industrial plants, and concentric-ring systems to be marked on target maps for the
enlightenment of others than bomb-aimers; previously to using these red and grey
target maps, the crews had been issued with minutely-detailed Ordnance Survey
maps of target cities, sprinkled liberally with overprinted red Maltese crosses, and a
heading HOSPITALS ARE MARKED @ AND MUST BE AVOIDED:‘These enabled people to get up
in Parliament,’ explained Saundby to this author,‘and say that we marked these things
on our target maps, and that the crews had been specially briefed to avoid hospitals.’
Wuppertal had not been attacked before, largely because it was well hidden in the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
surrounding countryside and did not present a particularly successful radar target.
With this attack it was planned to exploit the phenomenon of ‘creep-back’ which
had plagued the bombing offensive during previous attacks on heavily-defended targets. In the face of vigorous ground defence, the more timorous bomb-aimers habitually dropped their bombs early to avoid a long straight and level run over the
heart of the target city; in consequence, the eventual damage extended on these
occasions for several miles back from the aiming point marked by the Pathfinder
Force’s flares. If the marker flares were dropped near the eastern end of the town and
the bomber stream was routed in from the west, then the creep-back would devastate Elberfeld as well.
The force of bombers was instructed to cross the town on a heading of °;
the extent of creep-back would depend on the strength of the ground defences;
Wuppertal was a typical Ruhr target with many gun batteries and large and elaborate decoys, but on this of all occasions the Wuppertal flak stayed silent for the first
minutes of the attack. Unfortunately for the Germans, Sir Arthur Harris had taken
the unusual step of including forty-fire fire-raising aircraft with the early Pathfinder
aircraft.The result of these two factors was that by the time the German defences did
open fire an enormous load of incendiaries, very concentrated in both time and
space, had already gone down in a tight patch round the Oboe-dropped red targetindicator flares in Barmen.
The zero hour for the attack had been set at one A.M. on May . As early as
midnight the German Observer Corps had begun accurately tracking the bomber
formations as they entered the Continent over the Schelde Estuary. At . Air
Danger had been sounded, a private air raid warning to Party Leaders and industrial and hospital chiefs in the Ruhr to enable them to take advance precautions. At
. the sirens sounded the Fliegeralarm in Wuppertal, fifteen times repeating the
two-second note of the ‘Acute Danger’ warning; this alarm was used only in times of
gravest danger.
: A.M. The enemy formations are still pouring in over the Schelde
estuary [the Observer Corps reported]. The first waves have reached the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Maastricht area and are heading due East.
: A.M. The formations are heading for Mönchengladbach.
: A.M. The bombers are assembling in the Mönchengladbach area.
: A.M. The first waves are flying over the Rhine between Düsseldorf
and Cologne, heading due East. A real danger exists of attack.
At this moment, the first two Oboe-Mosquitoes of the Pathfinder Force were at
an altitude of some twenty thousand feet, being guided along a circular track directly
southwards into the heart of Wuppertal-Barmen, across which a second Oboe beam
had been laid, to signal the moment of release for the markers. First the ground
stations in England transmitted the Morse signal A, B, C and D, then at precisely
: the signal ST indicated that the Mosquitoes had reached the pre-computed
release point taking the centrifugal throw of the marker bombs and the strong northeasterly wind taken into account; the first red marker flares were released over
Wuppertal at precisely the correct moment; however, although the red flares fell
extremely accurately, they were timed two minutes late, and the first wave of
Pathfinder force Backers-Up and the fire-raising aircraft appear to have been ‘piled
up’ on top of the target area waiting for the Oboe markers.
One minute later the city’s observer posts reported aircraft engine sounds from
the south-west.
: A.M. The observer post at Tölleturm reports the sound of aircraft
engines right overhead.
: A.M. Observer post Tölleturm reports cascades of ‘Christmas trees’
over Wuppertal. A strong north-easterly wind is driving them south. The
area marked is the southern hills and city centre.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
At :, zero-hour minus seven for the main force, the observer post telephoned
its last report, to the effect that ‘very heavy loads of high explosive and fire bombs’
were already detonating in the immediate vicinity. In spite of a complete absence of
further Oboe Mosquitoes to correct the marking during the next eighteen minutes,
the enormous concentration of fire bombs dropped ensured the attack’s success.The
city’s defences were overwhelmed by the weight of the attack. ‘They city went up
like a volcano,’ one of the No Squadron markers reported.‘The first loads of marker
flares and fire-bombs all went down within seconds of the red Oboe markers appearing.’ The degree of concentration in the early minutes of the attack was such that six
bombers were themselves hit by falling incendiaries.
The catastrophe which hit Wuppertal-Barmen that night could in fact be attributed
to the employment of fire-raisers – in this case Lancaster bombers each loaded with
ninety-six thirty-pound liquid-filled incendiary bombs and , of the four-pound
thermite fire-bombs. In spite of decoy sites over of the crews dropped their
bomb loads within three miles of the aiming point in the heart of Wuppertal-Barmen, a total of ,· tons hitting the city.
In the absence of any significant creep-back Wuppertal-Elberfeld was unscathed;
R.A.F. Bomber Command had to return a month later to deal with Elberfeld. In
Barmen however over ninety percent of the built-up area was devastated, with damage covering a thousand acres, almost twice the area destroyed in London during the
whole war. The railway station, two power-stations, two gas-works, a waterworks,
and five of the six major factories were damaged. Wuppertal’s industrial production
was set back by fifty-two days, compared with thirty-nine in Coventry. In this one
attack the R.A.F. had killed , people (compared with the Luftwaffe’s ‘score’ of
ninety in Guernica, in Coventry, and in Rotterdam); the attack on Elberfeld
a month later would bring the total for Wuppertal to ,.
This was the first air raid to cause civilian casualties on such a scale and as such it
attracted special attention by the German war leaders; even in London there were
murmurs about the raid. In its first leader on May , The Times ‘recognised and
regretted that no matter how accurate allied bombing of military objectives may be
– and the degree of accuracy is very high in the R.A.F. – civilian losses are inevita-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
ble.’ The newspaper reminded those who might be tempted to question this apparently brutal use of the bomber weapon that ‘it was not questioned in either Germany
or Italy when the Luftwaffe was turned loose against undefended Rotterdam in
and killed many thousands of civilians, men, women and children.’ For Germany the
wheel was turning full circle, if a shade unjustly.
That hypocrisy was not the prerogative of Allied editors was cynically demonstrated by the speech of Hitler’s propaganda minister Dr Goebbels, who addressed
the mourners at the mass funeral arranged for Wuppertal’s air raid victims on June
, : ‘This kind of serial terrorism,’ he exclaimed, ‘is the product of the sick
minds of the plutocratic world-destroyers.’ He added: ‘A long chain of human suffering in all German cities blitzed by the allies has borne witness against them and their
cruel and cowardly leaders – from the murder of German children in Freiburg on
May , , right up to the present day.’
Just as the German raid on Rotterdam had begun to figure more frequently in the
Allied statements on the history of the air offensive, so the Germans had more and
more recourse to the story of the mysterious Freiburg raid; they even claimed it in a
government White Book published in as the start of the bombing offensive by
the British or French. However, as Hitler, Göring, and Dr Goebbels themselves had
known from the very evening of the Freiburg affair, the three twin-engined bombers
which had bombed Freiburg that afternoon were German Heinkel s dispatched
from the bomber station at Lechfeld, near Munich, to bomb the fighter airfield at
Dijon in France; their pilots claimed to have lost their way in the clouds and ‘attacked
Dôle’ near Dijon. The serial numbers on the bomb fragments and the unexploded
bombs had proved conclusively that they were German bombs which had originally
been delivered to Lechfeld airfield. It was a mistake that any operational crew could
make in the heat and excitement of its first sortie; Allied airmen made many similar
errors later in the war. But, before six years were out, over , German civilians were to die in an air offensive for which they now had in part their own leaders
to blame.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Butt report and its background are described in Professor R Harrod, The Prof. (London, )
and Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO,
London, ) vol.i, and vol.iv, p..Stationery Office
Professor P M S Blackett, ‘A Note on Certain Aspects on the Methodology of Operational Re-
search,’ in British Association Journal, vol.v, No, APR .
Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol., col..
Cf. The Biological Effects of Explosions, Prof. S. Zuckerman (HMSO, London, ); Hansard,
-Parliamentary Debates, Vol., Col.; P L Krohn, D Whitteridge, and S Zuckerman, ‘Physiological Effects of Blast’ in Lancet, . Operational Research (Science at War, HM Stationery Office, )
also adds: ‘Zuckerman was able to forecast the average number of casualties which would occur if one
ton of bombs was dropped on one square mile of territory of given population density... the results of
these investigations became a guide to future bombing policy.’
Blackett, Tizard Memorial Lecture, Feb , .The file on the controversy is in the papers of Lord
Cherwell (as Lindemann at this time became), in Nuffield College Library, Oxford. – In view of the
controversy which developed over the validity of Prof. F.A. Lindemann’s forecast, it is interesting to
observe in the Appendix to this book that at least as far as the raids discussed here are concerned,
Prof. Blackett’s estimate of the deaths and thus of industrial damage would have been out by a factor
of over , while Prof. Lindemann’s estimate of the homeless would have been out by a factor of only
.. – See too Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany
(HMSO, London, ) vol.i.
Elizabeth C Corwin, ‘The Dresden Bombing as Portrayed in German Accounts, East and
West,’UCLA Historical Journal, vol., .
Sir Charles Snow, Science and Government (London, ). In this volume was born the phrase
‘corridors of power.’
Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO,
London, ) vols.i–iv.
Ibid., vol.iv, pp.–.
For
HS see Dudley Saward, The Bomber’s Eye (London, ).
See the mimeographed reports, Sitzungsprotokolle der Arbeitsgemeinschaft Rotterdam (Zehlendorf,
), especially the session dated Jun , .
Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol., col., and vol., cols.–.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Bomber’s Baedeker, Guide to the Economic Importance of German Towns and Cities, nd
edition, issued by the Enemy Branch (Foreign Office and Ministry of Economic Warfare), in
PRO file AIR./; and Maxwell AFB, microfilm .–.
Royal Air Force, vol.ii, pp.–; Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air
Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.ii, pp.–.
These data are from the report by Major Dahl of Luftgaukommando VI, Münster:
‘Erfahrungsbericht über Aufklärung und Gegenmaßnahmen zum englischen Oboe-Verfahren’, May
, .
Text from Völkischer Beobachter, Jun , .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Fire-Storm
approached its end in July , it was clear that
the German defences were becoming increasingly successful. During the
later months of the battle, the rate of abortive sorties, something of a barometer of aircrew morale within Bomber Command, had risen from month to
month; as the German ground and air defences took an ever higher toll of the attacking formations, more and more crews were observed to be returning early, finding
often only the most minute faults in their machines to justify their action.The Command’s Operational Research statisticians had calculated that an average casualty
rate of seven percent in each mission would allow only ten crews in every hundred to
survive a tour of thirty operations; in some raids on the Ruhr this morbid statistic
had even been exceeded.
Even before the Wuppertal raids of May and June, the heavy losses had persuaded
Sir Arthur Harris that the optimum time had arrived for Window to be used; Window – called ‘chaff’ by the Americans – was the code-name given to bundles of centimetre long strips of metal foil which, released in slowly descending showers
from the aircraft of a bomber stream, would make it difficult for both the WürzburgRiese early-warning radar and the Würzburg-Dora flak-predictor radar to obtain
fixes on individual aircraft in the stream; these radar systems were at the heart of the
enemy’s air defence system.
The Germans, whose own early warning system had been in operation almost as
long as the famous radar chain set up by Britain in , had long recognised the
possibility of blinding radar sets with metal foil, but they had shied away from using
A
S THE BATTLE OF THE RUHR
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the technique, in case this gave the idea to the Allies whose bomber forces were now
vastly more powerful than their own.
Sir Arthur Harris had already pressed his view at a conference called on April ,
to discuss the Window problem. He urged the Air Ministry to authorise its use
at once.
In fact at an earlier conference on Window, held on November the year before,
with Bomber Command represented by Sir Robert Saundby, there had been rather
less pressure from Sir Arthur Harris on this problem. Discussing this apparent indecision later, Saundby would refer to the example of the premature deployment of the
Tank in the First World War, before this weapon was available in sufficient numbers
to be decisive; until Bomber Command was in the position to dispatch a very large
number of aircraft with the necessary means of releasing Window correctly, Saundby
explained, and until the technique could be introduced suddenly and at the tactically
most opportune phase of the air war, Harris was unwilling to betray this new tactic
to the enemy.
Bomber Command’s earlier reluctance, as voiced by Saundby, met with stiff opposition from Sir Henry Tizard, who was present at the conference as a radar expert.
Tizard founded his objections on the contents of an Air Scientific Intelligence Report
which indicated, correctly, that the Germans already knew all about the Window
principle. Of course Bomber Command might argue that there was a broad gulf
between the theoretical understanding of a principle and its operation in practice.
By the beginning of April , however, Harris had decided that the moment had
arrived for the sudden employment of Window, to snatch a brief respite from the
defences during which he might inflict a real catastrophe on Germany. Both at that
conference on April and at a subsequent Chiefs of Staff meeting he was overruled,
and there was a further delay in the introduction of Window.
Only on July , at a conference at which the Prime Minister, Professor Lindemann
– now Lord Cherwell – and the Chief of the Air Staff were present, was the final
approval given, despite vigorous opposition from Herbert Morrison who as Home
Secretary was responsible for Britain’s civil defences. The air ministry authorised
Harris to commence ‘Window-ing’ from July , . But already time was run-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
ning short: already Germany was conducting research into a new night fighting tactic, employing what Harris afterwards described as a ‘running commentary,’ which
would partially compensate for chaos inflicted on the defences by Window.
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During June Major Hajo Herrmann, a former Luftwaffe bomber pilot now
flying day-fighter sorties over the Reich, had suggested to General Hans Kammhuber,
then Inspector of Night Fighters and commanding general of the XIIth Air Corps,
the night fighter command, a new tactic to thwart Bomber Command’s colossal
night raids: since these in effect created daylight conditions over the target cities,
said Herrmann, what with the Pathfinder flares, the searchlights, and huge areas of
incendiary fires, it would be possible to employ single-engined day-fighter aircraft
like the Me.s and FW.s using ‘cat’s-eye’ interception techniques over the target itself, provided of course that the heavy flak was instructed to restrict their fire to
a certain altitude above which the fighters could visually engage the bombers.
General Kammhuber, a doctrinaire tactician of the old school, pooh-poohed
Herrmann’s idea. He claimed that it had been tried out as early as – it had
failed then and it would not succeed now; Kammhuber relied on his rigid system of
‘fighter boxes’ in which each night fighter pilot was brought into contact with single
enemy bombers by ground radar units. Disregarding the general’s instructions –
even as the British were gearing up for the first use of Window – Major Herrmann
commenced unauthorised experiments together with six comrades, all veterans of
bomber raids on England. Expecting an early assault on the Reich capital, they came
to a private agreement with General Schaller, Commander of Berlin’s Flak Division,
that if his men were operating fighter patrols above them, the heavy gun batteries
would fire only up to a certain height.
There were however likely to be no attacks on Berlin for several months – the
summer hours of darkness were too short – so within a few weeks Major Herrmann
removed his tactical experiments to the Ruhr, where he was put his theories to the
test over Essen and Duisburg with the co-operation of General Hintze, commander
of the Ruhr’s th Flak Division. The flak was instructed to keep its range below
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twenty-two thousand feet, above which altitude Herrmann and his comrades would
operate.Their successes were immediate and impressive. Herrmann was telephoned
by Reich Marshal Göring himself, head of the German air force: he ordered Herrmann
to report to him at Carinhall, his mansion in the forests outside Berlin on June .
Here the young major expounded his new tactical theory to Göring: ‘From every
direction, all available fighters must be assembled even while airborne and hurled en
masse against the enemy, perhaps in several sorties each night; the fighters must no
longer be tied down to their individual fighter boxes,’ – the nucleus of the Kammhuber
Line – ‘but directed by voice communications at the bulk of the raiders right over the
target itself. The Me. and FW. day-fighters should be equipped with drop
tanks to increase their range for night-fighting. Above all, the fighters will not return
to their home airfields, but will roam far and wide pursuing the enemy formations
until they run out of fuel, when they will land and refuel at the nearest available
fighter station.’
Impressed, Reich Marshal Göring ordered him to put his ideas to General Hans
Jeschonnek, Chief of the Luftwaffe’s General Staff. Jeschonnek told Herrmann to
set up three wings at once, each with forty Me.s or FW.s, to operate from
the fighter airfields at Bonn-Hangelar, Rheine, and Oldenburg. ‘Given the right
weather,’ Göring’s deputy Erhard Milch wrote to him, on the twenty-ninth, ‘we can
expect substantial successes.’ Major Herrmann promised Göring that by the end of
September his new force would be operational; in fact, within less than three weeks
his force, code-named ‘Wild Boar,’ would begin its activities, baffling Bomber Command’s Operational Research experts with the unaccountably high casualty rate which
the Command was again suffering, in spite of the final introduction of Window.
On the night of July – Herrmann and his six comrades, piloting single-engined
FW. and Me. planes, took off from Mönchengladbach on the western edge of
the Ruhr to engage an approaching formation of R.A.F. heavy bombers. Within a
short time, the Ruhr’s powerful batteries of -centimetre and -centimetre
searchlights had illuminated a patch of sky across which Herrmann’s pilots could
make out some fifty to sixty four-engined bombers crawling towards Cologne. They
joined a running battle which continued, even though Herrmann had reached no
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
agreement on altitudes with General Burckhardt, Commander of the th Flak Division (Cologne), right over the target city.The bombardment of Cologne began three
quarters of an hour after midnight and lasted for two hours. By the time the unwelcome attentions of their own flak guns forced the seven fighters to break off the
engagement they claimed to have destroyed twelve of the thirty-two British aircraft
which did not return from Cologne.
Major Herrmann reported the little victory that same night to the Commanderin-Chief (Centre), Colonel-General Hubert Weise; he apologised for having adopted
tactics forbidden by Kammhuber, but added that ‘in spite of the hot metal flying
around over Cologne’ he and his men had destroyed twelve enemy raiders. ‘You just
have to hang around the ⁶are-clusters,’ he reported at a conference on July , and
added the view that a proper force of such freelance night-fighters would soon be
shooting down eighty bombers a night.
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Late on July , , Bomber Command’s crews were ordered to prepare for
operations that night. It was the day that Sir Arthur Harris had finally won permission for Window to be used for the first time. Before his crews had time to find out
what target was in store for them – it was Hamburg – the night’s operation, codenamed ‘Gomorra,’ was scrubbed. On the following morning, a dry and sultry July
, he again issued the executive order for the Battle of Hamburg to begin. By :
P.M. the first Pathfinder aircraft were taking off and setting course for the rendezvous
over Cromer on the East Anglian coast. Zero hour over the great German port would
be at one A.M.
The weather conditions could hardly have been more propitious for the incendiary.The temperatures in Europe that July had been inordinately high, with the fall in
Hamburg itself of less than · inches of rain; the highest rainfall was of only half an
inch on July .
The atmospheric humidity at Hamburg in the first twenty-nine days of July was
only seventy-eight percent, with the lowest humidity, of only thirty percent, recorded on July – significantly, the fire-storm night. During the first half of the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
month the city had baked in a heatwave: mid-day temperatures had not fallen below
˚ Fahrenheit; between July and the thermometer fell to an average ˚, and
rose steadily thereafter to an average of ˚ on the twenty-sixth and ˚ on both the
twenty-seventh and the following day.The air was still, arid and hot. On the opening
night of the Battle which is now to be described, forecasters had predicted a slow
south-easterly breeze varying from ten knots at five thousand feet to only fifteen
knots at twenty thousand feet over Hamburg; but even this breeze was hot and dry,
coming off the parched plains of western and central Germany.
What meteorologists with an ominous turn of phrase term a hot air ‘chimney’ lay
over the city of Hamburg on July –, the night of the first attack, and this chimney did not go away until its evil function had been performed.
During the first years of the war, air raid precautions in the target city had been
advanced to a degree unknown in other German cities. By the time of the Battle of
Hamburg, , of the , buildings in Greater Hamburg with cellars had been
shored up and splinter-proofed; but a further , buildings, mostly in the morewaterlogged areas of the city, had no basements – without water-proof tanking, they
would have flooded too easily. A programme of shelter- and bunker-building was
launched for these areas above ground. In accordance with the Führer’s Shelterbuilding Programme of August , householders had to construct a honeycomb
network of wall-breaches [Mauerdurchbrüche] connecting adjacent basements; by
this work was virtually completed.
Hamburg had exploited every method of securing emergency supplies of water in
the event of a major conflagration: swimming pools, rain-water tanks, wells, industrial cooling-towers, empty oil-storage tanks, even the cellars of blitzed buildings
had been flooded with water and prepared for emergency use. The city’s main features had been cleverly camouflaged: the outlines of both Alster lakes had been changed
and a dummy railway bridge built across them several hundred yards from the real
Lombard bridge; the central railway station was completely hidden and in early
a screen of smoke-generators was installed around the U-boat pens. Fire-prevention
experts had advised homeowners on the clearance of roof-spaces, on the construction of ceilings in commercial and industrial premises that were proof against pen-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
etration by incendiary bombs, and, in the latter part of , on the thorough chemical
fire-proofing of roof timbers and attics.
Astute though these precautions and profound though the foresight of the Hamburg city fathers had been in promoting all of these schemes, all were doomed to
collapse under the weight of the great raids of the Battle of Hamburg.
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In Hamburg July , had already been punctuated by public air raid warnings
at : P.M. and : P.M., but in both cases the All Clear had sounded without
incident a few minutes later. At nineteen minutes after midnight on the twenty-fifth
however a confidential warning was transmitted to all Party and industrial establishments and to the city’s hospitals: Air Danger .
Five minutes later the state of alert was amended to Air Danger .The first waves
of the bomber formations were still far out to sea, but the large radar early warning
stations at Cuxhaven and Wangerooge had already picked them up. With rather under half an hour to go to zero hour, at thirty-three minutes past midnight the first
public warning of imminent danger was sounded – not the usual Forewarning, but a
sudden series of twelve-second blasts on the city’s sirens: Fliegeralarm, Full Alarm.
For a full minute the sirens’ wailing echoed dis-synchronously across the city with its
,, inhabitants from Blankenese in the west to Wandsbek in the east, from
Langenhorn in the North to Harburg in the heart of the dockyard area to the South.
The leading aircraft in the -strong main force of bombers were the twenty
Blind Marker aircraft of the Pathfinder force, each navigating by ·-cm HS radar;
their assigned task was to release salvoes of yellow Target Indicators blindly, on the
indications of their radar screens alone. The T.I.’s were bomb-shaped containers fabricated from sheet steel, each of which explosively ejected sixty pyrotechnic candles, each burning at , candle-power, at an altitude of two thousand feet; the
distinctive flares would burn fiercely in a -foot wide patch of brilliant, inextinguishable yellow light on the ground. At the same time as setting these ‘primary
markers’ the Blind Markers had to release parachute flares over the city area. Guided
by the eight primary markers, eight more Pathfinder crews, also equipped with HS,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
were to attempt to identify the actual aiming point – in the heart of the southern
residential areas of Hamburg’s inner city – and to mark it visually with red groundburning T.I.’s.
These twenty-eight Pathfinder aircraft were thus the first aircraft to arrive over
Hamburg on the night of July –. They were also the first to release Window
operationally during the war. The predicted confusion of the German defences did
not however immediately arise, as an extract from the log-sheet of one of these
blind-marker aircraft shows: (The aircraft was a Lancaster from the veteran No
Pathfinder squadron.)
: A.M. HELIGOLAND to Starboard. Windows [released];
: A.M. ˚ CUXHAVEN [miles: HS radar fix];
: A.M. Violent evasive action; ˚ HAMBURG ·;
: A.M. Position ‘C’. See course for TARGET; coned by searchlights [i.e. trapped
by several searchlights after being located by radar-predicted ‘Master’ searchlight.]
This shows that over twenty minutes after the first release of Window the German
searchlight batteries were still ‘clear-headed.’ But the rate of Window-ing was increasing as more bombers passed the ·˚ East datum line, and although at one bundle per aircraft per minute the metal foil was not being scattered as voluminously as
during later stages of the war, the increasing saturation of the air space over the
German Bight and Hamburg with clouds of these ‘tuned dipoles’ produced a cumulative effect on the ground defences.
‘Ahead of us we could see Hamburg,’ wrote the pilot of another Blind Marker
aircraft of No Squadron afterwards. ‘Every searchlight in Germany seemed suddenly to have been switched on. Below us there were stabs of flame as the guns
started firing. I took an accurate bearing on the target and passed it to the bomb
aimer; from now on, it would be his duty to guide us in. It was five minutes to zero.
As we approached, the incredible happened. The searchlights started swinging all
over the sky, completely without aim. The flak became confused and wild. The radio
monitors in our aircraft later reported hearing frenzied German radio operators
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
shouting that ‘millions of bombers’ were coming. The night fighters waiting to be
vectored on to us could only gamble in fury as their own radar gear became useless.’
Hamburg was only ten minutes from the worst catastrophe in its history.
Within minutes the coastal radar station had ceased to transmit data; until the
bombers came within range of the flak-batteries’ Würzburg-Dora radars, the only
source of information was visual and sound identification by the Observation Corps.
‘We could hear excited voices coming from the radar cabin,’ recalls one member of
the crew of an eighty-eight millimetre flak-battery located on the Harburg hills.
‘There was a wild display of flickers on their cathode-ray tubes, clouding the whole
screen. The Battery Commander, First Lieutenant Eckhoff, telephoned at once to
the nearest battery to us. The Würzburg-Dora there had been put out of action too.’
On telephoning the Flak Division’s operations room, the battery commander was
informed that every radar set in the Hamburg area was out of action. To the British
and Empire airmen flying three and four miles above the now helpless gun crews it
seemed a miracle. Many had been frankly dubious of the claims their commanding
officers had made for Window at the briefings that afternoon, but now their doubts
were dispelled.
:· A.M. Marker bombs gone.
: A.M. Over target; setting course for Position ‘D’.
The eight Visual Markers now attempted to sight and identify the marking point;
only a slight haze prevented otherwise perfect visibility but the visual marking fell
short of perfect, one salvo of the red T.I.’s falling two miles to the south-east, another
one and a half miles to the north-west, a third three and one quarter miles to the
north-east, and yet a fourth two and one half miles to the west in Altona. Large
though these margins of error may seem, it must be remembered that they were
being dropped from a level of some four miles above the target. The main force of
bombers, faced with only an ineffective barrage of unaimed fire from the flak, were
equal to the task of bombing on these four concentrations of markers.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Of the crews which subsequently claimed to have attacked, no fewer than
were found from their night-photographs to have placed their bomb loads within a
three-mile radius of the aiming point in Hamburg; the crews dropped , tons of
high explosive including many hundreds of ‘blockbusters’ which were concentrated
in the early part of the attack to rip open the houses and provide combustible material for the tons of fire bombs carried by the force.
Hamburg’s Police headquarters was gutted and the civil defence control room was
engulfed in fire. Operations were transferred to the Security Police control room;
although the telephone service broke down, it was swiftly superseded by motorcycle
despatch-riders.
This first raid of July – caused enormous fires.They had not been extinguished
even after twenty-four hours.The citizens of Hamburg had accumulated large stocks
of fuel for the winter in their cellars, and when these stocks caught fire they could
not easily be quenched. ‘One single suburb,’ gasped Hitler at his mid-day conference
in East Prussia, ‘has lost eight hundred dead!’
By the time that the All Clear sounded at one minute past three in the morning,
fifteen hundred people had been killed.
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The sudden use of Window by the British caused pandemonium at Luftwaffe headquarters.The Kammhuber Line was useless. In the early hours of July Major Hajo
Herrmann was for the second time in three weeks telephoned at his airfield at
Mönchengladbach by Reich Marshal Göring; the Luftwaffe commander told him
that it had been ‘very bad’ in Hamburg and asked whether at least some of the new
Night Fighting Experimental Kommando could be thrown into action at once, as he
anticipated further attacks on Hamburg. Major Herrmann promised to have at least
twelve fighters airborne that night.
On receiving Göring’s subsequent telegram of confirmation, he understood the
reasons for the pressure. The night’s raid had devastated the Hamburg districts of
Hoheluft, Elmsbüttel and Altona as well as the inner city. The conditions would have
been perfect for his ‘Wild Boar’ units over the city – the enemy bombers would have
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
been clearly silhouetted against the burning streets below. Working in great haste
Herrmann improvised an orientation system for his fighter pilots, who had no second crewman to act as observers or navigators and were accustomed to day fighting
conditions: he arranged for the Hamburg flak batteries to fire triple parachute flares
of a certain colour, the Hanover batteries two flares, and similarly distinctive flare
signals would be constantly fired over the main cities to enable the fighter pilots to
find their way; later on, this system would be replaced by a more sophisticated radio
beacon network.
During the first night of the Battle, the British had lost only twelve bombers to
enemy action out of the dispatched, thanks to Window; the flak and the fighters
claimed six each. As a direct consequence of Major Herrmann’s new tactic, however,
these losses would now rise sharply.That night, July –, Air Vice-marshal Donald
Bennett, to whose Pathfinder crews so much credit was due for the success of the
Battle of Hamburg, sent his light Mosquito force to harass the city; the sudden
Fliegeralarm sounding at thirty-five minutes past midnight awakened fresh fears in
the inhabitants.The main attack of that night however was on Essen, with a zero hour
ten minutes later. The Essen raid, Bennett afterwards explained, was ‘to fool the
German defences, but I sent a few Mosquitoes along to Hamburg to ring the alarms
and make the frightened people in Hamburg frightened once again. On the th I
did the same, just to keep their nerves on edge.’ – On the twenty-sixth two Mosquitoes dropped only two high explosive bombs on the city; but they sent one and a half
million people to their shelters for another thirty-one minutes.
Even if no other intelligence betrayed to the Germans that it was Harris’ intention
to attack Hamburg night after night until it was totally destroyed, this round the
clock intimidation of the population did. ‘The continuation of the first raid by daylight and nuisance raids until the morning of the th disclosed the enemy’s intentions,’ wrote S.S. Gruppenführer Kehrl in his report. As police chief – Polizeipräsident
– Kehrl was ex officio director of Hamburg’s civil defences. ‘When a fifth alert was
sounded during the night of July – we were not surprised, but the weight of the
raid exceeded all our expectations.’
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Harris had devised the bombers’ route that night with the intent of throwing the
enemy defenders off the scent. The main force and the Pathfinder squadrons had
headed out over the North Sea from Cromer on two different routes, meeting at an
appointed rendezvous some forty-five miles west-north-west of Heligoland and thereafter passing some miles south of Kiel naval base. Here the whole force turned onto
a southerly route across Hamburg; after the attack the force divided again some
thirty miles south of the city over the Lüneburg Heath; one section headed northwest out to sea, and the other due west across country in an almost direct line for
Cromer.
At five minutes to one the Pathfinders released the first of fifteen salvoes of yellow
Target Indicators over Hamburg. This time the eight Visual Markers had been dispensed with, in recognition of their aiming errors three nights before.The HS radar
marking had proved far better. All twenty-five primary marker aircraft were to drop
their yellow T.I.’s blindly on the basis of HS radar alone – Hamburg’s intricate network of waterways showed up particularly clearly on the radar screens. There were
minor improvements on the previous raid’s marking technique: during the previous
main force raid a seven-mile ‘creep-back’ had developed, with each new load of
green ‘backing-up’ T.I.’s only aggravating the error. On this second main force raid,
the wave of ‘Backers-Up’ were instructed to overshoot the main yellow concentration of ground marker T.I.’s by about two hundred yards to compensate for this
main-force error. This time the blind-laid yellow T.I.’s were well concentrated in the
Billwärder district, one of the most densely populated areas of Hamburg’s inner city.
By : A.M. when the All Clear sounded, a single one-minute siren tone, the
bombers had dropped a further , tons of bombs. ‘As a result of the high-explosive bombs and “blockbusters” dropped,’ the Police President described in his report,‘large numbers of roofs were stripped and the windows and doors were blasted
open and smashed; the Self Protection Service was driven for shelter into the cellar.’
The Selbstschutz included voluntary civil defence personnel, local air-raid wardens,
etc. ‘The continually alternating hail of high-explosive and fire-bombs and “blockbusters” enabled the fires to spread virtually unhindered.’
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Since the bomb load included liquid incendiaries, fires spread rapidly from the
attics and upper floors downward into the lower storeys.With tons of incendiaries dropped, the proportion of fire-bombs was considerably higher than in the first
main-force raid.
Forty minutes after zero hour it was recognised that Germany’s first fire-storm
had begun, the tornado of rising hot air sucking in fresh oxygen from all around, the
resulting tempests reaching such hurricane strengths that they tossed entire buildings, railroad boxcars, vehicles, trees and people willy nilly into the searing inferNo
Fires flashed through entire streets in seconds. Few people who came close enough
to witness the infernal scene survived. It was a fiery moloch which consumed all
those who set eyes upon it. The heat was so fierce that it melted glass, steel, and
bricks; it incinerated buildings, shelters, and their occupants without regard for sex,
age, or infirmity.
This second attack of the Battle of Hamburg had embraced eight square miles of
the city’s most heavily built-up and densely-populated area, with a registered resident population of , inhabitants swollen by thousands of evacuees from the
area blitzed three nights before.The area ravaged by this fire-storm included the four
districts of Rothenburgsort, Hammerbrook, Borgfelde and South Hamm. In these
four districts the fatality rates were appalling – · percent, · percent, ·
percent, and · percent of all known inhabitants.When Dr Goebbels phoned his
old friend Karl Kaufmann, the Hamburg gauleiter screamed down the line: ‘We’ve
got fifteen thousand dead.’ Kaufmann told Göring a few hours later that twenty-six
thousand bodies, mostly women and children, had been counted. The figure would
eventually climb to nearly fifty thousand. The photographs showed the streets littered with flame-seared bodies, many of women lying tangled with their obligatory
‘air raid suitcase’, sometimes stripped naked by the hurricane winds; one picture
showed a little boy hugging a fireman, both dead in each other’s embrace.
It was plain that Bomber Command would return.The following day Dr Goebbels
appealed to all non-essential civilian personnel to leave the city. Hamburg waited
and sweltered – the noon temperature was still over ˚F. Between dawn and dusk
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
of July nine hundred thousand civilians streamed out of the centre of Hamburg.
As night fell only essential fire-fighting and defence personnel were left.
Two minutes before midnight, their grim expectation was fulfilled as those of Hamburg’s sirens which still had their voice and power sounded the Full Alarm. The
Pathfinders again adopted the pure HS blind marking which they had used with
such catastrophic success on the previous night; in spite of favourable weather however the marking was less accurate – a measure of the renewed threat presented by
the German defences. Of the Lancasters, Halifaxes, Stirlings and Wellingtons
despatched, only crews claimed to have attacked, dropping , tons of bombs;
this was a higher rate of abortive sorties than previously. Despite Window, the loss
rate was climbing again. Major Herrmann’s ‘wild boar’ pilots accounted for eighteen
of the twenty-eight bombers destroyed that night. The Official History of the strategic air offensive states that ‘ minutes after zero hour, which was at a quarter to
one, an area of square miles was dotted with burning incendiaries.’ The police
chief Kehrl confirmed that this raid of July was as devastating as the fire-storm
raid of the twenty-seventh; the low loss of life in this third attack could be attributed
partly to Goebbels’ evacuation order.
During the four main-force attacks of the Battle of Hamburg – there was a final
raid delivered under adverse weather conditions on the night of August – – Sir
Arthur Harris had dispatched , sorties; the aircrews released , tons of
bombs, nearly half of them incendiaries, for a total casualty rate of · percent. The
Pathfinder Group had dispatched sorties losing thirteen aircraft, also . percent of its sorties.
As a direct result of this hard-fought Battle of Hamburg, as the police chief reported on December , , the known dead totalled ,, of which , had
been identified – , men, , women and , children. That could not be
regarded as a realistic final figure however as the centre of Hamburg was still in
ruins. At the end of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey suggested a corrected
figure of , killed and , seriously injured. After investigating the final
totals of missing persons Hamburg’s provincial bureau of statistics, the Statistisches
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Landesamt, arrived at an estimate of over fifty thousand dead in the Battle of
Hamburg.
Whether the virtually complete destruction of a major German city really achieved
any positive effect on the course of the war is a moot point. In fact the city’s heavy
industries lost about forty-five days’ production. Of the major factories,
had been destroyed; of Hamburg’s smaller plants, numbering ,, , were
destroyed. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, generally regarded as hostile to the
British bombing effort, estimated that within five months Hamburg had recovered
eighty percent of its former productivity. The American statisticians however ignored the argument which Sir Arthur Harris would vigorously stress: what would
have been the level of productivity within those five months if Bomber Command
had not thus checked its expansion in its stride?
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While undoubtedly the Battle of Hamburg had contributed to the Casablanca Directive’s target of ‘the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German economic and industrial system’ or not, by the time that the final All Clear echoed
across the now rain-soaked and wrecked city in the early morning hours of August ,
, the British airmen had taken the lives of fifty thousand civilians, all of whom in
the years immediately preceding the war both belligerent parties had earnestly sworn
to protect.
‘The streets were littered with hundreds of corpses,’ S.S. Obergruppenführer Kehrl
described, ‘Mothers with their children, youths and elderly people; sometimes their
bodies were charred and burned, sometimes untouched; sometimes they were
clothed, sometimes naked, with a waxen pallor like tailors’ dummies. They lay in
every attitude, now quiet and composed, now hideously contorted, with the final
struggle of death crying out in every line of their faces.’ Even those who had reached
the public air raid shelters had not escaped; there scenes were little different, unusual only where panic had broken out as the people realised the nature of the fate
they would never elude. ‘Here and there the positioning of the remains of the bones
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
and skulls betrayed how the occupants had fought each other to escape from their
buried prisons.’
When rescue teams finally cleared their way into the hermetically sealed bunkers
and shelters after several weeks, the heat generated inside them had been so intense
that nothing remained of their occupants; a soft undulating layer of grey ash was left
in one bunker, from which the number of victims could only be estimated as ‘between and ’ by the doctors. Doctors were frequently employed in these
gruesome tasks of enumeration, as the German Reich Statistical Office was up to
January , most meticulous about compiling its statistical tables and data.The
uncommon temperatures in these bunkers were further testified to by the pools of
molten metal which had formerly been pots, pans, and cooking utensils taken into
them.
The task of recovering the bodies was allocated to the Sicherheits-und Hilfsdienst
(S.H.D.), the Rescue and Repair Service, which was organised in five divisions: fire
service, comprised of local fire-brigades as distinct from the para-military national
service; Instandsetzungsdienst, the service which repaired fractured gas mains, restored electricity and water supplies, and demolished dangerous structures; the medical service, organised by the German Red Cross; the decontamination service, for
counter-measures during allied gas-attacks, and finally the veterinary service for tending wounded livestock and pets.
In Hamburg the S.H.D. cordoned off a two-and-a-half mile square Dead Zone,
embracing the whole fire-storm area; streets into this area were sealed with barbed
wire and dry masonry.This measure was necessitated both the undreamed of accumulation of corpses inside this area, and by the belief that publicly visible recovery operations would injure civilian morale. A special security formation of police battalions
was drafted in from outside Hamburg to maintain law and order, to forestall mass
breakouts by prisoners or foreign labourers in the city, and to bolster civilian morale; according to the Police President they were not heeded, and were soon disbanded.
Most of the credit for the restoration of civilian morale in Hamburg itself could be
attributed to the prompt arrival of Dr Goebbels from a week-end vacation with his
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
wife in Dresden. He was keen not only to organise on a large scale the relief measures and rehabilitation of the homeless: he wanted to gather experience for his own
city, for he expected the R.A.F. soon to do unto the Reich capital what it had now
done to Hamburg.
Hitler’s armaments minister Albert Speer expressed the view under interrogation
that if six more German cities had been similarly devastated, he could not have maintained arms production. Air Vice-marshal Bennett afterwards went further: ‘Unhappily,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘nobody seemed to realise that a great victory had
been won… Whatever the chances of success might have been, it would have been
certainly worth while to have tried to have weakened German morale by some appropriate political action.’ But Harris would point out that with the best luck in the
world Bomber Command could not repeat the Hamburg catastrophe on six major
cities at once: ‘To find new targets even half or a third the size of Hamburg, we
should have had to go as far afield as Dresden or Breslau.’
The Battle of Hamburg, like the Dresden tragedy just eighteen months later, was
an operation executed with the precision and determination characteristic of Bomber
Command at its most puissant: the commander had fulfilled his commission of briefly
demoralising the enemy; it was the tragedy of Casablanca, that the same political
leaders who had given the Command its directive had by their requirement of ‘unconditional surrender’ ensured that the best that the Command could accomplish on
this front would not shorten the war by one day.
Sir Robert Saundby in an interview with the author.
Thus, we learn from post-war study of the Protocols of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft ‘Rotterdam’, the
German scientific committee investigating the Allies’ decimetric radar – Rotterdam was their codename for HS, salvaged in Jan from a Pathfinder bomber which crashed near that city – that as
late as September they were still wrestling with the probability theory and other mathematical
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
niceties connected with the ideal dimensions and stiffness of the metal foil,; the imitation Window
(code-named Düppel) which they developed had only limited success.
On the night of Mar –, , during an RAF Bomber Command attack on Hamburg, metal foil
was dropped along the Elbe Estuary and over various towns on the route of the bomber formations to
Hamburg; this had not been authorised by either Sir Arthur Harris or Sir Robert Saundby, but appears
to have been one airman’s private effort to spare his own aircraft or squadron from the losses which
recent attacks on Hamburg invariably entailed, by releasing the Window already supplied to his station.
Historians are unanimously incorrect in asserting that this running commentary tactic was an ad
hoc emergency measure devised by frantic German defence experts after the success of Window on
the first night of the Battle of Hamburg. See below for evidence that its was in preparation for over a
month before, pp.-.
Hajo Herrmann, holder of the Knight’s Cross, and still alive as the revised edition of this book
goes to press, has more recently acted as the author’s brave attorney in many a stiff legal skirmish with
the present German authorities – thirty years after these lines were first written.
See Göring’s diary record of their conference of Jun , , in David Irving, Göring (London,
), p.; for the conference transcript, see Milch Documents, vol., pp., et seq.
(Bundesarchiv.)
Milch to Göring, Jun , (Ibid., vol., p.).
The reply of Weise showed that he had forgiven Hermann already: ‘th July . Top Secret
Telegram to Major Hermann, Night Fighting Experimental Kommando, Mönchengladbach. Express
my admiration of you and your men for the first magnificent success of your Experimental Kommando
over West German industrial area, especially since on your own initiative you executed operation in
the area most heavily attacked last night. C.-in-C. (Central), WEISE.’
For the raids on Hamburg see Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive
against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.ii, pp.–, and Royal Air Force –, vol.iii,
pp.–.
Navigation charts were supplied to the author by Pilot Officer J Moorcroft.
Helmut Heiber (ed.), Hitler’s Lagebesprechungen (Stuttgart, ), Jul , (pp. et seq.).
S.S. Gruppenführer Kehrl, ‘Bericht des Polizeipräsidenten in Hamburg als örtlicher
Luftschutzleiter über die schweren Großangriffe auf Hamburg in Juli/August ,’ Dec . .
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This contrasts with the suggestion in Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air
Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.ii., that the bombers despatched once again
followed a single route.
For a description of the fire-storm phenomenon and the causes of death in fire-storms see Hans
Brunswig, Feuersturm über Hamburg (Stuttgart, ), pp.–.
Goebbels diary, Jul , . Goebbels’ secretary Richard Otte, taking dictation the next morn-
ing, thought that Goebbels might even have said fifty thousand.
Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO,
London, ) vol.ii. – This was a curiously obtuse way of saying that the bombs were scattered over
a circle of radius . miles.
S.S. Gruppenführer Kehrl, ‘Bericht des Polizeipräsidenten in Hamburg als örtlicher
Luftschutzleiter über die schweren Großangriffe auf Hamburg in Juli/August ,’ Dec . . –
An earlier interim figure for the Hamburg death roll was given by the Hamburg Police Headquarters
Report of Sep , as ,.
U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, ‘A Detailed Study of the Effects of Area Bombing on Hamburg.’
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
A Second Firestorm
O
night of the Battle of Hamburg the bombers’ loss rate had
been the lowest for a year: twelve of the bombers despatched had
failed to return. On the second night the losses had risen to seventeen;
on the night of July –, thirty bombers had failed to return; on the fourth and
last night of the Battle, the loss rate was even higher.
After this comparative success of Major Herrmann’s new force, now formally named
the th Fighter Division, General Kammhuber, the Inspector of Night Fighters,
called a conference of his senior officers in Berlin. Dr Goebbels, as Berlin’s Reich
Defence Commissioner, was not alone in anticipating attempts to repeat the success
of the Battle of Hamburg in a renewed air offensive on Berlin; but the blow did not
follow as swiftly as either he or the senior air officers expected. Hamburg had been
principally a victim of the R.A.F.’s new ·-centimetre HS radar system; for Berlin,
a city without any of the large expanses of water which characterised the Hanseatic
port, the real Battle would have to await delivery to No Squadron of the first
operational -centimetre HS sets, with their greatly improved definition. As in the
case of Dresden in February , the target had to await the technology.
On the night of August – Sir Arthur Harris despatched a force of aircraft
to attack targets in the Berlin Tempelhof area; ninety-four of the Pathfinder aircraft
carried the older version of HS.The same blind marking tactics, actually using where
possible the same Pathfinder crews as at Hamburg, were adopted. For the crews, the
Berlin raid was again remarkable for the comparative absence of flak defences over
their target: crews seldom noticed heavy flak unless the shell bursts were within a
few hundred feet of their aircraft, but under debriefing after this raid many airmen
reported that the Germans had ‘put up scores of fighters’, and that there were ‘about
N THE FIRST
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
twenty belts of searchlights inside the capital and around it, co-operating with the
fighters.’
The raid had been timed to begin at : P.M., and, although Window-ing had
started at : P.M., by : p.M., before the first waves of bombers had even
crossed the Dutch coast, the German ground controller’s running commentary was
already suggesting that Berlin was the target. At : P.M., over half an hour before
zero hour, all night fighters were ordered to the capital. By : P.M. aircraft were
being shot down by the fighter defences all along the route from Hanover into Berlin. The result that night was that Bomber Command mourned its highest loss to
date: fifty-six bombers did not return, of which at least thirty-three had fallen to the
German fighter defences – no fewer than twenty of these latter over Berlin itself, a
most unwelcome innovation for the bomber crews, who expected to be spared this
hazard when over the heavy flak areas.
On August , the second night of this new Berlin series, the price exacted by the
fighters was even higher: no longer tied to Kammhuber’s rigid system of fighterboxes, they were summoned from as far afield as Grove in Northern Denmark and
Dijon in Central France. Zero hour was at : P.M., and once again the bombers
started releasing bundles of Window some two hours previously, well out over the
North Sea, to confuse the early-warning radars. Forty-seven bombers did not return
to their bases, probably all of them the victims of the German night fighters who
claimed as many as thirty successes over Berlin itself. During this raid, Major
Herrmann employed brilliant yellow and white fighter flares for the first time in
addition to relying on the glare of the batteries of searchlights to illuminate the cloud
layers; he and his growing band of freelance fighters could see the British raiders
clearly silhouetted against the clouds. As the Official History later observed, with a
perceptibly puzzled tone, ‘the [flak] barrage at Berlin had been of only moderate
intensity.’The successes of the fighter squadrons were not without impact on Bomber
Command’s aircrew morale: a thirty-mile creep-back of bombs on this occasion
testified to the unwillingness of a large number of crews to ‘press on’ into the heart
of the target area where eight days before so many of their comrades had been lost.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
This – for Bomber Command – disastrous little Berlin series ended on September
, with a curious example of routing, overlooked by the Official Historians.
The all-Lancaster bomber stream was ordered to return from Berlin over neutral
Sweden; this provided the bomber crews with both a fabulous war-time glimpse of
cities with all their lights on by night and the comfort of knowing that German night
fighters could not pursue them; partly in consequence of this device, only ten of the
attacking force fell to German fighter defences.
In the three raids, Sir Arthur Harris had despatched , sorties to Berlin, of
which only twenty-seven had de⁵nitely resulted in bombs falling within three miles
of the aiming point. In attained this meagre success his Command had lost bombers, an average loss rate of · percent – higher than the level suggested by his Operational Research experts as being the maximum permissible even over a short
term. He had no choice but to leave Berlin severely alone, at last until improved
tactics could be evolved to counter this unexpected resurgence of the night-fighter
threat.
As for Major Hajo Hermann, whose unit had saved perhaps half a million lives in
Berlin, he was decorated by the Führer with the Oak Leaves to his Knight’s Cross;
while General Kammhuber was soon after the last Berlin raid displaced to the minor
post of commander-in-chief, Luftflotte in Norway; to his former post of Inspector
of Night Fighters came Major Hermann, a move which augured ill for any future
Battle of Berlin. The Inspector of Day Fighters was Adolf Galland, whose name appears to be better known to air historians.
v
v
v
For Bomber Command it was obvious from the post-raid debriefings that most of
the aerial combats now were taking place over the target area, where the concentration of bombers gave the night fighters their richest pickings. The obvious solutions
were to try to deceive the German fighter controller as to the real target or targets
for the night, and to keep the actual raids as short as possible. From now on the
decoy raids and spoofs, executed sometimes by Air Vice-marshal Bennett’s Light
Night Striking Force and sometimes by entire bomber groups became more fre-
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quent, their timing and routing grew increasingly complex, and their Window deception techniques and electronic countermeasures ever more elaborate, as Sir Arthur
Harris tried to throw the German fighter controllers off the scent.
By autumn the German Fighter Command had completed the construction
of five cavernous underground bunkers to house the fighter control rooms for the
old Kammhuber Line. At Stade, a few miles north-west of Hamburg, the bunker
housing the nd Fighter Division for the German Bight was blasted out of a cliff face
and code-named Socrates; the bunker at Arnhem-Deelen housed the rd Fighter
Division covering Holland and the Ruhr; the bunker at Döberitz housed the st
Fighter Division covering Berlin and Central Germany, with other bunkers at
Schleissheim – th Fighter Division, Southern Germany – and Metz. These control
bunkers, aptly dubbed ‘battle opera-houses’ by the Luftwaffe personnel who worked
there, served as clearing-houses for the information on Harris’ intentions that arrived from every source including the highly advanced German radio-monitoring
units; but they were also the system’s Achilles Heel, because it was from here that
the fighter controllers directed the airborne fighter formations by running commentary into the bomber stream.
Soon after seven P.M. on October , , the Duty Officers in these western
control bunkers were informed by telephone from the Paris Headquarters of
Funkhorchregiment West – the Radio Monitoring Regiment – that the position was
‘Eagles five-hundred’. By monitoring the enemy squadrons warming up their radios
prior to take-off they had calculated that there would be approximately five hundred
British aircraft operating that night. Soon afterwards a further report arrived, stating
that the British Gee radio navigation chain had been switched on for an attack on
Germany.
The duty officers took up their stations: forty switches on each control desk in
each bunker provided instant communication to every fighter plane in the Division.
All officers and N.C.O.’s took up their positions on the terraces of the ‘opera house’.
To the left of the duty officer sat two officers in contact with the distant WürzburgRiesen early warning chain which would plot the bomber stream’s path, Windowing or not. One terrace lower down sat the ten Jägerleitoffiziere – fighter-control
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
officers – already in direct radio contact with the fighter stations, ready to hook up
the fighter aircraft to the senior controller as soon as the battle warmed up. At the
foot of the terrace was a giant translucent screen onto which Luftwaffe girls in contact with distant radar posts projected blue and red arrows representing German
and British formations respectively at thirty second intervals. In an office to one side
sat twelve stenographers taking down transcripts of all telephone messages and orders.
This highly ordered and ruthlessly rational conduct of the defence of the Reich
would have been better suited to earlier phases of the war. By the whole system
was already severely dislocated by the development of Harris’ feint attacks and the
decoy Mosquito raids; on the night of October – however Harris was to toss a
new and, as it turned out, literally infuriating spanner into the works as the already
overburdened senior controller attempted to direct the fighter force to the correct
target in time.
At : P.M. the first intelligence arrived from the giant radar stations; their Mammut
and Wassermann equipment, with a range of some miles, had detected enemy
aircraft approaching over the North Sea. The first red arrows lit up on the screen,
approaching the entrance of the Schelde. The Duty Officers ordered cockpit readiness for the entire force of night-fighters. Everything now depended on the senior
controller determining which was the target for the bombers.
Herein lay a problem however because on this night R.A.F. Bomber Command
was to introduce a new radio deception technique code named Corona. Air Commodore E B Addison, who was in charge of radio jamming, had discovered that the
powerful Corona transmitter, originally intended to jam the VHF radio traffic between German fighter controllers and their pilots, could be put to far better use
interpolating false ‘fighter control’ directions diverting fighters to distant corners of
the Reich or, more insidiously, warning of fog closing the fighters’ home airfields so
that they landed prematurely. At Kingsdown, in Kent, the British government had
established a radio monitoring station where they had been recording these running
commentaries for some time.The Post Office had placed its most high-powered VHF
transmitters at Addison’s disposal and now, with a handful of Jewish émigrés, Poles,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
and English linguists, each carefully shadowing a different Jägerleitoffizier and studying his idioms and dialect, their operation was ready to begin.
v
v
v
The Bomber Command target for the night was Kassel, in the province of Hesse.
At : P.M. Hesse’s flak network issued the order to ‘stand by’. Seven minutes later
the network carried the first warnings of ‘many enemy aircraft approaching the Schelde
estuary over a broad front’:
: P.M. Complete black-out. More waves of aircraft approaching Schelde estuary. Observation Post ‘Dortmund’ reports: Many enemy aircraft overhead. More
waves of aircraft approaching Schelde estuary.
. P.M. Flak: Stand by to open fire.
One minute later the flak at Kassel was reported ‘standing by’.
It is clear from the transcripts written up by the stenographers that until the very
last moment there was uncertainty about the destination of the bombers. Sir Arthur
Harris had arranged for the actual main force attack on Kassel to be covered by a
diversionary attack on Frankfurt-on-Main, commencing five minutes before the raid
on Kassel, and by No Group’s mining operations (known as ‘Gardening’) off
Terschelling; Harris had routed his bomber stream with deliberately ambiguity, to
support the possibility of a main force attack on Frankfurt.
At : P.M. the Luftwaffe ordered Kassel’s balloon barrage sent aloft. Two minutes later the city’s sirens sounded the Full Alarm.
: P.M. th Flak Battery [Kassel]: Picking up radar echoes.
: P.M. th Flak Battery: Radar echoes lost.
At : the observation posts in Holland announced that the last waves of aircraft
had passed overhead. To enable ‘wild boar’ fighter operations the flak was ordered
not to set their fuses above , feet.The ⁶ak gunners protested that theirWürzburg
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
equipment was picking up radar echoes at an altitude of , feet. There was a
four-minute delay while this was considered, then the flak was given permission to
open fire on positively identified enemy bombers up to , feet; all WürzburgDora radar sets were equipped with I.F.F. attachments to identify friend from foe. At
that moment the Observer Corps gave the signal that Sir Arthur Harris, and the
Corona team, had hoped for:
: P.M. Most probable target tonight is Frankfurt-on-Main.
Knowing that the fighter controllers were dispatching their fighter aircraft to Frankfurt the task facing the Kingsdown ‘shadow’ controllers was to delay the fighters as
far as possible, either by instructing them to orbit particular beacons awaiting further orders or by preying on their most potent fear, of all airfields suddenly being
‘socked in’ by bad weather. (On November , during an attack on Ludwigshafen, a
Corona warning that all south German airfields were becoming fogbound would
achieve a dramatic collapse of the defences as most of the fighters headed for the
nearest airfield: only one bomber was lost.)
On October –, the night of the Kassel attack, weather conditions were in fact
very poor right up the eastern edge of the Ruhr, with ten-tenths cloud up to twenty
thousand feet, electrical storms and severe icing which itself forced many aircraft to
return without bombing. At first bad luck dogged this first Corona deception operation: most of the night fighters had assembled over beacons north of the bomber
route, to the south of which lay Frankfurt. Convinced by the diversionary attack that
Frankfurt was indeed the main target the senior controller sent the night fighters
streaming south, and many stumbled across the tail end of the bomber stream near
Cologne, wreaking havoc on the slower Halifaxes near there. Of the forty-two aircraft missing this night, thirty-two were probably victims of the night fighters, twelve
of them being from No Group alone.
It certainly seemed to the Kassel defences at first that they were not to be needed
that night. At : p.M. they received the signal, ‘Bombs are falling on Frankfurt-onMain.’ That city was miles away. But already the first Pathfinder Blind Marker
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
aircraft, loaded only with yellow sky marker flares, were beginning their bombing
runs on Kassel. Most of their flares overshot by between one-and-a-half and five
miles, although the flak would not open fire for two more minutes. Two marker
flares which were released over the aiming point at : P.M. were however sufficient
for the Visual Markers then arriving to drop their red target indicators with great
accuracy. By : P.M., zero minus three minutes, there was a brilliant concentration
of eighty red T.I.’s within half a mile of the aiming point in the heart of Kassel, a
Pathfinder marking feat scarcely to be exceeded before the Dresden raids.
This was the technique which had produced the fire-storm in Hamburg, and now
it could hardly fail in Kassel. In Kassel, the city was still wondering what was hitting
it:Writing his report six weeks later the police chief of Kassel would observe thickly
that at : the Kassel observation posts had reported bombs falling on Frankfurt
and that as a result of this deception ‘most of the German fighters were ordered to
that zone.’ Even as the first Pathfinder flares were being laid in lanes across the city,
the unfortunate police chief recalled, the situation in the air was still being termed
‘obscure.’ Then, and only then, did the city flak begin firing. It was three minutes to
zero hour:
: P.M. Half of th Flak Battery has opened fire.
: P.M. The whole th Flak Battery is firing. Range found optically at ,
feet.
A furious Jägerleitoffizier ordered all fighters post-haste to Kassel. He warned all his
pilots that there was a rival ‘running commentary’ emanating from the other side of
the Channel, broadcasting false directions to them, and he ordered them not to heed
it; carefully mimicking him, his Kingsdown double advised the pilots to pay no attention to this obvious British trick. Understandably the Jägerleitoffizier began swearing
out loud; his ‘shadow’ coolly observed that ‘the Englishman is now swearing,’ upon
which the German burst out: ‘It is not the Englishman who is swearing, it is me.’
As Dr Goebbels ruefully admitted in his Diary two weeks later it was ‘very humiliating to see how the enemy is leading us by the nose in the air offensive; every
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
month he introduces some new method, which it takes us weeks and sometimes
months to catch up with.’
v
v
v
In Kassel, with up to eight thousand people dying a horrifying death during those
two hours, there was little cause for levity. Barely thirty minutes after the bombers’
zero hour Germany’s second fire-storm had broken out. Harris’ bombers had dropped
a total of ,· tons of high explosive and fire-bombs on Kassel. No fewer than
of the bombers claiming to have attacked were later plotted to have scored
hits within three miles of the aiming point.The night was dry and windless, as on the
night of July –, the second attack on Hamburg – the ideal prerequisite for a firestorm.
Ten minutes previously the city’s main telephone exchange had been hit and
wrecked, and although the bulk of the reinforcements from other cities had already
been summoned by the civil defence operations room, the communications breakdown critically hampered fire-fighting and rescue operations: when the individual
fire-fighting regiments and brigades from all over Hesse arrived at the city outskirts,
the ‘pilot’ offices of the Hitler Youth pilots there had no contact with defence headquarters, and after waiting for orders for a while the fire services went into action in
disjointed operations in the suburbs, while the main damage areas were not tended.
At : P.M., eighty-five minutes after zero hour, the last bombers were still over
Kassel, a city illuminated now both by the fire-storm and by the avenues of fighter
flares above; it was undoubtedly among these final waves of bombers that the fighters
reaped their richest harvest. Meanwhile the fire-brigades from the five-mile radius
arrived in Kassel between : and : P.M., and those from the thirty-mile
radius between : P.M. and : A.M. As the five mobile civil defence detachments already promised did not appear to be sufficient, the Police President appealed to Luftgaukommando – Air Zone Command – VI in Münster for two more.
Anticipating the destruction of the telephone network, the Kassel civil defence
had organised a despatch-rider organisation for just such an emergency; but by the
end of the raid the headquarters was blocked by blazing ruins, the motor-cycles had
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
for the most part been buried, and the streets were impassable; even those despatchriders who were able to penetrate the city’s side-streets had great difficulty in clinging to their machines, so violent was the fire-storm. Delays of over one-and-a-half
hours were thus common in transmitting the headquarters’ directions.
Since Professor Lindemann’s proposals of , Bomber Command’s night offensive had had as its foundation a series of ‘zoning’ maps issued by the Air Ministry
Intelligence Directorate dividing Germany’s cities into a central zone – the ancient
Inner City, often highly inflammable and densely built-up – with a thickly-populated
residential zone surrounding the central zone, and a third outlying industrial zone.
In Kassel, the two fire-storm areas embraced the whole central zone, especially on
the left bank of the River Fulda. Costly though the attack had been to Bomber Command, its effect on the target city was a total disaster. Of a pre-raid total of builtup acres, had been devastated, including three hundred acres of working-class
residential areas.
A preliminary report on the damage caused by this raid, issued on November ,
listed , homes destroyed with over , people homeless; of the ,
homes in the city sixty-five percent were said to be uninhabitable. The police chief
estimated on December that ten thousand residential buildings were destroyed or
damaged, and repeated the estimate of sixty-five percent of all homes being no longer
habitable; he put the number of homeless and bombed-out citizens at ,. Apparently unimpressed by these contemporary estimates, the United States Bombing
Survey estimated in late that ninety-one thousand people had been rendered
homeless that night, while accepting that sixty-one percent of the residential buildings had been destroyed. As Kassel’s pre-raid population was ,, one would be
forgiven for accepting the police chief’s estimate rather than the American’s.
v
v
v
The raid on Kassel provided a classic illustration of the theories underlying the
area offensive. There was a chain-reaction of dislocation, which first paralysed the
city’s public utilities then stopped even the undamaged factories: The city relied for
electricity on the city power station and on the Losse power station; the former was
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
wrecked, the latter halted by destruction of its coal-conveyer; the city’s low-tension
grid was also destroyed. With the loss of only three gas-holders the undamaged gas
works was not in itself unserviceable and the gas mains were not beyond repair. But
without electricity to drive the gas-works machinery, the whole Kassel industrial
area was deprived of both gas and power supplies. Although the five water pumping
stations were undamaged, without electricity they too were paralysed. Without gas,
water, or power supplies Kassel’s industry was crippled.
The physical damage to the factories was considerable: nine principal factories,
including the Fieseler aircraft plant now manufacturing the Fi. flying bomb in
Kassel-Waldau, were seriously damaged; the dilapidations to the three Henschel locomotive and tank plants amounted to forty-two million Reichsmarks. Speer, the
German armaments minister stated at his July interrogation that although the
tank assembly plants had already been slowed down by shortages in components
caused by bombing raids on other cities, the October raid reduced production
of the formidable new Tiger tanks from – monthly to only fifty or sixty.
Although a fire-storm like that in Hamburg had broken out in Kassel, the deathroll in this air raid, of certainly less than eight thousand, was comparatively low. As
usual, it had taken several months to arrive at a final figure.The preliminary report of
November cited an interim figure of ,, of which , had been identified;
by the time of the Police President’s report six days later, the figure had risen to
,, of which , were identifiable. At the end of October the director of
the Henschel works reported that the total death-roll in Kassel was near eight thousand. Once again the United States Strategic Bombing Survey was not satisfied with
these official figures and adopted a lower figure of ,. The Germans, it should be
added, kept records of all air raid losses with meticulous care – even those of livestock: on the night of the Kassel raid, for example, the city also mourned the deaths
of ‘ horses, sixty-eight pigs, twenty-six cows, eight dogs, six goats, three calves,
and one sheep’ as well as numerous domestic pets either killed or put down.
In Hamburg the death-roll had approached , and probably more; the question arises, How did Kassel escape this fate? In the first instance, the city was smaller
than Hamburg. The answer also lay in the extended measures of air raid precautions
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
taken in the city. Since the National Socialists’ election victory in they had
pioneered a thorough slum clearance programme and with remarkable foresight the
city authorities had endeavoured to leave the spaces thus cleared free as escape routes
for the civilian population in the event of a major city fire; this was even before the
war had begun. The escape routes thus cleared and in some cases opened up by the
demolition of quite modern streets were clearly indicated by arrows, and the populace was drilled in mass evacuation by repeated exercises under realistically simulated air raid conditions.
One positive consequence of the flood-waters which had reached Kassel after the
breaching of the Eder dam by No Squadron on the night of May –, as
well as of the American daylight raids on Kassel on July and had been a largescale evacuation which had left only twenty-five thousand indispensable residents in
the city centre. For those unable to reach private shelters, a concrete bunker housing
more than a thousand people had been erected at the St Charles hospital; in fact,
during the fire-storm of October this bunker had to be evacuated when the fires
outside consumed so much oxygen that its inhabitants were in danger of asphyxiation. In spite of the total destruction of five hospitals and serious damage to six more
including a maternity-home, there was not one casualty among either patients or
staff: the immovable sick had been permanently housed in underground tunnels,
shelters, and bunkers, and the ambulatory patients were invariably led to safety as
soon as the Air Danger alert was privately signalled to hospitals from the civil
defence headquarters.
Like Hamburg, Kassel had been provided with an extensive independent fire-hydrant system and the roofing timbers had been chemically fire-proofed; this was
undoubtedly a factor in preventing the spread of the fire-storm. In addition all householders had been required by the hastily passed Luftschutzgesetz – Air Raid Precautions Act – of August , to provide grappling-hooks, ropes, ladders, first-aid
chests, beaters, fire-buckets, water-tubs, sand-boxes, shovels, paper sand-bags, spades,
and sledges-hammers or axes and these were all to prove their worth on the night of
October –. Again with great foresight the dumps of sand had been located
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
ready for laying causeways of sand across roads: the asphalt was expected to melt in
the heat.
Since the Battle of Hamburg, conferences had been held on every level between
the city’s Nazi Party and civil defence leaders. Everybody had been reminded that
their primary duty was to organise the timely evacuation and rescue of people trapped
in air raid shelters. This had proved a weak spot in the Hamburg defences: many
elderly bunker wardens had lost their nerve when they found themselves in the midst
of a fire-storm. In accordance with regulations, all Kassel cinemas had to be closed
each night by : p.M., and it was the practice to halt the State Theatre performances
invariably once the Air Danger alert had been given.Thus although on the night of
the fire-storm every cinema and theatre in Kassel without exception had been totally
destroyed, the loss of life in them was small. Rescue workers recovered people
alive from the ruins, the last person being extricated alive on October , five days
after the raid.
There was one unusual, even startling feature about the eight thousand victims of
the raid: As in Hamburg, a total of seventy percent had been asphyxiated, the greater
part of them by carbon-monoxide fumes. Fifteen percent had met violent deaths.
The remainder could not be analysed, being completely carbonised. A particular
hindrance to recovery work was that the corpses recovered from the basements were
often bloated by the heat and humidity and their serous limbs were falling apart.The
removal of the air raid victims was effected in forty-five covered lorries operating
under the orders of six police officers with iron nerves and numbers of decontamination troops clad in special gas-attack denims. Since there could be no question of using individual coffins because of the danger of typhus and other epidemics
the victims were buried in six cemeteries, in communal graves dug by excavators.To
begin with, the cadavers were buried by Italian prisoners of war in a single layer;
later, owing to pressure on space, the mass-graves were dug twelve inches deeper, so
that the bodies could be interred in two layers. Doctors worked around the clock at
each cemetery determining the cause of death of every victim. Every day at six P.M.
a senior civil defence doctor reported the numbers of buried and unburied casualties
at each cemetery, and the numbers of corpses still waiting on the open streets to be
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
transported to the cemeteries. Sixteen corpse tally-men were placed at this doctor’s
disposal by the medical arm of the S.H.D.
The city authorities organised a Missing Persons Bureau, and this employed within
a few days to staff. The police chief expressed concern in his report at the
numbers killed by asphyxiation, although for the most part they had suffered a peaceful
death, ‘slipping into unconsciousness and finally succumbing without a struggle to
death.’ This was, he suggested, the inevitable consequence of the ethos which had
been dinned into the public during the first three years of the war – that the safest
place in an air raid was in an air-raid shelter. Only since the Battle of Hamburg had
attempts been made to reverse this advice. Many of the victims had probably had
every intention of escaping from their shelters, but had missed the right moment for
this undertaking; the correct moment, during the Kassel raid, would have been some
forty minutes after the start of the attack when the Inner City was still barely passable and the fire-storm was still just emerging, the police chief explained, adding: ‘It
is easy the understand how many people, especially the elderly folk and the women
and children could not pluck up the courage to desert their shelters at a moment
when the bombardment was still in progress.’ In addition to that, although the last
bombs had been dropped eighty-five minutes after zero hour, the continued explosion of delayed action bombs had, as was intended by Bomber Command, further
intimidated this section of the population.
The police chief’s conclusion was simple: ‘All this testifies to the urgency of convincing people better than hitherto of the vital need to evacuate shelters and bunkers
even while major conflagrations are still raging, if they are in the danger area. This is
not the place for misgivings that by depicting too graphically the terrors of the firestorm we may demoralise the civilian population.’
This view differed markedly from the policy of Reich Propaganda Minister Dr
Goebbels. A few days after his funeral oration at Wuppertal-Barmen in June he had
privately declared: ‘If I could hermetically seal off the Ruhr, if there were no such
things as letters or telephones, then I would not allow a word to be published about
the air offensive. Not a word.’
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
For many Kassel citizens therefore, as for the citizens of Darmstadt, Brunswick
and finally Dresden, the first experience they gained of fire-storms and of
conflagrations so large that, as in the case Kassel, three hundred fire-brigade teams
could not contain them, was when the bombs began to fall and the hurricanes of fire
began to howl.
v
v
v
As the winter of approached, the forces aligned against Bomber Command
were not entirely those under the command of Adolf Galland and Hajo Hermann; at
the same time, a controversy about the ethical issues involved in night area bombing
was mounting both within and without the British government.
In public the government’s statements had been designed to assuage suspicious
minds. When the B.B.C. reported in May that numerous workers’ dwellings
had been successfully destroyed during attacks on Rostock, a Member of Parliament
for the Independent Labour Party had asked the Secretary of State for Air whether
the Royal Air Force had been instructed ‘to impede and disorganise the German
effort by the destruction of workmen’s dwellings?’ Although this was some weeks
after the acceptance of Professor Lindemann’s minute on area bombing, and although
ten weeks had passed since Bomber Command had been instructed to aim at the
built-up areas, ‘not for instance the dockyards or aircraft factories where these are
mentioned’, Sir Archibald Sinclair still felt justified in replying smoothly that ‘no
instruction has been given to destroy dwelling houses rather than armament factories’.
Similarly, when Mr Richard Stokes, Labour M.P. for Ipswich and another veteran
campaigner against the bombing of enemy civilians, asked on March , , at the
height of the Battle of the Ruhr, whether British airmen had been instructed to ‘engage in area bombing rather than limit their attention to purely military targets,’
Sinclair again dismissed the suggestion with an airy assurance that ‘the targets of
Bomber Command are always military’. He must have been as aware by this time as
any of the thousands of Bomber Command personnel of the exact siting of the pencilled crosses on the aircrews’ target maps; but, as he almost guiltily explained in
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
October , it was only thus that he could satisfy the inquiries of the Archbishop
of Canterbury, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, and other significant religious leaders who, on learning the truth and condemning the area offensive could
undoubtedly impair the morale of the bomber crews, and hence their bombing
efficiency.
This explanation satisfied the Chief of the Air Staff, but not Sir Arthur Harris, or
apparently Sir Robert Saundby, both inveterate opponents of such hypocrisy and
firm believers in the propriety of the area offensive; Harris pointed out that the
effect on his bomber crews of the continued Ministerial denials could be just as ill:
the airmen might form the impression that they were being asked to perform deeds
which the Air Ministry was ashamed to admit. Whether or not this prolonged air
offensive against civilians in Germany was immoral, Harris never feared to proclaim
both his intentions and his methods to the world, frequently to the embarrassment
of the Air Ministry, as when he declared in November that his ill-fated Battle of
Berlin would continue ‘until the heart of National Socialist Germany cease to beat.’
Into this deep religious and moralistic argument stepped Sir Arthur Harris’ R.A.F.
chaplain at High Wycombe, Canon L J Collins – a relative by marriage to Harris who
had been appointed to the chaplaincy at Headquarters, Bomber Command in September and had organised an actively attended Christian Fellowship group there.
As this closed controversy was nearing its climax, Collins felt called upon to organise under the auspices of this group a series of political lectures on moral subjects for
the senior Bomber Command officers. One of the first lectures, held in the Command’s air staff conference room, was at Collins’ own suggestion delivered by Stafford Cripps, then Minister of Aircraft Production but a convinced pacifist. Sir Arthur
Harris refused to attend personally, and appointed his able deputy commander-inchief, Saundby, to receive the guest and chair the meeting.
Cripps took as the unfortunate text for his after-dinner lecture, attended by some
hundred senior officers and men, the words ‘Is God my Co-Pilot?’, eloquently pressing the argument that those responsible, the government as well as Bomber Command, should always be sure before sending a bombing mission to Germany that it
really was essential for military purposes. ‘Even when you are engaged in acts of
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
wickedness,’ he insisted, ‘God is always looking over your shoulder.’ For a leading
politician in the midst of one of the heaviest air offensives this implicit condemnation
of the Command’s methods was remarkable; but for the Minister of Aircraft Production to adopt such a partisan view was more than some officers present were prepared to tolerate.
A lively discussion ensued. A Wing Commander asked whether they were to assume from Cripps’ lecture that he had little faith in Sir Arthur Harris’ bombing
policies; Cripps treated him, as Saundby recalls, as a barrister would treat a hostile
witness.The meeting developed into a verbal brawl. Another officer queried whether
Cripps’ evident lack of sympathy for their air offensive was the explanation why
their Command had experienced inordinate delays in dealings with his Ministry.
Before Cripps could reply, the superior planning of bomber Command once again
outmanœuvred the ‘enemy’. Sir Robert Saundby depressed a hidden bell-push and
at once a meteorological officer appeared, flourishing the latest ‘met. report’ which
forecast, he said, ‘severe fog’ in Gloucestershire, to which the Minister had to repair
that same night; suspecting nothing, the Minister of Aircraft Production hastened for
home. In fact it was Corona tactics, being used against an enemy closer at home.
There must have been many officers present that night who were well aware of Corona; it was the credit of the Command that none of them betrayed the secret by
premature hilarity.
Sir Arthur Harris was naturally upset by the scene which had occurred; later on he
tried to rectify the harm he considered Cripps to have caused by inviting down his
Personal Adviser, T D Weldon, a tutor in Moral Philosophy at Magdalen College
Oxford, to lecture on ‘The Ethics of Bombing’ to his senior officers.This lecture was
almost as obscure as that of Cripps, lightened only by the innocent inquiry at the end
by Canon Collins whether he had mistakenly assumed the title of his lecture to be
‘The Bombing of Ethics’.
v
v
v
The exchanges in public were by the end of hardly less lively, if less enlightening than those behind the barbed wire and concrete at Bomber Command HQ. On
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
December , Richard Stokes made his last attempt until , after the Dresden
tragedy, to elicit an admission by Sinclair that the Churchill government had in fact
adopted a policy of area bombing; he asked whether in fact the objectives of the
night bombers had ‘been changed to the bombing of towns and wide areas in which
military targets are situated?’With accomplished dexterity, Sir Archibald again sidestepped the issue and, referring to his reply of March , assured him that
there had been ‘no change of policy.’
Bomber Command’s policy had indeed not changed. Dissatisfied with the minister’s obscure reply, Stokes persisted and demanded to know whether it would not
now be true to say that ‘probably the minimum area of a target is now sixteen square
miles?’ With more sarcasm than objectivity the Air Minister replied that his hon.
Friend could not have listened to his answer: ‘I said there had been no change in
policy’.
When Mr. Stokes, with remarkable tenacity, demanded to know the area in square
miles in which the blockbusters recently dropped on Berlin had landed, he was
informed that the question, predictably, could not be answered without giving useful
information to the enemy.
MR STOKES: Would not the proper answer be that the Government dare not give
it?
SIR A SINCLAIR: No, Sir. Berlin is the centre of twelve strategic railways; it is the
second largest port in Europe; it is connected with the whole canal system of
Germany; and in that city are the A.E.G., Siemens, Daimler-Benz, Focke-Wulf,
Heinkel and Dornier establishments; and if I were allowed to choose only one
target in Germany, the target I should choose would be Berlin.
MR STOKES: Does not my right hon. Friend admit by his answer that the Government are now resorting to indiscriminate bombing, including residential areas?
SIR A SINCLAIR: The hon. gentleman is incorrigible. I have mentioned a series of
vitally important military objectives.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Mr. Emanuel Shinwell interjected that he wished to applaud the efforts of H.M.
Government to bring the war to a speedy conclusion, and the view that any means
which would hasten the end of the war were morally acceptable appears to have
prevailed for the rest of the Debate. Even when the Church, in the person of Dr Bell,
Bishop of Chichester, did in early February protest vigorously about the air
offensive—he had learned of the horrors of Hamburg and the other great cities from
neutral sources while in Sweden—the national newspapers were enjoined to deride
and ridicule this lonely voice.This contemptuous deception of the elected representatives of the people, this deliberate blinding of the eyes of the Church, these strictures on the voice of the national press—these were all the ugly manifestations of the
total power necessitated by total war.
Information
from Air Vice-Marshal E B Addison to the author; and from Sir Robert Saundby and
Mrs Barbara Lodge, the WAAF officer referred to in Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The
Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.iv, p..
For the planning and execution of this attack see ibid., vol.ii, p..
SS Obergruppenführer Fürst Josias von Waldeck, ‘Erfahrungsbericht zum Luftangriff vom
.. auf den LO .Ordnung Kassel,’ Dec , , in the author’s archives.
United States Strategic Bombing Survey report, ‘Fire Raids on German Cities.’
Director R A Fleischer, director of the Henschel works, report on air raid damage Oct ,
(author’s archives.)
‘Luftschutzgesetz’ gazetted in Reichsgesetzblatt, , I, p..
In fact so many people dies of poisoning, and their bodies turned such brilliant colours, that it was
at first assumed that the RAF had dropped poison gas bombs for the first time, and steps were taken
for suitable retaliation. Post-mortem examinations by German doctors refuted this charge, and the
air offensive was spared this hateful new development.
Wilfred von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende, Buenos Aires, diary entry for Jun , .
Sinclair to Portal, Oct , in Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air
Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.iii, p..
Information from Sir Robert Saundby and Canon L J Collins to the author.
Hansard, House of Commons Debates, vol., col..
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Sabre and the Bludgeon
provided a further exposition of the theory of the area
attack, this time by the German air force. In June , the V-weapon of
fensive against London began. ‘Essentially indiscriminate,’ as Mr Churchill
angrily termed the V. offensive, it could be compared with the nightly nuisance
raids by the Pathfinders’ Light Night Striking Force Mosquitoes on Berlin.
The effect of these V-weapons, small though they were, was almost as immediate as
it was unscheduled. While on the one hand they produced a grave rift between the
western allies – the British prime minister strenuously advocating the use of gas
bombs on German targets as a retaliation – on the other they indirectly weakened
the bombing assault on French railway targets which was a vital component of the
invasion operations in Normandy: forty percent of Britain’s thousand-pound bomb
production was vested in factories in the London area; this slumped when the Vweapon assault began, as the sirens sounded and the delays in production increased.
From May onwards large numbers of these thousand-pounders had been required in the pre-invasion attacks on railway targets recommended by Professor
Zuckerman, but now there were insufficient stocks of weapons available to continue
the attacks either on V-weapon launching sites or on the German cities, for which
latter bomb loads of a more and more explosive composition were required.
The vicious circle was thus complete. It was with relief therefore that Sir Arthur
Harris received the embargo on further area attacks on German cities which accompanied the transfer of authority over his Command’s activities temporarily to General Dwight D Eisenhower’s headquarters, known as S.H.A.E.F. Faced with the crippling losses inflicted by the Luftwaffe on his Command during the winter’s Battle of
Berlin, culminating on the night of the March –, with ninety-five of the
force of bombers failing to return from an abortive attack on Nuremberg, Harris
T
HE SUMMER OF
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
readily postponed the provisional date that he had promised for Germany’s capitulation – April , – indefinitely.
During the summer months of Bomber Command lacked the logistics to
mount an attack on Germany comparable with those of .
When in July the prime minister, smarting under the V-weapon assault, urged
Bomber Command against the wishes of General Eisenhower to saturate a single
German city – in this case Stuttgart – with a succession of heavy raids, the reprisal
went off at half-cock: by the time of the third and final R.A.F. raid, all of which were
marked by the Pathfinder Group No , some of No Groups’ squadrons were employing bombs earmarked for scrapping before , charged with World War
explosives or the obsolete Amatol . The bulk of the explosive dropped in these
three raids on Stuttgart consisted of small General Purpose bombs, whose worth
had already been disproved by Professor Zuckerman three years previously.The only
innovation was the introduction of a large number of J-bombs, thirty-pound gasoline-and-phosphorus filled bombs, designed to throw a thirty-foot jet of liquid fire.
As an attempt at reproducing the Hamburg catastrophe the Stuttgart series was a
total failure. The city presented a notoriously indeterminate HS image, surrounded
as it was by a bowl of low-lying hills. The timing was poor, the concentration weak,
the Pathfinders’ marking hazy; the only significant success was during the attack of
July –, , when the Observer Corps operation room was hit, killing eight
officers and forty Luftwaffe girls. The failure of the first attack, delivered by
bombers, was reflected in the low death-roll: the police chief reported a hundred
dead, two hundred missing, and some ten thousand homeless, in an attack lasting
thirty-five minutes. The other two attacks did not fare much better.
On one night barely six weeks later, however, on September , , a force of
only R.A.F. Lancasters was able to deliver such a concentrated raid, under much
less auspicious conditions, that in the thirty-one minutes after : P.M. the nucleus
of the city was ‘completely wiped out’, people were killed and , were
injured. The difference was attributable to two factors; firstly, the first three attacks
were Pathfinder-led raids executed during the embargo on high explosive wastage
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
on German cities; and secondly, the last attack was delivered by No Bomber Group,
marking by its own distinctive low-level technique.
The success of this September raid as an area attack – No Group’s sorties had
achieved rather more than had the , sorties of the whole Command in the July
series against the same city – was a grim augury for the remainder of the air offensive
against the German cities.
No Group’s speciality of conspicuous and accurate visual marking or targets
from low level was contrary to all the doctrines in which the Pathfinder Commander
Donald Bennett believed. He had objected in the spring of that low-level marking
was impracticable.When a plan to ‘dive-mark’ Berlin in this way was being discussed
he protested that it was virtually impossible to map-read over densely built-up areas
at low level. Angered by Bennett’s opposition to change, Sir Arthur Harris had taken
away the Pathfinders’ crack Lancaster squadrons No and No and given them
together with No (Mosquito) Squadron to Air Vice-marshal Ralph Cochrane,
the commander-in-chief of No Group, with effect from April . All three squadrons were to discharge cardinal duties in the execution of the first of the three raids
on Dresden in .
All three squadrons had made their debut as a No Group force in the first lowlevel visual marking attack on a German city on the night of April –, . The
target this time had been Munich, the zero hour : A.M. The feint towards southern France appears to have failed to deceive the defences. The bomber formations
were plotted by the Observer Corps entering the Continental airspace over the
Somme estuary at : P.M., the Increased Alert was signalled at : A.M., and
the Air Danger stage was reached four minutes later. The city’s population had a
full hour to take cover, and casualties were low. Munich’s flak batteries opened fire as
early as : A.M., with zero hour still twenty minutes away: presumably they were
firing at the eleven No Squadron Mosquitoes dropping Window in an advance of
the main marker force.
While the main force of Lancasters dog-legged its way across France towards
southern Germany, and a full scale diversionary attack on Karlsruhe was decoying
the bulk of the fighter force, Group Captain Leonard Cheshire executed a coura-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
geous low-level dive across the heavily-defended Munich marshalling yard and
dropped his red marker bomb in the heart of the main railroad station some four
minutes before zero hour.Three other Mosquitoes repeated the marking at the same
time, guided by his voice over VHF radio: this ‘master bomber’ technique was something of an innovation to the Command – the Germans learned to call the ‘master
bomber’ the Zeremonienmeister, or master of ceremonies. The main force bombing
began one minute early, and ended twenty-nine minutes later, tons of incendiaries and tons of high explosives having been dropped, of which no less than
ninety percent was estimated as having hit the target.
The next day at ten p.M. the police provisionally placed the casualties in Munich at
thirty dead and six missing – later corrected to , still a remarkably low figure; but
the central station, the eastern station, the Arnulf-Strasse marshalling yards, the Central Post Office, and the Laim Station were reported as very badly damaged. The
lesson was clear: bombing raids at great range could be highly successful, given a
closely controlled attack with the main force bombers aiming at accurately placed
target indicators.
The idea of using a Master Bomber over the target to direct bomber crews and to
encourage them had first been mooted by Air Vice-marshal Bennett on December ,
when he sent Squadron Leader Pat Daniels, one of his best officers, to lead an
attack on Frankfurt. Daniels had however only standard radio equipment to communicate with the main force. The weather on that occasion had been poor and Daniels
could barely make himself heard above the atmospherics; all crews had been briefed
to listen out when over the target area, but many reported in their post-raid interrogations that they had heard only ‘muttering’ over the target. No bombs were recorded as falling anywhere within Frankfurt’s city boundaries that night; Darmstadt,
however, seventeen miles to the south, the recorded the deaths of four citizens in the
heaviest raid of the year.
This Master Bomber experiment was unauthorised and Sir Arthur Harris ordered
Bennett not to repeat it.When, however, AirVice-marshal Cochrane, the commanderin-chief of No Group, mounted the raid on the Ruhr dams six months later Harris
raised no objections to the use of VHF radio equipment for communication.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
v
v
v
The attack delivered by R.A.F. Bomber Command’s No Group on the Baltic
port of Königsberg on August , was to lay the foundation for the fire-storm
raids on Darmstadt, Brunswick, Heilbronn, and finally Dresden. This bomber group
now operated largely as an independent force, with its own pathfinder squadrons, its
own meteorological flights, its own post-raid reconnaissance aircraft; perhaps most
important of all, the group flew an all-Lancaster force of bombers. The rest of the
Command referred to No Group jealously as the ‘Lincolnshire Poachers.’
For the attack on Königsberg No Group tried out a new target-marking and
bombing technique was developed. After two pathfinder Lancasters loaded with red
target indicators had identified and marked the aiming point, a distinctive railway
yard in the southern city, the bombing force, comprising only Lancasters, approached the aiming point on three different bearings. Although bombers were instructed to aim from the same single marking point, they were assigned three different angles of approach angles and delays for overshoot which resulted in effect in
three different aiming points for the cost of only one successful marking attack; this
was no small consideration when the target was as highly defended as Königsberg. A
further advantage was that the marking point could lie to the windward of the area of
attack and thus avoid being obscured by smoke or swamped by dazzling incendiary
fires.
The resulting raid was disastrous for the ancient city – home and burial place of the
philosopher Immanuel Kant. Zero hour was at seven minutes past one A.M. on August but it took twenty minutes before the Master Bomber – on this occasion
Wing Commander J Woodroffe – was satisfied with the marking. In spite of unpredicted low cloud hanging over the target area, the final markers were both placed
within four hundred yards of the marking point in the railway yards.Woodroffe then
called in the rest of No Group to attack. Although the bomb load which each
Lancaster could carry was small in view of the eleven hours and twenty minutes
duration of the flight, of the tons of bombs dropped, tons were fire-bombs
of the small and particularly potent four-pound thermite type. The Master Bomb-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
er’s instructions over the VHF were clear and concise, and by : A.M. when the last
bomb fell acres of a total built-up area of acres had been destroyed: ,
people were homeless and twenty-one percent of the industrial buildings had been
damaged.
Bit by bit Harris – by now affectionately dubbed ‘Butcher’ Harris by his bomber
crews – was perfecting his weapon. When the time came two weeks later, on September , , for No group to mount an attack on Darmstadt, he refined the
technique of ‘offset bombing’ still further. The city was a dif⁵cult target to attack as
the industrial areas were scattered around the periphery of a sprawling central residential and commercial zone; scattering bombs around a central aiming-point and
hoping – as was standard Pathfinder Group practice – that collateral damage from
the overspill would affect the industrial suburbs would have dissipated the force’s
effort to a degree unacceptable with such a small force of bombers. Darmstadt was
thus a target well suited to the ‘line attack’ developed by Air Vice-marshal Cochrane:
in the western outskirts of the town was a large and prominent rectangular Cavalry
Exercise Ground; built on a chalky subsoil, it emerged conspicuously white on the
reconnaissance photographs. It was this parade ground which would serve as the
marking point for the attack. No Squadron, whose motto was ‘At First Sight’
and who had persistently distinguished themselves by their bold low-level visual
marking operations since Munich, provided fourteen of the black painted, woodenhulled Mosquito bombers both for the visual marking and for dive bombing attacks
on individual outlying factories like the IG Farben plant.Wing CommanderWoodroffe
was once again chosen as Master Bomber.
At : P.M. the sirens sounded the public air raid warning in Darmstadt. The
Drahtfunk (cable radio) warning service signalled: ‘Heavy enemy bomber formation
approaching from Oppenheim-East and Heidelberg-North. Acute danger for
Darmstadt.’ At : P.M. sirens sounded the Fliegeralarm – full alarm.Twenty minutes later the first bombs were already falling. The fire-watching posts reported that
there appeared to be no definite centre of the attack. They were correct. The bombing force, of Lancasters this time, had been divided and briefed to approach the
clearly marked parade ground on two different bearings, and each squadron was
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
assigned a different overshoot from the marking point. The intended result was that
two five-mile wide bomb-lanes would rip eastwards across the city, taking out the
whole of the city’s administrative section and its residential areas. Altogether
Lancasters attacked dropping tons of bombs within forty minutes, including
, thermite fire bombs and nearly two hundred four-thousand pound blockbusters. Although the left hand bomb-lane went partially astray the operation inflicted
terrible damage on Darmstadt. Within an hour, Germany’s third fire-storm began.
Once again the police chief’s post-raid report provides the best documentary description of the attack: he said that this raid was distinguished from its predecessors
by the massed and concentrated bombing.The fire-storm which emerged after about
an hour engulfed the entire inner city, igniting even buildings which had been only
slightly damaged by blast. Immediate rescue operations were out of the question, as
the streets and squares were inaccessible. Fire-brigades trying to penetrate to the
city centre were forced back by the fierce heat. The fire-proofing of roof timbers
with slaked lime, which had prevented the spread of the fire-storm in Kassel, proved
worthless in Darmstadt where it was only forty percent complete.The colossal blast
and suction waves had smashed doors and windows everywhere, and thus the fires
had free access to every floor; thus buildings were not only gutted from the roof
downwards but burnt out from the ground floor up as well.
By about two A.M. the ‘fire-typhoon’ raging in the streets exceeded hurricanestrengths force ten to twelve, reported the Darmstadt police chief; any kind of movement in the open was out of the question;.The typhoon subsided only slowly toward
four A.M. In consequence, those people luckless enough to be caught in this area
were unable to save themselves. On the railway sidings to the south of the town
centre a munitions train was slowly blowing itself sky-high, and the series of explosions fatefully discouraged people from abandoning their shelters while there was
still time, since they believed that the attack was still under way. The ⁵rst rescue
teams from outlying towns and villages reached the city soon after and civil defence
units poured into Darmstadt between four and six A.M.
For the first four days after the fire-storm, in addition to local S.H.D. troops – the
fire-fighting and medical services amounting to some men – and the Technische
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Nothilfe Emergency Technical Aid troops, some five thousand men were engaged in
rescue operations. As the last survivors were found, this force was cut back to three
hundred.
The whole inner city of Darmstadt was destroyed by this attack. The degree of
devastation reached seventy-eight percent; even if the less damaged suburbs of
Arheilgen and Eberstadt are included, the destruction still totalled · percent.
The British Bombing Survey, perhaps more objectively than their American counterparts, estimated from photographs that sixty-nine percent of the total built-up area
was destroyed, or acres of a total of . In a city with , inhabitants,
, homes had been destroyed, rendering seventy thousand homeless. In the Old
City it proved easier to list those buildings which had escaped destruction than those
which had been destroyed: the prison, which had actually been provided with a bluelamp to ‘spare it from air raids’; the ‘Crown’ tavern, a butcher’s shop next to it, an
architect’s house a little further away, and the rear buildings of the catholic St. Ludwig’s church. As Darmstadt was only a second-degree A.R.P. zone [L.S.-Ort . Ordnung]
the government had spent nothing on proper air raid bunkers, but only on less important buildings including three rescue centres and fifty-four public air-raid centres.
Darmstadt’s virtually unprotected citizens accordingly suffered more severely than
those in Kassel, and shortly in Brunswick. Thousands had died, in some ninety percent of the cases killed by asphyxiation or burned alive, even in the air raid shelters
which had withstood the raid.The lethality of the fire-storm on the virtually shelterless
Catholic parish of St Ludwig is indicated by this entry in the parish chronicle: ‘Of the
six thousand souls in this congregation only were left in the parish after the night
of the attack.’
The city’s police chief at first assessed the number of registered dead as five thousand five hundred, of which he described , (a proportion of · percent) as
being unidentifiable because of the victims’ total incineration. ‘Considering the scale
of this catastrophe the final death toll roll will be much higher,’ he emphasised,‘especially since no fewer than , people have now been reported as missing.’ He
predicted that the missing total would be even higher as ‘entire families with all their
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
members had been killed, whose disappearance will in consequence never be reported.’ The figure for the death-roll in this one R.A.F. attack on Darmstadt finally
rose to ,. The post-war United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which consistently under-estimated the results of R.A.F. area bombing operations, satisfied itself
with an estimate of ,.
For the first four days the recovery of the victims presented difficulties, as the
attack had left no vehicles intact. Only with the arrival of a transport unit of the
Speer Organisation was the situation alleviated. In Darmstadt the scenes so familiar
to rescue troops from Hamburg and Kassel now met their eyes. The streets were
strewn with naked, bloated and brightly hued corpses or charred objects some three
feet long which looked like logs and had once been humans. For two days one victim
lay in Sand-Strasse – nobody could be sure whether it had been a man or a woman.
Taken unawares by the force of the fire-typhoon and blown over, the victim was now
a completely charred corpse, bent double, resting on its hand and feet, its back arched.
The corpses were so numerous that it was several days before it was removed.
People brought the corpses of relatives in small tubs or similar containers to the
cemetery to bury themselves, because there were neither coffins nor grave-diggers.
The problems of identification were great. One man had lost track of his sister and
her infant daughter. Four weeks after the fire-storm, noticing an odour of decay
rising from the ruins of his home in Elizabethen-Strasse, he cleared an entrance to
the basement beneath the ruins, then remembered the existence of a wine-cellar
below this basement. Here, in the entrance to the lower wine-cellar he found the
skeleton of a woman, carrying in her arms a basket; in the basket was the skeleton of
a baby girl. The wine-cellar itself was flooded one foot deep with greenish-yellow
wine, which had escaped from bottles bursting in the heat. Beneath the surface he
could make out the shapes of more corpses preserved in the weak alcohol – one of
them his son, wearing a chequered shirt and with his pay-book still in his pocket.
Next to him was his son’s four-year-old child, and in a corner they found the master
tailor who lived on the second floor, whom they recognised from the thimble which
he always carried. On September , the Roman Catholic Bishop of Mainz
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
held a requiem Mass for the twelve thousand three hundred Darmstadt citizens who
had lost their lives in the forty minute No Group attack on the town.
v
v
v
With the attack on the North Sea port of Bremerhaven on September –,
, the No Group ‘line attack’ was further adapted to suit the peculiarly elongated port, which extended eight miles along the eastern shores of the Weser estuary; the problem was similar to the problem of the attack onWuppertal.The Pathfinder
group would probably have relied on some degree of creep-back; the line attack of
No Group however offered a more certain method of destroying the whole city.
This time five imaginary ‘aiming points’ were bombed, but once again only one
point was actually marked; the marking force this time was able to mark the chosen
spot in the northern end of the city with great speed: Zero hour was to be at nine
P.M., but two minutes before then the Master Bomber was already able to broadcast
the instruction to the main force of Lancasters to ‘come in and bomb’. Thus the
bombers, which were now Window-ing at the rate of five bundles per minute, a
much heavier rate than had been thought sufficient at Hamburg thirteen months
previously, were not held unnecessarily orbiting over the heavily defended port area,
and only two aircraft, one of them a Mosquito, were lost during the whole attack,
while of the despatched were able to drop their tons of bombs – including no fewer than , thermite bombs – in a very concentrated attack.The
British Bombing Survey reported from investigations of reconnaissance photographs
that of a total built-up acreage of acres, were totally destroyed: that represented seventy-nine percent destroyed. This was the first and last occasion on which
Bomber Command had to direct its attention to the port. No Group’s tactics were
rapidly nearing perfection.
It is perhaps surprising that these raids, which were amongst the most effective
executed by the Command, rated hardly any attention in the British official histories
of the strategic air offensive. The Pathfinder Force commander Air Vice-marshal
Bennett would dismiss all of these raids in one sentence: ‘In the rest of ,’ he
wrote in his memoirs, ‘No Group sometimes joined in with the rest of the Com-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
mand on proper P.F.F. marking but otherwise attacked on their own a large variety
of small targets, most of them comparatively undefended, such as … Darmstadt,
Königsberg, Heilbronn, etc.’ He also conceded that Cochrane’s group ‘went to’ Brunswick twice. Thus Bennett dismissed three raids which had procured the deaths of
over twenty-four thousand enemy civilians for the expenditure of only sorties
by his rivals, No Group.
Although comparatively few citizens, only in fact, were killed by the No
Group attack on Brunswick on the night of October –, its analysis is
highly important in the context of the raids on Dresden four months later. At Brunswick the Group first successfully put into practice its ‘sector-attack’, the technique
finally selected for the first attack on Dresden on February . As Air Vice-marshal
Cochrane explained to his station- and flight-commanders prior to the attack, in the
usual loudspeaker link-up peculiar to his Group, the intention was to saturate each
square yard of the target sector with an equal weight of bombs: the fires would then
break out swiftly and would be so widespread that no fire brigades would be able to
master them. It was a natural progression from the ‘line attack’. Instead of creating
bomb lanes with two or three or five aiming lines and varying degrees of overshoot,
during the Brunswick raid each of the Lancasters would attack over one single
marking point on a different heading and with a different timed overshoot; in this
way a fan-shaped sector could be devastated evenly right across the centre of the city.
The marking point was in the south of Brunswick, and the attacking force would fan
out in a generally northerly direction across the city.
Zero hour for Brunswick was set at two-thirty A.M. on October . Once again a
large part of the force was carrying the gasoline-phosphorus J-bombs, of which the
Command seemed to have an inexhaustible stock. By : A.M. a medium-strength
fire-storm had arisen in the area bounded by the Wool Market, Lange-Strasse,
Weberstrasse. Light pieces of furniture, tables, and chairs were being sucked into
the tornado; whirlwinds whipped up the dust and drove showers of sparks and burning embers before them through the streets. The fire area embraced the whole inner
city, with the exception of small patches around the central station, the City Hall,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
and the August Gate. It was in this area however that the city had built six big bunkers
and two public air raid shelters, with about , people now trapped in them.
Once again the telephone network had been destroyed.The despatch rider service
was unable to function properly.The city’s fire-brigades had already gone into action
in different parts of the city, and it was only toward six A.M. that sufficiently powerful
fire-fighting units could be assembled to risk the dangerous and rarely attempted
‘water-alley’ technique which seemed the only hope of rescuing the thousands trapped
in the heart of the fire-storm area. A group of high-pressure fire-hoses were fought
forwards under a constant screen of water into the seat of the fire-storm; the front
and sides of this ‘alley’ were protected from the fierce heat radiation by overlapping
veils of water; obtaining sufficient water-pressure presented considerable difficulties,
the pressure in the hoses had to be reinforced several times by auxiliary pumps in the
hose-system and all the time both the mobile pumps and the hoses were endangered
by collapsing buildings and the heat radiation.
Nevertheless, by seven A.M., four and a half hour after the raid had begun, the
bunkers were reached. As the gastight doors were unbarred, the rescuers heard the
sound of ‘many people talking quietly but nervously under their breath.’ All the
shelterers were still alive.The , people were evacuated without any casualties,
the people forming a human chain inside the ‘water alley’ to the safety outside the
fire-storm zone. Episodes like these were like a battle won, only these were not
brave soldiers, hardened by a hundred battles, but ordinary citizens and elderly folk
and invalids and infants, to whom a nightmare like this came only once in their lives.
Not every time did the rescuers win: people were brought out of the air raid
shelter in Schöppenstedter-Strasse but only nine of these could be revived. As so
often before, although the shelter itself was undamaged, the cause of death was the
familiar fire-storm hazard, asphyxiation. Nevertheless, thanks to the advanced state
of its civil defence precautions and the courage of its fire-fighting teams the city of
Brunswick had been able to avert a major tragedy.
During the forty-minute sector-attack No Group had dropped tons of bombs
on the city.They had left eighty thousand people homeless of a population of ,;
they had destroyed acres out of a built-up area of , acres.They had wrecked
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the city’s gasworks, power station, and waterworks, as well as the telephone network, and the tram- and railways. So great was the extent of physical damage, that
although only the one bomber group, No Group, had taken part the city authorities
estimated that over one thousand aircraft had been responsible. Four thousand five
hundred firemen fought for six days to control the last fires, repeatedly being driven
under cover by renewed air raid warnings; as they sheltered, fires which they had
nearly extinguished blazed up again as fiercely as before. Only on October were
the last fire-services able to return to their home towns. As the city’s history of the
raids complains,‘Even those heavy industries in Brunswick which had not been badly
hit in the attack of October were more seriously affected than ever before by the
loss of personnel, either killed or too pre-occupied with the day-to-day problems of
survival to report to for work.’ There can be no more eloquent support for the
theory of the area attack than this; unfortunately not all area attacks were performed
with such a miraculously low loss of civilian life.
Apart from this Brunswick operation, J-bombs were able to cause a major
conflagration only during the December , attack on Heilbronn: the R.A.F.
raid killed , of the town’s , inhabitants, with once more many thousands
of people missing and unaccounted for; the same sector attack method evolved by
Air Vice-marshal Cochrane and his Base Commander, Air Commodore H V Satterley,
was used, with a forked marshalling yard as the marking point. It was an ominous
augury for Dresden that both the Master Bomber and his deputy, the Marker Leader
on this attack, were to fulfil the same roles at Dresden.
v
v
v
As a precursor of the Dresden raids the night of October –, not only
brought the devastating sector-attack on Brunswick. That same night the other major technique which was to sound the knell of death for Dresden four months later
was demonstrated in the triple-blow on Duisburg delivered by a total of , bomber
sorties. The first blow had been delivered in broad daylight during the afternoon by
more than one thousand bombers; during the midnight hours the whole force, apart
from No Group which was attacking Brunswick, returned to the Ruhr port and
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
executed a crushing double blow, the two halves separated by a few hours so that the
German night fighters would be grounded and refuelling by the time of the second
attack. The raids killed , Germans in Duisburg, with a further reported
missing; among the dead were prisoners of war and foreign labourers.
Thus the stage had been set for the February area attacks on population centres which were to culminate in the tragedy of Dresden: the prevailing climate of
public opinion, sedulously seeded by the government’s official statements on bombing policy, would no longer be offended by Bomber Command attacks on this scale;
Sir Arthur Harris now disposed over a long-range and independent air weapon capable of striking at targets even as distant as Dresden with great accuracy and violence; and, while No Group had perfected the sabre of its sector attack, Bomber
Command as a whole had fashioned the bludgeon of the triple blow.
In Cabinet on Jul , . He was inebriated at the time, according to the private diary of the
Chief of Naval Staff, A B Cunningham (British Museum, Cunningham Papers).
Air Commodore P Huskinson, Vision Ahead (London ).
The Stuttgart Statistical Office states that in these three raids of July , , and , the
R.A.F. killed a total of and injured ,.
For Bomber Command’s operational analysis reports on these Night Operations against Stuttgart
in Jul see PRO file AIR./.
W J Lawrence, No Bomber Group (London ); further material on this raid was provided to
the author by Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane and Group Captain G L Cheshire, VC.
Der Polizeipräsident, ‘Vorläufiger Abschlußbericht über den Luftangriff auf die Hauptstadt der
Bewegung vom ..’ Munich, Apr , (in the author’s archives).
It did both No (Pathfinder) Group and Wing Commander S P Daniels an injustice to suggest as
did Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO,
London, ) vol.ii, p., that the Master Bomber technique was ‘first evolved by Wing Commander Gibson in the dams raids’, or that the Peenemünde raid was ‘the first occasion upon which [it]
had been applied to a major attack’ (by Wing Commander ...).
W J Lawrence, op. cit.; and Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.iii, pp.–.
During an unsuccessful attack on Königsberg three nights before, No Group had dropped
clusters of J-bombs, the gasoline-phosphorus weapons, which had proven as ineffective here as they
had at Stuttgart in July and Darmstadt on Aug , .
W J Lawrence, op. cit.; and report of the Polizeipräsident, as cited in a letter of Mar , to
the American Military Government of Darmstadt.
Die Pfarrchronik von St Ludwig in Darmstadt – (Darmstadt, ).
Statistical Yearbook of German Municipalities. – The town’s Statistical Office places the figure be-
tween , and ,.
W J Lawrence, op. cit.; the author also relied on photographs supplied by Flight Lieutenant
Steele.
Rudolf Preschner, Der Rote Hahn über Braunschweig (Brunswick, ); and Braunschweiger
Tageszeitung, Oct , .
One historical note: of the , high explosive bombs (not including the big blockbusters)
which were dropped in this raid, no fewer than , failed to explode.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Part Two
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Dresden the Virgin Target
L
ATE IN the Allied political leaders turned their attention to a possible air
attack on Dresden for the first time. In October, the Chief of the Air Staff
suggested that the Soviet air force might be requested to attack the city,
although it is not clear from published references to this request whether the city
area itself or the nearby Ruhland synthetic oil plant was meant; current practice was
to refer equally to Dresden and Ruhland, thereby according to the Saxon capital an
industrial significance of which it was not entirely worthy. In spite of the subsequent
representations made by the British military mission in Moscow, the Soviet air force
did not follow up the recommendation.
There was no mention of Dresden on the target list drawn up on November ,
by the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (C.S.T.C.) The city did figure
however as eighth on a list of eleven cities east of ten degrees, which the committee
described on November as being suitable for area attack; seven of the eleven cities
were incidentally identified as ‘transportation targets’ – but these did not include
Dresden.
In spite of having appeared from time to time on draft directives since , the
city had not suffered its first air attack until October . At : P.M. on the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
seventh, some thirty American bombers had attacked the Dresden industrial area as
a secondary target during an attack on the oil refinery at Ruhland. By the time that
the city’s sirens had sounded the All Clear at : P.M. that afternoon, the western
suburbs of Dresden-Friedrichstadt and Dresden Löbtau had suffered considerable
damage. The Nazi gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, reported to the Reich
Chancellery in Berlin that the bombers had done ‘medium to severe’ damage to
residential areas in the city centre between the post office square and the Wettiner
railroad station, with lesser damage to two industrial plants, and none to the city’s
historic and cultural buildings.
The air raid was a local sensation, and it is recorded that enterprising school-children cornered all stocks of bomb fragments to sell as souvenirs, while coach-owners
ran special excursions to the blitzed streets; nothing like this had ever happened to
Dresden before. There were fatalities, mostly workers including French and
Belgian labourers in the small factories of Seidel & Naumann and Hartwig & Vogel.
Arbeitskommandos – labour details – of Allied prisoners working in the railway yards
took many casualties; a number of Americans in one squad was killed, and other
prisoners of war were drafted to take their places. Several previously idle Kommandos
of prisoners were put to work on salvage operations in this area.
It all seemed very unfortunate. The local inhabitants unanimously agreed among
themselves that the bombing was the result of some unfortunate oversight by an
allied navigator, and this early blow did nothing to shatter the enormous confidence
of the Dresden people that their city was not going to be attacked.
v
v
v
For the hundreds of British prisoners of war in and around the city of Dresden in
these weeks before the horrors of February life could not easily be bettered.
The local people were familiar with the English from pre-war days, and made many
friends amongst the prisoners – a large section of whom were from st Airborne
Division contingent captured at Arnhem. ‘The Germans here are the best I have ever
come across,’ wrote one soldier, captured at Anzio, at Christmas . The Commandant is a gentleman, and we are allowed an extraordinary amount of liberty in
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the town.The Feldwebel has already taken me to see the centre of the town. Unquestionably it is beautiful – I would like to see more of it.’The war seemed far away from
Dresden.
Not endowed with any one capital industry like those of Essen and Hamburg, even
though Dresden was of a comparable size, the city’s economy had been sustained in
peacetime by its theatres, museums, cultural institutions and home-industries. Even
by the end of it would have been hard to single out any one plant of major
importance, apart from the Ruhland oil refinery twenty-five miles to the North.
According to the American O.S.S., the Office of Strategic Services, Dresden had at
least factories and industrial enterprises including, according to the OSS, dispersed aeroplane components factories, a poison gas factory (Chemische Fabrik Goye
& Co), a ⁶ak- and field gun factory (Lehman), the great Zeiss-Ikon optical works,
factories producing electrical and X-ray equipment (Koch & Sterzel), small arms
(Seidel & Naumann), gears and differentials (Sachsenwerke) and electric gauges
(Gebrüder Bassler).
Only some of this was true. In the suburb of Dresden-Striesen, about three miles
from the city centre, Zeiss-Ikon had an optical factory; elsewhere in the city, in
Freiberger-Strasse, was Siemens-Glas AG, a factory making about fifty-thousand gasmasks per month, and in Dresden-Niedersedlitz were two Sachsenwerk plants; these
two plants employed about five thousand workers on the manufacture of radar and
other electronic components for sets being manufactured by A.E.G. in Berlin; in
Grossenhainer-Strasse, the long road leading northwards out of Dresden-Neustadt,
was the Zeiss-Ikon Goehlewerk plant. Built in of strong reinforced concrete
with blast-proof windows and other civil defence measures; this factory was, by the
time of the raids, employing , men on the manufacture of anti-aircraft shellfuses for the German Navy. In Dresden-Friedrichstadt were two large factories supplying Germany with a large proportion of its cigarettes.
Distributed throughout the town area were however numbers of small firms manufacturing a large assortment of precision goods, and in some cases components for
the armament industry; thus in Kesselsdorfer-Strasse the firm Glashütte – formerly
a famous watch and clock factory – employed about fifty men assembling fuses in a
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
two-storeyed building. The Arsenal five miles to the north of the city centre, on
which so much stress was placed in subsequent Air Ministry bulletins – though not it
was never mentioned by Bomber Command in its weekly digest – had in fact been an
arsenal in the pre-Versailles days of the First World War, but during a small-scale fire
on December , it had been totally destroyed when a munitions train caught
fire and exploded. By only the name survived. The premises had been developed into an industrial estate, with small firms manufacturing tin boxes, baby powder, toothpaste, and according to local rumour bombsights and navigation devices
for aircraft. Apart from the main cigarette and optical industries, the rest of the city’s
commodities presented a motley spectacle: a radio cabinet works, a soap-factory in
Niedersedlitz, several breweries and two small firms manufacturing components for
Junkers aircraft engines and fuselages and cockpits for Messerschmitt’s Augsburg
plant. Research into the V. rocket motor injection nozzles was also carried out at
the Dresden Technical University. None of these plants, it should be added by way of
anticipating what will be said below, was within three miles of the city centre, or
within the area marked out for R.A.F. Bomber Command’s two devastating night
attacks.
Dresden was not, on the other hand, by any means an open city. An American Air
Force historian has established to his own satisfaction, by an exhaustive study of
German and allied papers, that in addition to Dresden’s significance as a major transportation centre, there was an ‘entire series’ of other reasons why it was a major and
bona fide military target, and was ‘so considered by the German military and civilian
authorities.’
Dresden had become a key point in the German postal and telegraph system, and
there is little doubt that the obliteration of the postal installations in the city would
hamper communications with the eastern front. The permanent staff at the central
post and telegraph offices in the heart of the inner city had been reinforced by some
hundreds of Reich Labour Service and War Auxiliary Service personnel to cope with
the increased traffic; hundreds of British prisoners had been impressed into the German postal service working in shifts in the Post Office sheds in the Rosenstrasse
goods-station unloading mailbags and sorting packages.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
At the time of the attack, however, the city’s strategic significance was less than
marginal, and it is questionable whether at that stage of the war Dresden was likely
to become a second Breslau; it was not until April , that the Gauleiter of
Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, declared Dresden formally a fortress.
v
v
v
Historically, Dresden had been of some importance as a centre for the administration of military and, somewhat later, air force operations. In Dresden became
the headquarters city of Luftkreis III, from which Colonel Bogatsch, commander of
the Saxon anti-aircraft artillery defences, controlled various flak-regiments in Dresden, Gotha, Wurzen and Rudolstadt; a year later his authority was extended to include new flak-regiments formed in Weimar, Merseburg, Breslau, and Dessau, and
in , as German rearmament progressed apace, his Luftkreis was extended to
embrace new flak-regiments being organised for the defence of Jena, Leipzig,
Chemnitz, Liegnitz, Halle, Wittenberg and Bitterfeld. On November , the
German flak artillery was re-incorporated and extended to place the flak regiments
under the control of the newly organised Luftgaukommandos – Air Zone Commands.
Colonel Bogatsch was now given the command of Luftgau IV in Dresden, with
headquarters in Dresden’s General-Wever-Strasse, not far from the central station.
A separate Breslau Luftgaukommando was organised, Luftgau VIII; already the importance of Dresden as a control centre was declining. With the outbreak of war in
, the duties of the Dresden Luftgaukommando were primarily performed by
Berlin’s Luftgaukommando III, with which it was united.
At the time of the air attack in , the city’s military significance was minimal.
Since Dresden had been Headquarters of Wehrkreis IV, Army District Command
IV, and near the defunct arsenal in the northern outskirts of the town there was an
extensive complex of barracks and parade-ground installations. In the hills to the
north-east S.S. troops under S.S.-Gruppenführer von Alvensleben, the chief of police, had blasted an underground command bunker into the Mordgrundbrücke rock
face. While this was a target of a military nature, it was hardly one for the strategic
air forces.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
In recognition of the city’s lack of any obvious military signi⁵cance, the Reich government had turned increasingly to Dresden as a haven for administrative departments
and commercial offices, especially as the pressure from air attacks on Berlin became
more severe during . Typical of this trend was the decision to move the head
office of the Berlin Grossbank to Dresden with its entire staff. But even by February
there was no sign that the Reich government itself would be transferred to the
city, although with the fall of Berlin such a move might have been contemplated.
Throughout the middle years of the war, Dresden’s Luftgau IV had stationed strong
flak defences around the city, but as the years passed without their springing into
action more than twice, the authorities not unreasonably accepted that the guns were
being wasted in Dresden, and dispersed them to the eastern front and the Ruhr.
There thus arose the wide-spread but fatal legend of Dresden, the city that would
never be bombed. On the one hand, the Dresdeners were reassured by the authorities’
inaction on civil defence programmes and by their relinquishing of the city’s flak
defences; and on the other hand they had a pathetic confidence in the Allied governments respecting a city that housed ever increasing numbers of civilian hospitals and
military dressing stations. Those people who could sent their children to Dresden
for safety. The Allies might bomb one of the more remote industrial suburbs, it was
admitted, but never the city centre.‘The Dresden population,’ the Head of the Home
Office Intelligence Section would minute in , ‘appears to have believed that an
understanding existed between ourselves and the Germans that we would spare
Dresden if Oxford was not attacked.’
Insidious folklore added to this false sense of security. Some people claimed to
have found Allied leaflets which promised that Dresden was needed as the post-war
capital of a defeated Germany; others asserted that Mr Churchill had relatives living
in or near the city. That the city had not even been subjected to nuisance raids by the
Light Night Striking Force appeared to lend credibility to these rumours. Tragic and
even pathetic though they may appear in retrospect, the rumours were nevertheless
believed not only by the , permanent residents of Dresden, but by the city’s
own officials; and they were impressed in turn upon the million or more evacuees
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
who flooded into the city after January , when the Russian invasion broke in the
East.
v
v
v
As it is of some significance to consider whether the city was in February an
undefended city within the meaning of the The Hague Convention, it will be
necessary to examine the establishment and subsequent total dispersal of the city’s
flak batteries, before the date of the triple blow.
German flak was predominantly divided between the light and the heavy flak batteries. Light flak was provided by twenty-millimetre machine guns, and seldom scored
damaging hits above seven thousand feet; with its familiar green and yellow tracer
shells it was used primarily as a defence against low flying intruders. The heavy flak
batteries provided a far more formidable defence and deterrent to high altitude
bomber formations. It was provided by the eighty-eight-millimetre and -millimetre guns, of which the former were the capital weapon of all German artillery
planning.
Since the summer of there had been two genres of heavy flak in the city, the
standard ‘eighty-eights’ and the less efficient /-millimetre guns known as Flak m
(r).
The ‘eighty-eights’ achieved muzzle velocities in excess of four thousand feet per
second. Among the standard heavy flak batteries stationed in Dresden were the /
th stationed in Dresden-Übigau, near to the autobahn bridge across the River
Elbe; the /th on the Heller parade ground near Dresden-Klotzsche airfield; the
/th in the hills to the south of the city, stationed to be exact in Kohlenstrasse in
Dresden-Räcknitz, and later enlarged – by cannibalising the others – to a Grossbatterie;
the /th on the high ground between Rochwitz and Gönnsdorf, and finally the
/th in Altfranken to the west of the city.
The /-millimetre pieces were captured Russian eighty-five millimetre guns
which had been rebored to eighty-eight millimetre calibre for use as anti-aircraft
artillery. Their bigger brother, the standard eighty-eight millimetre guns, were also
serviceable an anti-tank weapons, as the British Army had been pained to discover in
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
June in the Western Desert; fired horizontally, the eighty-eight was capable of
piercing -millimetre armourplate at a range of a thousand yards and more. For
Dresden this dual utility was to prove fatal as the Soviet tank offensive in the east
gathered momentum, and first the eighty-eight millimetre batteries, then even the
inferior /s were dismounted and rushed into action along the eastern front.
More will be said about this in due course.
During such time as the flak was in Dresden, the Russian pieces were concentrated
more toward the city centre than the heavier German guns; the /IV /-mm
battery was stationed on the Elbe embankment at Vogelwiese; the th was in
Wölfnitz; the th in Radebeul; the th in Seidnitz; the th was in Rochwitz –
all of them captured Russian guns. Battery /IV on the Elbe embankment was
closest to the city centre; the battery was equipped with six of the /-mm guns
with radar-predicted fire-control equipment. Four of these guns were manned by
day by Hitler Youth schoolboys from the city’s famous Kreuzschule, together with a
permanent crew of soldiers; by night the other two guns were manned by shifts of
workers from the factories.
Not surprisingly the Dresden flak had little chance in the early years to practise or
demonstrate its potency: private records indicate that the /th battery was the
first to fire in anger, and then only on May , , when the U.S.A.A.F. was
attacking nearby oil installations; on August , the flak was able to fire again
during an attack on neighbouring Freital, and again on the September – – if
only a mild barrage. In October , however, the process of disbanding the
Dresden flak was commenced: the rd Battery was dissolved and merged with the
th to form a single Grossbatterie in Radebeul; only once did this new battery
open fire, during the American attack on Dresden on October . There is a note of
pathos in the recollection of one of the Hitler Youth boys, himself on duty as a radar
fire-control officer, of the wild attempts of the flak to counter the attack; his own
steel helmet was much to large for him, and the throat microphone he wore was too
loose for his neck. ‘The gun barrels were bristling in all directions when we were
told to put up a barrage,’ he recalled. ‘The boys in our crew were all so young and
weak that the Russian prisoners had to be used for loading the guns. All in all the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Dresden flak was not the elite of the Reich defence.’ Fortunately, he added ironically,
there was no flak left in Dresden in February ; had there been, he and his friends
would have been immolated with the rest of the city.
During the winter of –, with the renewed Soviet offensive on the Eastern front, and allied armour thrusting into Germany all along the western frontiers,
the demand for the dispatch of Dresden’s flak batteries to bolster these sagging defences became too insistent to ignore. Nor was Dresden the only city to have its
defences denuded: the United States Strategic Bombing Survey’s summary report
pointed out that in January and February alone, some three hundred flak batteries
were moved to the Eastern front to be used for anti-tank fire. By the middle of
January only the concrete pads remained to mark where the ⁶ak guns had once
stood in Dresden; only papier-mâché dummies remained on the hills outside to defend the city.
Hitler’s systematic reduction of the German cities’ flak and fighter defences to
reinforce the eastern front can be traced from the war diary of the German air force
high command (OKL) which has now been found. On February Göring directed
the fighter planes of Luftflotte Reich to operate only against ground targets on the
eastern front, where the Russians had established their bridgeheads across the Oder,
or against enemy troop concentrations on the eastern bank of the river. Since the
First and Second Flak Corps had already lost twenty-millimetre and eightyeight millimetre flak guns since the Soviet offensive began on January , Hitler also
ordered under the code-word ‘Gneisenau Flak’ the massive transfer of flak batteries
from the cities to the battlefield in the east. On February after Hitler issued the
codeword a further flak batteries were transferred to the eastern front, packing
the guns into anti-tank defences, line upon line of them massed along the Oder. By
February , of the heavy and medium and light flak batteries ordered sent
to the eastern front heavy and forty medium and light batteries were recorded
as having arrived and forty-five heavy and twenty-four medium and light batteries
were on their way.
As for Dresden’s gun batteries, these were dispersed throughout the length and
breadth of the Reich. Battery /IV was transferred to Halle; others were sent to
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Leipzig and Berlin. The eighty-eights were sent into action on the eastern front.
Battery / was switched to the Ruhr, where it served during the almost continual air attacks up to the end of March ; on April it was converted to an antitank battery and took part in the defence of Hamm, near where it was finally overrun ten days later by American infantry. Of the crew of Dresden HitlerYouth schoolboys, half were killed in this final stand; the story of the Dresden flak batteries,
defending anything but the city from which their youthful crews had been impressed,
is one tinged with tragedy, but with heroism.
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By the beginning of February , therefore, the capital city of Saxony was within
the full meaning of the relevant conventions an undefended city; in addition, as we
have seen, it was devoid of industrial, strategic or military targets-in-being of the
first order. Sir Arthur Harris and his American counterparts were however concerned with winning the war and not with considerations of international law.
In his own bluff, inimitable style Harris would observe years later that the only
international restriction which he considered to be binding on him and his Command during the war was an agreement dating back to the Franco-Prussian War
which prohibited the release of explosive objects from gas-filled dirigibles. Bomber
Command, he pointed out, rigidly complied with this restriction through the Second World War.
All this is, however, trespassing seriously on chronology, and it is necessary first to
observe how it came to pass that one of Germany’s most treasured and beautiful
cities, a city housing by then well over a million civilians and refugees, finally came to
be attacked in the fourteen hours and fifteen minutes that were to commence with
: P.M. on the night of February , .
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THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
During the first weeks of , the German army headquarters learned from intelligence sources that the Russians were preparing for a new major offensive across
the River Vistula, a front which had remained stable since the conclusion of the Soviet summer offensive of . Massive Soviet forces, estimated to outnumber the
German defenders by more than ten to one, were observed concentrating at Baranov,
Pulavy and Magnusev. Several German divisions had already been withdrawn from
this front and East Prussia during the winter, and transferred to Hungary and the
Rhineland.
It was the responsibility of the local Gauleiters to organise mass evacuation of the
civilian population from battle areas, and experience had already demonstrated that
the prospects of the evacuees of reaching safety depended only on the speed with
which the evacuation operation was implemented; in this respect, the Gauleiters as
political leaders were at variance with themselves as Reich Defence Commissioners:
The whole German civilian morale was founded on the dogma of the Final Victory,
and it was dif⁵cult to reconcile final victory with being forced to leave ones home and
possessions overnight to the enemy; some Gauleiters like Erich Koch of East Prussia
had resolved this dilemma by refusing any discussion of evacuation measures in the
province’s battered capital Königsberg; thus when the weight of the two R.A.F Bomber
Command attacks on the city in August had constrained the city’s Oberpräsidium
to appeal to Koch to order the evacuation of all non-combatants from the city, he
was empowered to refuse, and did. He did not wish to spread alarm and despondency among the populace. On the other hand, the Gauleiters of Wartheland and
Danzig/West Prussia had drawn up secret plans to deal with mass evacuation, which
were to stand them in good stead.
The resulting fate of the East Prussian population who did obey the Gauleiter’s
embargo on evacuation was an object lesson not only to the other Gauleiters but also
to the citizens of all other areas likely to be overrun by the Soviet Army. On October
, the first mass Soviet offensive along a front of eighty-five miles had threatened the very heart of East Prussia, and sent hordes of refugees and evacuees reeling
southwards; many thousands arrived in Dresden, considered to be the Reich’s ‘safest
air-raid shelter.’ Despite the exhortations and threats of Gauleiter Koch, some twenty-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
five percent of the population fled East Prussia, about six hundred thousand people.
The town dwellers, together with women, children and invalids from rural areas
were evacuated en masse to the provinces of Saxony, Thuringia and Pomerania.
The Saxon capital, Dresden, which in had a population of ,, was soon
swollen by one or two million refugees. The Russian offensive in East Prussia demonstrated to Nazi Party officials and citizens alike that Germans might expect short
shrift from the Soviet troops if they stayed behind; the evacuees pouring into Saxony
and Western Silesia brought with them harrowing eye-witness stories of atrocities
committed against German civilians who had not been evacuated in time. On October for example Soviet tank commanders caught up with a column of refugees
streaming out of the East Prussian district of Gumbinnen and ordered their tanks to
proceed straight over the refugees and their vehicles, wiping out the whole column.
The Gumbinnen affair came to signalise to The Germans what awaited them in the
event that their leaders did not order the evacuation of the battle zones in time.
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The sudden launching of the Soviet offensive on the Vistula on January ,
was to bring in its wake atrocities more degrading than this first Gumbinnen affair; it
served to terrify the population, and inculcated an even wilder reluctance to stay
near the battlefields.
On January the First Ukrainian Front commanded by the ruthless Soviet Marshal Ivan S Koniev broke out of the Baranov bridgehead, and started a massive push
in the direction of Silesia On the following day the First White Russian Front under
the command of Soviet Marshal Zhukov broke out of the neighbouring bridgeheads
at Pulavy and Magnusev; his tank columns were headed for Lodz and Kalisch. A
simultaneous attack on East Prussia where the offensive had stagnated since the October onslaught, was mounted by the Third White Russian Front under Soviet Marshal Chernakovsky, with the capture of Königsberg as its aim; on January the plan
to detach East Prussia from the rest of the Reich was put into the operation, with the
Second White Russian Front pushing toward Thorn and Elbing.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Overnight the westward movement of evacuees swelled to a flood-tide which the
gauleiters could no longer stem. An exodus of five million Germans from eastern
Germany had begun, an exodus that was voluntary as yet, but destined with the end
of the war to yield to the most brutally enforced and greatest mass expulsion in the
history of the European continent.
Inevitably the greater part of the responsibility for this sudden exodus through
Saxony must lie with the gauleiters of the areas upon which the weight of the Soviet
offensive fell. At the beginning of there had been some ,, German
nationals – ethnically German – living in Silesia, the province to the immediate east
of Saxony. Wretched columns of Allied and Russian prisoners of war tumbled westwards and southwards together with evacuated concentration camp prisoners and
pitiful ‘treks’ of civilian refugees.The local population too needed no second bidding
to leave the path of the invaders. One section fled south-westwards over the mountains into Bohemia and Moravia; a larger section trekked along the main autobahn
into Saxony.The first major city there was Dresden, and beneath that city’s glittering
spires, whether or not they had friends there, most of the evacuees intended to stay.
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On January , the two Allied air commanders issued a new directive, No.,
for the Strategic Air Forces in Europe, according first priority to attacks on the enemy petroleum industry and second priority to the destruction of enemy lines of
communication, with ‘particular emphasis’ however on the Ruhr.
On the following day the city of Dresden was for a second time the object of a
minor Allied bombing attack. Part of a force of some four hundred Liberators of the
Second Air Division of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces attacked the ‘Dresden oil refinery
and marshalling yards’. The Eighth Air Force Target Summary recorded effective sorties against Dresden’s marshalling yards, in an attack commencing at noon:
bombs fell accurately along the Hamburger-Strasse side of the Friedrichstadt marshalling yards, doing damage to some railway installations.The bombing of one unit,
the th (Liberator) Bombardment Group, went rather wide and a target photograph
shows its bomb pattern bursting in the grounds of the Friedrichstadt hospital and
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
among the hospital buildings. Each of the Liberators dropped eight -pound R.D.X.
high-explosive bombs. The flak had been heavy on the way to the target, and although over Ruhland the flak was also heavy the crews bombing Dresden from ,
feet were surprised to experience no opposition from the city. This attack claimed
victims in the city, among them the first recorded British death: a British private
from the second largest work-detail of prisoners of war, Norman Lea, was killed on
his way to hospital. ‘That is the first casualty and I hope the last,’ recorded the
Kommando’s Man of Confidence in his diary. ‘But with around men from this
Kommando alone working every day in the town, and with the strong possibility of
a Blitz, it is by no means impossible that there will be further casualties.’
While the German civilians were buried in a mass-funeral in one of the city’s cemeteries the Army District Command in Dresden, in strict observance of the relevant
conventions paraded the city garrison and buried the unfortunate British soldier
‘with full military honours and a British and German guard of honour’ at the Military Cemetery in Dresden-Albertstadt, as the Camp Leader informed the bereaved
parents. In Dresden, the war was still regarded with an almost old-fashioned chivalry.
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On the same day as this minor air raid, January , the German Army Group A
pressed for the immediate evacuation of Silesia, and between the nineteenth and the
twenty-fifth the first great treks began assembling in the main town and cities of
Silesia to start the long tramp west.
Unlike the mass evacuations of Hamburg, Berlin, and the Ruhr under the pressure
of R.A.F. Bomber Command’s night offensive – ,, citizens had been evacuated from Berlin and about two millions from the Rhine province by the end of
– this was a flood-tide of humanity unleashed on the very largest scale, and within a
cruelly short space of time. Within seven days five million German civilians were
uprooted from their ancestral homes and began streaming westwards along the roads
and highways carrying their few remaining chattels in boxes and bags, and camping
out in the open air night after night despite sub-zero temperatures. Just as this mass
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
exodus was gathering momentum, Silesia’s Gauleiter Karl Hanke intervened, having
observed with dismay the depletion of the labour force for his vital Silesian war
factories; he ordered that women and children only were to be evacuated; everybody else was to stay at their jobs to the last. This decree inflicted appalling hardships on the ‘treks’ of evacuees fleeing westwards, which were now deprived of all
their able-bodied men; it accounts for the number of predominantly female casualties among the refugees who reached Dresden.
On January , Hanke ordered the evacuation of Namslau in Lower Silesia and
designated Landeshut as a reception area for the townsfolk, and the Sudetenland for
the rural population. On the twentieth the Soviet armour reached Kattowitz, Beuthen,
Gleiwitz and Hindeburg, and in defiance of Hanke’s decree a small scale evacuation
by the entire German population began. On the twenty-second the first Russian
units crossed the River Oder between Brieg and Ohlau, cutting all main railway lines
westwards out of Breslau, Hanke’s capital. Thus the only escape lay by rail along a
southerly route through Ratibor and Neisse, and soon these railways were burdened
with thousands of women and children fleeing to Dresden and Saxony. In most cases
the industrial population stayed to the last moment; cases occurred where even as
Soviet troops were fighting for possession of the collieries, German miners were still
working the coal face below. Other areas were more fortunate however. Of the seven
hundred thousand inhabitants of Oppeln and Glogau a timely evacuation order on
January allowed no fewer than six hundred thousand to escape the Russians; the
remainder, who were ethnically Polish, stayed behind considering that they had little
to fear from the invaders.
On January the Gauleiter ordered the evacuation of Trebnitz. As soon as the
evacuation decree was promulgated, the whole German population descended on
every available means of transport to escape westwards, despite the bitterly cold
temperatures which were to mark the first three months of ; being a largely
rural community there were however farm carts and wagons available for these families
to travel in. As the authorities believed that the Soviet armour would be halted for
some time on the Oder, they at first designated reception areas for the evacuees only
just to the west of the river in localities including Liegnitz, Goldberg, and Schweidnitz.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Providentially, the military commanders insisted however that these areas too close
to the battlefield and they had the civilians displaced some miles further to the west.
Soon after, the Russian bridged the Oder, and the fight for Saxony began afresh. It
was as though fate were conspiring to ensure that by the time that the middle days of
February arrived, the maximum number of refugees would be sheltering in the province’s capital city.
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It was unfortunate, if foreseeable that the city was also housing a large population
of Allied prisoners of war. R.A.F. Bomber Command was dependent on the International Red Cross for precise information on the location of these Allied prisoners of
war; Sir Arthur Harris later denied that in the case of Dresden any such information
was contained in Bomber Command’s dossier on the city. In fact Article of the
Convention on Prisoners of War had defined that prisoners of war were not be
so located as to render certain points or areas immune from bombardment; the
German Army had rigidly observed this article, as the Protecting Power was able to
report. But especially in Central Germany where the major camps were divided into
Arbeitskommandos (work-details) sometimes numbering only or two hundred
men or even less, each Kommando being based on or near the farm, factory or
railway yard where its men were working, casualties were inevitable. It is of course
questionable whether the entire residential districts of a city were the kind of ‘points
or areas’ which the draughtsmen of the Convention had in mind in as targets
for bombardment.
In Dresden the casualties among Allied prisoners of war were high during the
February raid, and if statistics on them had been published at the end of the
war, no doubt they would have excited comment: the British War Office would admit that the last report on the British camps in Dresden had been received from the
Protecting Power, Switzerland, in January ; this had stated that there were sixtyseven such ‘work-details’ within the immediate Dresden area, under the Stalag IVa
camp. Added to these were seven American work-details, each considerably larger
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
than the British ones, reported after a visit to Dresden by a representative of the
Swiss Legation in Berlin between January –.
The exact statistical position is however complicated by the numbers of Allied and
Russian prisoners temporarily in transit through Dresden from the eastern territories. The British government published soon after the February raids on Dresden a
list of Allied camps in the territories known to have been overrun by the Soviets. Of
the nineteen camps listed, some are known to have been passing through the city at
the time of the attack; other camps, like Stalags VIIIb and VIIIc from Oppeln and
Sagan respectively, which were also evacuated through Dresden, are known to have
reached the city only after the attack; Stalag VIIIb was evacuated from Oppeln on the
Oder on January but did not arrive until February , after three weeks on the
march. Stalag VIIIc, with fifteen thousand Allied prisoners, was also routed through
Spremberg to Dresden. The measure in which the city’s population of Allied prisoners grew during February is shown by a report by the International Red Cross on a
visit to Dresden’s Stalag IVa on February which revealed that there was by then a
total of , prisoners of war interned there, including , Americans.
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On January , the first officially organised refugee trains from the east began to arrive in Dresden. Over a thousand Reich Work Service girls were waiting at
central station to help the elderly and invalid refugees unload their baggage from the
passenger trains and goods trains and find food and temporary lodgings for them;
then the emptied trains were sent back to the East to pick up more refugees. Day and
night the unloading , victualling and re-directing of refugees continued in Dresden,
the tempo increasing until finally R.A.D.W.J. girls, Hitler Youth units, League of
German Girls units, National Socialist Welfare Service (N.S.V.) and the Party’s
Frauenschaften (women’s associations) were all engaged in refugee welfare work.
At the same time many of the city’s main secondary and grammar schools were
shut down for conversion into military and Luftwaffe hospitals; within a few days of
the Soviet invasion the Dreikönigs-,Vitzthum- and State Grammar Schools had been
converted, as had the boys’ secondary schools in Dresden New Town, Dresden-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Johannstadt, Dresden-Plauen, Dresden-Blasewitz and the girls’ secondary schools in
Dresden New Town and Dresden-Marschnerstrasse; the school children thus released
were assigned to work on refugee duties in the stations. On February , the largescale employment of school units at Dresden-New Town station began, the senior
schoolboys being required to work all night from : P.M. until eight the following
morning tending the ailing refugees who were now pouring in with every train that
arrived from the east. One by one the towns, cities and provinces of the east were
emptied of their German population – Glogau, Fraustadt, Guhrau, Militsch,Trebnitz,
Gross-Wartenberg, Oels, Namslau, Kreuzberg, Rosenberg and the eastern areas of
Oppeln and Brieg. The existing transport system was hopelessly over-burdened, but
the party’s welfare organisations were able to set up moderately efficient food stations at intervals along the route to Dresden to alleviate the worst distresses inflicted
by hunger and bitter cold.
Soon the first uneasy fears were awakened among the Germans remaining in Breslau,
the metropolitan capital of Silesia. Fortunately, the city was already under-populated, with only , inhabitants; sixty thousand non-essential civilians had already been evacuated since the autumn of when the city had been declared a
Fortress. On January the distant thunder of the artillery bombardment of Trebnitz
had been heard in Breslau, and the authorities ordered the city’s remaining invalids,
women, children and elderly folk to leave for the west. As the train service was
slowly grinding to a halt over one hundred thousand people therefore set out literally on foot; in the absence of the farm carts and wagons which had evacuated their
more fortunate rural cousins, the industrial populace had no alternative but to walk.
It would take some weeks for them to reach Saxony, where the larger part of them
were heading.
Nor were civilians alone in being pulled out of Breslau, a city which was destined
to become the scene of a bitter and heroic fighting until it finally succumbed on May
, ; the Government, in preparing for the siege, ordered the evacuation of many
of Breslau’s administrative and military installation to Dresden. Breslau’s
Luftgaukommando had been transferred to new quarters in Dresden. The complete Radio Breslau transmitting station was dismantled and transported to Dresden
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
with orders to reinforce the low-powered Dresden station and at the same time to
convert it to the former Breslau wavelength, so as to camouflage its location; the
trucks carrying the precious transmitter equipment arrived in Dresden on the afternoon of R.A.F. Bomber Command’s first attack, and suffered the fate of the city.
By the time that the final Russian encirclement of Breslau began, during the night
of February –, only two hundred thousand civilians remained in the city. The
rest had escaped, most of them to Dresden. Of those Breslauers who remained,
some forty thousand were to be killed during the bitter street fighting and Soviet air
raids. Events in the east augured ill for Dresden and only the Allied prisoners, cut off
from the general mood of confidence in the city, appear to have realised the city’s
vulnerability as a refugee traffic centre: ‘Although Breslau is directly to the east of
us,’ recorded a Dresden prisoner on January , ‘there has been no railway bombing
and German traffic has been flowing quite freely. Marvellous organisation on our
part or the Russians’. I don’t know which!’
The Oct request to the Soviet government to bomb Dresden is referred to in Dr Noble
Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, )
vol.iii, p., and was confirmed by personal communications to the author from Major General M
B Burrows, General J R Deane, and Lieutenant Colonel Brinkmann.
CSTC Working Committee Transportation, ‘Attack of German Transportation System,’ Nov ,
(PRO file AIR./).
CSTC th meeting, Nov , (PRO file AIR /).
Eighth Air Force Target Summary.
Professor Max Seydewitz, Die Zerstörung undWiederaufbau von Dresden (Dresden, ).
‘Bericht über die feindliche Fliegertätigkeit in der Zeit vom .. Uhr bis ..
Uhr,’ Berlin Document Center files, National Archives film T, roll (Author’s microfilm DI–
).
HQ, US Strategic Bombing Survey, report, Jul , : ‘Dresden, Germany, City Area’. –
Report by OSS London, B./, Mar , . cited in Walter F Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of
the – February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF Historical Division Archives).
Dieter Georgi, ‘The Bombings of Dresden’, in Harvard Magazine, No., Mar–Apr , p.;
Georgi was fifteen years old at the time he was evacuated to Dresden.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
McIvor (Chief of Home Office Intelligence Section) to A Nicholls, Air Historical Branch, Apr ,
.
Information from one of the HitlerYouth flak gunners, Götz Bergander, to the author; Bergander
subsequently published his own well researched account of the raids: Dresden im Luftkrieg (Cologne
and Vienna, ). – And see the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey report of Oct , .
Most of the bombs during the Freital attack fell on the working-class housing estate of Birkigt.
Kriegstagebuch OKL Führungsstab Ia (War Diary, German Air Force operations staff), Feb ,
(NA film T, roll ).
Ibid.
Ibid., Feb , (NA film T, roll ).
Ibid., Feb , (NA film T, roll ).
Directive No., Jan , (PRO file AIR./). Spaatz to Kuter, ‘Comments on Strategic
Directive No. ,’ (Maxwell AFB, microfilm .–): Spaatz speculated that the only reason why
the so-called ‘industrial targets’ were given this priority rating was to enable Bomber Command to
attack them.
Information from Richard Dugger, former bombardier of an aircraft of the th Bombardment
Group, Second Air Division, to the author.
See the published history of the th Bombardment Group.
From Corporal S Gregory’s ‘Camp Diary of Arbeitskommando , Dresden’; and his letter to
the parents of private Norman Lea, Feb , (both in the author’s archives.)
My account is based largely on the official German government publication Dokumentation der
Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, vols.i–iv, published by the German Federal Ministry of
Refugees, Expellees and War Victims (Bonn, ); the original reports on the expulsion have now
been retired to the Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz, Germany.
Tragedy of Silesia, – (Munich, ), p..
Information from Sir Arthur Harris to the author.
Information from the British War Office Records Dept. to the author.
Information from Chief Archivist Sherrod East of World War II Records Division, the National
Archives, Washington DC, to the author.
From the diaries of former RADwJ (Reichsarbeitsdienst weiblicher Jugend) Maidenführerin
Margarete Führmeister, Mannheim, supplied to the author; and information from Studienrat Hanns
Voigt, Bielefeld.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Information from Luftwaffe Major Victor Scheide to the author.
Aktuell (Munich), issues Nos. , , , .
Diary of Corporal S Gregory (author’s archives).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Thunderclap
T
of the Soviet advance into Germany and the accompany
ing Orders of the Day heralding the fall of one eastern town after another
could not have come at a more embarrassing time for the Western Allies.
The long-awaited Crimea conference, on which so much was to depend for the future of post-war Europe, was thus to open with a display of Soviet might on the
grandest scale; compared with the Soviet advances in East Prussia and Silesia, the
Allies’ achievements in Italy and the Rhineland must have seemed paltry indeed.The
political leaders of the west would be hard pressed to bargain from a position of
strength when the conference opened at Yalta. In the circumstances it was natural
that the Allied governments should turn to their bomber weapon as a means of impressing upon the Soviet Union that the air offensive on the German ‘home front’
was as crushing as any mounted by Soviet armour in the east.
Military collaboration between the Soviets and the Allies had been at best only
fitful ever since Hitler invaded Russia. During September and October the
Allies had however begun exchanging with the Russians details of specific plans to
bring the war to a rapid close. On December the American ambassador in Moscow, Averill Harriman, had told Marshal Stalin that General Dwight D Eisenhower,
supreme commander of the Allied forces in the west, was anxious to concert his
operations with the Russians; from Harriman’s mention of the possible use in the
Balkans of the Allied air forces based in the Mediterranean it was implicit that the
main strategic air forces were also being offered for operations in support of the
Soviet armies.
When Stalin had failed to launch his major winter offensive during Hitler’s attack
in the Ardennes, the Allies had sent to Moscow Eisenhower’s deputy, Marshal of the
HE IMPRESSIVE SPEED
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Tedder, in an attempt to co-ordinate operations; Tedder
met with Stalin on January , , three days after Stalin finally began his offensive, and outlined to the Soviet dictator Allied plans to bomb German oil targets,
railroads and waterways, and to prevent Hitler from transferring his forces from the
western to the eastern front.
Throughout that month however the weather in Europe remained as unfavourable
for bombing operations as it was inhospitable for the millions of refugees ⁶eeing
westwards.
The Joint Intelligence Committee of the British War Cabinet continually re-examined the most effective employment of the Allied bomber forces.They came up with
a modification of a plan previously projected under the code-name THUNDERCLAP: in
July the Chiefs of Staff had discussed the possibility of making Berlin the target
for a blow of ‘catastrophic force’ on morale, both military, political – and civilian.
The suggestion had been put to the prime minister and then embodied in a detailed
memo submitted by Sir Charles Portal to the Chiefs of Staff on August . THUNDERCLAP was to last for three days and nights if weather allowed. With some justice this
memo was later termed by the Official Historians the ‘title-deed’ of the Dresden
operation. As an alternative to Berlin, Portal wrote,
immense devastation could be produced if the entire attack was concentrated
on a single big town other than Berlin and the effect would be especially great if
the town was one hitherto relatively undamaged.
The Foreign Office, the Political Warfare Executive and the Ministry of Economic
Warfare, with whom THUNDERCLAP had been discussed in principle, believed that such
an attack might hasten an imminent victory or determine one which seemed in the
balance. On the advice of the Joint Planners’ Committee however the plan had been
shelved until such time as the J.I.C. might consider the circumstances favourable for
a reappraisal of its possibilities.
Had that time now come? Basing its judgement primarily on deciphered intercepts, on January , the J.I.C. had decided that about six weeks after mid-
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March the German armed forces would be completely immobilised – an estimate that was to prove remarkably accurate. In a further report two days later the
J.I.C. presented its own appreciation of the latest Soviet offensive on the eastern
front. They informed Churchill and the chiefs of staff, in a paper entitled ‘Strategic
Bombing in Relation to the Present Russian Offensive,’ that the war could be shortened if the British and American strategic bomber forces assisted the Red Army
during the next few weeks, and that they should therefore review their current bombing priorities – oil and tank production currently sharing top place. Specifically, the
J.I.C. drew attention to the contraflow of German troops heading east to the Oder
front and the refugee treks fleeing to the west: the committee felt that a ‘heavy and
sustained’ bombardment of Berlin might cause a chaotic outpouring of refugees from
the city which would severely disrupt the troop movements. In addition to these
tactical considerations, the J.I.C. suggested – apropos western bargaining power at
the forthcoming Crimea conference – that there might be a ‘political value’ in demonstrating to the Russians a desire to assist them ‘in the best way open to us’ in their
current offensive.
For several days Eisenhower’s staff studied these recommendations.
The British Air Ministry was quicker to act on the J.I.C. report. Sir Norman
Bottomley, the deputy Chief of the Air Staff, telephoned Sir Arthur Harris that same
day to acquaint him with the report’s recommendations and to discuss its implications. Though Harris affirmed that he regarded Berlin as already being ‘on his plate’
Bottomley pointed out that as the full THUNDERCLAP plan for a shattering blow on the
capital was now being projected Harris would have to co-ordinate his operations
with the U.S. Strategic Air Forces, and in all probably consult with the Chiefs of Staff
as well. In this conversation, according to the minute sent up by Bottomley to Portal
on the following day, Harris suggested supplementary attacks on Chemnitz, Leipzig,
and Dresden, which, equally with Berlin, would share the task of housing evacuees
from the East, and were focal points in the communications systems serving the
eastern front.
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There was something ironic in Sir Arthur Harris now being required to put the full
strength of Bomber Command behind an area offensive again, since he had long
advocated precisely that, in preference to the bombing of precision targets – what he
called ‘panacea’ targets like oil refineries.The efforts of his Command had been largely
directed since toward the bombing of cities. Late in however the success
of the air offensive against the oil plants waged under the direction of S.H.A.E.F.
during the summer had convinced the Air Staff that continuing this oil offensive
could have a decisive effect on the war before the end of the year. Harris however
had obstinately maintained the importance of continuing the area offensive, claiming
that it would be impossible to operate his squadrons on the set schedule needed for
destroying precision targets in uncertain winter weather conditions.
Thus, despite the top priority ordered for the oil offensive throughout the autumn
of , during the last three months of that year fifty-eight percent of Bomber
Command’s operations had still been directed against cities rather than oil targets.
Harris refused to change his strategy.Writing to Portal on November , he had
pointed out that within eighteen months his Command had virtually destroyed fortyfive of Germany’s sixty biggest cities, and he suggested they now deal with those
which were still standing, ‘Magdeburg, Halle, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, Breslau,
Nuremberg, Munich, Coblenz and Karlsruhe, and the further destruction of Berlin
and Hanover.’ (There was nothing unusual about the mention of Dresden, apart from
the city’s extreme range from the R.A.F. airfields even now. Along with every major
population centre in Europe Dresden had long been included in Bomber Command’s
‘Bomber’s Bædeker.’ The target map finally used for the first attack on Dresden had
been printed as early as November .)
The Air Staff had refused however to cede to Harris this proposed reversion to the
old priorities and the deadlock of strategic policy had continued.
In January , with the unleashing of the new Russian offensive, Harris had
again written to Portal. His letter, dispatched on the eighteenth, brought matters to
a head. He again voiced dissatisfaction with the oil plan, and advocated the destruction of ‘Magdeburg, Leipzig, Chemnitz, Dresden, Breslau, Posen, Halle, Erfurt, Gotha,
Weimar, Eisenach and the rest of Berlin’ – a shifting of emphasis, but only from the
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industrial to eastern cities. Harris concluded in this letter by suggesting that Portal
‘consider whether it is best for the prosecution of the war and the success of our
arms, which alone matters’ that he should remain in his Command. Faced with the
unpleasant choice between losing a commander-in-chief at a critical stage of the war
whose standing with the men of his command had never been higher, or leaving the
current deadlock over priorities virtually unresolved, Sir Charles Portal chose the
latter course; in a letter dated January he asked Harris to remain in command,
but to observe the existing priorities despite his lack of faith in them.
It was in these strained circumstances that less than a week later the revival of
THUNDERCLAP – a highlight in the concept of area bombing – was to receive the highest possible stimulation. Quite independently of Bottomley’s conversation with Harris,
Mr Churchill was insisting on an aerial attack on the Eastern population centres.
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Mr Churchill too had considered the J.I.C. report on the implications of the new
Soviet offensive. Late on January , before going off for a drink with President
Franklin D Roosevelt’s emissary Harry Hopkins, Churchill had phoned Sir Archibald
Sinclair, his secretary of state for air, to inquire what proposals Bomber Command
had, as he put it, for ‘basting the Germans in their retreat from Breslau.’ (to ‘baste’
normally means either to ‘moisten meat with drippings, butter, etc., while cooking’
or ‘to beat with a stick; thrash; cudgel.’) There was, of course, no military retreat
from Breslau – the city had been declared a Fortress several months before; the
retreat from Breslau was entirely an evacuation of non-combatants. Historians to
come will accordingly be pardoned for finding the Prime Minister’s choice of words
in questionable taste. Since the London newspapers were full of accounts of the
harrowing scenes in the eastern cities where the refugees were arriving from Silesia
and East Prussia, it is plain which ‘retreat’ Mr Churchill was referring to. The newspapers described refugees streaming through Berlin and the Saxon cities, and packed
trains arriving from the eastern front. The Times reported on its main page that
morning that Hans Schwarz van Berg, speaking on German radio, had described
women and children crowding even the buffers between railway coaches and wag-
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ons, despite the bitter cold; nevertheless, he had claimed, even all these refugees
streaming through Berlin had not dislocated the Reich capital.
The Prime Minister’s insistence on such a radical change in the directive to the
strategic bombers led to rapid consultations behind the scenes. Portal sent a minute
to Bottomley on the following morning, January , recommending that oil targets
should continue to enjoy absolute priority, with jet aircraft factories and submarine
yards in second priority; subject to these target systems, in third priority rating, the
modified THUNDERCLAP plan should be prepared (Portal doubted whether the time
had come for a full-scale THUNDERCLAP, or whether it alone would be decisive): one
big attack should be planned for on Berlin, with supplementary attacks on Dresden,
Leipzig, Chemnitz and other cities where severe blitz would ‘not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East, but also hamper the movement of troops from
the West.’
A copy of Portal’s minute was provided for the Secretary of State for Air, and
Sinclair had this in front of him when he replied in writing on January to the
Prime Minister’s telephoned demand of the night before: Sinclair mistakenly believed that Churchill was interested in disrupting a German military withdrawal
westward to Dresden and Berlin. He replied that this was under examination. He
urged the prime minister not to press for attacks on these eastern population centres, as the lines of communications were more suitable to attacks by medium bombers and the Tactical Air Forces, particularly as winter cloud conditions would prelude
the possibility of a THUNDERCLAP, which would have to last for three or four days. He
recommended a continuation of the successful offensive against enemy oil plants,
pointing out in effect that although this might not be as dramatic as enemy cities
burning from end to end within full view of the Soviet armies, its benefits would be
‘felt equally by the Russians and by ourselves,’ and nothing should be allowed to
interfere with it.
The Prime Minister was pre-occupied with plans for the Yalta conference, and
appears to have penetrated little deeper into Sir Archibald Sinclair’s rather verbose
minute than the first few lines. Ignoring Sinclair’s detailed and convincing arguments,
the Prime Minister dispatched a surprisingly caustic reply: ‘I did not ask you last
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night about plans for harrying the German retreat from Breslau,’ he now asserted.
‘On the contrary, I asked whether Berlin, and no doubt other large cities in East
Germany should not now be considered especially attractive targets. I am glad that
this is “under examination”,’ he added, mimicking the Liberal minister’s reply: ‘Pray
report to me tomorrow what is going to be done.’
The immediate results of this hard reply was to panic the Air Staff, whose Deputy
Chief, Sir Norman Bottomley, was acting for Sir Charles Portal prior to the latter’s
departure forYalta – into issuing an instruction in a letter to Sir Arthur Harris which
would make it inevitable that the eastern population centres, including Dresden,
would soon be the object of a modified version of THUNDERCLAP. Bottomley reminded Harris of their telephone conversation two days earlier, in which they had
touched upon attacks on the industrial areas of Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig. Bottomley enclosed with his letter to Harris a copy of the J.I.C. report of January which had examined in part the plan for delivery of a THUNDERCLAP attack on
Berlin, but added that Portal did not think it would be right to attempt attacks on
Berlin on the THUNDERCLAP scale in the immediate future, as it was doubtful whether
such an attack, even if done on the heaviest scale with consequent heavy losses would
be decisive. Portal had however agreed with the report’s recommendation that Bomber
Command use available effort in one big attack on Berlin and related attacks on
Dresden, Leipzig, Chemnitz or any other cities ‘where a severe blitz will not only
cause confusion in the evacuation from the East but will also hamper the movement
of troops from the west.’
Sir Norman Bottomley concluded his letter to Harris with the formal request that
– subject to the qualifications still imposed on the execution of this attack on the
eastern population centres by the ‘overriding claims of oil and other approved target
systems within the current [i.e. No] Directive’, and as soon as moon and weather
conditions permitted, Bomber Command was to undertake such attacks, ‘with the
particular object of exploiting the confused conditions which are likely to exist in
the above mentioned cities during the successful Russian advance.’
The moon conditions were unlikely to be favourable much before February however and Mr Churchill was informed of this immediately after Bottomley’s letter
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
was couriered to Sir Arthur Harris. On the following day, January , the prime
minister formally acknowledged the message. He had secured his political aim: soon
after the fourth, at the climax of the Crimea conference, he would be able to produce a dramatic strike on an eastern German city with which to impress the Soviet
delegation. He could not foresee that in fact nine more days – and the end of theYalta
conference – would pass before the weather too was propitious for such a long range
operation.
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Meanwhile, Sir Norman Bottomley attempted to bring the Americans into the
attack on these eastern cities. There is some evidence that both General George C
Marshall and General Carl A ‘Tooey’ Spaatz, the commanding general of the U.S.
Strategic Air Forces, knew of the developing plan to bomb eastern cities at this time,
and supported it in principle. On September , Eisenhower had discussed
with Spaatz the idea of delivering a colossal air raid on Berlin. Ike’s Psychological
Warfare staff had recommended that they camouflage it as a strike against the Nazi
administration, in order to deflect charges of delivering a terror-raid.
Most of the American generals had however always opposed the bombing of civilians, while there is no record of their British counterparts expressing any such
compunctions. When the British tried to persuade the American strategic air forces
to join in such raids, on September General H H (‘Hap’) Arnold, commanding
the U.S. Army Air Forces, and Roosevelt’s personal chief of staff Admiral William D
Leahy put their foot down against it in a meeting of the American Joint Chiefs of
Staff. This opposition had become plain in the latter part of when some Allied
strategists advised by Professor Solly Zuckerman mooted a plan, code named CLARION,
for an all-out attack on the German transportation network, including low-level
bombing and machine gunning attacks by every plane taking part. Many American
generals rejected the idea however. General Charles P Cabell, an adviser to General
Arnold, rejected any notion of killing helpless women and children. When Spaatz’s
deputy commander, Major General Frederick L Anderson, sent this plan direct to
the Fifteenth Air Force for comment, it attracted a hostile reaction from Lieutenant-
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General Ira C Eaker, commanding general of the Eighth; Eaker wrote to Spaatz on
the first day of that Zuckerman’s ‘crowd’ seemed to ‘have gone nuts on transportation’, although the Germans had the best transportation network in the world;
the most rewarding target was still surely the German oil reserves, he argued,‘where
we really have the Hun by the neck.’ Specifically, Eaker had protested that CLARION
would convince the Germans that the Allies were barbarians: ‘For it would be perfectly obvious to them that this is primarily a large-scale attack on civilians.’ Moreover the plan totally contradicted an agreement reached between Spaatz and Robert
Lovett, U.S. assistant secretary of war for air, about the need to adhere to military
targets. ‘If the time ever comes,’ wrote Eaker in this letter, ‘when we want to attack
the civilian populace with a view to breaking civil morale such a plan [CLARION] is
probably the way to do it. I personally, however, have become completely convinced
that you and Bob Lovett are right and we should never allow the history of this war
to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street.’
Bringing the American heavy bomber squadrons in on any version of THUNDERCLAP
would therefore require some diplomacy. On January Sir Norman Bottomley
seized the opportunity of a luncheon at Bovingdon with General Spaatz at Bovingdon
to push a new order of bombing priorities to exploit, as he put it, the developing
situation in the east. The former Directive No to the Allied strategic air forces, in
force since January , seemed to preclude attacks on eastern targets, as it stipulated
that ‘the Strategic Air Forces based in the United Kingdom will place particular emphasis upon the Ruhr’ lines of communication.
Under the new directive to be issued the principal German synthetic oil plants
were still to have top priority, but for the strategic bombers operating from Britain
the second priority was now switched from the Ruhr communications to attacks on
Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and the other eastern population centres, designed to dislocate the refugee evacuation from the East, and to hamper troop movements. General
Spaatz subsequently briefed Major-General Jimmy Doolittle of Eighth Bomber Command, which like R.A.F. Bomber Command had its headquarters at High Wycombe,
to attack Berlin, apparently within this plan.
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In reporting to Sir Charles Portal on this agreement, Bottomley suggested that the
Russians ‘might wish to know our intentions and plans for attack of targets in eastern
Germany.’ One complication would be that the British Military Mission in Moscow
had been wound up in November when Lieutenant-General M B Burrows had
been declared persona non grata, and the Russians, not recognising the existence of
an air force distinct from either of the other two arms of the service would not
tolerate an air force mission either; all communications to the Soviet General Staff in
Moscow therefore had to be made through the American Military Mission under
General J R Deane, and the head of the aviation section of this mission, Major-General Edmund B Hill.
General Spaatz was uneasy about the changed in priorities. He specifically requested
that Bottomley’s minute to Portal, in which something akin to the American bombardment of area targets was clearly broached, also be shown to General Laurence
Kuter, who was deputising for the convalescing General Arnold at Yalta. It is probable that Spaatz, whose own opposition to area bombing was becoming more pronounced, sought some confirmation of this new policy from a higher authority. Not
until February however did the British air officers show his message to General
Kuter and by that time the American air force had already committed itself to the
new policy.
In retrospect it is not dif⁵cult to surmise the nature of the approach made by Sir
Norman Bottomley to the shrewd American general over that luncheon at Bovingdon.
Spaatz would not permit his bombers to be sent on terror-raids against the German
populace; it would be less simple for him to refuse to attack military targets in the
heart of residential areas. Blind American attacks in daylight upon aiming points
surrounded by residential areas would however be just as destructive as the blind
night attacks delivered by the British on the residential areas themselves, as the Americans were aware. (Major-General Jimmy Doolittle was informed on January that
during blind air attacks the U.S. Eighth Bomber Command had an average circular
probable aiming error of about two miles, which ‘necessitated drenching an area
with bombs to achieve any results’.) It is significant that when General Kuter, and
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
later General Arnold, heard of the change in policy, they immediately stopped further such attacks.
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Mr Churchill left London after a final Cabinet meeting held in the underground
war room – because of the continuing V-weapon offensive against London – late on
January , and flew across France to Malta where he was to consult with the
American Joint Chiefs of Staff and Roosevelt before proceeding to Yalta.
Two days later Sir Charles Portal told the chiefs of general staff (Brooke) and naval
staff (Cunningham) about his plans to use the strategic bombers to assist the Russians by making ‘heavy attacks on the four cities, Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and
Chemnitz’ where, he felt, the resulting confusion would be most likely to hamper
the German efforts to switch their forces between the western and eastern fronts.
That same day, January , Eisenhower’s deputy Tedder and his air staff noted that
the second priority for the Allied strategic air forces should be the ‘attack of Berlin,
Leipzig, Dresden and associated cities where heavy attack will cause great confusion
in civilian evacuation from the east and hamper movement of reinforcements from
other fronts.’
On February , S.H.A.E.F. decided to attempt to break the German will to
resist by demonstrating the terrifying Allied air power. This was to be the first
demonstration of the all-out two-day CLARION assault. Officially it was termed ‘General Plan for Maximum Effort Attack against Transportation Objectives.’ General
George C Marshall, the chief of staff of the American armed forces, strongly approved. He even suggested a raid on Munich deliberately designed to create maximum panic among the refugees there and to demonstrate to the German people the
hopelessness of their plight. One day before the British and American air forces
launched CLARION Spaatz cabled to the commanders of the air force units to emphasise the military importance of the operation – they must avoid at all costs the impression that this was an operation designed to terrorise the civilian population. In
fact it would be February before the CLARION was officially launched; the Americans executed the ‘Marshall’ raid on Munich three days later.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Combined Chiefs of Staff – both British and American – had meanwhile also
convened at Malta on the last day of January. Here they took the final decision to
throw the strategic bombers into the battle in the east. Under the revised directive
issued on January from Malta, the bombing of Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and other
cities ‘where heavy attacks will cause great confusion in civilian evacuation from the
East and hamper reinforcement’ now took second priority after the synthetic oil
plants. Hampering reinforcements: the reference to troop movements was thus now
only a two-word formality. The new directive relegated air raids on the Ruhr–Cologne–Kassel traffic complex to third priority. Major-General Frederick Anderson
dispatched this revised directive from Malta ‘for General Spaatz eyes alone’ on February .
That Friday February the Combined Strategic Targets Committee (C.S.T.C.)
was holding its sixteenth meeting in London. The nineteen officers representing
the Air Staff, Bomber Command, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, S.H.A.E.F. and
the U.S.A.A.F. met in Room /I of the Air Ministry in Whitehall under the chairmanship of Air Commodore S O Bufton, Director of Bomber Operations. The first
point on their agenda was the demand for the destruction of cities in eastern and
central Germany to impede the refugees flooding to the west and the military transports moving to the east. The names of Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig were explicitly
mentioned along with ‘associated cities’, a vague phrase which attracted some debate. That day, February , as (incorrect) reports reached London that elements of
S.S. Obergruppenführer ‘Sepp’ Dietrich’s Sixth S.S. Panzer Army were transferring
from the western front to the east, the British vice-chiefs of staff also looked at
emergency measures to halt the movements by bombing communications targets
south and east of Berlin – Berlin itself and Dresden being specifically mentioned.
No doubt there was some collusion between the Vice Chiefs of Staff and the C.S.T.C..
The vice-chiefs telegraphed their detailed suggestions toYalta overnight, identifying
as priority targets certain ‘focal points in the evacuation areas’ behind the eastern
front such as Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz.
On February , a Saturday, overcoming whatever misgivings he may have had,
Spaatz sent one thousand and three American heavy bombers to attack the centre of
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Berlin in broad daylight, dropping , tons of bombs. This time the intent of creating maximum casualties and chaos among the refugees thronging into the capital
was openly avowed. Although the B– crews had been led to believe that the Sixth
S.S. Panzer Army was passing through the city to the Russian front, the underlying
purpose of the attack was quite evident from one bombardier’s diary entry: ‘Five
thousand-pounders. Shacked [i.e., killed] women and children!’The Flying Fortresses
were allocated military objectives to aim at, but in the heart of residential and business areas. Although most of the flak had been withdrawn to the Oder front, twentyone B–s were destroyed over the city, and ninety-three suffered battle damage.
German reports quoted in Sweden claimed that over twenty-five thousand people
had lost their lives, including heavy casualties among the refugees. The figure was an
exaggeration – the German High Command’s diary recorded that less than a thousand died – but the American commanders can have had little doubt of the probable
results of any more such blind attacks. General Spaatz however was convalescing
from an illness, and he would authorise the Eighth Air Force raid on Dresden before
the implications of the attack on Berlin had fully sunk in. At his Allied air commanders’ conference on February , Spaatz drew attention to the spectacular results of
this Berlin attack; he too added that it was suspected that the ‘Sixth Panzer Army’
was on its way through the capital to reinforce the Eastern front.
After this air raid the Japanese ambassador in Berlin was monitored by the British
reporting to Tokyo that the German foreign ministry had informed him that one of
the neutral diplomats in Berlin ‘had telegraphed to his Government asking them to
advise Britain and America to stop the terror-bombing as this was driving the German people into the arms of Russia.’
Troubled by the news agency reports of the carnage caused by this raid on Berlin
General Kuter sent a message to Spaatz from Yalta on the thirteenth asking whether
the revised directive of January had authorised what he called ‘indiscriminate
attacks’ on cities. From Washington, Lieutenant General Barney M Giles seconded
Kuter’s inquiry the next day, February – even as Dresden was under American
attack and blazing. Spaatz, nettled by these inquiries, replied evasively – his forces
were really observing the original Directive No, he explained, and not the revision
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of January : his bomber squadrons were not bombing cities indiscriminately, he
said, but attacking transportation facilities inside cities, in operations which the Soviets had requested and seemed to appreciate.
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At this time, the fiction that Dresden was an important industrial city appears to
have been only superficially accepted. The War Office department responsible for
briefing the Chief of the Imperial General Staff on all air matters fully endorsed the
attack on the German synthetic oil plants, but viewed with some suspicion the strategic air offensive on German cities; when the Russians had appealed in general for
an Allied air attack on communication centres, a map was produced indicating some
of the communications centres which might be included in this request. One of the
towns listed in this communications map was Dresden, as it was ‘just possible’ to put
it in this category. However, it was ‘certainly not an important industrial centre’;
indeed, the information which the department had to supply to the Chief of the
Imperial General Staff about Dresden was ‘that it was not being used so much as a
transport centre by the German Army as by vast numbers of refugees from the Soviet front.’
At the Crimea conference meanwhile the days passed and there was no word of
the great THUNDERCLAP that Churchill had imperiously called for. On February he
met with Roosevelt and Stalin. Stalin invited the deputy chief of the Soviet general
staff, General Antonov, to outline the war on the eastern front; Antonov stated three
specific requests, one of which was to use Allied air power to prevent the enemy
from shifting his troops from other theatres to the east (while not mentioning Dresden specifically, the Soviet general did suggest the bombing of Berlin and Leipzig).
Although the Big Three did not debate the saturation bombing of civilian targets at
Yalta, it is worth noting that Churchill took a robust view of the expendibility of
German non-combatants.When the British prime minister protested about the problems that would face the Allies in housing and feeding, in their allotted sector of
western Germany, the refugees ⁶eeing from East Prussia and Silesia – around six
million Germans being involved – Stalin passed over the problem with a witticism.
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‘But one has to consider also,’ objected Churchill, according to the transcript, ‘where
are those Germans who run away? Will there be room for them in what is left of
Germany? We have killed six or seven million Germans and probably there will be
another million or so killed before the end of the war.’
On February and the weather prevented long-range air operations by the British or Americans, and on the sixth it compelled a diversion from an attempted precision attack on oil targets to the associated secondary targets in the marshalling yards
at Chemnitz, thirty miles south-west of Dresden, and Magdeburg. Some eight hundred tons of bombs were dropped on each city, in compliance with the general spirit
of the Russian request for assistance. Clearly the time when bombs would be falling
on Dresden from either British or American bombers was not far off.
On February and heavy bomber forces were detailed for daylight operations
over Germany, but on both occasions the missions were scrubbed because of deteriorating weather conditions. On the seventh too a labour M.P. demanded to know
when Chemnitz, Dresden, Dessau, Freiburg, and Würzburg, cities ‘which have had
little or nor experience so far in this connection,’ would be bombed.
On that same date, although perhaps he did not know it, a specific order listing
Dresden for attack at the earliest opportunity was being authorised. The ultimate
decision lay in the hands of S.H.A.E.F., which acted on the recommendations of its
Combined Strategic Targets Committee (C.S.T.C.) and the Joint Intelligence Committee (J.I.C.). The C.S.T.C. had met since October in the Air Ministry
building in Whitehall. Even as the Labour politician was speaking in Parliament, the
C.S.T.C. was convening again in Room /I of the Air Ministry building, at : P.M.
on Wednesday February , for its seventeenth meeting. The officers present all
agreed that the many area attacks of recent months had dramatically reduced the
number of targets still available. As a result of this meeting the C.S.T.C. telexed a
new top secret Target List to Bomber Command, to the American strategic air force
command and to S.H.A.E.F. Headquarters at : P.M. on the eighth. Paragraph
one read:
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The following targets have been selected for their importance in relation to the
movements of Evacuees from, and of military forces to, the Eastern front.
. Berlin
. Plauen
. Dresden
. Dessau
. Chemnitz
. Potsdam
. Leipzig
. Erfurt
. Halle
A Magdeburg.
The second paragraph listed seventeen subsidiary targets to be attacked when
weather conditions did not permit the main targets to be attacked.
By a process of elimination, the area bombing offensive against German cities was
on the threshold of its climax.
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With the Soviet armour halted temporarily at the Oder, the refugee tide descending on Dresden had ebbed to a trickle. Then, on February , Soviet armies succeeding in crossing the Oder in many places, and the regions immediately west of the
river became battlefields. The refugees in these regions, who had only days before
thought themselves safe, now rejoined the headlong rush to the west; at the same
time a pincer movement to seal off Breslau was launched by the Soviet troops.
The evacuation of Western Silesia too now began. Of , inhabitants of the
town of Grünberg, thanks to swift Party evacuation orders, all but four thousand
escaped in time. Other towns were less fortunate: Liegnitz had already been declared a reception area for refugees from towns east of the Oder; its normal population of , was multiplied many times by these refugees; lacking the agricultural
transport common in other provinces, twenty thousand German civilians were left
behind when Soviet troops occupied the town, the second largest in Western Silesia.
These civilians were to suffer fearfully at the hands of both the Soviet troops and of
the Polish minority.
The scale of this migration, which was both to cause and to compound the Dresden tragedy, can be only approximately indicated. At the beginning of , the
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population of Silesia had numbered some ,, people, of which about one and
a half million could not escape in time or, being of Polish origin, stayed behind. Of
the · million who took flight, half sought refuge in Bohemia and Moravia, not even
suspecting the racialist atrocities which were in store for them after the Czech uprising there; the remainder fled deeper into Germany, numbering some · million.
Silesians represented probably eighty percent of the displaced persons crowding into
Dresden on the night of the triple blow; the city was by the eve of the air attack so
crowded with Silesians, East Prussians, and Pomeranians from the eastern front,
with Berliners, and with Rhinelanders from the west, with Allied and Russian prisoners of war, with evacuated children’s settlements, and with forced labourers of
every nationality, that the population had swollen to between ,, and
,, citizens, of whom literally hundreds of thousands had no roof over their
heads – let alone the protection of an air raid shelter.
On the afternoon of February , with the arrival in Dresden of the last official
refugee trains from the east, the city had reached bursting point. The first official
refugee trains westwards would run some days later.
Still refugee columns were pouring into Dresden on foot and packed into horsecarts, an endless stream of humanity trudging along the autobahn from the east. Not
all them were civilians – some were soldiers who had lost their units on the front.
Military police patrols stationed at the outskirts of the city tried to control this Rückstau
Ost – Backwash-East – of refugees and to redirect the soldiers to assembly areas.
However the evidence does not support the Soviet belief that Dresden itself was
being used as an assembly centre for these troops; the military police directed the
stray troops to assembly areas outside the city.The refugees were also being diverted
round the city, as the approach roads were blocked with the convoys of horses and
carts, each three hundred yards long; refugees on foot were permitted to enter the
town, but warned to move on again within three days.
Most of the refugees were simple agricultural people, who had lived remote from
the ugly manifestations of modern warfare, in their farming communities in the eastern marchlands. Very few of these eastern peasants had ever heard an air raid siren
before, nor would they now. For six days before the triple blow, the air raid warnings
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
did not sound in Dresden. These were the peasants who would have benefited from
the Lebensraum policies which their Führer had mapped out for them in the east;
now they were to become the victims of the western Allies’ sweet revenge, in the
bloodiest massacre of the European war. Dresden, as the Official Historians would
dryly record, had become a ‘desirable bombing target in its own right’.
v
v
v
The appearance of Dresden as a specific target for attack came as a surprise not
only to Harris and Saundby but also to the Command’s Intelligence Staff. Since ,
in addition to the directives issued from time to time to the two Allied bomber
commanders, Bomber Command had received a weekly target priority list from the
Combined Strategic Targets Committee, a joint committee including representatives from British and American air force authorities, and the S.H.A.E.F. Intelligence sections; Bomber Command normally selected its target from these weekly
lists, according to the weather conditions and similar tactical considerations; sometimes, to be sure, attacks specifically asked for on particular targets not listed by the
committee, but in these cases Bomber Command was invariably given the reason for
the emergency. Dresden, however, had not yet appeared in these weekly target lists,
and as a result Bomber Command’s intelligence section was in a quandary, as they
had no great volume of preparatory matter for an attack on Dresden.
By several accounts, Harris was not pleased. Saundby would later recall, ‘We did in
fact question whether Dresden was intended to be bombed.’ According to Air
Vice-Marshal Richard Harrison, operations officer at Bomber Command headquarters and later commander of a bomber group, when Harris heard of the order he
said: ‘This is crazy.’ He got into his own car and motored up to London to be told:
‘You get on and do what you are told.’
For five days after February , the meteorological section at Bomber Command was unable to forecast weather favourable for a long range thrust into Central
Germany. On Harris’ authority, Sir Robert Saundby took the opportunity to query
the Dresden order through the Air Ministry. He suggested that in the light of their
information the ministry double-check the inclusion of Dresden before the Com-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
mand went ahead. They did not query their orders lightly, and when they did they
would speak to Sir Norman Bottomley or his representative on the scrambler telephone.‘We were not keen about going such a long way’, recalled Sir Robert Saundby,
‘and it was a diversion from our task at the time’. On previous occasions Bottomley
had got back to Saundby within a matter of hours. On this occasion however he was
told that the matter would have to be referred to a higher authority.
It was not for several days that the answer came through. Saundby was informed by
scrambler telephone that Dresden was to be included in the order, and that the attack was to take place at the first suitable opportunity. He understood that the attack
was part of a programme in which the prime minister was personally interested, and
that the delay in answering the query was because it had been referred to Mr Churchill
in Yalta. (Sir Charles Portal was of course also at Yalta, and the query may have been
dealt with by him alone.)
Saundby understood that the request had come from the Russians, that the Russians had insisted that Dresden was full of armoured German forces, re-grouping
and preparing for battle. The Official Historians found no evidence of such a Soviet
request. The Russians also later denied it, and there is no evidence that a request
came through the usual liaison channel, the American Military Mission in Moscow.
General Deane, the head of the mission who was at that time also at Yalta, later had
no recollection of any such Russian request. In other instances he was specifically
apprised by the Russians, for example when they demanded the bombing of the
German general staff headquarters at Zossen, outside Potsdam, and an attack on a
particular shipping concentration at Swinemünde.
In his memoirs, Sir Arthur Harris allowed himself only the guarded comment that
‘the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by more
important people than myself’.
v
v
v
Without doubt the Prime Minister was as pre-occupied at the end of the Crimea
Conference on February , as he was at its commencement, and there was no
reason why, once pressed for, the raid on Dresden should now be called off.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Early on the thirteenth, at the daily morning conference presided over by Sir Arthur
Harris, the met. officer reported that weather conditions would at last be favourable
for an attack on Dresden. Although there would be ten-tenths cloud over most of the
route out, the cloud tops would probably lower to six thousand feet beyond five to
seven degrees east. In the Dresden and Leipzig areas there was a chance of the cloud
breaking to half cover, and there was some risk of thin medium cloud layers spreading over between fifteen and twenty thousand feet.The meteorological report added
that Bomber Command’s airfields would be generally ⁵t for landing by the time that
the bombers returned from the nine-hour flight to Dresden.
That put the ball in Eisenhower’s court. Shortly before nine A.M. in a telephone
conversation with Air Marshal R D Oxland, Bomber Command’s liaison officer at
S.H.A.E.F. Headquarters, gave final clearance for the attack, and Sir Arthur Harris
issued the order to attack Dresden. It had ceased to be the object of messages and
minutes between air marshals, ministers and committees; now it was an affair of
machines and men, of bombs and flares, of briefing officers and bomb-aimers. ‘With
a heavy heart,’ related Sir Robert Saundby, ‘I was forced to lay the massive air raid
on’.
That day Mr Churchill and his staff rejoined the Cunard liner Franconia, waiting at
anchor off the Crimea. Aboard the luxury liner they feasted like lords and quarrelled
about which country to visit next. Due to address the ship’s company that evening at
eight-thirty, the prime minister first left the sailors standing shivering at attention in
the chilly Black Sea breezes for half an hour in a brutal display of power.
It was eleven-thirty P.M. in England and Germany. Seven thousand airmen were
now aloft and heading for Dresden.
Octagon summary, Office No., US Military Mission in Moscow, Sep , ; memo of
conversation between Stalin, Churchill, Harriman and others, Oct , , Moscow. – Walter F
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of the – February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF Historical
Division Archives). In the author corresponded at length with Major Melden E Smith, Jr., a
Boston, Massachusetts, historian who had seen two versions of the Angell study, one clearly sanitised
of sensitive materials. Smith also saw ‘British and Soviet intelligence figures’ on the Dresden casualties, both lying in the –, range; the Soviet report had been submitted shortly aftrer they
occupied Dresden in May . – Melden E Smith, Jr., Ph.D. dissertation: ‘The Bombing of Dresden
Reconsidered: A Study in Wartime Decision-Making’ (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms,
).
Harriman’s memo on the conversation, cited by Walter F Angell Jr., ibid.
Tedder memo, Jan , , cited by Walter F Angell Jr., ibid.
Kuter to Anderson, Aug , (Maxwell AFB, Spaatz papers, box , ‘Thunderclap folder’).
Sir Frank H Hinsley, British Intelligence in the SecondWorldWar. Its Influence on Strategy and Operations,
vol.iii (), (London & New York, ) p..
JIC report () (O) (Revised Final) Jan , (PRO file CAB./); for the JIC minute
entitled ‘Bombing of Berlin’ Jan , see too the Frederick L Anderson papers in the Hoover
Library.
Sir Norman Bottomley, note on a conversation with Harris, Jan , , cited in Dr Noble
Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, )
vol.iii, p..
Minute by A.P.S. of S. (Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman), Jan , (in Air Historical
Branch file CMS.); Martin Gilbert, vii, softens Churchill’s word from ‘basting’ to ‘blasting’
– or perhaps his automatic spellchecker is to blame.
The Times, Jan , .
Ibid.
Churchill to Sinclair, minute M./, Jan , (ibid.; Churchill papers, /).
Bottomley to Harris, Jan , ; printed in full in Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster,
The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.iv, p. (Appendix ).
Internal Address SHAEF Main to Air Officer commanding Mataf for Spaatz and Vice Chief of the
Air Staff, Jan , (Anderson diary, Jan , : Anderson papers).
p..
Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York, Oxford, ),
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The discussion of the American part in the attack is based on The Army Air Forces in World War II:
Europe: Argument to V–E day, Jan to May (Chicago, ), vol.iii, pp. onwards, and on
personal communications to the author from General Carl A Spaatz.
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Corrigendum to JCS th meeting, minutes Sep , , copy No.
(Maxwell AFB archives).
PRO file AIR./, ‘General Plan for Maximum Effort Attack against Transportation Objec-
tives ‘ Dec , ; and see AIR./.
Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment, (New York & Oxford, ) p.
Ira C Eaker to Carl A Spaatz, eyes only, Jan , (Libr. of Congress, Spaatz papers, box ;
courtesy of JLS Hayward; and cited in The Army Air Forces inWorldWar II: Europe: Argument toV–E day, Jan
to May (Chicago, ), vol.iii, .
Lieutenant-General M B Burrows to the author.
PM’s appointment diary card, Jan , (copy in author’s possession).
COS Committee (Argonaut), meeting of Jan , (PRO file, CAB./).
Message, SHAEF SCM OUT A, Jan , , cited by Walter F Angell Jr., ‘Historical
Analysis of the – February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF Historical Division Archives).
The Army Air Forces inWorldWar II: Europe:Argument toV–E day, Jan to May (Chicago, ),
vol.iii, p.; ‘Notes of the Allied Air Commanders’ Conference held at SHAEF, Feb , ,’ Spaatz
Papers, Maxwell AFB, micro⁵lm .–.
PRO file AIR./, ‘General Plan for Maximum Effort Attack against Transportation Objec-
tives ‘ Dec , ; and see AIR./.
Anderson to Spaatz, Feb , (Anderson diary, Feb , : Hoover Library, Frederick
Anderson Papers); and memorandum by Alfred R Maxwell, Feb , (ibid.)
Spaatz to Doolittle, Eaker, and others, Feb , (Maxwell AFB, Microfilm .–.)
CSTC th meeting, Feb , (PRO file AIR./). Squadron Leder Fawssett repre-
sented Bomber Command.
Vice Chiefs of Staff meeting, Feb , (PRO file CAB./).
COS to Yalta, ‘Fleece’ No., Feb , (ibid.)
Roger Freeman, The Mighty Eighth (New York) ), .
Ambassador Oshima to Tokyo, Feb , , cited in ‘Ultra History of U.S. Strategic Air Force
Europe vs. German Air Force,’ Jun (National Archives, Washington DC, RG., file SRH–
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
).
Message, Kuter to Spaatz, U–, Feb , , cited in The Army Air Forces in World War II:
Europe: Argument toV–E day, Jan to May (Chicago, ), vol.iii, chap.xx, ff.
Message, Giles to Kuter, CM–OUT–, Feb , ; cited in ibid.
Message, Spaatz to Kuter, U–, Feb , (USAF Historical Division archives). General
Spaatz averred to this author that at no stage did he depart from the US directive for attack on
‘military objectives’; in the case of Dresden this was to be the marshalling yards.
Information to the author from the then Major (G.S.) David Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech.
ARGONAUT conference, James F Byrnes’ shorthand note of the Plenary Session on Sunday, Feb ,
at p.m. (H S Truman Library, Independence, Missouri). Angell’s study (p.) suggests that the
Allied air authorities, after studying the structure of the Berlin–Leipzig–Dresden railway complex,
were bound to include Dresden too.
James F Byrnes’ shorthand note of the Plenary Session at Yalta, Feb , (H S Truman Libr.,
Independence, Missouri).
Message, SHAEF SCM IN , Jan , , cit. in Walter F Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of
the – February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF Historical Division Archives).
CSTC th meeting, Feb , (PRO file AIR./).
Air Ministry message MSW , CSTC Target List dispatched on Feb , (PRO file AIR./
); also cit. in Walter F Angell Jr., ibid.
Documents on the Expulsion, op. cit.
Aktuell, op. cit; and information to the author from Horst Galle, one such military policeman.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Dr Hugh Bannerman, Wing Commander (ret.), to the author on Dec , ,
quoting Harrison.
Information from Saundby to the author; and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm DI–).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , )
on Night Operations, /th February, (PRO files; transcript on author’s
microfilm DI–).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Part Three
THE EXECUTION OF THE ATTACK
The Plan of Attack
T
he TECHNICAL AND STRATEGIC problems that faced Bomber Command in carrying out the ‘massive air attack’ on Dresden, a city in the heart of Central
Germany, could not have been easily resolved at any earlier stage of the
war. The weather during February remained poor, and for an attack which
would involve a nine- to ten-hour flight by the Lancaster force, and which would
require standards of timing and concentration on the target rivalling the best that Air
Chief Marshal Harris had ever achieved, the meteorological outlook was of considerable importance.
In the early weeks of , the German night fighter defence had been of indeterminate strength.The fighter force was indeed numerically diminishing, and the fighter
crews were tired and reaching breaking point; but by February the area that
they were required to defend was also shrinking, as the invading armies rolled back
the Reich frontiers into Germany.
For this reason Harris planned the execution of the attack on Dresden as a double
blow, the value of which he had tested as early as October .
This strategy had only become practicable late in the war, as large numbers of front
line aircraft became available. ‘The theory of it was,’ said Saundby years later, ‘the
first blow would bring up all the fighters into the air, would alert all the searchlights
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
and the fire services; the attack would then take place, and a large number of fires
would be started, a good deal of disorganisation would occur and, and the fighters in
due course would run out of petrol and ammunition and have to go down to refuel.
That was the moment in which it was intended to stage the second attack, catching
them with, uh, at a disadvantage.’ No Group’s Master Bomber at Dresden echoed
this: ‘You could embarrass the defences either by making sure that the fighters were
just about to run out of gas at the time that the second wave was coming over or in
the target area.’
It was also intended that the German fire services and other passive defences would
be preoccupied by the conflagrations caused in the first attack; they would then be
swamped and overwhelmed by the second blow. The third profit to be drawn from a
double-blow was that the first strike would interrupt any telephonic or telegraphic
communications passing through the target city to the fighter and flak defences; this
would paralyse the defences in the air and on the ground, and the civil defence forces
would be caught unawares by the second strike.
Air Chief Marshal Harris and his tacticians had calculated the optimum interval to
be about three hours. If the delay were any shorter, the fighter squadrons might not
be properly dispersed; the fires would not have properly taken hold and the firefighting defences would not be overwhelmed in the second attack. If the interval
were any longer, the active defences would be refreshed and ready to do battle anew
and, knowing the probable identity of the target of the second attack, they would be
able to inflict heavier losses on the bomber stream.
For five days a belt of cloud covered most of Central Europe after Harris and his
staff had received the order to bomb Dresden. Apart from No Bomber Group, a
force specially trained and equipped for blind daylight bombing on instrument through
cloud layers, the whole of his Command was grounded.
The end of theYalta conference came and went. Harris was able to use the interval
before issuing the executive order to bomb Dresden to collate and check all available
information on the city, and to ascertain once more that no mistake had been made
by the Air Ministry in confirming the order to attack the city; his staff officers were
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
still not able to procure any standard HS comparison photographs, which were not
included in the original Dresden file.
Then, on February , , the meteorological section at High Wycombe was
able to promise the two allied Bomber Commanders reasonable weather conditions
over the Continent during the following day, Tuesday the thirteenth.
In the early hours of the thirteenth the American crews were briefed for an attack
on two alternative targets. If the weather was satisfactory the Flying Fortress crews
were to attempt Plan B, the long flight to Dresden, and attack the railway yards and
stations there in either a precision visual attack or a blind attack on instruments, as a
preliminary to a heavy R.A.F. blow. If the weather closed down central German
operations, then the alternative American target was Plan A, Kassel. But the weather
which had looked favourable the night before deteriorated suddenly on the early
morning of the fated day, and both American missions were cancelled; ice clouds
were blanketing Europe and in Dresden itself a thin frosty snow was drifting down
out of the sky. Thus the honour – as it was described to the Master Bomber, Wing
Commander Maurice Smith – of striking the first blow at Dresden, the virgin target,
fell to Royal Air Force Bomber Command.
Soon after nine o’clock on Tuesday morning, February , having studied the weather
reports and synoptic charts, the Commander in Chief ordered his Deputy, Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby to lay on the attack on Dresden. The plan of attack had
already been decided; it remained only for Saundby to pass the appropriate coded
signal to the five Bomber Group headquarters directly concerned.
The Russian front lay less than eighty miles to the east of Dresden. There must be
no chance of any of the Lancasters going astray and dropping their bomb load behind
the Red Army Lines; even less must the target-making force be permitted any latitude for error. The highest precision in navigation was required; only Loran could
provide this. The Royal Air Force’s most up-to-date piece of electronic long-range
navigation equipment, installed only in a few aircraft, Loran was to be used to make
the initial fix on the target area, and Smith was thereafter to rely on low-level visual
marking for the attack.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Loran, a bulky piece of equipment housed in several metal containers strapped
into the already cramped cockpit of nine Mosquito high-speed bombers, was originally designed to be installed in Lancasters and used in long-range attacks in the
Pacific theatre of the war. Basically an upgrade of the Gee radio-beam navigation
device, which spun an invisible web of beams across the Western European ether,
Loran did not suffer from the shortcomings of Gee which permitted its use only
within relatively short distances of the transmitter chains. Using reflected radio waves
from the ‘E’-layer, Loran had a range of some fifteen hundred miles; but the use of
the ‘E’-layers limited its applicability to night flying only. Before February the
R.A.F. had never relied on it for an operation.
The crews of the nine Mosquito aircraft fitted with Loran were quickly trained in
the operation of their equipment; Bomber Command’s navigation chiefs crossed their
fingers and hoped that on the night the gear would work perfectly; the English Gee
chain’s radio beams, even when not jammed by the enemy, petered out some
miles west of Dresden; the signals picked up from the mobile Gee transmitters moving up behind the Allied lines were unreliable and even they did not extend to Dresden, the target city.
There was however an added complication involved in navigating successfully to
Dresden by Loran – because of the curvature of the earth the beams would probably
not be picked up below nineteen thousand feet. The Master Bomber and his eight
Marker Mosquitoes would have to endure a painful switchback dive from nineteen
thousand feet to their normal marking altitude of less than one thousand feet within
four or five minutes if they were to arrive at the target area on time.
The political embarrassment that any mistaken target marking would occasion was
clear:The Allied leaders had promised the Red Army High Command the destruction
of Dresden during the next few nights; the blow was intended not only as a demonstration of solidarity with the Russian but also as a timely expression of the terrible
striking power possessed by the Western allies. If when the ashes settled and the
smoke cleared it was found that the Lancasters had groped their way across Europe
and destroyed Prague or some other city the embarrassment would be bitter; if the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
bombers were to strike a city behind the Red Army lines the consequences did not
bear thinking about.
This was why Harris had insisted that Loran must be available to the crews responsible for initially finding and identifying the city and marking the target area.
And this was why he decided that the initial blow should be struck by No Bomber
Group with Air Vice-Marshal the Hon. Ralph Cochrane’s famous low-level visual
technique. (Command of the Group had in fact passed one month before to Air
Vice-Marshal H A Constantine; but to all intents and purpose the technique evolved
for the Dresden attack was elaborated and developed during the period that Cochrane
was at Swinderby).
The early record of the rival No (Pathfinder) Group was marred by unfortunate
incidents where it had marked the wrong town – though this was largely a product of
the refusal of other Group commanders to provide Air Vice-marshal Bennett’s Group
with their best crews for Pathfinder training. In the first months of the Pathfinder
Force’s existence they had marked Harburg instead of Hamburg, they had missed
Flensburg completely, and they had heavily damaged Saarlouis instead of Saarbrücken;
in researching many raids on cities like Frankfurt and Nuremberg which to this day
have gone down in the official histories as successfully marked by Pathfinder crews
we find in the city archives and Police reports that although the sirens sounded that
night, not a single bomb fell within the city boundaries. Until the introduction of
the highly accurate Oboe beam-system, the Pathfinder Force was looked at askance
by many of the senior officers at Bomber Command Headquarters. Oboe however
reached only as far as the Ruhr; even the trailer-mounted Oboe stations moving up
behind the Allied lines in France and Germany did not reach halfway to Dresden.
Moreover, the No Group Pathfinders were untrained in the visual identification of
targets from low levels. Thus ‘Butcher’ Harris had selected No Group’s unofficial
pathfinder force to lead the attack on Dresden on the night of February , .
Harris and his commanders had honed Bomber Command’s killing techniques to a
fine edge. Intricate planning went into every minute of these huge, set-piece attacks
to ensure the maximum kill for the minimum cost.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The eight Mosquito markers from No Squadron were to use their Loran sets
to reach the proximity of the city, flying independently of the main force of marker
and bomber aircraft; since the Mosquitoes hardly even had the range to reach as far
as Dresden with a full load of flares they would have to follow an almost direct route,
while the Lancasters of the marker and bombing forces could be routed out to Dresden by more leisurely course, taking them first to a rendezvous over Reading, then
out over the Channel to a point on the French coast by the Somme estuary, from
which they would fly due east for some miles; on reaching the line of five degrees east they would then head directly for the Ruhr, setting the sirens wailing
throughout Germany’s industrial cities.Ten miles north of Aachen, the bombers would
head across the Rhine between Düsseldorf and Cologne; at nine P.M., with the heavy
bomber formations still droning high across the Rhineland, swift Mosquito formations from the No Group’s Light Night Striking Force would attack Dortmund and
Bonn to divert the attention of the night fighter controllers. The Lancasters would
then begin skirting by a northerly route round Kassel and Leipzig; five minutes before the attack on Dresden was due to commence, a force of Halifaxes from No
and No Groups would attack an oil refinery at Böhlen, just south of Leipzig, in a
large-scale diversionary move.
The Lancasters – code-named ‘Plate-Rack Force’ – would however be heading
south-east, almost following the course of the River Elbe, bearing at high speed
downwind towards the target city, Dresden. After unloading their bombs the whole
force would be withdrawn by a totally different southerly route, passing south of
Nuremberg, Stuttgart, and Strasbourg. The flare force and primary marker Lancasters for the attack on Dresden, supplied by Squadrons Nos and , and also
equipped with Loran, would approach along the same route. These Lancasters were
crewed with especially trained radar operators, highly skilled in interpreting the data
provided by the HS radar equipment. On the small cathode-ray tubes of this equipment, a rotating time base provided a crude shadow-pattern picture of the landscape
beneath the aircraft, showing up rivers and large expanses of water as dark patches
amidst the green of the land itself and the brilliantly glowing towns.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
At best HS was only a confirmation of the existence of some city ahead of the
bomber; unless, as in the case of Hamburg and Königsberg, there was a sharply defined
water-front or system of docks, the town itself would not be readily identifiable
from the tube. Dresden on the radar scope was one of the non-descript towns-on-ariver with which Central Germany, both sides of the Red Army front, abounded.
Only the characteristic S-bend in the River Elbe made a feature for the radar operators to watch out for. They had no comparison radar photographs to guide them:
Attacks on other cities had yielded Leica-photographs of the HS screen over the
target; the operators could then compare the photographs of the target-image with
the image on their screens for certainty. But Dresden had not been attacked by Bomber
Command since the introduction of HS.
It was the duty of these Lancasters of Nos and Squadrons to arrive at Dresden some eleven minutes before zero hour. While some dropped strings of threeminute parachute flares across the city, together with make-weights of long-delay
high explosive time-bombs, the others would attempt to lob green target indicator
bombs, set barometrically to burst at two- to three-thousand feet above the approximate position of the aiming point as it appeared on the radar screen. This was
the pathfinder technique known as ‘Newhaven.’ At no time was any attempt at a
visual identification to be made by these first waves of bombers over the target.Their
task was only to point out the approximate position of the city, and the rough location, give or take a mile or two, of the allocated aiming point. These flares were to
guide the eight Mosquito crews, whose task was to search the landscape from only a
thousand feet up for the marking point itself, and to mark it with salvoes of red
marker bombs.
If the first attack on Dresden was to provide the unmistakable beacon that Harris
required for the second blow, which would be delivered by the rank-and-file bomber
squadrons of the rest of his Command, the city must be set well on fire.
A fire-storm would provide that beacon. The German engineer directing civil defence measures in Dresden afterwards characterised the fire-storm phenomena as ‘a
slowly developing series of fires scattered evenly across a large area, fires which were
not extinguished by the inhabitants (who preferred to remain in their basements,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
cowed by the explosions of the time-bombs) and which suddenly multiplied and
spread as thousands of individual conflagrations united’.This period would take about
half an hour or more. Air Chief Marshal Harris calculated that within three hours the
⁵res should have gained a good grip on the centre of the city, provided that there was
a strong enough ground wind and that the incendiary loads were well concentrated;
three hours would give sufficient time for the fire brigades from most of the big
cities of central Germany to come to the assistance of the burning Dresden and to
penetrate to the heart of the Old City.
All this happened exactly as he had planned.
Only the No Group sector-attack provided the degree of saturation required to
start a fire-storm. Every time it had been employed before it had caused a fire-storm
of some degree. Previously the fire-storm had been merely an unforeseen result of
the attack; in the double-blow on Dresden the ⁵re-storm was to be an integral part of
the strategy.
v
v
v
As in all the other major attacks now carried out by No Group, a Master Bomber
was required to control the development of the attack. The Master Bombers (or
‘controllers’) were all provided by Base at Coningsby, the headquarters for the
Group’s unofficial pathfinder Force. The low level marking technique, whereby a
Mosquito bomber carried a large pyrotechnic bomb and put it down within a one or
two hundred yards of the aiming point, had also been developed at Base.
To control the attacks on Dresden and the two decoy targets, the choice fell on
No Group’s three most experienced Master Bombers. By rotation, the officer selected to lead the Dresden raid was Wing Commander Maurice Smith, an urbane,
elegant, quiet spoken gentleman. ‘Frankly,’ he later said, ‘I was not very pleased to
be chosen for the Dresden raid.’ The target was at the extreme limit of his plane’s
endurance; it would be a long, fatiguing mission for a single pilot (flying without an
autopilot in those days); he and the main force bombers would be returning over
enemy territory in the twilight of dawn. Heavily loaded as it would be, the Mosquito
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
was not an easy plane to handle on instruments and in clouds. But he also had a
proper respect for the city’s fame as a centre for producing delicate porcelain.
As Smith’s flying logbook showed, he had himself controlled raids on several larger
German cities, including Karlsruhe and Heilbronn, and he was an expert in directing the marking and development of sector-attacks. His deputy, the Marker Leader,
Flight Lieutenant William Topper, was also a veteran of the Heilbronn and other
sector-attacks. Smith has written since the war in specialised publications that as
Master Bomber he was ‘in effect the personal representative of the Air Officer Commanding [Sir Arthur Harris] in the target area’. Of squadron commander status, he
would be given complete control of the attack after an in-depth briefing. His job was
as hazardous as it was responsible: he had to remain in the target area for the duration of the attack, often flying at low altitude regardless of the enemy defences.
Providing all went well his duty was largely a psychological one. ‘It’s not always the
instructions you notice so much as the relief at hearing a good English voice getting
things organised ahead of you after that long slog through flak and dirty weather,’ a
pilot remarked after a raid on another city in the Leipzig area.
At Swinderby, Headquarters of No Group, the morning of February was
taken up with final details and planning. The wing commander in charge of Intelligence was forced once again to bemoan their ignorance about the city and its defences: It was suspected however, that if Dresden was being used for the passage of
troops and munitions to the eastern front, and that the flak defences might have been
reinforced since the small attack by American bombers on January . The presence
of army vehicles passing through the city prompted the Intelligence staff to warn
that the convoys and trains might mount light anti-aircraft guns; these guns could be
very dangerous for the Mosquito crews, circling across the city at altitudes below a
thousand feet. At the station briefings a few hours later the seven thousand airmen
would be told that the defences at Dresden were ‘unknown’.
Toward noon the word came through from High Wycombe that meteorologists
were predicting a stiff breeze blowing across the city from the north-west. But the
teleprinter message added a warning that conditions were unfavourable, and the
attack would succeed only if the timing was kept strictly to the minute: If the No
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Group attack had to be delayed for any reason more than half an hour, the double
attack would fail, because the second mission would be aborted.
A belt of strato-cumulus cloud was drifting across central Europe; there would be
a gap in the cloud layer over Dresden, likely to last however for only four or five
hours as it passed through. The skies over Dresden would begin to clear soon before
ten o’clock in the evening. Within five hours, the cloud would return.
By noon Bomber Command had passed the executive order to every Group headquarters.
Altogether Lancasters from No Group were detailed to take part in the first
attack, although one dropped out later.
The biggest contingent of aircraft for the second blow would be supplied by No
Group, with headquarters at Bawbry: over two hundred of the Group’s Lancasters
were asked for; No Group despatched Lancasters to Dresden, and the Canadian Bomber Group, No sent sixty-seven; the remainder of the second attacking
force was provided by the No Group Pathfinders.
Since Dresden was beyond the operational range of the Group’s Pathfinder Mosquitoes, sixty-one Pathfinder Lancasters, many of them equipped with the latest version of the HS -radar equipment, were assigned to mark the aiming point for the
second attack. It was expected that this new equipment, the HS Mark IIIF with the
six-foot scanning dish, would provide sufficient ground detail on the radar screen to
enable the crews to pick out topographical details more clearly. Ten of these
Pathfinder-Lancasters were to be provided by No Squadron, theVancouver Squadron of the R.C.A.F.; one of this squadron’s most experienced crews was the only
Pathfinder Lancaster crew not to return from the Dresden operation. The largest
Pathfinder contingent was to be supplied by the veteran No Squadron, with twelve
Lancasters in the Pathfinder Force; No Squadron provided both the Master
Bomber and his deputy for the operation, as well as nine other Lancasters; the primary visual marker was supplied by No Squadron; No Squadron dispatched
ten crews, and Nos and Squadrons nine crews each. As No Squadron’s
records are incomplete, the composition of its Pathfinder crews in the final battle
order for the attack on Dresden cannot be stated with certainty.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
In addition to the attacks on Dresden and Böhlen, Air Vice-Marshal Bennett had
also planned for his force to deal with six other targets, including Bonn and Dortmund. Two targets were spoofs only – with crews dropping flares but no bombs on
them; at thirty minutes past midnight, however, just as the two Dresden formations
of bombers were passing by to the north and south of Nuremberg, one attacking,
one withdrawing, a force of Mosquitoes would deliver a twelve minute attack on
that city; again, at two a.m., after the last Dresden attack had finished, four highaltitude Mosquitoes – including one of the new Mark XVI pressurised-cabin versions – from No Squadron would each drop four five-hundred pound bombs on
Magdeburg.
As the German defence planners were well aware that Bomber Command had
been ordered to concentrate to an increasing extent on Germany’s frailest link, her
oil production and reserves, it was planned to lead off the night’s attack with a small,
but positive attack on the synthetic oil plant at Böhlen, ten miles south of Leipzig and
not far from Dresden. The zero hour for Bohlen was set for ten P.M., fifteen minutes
before the first blow fell on Dresden. This attack would employ the Pathfinders’
marking technique known as Newhaven, and would be carried out by the Halifax
Squadrons of Nos and Groups; aircraft were detailed to attack Böhlen, rather
over a third being from the Canadian No Group.The Halifax bomber, four-engined
like the Lancaster, and having a similar range, had however a considerably smaller
bomb-lead, and was being gradually eliminated from the Command. As the attack
on Dresden had been ordered as a ‘very heavy blow’ it was appropriate that the
biggest possible all-Lancaster force should by despatched in order to maximise the
load of incendiaries and high explosive.The raid on Böhlen can hardly be regarded as
anything other than an elaborate spoof, in view of the unfavourable weather forecast
for raids on small targets like synthetic oil plants.
It was intended that the first attack on Dresden, the real bloody business of the
night, should begin at ten-fifteen P.M. and set the whole city on fire as a beacon for
the crews of the second attack following three–and-a-quarter hours later. It would
open with the Newhaven technique – flares laid by HS radar alone – coupled with
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
‘sector bombing,’ No Group’s speciality, if ground visibility allowed; otherwise
they would fall back on sky-marking (using parachute flares).
The second attack would follow Bennett’s standard ‘Newhaven–II’ technique.With
zero hour for this second blow at one-thirty A.M. on February , his Blind Illuminator Lancasters – twelve in number not counting No Squadron’s contribution –
would make blind runs across the city at : A.M., zero minus seven, relying on
their HS radar alone, and drop sticks of flares across the approximate position of the
aiming point. In an emergency they would adopt sky-marking instead.
At : A.M., one minute later, the deputy Master Bomber would make a bombing
run in his Lancaster high across the city, and having unambiguously identified the
aiming point attempt to mark it with his six red target indicator bombs; the Master
Bomber, orbiting the city to the north-east, would assess the distance between these
red flares and the true aiming-point, and if they had gone wide he would attempt to
drop his own red target indicators more accurately, using the first red flares as datum
lines. If the deputy Master Bomber’s flares were accurate, then the Primary Visual
Marker would put down an load of red and green flares around them to reinforce the
marking of the aiming point. The rank and file of Visual Centerer Lancasters, of
which there were some twenty in the Dresden operation, would then attack in waves
of three at a time, at three and four minute intervals, replacing the dying target
marker flares of the preceding marker waves, and at the same time visually centring
any wide marking shots.
Provision was also made for the event that cloud obscured the target; if the cloud
was moderate, then thirteen Blind Markers (a number which does not include those
of No Squadron) would be used to drop green ground marking flares early on.
The Master Bomber would check whether the glow was visible through the cloud; if
not, then as a last resort, eight Blind Sky Marker planes (again not including those of
No Squadron) were laid on, carrying loads of parachute-borne flares of a kind
that would emit a red light with green stars, a technique that Bennett, a native Australian, called ‘Wanganui’; these would have to be released blindly on radar data
alone to float above the cloud layers on their parachutes – a technique that provided
a great and terrible beauty, but little bombing accuracy.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Had the cloud been so dense during the second attack on Dresden that sky marking was necessitated, without doubt the massacre would not have occurred; the
weather over Dresden however was fine, and neither the Blind Markers nor the Blind
Sky Marker bombers were called upon to release their flare loads by the Master
Bomber.
The Master Bomber for the second Dresden attack, Squadron Leader C P C de
Wesselow, a Canadian, was an experienced pilot with more than three tours of operations behind him. Once, in November , he had been asked to act as Master
Bomber during the ruinous attack on Freiburg im Breisgau, but he had declined as he
had been to university there and had many friends in the area around the Gothic
cathedral which was to be the aiming point; he had, however, never been to Dresden.
The executive order to bomb Dresden did not pass unquestioned: Soon after receiving it, the Pathfinder Group Commander felt bound to telephone back to High
Wycombe to check that his staff had not misunderstood the order; when the order
to bomb Dresden was confirmed, Air Vice-Marshal Bennett satisfied himself with a
discussion of the aiming points allocated to his Group’s marker force. The Commander of No Group later recalled that he and his senior staff were also ‘a little
surprised,’ when they read the teleprinter message from Bomber Command. Other
Group commanders remember the distinctly reserved note in Harris’ voice when he
confirmed the order, and gained the impression that he was dissatisfied with the
whole affair.
Bomber Command headquarters had issued by teleprinter identical brie⁵ng instructions to every bomber airfield. The wording, which has survived, makes odd
reading now. The seven thousand British airmen were to be told that afternoon that
they were about to attack Dresden, ‘far the largest unbombed built-up area the enemy has got.’ ‘The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it
most,’ the telex said; it then added words pregnant with other implications: ‘And
incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can
do.’
v
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v
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
In the early afternoon the Master Bomber, and his navigator were called over to
the intelligence building of Base for final briefing on the plan of attack. The Base
officers had searched in vain for one of the usual target maps prepared for attacks on
German cities: target maps at this stage of the war were specially printed plans
inches, on which in grey, purple, and white the countryside and city were lithographed as an artist’s impression of how they looked by night, with the stretches of
water and rivers showing up a brilliant white amidst the black and grey masses of the
cities and the purple shading and cross-hatching representing variously fields, woods,
and open countryside; marked on these target maps were the main gun defence
positions, the local airfields, and positions of German decoys. The target installation
appeared in the middle of the target map, at the centre of a system of black concentric one-mile rings. The target installation itself would be printed on these target
maps in a distinctive orange colour, whether it was the Krupps factory site at Essen,
the Focke-Wulf works at Bremen, or the oil refinery at Gelsenkirchen.
For Dresden there was no such target map. Perhaps, as Sir Robert Saundby and Air
Commodore H V Satterley suggested to the author, this was the conclusive evidence
of the absence of any fundamental desire on Air Marshal Harris’ part to destroy this
city. Had Dresden figured on Harris’ famous list of cities to be destroyed, then he
would undoubtedly have ensured that adequate photographic cover had been made
of the city with sufficient frequency to ascertain the nature of the target, its defence,
and any decoy sites in the immediate neighbourhood. He would have plotted and
fixed the position of the Dresden fighter squadrons on the air station at Dresden
Klotzsche.
As it was, all that Bomber Command could provide to the Master Bomber and his
deputy was a ‘District target map: Dresden (Germany), D.T.M. No G./’; this
pathetic piece of equipment, with which the Master Bomber and his marker force
were to identify and mark the aiming point for what was to be the climax of the
strategic air offensive against Germany, was nothing more than a glossy aerial mosaic
of Dresden dating back to November , printed in black and white, made up
from aerial-reconnaissance photographs of indifferent quality. It did however show
clearly the points from which an attempt at marking Dresden might be made. Curi-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
ously, a single black cross was printed on the target map on a building in the centre of
the sector; this building was the police headquarters in Dresden, in bunkers below
which the Saxon Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann had placed the underground command centre of his civil defence staff.
The wind was forecast to blow steadily from the north-west. If the smoke from the
burning city was not to obscure the glare of the target-indicator candles burning on
the ground, they must be placed to the windward of the target area.The most prominent feature of the city’s topography which could be identified on this target photograph was the large cycle stadium to the west of the Old City. It was the central
stadium of three built roughly in a line across Dresden. The cycle stadium selected,
the Dresden-Friedrichstadt Sportsplatz, was about five hundred feet long and close
enough to both the river and the railway lines to assist the marker force in searching
for the stadium in what were likely to be conditions of minimal visibility.
The Marker Leader would have to place his single red marker clearly into this
stadium; when the Master Bomber had checked its accuracy, he would order the
remaining Marker Mosquitoes to back up on it with more red indicators until the
whole stadium was well marked with red ⁶ares. Then he would call in the ‘PlateRack Force,’ the main force of Lancasters dog-legging across the countryside a few
miles to the south west to attack. They would fly downwind across the city, training
their bombsights on the red glow of the marker indicators twinkling in the stadium,
and after a timed overshoot which would vary from squadron to squadron and from
aircraft to aircraft, they would release the bombs on the city itself.
As the Lancasters pilots were each briefed to fly on a different heading over Dresden, the result would be that the bombers would fan out over the city and drop their
bombs in a cheese-shaped sector stretching eventually from close to the stadium to a
maximum radius of , yards from the marking point.The target map for the first
attack has survived. This sector marked on it included the whole of Dresden’s Old
City; this was to become the fire-storm area which would in turn serve as the beacon
for the Lancasters of the second attack.
As we now know from the man who became director of Dresden’s bureau of missing persons this was the area which became the main area of the inferno. Those who
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
made for the open air and the suburbs immediately after the first raid saved their
lives. Those who waited for the second attack did not. ‘There were areas in (Dresden-) Striesen and particularly around Seidnitzer-Platz where hardly anyone – if
they waited for the second attack – escaped with his life.’
The Master Bomber and his navigator were instructed that the purpose of the
attack was to hinder the railroad and other communications passing through Dresden. As they studied this · square-mile sector allocated for a precision saturation
attack it ought have occurred to them that in fact there was not one railway line
crossing the sector: nor one of Dresden’s eighteen passenger and goods railway stations; nor did the sector include the Marienbrücke railway bridge across the Elbe,
the most important bridge for many miles in either direction.
The only detail of the special briefing which stood out clearly in the Master Bomber’s memory later, seventeen years after the attack, was that at the end of the briefing
the Base Commander, an officer of Air Commodore rank, recalled that before the
war he had been to Dresden once, and had stayed at a famous hotel on the Dresden
Altmarkt, the large square in the centre of the Old City.
This square was in the very heart of the sector marked out for saturation in some
eight hours’ time; it appeared that the Air Commodore had been thoroughly and
disgracefully rooked by the hotel staff on his departure. Now was his chance for
revenge: he asked the Master Bomber to make sure that this building did not escape
the general destruction. The call sign for the main force of bombers was also imparted: plate-rack. The zero hour on which all timing would be based was set for
: p.m.
v
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v
By five-thirty P.M., with dusk already fallen, the eight marker crews had been briefed
and each had drawn one indicator bomb from the bomb dump. Their aircraft had
been checked, and extra fuel tanks strapped into position. A run out to Dresden was
going to be stretching the Mosquitoes’ operational range to the limit and extra fuel
was being carried only at the expense of fewer marker bombs; there was no latitude
for error in the marking.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
As it was, if the Mosquito crews were to reach as far as Dresden, they would have
no opportunity for making a wide detour to throw the enemy fighter controllers off
the scent: at best they could feint toward Chemnitz, a few miles to the south-west of
the target city, and then at the last moment alter course for Dresden. But even so the
direct route across Germany was going to take the marker force across several areas
well defended with flak.
By five-thirty too, the first squadrons of Lancasters from the No Group airfields
in the Midlands had taken to the air. By six o’clock the whole force of bombers
of the first wave was airborne, circling their airfields and setting course for the first
route marker, and Germany.
There is a total lack of information in any of the official histories regarding the mounting and
execution of the triple blow on Dresden. The author had recourse therefore to the statements made
by senior air officers who delivered the attack and especially the two RAF Master Bombers involved,
Wing Commander Maurice A Smith and Squadron Leader C P C de Wesselow, who controlled the
first and second attacks respectively. Wing Commander Smith made available to the author his flying
log, the wire-recording transcript, the original target map, post-raid damage photographs, and other
memorabilia relating to the attack.
See in this connection Royal Canadian Air Force Overseas, SixthYear (Toronto, ), p.; the Air
Historical branch (Meteorological Records) also supplied information to the author.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
Maurice Smith, ibid.
Information to the author from Edmund Kennebeck, formerly of th Bombardment Group,
and General Carl A Spaatz.
See Maurice F Smith’s article on Loran in R.A.F . Review, Mar .
Information to the author from Wing Commander Maurice Smith and from his navigator Flight
Lieutenant Leslie M Page.
Information from Sir Arthur Harris to the author.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
E.g. communication from Flensburg city archives to the author.
At the time the author interviewed him, he was chief editor of Flight International. Shown the
heart-rending photographs of the carnage in the city, which he had never seen before, Smith went
purple and showed true remorse.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–); see also Royal Air
Force –, vol.iii, p., R.C.A.F. OVERSEAS, SIXTHYEAR, P.; and records provided to the
author by Wing Commander Maurice Smith and by Flight Lieutenant Edward Cook of No. Group.
Dudley Saward, Bomber’s Eye (London ).
Information provided to the author in by the Air Historical branch.
Information to the author by Air Vice-Marshal D C T Bennett.
Information from Wing Commander M Sewell.
R.C.A.F. Overseas, SixthYear.
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Information to the author by Air Vice-Marshal D C T Bennett.
Information to the author by Air Vice-Marshal Buckle.
This remarkable briefing telex for Dresden was used as an illustration in the two-volume internal
monograph, Review of theWork of Int I, which Max Hastings was able to quote in his Bomber Command,
.
Based on descriptions by Wing Commander Maurice Smith and Air Vice-Marshal H V Satterley.
These tactical details were supplied to the author by Maurice Smith, his navigator Leslie M Page,
the Marker Leader William Topper, and the pilot of the first Flare Force Lancaster, Wing Commander
F Twiggs.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Plate-Rack Force Arrives
D
USK WAS ALREADY FALLING across England, and many crews must have looked
at each other with uneasy anticipation as they eyed the cloud-heavy skies
and read their weather forecast notes. These predicted icing at low altitudes, electrical storms, and ten-tenths cloud covering most of western Europe.
Few of the airmen were relishing the prospect of a nine- or ten-hour flight across
enemy-occupied territory in weather conditions like these: the only comfort was
that the poor visibility and cloud cover over Germany might keep the enemy’s nightfighters grounded.
The nine Mosquitoes of the first Marker Force had, bolted into their equipment
racks, some of the most advanced electronic apparatus developed by western scientists. Their briefing instructions were unique in that if they got into trouble, they
were to head back west; they were to avoid being forced down to the east of Dresden; and they were to destroy the aircraft utterly and completely. They were to land
in German-occupied territory in preference to that overrun by the Soviet army.
At the same time as the Marker Force pilots drew their equipment and pyrotechnics for the attack, Farnborough scientists were checking for the last time a special
camera fitted on January into the bomb bay of the Mosquito of the Marker Leader
Flight Lieutenant William Topper, who was also ex officio deputy Master Bomber.
The camera had been equipped with a high-speed cartridge flash system, designed to
take photographs of the target from very low level at one-second intervals during
the marking procedure starting as the Marker Leader pressed his bomb release and
continuing until the film was finished. It was expected to obtain precise confirmation
of where the target indicator bomb had landed. For the first time the apparatus was
to be used on Dresden.
At three minutes to eight on the evening of February , Mosquito KB. piloted
by the Master Bomber Wing Commander Maurice Smith lifted into the air from his
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the base at Coningsby. At : P.M. he passed out of range of the Gee navigation
chains both in England and in France.
Darkness covered the Earth.
Smith’s target-marking force took its own route out to Dresden – he decided they
should fly at high altitude that night. Between fifteen and twenty thousand feet above
north-west Germany a steady -knot gale was hastening the Mosquitoes towards
their target. The navigators had to rely on their own navigation and the correctness
of the wind forecasts to keep on track and avoid wandering across any heavily defended areas until they could pick up the faint signals from Loran, the long range
navigation equipment. They also had an exact timetable to keep to. At ten P.M. the
decoy attack on Böhlen was due to start, and a few minutes later the blind radar
markers would be dropping their parachute flares and green primary markers over
the approximate position of Dresden.
Only at : P.M. did the navigators finally pick up the Loran navigation system’s
transmission. The navigators required to pick up two of the beams for a position fix
and, while the Master Bomber looked anxiously at his watch, his navigator checked
the Loran screen trying to pick up the second beam; higher and higher the Mosquitoes were forced to climb, groping in the ether for the elusive radio beam. It was
: P.M. In five minutes or so the flare force would be over Dresden. The Master
Bomber’s Mosquito was over twenty thousand feet up. Then the navigator was unable to get the second beam he needed to get a perfect ‘cut’, and when they were
fifteen miles south of Chemnitz Wing Commander Smith decided to proceed to
Dresden without it. The pilots of all nine Mosquitoes scanned the horizon for the
tell-tale flares which would tell them that their calculations had been correct.
Meanwhile the big decoy attack was beginning on the synthetic oil plant at Böhlen,
near Leipzig. It said something for the strength of Bomber Command at this time
that it could mount decoy operations on this massive scale. Altogether Halifaxes,
thirty-four Lancasters and eight Mosquitoes took part, of which all but seven attacked Böhlen in a raid that lasted from : to : p.m.; one plane went missing.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
There was no moon as Wing Commander Smith’s Mosquito force meanwhile neared
Dresden. The whole of the countryside beneath seemed to be swathed in banks of
starlit cloud. In fact the weather en route to the first targets of the night, Böhlen and
Dresden, was roughly as had been forecast: the cloud cover was nine- or ten-tenths
strato-cumulus, the cloud tops around nine thousand feet with some medium cloud
at fifteen thousand feet. The cloud thickened to ten tenths over the whole route,
rising to fifteen thousand feet in a frontal belt with heavy icing encountered between
two and four degrees east and lowering again as the squadrons neared the target
areas. Above the seven thousand airmen the cold February sky was clear and starry.
But, even as the Mosquitoes covered the last thirty miles towards Dresden, losing
seventeen and eighteen thousand feet in a matter of four or five minutes, they could
see the cloud clearing away exactly as had been forecast by the meteorologists at
Bomber Command. Over Dresden itself, they would ⁵nd only three layers of cloud:
a thin layer of strato-cumulus from fifteen to sixteen thousand feet, another layer of
cloud from six to eight thousand feet, and wisps of cloud at three and five thousand
feet.
As the Window-aircraft of No (Electronic Counter Measures) Group feinted
against the Mainz–Mannheim area, and the cumbersome Halifaxes slipped past north
of Koblenz en route to the target at Böhlen the Master Bomber saw the edge of the
horizon ahead rapidly broken by a string of vivid white lights, and a single ball of
green fire hanging in the sky.The primary flare force of No Squadron’s Lancasters
– which had the better navigation equipment – had arrived over Dresden and they
were dropping the first proximity markers; their parachute flares were beginning to
light up the whole countryside. The Primary Green, aimed and dropped by radar
over the S-bend in the river Elbe, together with the attendant showers of magnesium
parachute flares, was falling exactly over Dresden.
From now on the whole attack would develop with awesome military precision.
After the first wave of Blind Illuminator Lancasters, a second wave marched over
the target area, dropping sticks of white flares; this time the bomb aimers relied on
visual methods as well as the data on the radar screens.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
That ended the ‘Newhaven–II’ part of the Pathfinder marking of Dresden. It was
the turn of Smith’s Mosquito marker force, the brilliant red marker bombs still
clutched in their bomb bays, to swoop down on Dresden and mark out the cycle
stadium on which the whole attack depended.
v
v
v
Dresden lay within the ægis of the German First Fighter Division, whose headquarters was in the bunker at Döberitz, near Berlin. These fighter command centres
were referred to by the airmen as ‘battle opera houses’.
‘On entering’, wrote one Luftwaffe night-fighter general, ‘one was immediately
infected by the nervous atmosphere reigning there. The artificial light made faces
appear even more haggard than they really were. Bad air, cigarette smoke, the hum
of ventilators, the ticking of the teleprinters and the subdued murmur of countless
telephone operators gave one a headache.The centre of attraction in this hall was the
huge frosted-glass panel on which were projected by light spots and illuminated
writing the position, altitude, strength and course of the enemy as well as of our own
formations. Each single dot and each change to be seen here was the result of reports
and observations from radar sets, aircraft spotters, listening posts, reconnaissance
planes, and from units in action’.
Seated in front of the map, several rows deep like in an amphitheatre, were the
fighter controllers who issued the orders to their night fighters as the battle progressed. By February however the allied offensive against oil had so crippled
the German fighter defences that a policy of the strictest conservation of resources
was in operation. The latest raid had totally wrecked the synthetic refinery at Pölitz:
the Luftwaffe’s war diary recorded that in the whole of February they could now
expect the refineries to produce only four hundred tons of aviation spirit. The quartermaster general recommended that all flying training be cancelled. Luftflotte VI,
on the eastern front, was to get priority for all fuel allocations. On this very morning, February , the Luftwaffe High Command directed Luftflotte Reich to
give daytime priority to its jet squadrons, and night time priority to ground attack
squadrons on the western front. The night defences were virtually paralysed. Only
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the best crews were permitted to fly, except in the severest emergencies, and it was
more than a station commander’s position was worth to order his aircraft up into
battle on his own initiative without first receiving permission from Döberitz.
On the night of February a dilemma faced the fighter controllers at Döberitz.
Their information was worse than scanty; even their monitoring posts, which had
once picked up the enemy’s airborne radar and radio sets being tested during the
mornings prior to full-scale attacks were now blinded by electronic ‘curtains’ thrown
around the eastern coast of the British Isles and along the western front.The German
early-warning chain along the Channel coast had long fallen into allied hands. German radar would detect the enemy bombers approaching low across the Allied lines
only as they came within range inside the Reich. No (Radio Counter Measures)
Group had detailed aircraft to support the night’s operations laying a ‘Mandrel’
jamming screen from north to south behind the battle line for both Dresden raids;
other planes from this Group carried out Window feints toward other cities, and
executed missions with ‘Jostle’ – a high-power jamming transmitter – and signals
investigation aircraft. None of this made the German controllers’ task any easier.
When the threat did materialise moreover on this cold evening of February
only bombers at first emerged from behind the ‘curtain’ of electronic jamming
thrown up by No Group.The problem facing the controllers at Döberitz was not
only to deduce where they were heading for, but also what Harris planned to do with
the rest of his force? Bomber Command’s decoy operations were already in full swing:
Five Mosquitoes (out of six sent) had bombed Dortmund from : to : p.M.
Fifty-two Mosquitoes (out of fifty-three) then bombed Magdeburg from : to
: P.M. despite the prevailing ten-tenths cloud. (Three and a half hours later nine
more Mosquitoes would bomb Magdeburg again, to divert attention from Harris’
second strike force heading for Dresden.) Then the fighter controllers’ attention was
distracted to the south, as seven out of eight Mosquitoes sent to Nuremberg bombed
the city from : to : P.M., even as the first Dresden raid was starting. So it
went on for several more hours: sixteen Mosquitoes bombed Bonn from fourteen to
twenty-four minutes after midnight. Seven Mosquitoes (out of eight) attacked
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Misburg, near Hanover, from : to : A.M.; by which time the second force of
bombers had completed its assault on Dresden and was returning home.
As the first Lancaster bomber formation assigned to attack Dresden headed deeper
and deeper into Southern and Central Germany, followed shortly by the three hundred Halifaxes despatched to Böhlen, the threat became clearer; but the air-worthy
fighter squadrons in central Germany were scrambled only when it was realised that
the third, smaller formation of red arrows on the frosted glass screen in front of
them – Maurice Smith’s marker force – was not the usual nuisance raid on Berlin
under way, but was in fact likely to pass over either Leipzig, Chemnitz, or Dresden at
the same time as the big bomber stream. At this point the controllers decided that
the immediate threat was to one of the Saxon cities. Even so, none of the controllers
considered an attack on Dresden likely; right up to the last few moments the population in Leipzig alone was being warned by the radio to take cover.
In Dresden the sirens had not sounded the usual preliminary air raid warning. The
first that the people heard was the full alarm, suddenly shrieked by the sirens at :
P.M. At the same moment the order reached the airfield at Dresden-Klotzsche –
which is now Dresden’s commercial airport – to scramble the night fighter squadron
based there, V/NJG.. By then it was too late, and the target marking was about to
begin. The A-crews on this airfield were finally scrambled at the same time as the
Mosquito markers were at twenty thousand feet picking up the Loran beams.The Acrews were the eight or ten most successful crews of the squadron. One of the Bcrew Me. night-fighter pilots, a twenty-five year old sergeant pilot, described
February in his diary as ‘his saddest day as a night-fighter pilot’. At midday he had
tested his aircraft.The SN- night interception radar device checked out okay.‘In the
evening,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘we received an alarm, the first of the day. Naturally it
concerned only the A-crews. The take-off order came much to late.’ It would the
Messerschmitt twin-engined night fighters over half an hour to gain attacking altitude.
The light anti-aircraft gunners at the airfield became increasingly trigger-happy as
the sounds of the approaching armada of bombers echoed from beyond the horizon,
and when the airfield’s one searchlight trapped and held an aircraft circling at quite a
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
low altitude, the gunners all opened up to it. The plane crashed in flames. It was the
anti-aircraft gunner’s only success during the night: one of the five A-crew Me ’s
piloted by another young sergeant pilot.
Thus the Saxon capital girded itself against the attack. In the whole of Germany
only twenty-seven night fighters had taken off to ward off the most destructive air
raid in history.
v
v
v
Three of the Lancasters of No Group’s two Pathfinder squadrons had been
equipped as special Link aircraft; their task was to communicate the instructions of
the Master Bomber in Morse code to the bomber force if the speech transmitter
equipment installed in the bombers should fail or be jammed. Sometimes one of the
bomber wireless operators would switch on his VHF set by accident, jamming communications between the bombers and the Master Bomber; at other times the Germans themselves were responsible.The Links also acted as a means of communication
between the Master Bomber and the group’s base in England. Corrected weather
forecasts and wind estimations were exchanged between the Master Bomber and the
base; on special operations the controller might be required to make a snap judgement of the success of the raid and pass it back to England even as he was still over
the target.
On the Dresden raid, the three Link Lancasters were all provided by No Squadron. In Link , piloted by a Flight Lieutenant, a special wire-recorder had been installed to make a permanent record of the progress of the attack; the record would
be produced at the post-raid assessment during the following days. R.A.F. Bomber
Command was still eager to learn from its mistakes, and to develop and extend its
procedure and techniques.
As the Master Bomber’s Mosquito was still approaching the target area, he switched
on his TR. VHF speech transmitter, breaking his radio silence was broken over
Germany.
‘Controller to Marker Leader: How do you hear me? Over’.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Marker Leader, Flight Lieutenant Topper, replied that he could hear the Master Bomber clearly ‘at strength five’. A similar inquiry of the first Link aircraft recorded that communications between Link and Master Bomber were ‘loud and
clear’. Thus the whole operation would be directed in plain speech. Code-words
were only used for prime orders like ‘Recall’, or ‘Mission Cancelled’. The Master
Bomber required no acknowledgement except for the order ‘Go home’.
The cloud was still quite apparent over the target area; the Master Bomber called
up the Marker Leader once more: ‘Are you below cloud yet?’
‘Not yet,’ replied the Marker Leader. He too had just lost nineteen thousand feet
in less than five minutes; the navigator in the Master Bomber’s aircraft had suffered
severe discomfiture with ear pains during the descent.
The Master Bomber waited, asked the Marker Leader whether he could see the
Primary Green dropped by No Squadron, then said: ‘Okay, I can see it. The cloud
is not very thick.’
‘No’, confirmed the Master Bomber. ‘What do you make the base of it?’
After a moment the Marker Leader replied ‘The base is about two thousand five
hundred feet.’
It was time for the low-level marking procedure to begin. The flares were burning
brilliantly over the city now; the whole town looked serene and peaceful.
As his Mosquito circled the city, the Marker Leader carefully inspected the target:
rather to his surprise he could see not one searchlight, not one light flak piece firing.
Cautiously he again circled round, picking up bearings. ‘As I flew across the city,’ he
now recalls, ‘it was obvious to me that there was a large number of black-and-white
timbered buildings; it reminded me of Shropshire and Hereford and Ludlow. They
seemed to be lining the river which had a number of rather gracefully-spanned bridges
over it; the buildings were a very striking feature of the city’s architecture.’
In the marshalling yards of Dresden-Friedrichstadt he could see a single locomotive puffing industriously away with a short train of boxcars. Outside a large building
which he identified as the central station – he had spent the afternoon at Woodhall
Spa studying maps and aerial pictures of Dresden – there was another plume of
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
smoke where a locomotive was struggling to pull a passenger train with some white
coaches out into the open air.
Then it was time for Topper to begin his first run up the marking point. Over the
central station he was still two thousand feet up. He began to dive steeply, keeping a
wary eye on the altimeter: The target indicator bombs were set to burst barometrically at seven hundred feet. If released below that altitude, they would probably set
the little wooden plane on fire.
His eyes tracked the railway lines out of the central station, and round in a righthand curve toward the river. Just to the left of the railway bridges lay his marking
point, the cycle stadium; once in position to commence his marking run, he called
out into his microphone ‘Marker Leader: Tally-ho’ to warn off other markers who
might otherwise be commencing marking runs. From two thousand feet the Mosquito dived to less than eight hundred, opening its bomb-doors as it entered upon
the straight run-in to the aiming point. He switched on the automatic camera. The
first flash cartridge fired as the lens was pointing at the Dresden-Friedrichstadt
Krankenhaus, the biggest hospital complex in central Germany. In its lens the camera trapped the picture of the thousand-pound target indicator bomb slipping out of
the bomb bay, the finned canister silhouetted menacingly on top of a small oblong
building in the hospital’s grounds, the Catholic Old People’s and Sick People’s Institution.
Topper briskly levelled out while maintaining a high speed as he did not know
whether there was any flak to come up and as the flare illumination of both Dresden
and his aircraft was uncomfortably strong. The camera flashed a second time: The
bomb was a dark fleck above the oval of the cycle stadium. One of the Mosquito
pilots who had not been warned of the new camera technique shouted an involuntary ‘My God, the Marker Leader’s been hit’ to his navigator. But at the same moment,Topper’s marker bomb burst into a cascade of red pyrotechnics.The Mosquito
thundered across the stadium towards the river at three hundred miles an hour, its
camera was still flashing regularly once per second. The third flash was over the
hospital’s railway siding; a hospital train from the eastern front was unloading there:
now it was recorded for all time on a strip of film before the bombers arrived to blast
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the sidings from the map. The fourth flash showed the Marker Leader that he was
already across the River Elbe; a cotton-wool plume of steam coiled up from a single
saddle-tank locomotive puffing along the railway running beside the Japanese Palace
Garden.
‘Marker Two to Controller: Tally-ho!’ The second Marker Mosquito was already
following the railway lines round, ready to estimate the overshoot of the Marker
Leader’s red indicator bomb.
At the same time, the Master Bomber checked the three Dresden stadiums on his
District Target Map, and announced grimly over the radio to Flight Lieutenant Topper: ‘You have marked the wrong one.’
For a moment the VHF radio recorded only uncomfortable breathing. Then there
was a relieved ‘Oh no, that’s all right, carry on.’
The Marker Bomber could clearly see the red marker flare burning in a brilliant
crimson pool not far from the stadium. ‘Hello Marker Leader,’ he called. ‘That
target indicator is about a hundred yards east of the marking point.’
This initial marking shot was extraordinarily accurate. When one remembers that
during the first night of the Battle of Hamburg in , the markers of the official
Pathfinder Group were anything from half a mile to seven miles wide of the aiming
point, also using a visual technique, the fundamental difference between the standards achieved by the two bomber groups can be judged.
The VHF radio waves above the doomed city were lively with crackled orders and
acknowledgements. ‘Controller to Marker Leader: Good shot! Back up, then; back
up.’
‘Marker Leader to all Markers: Back up, back up.’
‘Marker Five to Master Bomber: Clear?’
‘Marker Two to Master Bomber: Tally-ho.
The time was six-and-a-half minute past ten. Zero hour was still nearly nine minutes away, but the target marking point was clearly and unambiguously marked.There
remained only for the other Mosquitoes to heap their red marker bombs onto the
one already burning to reinforce the glow.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The only thing which still concerned the Master Bomber was the visibility of the
target-indicator bombs (T.I.s) through the thin layers of cloud, especially for the
Lancaster bombers which had been stacked in the top altitude band around eighteen
thousand feet; the Lancaster squadrons had been briefed to approach the marking
point a different altitudes to avoid collisions as they fanned out over the city. A specially-equipped Lancaster of No Squadron had been positioned at eighteen thousand feet over Dresden. This was Lancaster Check .
‘Controller to Check : Tell me if you can see the glow.’
‘I can see three T.I.s through the cloud,’ replied the Check Lancaster.Thinking that
the Check had reported seeing only ‘green T.I.s’ the Master Bomber, queried this.
‘Good work. Can you see the reds yet?’
‘Check to Controller: I can just see reds.’
One after another two more Marker Mosquitoes tally-ho’d and placed their reds
on the cycle stadium. Remembering that the Mosquitoes only carried one marker
each, the Master Bomber warned them to ‘take it easy’; they might be needed later
on.
It was seven minutes past ten, zero minus eight.The marking had proceeded better
than expected. ‘Controller to Flare Force: no more flares, no more flares.’
One more Mosquito called out its intention of marking the stadium. A trifle impatiently the Master Bomber called out to all the markers, ‘Hurry up and complete
your marking and clear the area.’
A brilliant concentration of red markers was now burning around the stadium,
each marker a pool of burning candles, scattered over an area of several hundred
feet, far too numerous to be extinguished even if there were any Germans brave
enough to venture into what must seem to them the very bull’s-eye of the target
area.
In Dresden the Horizont flak transmitter was warning: ‘The formation of nuisance
raiders is orbiting from Martha–Heinrich to Martha–Heinrich .The first waves of
the bomber formations are at Northpole–Friedrich, now Otto–Friedrich . Their
heading is East-North-East.’ MH, MH, OF – these were the appropriate squares
of the grid overprinted on the flak commanders’ plotting charts. In their excitement
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
however the speaker had confused the ‘nuisance raiders’ – in fact the nine Mosquitoes of Smith’s marker force – with the heavy bombers, and vice versa. Moments
later, it dawned on the flak commander that the ‘nuisance raiders’ were Pathfinder
Mosquitoes arriving from the Chemnitz area, and that the bomber formations were
approaching over Riesa from the north-west; at once a signal was passed to the local
civil defence Control Room in the basement of the Albertinum building.
The Master Bomber made one final check with the Lancaster in the top altitude
band: ‘Can you see the red target indicators?’
The reply was satisfactory. ‘I can see the green and the red T.I.s.’ It was nine minutes past ten, zero minus six. The marking was complete, and the Master Bomber
wanted the attack to begin at the earliest possible moment; his tanks would only
allow him to stay over the target for another minutes. He wanted to witness the
commencement of the attack and ensure that all went well.
It was at this moment that the Dresden people, by now cleared from the open
spaces and listening apprehensively in their basements and cellars to the sound of the
light Mosquitoes racing back and forth across the rooftops of the Saxon capital, were
informed for the first time the nature of the real threat to their city. At : P.M. the
ticking clock which replaced cable radio broadcasts during alerts in Germany was
sharply interrupted.The unmistakably Saxon voice of a very agitated announcer broke
out of the loudspeakers: ‘Achtung,Achtung,Achtung! The first waves of the large enemy
bomber formation have changed course, and are now approaching the city boundaries.There is going to be an attack.The population is instructed to proceed at once to
the basements and cellars. The police have instructions to arrest all those who remain in the open…’
In his Mosquito three thousand feet above the silent city the Master Bomber was
repeating over and over into his VHF transmitter: ‘Controller to Plate-rack Force:
Come in and bomb glow of red T.I.s as planned. Bomb glow of red T.I.s as planned.’
The police headquarters logged the first bombs as falling at : p.m.
The last report from the civil defence Control Room was a shrill: ‘Bombs falling
on the city area! Comrades, keep sand and water handy!’ But still the sirens were not
sounded, and the citizens were not warned to take cover.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The time was exactly : and thirty seconds.
The Marker Leader called up, asking: ‘Can I send the Marker Force home now?’,
but it occurred to the Master Bomber that the Germans might well have a decoy site
in the neighbourhood.
‘Controller to Marker Leader: If you stick around for a moment, and keep one lad
with yellow, the rest can go home’.
‘Okay, Controller. Marker Leader to all markers: Go home, go home. Acknowledge’. One after another Markers – Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight – acknowledged, ‘Going home’.
The Marker Leader spotted a circling aircraft with its green and red navigation
lights on.This was asking for trouble over enemy territory. ‘You have your navigation
lights on’, he warned the aircraft. The lights did not go out. It was probably one of
the German Me.’s still circling to gain height; but the Mosquitoes were completely unarmed, and short of ramming the fighter, there was nothing that anybody
could do about it.
The Master Bomber was still broadcasting to the main force bombers ‘Controller
to Plate-rack force: Bomb concentration of red T.I.s as planned as soon as you like.’
The guns defending Dresden were still silent. Not even a muzzle flash was to be
seen. It began to dawn on the Master Bomber, Wing Commander Smith, that in fact
Dresden was undefended. He could safely order the heavy four-engined bombers
down to attack from lower altitudes, thereby ensuring a more even saturation of the
sector marked for attack. He called up the Link Lancaster which was in constant
Morse contact with the bombers. ‘Tell the aircraft in the top height band to come
down below the medium cloud,’ he ordered.
‘Roger’. By : P.M. the bombs had started falling on Dresden. The Marker
Leader, Flight Lieutenant Topper, called the Master Bomber’s attention to the characteristic heaving explosions of the huge four- and eight-thousand pound high-explosive blockbusters, designed to smash the windows and rip off the roofs of the
highly combustible Dresden Old City buildings, some of them dating back over a
thousand years. A vivid blue flash split the darkness as a stick of bombs, falling wide
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
of the target sector detonated; the crews decided later that an electricity installation
must have been hit.
‘Marker Leader to controller: The bombs seem to be falling okay now. Over!’
‘Yes, Marker Leader. They look pretty good.’
‘Hello Plate-rack Force. That’s good bombing. Come in and aim from the red T.I.s
as planned. Careful overshoot, somebody! Somebody has dropped very wide.’
‘Controller to Marker Leader: Go home now, if you like. Thank you.’
‘Hello Controller: Thank you, going home. Good work Plate-rack Force. That’s
nice bombing.’
The wire-recorder continued to run, recording this banal, almost bland dialogue
of death. Squadron by squadron the Lancasters ran up to the marking point on the
cycle stadium, each aircraft approaching the brilliant red glow on a different heading, some heading due south, others almost due east, fanning out across the blazing
Old City. The whole of the cheese-shaped sector was a mass of twinkling fires and,
here and there, the lazy, brilliant eruption of the big bombs wrenching out doors and
windows, churning up the debris, and splintering the buildings. Master bomber
Maurice Smith could see from his Mosquito, circling the city, that the target sector
had been truly saturated; rashes of glittering fires spread across the city as the hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs ignited with a searing flame.
By eighteen minutes past ten, the patterns of bombs were covering the whole
sector, but one or two tell-tale splashes of light were visible in the darker areas outside too. The Master Bomber saw these bomb loads go down wide, and he warned
the rest of the force of Lancasters: ‘Hello Plate-rack Force: Try to pick out the red
glow. The bombing is getting wild now. Pick out the red glow if you can, then bomb
as planned.’
He had another three minutes in which he could stay over the city. In the near
distance he spotted something else beginning to glow – the red and yellow glare of a
German decoy site being vainly ignited. The thing the Germans never realised when
they designed decoy sites was that a burning city from the air was an untidy, turbulent mass of billowing smoke, bursting high explosive charges, and irregular patches
of myriads of incendiaries; the German decoy sites were built in neat rectangles, the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
burning ‘incendiaries’ tidily scattered at regular intervals across the ground. Nevertheless, it was the Master Bomber’s duty to ensure that no bomb loads were needlessly drawn astray to decoys. On this occasion he did not consider that the decoy
was worth wasting a yellow cancellation-marker bomb on; he merely broadcast to
all crews of the remaining Plate-rack Force bombers: ‘Decoys at twelve to fifteen
miles on a bearing three hundred degrees true from town centre.’ A minute later he
repeated the warning: ‘Complete bombing quickly and go home. Ignore the decoy
fires.’
At twenty one minute past ten on the night of February , , the Master
Bomber called up the Link Lancaster aircraft for the last time, as he turned his own
Mosquito on to the new bearing which would take him home.
‘Controller to Link : Send home: TARGET ATTACKED SUCCESSFULLY STOP PRIMARY PLAN
STOP THROUGH CLOUD STOP.’
The Link Lancaster repeated the signal’s wording, then flashed it back to England
by telegraphy, where within minutes it had been passed on to the desk of the commander-in-chief, Sir Arthur Harris, in the underground headquarters of Bomber
Command.
Appendix: Summary of Operations against Germany on Nights of th/th and th/th
February (Records of RAF Bomber Command, PRO) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO) (Author’s microfilm DI–)
Ibid.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
Adolf Galland, Die Ersten und die Letzten (Bonn, ); and information to the author from Major
Hans Kuhlisch.
Kriegstagebuch OKL Führungsstab Ia, Feb , (NA film T, roll ).
Ibid.
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives); first published by Walter Weidauer in Inferno Dresden (Dietz Verlag, East Berlin,
), nd edition, with an account of how a Frau Jurk of Dresden had found it in the spring of
among the papers of her late father-in-law Max Jurk, whose initials (‘Ju.’) are on the document as
author (pp.f.). – Thierig, born Apr , , went to Munich in after his release from communist custody (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Hermann Kinder, of Bielefeld, kindly provided to the author excerpts from his diary as a fighter
pilot that night.
All such quotations are from ‘Transcript of Wire-Recorder, Operations Night th/th Febru-
ary ,’ which was kept for demonstration purposes after the triple blow and provided to the
author by Wing Commander Smith. Timings are from the logsheet of the navigator in Smith’s Mosquito, Flight Lieutenant Leslie M Page, furnished to the author.
The photographs taken by the Marker Leader aircraft bear the official numbers (Coningsby)
–, and were provided by William Topper to the author.
Wire-recording transcript, and Wing Commander Smith’s recollections in Canadian Broadcast-
ing Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm DI–).
The announcements were noted down by Götz Bergander, of Berlin; he was a young flak gunner
at the time.
Aktuell, Munich, , No..
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives).
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
Wire recording transcript.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
A City on Fire
in which the success of this first attack on Dresden by No
Group in the late evening of February , was aided by the accuracy of
the weather predictions over the target area can be judged by comparison
with the numerically larger attack – Halifaxes – on the synthetic oil plant at
Böhlen, just one hundred miles west of Dresden.
The weather section at Bomber Command headquarters had predicted that the rift
in the cloud layers over western and central Europe would give clear skies over
Dresden only for four or five hours. But even as Maurice Smith’s marker force had
swept into Dresden from almost due west, they were climbing down over the edge
of a precipice of cloud for the last thirty-five miles. Over Böhlen itself, crews reported layers of strato-cumulus clouds. Only the faintest glow of the Pathfinder
markers could be seen, and they were widely scattered. Moreover the Germans
ignited an array of dummy target indicators several miles away, and the Halifax crews,
not being able to distinguish ground detail, were to a large extent misled.The Master
Bomber for this raid warned against the decoys and ordered the crews to bomb only
the glow of the markers on the ground, but the marking was scattered and the bombing
ineffectual. The bomber squadrons, from Nos , , and Groups, dropped ·
tons of high explosive and · tons of fire bombs but few fell on the oil plant.
Had the same cloud layers been over Dresden just fifteen minutes later when the
No Group bombers arrived, the first attack would probably have failed to achieve
the degree of concentration in space required to start the fire-storm.
The records kept by the meteorological post at the local fighter airfield at Dresden-Klotzsche confirm that not only was the initiation of the attack nearly impossible but the cloud banks were equally close on the heels of the attacking force at the
T
HE MEASURE
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
end of the second blow: thus although at seven p.m. there had been only one-tenth
cloud below ten thousand feet, within ten minutes of the end of Harris’ second blow
on Dresden, at two a.m. on February , cloud was obscuring ten-tenths of the sky
both above and below ten thousand feet. Bomber Command had to fit two heavy air
raids into this accurately forecast break in the cloud cover over Dresden, with an
interval of some three hours between them. Wing Commander Maurice Smith
confirmed later that if the first raid on Dresden had been timed ten or fifteen minutes earlier, the double-blow would have failed; the Lancasters could not have been
kept orbiting for fifteen minutes waiting for clouds to clear.
Thus close was Bomber Command to being cheated of its climactic success in its
area offensive against Germany; and, equally, thus close were Britain’s post-war enemies to being robbed of one of their greatest propaganda indictments against her.
v
v
v
By ten-thirty p.m. on February , the whole of the first Dresden force was making its way back to England. Of the Lancasters and nine Mosquitoes of No
Group which had taken off, had attacked Dresden between : and :
P.M. The raid had been so concentrated in time and space that one of the Lancasters
had been destroyed by the bombs dropped by another Lancaster above, the only
plane lost in this phase of the attack. ‘The first force achieved a fine concentration,’
reported the British operational analysts,‘and left fires visible for one hundred miles.’
The ground defences estimated that as many as five hundred planes had taken part in
this first phase; deciding at : P.M. that the bombs had stopped falling they ordered the preliminary all clear sounded five minutes later. With their mechanisms
shattered however, and all the power lines down, few sirens stirred the stricken city’s
infernal air.
The first wave of bombers was withdrawing – going home. Ten minutes after the
first attack had ended the No Group force abruptly ceased Window-ing, and by
losing height rapidly until they were flying at a mere six thousand feet they effec-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
tively slid under the horizon of the German panorama radar chains. Only as they
approached the Allied lines at a point a few miles south of Strasbourg did they begin
a slow climb back to fifteen thousand feet, their withdrawal from here on being
covered by the new bomber stream coming in over France and Southern Germany –
the force of Lancasters due to open the second attack on Dresden at one-thirty
a.m. Since midnight, the crews of these bomber formations had been cascading Window into the air in copious amounts, while the aircraft steadily climbed over Alliedheld territory, finally crossing the front lines at a point some twenty miles north of
Luxembourg.
This was a veritable bomber armada, carrying a huge bomb load. At the head of the
bomber stream flew the Blind Illuminator Lancasters, their bomb racks charged with
high-explosive time-bombs and parachute flares – hooded magnesium lanterns set
to ignite at twenty thousand feet, to light up the countryside for the Deputy Master
Bomber to identify the target and to mark the aiming point. In case the cloud was
too dense for the glow of the ‘Paramatta’ ground-marker flares – as said, the Pathfinder
chief Bennett was an Australian – to penetrate them, eight further Pathfinder crews
had been detailed to stand by to drop parachute ‘Wanganui’ sky-marker flares, again
on instruments and radar: they were the Blind Sky Markers; all eventualities had thus
been provided for.
At regular three or four-minute intervals in the bomber stream flew some twenty
Visual Centerer Lancasters of the Pathfinder force, who were to aim their target
indicators visually into the centre of patterns of flares dropped by previous marker
crews; in this way the attack could be tightened up and prevented from sprawling.
In the van of the bomber stream flew squadrons of Mosquito aircraft equipped for
night fighting and for strafing German airfields. Infiltrated in the five-mile wide stream
were the Liberators and Flying Fortresses of No (Radio Counter Measures)
Group, each carrying two trained signals specialists for duties of a nature which even
the other members of the aircrew were not permitted to ascertain, and loaded with
tons of the metal-foil Window strips.
If the bomber force despatched to deliver the second blow to Dresden that night
was impressive, the mood of their crews was not jubilant. At their briefing some had
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
learned, if only after questioning, the nature of the target they were to attack. On
some air stations the briefing had passed without comment, and the young bomber
crews accepted what their briefing officers told them. On other stations where a
chance question had elicited further information about Dresden, there were open
signs of uneasiness. The trouble had started for most crews when the station commander had peeled away the brown paper covering the target maps and routing plans
on the wall facing them at the end of the briefing huts. The first reaction of most of
the crews was awe at the depth of penetration into Germany. The captains and navigators exchanged glances and calculated roughly the duration of flight to Dresden: It
would be about ten hours. This would be stretching the limits of the Lancaster aircraft; there seemed to be little point in going such a long way into enemy territory to
attack what seemed to be such an unimportant target. Many of the aircrew voiced
wonder and surprise that the Russians were not being asked to attack the city themselves, if it was so ‘vital’ to their front.
The misgivings of many of the aircrews could be set aside by the assurances of the
intelligence officers. The aircrews of No Bomber Group were informed, ‘Your
Group is attacking the German Army Headquarters at Dresden.’ Some crews of No
Squadron even remember Dresden’s being described as Fortress city. Crews were
briefed that they were attacking Dresden to ‘destroy the German arms and supply
dumps.’They were given to understand that it was one of the main supply centres for
the eastern front. In No Group the emphasis appears to have been laid on Dresden’s importance as a railway centre. The crews were told that their designated aiming point was the railway station. The dossier prepared by the headquarters of No
Group, the Canadian Group, described how ‘Dresden was an important industrial
area, producing electric motors, precision instruments, chemicals, and munitions.’
In few of the squadrons were the airmen warned of the presence of several hundred
thousand refugees in the city, or the prisoner-of-war camps containing , prisoners of war in the suburbs. The imagination of local briefing officers at some stations seems to have been given free rein; at one air station the crews were told that
they were attacking a Gestapo Headquarters in the centre of the city; in another, a
vital ammunitions works; in yet a third, a large poison gas plant.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
For the first time all crews were issued with Perspex envelopes containing large
Union flags embroidered in Russian with the words ‘I am an Englishman.’ While this
may have upset many of the British Empire crews – many Canadians, and every
Australian squadron in the force was taking part in the night’s operation – it was the
best that Bomber Command could offer the airmen for their personal security in the
event of being forced down behind Russian lines. They were warned that the simple
Russian soldiery had the habit of shooting strange militia men on sight, whether
decorated with the English Union flag or not.
The briefing ended with full instructions on the Pathfinder marking techniques
being used, the call-signs for the Main Force and Master Bomber, and general warning.The crews were advised by bombing leaders to identify the target-indicator flares
with care, not only because of German decoy markers, but also because Dresden
would ‘probably burn’ and the markers might be swamped by the other fires. The
call-sign for the Master Bomber was given as CHEESECAKE, for the Main Force of
Lancasters as PRESS-ON; when the latter call-sign was announced, there was an uneasy
ripple of laughter – it was an R.A.F. expression which summed up the current attitude.
With the Dresden raid some standard details of other briefings were missing.When
a squadron was briefed for what they regarded as a worthwhile target, they normally
raised a cheer when the station commander mounted the rostrum to speak, even
when the target was a tough one like Hamburg or Berlin. With Dresden the cheers
were absent.With this target there seemed to be a definite, perhaps a studied, lack of
information on the city and the nature of its defences. Encouraged though they were
by talk of a Gestapo headquarters and poison gas plants, many of the crews were
distinctly unhappy when they heard about the refugees. When one of the squadrons
of No (Radio Counter Measures) group was briefed, the intelligence officer
even suggested, probably not seriously, that the very object of the raid was to kill as
many as possible of the refugees known to be sheltering in the city, and to spread
panic and chaos behind the eastern front. This remark, however, did not meet with
the jocular reception he had expected; normally it was the practise of bomber crews
to take along bits of concrete, steel, and old bottles to drop on enemy villages and
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
towns as they passed over. Unanimously they voted to show their disapproval for this
mission by omitting this practise for the night. One French pilot based on No
Pathfinder Squadron was on the verge of tears: he had studied at Dresden’s university and had left many good friends there on the outbreak of war; unwilling however
to incur the despised L.M.F. stamp in his log book which standing down would entail
(‘lack of moral fibre’) he took off with the others when the time came for the force
of Lancasters to take to the air.
This kind of reception for the night’s operation was however by no means general
in Bomber Command; in other stations, especially those where the real nature of the
city had been obscured, the reaction ‘was the usual light-hearted chaff, probably
covering their concern at the distance of the target’ as one bomb-aimer described it.
Unlike most of the air raids on German targets at this stage of the war, the force
was carrying about seventy-five percent incendiaries. While it had been found
profitable earlier in the war to employ such a large proportion of incendiaries, by
few of the German cities had not already been attacked, bombed, and destroyed; in the Ruhr there was hardly a city where hundreds of acres had not been
turned into an incombustible heap of rubble. For this reason bomb loads had included ever larger proportions of high explosives, as the economic value of incendiaries dropped.
Dresden was however virtually a virgin city, and the full ‘Hamburg’ treatment
could be employed against it: first the windows and roofs would be wrenched apart
by high-explosive bombs; then the incendiaries would rain down, setting fire to the
houses and whipping up whirlwinds of red hot sparks; these in turn would rage
through the wrecked roofs and smashed windows, setting ⁵re to curtains, carpets,
furniture and roof timbers. The waves of bombers in this second attack would have
to carry only sufficient high-explosive bombs to spread the fires and keep the heads
of the fire fighters down. Thus the bomb-loads of No Bomber Group were divided
into two types: the bombers of one wave each carried a four-thousand pound blockbuster, now commonly called a ‘cookie’, and five -pound clusters of incendiaries;
those of the second wave carried one five-hundred pound general purpose highexplosive bomb and the -pound clusters. In No Group the bomb loads were
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
slightly different, the incendiary bombs being more usually dropped from small bomb
containers – metal trunks in the bomb bays, in which the -inch long hexagonal
four-pound thermite incendiaries were stowed, and from which they were released
into the wind over the target; these showers of small bombs presented a danger to
other aircraft over the target area, and possessed no ballistic properties which enabled them to be accurately aimed.
Nevertheless, for targets like Dresden, where the purpose was to get as much of
the city on fire as possible, they achieved as useful random effect. The No Group
aircraft were carrying seventeen of these trunks and one two-thousand pounder each;
another variation was one four-thousand pounder with twelve trunks of incendiaries.
Altogether, , incendiary bombs were in the bomb racks and small bomb containers of the Lancasters attacking Dresden. None of them seems to have been carrying ‘J-bombs’ – the ‘phosphorus bombs’ which would become a feature of propaganda after the war. The whole force had been tanked up with maximum fuel loads,
, gallons of high-octane petrol each. After the engines had been tested and run
up, and the bombers had taxied from their dispersal areas to the end of the runways,
the bowsers were waiting to top up the tanks once again. For two hours after takingoff there would be the sickly smell of petrol mingling with the smell of Glycol antifreeze inside the aircraft.
By eight p.m. the whole force was airborne.This second attacking force was twice
was powerful as the first. It consisted of Lancasters in squadrons from Nos , ,
, and Groups. To cover the approach of this second bomber armada, the Windowing (‘chaff’) aircraft of No Group simulated for the German radar screens a
bomber force bearing down on the Cologne–Koblenz area.
As the bombers approached central Germany, the cloud cover was clearing. The
bomb aimers, crouched in their nose turrets, could see between three- and seventenths variable drifting cloud patches far beneath them, the cloud tops rising to six
thousand feet. There was still no moon. At the altitude at which the bombers were
flying the route was clear all the way to four degrees east, where a frontal belt with
cloud, rime, and weird electrical phenomena developed.The blue flames of St. Elmo’s
fire, static electricity, played along the leading edges of the wings and around the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
spinning airscrews. In many aircraft the cold was so intense that the automatic pilots
ceased to function, and faced the pilots with hours of flying on manual control.
Mercifully, between the German frontier and the target there was a thick bank of
cloud which grounded many of the enemy’s night fighters. Soon after passing to the
south of the Ruhr the defences there opened up; many crews saw the flak barrage
thrown up over the Ruhr cities. The first of the feints laid on by the Pathfinders was
under way – a big attack on Dortmund by Mosquitoes of his Light Night Striking
Force. Other spoof attacks were scheduled for Bonn, Nuremberg, and Magdeburg as
the night wore on. Once again the Liberators of No Group, their crews cascading Window into the air, patrolled a line at ·-degrees east, generating a screen
which the German radar system could not penetrate.
At Chemnitz the banks of cloud rolled apart. Chemnitz was not even marked on
the Captains-of-Aircraft maps used by the pilots; perhaps for this reason some were
careless about skirting the flak areas there. As the bomber stream, by now partially
scattered and far beyond the range of Gee, emerged from the cloud formation and
passed by the heavily defended city with its Siegmar assembly plant for Mark IV
tanks and engines, the flak batteries along its whole length began to fire. Several
Lancasters were punctured by flak but managed to complete the flight to Dresden.
In the distance the airmen could clearly see the fires started by the No Group
attack. Indeed, the fires had been visible from over fifty miles away. Some of the
Pathfinder crews later admitted to being mortified on seeing the city ablaze – a feeling explained by the spirited rivalry then existing between Nos. and Groups,
who had so successfully initiated this double-blow. ‘No Group were known to us as
the Lincolnshire Poachers,’ said one officer, ‘or as the “independent air force.” We
were irritated to see how successful they had been.’
Unlike the Mosquitoes and Flare Force of No Group, the Pathfinders of the
second attack had no Loran navigation equipment, and if the first blow had not been
successful, it is unlikely that they would have achieved the necessary concentration
on the target. As it was, the second attack began only a few seconds late.
Zero hour for the main force was one-thirty A.M.; of the Lancasters which had
taken off, would attack Dresden between : and : A.M.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
At : the Blind Illuminator Lancasters, relying only on their HS radar images,
released sticks of parachute flares across the aiming point, and at : the Master
Bomber, Squadron leader C P C de Wesselow, arrived. He found that the whole of
the centre of the city was being swept by raging fires, making it impossible for him to
identify the aiming point clearly; a strong north-westerly wind was blowing down
there, and a pall of smoke from the burning city was obscuring the whole southeastern section of the city.
At : the Deputy Master Bomber, Wing Commander H J F Le Good, arrived.
He too found that the aiming point was obscured by fires and smoke. As the two
Master Bombers had agreed between them prior to taking off that the Deputy should
make the first marking run, Le Good called up de Wesselow to confer with him on an
alternative marking tactic. The question was whether to advise the crews over the
radio-telephone to concentrate their bombs on the area already burning, or to allow
the attack to spread. The Master Bomber decided on the second course: they would
concentrate the main force bombing on those areas not affected by the ⁵rst attack.
The Deputy Master Bomber did not therefore use his flares to mark the aiming point.
He and the Visual Centerers backing up on him instead marked first to one side, and
then to the other of the fire-storm area with the clusters of red and green target
indicators, their only concern being to ensure that the bombing did not become too
widespread.The bomb aimer in Wing Commander Le Good’s aircraft noted down in
his log-book afterwards:
/th February Dresden. Nil defences, six red target indicators and
four -pound H.E. bombs carried; smoke from the first attack prevented marking aiming point.
Wing Commander Le Good himself, an Australian, noted: ‘Dresden. Clear over
target, practically the whole town in flames. No flak.’
The Master Bomber and his deputy did exchange some remarks while they were
over the target concerning the railway yards, but the deputy was unable to see them
clearly in spite of being to the windward of the burning area. When the Master
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Bomber called up the main force, the press-on crews, over the radiotelephone he
therefore directed them to bomb first left, then right, and then overshooting the
existing fire and flare areas. Both Master Bombers stayed over the target area throughout the twenty-minute duration of the attack. As the Master Bomber was leaving, he
checked again for the railway yards, and this time he was able to observe in detail the
effect of the raid on them. The Squadron Record Book reports that in his post-raid
debriefing he stated that the ‘marshalling yards to the south-west had escaped major
damage.’
v
v
v
In most areas of Dresden the sirens had again not sounded.The power supplies had
failed during the first attack, and this second raid took the people by surprise.
As the Illuminator Lancasters thundered across the burning city some minutes
before zero hour the bomb aimers could see the roads and autobahns leading into
Dresden alive with activity. Long columns of trucks, their headlights full on, were
racing toward the blazing city. These must have been the convoys of relief supplies
and the fire-brigades arriving from the other cities in central Germany. The second
component of Harris’ double-blow tactics was about to be enforced: the annihilation
not only of the passive defences of Dresden, but of a large number of rescue forces
summoned from surrounding cities. ‘It was the only time I ever felt sorry for the
Germans,’ related the bomb-aimer of a Lancaster supplied by No Squadron. ‘But
my sorrow lasted only for a few seconds; the job was to hit the enemy and to hit him
very hard.’
Within seconds, the first Lancasters of the Blind Illuminator force were lighting up
the whole area with their sticks of parachute ⁶ares.
From the German point of view the opening of a mass attack on a city, prefaced by
the waves of Pathfinders, must have been an ominous spectacle – the unseen hands
scattering huge, dazzling ⁶ares through the clouds, the coloured target indicators
descending in shimmering cascades and glittering hazily over the doomed city with a
dread measure of ⁵nality.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The bomber crews had been briefed to watch out early on for these sky flares
going down over the target city. But these flares were scarcely needed.
On February , at : A.M. there was no doubt at all in any body’s mind
that they had Dresden beneath them. From one end to the other, Dresden had become a sea of fire. ‘The area was so bright,’ an airman wrote in his diary afterwards,
‘that we saw our own aircraft all around us, and our own vapour trails as well.’
‘The fantastic glow from two hundred miles away grew ever brighter as we moved
in to the target,’ wrote another, a Jewish pilot of No Group. ‘At twenty thousand
feet we could see details in the unearthly blaze that had never been visible before.
For the first time in many operations I felt sorry for the population below.’
The navigator of another aircraft from the same group writes: ‘It was my practice
never to leave my seat, but my skipper called me on this particular occasion to come
and have a look. The sight was indeed fantastic. From some twenty thousand feet,
Dresden was a city with every street etched in fire.’ One flight engineer of No
Group recalls that he was able to fill in his log-sheet by the light striking down the
length of the darkened fuselage. ‘I confess to taking a glance downward as the bombs
fell,’ recalls a bomb aimer of another No Group bomber, ‘and I witnessed the
shocking sight of a city on fire from end to end. Dense smoke could be seen drifting
away from Dresden, leaving a brilliantly illuminated plan view of the town. My immediate reaction was a stunned reflection on the comparison between the holocaust
below and the warnings of the evangelists in Gospel meetings before the war.’
v
v
v
Each target-indicator flare could be relied on to burn for some four minutes. For
this reason the Pathfinder commander had programmed Visual Centring bombers to
arrive at three or four minute intervals throughout the attack on Dresden.
Few of the main force crews were aware of the nature of the aiming point they
were attacking. Unless they had taken pains to study the intelligence charts and plans
in the briefing huts on the previous afternoon – and few aircrew were as keen as that
– they were content to aim at the patterns of flares dropped by the Pathfinders and to
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
follow the instructions broadcast by the Master Bomber: ‘The Master Bomber was
flying much lower than we were,’ records a No Group pilot. ‘He was directing each
wave of the attack separately, and was most anxious that we should not waste our
bombs on districts which were already well ablaze.’
Perhaps some bomb aimers wondered how it was possible for them to be destroying a railway station, or a German army headquarters, or even the Gestapo building
or poison gas factory which had been received with such popular acclaim at the
briefings, if the Master Bomber was constantly directing the main force to release
their loads on different sections of the town. One area that stubbornly refused to
catch fire was the Grosser Garten, the large rectangular park in Dresden. Many tons
of bombs were wasted in futile attempts to set the park on fire along with the rest of
the city; the smoke layers blowing eastward across the city obscured this part of the
target area.
v
v
v
For a second time the German night fighter force was paralysed. This time the
difficulty was not one of lack of fuel, or of lack of preparation at the airfields concerned. The night-fighter pilots at the Klotzsche airfield could clearly see the large
fires taking hold in Dresden less than five miles to the south.When news reach them
through the cable radio channel (the Drahtfunk) of another bombing force approaching
central Germany from the south, not one of these German airmen doubted that this
second force was heading for Dresden too, thus clearly marked out as a beacon. The
Station Commander at once ordered all the night fighter crews into their
Messerschmitt s at ‘cockpit readiness.’ The ground crews stood by the starting
equipment. The eighteen fighter planes were ready this time, their tanks fuelled and
their guns armed, and warned in advance. They would still have more than enough
time to reach the attacking altitude.
At : p.m. the perimeter lighting and flarepath flickered on, brilliantly silhouetting the hundreds of German aircraft parked all round the perimeter track; several
squadrons of fighter and transport planes had been withdrawn to Klotzsche from the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
eastern front, to prevent their being overrun. But the flarepath had not been switched
on for the night fighters. The station commander explained that a flight of transport
planes was expected from supply missions to Breslau, now besieged by Marshal
Koniev’s armies. The flarepaths could be turned off only from time to time. The
fighter crews protested that the whole airfield would be destroyed if the enemy bombers saw it. The station commander was adamant, and so the flarepath winked on and
off, as though beckoning the British aircraft to attack.
But first ten, then twenty, then thirty minutes passed from the moment that the
Drahtfunk had sounded the first alarm; and still the green signal cartridge was not
fired.
‘Thus we awaited our fate, sitting in our cockpits,’ recalled one of the night fighter
pilots bitterly.‘Impotently we watched the whole of the second raid on Dresden.The
enemy Pathfinder aircraft dropped their ‘Christmas Tree’ flares right overhead, brilliantly illuminating the airfield which was overflowing with the aircraft transferred
from the eastern front.’
Wave after wave of the heavy bombers passed overhead, the bombs whistling down
into the city. Still the flarepath lights were switched on and off, on and off, waiting
for the transport planes from Breslau. ‘At any moment we expected the airfield to be
wiped out. The strained nerves of some of the technicians and ground-crews could
not take it. They abandoned their starting gear and bolted for shelter. We were certain that the airfield would be obliterated; but apparently the bomber crews had
their orders and had to adhere to them; the airfield cannot have been included in
their target plans. Given the opposite situation a German formation would scarcely
have possessed the discipline not to attack an objective exposing itself in such a manner right by the target area, even if that objective was not mentioned in the original
orders.’
Still the green cartridge was not fired. The raid on Dresden was over. The pilots of
the Me.s whose ground crews had deserted them climbed stiffly out of their
cockpits. The other crews followed. The station commander who on his own initiative had ordered the crews to their cockpits now wearily admitted that he had not
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
been able to contact the First Fighter Division headquarters at Döberitz, outside
Berlin, to obtain permission to scramble his squadron.
The telephone lines were dead, he explained, and for some reason the short-wave
radio channel between Döberitz and the airfield was also unusable. The telephone
lines passed of course through Dresden’s old city; and the Luftwaffe’s radio communications had been effectively jammed during every major night attack since the
introduction of the R.A.F.’s No (Radio Counter Measures) Group in November
.
‘Result,’ commented the night fighter pilot in his diary: ‘A major attack on Dresden.The city was smashed to pieces. We had to stand by and look on. How could such
a thing have been possible? People are hinting more and more at sabotage, or at least
at an irresponsible defeatism among the “gentlemen” in the Command Staff. Have a
feeling that things are marching to their end with giant strides.What then? Wretched
Fatherland!’
v
v
v
The ground defences were completely silent. Some of the Lancaster bomber crews
felt almost ashamed at the lack of opposition. Many crews chose to orbit the burning
city several times – there was nothing to stop them. For ten minutes one Lancaster
equipped with -millimetre ciné cameras circled the target filming the whole scene
below for the R.A.F Film Unit. The four-hundred foot film, now stored in the film
archives of London’s Imperial War Museum, is one of the most grimly magnificent
visual records to come out of the Second World War. This film provides the conclusive evidence that Dresden was undefended: no searchlight, no bursting flak shell
appears on the film throughout its length.
‘When we came to the target area at the end of the attack it was obvious that the
city was doomed,’ remembers the pilot of a No Group Lancaster which had been
hit and delayed by flak over Chemnitz. Originally briefed to arrive at Dresden five
minutes before the end of the attack, their Lancaster was now over ten minutes late.
Probably theirs was the last aircraft over the target. ‘There was a sea of fire covering
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
in my estimation some forty square miles. The heat striking up from the furnace
below could be felt in my cockpit. The sky was vivid in hues of scarlet and white, and
the light inside the aircraft was that of an eerie autumn sunset. We were so aghast at
the awesome blaze that although alone over the city we flew around in a stand-off
position for many minutes before turning for home, quite subdued by our imagination of the horror that must be below. We could still see the glare of the holocaust
thirty minutes after leaving.’
Another No Group pilot on the way home was so impressed by the persistent
red glow in the sky behind that he verified the aircraft’s position with the navigator:
they were over miles from Dresden. Instead of growing dimmer, the fires beyond the horizon seemed to be getting brighter. In his diary afterwards this pilot
noted, ‘It was the first time the R.A.F. had bombed the city. I don’t think it will have
to be done again.’
‘The second force reported that their marking and bombing too were concentrated,’ summarised Bomber Command analysts afterwards, ‘and that the resultant
fires were visible for – miles.’
Between them the two forces had dropped ,· tons of high explosive on Dresden, including four-thousand pounders and one eight-thousand pounder, and
,· tons of fire bombs. In the diversionary raids, Mosquitoes had attacked
Magdeburg, Bonn, Dortmund, Misburg, and Nuremberg without loss.
Losses had been surprisingly low. Bomber Command’s analysts attributed this to
the cloud cover and to the successful counter-measures – the radio counter measures and feint operations by aircraft filling the skies with Window foil. In intruder
operations the R.A.F.’s Mosquito night-fighters had claimed two Me.s as destroyed. The defences, concluded the analysts after studying the de-briefings, had
been non-existent. Only nine of the , returning aircraft reported having been
attacked by fighter aircraft, and crews had described the flak defences at Dresden
itself as ‘negligible.’ Several of the bombers had made forced landings in France,
and one of these had been wrecked on landing.
Echoing these reports, a British Air Ministry communiqué announced that the fires
had been visible ‘nearly miles from the target.’ Nearly , incendiaries had
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
been dropped on the city, the ministry announced, both loose from canisters, and in
clusters. Hundreds of four-thousand pounders and eight-thousand pounders had been
in the bomb loads.
At first it was announced that the night’s operations, in which , Bomber Command aircraft had been involved, had cost only sixteen aircraft, a loss of rather more
than one percent. Of No Group’s radio-countermeasures sorties planes
completed their missions, and none had been lost. By next day the casualties had
dwindled to six Lancasters; the other ten had landed, short of fuel, on the Continent. One had been lost over Böhlen and one during the first raid on Dresden – hit
by bombs from above; four more had gone down during the second raid – one to a
German fighter east of Stuttgart, one in a collision south-east of Frankfurt, one while
approaching the Somme estuary on the way out, and the fourth over Dresden to
unknown causes. The wreckage of the two Lancasters lost over Dresden was found
in the city’s Nord Strasse and Albert Platz, with the dead crewmen still aboard.
The most successful night raid in the history of Bomber Command, involving the
deepest penetration into Germany, had been made at a casualty rate of less than half
of one percent.
At : A.M. that morning, February , the Air Ministry communiqué began to
rattle out of the teleprinters throughout the English speaking world:
⁶ASH. LAST NIGHT BOMBER COMMAND DISPATCHED AIRCRAFT. THE MAIN OBJECTIVE WAS DRESDEN. MESSAGE
ENDS
: HOURS ...
For Dresden however it was not the end. For Dresden the onslaught was just beginning anew. A new force, this time of American bombers, was already lifting into
the air. The principal target for the , Flying Fortresses and Liberators was to be
Dresden once again. The third heavy attack within fourteen hours was under way.
v
v
v
It was : A.M. that morning before Adolf Hitler had gone to bed in Berlin. He
never retired until the last planes had left German air space. Racked with exhaustion
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
he rose at one P.M. that afternoon to learn that Dresden was in flames, and that
American bombers had just returned to complete the carnage.
After the sirens sounded the all clear Hitler chanced upon Dr Erwin Giesing, visiting the Reich Chancellery; the young army doctor had treated his head injuries
after the bomb attempt on his life seven months before. His voice cracking, his gaze
drifting absently between the doctor and the floor, Hitler talked of a Victory Weapon
(Siegwaffe) that he still had up his sleeve. ‘Then the war will come to a glorious end,’
he said. ‘Some time ago,’ he continued, ‘we solved the problem of nuclear fission and
we have developed it so far that we can exploit the energy for armaments purposes.
They won’t know what hit them! It’s the weapon of the future. With it Germany’s
future is assured. It was Providence that allowed me to perceive this final path to
victory.’
He shambled off back down into the bunker: he had lied to the doctor – or perhaps
romanticised, and he knew it.
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
The records of Dresden-Klotzsche were quoted to the author by the German Central Meteoro-
logical Office in Offenbach.
Appendix: Summary of Operations against Germany on Nights of th/th and th/th
February (Records of RAF Bomber Command, PRO file AIR…/…) (Author’s microfilm DI–
).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Details of the Main mForce brefings were quoted to the authgor by Messrs Hofmann, Abel,
Lindsley, and Jones, all foremr Bomber Command aircrew personnel. Other details were quoted to
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the author by Messrs Cook, Mahoney, Parry, and otehr airmen and offciers of Bomber Command at
the time.
That the Air Ministry had spoken of poison gas plants, vital ammunition works, etc. was outlined
in a communication to the author from the Air Historical Branch.
The attitude was evidently current among Bomber Command crews for many weeks: for several
of the major operations into Germany the bombers’ call-sign was given as PRESS-ON.
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Ibid.
The timing of the actual attack is based on the Operational Record Book of No Squadron,
and on log book entries made by Squadron leader C P C de Wesselow, Wing Commander H J F Le
Good (deputy Master Bomber), and their crew members.
Ibid.
Appendix: Summary of Operations against Germany on Nights of th/th and th/th
February (Records of RAF Bomber Command, PRO file AIR…/…) (Author’s microfilm DI–
).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Appendix: Summary of Operations against Germany on Nights of th/th and th/th
February (Records of RAF Bomber Command, PRO file AIR…/…) (Author’s microfilm DI–
).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Ibid.
Appendix: Summary of Operations against Germany on Nights of th/th and th/th
February (Records of RAF Bomber Command, PRO file AIR…/…) (Author’s microfilm DI–
).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Of the , bombers which took off, , attacked the primary targets. See the Appendix to
the Summary of Operations against Germany on Nights of th/th and th/th February
(Records of RAF Bomber Command, PRO file AIR…/…) (Author’s microfilm DI–). Aircraft
operating statistics were as follows:
Böhlen
Dresden (st) Dresden (nd)
Number of abortive sorties
Number of aircraft missing
(.%)
(.%)
(.%)
Number of aircraft despatched
Number of aircraft reporting attack
on primary area
Number of aircraft reporting attack
on alternative area
Air Ministry bulletin No ,.
Erwin Giesing MS (IfZ, Irving collection); note that Giesing wrote it from notes, on Jun ,
, before Hiroshima.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Triple Blow Complete
I
n MOSCOW the Soviet army general staff had received without comment the
news that the British and American air forces were to attack Dresden.
Following procedures established during the first days of February , messages the Allied commanders passed messages through military channels to Moscow
to notify them of this. On February General Spaatz informed Major General John
R Deane, chief of the U.S. military mission in Moscow, that the ‘communications
targets’ for strategic bombing by the Eighth Air Force were to be, in order of priority, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz and others of lesser importance; Spaatz undertook to provide the Russians with twenty-four hours’ notice of each such operation.
The next day Deane’s staff duly passed this information – that Dresden was among
targets selected to be bombed – on to the Russians.
As we have noted earlier, the Americans were very nearly the first to bomb Dresden. On February General Spaatz had informed the U.S. military mission in
Moscow that, weather permitting, he proposed to send twelve to fourteen hundred
heavy bombers of the Eighth U.S. Air Force to attack the Dresden marshalling yards
on the thirteenth. That same day the chief of the American aviation section in Moscow, Major-General Edmund W Hill, passed precisely this information on to the
Soviet general staff.
‘As is seen from this communication,’ a Soviet government spokesman pointed out
to this author, ‘the allies made known to the Soviet command only their intention to
bomb the marshalling yards at Dresden. Mass attacks on the city area itself were not
communicated to the Soviet army general staff.’ The Soviet army must however
have been aware of the implications of a large scale Allied attack on marshalling
yards, from what they knew of the raids on other German railway centres.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Although the American crews were briefed for this mission on the day following
this communication, February , , weather conditions forced its cancellation.
That day Major-General Hill again announced in Moscow that if weather permitted
the Eighth Air Force would be attacking the marshalling yards in Dresden and
Chemnitz the next day. In a subsequent message, the Russians were told that Dresden and other such high priority communications targets would be attacked whenever weather permitted.
On the early hours of February the weather was deemed favourable and the
executive order was issued by American air force headquarters for the attack on
Dresden – the third blow to the city within fourteen hours. An almost simultaneous
American attack was to be launched on Chemnitz, thirty-five miles to the southwest. The Chemnitz attack would pave the way for an attack on that city by Sir
Arthur Harris’ bombers that same night. Thus Chemnitz was to suffer the fate originally planned for Dresden, an American attack preceding, not following, a British
double-blow.
Even before the Lancasters of Bomber Command returning from Dresden had
crossed the English coast the crews of over , B– Flying Fortresses and B–
Liberators and of all fifteen American fighter groups were sitting down to the usual
pre-operational ‘hangman’s breakfast’ of cold powdered eggs and coffee.The briefing
began at : on the morning of the fourteenth, long before dawn broke across the
frosty East Anglian countryside.
The First Air Division was to deliver this third blow to Dresden with a force of
some Flying Fortresses. Again the heaviest bombers, with maximum bomb-carrying capacity, were allocated to Dresden; all others were despatched on secondary
tasks – missions to Magdeburg, Wesel, and Chemnitz.
The problem which again worried the navigation leaders was how to avoid faulty
navigation which might take the Fortresses beyond the Russian lines. For the Dresden operation they decided to route the bombers out to an Initial Point on the river
Elbe, after entering enemy-held territory over Egmond on the Dutch coast, and
making a rendezvous with groups of P– Mustangs at a point south of the Zuider
Zee. The fighter groups would accompany and escort the bomber formations, flying
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
in their tight boxes of thirty-six to forty heavily armed aircraft, to Quakenbrück,
south-west of Bremen. From Quakenbrück the bomber formations would head southeast for two hundred miles in a straight line across Höxter to Probstzella. The
Magdeburg-bound Liberators would follow the same route and divert from a point
near Höxter on a heading which could take them equally to either Magdeburg or
Berlin. The First Air Division’s four hundred and fifty Fortresses detailed for the
Dresden mission, accompanied by some three hundred more bombers from the Third
Air Division attacking Chemnitz, would then head north-east to their respective
targets.
Chemnitz was over a hundred miles from the Russian lines and the danger of faulty
navigation was less severe.
In the case of Dresden, the lead navigators in the Bombardment Group were instructed to set course for the Initial Point at Torgau, fifty miles north of Dresden on
the river Elbe. From Torgau they needed only to head south to the first large city
with a river snaking through it; this would be Dresden. Their actual target would be
the railway station in the Neustadt area.The crews do not appear to have been briefed
to look for a smoke pall over the target city; in fact the Germans were so adept at
faking dummy targets by day that the lead bombardiers of the Bombardment Groups
were warned to rely only on their crews’ navigation, and not to take the aspect of the
target below them into account. The flak defences at Dresden were reported to be
‘moderate, to heavy, to unknown.’
The bomber call sign was given as VINEGROVE. Should the weather close down severely over the continent, the recall codeword for the Dresden mission was CARNATION. The fighter escort flights were to be identified by various call-signs – COLGATE,
MARTINI, SWEEPSTAKES, RIPSAW and ROSELEE were among them.
It is worth noting that although it was the stated intention of this triple blow on the
Saxon capital Dresden to destroy the town and make it impossible for the Germans
to fall back on it as an administrative headquarters, once again, as at Berlin ten days
earlier, the bombardiers were advised that they were attacking ‘railway installations.’
There was little joy in the hearts of the American crews that morning. They were
required to be in their aircraft by : A.M. They were relieved to hear that engine-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
starting, provisionally set for : A.M. had been postponed for an hour. Apparently
there was still uncertainty with the weather over the continent.
The Lancasters were returning over the East Anglian coast and the American airmen must have seen them passing high overhead as they waited beside their aircraft
for the signal to take off. Finally at : A.M. the Véry lights were fired and the
Fortresses rolled down the runway and set course for the radar ‘splashers’ over which
they would meet other squadrons, other bombardment groups, and finally joined up
with the whole First Air Division making its way to the Dutch coast. They were
escorted by Spitfires as far as the coast-out point. At the Zuider Zee the Mustang
fighter groups were duly waiting for the bombers and the whole force set out to fight
its way across Germany. On the way into Dresden some of the groups became scattered on condensation trails. The initial zero hour for the Flying Fortress formations
over the target was given as noon; but as the bombers flew in self-defensive formations and in visual contact with each other, the same accuracy was not required of the
individual navigators as was required for the R.A.F. night bombers, who had to stay
in a designated stream five miles wide, knowing that if they strayed out of that stream
they lost the protection afforded by Window, and were more vulnerable to night
fighters.
There were cloud layers above and below the invading force: ten-tenths cloud still
covered the whole of the continent. It was unlikely that visual bombing of the target
would prove possible. At Kassel the bomber formations were greeted with heavy flak
but there were few hits.
The th Fighter Group was escorting the first two bombardment groups of the
First Air Division to Dresden. The remaining escort duties were undertaken by the
th, th, and th Fighter Groups. It will suffice for the purposes of this narrative to describe the th Fighter Group’s role in the operation. It was mission number
in the group’s history; the group was subdivided into ‘A’ and ‘B’ sub-groups, a
total of seventy-two P–s which had to rendezvous with their charges, the bombardment groups at the Zuider Zee soon after : A.M. The ‘B’ group fighters had
to maintain visual contact with the bomber boxes; the ‘A’ group pilots were briefed
that as soon as the bombers’ attack on Dresden was over they were to dive to roof-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
top level and strafe ‘targets of opportunity.’ Columns of soldiers being marched into
or out of the wrecked city were to be machine-gunned, trucks strafed by cannonfire, and locomotives and other transportation targets destroyed by rockets. Both ‘A’
and ‘B’ groups would withdraw from the bomber formations at : P.M. at a point
near Frankfurt where escort duty would be taken over by P– Thunderbolts.
v
v
v
The bomber formations picked up the Initial Point of the bombing run at Torgau
as planned, and followed the river down to Dresden. The target aiming points, the
city’s three large railway stations and marshalling yards – two of them in the older
part of Dresden, the third in Neustadt – were to be indicated by smoke streamers.
The first bombs began to fall on the city, still burning furiously from the previous
night’s attack, at twelve minutes past noon. For eleven minutes the salvoes of bombs
whistled down through almost complete cloud cover on to the northern section of
the city, Dresden Neustadt. ‘The clouds came up high, not far below us,’ reported
one of the bombardiers. ‘But they broke up from ten-tenths, and over Dresden there
was about nine-tenths cloud. There was no flak for us at the target. Bombs away at
:.’
Captain James R Rich, a bombardier in the first group over the target, reported
that the area was spotted with clouds but he managed to pick up most of his check
points while on the bombing run. ‘I saw a couple of fires burning before I dropped
my bombs,’ he reported afterwards, ‘but a thick layer of smoke that covered the
whole works prevented me from seeing how large they were.’ The B-s dropped a
total of · tons of high explosive and · tons of incendiaries.
Simultaneously with the end of the American attack at : P.M. the thirty-seven
P–s of the th Fighter Group’s ‘A’ Group hurtled low across the city together
with the ‘A’ groups of the other three fighter groups operating over Dresden. From
eye-witness accounts, which may be mistaken, most of the pilots appear to have
decided that the safest attacking runs could be made along the Elbe river banks.
Others attacked vehicles on the roads leading out of the city, crowding with refugees. According to one account, a P– of the th Fighter Squadron flew so low
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
that it crashed into a wagon and exploded. The other fighter pilots were however
disappointed by the lack of opportunities for actual combat, although none of them
regretted the absence from the target area of the dreaded German jet-fighter, the
Messerschmitt . Three Me.s were reported this day making passes at the
bomber formations in the Strasbourg area. None of the jets opened fire, and one was
claimed damaged. The overcrowded fighter airfield at Dresden-Klotzsche was once
again left unmolested. The Luftwaffe’s flying personnel were evacuated from the
airfield: V./NJG. being a night fighter squadron, there was no part that the airmen
could usefully play in daylight operations. They witnessed the American attack from
the fields to the north of the city.
Sending a preliminary report on this raid to his superiors, the Dresden police
commander sent this cipher message (which the British soon deciphered): ‘Renewed
attack .. from : to : hrs. High explosive and incendiary bombs. More
accurate details not yet possible to establish because all signals communications and
most police stations are out of action. Moderately heavy attack; in particular stationary Wehrmacht trains with ammunition, etc., were hit between goods stations Dresden-Neeln and Pieschen.’ It is worth noting that he made no reference to strafing
of civilians.
Most of the B–s found Dresden and of them had made what were called
‘effective sorties against the marshalling yards.’ Another tons of bombs had
been dropped on Dresden. The Germans scrambled over one hundred and forty
fighter planes to intercept the raiders, but these claimed only two victories.
For at least one American unit the operation on Dresden seems to have gone astray.
The th Bombardment Group lost its way flying through cloud at its predetermined
altitude and when the forty B–s emerged above the cloud the lead navigator was
uncertain about their position. They should have picked up Torgau and headed southeast to the first big city on a river. (The Flying Fortress lead navigators were relying
on their superior APS. radar for navigation.The ‘mickey-man’ operating the APS.
would read off six successive sighting angles on his screen between the aircraft and
the city ahead and these were set on the lead bombardier’s sighting angle index on
the Norden bombsight. The other bombardiers would all press their bomb releases
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
when they saw the bombs of the lead plane cascade out of the racks.) It struck some
of them as odd when their high squadron was attacked by German fighters – but
their fighter escort had long evaporated. For a while the formation banked and
wheeled, making S-turns for an on-time arrival over the target. and this added to the
error. Eventually the navigation leader picked up what he took to be Torgau, and
turned on a bearing to take them to Dresden.
Some time passed before the navigator in one of the Fortresses, ‘Stinker Junior,’ a
flying Deputy Group Leader, radioed the Group Commander and suggested that in
fact they had picked up Freiberg instead of Torgau; he was overruled and told to keep
radio silence. From time to time the bombardiers reported that they could see a
river underneath.There was indeed a river snaking through the city ahead.The bombardier could see no detail of the city to warrant taking over on a visual run, and a
blind attack was made by radar. After a while the navigator in ‘Stinker Junior’ again
broke radio silence and insisted that they had not in fact bombed Dresden; the other
navigators now also disputed the lead navigator’s calculations. They concluded that
their forty bombers had delivered their attack on Prague instead – a bitter blow for
the pilot of ‘Stinker Junior,’ a Czech citizen born and bred in Prague, who had fled to
America when the Nazis occupied his country.
Errors like these were not uncommon in raids conducted at extreme range for the
Americans. Many of the Flying Fortresses ran into serious fuel problems on the flight
back to England. Many landed on airfields in Belgium and France; some of the P–s
ran out of fuel before they could taxi to the parking aprons.
v
v
v
Bomber crews returning with the Flying Fortresses from their eight and a half
hour flight reported that ‘huge fires were still burning in the city after last night’s
attack by R.A.F. Bomber Command, with a layer of smoke over the whole city.’ The
scale of the disaster that had befallen Dresden was only slowly filtering through to
the higher Nazi echelons in Berlin. The Luftwaffe High Command reported in its
war diary for February :
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
In the west on the night of February – the British undertook a further
major incursion from behind a powerful radio jamming screen and with the bomber
squadrons themselves releasing large amounts of Window. About fifty Mosquitoes attacked Magdeburg, about heavy bombers and Mosquitoes attacked
Böhlen and Tröglitz, about heavies and Mosquitoes attacked Dresden. Three
hundred more heavies and Mosquitoes staged a repeat attack on Dresden about
three hours later.
By this double attack the city of Dresden was critically damaged, the inner city
almost entirely destroyed. Immense casualties.
In the course of the day about twelve hundred American heavies continued the
air offensive against the Reich from the west, concentrating on Chemnitz, with
sections to Dresden and Magdeburg. Grave terror-effect in the cities attacked.
Only of our own planes could be operated against this attack.
At the same time, higher up the chain of command a dazed Oberkommando der
Wehrmacht took stock in its secret situation report:
For the first time a daylight attack was delivered by all available American heavies in the West on Dresden; fire-storms were caused by this attack and those of
the previous night. The Central Station has been knocked out. There are now
, homeless in a city of , inhabitants – a figure enormously swollen
by refugees. Only of our day fighters took off in Dresden’s defence; they
were savagely beaten down by seven hundred American fighters. We shot down
two bombers, but twenty of our own fighters are missing.
The simultaneous American attack on Chemnitz had been less successful; aircraft had attacked the city and its marshalling yards, and dropped tons of bombs
on the target area. But many sections of the Third Air Division force detailed to
attack Chemnitz had been unable to identify the target; the th Bombardment Group
had delivered attacks instead on Hof and Sonnenberg. When the th Bombardment Group arrived at Dresden the lead bombardier was unable to pick up the tar-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
get beneath the cloud layers and dropped his bombs instead on a Luftwaffe airfield at
Cheb in Czechoslovakia and on Plauen, using the pathfinder method.The Americans
had dropped a further tons of bombs on the Brabag Bergius hydrogenation plant
at Magdeburg. But already the weather conditions which had made possible the R.A.F.
Bomber Command attack of the previous night had sadly deteriorated.
The only limited success of the attack on Chemnitz was to set the pattern for the
rest of the offensive against Germany’s eastern population centres. Harris’s attempt
to spring of series of sudden, catastrophic blows on these cities petered out. According to Albert Speer, the former German armaments minister, such a series of blows
might indeed have forced the sudden capitulation of the German people. He stated
during his July interrogation that ‘in every case in which the R.A.F. suddenly
increased the weight of its attacks … as for example in the attacks on Dresden the
effect not only upon the population of the town attacked but also upon the whole of
the rest of the Reich was terrifying, even if only temporarily so.’
That the raids on Dresden had failed to bring about a sudden capitulation was not
because of any want of damage. Over sixteen hundred acres of the city had been
devastated in one night, which compared with the rather under six hundred acres
destroyed in London during the whole war.
Sir Arthur Harris was determined not to give up, indeed keen to twist the knife in
the wound. His tired Bomber Command crews who had stumbled into their beds
soon after nine in the morning were roused before three o’clock that afternoon and
told to expect a big operation that night. As they walked across to the briefing huts
they could see the lines of fuel tankers filling up the Lancasters again, and from the
minimal bomb loads being winched up into the bomb racks they deduced that once
again it was to be an operation at extreme range.
This time less attempt was made to veil the nature of the target city. Although
Chemnitz as a city possessed many obviously military and legitimate targets – the
tank works, the large textile and uniform-making factories, and one of the largest
locomotive repair depots in the Reich, in at least two squadrons of two Bomber
Groups an almost identical wording of the briefing was used by the Intelligence
officers. Thus No Group crews were informed: ‘Tonight your target is to be
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Chemnitz. We are going there to attack the refugees who are gathering there, especially after last night’s attack on Dresden.’ No Group crews were briefed in these
terms:
Chemnitz is a town some thirty miles west of Dresden and a much smaller
target.Your reasons for going there tonight are to finish off any refugees who may
have escaped from Dresden. You’ll be carrying the same bomb loads and if tonight’s attack is as successful as the last, you will not be paying many more visits
to the Russian front.
The latter wording is from the diary kept by one of the bomb aimers who was
present at one of the No Group briefings.
Once again Sir Arthur Harris had divided the attacking force into two waves. This
time however, anticipating that the German fighter controllers in the ‘battle opera
house’ at Döberitz would be aware of the significance of this concentrated offensive
on the eastern cities, Harris had prepared an even more complicated strategy of
feints and spoof attacks to divert the night fighters. A substantial force of Lancasters
– of them from No Group – was to attack the Deutsche Petroleum refinery at
Rositz, not far from Leipzig. In the first wave of the main attack on Chemnitz
heavy bombers including Halifaxes and Lancasters from No Group were to set
fire to the city, guided by regular Pathfinder marking; three hours later bombers
including this time the No Group Halifaxes and Lancasters from No Group,
were to attack the burning city. Diversionary sweeps were to be conducted by a
minelaying force in the Baltic, while the Light Night Striking Force of Mosquitoes
provided by Air Vice-Marshal Bennett attacked Berlin.
Despite all this, the attack on Chemnitz was a relative failure.The weather forecast
from the Bomber Command meteorological service had predicted that the city would
not be obscured by cloud; but an amendment had been later issued indicating a risk
of thin broken alto-cumulus or alto-stratus cloud, or both, and thin stratus cloud at
low altitudes; unlike the very accurate weather forecast issued before the attack on
Dresden, this forecast was seriously mistaken. One Australian Lancaster pilot re-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
ported that when he was miles from Chemnitz the sky began to cloud over, and
over the target itself he found ten-tenths cloud piling up to fifteen thousand feet,
which prevented visual identification of the aiming point.
The city was totally covered by cloud when the first force arrived and the Path⁵nders were obliged to rely entirely on sky marking. Their flares disappeared into the
clouds almost as soon as they were released.
The Master bomber during the second blow, a Canadian like the master bomber in
the second attack on Dresden, was clearly worried as to where to direct the bombers; he repeatedly called over the radio telephone for more flares, but few were
forthcoming. He seemed indecisive, unlike his counterpart the night before, and he
had difficulty in locating the target at all.
In addition, the bomber formations were seriously pestered by the German night
fighters which had not been misled by Harris’ elaborate feints.They laid fighter flares
all the way from the frontier to the target and back; the difficulties under which the
young pilots of the German night fighter force were labouring, their equipment
jammed by No (Radio Counter Measures) Group, are well illustrated by this
extract from a night fighter pilot’s diary:
FEBRUARY , . Just as expected: scrambled this evening. This time the Bcrews were scrambled too, and in good time. Target: Chemnitz, a major air-raid.
Our operations were under an unlucky star right from the start: EiV [Eigenverständigungsanlage, the aircraft intercom] packed up, no radio beacon picked up, Fug.
VHF-received jammed, [picking up] flak predictors, jamming signals, and enemy
fighter approach radar [FISHPOND]. Radio communication with Prague suddenly
evaporated, so had to fly south-west. Could not find a landing ground, fired ES
[Erkennungssignale, emergency recognition flares], last hope: a tiny maintenance
and repair airfield at [Windisch-] Laibach. Nevertheless a clean landing. Another
fifteen minutes and we would have had to bail out.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The efforts of the Luftwaffe to ward off Sir Arthur Harris’ lunges into the heart of
Germany can be no better portrayed than as mirrored in the notes of this young
German fighter pilot, struggling to engage a technically far superior enemy.
v
v
v
The results of the fire-storm that they had started in Dresden the night before
were apparent to the aircrew of the No Group force attacking Rositz. As they
passed by barely fifty miles from Dresden, the fires were still burning. (Dresden
burned, as one British prisoner of war in the city noted day by day in his diary, for
seven days and eight nights.) The Chemnitz railway system was scarcely hit at all.
Nearly three quarters of a million incendiaries were dropped on Chemnitz but there
was nothing approaching a fire-storm and in comparison with the raid on Dresden
the death roll was low, apart from isolated incidents – of seven hundred children in
an orphanage hit by the bombs, only thirty-six survived. All historical evaluations
of the Chemnitz attack are in agreement that the city was not damaged severely,
either by the daylight attack of the American Flying Fortresses or by the British double-blow. ‘There was no marked concentration of bombing and the numerous fires
which left a glow on the clouds were scattered over a large area,’ reports the Canadian bomber group history.
This demonstrated clearly yet again how the random methods of blind bombing
through overcast or on sky markers failed to achieve the scale of devastation attained
by No Group’s sector attack method. Perhaps if Sir Arthur Harris had required No
Group to start the Chemnitz attack as well – they had after all proved their worth
in the Dresden double-blow – a fire-storm might have been ignited of sufficient
violence to provide crews of the second attack with a bright enough glow to aim
around.
There is no explanation on record why he delegated the task to Bennett’s No
Group Pathfinders, unless it was partially a desire to appease Bennett, unhappy when
the honour of leading mass attacks was awarded to his rivals; and partially Harris’
conviction at this stage of the war, when the Romanian oilfields had been finally
overrun, and the transportation attacks were introducing a degree of thrombosis
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
into the German railway networks, that the attack on the oil plant at Rositz was
worthy of the precision attention of No Group while the attack on Chemnitz was
not. The American bomber commander certainly returned to an immediate resumption of the oil offensive after Chemnitz, as we shall see.
v
v
v
Discussing the July Battle of Hamburg, fought at a stage when German morale had possibly never been higher, Albert Speer revealed two years later under
interrogation that ‘I … reported to the Führer that a continuation of these attacks
might bring about a rapid end to the war.’
In the raids on Hamburg, lasting for over a week, some forty-eight thousand of the
port’s inhabitants had been killed, particularly during the fire-storm on the night of
July , .The British double blow on Dresden, and to a lesser extent the American daylight attacks, cost up to a hundred thousand people their lives. For the first
time in the history of war an air raid had wrecked a target so disastrously that there
were not enough able-bodied survivors left to bury the dead. The attempt to repeat
the catastrophe at Chemnitz, had however failed. The opportunity of crippling German civilian morale by two ‘Dresdens’ within forty-eight hours was lost.
Had the two attacks, on Dresden and on Chemnitz, succeeded in their purpose –
had they indeed forced the precipitate capitulation of the German people, as foreseen by Albert Speer, probably there would have been no outcry. If the immediate
surrender of the enemy had been the result, as the Japanese would surrender after
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there would have been few recriminations.
As it was the attacks failed to achieve anything other than a brutal spectacle of
Allied air superiority. Dresden had been ruined, but the war would continue for
another three months.
Those who originated the orders for the attacks, and who were preparing themselves for the acclaim, withdrew into the background. Now a scapegoat had to be
found.
Message, USTAAF UA–, Feb , , cit. in Walter F Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of the
– February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF Historical Division Archives); presumably RAF
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Bomber Command sent a similar message to the British military mission in Moscow. – Cf. Major
General John R Deane, The Strange Alliance (New York, ), –.
Letter, Major General S P Spalding, acting chief, US military mission, Moscow, to Major General
N V Slavin, assistant chief of staff of the Red Army, Feb , (ibid.)
Message, HQ USTAFF US–, Feb , (ibid.)
Letter, Major General Edmund W Hill, chief, Air Division, US military mission, Moscow, to
Major General N V Slavin, assistant chief of staff of red Army, Feb , (ibid.); General Hill
confirmed these details in communications to the author.
Soviet historian C Platonov, President of the Moscow Journal of Military History, to the author.
Message, Eighth Air Force, D–, Feb , (USAF Historical Division Archives).
Military Mission, Moscow, to Slavin, Feb , . – Message, HQ USTAFF UAX–, Feb
, , all cit. by Walter F Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of the – February Bombings of
Dresden.’ (USAF Historical Division Archives).
Document No..c, Feb , (ibid.)
ce, IntOps
Summary, for Nov through Feb , , Nos. through , document
No..a (USAF Historical Division archives).
So this author was told. US Air Force historians have however suggested that the only casualty
suffered this day by the th was First Lieutenant Jack D Leon, while attacking a train. ‘The accident
most probably occurred somewhere in Czechoslovakia.’ In the opinion of the US Air Force historians
the (out of ) B–s escorted by the th Fighter Group did not attack the assigned target,
Dresden, but targets of opportunity in Czechoslovakia.
Commander,
Civil Police, Dresden, to Chief of Civil Police Luftgaukommando III, Berlin–D:
Preliminary Report from the Luftschutzgebiet Dresden; extract from Ultra file GPD., Feb ,
, decrypt (English translation) in pp. SHAEF file, ‘Dresden Attack,’ ca. Mar , document
No..a (Maxwell AFB: USAF Historical Division Archives).
This is the figure given in the Eighth Air Force target summary; the official American history, The
Army Air Forces inWorldWar II quotes a figure of B–s.
Tonnage is quoted in British long tons.
Based on a communication from lead bombardier Ed McCormack to the author.
Kriegstagebuch OKL Führungsstab Ia, Feb , (National Archives, Washington, DC, film
T, roll ).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Kriegstagebuch des OKW, Feb , .
A full account would be out of place in this narrative, but the reader’s attention is directed to Sir
Arthur Harris’ Bomber Offensive for a description of the night’s operations.
Jim Conrad, of Spanaway, Washington state, USA, to the author, Sep , : his wife was one
survivor, buried for three days in the basement of the orphanage.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Part Four
THE AFTERMATH
Ash Wednesday
of Ash Wednesday, February , , broke over central Ger
many the wind was still blowing strongly from the north-west. In Dresden
the arrival of the dawn was hardly noticed. The city was still obscured by
the three-mile high column of yellow-brown smoke and fumes which characterised
the aftermath of a fire-storm. Perhaps this different colour of the funeral shroud
hovering above the luckless city was a measure of the extraordinary flotsam of charred
and shrivelled fragments of buildings, trees, and debris which had been caught in the
grasp of the artificial tornado and were still being sucked up into the sky.
As the swathe of smoke drifted down the River Elbe toward Czechoslovakia, the
people in the towns and cities over which it passed must have guessed that here were
the results of no ordinary raid, that these were in fact the last mortal remains of a city
which twelve hours earlier had sheltered a million people and their property.
As the smoke pall was driven ever further from the still burning city, the air cooled;
as the air cooled, the damp clouds heavy with dust and smoke began to break. The
rains fell along the whole length of the Elbe valley.
Not only rain descended from the sky: the countryside to the leeward of Dresden
was drenched with a steady shower of wet and sooty ash. British prisoners of war
A
S THE DAWN
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working in the large parcels sorting dump at Stalag IVb over twenty-five miles southeast of Dresden noticed that the smoke pall lasted three days and that particles of
smouldering clothing and charred paper were still floating down over the camp for
many days after that. The owner of a house in Mockethal, some fifteen miles from
Dresden, found his garden littered with prescriptions and pill-boxes from a chemist’s shop; the labels showed them to have come from the heart of the Dresden inner
city. Papers and documents from the gutted Land Registry in the inner city likewise
showered down in the village of Lohmen, near Pirna, some eighteen miles away;
schoolchildren had to spend several days scouring the fields for them.
These were the manifestations of the most terrible fire-storm in the history of the
R.A.F.’s area offensive against German cities. According to the police report the firestorm appears to have erupted between half an hour and forty-five minutes after the
first attack began, and to have subsided only gradually until, with the fall of a light
rain toward three A.M., it could be said to have worked itself out and lost its fury; but
it had itself caused the deaths of thousands of frail and elderly people who otherwise
would have been able to fight their way out of the encircling ring of fires.
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The Battle of Hamburg in July had brought Germany’s first such fire-storm:
eight square miles of the city had burnt as one single bonfire.The air raid on Pforzheim,
a little jewellery-manufacturing town in Württemberg, ten days after the destruction of Dresden would create the last fire-storm of the war, killing , people –
almost one in four of the town’s population – in the space of twenty minutes.
So horrific was the phenomenon in Hamburg that the police president had ordered
a scientific investigation of the causes of such fire-storms, so that other cities might
be warned. ‘An appreciation of the force of this fire-storm,’ reported Hamburg’s
police president, ‘could be obtained only by analysing it soberly as a meteorological
phenomenon: as the result of the sudden linking of a number of fires, the air above
was heated to such an extent that a violent updraught occurred which, in turn, caused
the surrounding fresh air to be drawn in from all sides to the seat of the fire. This
tremendous suction caused movements of air of far greater force than normal winds.’
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In meteorology [he continued] the differences of temperature involved are of
the order of ° to ° Celsius. In this fire-storm they were of the order of °,
° or even one thousand degrees Celsius. This explained the colossal violence
of the fire-storm winds.
The Hamburg police president’s gloomy forecast was that no kind of civil defence
precautions could ever contain a fire-storm once it had begun. The fire-storm was a
man made monster which no man would ever tame.
In Dresden the fire-storm appears by examination of the area more than seventyfive percent destroyed to have engulfed some eight square miles: some of the city’s
authorities after the war put the area as high as eleven square miles. It was unquestionably the most devastating fire-storm that Germany had experienced. All the signs
observed in Hamburg were repeated in Dresden, multiplied in scale many times.
Giant trees were uprooted or snapped in half. Individuals were flung over and bowled
like tumbleweed along the streets as the hurricane ripped all the clothes from their
bodies. Crowds of people fleeing for safety were seized by the tornado, hurled into
the flames and burned alive – a holocaust in the truest sense of the word. The rapacious moloch found constant nourishment to feed its furious appetite. Gables of
roofs, and furniture that had been stacked on the streets after the first raid were
plucked up by the violent winds and tossed into the centre of the burning inner city.
The fire-storm reached the peak of its strength in the three-hour interval between
the raids.This was the very period in which those sheltering in the cellars and vaulted
corridors of the inner city should have been fleeing to the safer surrounding suburbs.
As one S.S. officer reached the Post-Platz – formerly a hub of Dresden’s traffic, but
soon to become a desolate wasteland of ruins, weeds, and shrubs – the brilliant
‘Christmas trees’ appeared in the sky heralding the start of the second raid.Without
further thought he clawed his way feet first into a sewer shaft which opened onto the
pavement’s edge. From here he had an eerie peephole onto the infernal scene all
around.The fire-typhoon was thundering through all the streets and alleys with such
strength that it was feeding human beings into the grasp of the fires like dry leaves.
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‘Their clothes literally flew off their bodies,’ he described. ‘Then they slithered,
slipped and rolled a hundred yards into the flames as though drawn by an invisible
but mighty magnet.’ A railroad worker also sheltering near the Post-Platz observed
how the hurricane seized a woman with a perambulator and tossed her brutally into
the flames. Other people, running for their lives along the railway embankments
which were the only escape routes not badly cratered or blocked by rubble, reported
how railway trucks on exposed portions of the lines had been blown over by the
gale.
Even the open spaces of the large squares and great parks were no protection against
this unnatural hurricane. Several thousand people had fled into the rectangular Grosser
Garten, the one mile long park in the heart of the southern city, where surrounded
by lakes, shrubs, wooded groves and ornamental palaces they had felt some measure
of security. ‘We were running across one of the lawns of the Grosser Garten,’ reported one man, ‘when something white flew through the air toward me. I grabbed
at it, and my hand closed on a large feather eiderdown. At the same time we heard
some hundred yards away a giant oak tree crashing down. We pulled the branches
aside and crawled beneath the trunk.’
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Once the fire-storm had erupted there was nothing that the fire fighting forces
could do to contain it. In all the great German fire-storm raids the swift and unhindered emergence of the storm had been prospered by the early disruption of telephone communications between civil defence control rooms and external reinforcements.
In Germany, as in England, the fire brigades had been reorganised during the war
on nationwide, paramilitary lines, one feature of which was the constant mobile
reserve of fire fighting regiments held outside the danger zones.
Most of the major cities had at this stage of the war been equipped with alternative
telephone communications and with radio links between important control posts.
But invariably these were unreliable when it came to the test, and the civil defence
authorities had to fall back on the standard Post Office telephone network. Much
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therefore depended on how long this system functioned in an emergency before it
was overwhelmed. In the Battle of Hamburg in July the telephone communications had very soon broken down, and when the fire-storm broke out on the third
night the service had still not been adequately restored. Added to this, as we have
seen, the burning down of the police headquarters which housed the civil defence
control room had for a while seriously hampered fire fighting. In Kassel in October
, the telephone exchange had been hit twenty minutes after the start of the
attack, and the motor-cycle dispatch rider service had proven inadequate for this
emergency. For this reason fire brigades arriving in Kassel from nearby cities had
waited for several hours without any definite orders for action.
Now, in Dresden, the almost immediate destruction of telephone communications
was to seal the city’s fate. With a native fire brigade of less than one thousand men,
and with few fire appliances under its direct control, the city was dependent on
immediate assistance arriving from outside the city.
Both the power station and all of the Party’s, province’s and city’s administrative
buildings lay well within the fan -shaped sector marked out for saturation bombing
by No Group. From the air raid warning post (Luftschutzwarnkommando) all
reports had to be transmitted to the Air Zone Command (Luftgaukommando) XVI
headquarters in General Wever-Strasse; this command reported directly to the
Führer’s headquarters, currently located in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. But
soon after the first bombs had fallen on the city the electricity supply to the telephone exchange, the basement of which also housed the Dresden air raid warning
post, failed; the emergency power supply in the building was irreparably crushed by
a collapsing wall.
With the silencing of the air raid warning post there was no quick way of informing Berlin of the air raids or of forwarding reports from the observation posts in
Saxony to the Fighter Command divisional headquarters at Döberitz near Berlin. It
was not until after the second raid was over than Dresden managed to pass an appeal
to Berlin for emergency fire fighting forces. At once the Berlin fire brigade sent
detachments of appliances down the autobahn to Dresden, but it would be three
hours before they could arrive.
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At : a.m. civil defence engineer Georg Feydt visited the city’s gauleiter, Martin
Mutschmann, in the central command post, a concrete bunker beneath the Albertinum
across the road from the police headquarters. The bunker was packed with Nazi
Party and civil defence officials, small though it was. They were still trying to build
up a picture of the destruction, trying to discover the main seat of the fire-storm.
But just as the destruction of telegraph wires and the breakdown of the exchanges
prevented appeals for help from being dispatched, so it also threw into confusion the
communications with fire watchers and local civil defence posts.
The final police report states that the full alert was given at : P.M. – though the
sirens no longer had the electric power to sound it – and that the bombs started
falling fifteen minutes later at : a.m., which closely agrees with the R.A.F.’s timings. Within half an hour to forty-five minutes a fire-storm had begun. The police
logged the last bombs falling at : A.M. – probably they were in fact bombs with
delayed-action fuses detonating. According to the immediate report of the civil police commander of Dresden, evidently intercepted by Allied code breakers and now
in American archives, the second attack lasted twenty-four minutes. Dresden itself
was down and out for the count. The police assessed that most of the bomb load this
time was high explosive, dropped on the already blazing city centre and on the outer
areas to which the population had taken refuge (the Grosser Garten, and other parks
and open areas.) Just as there had been no warning, the final police report stated that
because of the total collapse of the main siren network and of all telecommunications no all clear could be sounded either, to announce the departure of the last
British bombers.
The Germans estimated that in the first raid the R.A.F. had dropped three thousand high explosive bombs, four hundred thousand incendiaries, and , ‘fire-jet
bombs’ – known to the British as J-bombs, filled with oil and phosphorus – and
, high explosive bombs, , incendiaries, and two thousand fire-jet bombs
in the second. The police chief noticed the phenomenon that while entire streets of
buildings had been flattened, there was comparatively little cratering to the streets
themselves, from which he drew the rather odd and certainly inaccurate conclusion
that the bombers had attacked at low level. A third of the incendiaries had small
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explosive charges added to deter fire fighters. A large number of long-delay timebombs had been dropped. By mid March the German authorities had located
unexploded bombs.To add to the long-term dislocation, the bombers had also dropped
bundles of psychological-warfare leaflets and millions of fake ration cards.Civil
defence and rescue operations were badly hampered by the onset of the second raid.
Within a few minutes the Party headquarters in the Albertinum was surrounded by
blazing buildings, and the massive sandstone structure was in danger of being gutted
itself. The gauleiter and his staff made a dash for safety through the blazing streets
and collapsing inner city into the open areas beyond; that same night, according to an
official account, all reported for duty at the emergency control room built in
Lockwitzgrund. Lockwitz was a village some five miles south-east of Dresden, where
the Nazi Party had prepared an auxiliary gau headquarters for just such an emergency as this.
The gauleiter succeeded in passing an appeal to the Neustadt barracks to the north
of the river. The barracks had escaped damage in the first raid, as had the whole new
town area. The army hastily organised five hundred soldiers into squads of eight to
fifteen men and ordered them to report to police headquarters. As they marched
down the northern slopes of the Elbe valley they could see the city stretched out
before them, and the whole city was on fire.
The police headquarters itself had a cellar which was several storeys deep. At this
stage between the raids, there were still wounded people being brought in for attention. There was much coming and going. Everywhere there were policemen, civil
defence workers, and many officials in Nazi uniforms. ‘Most of the people were
apparently waiting for instructions,’ recalled one of the squad leaders, underlining
the chaos in the communications. ‘But my impression was that although everybody
was very tense the scene was not without order.’
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Among those watching from afar was Tania, who talked about it years later on a
Canadian television programme. She had been sent to Auschwitz, the brutal slave
labour and transit camp run by the S.S., in : ‘After standing a whole night naked
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in Auschwitz we were given wooden shoes and a dress,’ she said, in halting English,
‘and we shipped off in a cattle car, and we did not know where we went, but when
we arrived at our destination it was Freiberg in Saxony.’ There were five hundred
Polish girls and five hundred Czech girls in this shipment, she said, all Jews: ‘We all
came from Auschwitz.’ In Freiberg they were put to work in an aeroplane factory. ‘It
was on a hill with a very tall building, we were living in the fourth or fifth floor. We
worked there twelve hours every day.’
On the evening of February they had the second of their twice daily roll calls,
standing five in a row to be counted; then they were released to their lice-infested
bunks.
That night the guards turned the lights off earlier than usual, although there had
been no sirens. Looking out of the windows she could not see the usual female guards
or sentries either. Something was clearly happening. ‘Then we heard this very distant
rumbling, like blasting, and we knew that something was going on. We were very
happy… We all went to the window and we saw the most fantastic sight that I have
ever seen in my life, it was something like fantastic fireworks, all colours, it was
going on all night long, it was blue and yellow and green, and of course to us it was
a beautiful sight. It was a fantastic occasion to rejoice.’
She had often worried about their factory being bombed. ‘But why those beautiful
fireworks, I never knew. I was very curious to know what that was.’
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The Dresden fire brigade headquarters was in Annen-Strasse in the old city. It
housed one of central Germany’s finest fire brigades. The service had often been in
action after big fire raids on other nearby cities, so they in no way lacked experience.
Fire brigade director Ortloph had carefully decentralised his forces, placing reinforced brigades in Neustadt at the Luisen-Strasse fire station and in Striesen, and
permanently locating fire engines near buildings of special cultural importance like
the castle and the Frauenkirche cathedral.
After the first raid most of the city’s native fire appliances were sent to the castle to
try and save it from the flames; few however arrived, and those that did found no
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pressure in the water hydrants. Other appliances attempted to save the City Hall,
again without success, for their thick hoses had been perforated by showers of burning embers in the air. Firemen ran hoses all the way down Ostra-Allee to the Zwinger’s
lake to try to save the Playhouse, but they were too late and this building also succumbed to the flames. Twenty-three kilometres of fire hose were destroyed in the
raids.
Towns all over Saxony had sent their fire-fighting units in motion to the Dresden
immediately after the first raid. As they drew near, the glow they could see beyond
the horizon told its own story of what was happening. By one a.m. the first of these
‘foreign’ fire brigades were penetrating the city’s outskirts. The police report stated
that altogether four companies of police were in action, together with fire brigade
troops from Frankenberg, Berlin, Leipzig, Gera, Senftenberg, Chemnitz, Halle, Riesa,
and Oppeln and a score of volunteer fire brigades and factory fire brigades.
Here in Dresden they met their sudden and unexpected end. The electric sirens
could not provide any warning of the second raid. Some statistics hints at the story of
what happened in the desperate hours that followed: The fire brigade dispatched
from Bad Schandau to Dresden, ten miles away, arrived soon after one A.M. From the
men of this brigade there was not one survivor. All were ‘overwhelmed’ by the second raid. Of sixty-six police horses, forty-four were killed. More than half of the
city’s police and firefighting vehicles were wrecked. ‘The fire fighting forces and
passive defences of the city,’ the Allied air commanders could dryly summarise,‘were
overwhelmed by the double-blow.’
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As was the case everywhere else in Germany, Dresden’s civil defence organisation
was incorporated in the Nazi party structure with the city’s police chief
(Polizeipräsident) in the ex officio position of Civil Defence Director. Everybody
had a role to play, down not only to the HitlerYouth but also to the Deutsches Jungvolk,
an organisation comparable with the Wolf Cubs.
‘In February I was fifteen years old,’ records one such Deutsches Jungvolk
boy, ‘and during the period of Total War my duty was as a Luftschutzmelder, an air
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raid message runner.’ His story demonstrates how the collapse of communications
inside Dresden would have been incomplete without the swiftly following second
R.A.F. blow. ‘February was the day of our great Shrove Tuesday carnival, and I
spent the evening at the Circus Sarassani, which has a permanent building in Dresden Neustadt. During the last number of the programme, a hilarious performance of
donkey-riding by the clowns, the Full Alarm was sounded over the loudspeakers.
The audience, amid the jokes of the clowns, was instructed to make its way to the
vaulted basement of the Circus building. Because of my messenger’s pass I was allowed out of the building.’
He found the city already lit as bright as day by the first white parachute flares set
by the Illuminator Lancasters. Like most of the native Dresdeners the youngster had
no inkling of what these strange lights meant. ‘At the time I was deeply impressed by
the flares. Dresden Neustadt was not hit at all during the first raid, so I ran home
immediately. There was nothing to be done there, so according to orders I reported
for duty as a runner at the Party headquarters in the local group (Ortsgruppe) Hansa
of the Nazi Party in Grossenhainer-Strasse. The Ortsgruppenführer in his S.A.
(‘brownshirt’) uniform issued damage reports to me and the other boys to take to
the civil defence control room in the centre of the inner city. We were given blue
steel helmets, gas masks, and bicycles and set off. The castle, the Residence Church,
and the Opera were already burning fiercely and the bridges across the Elbe were
strewn with spent or still burning incendiaries. Single fire-fighting appliances, recognisable by their colour as being from Dresden, were trying to reach the fires. The
streets were flooding with water from burst mains. Already the ⁵rst tugging winds of
the fire-storm could be felt. The gallant but hardly properly equipped civil defence
runners had only penetrated as far as Post-Platz when the second raid began. They
could only take refuge in a hospital basement near the Post-Platz.The messages were
still in their hands, and they would never be delivered.
Thus the civil defence organisation in the centre of the city was largely ignorant of
the development of the fires. The second raid had begun just at the right time. The
soldiers from the neighbouring barracks, in so far as they had already been committed to action, would be trapped in blazing areas where they would find no refuge.
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The fire brigades from the neighbouring towns were also in the heart of the areas
now marked out for the attack; and the civil defence leaders were ignorant of the
location of the main ⁵res as one after another their telegraphic, telephone, radio, and
finally personal lines of communication were severed.
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During post-war years the legend grew up around this unlucky city, encouraged
by the occupation authorities, that not only was Dresden undefended by guns or
fighter aircraft, but no kind of civil defence precautions had been taken.
This was true only to a limited extent. It was not considered necessary to build
public air raid bunkers of the kind which had saved the lives of hundreds of thousands
of people in other fire-storm cities. In Hamburg even the hospitals had been provided with special bunkers, and by June , there were four operating theatres
and three maternity suites installed in air raid bunkers. In Dresden neither of the
biggest hospitals, those in the Friedrichsstadt and Johannstadt suburbs, had such
amenities. Little attempt had been made to provide alternative sources of water, or
electric power for the pumping stations, in the event of major damage to the water
mains or the breakdown of the electricity supply.This is not surprising, since nobody
had expected that Dresden would be bombed. When it was announced late in
that as part of the ‘expanded Führer programme’ a sum of money was to be devoted
to civil defence measures, the city’s population had reacted with a measure of hilarity and disbelief.
From the beginning of the war onwards the air raid police (Luftschutzpolizei) had
worked in two shifts on the construction of an escape tunnel network; they had
erected large static water tanks on the Altmarkt square, on Seidnitzer-Platz, and in
Sidonien Strasse, and they had begun building underground water tanks as well.
‘Train loads of concrete were used on these schemes, not just truckloads,’ emphasises the city’s civil defence engineer of the time; the measures were directed senior
architects of the city’s School of Architecture.Without doubt the citizens of Dresden
were better protected at that time against air raids than those of many comparable
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British towns who through themselves safe with their Morrison or Anderson shelters, contrivances which, in a fire-storm, would have become death-traps.
Later on, as Dresden filled with refugees from east and west, and as the rumble of
guns from the eastern front could sometimes be heard, the city’s authorities did
adopt further limited measures of protection for the population. Schoolchildren were
put to work digging out zig-zag lines of splinter-proof trenches on Bismarck- and
Wiener-Platz – on either side of the central railroad station – on Barbarossa-Platz
and in most of the parks and green strips in the city. A complex system of
Mauerdurchbrüche was built – specially prepared weak spots in the parting walls separating the cellars of neighbouring houses; in an emergency, if the houses caught fire
during localised air raids, the inhabitants could break through to the next door cellar
with the pick-axes and other tools required by law to be on hand in each basement,
and escape through that. If however that house was also on fire the people could
smash their way through from one cellar to another.
These measures had been adequate for the small attacks which other cities, and
even Dresden itself, had suffered up to February . Nobody however could have
foreseen the tornado of fire and flame which was to engulf the Saxon capital. The
cellars and basements of each nineteenth-century house were sheltering some eighty
or ninety people when the attack began, with more and more people clambering
down the steps from the street. When the first raid subsided the rush to escape
began. Again and again the same circumstances prevailed: refugees from the eastern
marchlands who had never before heard a siren’s wail or a bomb’s explosion now
found themselves trapped at the heart of one of the biggest conflagrations in history.
They could not escape on to the streets, for these were swept by forty and ⁵fty foot
long jets of flame.They could only surge from one cellar to the next, smashing through
the partition breaches until finally they reached the open air – or the end of the
street. Sometimes several hundred people packed into the last cellar of the street, or
were checked in their flight by collapsed houses. There they either broke out, somehow, into the open air to meet their fate, or waited for developments.This is the only
explanation of the disproportionate numbers of victims found later in basements at
the either end of such labyrinths.
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This contingency had in fact been foreseen by the Hamburg police president, S.S.
Gruppenführer Kehrl, when he advocated the construction of such an underground
system of escape routes. After referring to the ’terrifying’ number of people killed in
basements in the fire-storm areas, he recommended that where rows of houses were
interrupted by cross streets the houses on opposite sides of the street should be
connected by tunnels. His advice had not however been heeded in Dresden, and a
system which might have averted such a major tragedy if completed, led there to the
deaths of large numbers of people not hitherto endangered by carbon monoxide or
smoke fumes, as we shall now see.
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Most people hoped that the fires caused by the first raid would soon subside and
that they would then be able to emerge unscathed and with their personal property
intact. Thus the majority of the people were still waiting in their cellars and underground tunnels at : A.M. when without warning the bombs began to fall again.
‘The detonations shook the cellar walls.The sound of the explosions mingled with
a strange new sound, which seemed to draw closer and closer, like the sound of a
thundering waterfall,’ describes the commander of a Reichsarbeitsdienst (R.A.D.)
transport company surprised by the second British raid after he had hastened in
convoy to the rescue from a village outside the city. ‘It was the sound of the might
tornado howling into the inner city, where the fire bombs had concentrated in the
first attack.’ He and his men had taken refuge in the cellar of a house.Within seconds
this house received a direct hit and collapsed, but fortunately for them the meagrely
supported cellar ceiling held firm.
‘When the raid ebbed,’ reports another R.A.D. commander similarly trapped with
his men, ‘I confirmed for myself that we were surrounded on all sides by fire: enormous flames were sweeping the streets. It was out of the question for people to leave
the house direct without being burnt alive. I learned from the others that some ten
houses further down the street there was an open square, by the Circus Sarassani
building. I ordered my men to break through the breaches from house to house, and
so we together with a growing throng of people finally stormed out into the open air.
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In the middle of the square was the round circus building; I believe there had been a
special Carnival night performance. The building was burning fiercely, and was collapsing even as we watched. In a nearby street I saw a terrified group of dappled
circus horses with brightly coloured trappings standing in a circle close to each other.’
These magnificent Arab horses did not have long to live. During the second R.A.F.
attack forty-eight of the horses from the Circus Sarassani were killed. In the days
following the raids their carcasses were to be dragged down to the Elbe’s northern
embankment, the Königsufer, between the Albert and Augustus bridges, where on
February a grim scene was witnessed with the arrival of a flock of vultures which
had escaped from the City’s zoo.
However in many cases people, finding that the dense, suffocating fumes from
above were rolling down into the unventilated basements, broke down the wallbreaches – and the smoke had access to the next cellar as well. This was a dilemma
which would have confounded even the citizens of Hamburg and Cologne, hardened
though they were by long exposure to Allied air attacks. To the million inhabitants of
Dresden on the night of February , lulled into a false sense of security, and totally
unversed in civil defence practice, the dilemma because a nightmare, a nightmare to
which many of the people finally resigned themselves.
A cavalry captain on the way to his unit on the eastern front recounts in detail the
fate which befell the people who were with him during this second attack. Between
sixty and eighty of them, mostly elderly people and children, were to lose their lives
as a result of the carbon monoxide fumes infiltrating into their makeshift shelter.The
captain’s billet had been in Kaulbach Strasse, a street in the heart of the area which
became a fire-storm centre during the second raid. ‘Kaulbach Strasse was filled with
smoke and sparks,’ he related ‘Somebody foolishly broke down the wall-breach from
the next door cellar; that house was burning fiercely, and the sound of crackling
flames and dense smoke poured in. Something had to be done. I informed the people
in my cellar that we would all suffocate in the cellar if we did not get out into the
open. I told all the people to soak their coats in the regulation fire buckets placed in
the cellar. Only a few agreed, as the women were very unwilling to ruin their valuable fur coats like this: these were the first things they had taken with them. I ordered
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them all to gather behind me on the staircase, and to run out with me onto the street
when I shouted ‘Now!’. Only a few of them joined me at the staircase, and of these
half turned back when they saw the flames. My passionate appeals to them did not
have any effect, so I finally shouted the order and myself ran up into the street. Only
a handful followed me.’
An officer with the courage of this cavalry captain, decorated incidentally with one
of Germany’s highest military awards, might risk his life in this way and escape to tell
the story. The majority of the people in Dresden were neither young nor brave;
many made the unwitting choice to die in their own homes rather than to run the
gauntlet of these terrifying fires. As it turned out, those cellar-breaches were the
doom of the cavalry of⁵cer’s former companions.
‘After a very short while,’ reports a woman, herself an evacuee from Cologne,
trapped in another basement, ‘we had to put on our gas masks and goggles. Smoke
and fumes were pouring through the breaches in the cellar walls from the cellars on
both sides. There were no gas masks however for the infants. The people who suffered most were the elderly and the children. With my own eyes I had to watch as a
three week old baby suffocated in the arms of its mother.’
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There was an extensive tunnel system extending underneath the Post-Platz square.
This proved of little avail however when it came to the test; while the tunnels did
indeed connect the main administrative buildings around the square, and while other
streets nearby were also provided with these tunnel networks, the scale of the firestorm was such that they proved virtually useless. The ventilation in the Ostra Allee
tunnel broke down, causing many casualties. As the whole of the inner city was on
fire the tunnel exits were all effectively sealed by flames.
A switchboard operator on duty in the telephone exchange recalls how the whole
staff had to take refuge in the in the bomb-proof emergency exchange in the basement of the building; after the second raid the whole block was on fire and they
realised that they would have to escape through one of the other buildings. As they
made for the escape tunnels, however, a stream of people came toward them. ‘The
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Post Office savings bank had been hit by an air mine,’ related this switchboard girl,
‘and from the basements of nearby private houses a stream of people poured out of
the underground connecting tunnels. I remember seeing one old woman who had
lost a leg. Some of the other girls suggested making a dash for home through the
streets. A staircase led from the Telephone Exchange basement to a glass-roofed courtyard. The Exchange had been build around this quadrangle. Their idea was to escape
through the courtyard’s main gate onto the Post-Platz. I did not like the idea, and
paused; all at once, just as the girls – twelve or thirteen of them – had run across the
courtyard and were struggling to open the main gate, the red-hot glass roof came
crashing down, burying them all beneath it. The whole telephone exchange building
was by now on fire.’
Had the half-hearted civil defence measures in Dresden been completed, had there
been adequate provision of properly ventilated bunkers, as in other German cities,
had there been an invulnerable back-up siren system and independent water supply
for the hydrants, then the catastrophe which befell Dresden during the fourteen
hours of the triple blow could perhaps have been averted. In view of the Nazi leaders’ belief that Dresden would never be bombed, these shortcomings may appear
excusable. Nevertheless tens of thousand of the city’s population were now to pay
for their leaders’ lack of foresight with their lives.
H
Lloyd to the author, Dec , ; and J W Willis, Dec , .
Hans Schmall, Giessen, to the author, Jul , .
Hanns Voigt, Bielefeld, Jun , .
S.S. Gruppenführer Kehrl,‘Bericht des Polizeipräsidenten in Hamburg als örtlicher Luftschutzleiter
über die schweren Großangriffe auf Hamburg in Juli/August .’
Quoted by Wilhelm Sander in Züricher Stadt Anzeiger, Mar , .
Quoted by Max Seydewitz in Zerstörung undWiederaufbau von Dresden (Dresden, ).
Author’s interview of Hans Kremhöller, Hamburg, Apr , .
Hans Schmall to the author, Jun , .
Major-General Hans Rumpf to the author, Jun , ; author’s interview with Dresden fire
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
brigade director Ortloph, Apr , .
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Report of Civil Police Commander of Dresden, GP., dated Feb , , document
No..a (Maxwell AFB: USAF Historical Division Archives). This was evidently an Ultra intercept.
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
‘Public Eye,’ Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s
microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Seydewitz, op. cit.; also Diplom-Ingenieur Georg Feydt, ‘Civil Defence Engineer,’ an article in
Ziviler Luftschutz, (Koblenz), the organ of the German ministry of civil defence, Apr .
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Günter Arnold to the author, Apr and May , .
Kehrl, loc. cit.; Seydewitz, loc. cit.
Karl-Heinz Zimmermann to the author, May , .
Seydewitz, loc. cit.; Arnold to the author, May , .
Kehrl, loc. cit.
Gerhard Nagel, of Lippstadt, to the author, Jul , .
Heinrich Prediger to the author, Jul , .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Rittmeister a.D. Dr. jur. Wolf Recktenwald to the author, Nov , , and interview of Apr
, ; a thirty year friendship between Judge Recktenwald and the author followed. –Years later
Recktenwald found the letter that he wrote to his mother on Feb , : ‘Then the great adventure
began,’ he wrote. ‘I arrived in Dresden late on the twelfth, and stayed there on the thirteenth too in a
nice furnished room found for me by the rail transport office for me, because there was no billet for
me at K[önigsbrück]. There I went through the terror raid on the night of the –th, I lost my
luggage but I’m alright myself. I got out okay with a young woman and her four month old baby in my
arms. If only we could pay the British and American criminals back in their own coin!’
Kate Zimmermann, of Recklinghausen, to the author, Sep , .
Gertrud Nimmow to the author, Mar , .
Eva Antons née Miersch, of Osnabrück, to the author, Apr , May , Jun , .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The Victims
T
AMERICAN BOMBERS of the third blow had still not arrived at midday
when the first columns of rescue and salvage workers began pouring into
Dresden from all over central Germany. Local civil defence leaders had at
last found means of broadcasting an appeal, and motorised columns with emergency
food supplies, medical aid, and several battalions of TN-engineers (Technische Nothilfe:
emergency technical aid) were heading for the city. From as far afield as Berlin and
Linz in upper Austria squads of able bodied men were being impressed to take join in
the fire fighting and rescue work. In addition civil defence police and fire-protection
police were in action in the rescue operations.
The Hilfszug ‘Hermann Göring’, a motorised convoy of soup kitchens, first-aid
trucks and mobile electric generators had arrived at Nord Platz in Dresden Neustadt.
A second convoy, the Hilfszug ‘Goebbels’ was making its way to Dresden’s Seidnitz
suburb. Although there were in each convoy only about twenty trucks, they brought
desperately needed succour for the city. By February more Hilfszüge were arriving from every region in the province of Saxony to provide hot and cold meals for
the homeless families and rescue workers. ‘Nobody will go short of food,’ the Nazi
party’s local newspaper declared proudly on the seventeenth. The city’s emergency
stores were broken out, and a special issue of ‘morale rations’ was authorised. As
from February all residents over eighteen years of age were given rather under
two ounces of coffee each, and half a bottle of schnapps; those under eighteen were
allocated a tin of condensed milk.
Nearly all of the hospitals had been put out of action, as we shall see, and the need
for immediate first aid was urgent. The gau’s chief inspector of health, Fennholz,
directed all bombed out doctors and dispensing chemists to report at once to the
German Red Cross headquarters in Wasa Strasse for emergency work. Those docHE
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
tors unable to reach this temporary headquarters on foot – it was nearly five miles
northwest of the city centre – were directed to report to the Party’s nearest Ortsgruppe, which would requisition homes and other private buildings for them to set
up surgeries.
The Party organisation worked well. It ensured together with the Red Cross that
the tens of thousands of mothers in the population, especially those with infants and
babies to care for, knew where to obtain milk and baby-food. At the main railroad
stations in Dresden, badly damaged though they were, relief centres run by the Bund
deutscher Mädchen and Frauenschaften – the Party’s equivalent of the Girl Guides and
the Women’s Voluntary Service – were speedily set up. ‘It was,’ said one bombed out
women whose infant was only ten days old at the time of the raids, ‘a real act of
kindness on the part of the Party that we could get baby-food and warm drinks for
the children, and bread for the grown-ups.’
The small acts of kindness by the Party had succeeded in restoring morale in other
cities visited by Bomber Command; in Dresden however morale was damaged more
than warm drinks and baby-food could effectively repair.
Arriving too in Dresden was General Erich Hampe, director of emergency repair
operations for the German railroad system after air attacks. He had travelled through
the night from Berlin with an aide as soon as word had reached him that Dresden was
under attack. ‘I could not immediately reach the central station,’ he later reported,
‘because the way into the city from the west was completely blocked. I made a wide
detour round the city and came in through the northeast sector, crossing the river by
the Loschwitz bridge. The first living thing I saw on entering the city was not a
person – I saw few alive, but many dead – but a great llama. It had apparently escaped from the circus. Everything in the inner city was destroyed, but my concern
was only for the central station and the railroad system. I looked everywhere for the
Dresden stationmaster but he was nowhere to be found. None of the leading railroad
officials was available. I had to send for a leading Reichsbahn (national railways) official
from Berlin to help me sort out the tangle and discuss what had to be done to get the
traffic flowing again.’
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The first stage was to clear the debris from the station halls and fill in the bomb
craters along the railway embankments.This work was done by soldiers, prisoners of
war, and forced labourers. The second stage, the construction of emergency lines,
was the duty of Hampe’s special technical troops. In Dresden he had two battalions
of these engineer troops, each of fifteen hundred men, mostly elderly engineers
beyond military age.
The carnage at the central station was the worst that General Hampe had ever
seen.The building itself was a large, nineteenth-century structure, its platforms covered by a single glass-and-iron arch extending the length of the station. On the night
of the attack there had been a train standing at every platform of the ground-level
Dresden terminus beneath this arched roof; on either side of the terminus station,
supported by concrete piers, there were two high-level express tracks that conveyed
the through traffic between Czechoslovakia and Berlin.
Two days before the last official refugee train from the eastern front had arrived in
the city, its passengers crammed into primitive wagons and even boxcars. Even after
that however the refugees had still continued pouring into the city, packing the regular passenger trains coming from the east, mostly without tickets and often without
anything else. In addition to those still trickling in by rail on the night of the attack
there were the farmers and peasants whose horses and carts had clogged the ice- and
snow-covered roads since the beginning of the great Soviet offensive just four weeks
before.These endless, well organised refugee ‘treks’, each with its designated ‘Führer’,
had been directed one after another to the designated reception areas – like the
Grosser Garten, where many thousands of them had died in the blindly released
showers of incendiaries and high explosive. A Swiss resident of Dresden who had
taken refuge in these gardens near the palace witnessed the unnerving sight of people trying to tear the burning two-inch thick firebombs out of their own bodies.
Other treks had been diverted to the exhibition grounds, where hundreds of people
were burned to death by the blazing oil flowing from wrecked military transport
dumps being built up there.
Still other treks, of refugees intending to travel on westwards, had been sent to the
public squares on either side of the central station. Few of the refugees who were
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
standing in line at the station on the evening of Shrove Tuesday escaped with their
lives. Only one train which was at the station as the sirens sounded escaped to the
west, the express to Augsburg and Munich.
In the vaulted basement beneath the central station there were five roomy gangways in which there was room for some two thousand people. In spite of the heavily
reinforced concrete roofs over these gangways, which had to carry the weight of the
two tiers of trains passing overhead, the city’s civil defence engineers had not made
provision for their use as air raid shelters: there were neither blast-proof doors nor
ventilation plants fitted into them. In fact the city had provided for the temporary
housing of several thousand refugees from Silesia and East Prussia, together with
their baggage, in these underground passages beneath the station, where they were
cared for by the Red Cross, the female labour service, the Frauenschaften, and the
N.S.V. (the Party’s welfare service). In any other city the combination of so many
people, and so much inflammable material, in such a vulnerable and potentially dangerous location as the central station would have appeared suicidal. But in the face of
Dresden’s believed immunity from attack on the one hand, and the pressure on every
usable living space for the refugees on the other – it was after all mid winter – it is
hard to be censorial.
‘Even the stairs to the high level platforms had been blocked by the piles of baggage heaped on them,’ described the Führer of one refugee column arriving in the
central station on the night of the attack.The platforms themselves were overflowing
with people, the crowds surging back and forth as each empty train arrived from the
west. Amidst impatient loudspeaker announcements to board trains as quickly as
possible, amidst the hoots of the locomotives and the sound of escaping steam, the
wild rush to clamber aboard began, with Silesians mixing with Rhinelanders, the
Berliners jostling Bavarians, squeezing bulging sacks and cases through the carriage
windows.’ Outside in Bismarck- and Wiener-Platz, the two station squares, there
were further endless lines of people waiting to get in.
v
v
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THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Into this chaos and confusion had sounded the Full Alarm at : P.M. on February
, , echoing suddenly and clearly across the city from Klotzsche in the north to
Räcknitz in the south, from western Friedrichstadt to the suburbs in the east. Every
light in the central station went out, leaving the station brie⁶y lit only by the signal
lamps at each end of the platform hall before they too were doused. Station officials
hastened to empty all the trains so that they could be hauled out into the open. The
people were however apathetic, and refused to admit the possibility of an air raid.
Many refugees had waited for several days in line for these trains, and they were
unwilling to forfeit their places because of what might well be Dresden’s one hundred and seventy-second false alarm. Two trains had just arrived from Königsbrück
full of evacuated Deutsches Jungvolk children; they had been sent to the K.L.V.
evacuee camps in the eastern provinces, but these were now being overrun by the
Red Army. Another train from Königsbrück was unloading soldiers on leave or on
their way to Berlin. Only the Munich express was ready to depart. Several white
painted hospital trains, converted sleeping cars, were standing on the trough lines
together with a train due to depart for Halle and Berlin soon after midnight. The
hospital trains had brought back thousands of wounded soldiers from the east, where
the military hospitals had been completely evacuated, to the famous hospitals and
clinics of Dresden as well as to the former schools and public buildings which had
been taken over by the medical authorities during the past seven days. A British
prisoner who had been forced to work in the extensive Dresden posts office and
parcels sheds near the Friedrichstadt marshalling yards witnessed the distressing sight
of the ‘blood wagons’ being hauled and shunted gently through the Rosen Strasse
station into Dresden from the eastern front to the hospital sidings where ambulances
were waiting. Every day for weeks the white trains, with coach doors locked and
curtains drawn, had been arriving at Dresden – the ‘hospital city’ of popular belief,
which ‘would never be bombed.’
v
v
v
In spite of the crowds and confusion inside the station hall, by : P.M. when the
first bombs began to fall every train had been shunted out into the open. The loud-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
speakers instructed everybody to go down to the roomy vaults beneath the platforms. At first few obeyed, but as the bombs began to fall a stampede began.
The station lay outside the sector marked out for attack in the first blow by No
Bomber Group, and apart from minor incendiary fires and blown out window panes
little damage had been done to the station by the time the first raid had passed. It was
then that the railroad officials made what was to prove a fatal mistake.The disruption
of communications between Dresden, Berlin, and the Observation Corps outposts
had left the city’s civil defence leaders completely ignorant of the air situation. Believing that Dresden had seen the last of the Royal Air Force that night the stationmaster
ordered the trains shunted back into the station hall again. One after another the
empty carriages were hauled back to the platforms, and the turmoil and confusion
began anew. Within three hours the station was working at top pressure again, with
the streams of people from the inner city, which was now well ablaze, adding to the
confusion. The platforms were again thronged with Red Cross and welfare workers,
with refugees, evacuees and soldiers.Totally without warning the second attack now
began, and this time the station was clearly right in the heart of the area under attack.
Two trains filled with evacuee children, between twelve and fourteen years old,
had been left standing on the open yards outside the station, near the Falkenbrücke
bridge. After the first attack had passed over the station without incident, the evacuee camp leader, a Party official of some fifty-five years,. had unwisely explained to
the curious children that the white ‘Christmas-tree’ flares marked out the area for
the bombers to destroy. With the unexpected return of the bombers he must have
cursed himself for his tactlessness; although he hastily ordered the youngsters to
draw the blinds, they could not help but see that the parachute flares this time seemed
to be marking out a broad rectangle all round them. Thousands of incendiary bombs
began raining through the fragile glass roof of the station hall. A heavy bomb landed
in the yards overturning a locomotive and hurling one of its driving wheels into a
passenger coach full of people fifty feet away. Within seconds the mounds of baggage and cases inside the station hall were in flames, pouring out dense fumes and
choking smoke. Clouds of steam from the shattered locomotives tumbled into the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
air. Incendiary bombs penetrated the platform baggage elevator-shafts, filling the
unventilated tunnels beneath, where many people had taken refuge, with poisonous
fumes and devouring the precious air. One young mother who had just arrived in a
passenger train from Silesia, travelling for four days without even a ticket, had taken
shelter in this network of tunnels as the first raid began. She had chosen to come here
with her two infant children because her husband had written to her from Dresden
that there was an agreement that the city would not be bombed because, he said, ‘the
Allies want it for their post-war German capital.’ ‘I struggled with all my might to
reach an empty corner of the basement. With wild determination I just made it.
Only one thing saved me and five or six others in that cellar: I had pushed through
into a boiler room, beneath one of the platforms. In the thin ceiling was a hole made
by a dud incendiary. Through this hole we were now and again able to get sufficient
air from outside to breathe. I held wet rags across my two babies’ faces; I lost mine in
the crush and began coughing violently. Everybody else seemed to be leading against
us. Several hours passed. Then I heard someone shouting and an army officer helped
me out through a long passage. We passed through the basement. There must have
been several thousand people there, all lying very still.’ On the square there were
thousands of people standing packed shoulder to shoulder, not panicking but very
mute and still. Above them the fires raged. At the station entrance the heaps of dead
children and others were already being piled up, as they were brought out of the
station. ‘There must have been a children’s train at the station. More and more dead
were stacked up. I took away one of their blankets for one of my babies, who were
not dead but alive and terribly cold.’ In the morning some elderly S.A. men came
and one of them helped me and my family to get through the town to safety.’ Among
the victims were children in carnival costumes who might perhaps have been waiting
at the station to meet their parents coming from the east.
While only the fortuitous piercing of the ceiling had saved this handful of people in
the station boiler room several thousands had not been so fortunate. Of some two
thousand refugees from the east who had been billeted in the only tunnel in which
any reinforcing measures had been taken. One hundred had been burned to death by
direct incendiary action; but five hundred more had been suffocated by the fumes, as
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the station’s civil defence director later reported. The people lay in the underground tunnels of the station, describes one eye-witness, ‘as though somebody had
ordered them all to lie down.’ They were piled up, face down, in clusters as though
they had sought safety in numbers.
‘I had left all the baby clothes and medicines in my bags beneath the platforms,’
continues the account of the refugee woman from Silesia. ‘It was at first after the
great raids quite impossible to obtain any baby clothes, so I ventured to visit Dresden
and the station again. The station cellars had been cordoned off by S.S. and police
units. There was danger of typhus they said. Nevertheless I was permitted to enter
the main cellar accompanied by a one-armed Reichsbahn official He warned me that
there was nobody alive down there, everybody was quite dead. What I saw was a
nightmare, lit as it was only by the dim light of the railway man’s lantern. Only the
thought of my children’s need gave me strength, as I searched for my things. The
valuables had all been looted. The whole of the basement was covered with several
layers of people, all very dead.’
Once again the majority of people in the central station had fallen victim, not to
the hundreds of high-explosive bombs, so much as to the , incendiaries dropped
on the city. Most of the fatalities had been caused by the inhalation of hot gases, and
by carbon monoxide and smoke-poisoning. To a lesser extent lack of oxygen had
contributed to the death-roll.
‘What we noticed when we escaped,’ recalled one Panzer-grenadier office, ‘were
not so much dead bodies as people who had apparently fallen asleep, slumped against
the station walls.’ He had had to change trains at Dresden en route to Berlin, and had
had the foresight to leave the baggage tunnel in which he and his men were sheltering as son as it started to fill with smoke. Of his eighty-six men less than thirty
survived the night to arrive in the Reich capital, yet another illustration of the colossal weight of the attack; but also an indication that at least at the central station the
victims of the terrible triple blow were not all the elderly civilians, women, and
children that post-war writers would have us believe.
v
v
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THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
British aircraft carried out the first reconnaissance flight over Dresden on the day
after the raids. Negative K. showed great material damage, and the interpreters
could see that fires had already destroyed part of the city. The large DresdenFriedrichsstadt marshalling yards had been scarcely damaged.The photograph showed
twenty-four goods, passenger and hospital trains standing in the marshalling yards
after the raids, while all around the buildings were burning fiercely, very large areas
of flame being visible. Of the three engine roundhouses in the yards, one had been
hit by incendiaries at one end. In the goods yards could be seen over four hundred
boxcars and carriages, still perfectly ordered, waiting on the sidings and weigh bridges,
with scarcely a gap in their ranks. Large fires were still raging in the working class
suburb of Friedrichstadt and smoke was billowing from the buildings of the
Friedrichstadt hospital. On the fifteenth another attempt was made to obtain photographs, but the fires still burning more than thirty-six hours after the attack generated such haze that the photographs were difficult to interpret.
It would be March before the R.A.F.’s photographic reconnaissance planes obtained clear photographs of the city. From their study of these, Bomber Command’s
operational research section reached some surprising conclusions: the two British
raids, they said, had devastated % of the fully built up area (they presumed that the
American raids of October , January , and February , and March had
done less damage to the areas). ‘Rail facilities and industries suffered immense damage,’ they claimed. Dresden’s old town was ‘virtually wiped out’ along with most
of the inner suburbs, but the outskirts had escaped comparatively lightly. The photo
interpreters detected that the gasworks and two tramway depots had been severely
damaged, and aghain they insisted that the railway facilities had suffered particularly
heavily: ‘The bridges over the Elbe and public buildings,’ the analysts reported, were
‘well hit.’ ‘Barracks and military camps were less troubled, being mostly situated on
the outskirts,’ and a number of industries had escaped for the same reason. ‘But the
total damage was very great indeed.’
In fact the damage to the railways was more than questionable. While the incendiaries proved their worth as anti-personnel weapons, and in starting a general
conflagration in the city itself, they were hardly the best weapons for an attack on the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
city as a ‘main communications and railway centre’, as was claimed immediately
afterward by the Allied governments. The railway system in Dresden – the permanent ways and railroad installations – was very little damaged even by the third attack delivered, as the U.S. Army Air Forces explained, against ‘marshalling yards’ at
Dresden. That this lack of damage had not passed unnoticed by the Allied air commanders is confirmed by Mission Report No of the Americans’ th Bombardment Group, relating to the later attack on Dresden on March , : ‘The crews
were diverted by weather from an oil assignment [against Ruhland]. The great Dresden marshalling yards were the PFF [pathfinder force] target, one of the few north to
south channels into Czechoslovakia which had not been bombed severely.’*
In view of the Allied insistence that the triple blow was delivered to disrupt the
traffic through the city, and that the attack was highly successful in this respect, some
estimate should be reached for the time during which the main lines through the city
were unserviceable.
The police chief’s report stated that the central station was completely knocked
out, with the destruction of all its platforms, buildings, signalling and tracking equipment; ten trains had been caught in the station by the raid and completely burnt out.
At the city’s Neustadt station a refugee train and a hospital train had burned out
completely, and another refugee train had been badly damaged. At the nearby freight
yard a munitions train had exploded, and railway carriages, goods wagons,
and thirty mail wagons had burned out in the shunting yards at Dresden’s minor Old
Town station. The postal buildings were also wrecked.
With the arrival of General Hampe and his two battalions of engineers in Dresden,
salvage and repair work to the railway system commenced at once. He was not concerned with repairing the station buildings or facilities; his concern was to set the
rail traffic moving through the city again as soon as possible. He found the main
Marienbrücke railway bridge across the river undamaged apart from a scorched patch
where an incendiary bomb had burned itself out.‘If they had really wanted to disrupt
the traffic through the city,’ a rather puzzled General Hampe later observed, ‘they
need only have concentrated on this one bridge. It would have taken many weeks to
replace during which time all railway traffic would have had to make long detours.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
One need only remember the dislocation of both rail and river traffic caused by the
collapse of the Hohenzollern bridge across the Rhine at Cologne.’ Working day and
night Hampe and his special troops were able to open up a double line of railway
track for normal working within only three days of the raids, while his experts supervised gangs of forced labourers in the execution of heavy repairs to road bridges,
especially on the Dresden–Plauen sector of the railway system. ‘The importance of
Dresden as a railroad centre, which was considerable,’ declared Hampe later, ‘was
not diminished by more than three days as a result of these three air raids.’
This observation must seem surprising when viewed in the light of the Allied claims
that the attack on Dresden’s transportation installations had been a success. These
claims could hardly have been expressed in stronger terms: the official American
history of the U.S. Army Air Forces operations in the European theatre, while referring sceptically to how the R.A.F.’s post-raid report ‘went to unusual length to explain how the city had grown into a great industrial centre and was therefore an
important target,’ itself then continued with the palliative, but no less dubious report that ‘if casualties were exceptionally high and damage to residential areas great,
it was also evident that [Dresden’s] industrial and transportation establishments had
been blotted out.’
The final report of the Dresden police chief, which is now available, confirms that
the bridges were not taken out: like the Augustus, Carola, Loschwitz, and Nossen
road bridges, the Marienbrücke railroad bridge was damaged, though not seriously;
only the Augustus road bridge was damaged seriously enough to be still closed to
traffic at the time of the police report in mid March .
It was the same with the actual railroads through the town. Rail transport through
the city – the ostensible target of the raids – had barely suffered, confirmed the
police chief. Although traffic had halted for a few days, by the end of the month the
trains were rolling through again.Years later, the east German (Soviet zone) history
of the destruction and reconstruction of Dresden stated: ‘The railroad lines were not
particularly seriously damaged; an emergency service was able to repair them so
swiftly that no significant dislocation of traffic resulted.’ After referring to the devastation wrought on the city’s architectural treasures the history continued that ‘in
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
contrast to these cultural monuments and the entire Dresden inner city, these transport installations were not destroyed. The damage to them was relatively light, so
that traffic to and from Dresden was not really interrupted at all; one example was
how the debris on the railroad lines at the Central Station was cleared away within
only a few hours, and the trains diverted to temporary tracks.’ Regular trains were
running again through Dresden Neustadt by February .
West German postwar accounts of the destruction in Dresden also draw attention
to the miraculous escape of the railroads. A writer in one newspaper reported on the
eighth anniversary of the raids that he had seen Dresden three days after the attacks.
‘The supplies were rolling virtually unhindered to the eastern front. The railways
were running, in spite of the general destruction all around.’ At the same time an
authoritative Munich newspaper, irritated by a U.S. State Department announcement that Dresden had been bombed on Soviet instructions to hinder the movement
of troop reinforcements through Dresden, editorialized: ‘The explanation … patently flies in the face of the facts. The railroad between Dresden and the Czech frontier – the one in question – is built between a mountain chain and the river Elbe.’ To
destroy these lines, the newspaper suggested, would have been simple for the marksmen of the Royal Air Force. No strategist could honestly assume that German troops
would in fact be marching in massed formations through the centre of the city to the
eastern front. ‘On the contrary,’ the newspaper continued, ‘One is amazed at the
extraordinary precision with which the residential sections of the city were destroyed,
but not the important installations. Dresden central station was full of mounds of
corpses, but the railway lines had been only slightly damaged and after a short period
were in service again. The same went for the railroad line crossing the Elbe in the
direction of Meissen and Chemnitz.’
G Conway to the author, Feb , ; Karl Forstner, of Linz; and Seydewitz, loc. cit.
Georg Feydt, Ziviler Luftschutz, Apr .
Alfred Hempel, of Dortmund, to the author, Jun , ; Hanns Voigt to the author, May ,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
.
Der Freitheitskampf, Feb , (Dresden city archives).
Elsa Ködel, of Tauberbbischofsheim, to the author, Aug , .
General Erich Hampe to the author, and interview on Apr , .
Otto Thon, of Krefeld, to the author; he was one such refugee column leader.
Wilhelm Sander, in Züricher Stadt Anzeiger, Mar , .
Hanns Voigt, diary for Feb (copy in the author’s possession).
Dennis Brock, article in ex-prisoner of war magazine Clarion, and interview with the author on
Apr , .
Heinz Buchholz, of Köln-Sülz, to the author, Jun , .
Dennis Brock, interview with the author, Apr , .
Luftschutzleiter Schöne, quoted by Seydeitz, loc. cit.; also Hanne Kessler, of Wülfrath, to the
author, May , .
Hans Kremhöller to the author, Apr , and interview with the author.
‘Immediate Interpretation Report No. K ,’ Feb , (PRO file AIR./).
Imperial War Museum, London: photograph negative No. C–: ‘Friedrichstadt marshalling
yards.’
COS Committee weekly resumé No., week ending Feb , : COS() , and
WP() (P{RO file CAB./).
PRU Negatives K and K .
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
RAF Bomber Command, Report BC/S. //ORS (dated May , ) on Night Opera-
tions, /th February, (PRO file AIR */*) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Author’s interview with Hampe, Apr , .
Horst Galle, of Herbede, to the author, Jun , .
U.S. Government Printing Office,The Army Air Forces inWorldWar II, vol.iii.
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HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Ibid.
Passauer Neue Presse, Feb , .
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Feb , .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Abteilung Tote
of February , thousands of British prisoners in
the camps outside Dresden were awakened and marched into the city for
their usual work clearing bomb damage: although the whole city was still
burning ⁵ercely from the night’s raids, the men were still directed to their former
workplace, a school in Wettiner Strasse that had been damaged in the small American
raid of October . At eleven o’clock however the prisoners were marched back
into their camps and told that they would not be needed for the rest of the day.
Rescue work in the inner city was still impossible, with furnace heat in the narrow
streets and none of the cellars yet cooled enough to enter.
This early return saved many British lives, because only an hour later the prisoners
of war might have been caught by the American attack. Evidently the city’s civil
defence officials had learnt the lesson of the first and second raids, and they were
unwilling to endanger further rescue forces in any subsequent attacks. Thus the fires
were able to burn uncontrolled for fourteen hours or more, and few efforts were
made to fight a path through to those still surviving in the roomy underground catacombs of the city. In Kassel, it will be remembered, the swift decision to use the
‘water-alley’ technique had saved the lives of several thousand people trapped in the
city’s Hochbunker in the heart of the fire-storm area even before the raid was over.
Only at four P.M., some three and a half hours after the American raid had passed,
were the first large scale rescue operations set in motion. Companies of soldiers
from the King Albert barracks in Dresden Neustadt were loaded onto trucks with
storm equipment, gas masks, steel helmets, water bottles, digging tools and food for
one day. On the eastern banks of the Elbe the columns of trucks were halted: al-
E
ARLY ON THE MORNING
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
though only the Carolabrücke was impassable and the other bridges were for the
most part undamaged they were still deemed unsafe for motor vehicles; besides,
they had been mined four days previously and the demolition charges might be detonated by any new vibrations.
As the soldiers were marched in single file across the Augustus bridge many must
have paused and gazed at the scarred Dresden skyline. Most of the familiar landmarks had vanished; many of the church and cathedral spires had collapsed; the castle was still blazing, and the dusk was darkened by the masses of smoke still swirling
slowly up into the sky. Miraculously however Dresden’s most famous landmark, the
three hundred foot dome of the Frauenkirche cathedral, was still standing, the grey
smoke pall drifting round the gold cross on its summit. The Frauenkirche had survived many wars: it was from this very dome that the young Goethe had in
surveyed the devastation wrought by the long bombardment by the artillery of King
Frederick II of Prussia in the Seven Years War. (Canaletto’s portrayal of the ruins in
Dresden bear an uncanny resemblance to the destruction after February .) If
the Frauenkirche was still standing, then somehow the destruction of Dresden was
incomplete.
One unit of soldiers, about a hundred men from an interpreter company, was sent
to the Brühl’sche Terrasse on the western Elbe embankment. Many people had fled
into the cellars, built like gun embrasures beneath this terrace, in the false belief that
they would provide refuge from the fires. The four hundred year old tunnels had
strongly vaulted ceilings, and, divided into many sections, ran the length of theTerrasse.
Had Dresden been on the list of sixty most endangered cities of the original ‘Führerprogramme’ then without a doubt these vaults, with accommodation for about ten
thousand, would have made ideal public shelters when equipped with the necessary
ventilation gear and blast-proof doors. This had not however been done.
Most of those who had taken refuge there were dead, their lungs burst by the blast
of the high explosive bombs. Nevertheless the soldiers had to find any survivors and
carry the wounded across the bridges to the trucks waiting on the other side, which
transported them to the military hospitals and the many luxury clinics in the Weisser
Hirsch, the city’s famous hospital suburb. There were no stretchers available; all the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
stocks of stretchers had been burned. No attempt was made as yet to remove the
dead.
v
v
v
By this time the civilian population was completely dazed by the weight of the
blow which had befallen Dresden. The war, from which their city had kept itself
aloof for so long, had erupted with a sudden savagery over their heads. Just a few
hours before Dresden had been a fairy tale city of spires and cobbled streets, where
it was possible to admire the crowded shop-windows, where the evening hours did
not bring the gloomy of a total blackout, where the windows were till unbroken and
the curtains had not been removed, a city where the evening streets had been full of
people thronging their way home from gala performances of the circus, the opera,
or the scores of cinemas and theatres which, even in these days of ‘total war’, had
been playing to full houses. Now the columns of soldiers were marching into the
centre of a city strangely quiet and very empty of other live human beings.
The ferocity of the American daylight raid of February had finally brought the
people to their knees.The sky had been well overcast, and the bombs dropped by the
Flying Fortresses were widely scattered around their supposed aiming points. Again
no sirens heralded either the commencement or ending of the attack (: and
: P.M.), as the British raids had destroyed even the mobile siren equipment. The
police stated that in this first American raid the suburbs of Löbtau, Friedrichstadt,
and Gotta were damaged, while the second, on the fifteenth, hit the districts of
Plauen, the southern suburbs and the suburbs of Tolkewitz, Laubegast, Loschwitz
and Oberloschwitz.
It was not however the · tons of high explosive bombs and · tons of
incendiaries which the Americans dropped in the first raid which ⁵nally demoralized
the people – compared with the night’s British bombardment by two- and four ton
‘blockbusters,’ the American five-hundred pound General Purpose bombs must have
seemed very tame. It was when the Mustang fighters suddenly appeared low over the
streets, firing on everything that moved, and machine-gunning the columns of trucks
heading for the city. ‘Strafing by machine guns was observed during all the raids,’
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states the Dresden police chief’s official report. One section of the Mustangs concentrated on the river banks, where masses of bombed out people had gathered.
Another section took on the targets in the Grosser Garten area. These strafing attacks were apparently designed to perfect the task outlined in the air commanders’
directives as ‘causing confusion in the civilian evacuation from the east.’
Civilian reaction to them was immediate and universal. ‘We were in Lenne Strasse
just by the Grosser Garten,’ related one woman, evacuated with her ministry from
Berlin to Dresden.‘I and one or two others were able to save ourselves beneath some
wooden benches. The fighter aircraft came right down and a woman near us suddenly screamed out, shot in the stomach. There were no cars or doctors; they came
along afterwards and took her away on a hand cart. Long after she was out of sight
we could still hear the woman screaming.’
The American fighter planes also strafed the Tiergarten Strasse, the road bordering
the Grosser Garten on the southern side. Here the remnants of the famous
Kreuzkirche children’s choir had taken refuge. Casualties on record here include the
choir inspector, seriously wounded, and one of the choirboys killed. British prisoners who had been released from their burning camps were among those to suffer the
discomfort of being strafed on the river banks and they later confirmed the shattering effect the attacks had on morale. Everywhere where columns of people were
trudging in or out of the city they were pounced on by the fighter planes and machine gunned or raked with cannon fire. (U.S. Air Force historians have pointed
out, ‘Nothing in the records can be found to substantiate such claims,’ and it is only
fair to record this.)
Memories may be fickle, of course, and eye-witness testimony is ever suspect. ‘We
had just passed under the Leipziger Strasse railroad bridge when waves of fighters
swooped down and began firing their machine guns at us and into the people swarming out of the city,’ described another survivor. ‘On the banks of the river there
were Red Cross trucks parked without any drivers,’ recounted a Breslau refugee
who had spent the night and early morning at the water’s edge. ‘Suddenly we heard
the roar of aircraft engines. A terrible panic seized us.The Red Cross trucks were full
of badly wounded soldiers being taken out of the cities. Those who were still able to
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move jumped clear of the trucks and ran into the ruins. My sister and I ran after
them. At a street corner stood another Red Cross truck filled with soldiers. We
could hear the aircraft diving low and then they began firing from all their guns. We
were fortunate, we were able to crawl into a doorway. The soldiers tumbled out of
the truck, more dead than alive. One was hit by a bullet and fell to the ground. The
Red Cross truck burst into flames.’ Such low level strafing attacks later became a
permanent feature of American attacks.
v
v
v
There was after the triple blow on Dresden an immediate and urgent need for
hospital accommodation. But the hospital situation was desperate: not only had Dresden before the time of the attack been relied on as a main centre for convalescing and
wounded soldiers from every front, but in the triple blow nearly all the hospitals
converted from schools and public buildings had been hit, and out of Dresden’s nineteen major permanent hospitals sixteen had been damaged in varying degrees and
three totally destroyed. The police report states that in the whole city and its surrounding areas there were by mid March only surviving hospital beds. An example of the fate of the temporary military hospitals was provided by the Vitzthum
High School, serving as an hospital with five hundred fully occupied beds. It proved
possible to evacuated some two hundred of these invalids in the half-hour between
the full alarm and the attack; the rest perished.
Other temporary arrangements were made for caring for limited numbers of
wounded and sick civilians from Dresden. The inappropriately named ‘Haus
Sonnenschein’ at Pirna – a euthanasia hospital for disposing of the incurable mentally disabled – was turned over to meet the needs of the truck loads of patients
arriving in the town from Dresden. The bunker being blasted by an S.S. construction unit into the solid rock face near the Mordgrundbrücke bridge as a future command post, was also placed by the commanding S.S. general at the disposal of the
Red Cross for setting up a temporary hospital and shelter for the homeless. The
sixty-foot thick roof made the bunker absolutely bomb-proof.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Of the two largest hospitals in the city, the Friedrichstadt and Johannstadt, the
former was still partially habitable while the latter was completely wrecked and
unusable. The Johannstadt hospital complex in the east of the city also the city’s
biggest maternity clinic, the Frauenklinik. ‘When the Pathfinders appeared over the
city,’ the director of the clinic later wrote. ‘the clinics had still not been completely
cleared. The warning period was too short. The bombs started falling to the west of
us, and the last patients, among them women recently operated on, hastened down
stairs into the basement. A blockbuster hit B wing. Two labour wards, an operating
theatre, the maternity wards, the gynæcological surgery and the sterilisation equipment in the three departments were destroyed.’ Immediate attempts were made to
transfer the patients from B wing to A wing. A section of A wing began to burn
however and the patients there had to be evacuated there too. French forced labourers arrived to joint in rescue operations at the Frauenklinik and, later, German rescue gangs carried to safety some patients who had recently been operated on and
they evacuated the shelter provided for newborn infants.’
‘Only when daylight came,’ continued the director’s account,‘could we appreciate
the scale of the catastrophe which had befallen our clinic. A wing was burning so
fiercely that fighting the fires was out of the question. B wing was largely destroyed
by the five high explosives bombs which had hit it. C wing was wrecked down to the
ground floor and already burned out. D wing also showed heavy damage. Only E
wing had escaped lightly, although its roof too was on fire.’The bombs of the American daylight attack by-passed the Frauenklinik, but one solitary Mustang fighter machine-gunned C, D, and E wings.
An indication of the amount of damage done to Dresden’s hospitals is the scale of
the casualties. In the Frauenklinik in Johannstadt, where the damage is best documented, some two hundred people had been killed; of these only could be
identified. There was the familiar pattern of the fire-storm aftermath: in Kassel .
percent of the total victims (,) could not be identified. In this clinic at Johannstadt
the unidentified percentage was thirty-one. Of those dead who were identified, eleven
were nurses, twenty-one were student midwives, nurses and orderlies, two were
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
French rescue workers, and nine were men of the German rescue gang; of the ninety
five killed who had been patients, forty five were expectant mothers.
For the rest of the war this large hospital was out of commission. Arrangements
were made for the city’s surviving expectant mothers to be transferred to the undamaged wing of the Friedrichstadt general hospital. Several wards had to be cleared
for the purpose, adding to the obvious problem of surgical care for the thousands of
people injured by the raids. Meanwhile the routine medical care of the population
had to be continued: diabetics had to be instructed where to obtain supplies of insulin, for example; those who had lost their prescriptions had to be re-examined and
given new prescriptions. The process was inevitably slow, and many sick and injured
died before the could be given proper attention. Gradually the already enormous
death roll crept higher. Still no organised attempt at rescuing those trapped beneath
the fallen masonry had been begun.
v
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v
As we have recorded, it was not until the late afternoon of Ash Wednesday, February , that even the troops stationed in the city’s barracks were assigned to rescue
operations. For many units stationed further afield the delay was even longer. At
Königsbrück, where units were assembling for action on the eastern front, the Dresden situation had still not been realised two days after the attacks owing probably to
a failure of communications. One army officer who had arrived from the burning
city addressed himself directly to the commanding officers of the troops and suggested that all men should be marched into Dresden to dig out those people still
buried in the ruins; he received the reply that until orders were received from above,
such action was unthinkable.
Not the least among the difficulties was that the seat of the fire-storm and therefore of the damage to life and limb in the city was on the left bank of the Elbe, while
Königsbrück and most other troops concentrastions were on the right bank.The left
bank of the Elbe was designated as the ‘home front’ (Heimatkriegsgebiet) while everything east of the river was assigned to the ‘rearward army district’ (rückwärtiger
Heeresgebiet). Thus any initiative for such troop movements had to come from the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
appropriate authorities. Only on February did the necessary marching orders
arrive; the army eventually provided fifteen hundred to two thousand men for rescue and salvage operations.
In the case of the Allied prisoners of war caged in or near Dresden, of whom there
were over twenty thousand at the time of the attack, the instructions to join in rescue work came even later. Although there were over Allied prisoners for example in one working detachment, No in Dresden-Übigau, after their narrow
escape of February no further working parties were put together until February
when of the prisoners were ordered by Army District IV to march in gangs of
thirty, fifty, and seventy men into the city to assist in salvage operations. For a whole
week before that the men were confined to camp. Eventually five hundred to a
thousand prisoners of war were marched in to help rescue and salvage operations. A
prisoner of war caged in Dresden’s big slaughterhouse remarks that although the
area around the complex was badly damaged their German guards forced them to
march right across the city each morning to a site in eastern Dresden, and the same
route back each night; the intention was, he felt, to ‘rub their noses’ in the horrors
that their fellow countrymen had caused, as well as to promote the recruiting drive
for prisoners to join a ‘Free British Corps’ to fight the Russians on the eastern front.
After these raids many prisoners did in fact volunteer for this corps, including one
camp’s ‘man of confidence.’
Most of the British prisoners worked with a will at their allotted rescue and salvage tasks. Even before the orders were received several hundred prisoners had volunteered for the work.
Several were to pay for their willingness with their lives when, after living for
weeks on diminishing prison rations their rescue operations inevitably brought them
within reach of food stores in wrecked shops and hotels. Thus an American from a
camp in Dresden Plauen was found with a tin of food concealed in his uniform during a routine search; a young Canadian soldier was caught smuggling a looted gammon of ham into the camp in Dresden-Übigau. Both were shot by firing squads.
German and non-German looters alike were given the same short shrift. A German
labourer was found to have secreted between and wedding rings in his pockets
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
in Grunaer Strasse; he was executed on the spot. ‘So far seventy-nine looters have
been arrested by police, in particular by special patrols,’ stated Dresden’s chief of
police in mid-March, . ‘A large number has already been executed.’
v
v
v
In Dresden the authorities had declared a state of emergency on February ,
.
On the orders of the gauleiter [announced the local Party newspaper] a number
of plunderers and looters was shot on the spot yesterday, immediately after their
apprehension.Where plunderers are discovered they must be handed over at once
to Party officials or their representatives; Gauleiter Mutschmann has no intention of allowing any kind of softness in this, his so cruelly tested gau. This is a
matter for the whole community; he who commits a crime against the community is worthy only of death.
Not only looters were being executed in Dresden, adding to the enormous deathroll of the triple blow. It was ascertained that ‘unscrupulous elements’ were spreading rumours which were both uninformed and unkind.
The rumour-monger serves only the enemy’s interests, and he must expect
immediate death. The gauleiter has decreed that all rumour-mongers are to be
shot out of hand; this has already happened in certain cases.
v
v
v
For several days the thousands of victims lay strewn about the streets where they
had been overwhelmed by the raids. In some cases limbs had been bodily torn off; in
others, the victims seemed to have just fallen asleep, and only their greenish pallor
betrayed that they were no longer alive. In the parks there were bodies dangling
from the branches of trees where the blast waves had tossed them. Here and on the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
banks of the river were scattered the corpses of those who had fallen to the strafing
attacks of the fighter planes. Some people died soon after being dug out of their
cellars. Six people were rescued alive from a cellar beneath the operating theatre of
the Johannstadt Frauenklinik; five of them, all women, died soon afterwards,
‘apparently from internal injuries.’ An official who inspected the main Johannstadt
hospital complex after the raids has described how in the hospital gardens there were
torn children’s bodies tossed up onto walls, hanging from the branches of trees, and
scattered over a wide area, such was the force of the heavy bombs dropped.
After their two day delay the troops were now worked hard, digging feverishly for
survivors. The soldiers had to work for twenty-hours straight off with very little
food. Each neighbouring city had contributed a rescue company, and it was up to
each city to make adequate provision for them. Generally this system worked efficiently, but by the time of the Dresden catastrophe all sort of organisation had collapsed
and rescue troops could not expect a meal until they were relieved by further troops.
‘The work was very demanding,’ relates one soldier detailed for these rescue operations. ‘It took four men to carry out each injured survivor. Other soldiers before
us had already started removing the rubble and opening up the cellars. Sometimes
twenty, sometimes more people had sought shelter in them from the bombs.The fire
had robbed them of oxygen and the heat must have tortured them terribly. We were
lucky to find here and there one or two still alive. This went on for hours. Later on
we were ordered to the sub-basements of the buildings.We found a dozen frightened
women and children who did not date to leave the cellars. As the building was still
burning and might collapse and bury them at any moment, we dragged them out by
force.’
‘All over the ground,’ he continued, ‘lay these corpses – shrivelled by the intense
heat to about three feet in length. A sweet smell of putrescence and burnt flesh – a
filthy, sickly smell – pervaded the whole city.’ He and his company later set to work
rescuing survivors trapped in the gutted opera, where there had been a special performance on the night of the attack. This Gottfried Semper building had seen the
premieres of Wagner’s ‘Rienzi,’ ‘The Flying Dutchman,’ and ‘Tannhäuser’; and, more
recently, of Richard Strauss’ ‘Der Rosenkavalier.’ Now it would present no more
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
musical masterpieces to the world. Like the Circus Sarassani it had collapsed, leaving
only a crumpled shell, with many people buried beneath the ruins.
‘Many of the people had gone out of their minds when we finally reached them in
the opera cellars,’ related this soldier further.‘They refused to come out. On the way
back to the barracks that night, after working a twenty-four hour shift, we passed an
overturned cart in the street. A refugee from the east, about sixty years old, was
trapped beneath it with both his legs broken. he cried out for water as we passed
him.’ The man had been lying trapped there for nearly three days shouting for attention, but so severe was the damage to the city that nobody had yet found time to free
him.
As the columns of soldiers were marched back across the river they could see that
the dome of the Frauenkirche had now collapsed as well. Stored in the basement of
the cathedral were extensive film archives of the German air ministry, and just when
the cathedral’s fire fighters thought that they had controlled the flames the celluloid
rolls had ignited with explosive violence.
The dome had collapsed at : A.M. on Thursday morning, February .
With this sad event the destruction of the city’s architecture, too, was complete.
v
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v
At : p.m. on February , sleepless and with his hands trembling, Hitler had a
forty-five minute talk with Dr Goebbels. He was the picture of dejection. ‘They
flatten the Dresden opera house and wipe out refugees,’ exclaimed Hitler,‘but Stettin
harbour, jam-packed with troop transports, they leave alone!’
Dresden’s police headquarters had been bombed out. In American archives is the
intercept of the text of the first report on the raids radioed – since all telegraph lines
were down – by the civil police commander in Dresden, SS Gruppenführer Werner
von Alvensleben; the signal was deciphered by British codebreakers.
Preliminary report: Heavy terror-raid on Dresden. Bombs dropped on Dresden
from : to : hrs. In the whole city area heavy high explosive bombs and
great fires, especially in the quarter of the Inner City. Hit: Opera House, Catholic
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Hofkirche, Japanese Palace, Museum of Hygiene, Railway Directorates offices,
several hospitals, Exhibition Palace, T-s-nberg Palace – , at least , high explosive and , incendiary bombs estimated. Forces from outside called in.
Barrack Area Albertstadt: Rifle Barracks, Adolf Hitler Barracks, Army Provisioning
Office, Magazine Building, Ammunition Depot. Outward communications also
interrupted. Even stronger attack from : to : hrs, chiefly high explosive
bombs, some of them of the heaviest calibre.
‘In the raging conflagration that arose almost complete destruction of the city
must be anticipated,’ concluded the police commander. ‘Estimated that , are
homeless. Reich assistance on the greatest scale immediately and urgently required.’
Deprecating the use of such hysterical language, Heinrich Himmler, the S.S.
Reichsführer, radioed back to Alvensleben this nonchalant message:
I have received your report. The attacks were obviously very severe, yet every
first air raid always gives the impression that the town has been completely destroyed. Take all necessary measures at once. I am sending you at once a particularly able S.S. Führer for your staff, whom you may find useful in the present
difficult situation. All the best.
Alvensleben sent a further telex on the fifteenth. The Reichsführer S.S. followed
this radiogram with a particularly heartless letter to the police chief by mail:
My dear Alvensleben!
I received your telex of February .
. Approve relocating your office but only to suburbs of Dresden. Any further
out would make a rotten impression.
. Now is the time for iron steadfastness and immediate action to restore order.
You are to see to it that power, water supplies and public transport immediately
are restored. I’m prepared to send you S.S. Obergruppenführer Hildebrandt to
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
help you so that you have a comrade who can be effective for you in various other
locations outside Dresden.
. Set me a good example of calm and nerve!
Heil Hitler.Yours, H HIMMLER.
Alvensleben transferred his headquarters as S.S. and Polizeiführer together with
those of the Security Police and the S.D. (security service) to the half-completed
rock bunker being blasted into the cliff face at Dresden’s Mordgrundbrücke bridge.
Four days after the raids the local Party newspaper published the first announcement requesting people searching for their next of kin to contact a newly set up
Vermissten-Suchstelle – a missing persons search bureau – housed in the still-intact
Saxon ministry of the interior building on the Königsufer embankment of the Elbe.
The newspaper announced: ‘Postcards – not letters or other forms of communications – must contain the pre-raid address and name of the persons being sought, and
the name and post-raid address of the searchers.’ This was the first small step in the
gargantuan task of trying to reunite the thousands of families which had been sundered by the triple blow.
At the same time, a more ominous organisation had been set up, compiling a registry of people who were missing and unlikely to be found alive again. In each of
Dresden’s seven municipal districts a Vermissten-Nachweis – register of missing persons – was established. The registers for the boroughs of Weisser Hirsch and Dresden-Central were held in the local city halls; those for the boroughs of Blasewitz,
Strehlen, and Cotta were in the local elementary schools; the register for Trachau
was in Dobelner Strasse, and that in Leuben was in a former children’s nursery at No
Neuberin Strasse, and it was to this latter bureau that all inquiries about victims
with no permanent address in Dresden, including refugees, soldiers, forced labourers and other transients were to be addressed. At this centre a Vermissten-Nachweiszentrale (VNZ) or central bureau of missing persons, had been established immediately after the raids to collate the information from the six others.
On the morning of February , Hanns Voigt, an assistant master at one of the
schools in the city which had been closed down, like so many schools in the Dresden
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
area, eleven days earlier for conversion into a Luftwaffe hospital, was ordered to
report to this VNZ office at Leuben, some seven miles to the south-east of the city.
This part of Dresden could expect to be spared further air raid damage, and it had
the advantage of being on the left bank or the river – prevailing opinion in Dresden
expected the Russians to arrive shortly. They were after all only some seventy miles
away by now.
Voigt was given the task of establishing and organising an Abteilung Tote for the
VNZ, a Dead Persons Department which would take over the records and personal
effects of all people already known to have died, as well as those still to be recovered
from the ruins of the city.
For two weeks, with characteristic German thoroughness, he collected assistants
and formulated a plan for what was to prove perhaps the biggest task of identification
and registration in history. On March Voigt was able to report to the VNZ that his
department was fully operational, with a total complement of clerks and officials
numbering over seventy; a further three hundred were employed in the VNZ. The
Dead Persons’ Section would be responsible for identification of the victims and for
arriving at some final estimate of the death roll. On March the department was
recognised by the Reich and incorporated into the VNZ.
The bureaucratic thoroughness with which we have all come to associate the German people was well demonstrated by this macabre institution. Dresden was divided
for the purposes of identification procedure into seven operational districts, each
with its own central SHD office: the SHD was the Sicherheits- und Hilfsdienst, the
service most commonly in action in blitzed cities. In Dresden Neustadt the SHD
office was set up in the local town hall. In Blasewitz it was in the police station; in
Friedrichstadt it was in the hospital complex, the only one in which some buildings
were still standing. The recovery of the corpses was supervised by four squads of the
Repair Service (Instandsetzungsdienst) and its four companies of medical orderlies,
by two battalions of soldiers, and by the squads of the Emergency Technical Service
(Technische Nothilfe). A command post for the Instandsetzungsdienst was set up in the
concrete bunker beneath the police headquarters in the Albertinum building.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
The organisation of the rescue work, identification, and body-counting was closely
coordinated with the police headquarters in the Saxon ministry of the interior building on Königsufer.This issued its orders via a Hauptsammelstelle (main assembly point)
on the Weisser Hirsch to the SHD troops conducting the actual rescue and salvage
operations. Officials of the new VNZ were at hand to supervise identification work
on the spot. The bodies were lined up for one or two days in spaces cleared on the
sidewalks for this purpose. All valuables including jewellery, papers, letters, and rings
and other identification material found on the bodies was placed in separate paper
envelopes. These envelopes bore a serial number and other essential information
including the place and date that the corpse was found, the sex and, if known, the
person’s name. A colour-coded card was affixed to the victim with the same serial
number. At the same time officers counted each head – literally – and these daily
tallies, together with the truckloads of valuables recovered, were collected by the
SHD officials of each of the seven district offices. Each night the VNZ assembled
these envelopes and registered the names and serial numbers in its central indexes.
After the contents of each envelope had been evaluated and all possible identification
details extracted, the envelopes were sealed and passed to the Saxon ministry of the
interior for safekeeping.
Some parts of the inner city remained so hot that the cellars could not be entered
for several weeks. This was especially found where, contrary to regulations, large
stocks of coal had been hoarded in collars and caught fire. (The Hamburg police
chief had recommended after the raids there that coal and coke should be stored in
attics, where experience showed them to be less vulnerable.) One street in Dresden’s inner city was impassable for this reason for six weeks. As in Hamburg, the
usual grotesque aftermath of melted preserving-jars, pots, and pans, and even completely incinerated bricks and ceramic tiles, was found in some cellars in the centre
of the city. These too were indicative of the thousand-degree plus temperatures
which had prevailed in the fire-storm area.
‘The work of recovering the bodies was the hardest task,’ the director of the
Instandsetzungsdienst in Dresden later explained. ‘The gases which had been collected
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
in the hot basements posed a very serious danger to our rescue gangs, as there were
not enough gas masks to go round.’
Even more unpleasantly, for the first week after the raids the units of the
Instandsetzungsdienst, the RAD and the SHD companies were obliged to work without rubber gloves – their whole stock of these items had been consumed by the fires.
Experience in other fire-storm areas had demonstrated that recovery workers were
readily exposed to disease and to what was identified as a ‘post-mortem virus’. Rubber boots were also urgently needed: normally dry cellars and basements became
impassable because of the serous fluids oozing from the mounds of corpses. For the
first few days the men and women working on corpse-recovery had to work with
bare hands or with only the most improvised protection. A week later supplies of
rubber gloves did begin to arrive from all over Germany, finally accumulating in
such quantities that a thriving black market in rubber gloves began.
In this respect Dresden was as ill-prepared as Kassel had been for such a firestorm. In Kassel too supplies had run low, and extra stocks had to be delivered by
aircraft. Nor were these the only supplies lacking in Kassel. ‘To combat the very
strong stench of decay which arose after some days, all forces taking part in the
recovery work were provided with cognac and cigarettes.’ Even eau-de-cologne
and special soap rations were available at the time of the Kassel raids. Some salvage
squads there wore gas masks with alcohol soaked pads inserted in the filter frame.
During the first weeks after the raids the city’s police were entrusted with the task
of loading the victims onto the wagons and supervising the attempt to keep a tally. It
was grim work, but in Dresden not all the lessons of the earlier fire-storms about the
personal needs of body-salvage crews had been lost. There were large emergency
stocks of schnapps in the deep vaults of both the Albertinum and the Hygiene Museum near the Grosser Garten and these had remained intact; without regular issues
of this schnapps and special cigarette rations, the unpleasant task of retrieving the
corpses from the cellars, often under the most degrading conditions, would have
been impossible for the forced labourers and others impressed for the task – the
Ukrainians, the Romanians, the troops from the barracks, and the prisoners of war.
Each day a police officer was delegated to collect thirty bottles of cognac for each
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
salvage gang from these stores.The Allied prisoners, held collectively responsible for
the carnage, were not included in either the cognac or the cigarette issues.
The female recovery workers, mostly supplied by the Reich Labour Service, were
not permitted to drink alcohol; they were given twenty cigarettes a day to calm their
nerves. The first task was to clear the victims off the streets. ‘One shape I shall
never forget,’ a Dresden survivor wrote to his mother after the raids, ‘was the remains of what had apparently been a mother and child.They had shrivelled and charred
into one piece, and had stuck rigidly to the asphalt. They had just been prised off it.
The child must have been beneath its mother, because you could still clearly see its
outline, with its mother’s arms clasped around it.’ Nobody would ever be able to
identify either again.
During the Hamburg raids in , somebody had suggested to Dr Goebbels,
increasingly being made responsible for coordinating civil defence ideas, that everybody be made to wear fireproof dog-tags to facilitate the identification of corpses.
Goebbels, author of the evil idea that all Jews be made to wear the Yellow Star, had
shuddered and discarded the idea.
Now, in Dresden, where the fire-storm had raged the task of identification was all
but impossible. ‘All across the city we could see the victims lying face down, literally
glued to the asphalt, which had softened and melted in the enormous heat,’ described one of the soldiers engaged in recovery work. The city’s civil defence engineer Georg Feydt counted between and bodies lying in Ring Strasse alone.
‘A comrade asked me to help him find his wife in Muschinksi-Strasse,’ described
another soldier from the Neustadt barracks. ‘The house was burnt out when we
reached it. He shouted and shouted, hoping that people in the cellar might hear him.
There was no answer. An old woman was sitting on a heap of broken bricks, singing
to herself. He refused to give up the search and continued poking around in the
cellars of neighbouring houses, even prising up charred torsos from the melted asphalt to see if his wife’s was among them.’ However even by inspecting their shoes
the soldier was unable to identify her. His inability to recognize his own wife’s remains was characteristic of the formidable problems facing the VNZ.
v
v
v
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
‘Never would I have thought that death could come to people in so many different
ways,’ said Hanns Voigt, director of theVNZ dead persons’ section in Dresden.‘Never
had I expected to see people buried in that state: burnt, cremated, torn, and crushed
to death. Sometimes the victims looked like ordinary people apparently peacefully
sleeping; the faces of others were racked with pain, the bodies stripped almost naked
by the tornado. There were wretched refugees from the east clad only in rags, and
people from the opera in all their finery. Here the victim was a shapeless lump, there
a layer of ashes shovelled into a zinc tub. Across the city, along the streets wafted the
unmistakable stench of putrefying flesh.’
Some people had met extremely unpleasant ends, when the central heating systems were hit and the basements had flooded with scalding hot water. People who
had taken refuge in the static water tanks had also in some parts been scalded to
death. The water tank on the corner of Muschinski-Strasse for example had apparently boiled in the intense heat of the night’s fire-storm. A score of corpses, their
skin lobster-red from the heat, were floating in the water. In other parts of the city
this recourse had proven more successful. An army captain observed two men clambering out of another such static water tank on Grunaer Strasse very soon after the
first attack: by sitting up to their necks in the water they had been able to avoid the
showers of sparks, and escape the invisible grasp of the fire-storm tornado.
In most cases death had been peaceful and slow. Probably over seventy percent of
the casualties were caused by lack of oxygen or by carbon-monoxide poisoning. In
one basement salvage workers found one hundred people, the greater part of them
women, whom death had overtaken as they frantically scrambled for the basement
exit. Tens of thousands of people had been trapped in the places, and sometimes
frozen in the attitudes of the moment when this Pompeii-like catastrophe had engulfed their city.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe
auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., . und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonel Wolfgang] Thierig,
Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Lieselotte Seifert, of Köln-Lindenthal, to the author, May , .
Max Seydewitz, Zerstörung undWiederaufbau von Dresden (Dresden, ).
Gerhard Nagel to the author, Jul , .
My comment in The Destruction of Dresden about American strafing generated an internal inquiry
by US air force historians. Maurer, at Maxwell Air Force Base, minuted on Jan , that th
Fighter Group had conducting strafing missions at Koblenz and Fulda. ‘None of the other groups
named in [your] inquiry strafed roads in and out of Dresden, or other targets at Dresden. Some
squadrons (planes) strafed railroad yards at Dresden, but they were not those named by Irving.’ (Maxwell
AFB files: courtesy of JLS Hayward).
John Heard, a prisoner of war, interview with the author, May , .
Anneliese Heilmeyer, of Köln-Braunsfeld, to the author, May , .
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Seydewitz, loc. cit.
Victor Scheide, of Leverküsen, interview with the author, May , .
Marga Staubesand, of Köln-Lindenthal, to the author, May , .
Seydewitz, loc. cit.
Prof Fischer, quoted by Seydewitz.
Captain Wolf Recktenwald, interview of Apr , and letters to the author.
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dres-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
den city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Sergeant Gregory’s camp diary of Arbeitskommando .
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Ibid., and Dennis Brock to the author, Dec and , , Apr , and interview of Apr
, .
Sergeant Gregory’s camp diary of Arbeitskommando ; camp correspondence, and Dennis
Brock, interview with the author, Apr , .
Margarete Führmeister, of Mannheim, interview of Jun , .
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Der Freiheitskampf, Dresden, Feb , (Dresden city archives).
Report of Civil Police Commander of Dresden to Chief of Civil Police, Luftgaukommando III:
extract from ULTRA file GPD., dated Feb , , decrypt (English translation) in pp. SHAEF
file, ‘Dresden Attack,’ ca. Mar , document No..a (Maxwell AFB: USAF Historical Division
Archives).
decrypt (English translation) in pp. SHAEF file, ‘Dresden Attack,’ ca. Mar , document
No..a (Maxwell AFB: USAF Historical Division Archives); also cited in ‘Ultra History of U.S.
Strategic Air Force Europe vs. German Air Force,’ Jun (NA, RG., file SRH–); cited also
by Walter F Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of the – February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF
Historical Division Archives), p..
Himmler to von Alvensleben, Feb , (NA film T, roll , page ,); the film has
a folder of about letters exchanged between Himmler and Alvensleben.
Der Freiheitskampf, Dresden, Feb , (Dresden city archives).
Hanns Voigt, of Bielefeld, to the author, Jun , ; he also made his diary available to the
author.
Hanns Schmall; and S.S. Gruppenführer Kehrl, ‘Bericht des Polizeipräsidenten in Hamburg als
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
örtlicher Luftschutzleiter über die schweren Großangriffe auf Hamburg in Juli/August .’
Georg Feydt, loc. cit.
‘Erfahrungsbericht zum Luftangriff vom .. auf den Luftschutzort . Ordnung Kassel.’
Sergeant Gregory, camp diary, Arbeitskommando .
Author’s interview of Führmeister, Jun , .
Ch. Th. Rademann to his mother, Feb , , and author’s interview with Rademann, of
Helmstedt, on Apr , .
Propaganda ministry, air war notice No., Jul , (NA film T, roll , f).
Rudolf Schramm, of Buchholz near Hamburg, to the author, and interview of Apr , .
Georg Feydt, loc. cit.
Hanns Voigt to the author, Jun , .
Rudolf Schramm, author’s interview, Apr , .
Wolf Recktenwald to the author, Nov , , and interview of Apr , .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Anatomy of a Tragedy
‘I
T’S PROBABLY NOT
very wide of the mark to relate this attack to the Crimea
conference,’ wrote a senior official of Dr Goebbels’ propaganda ministry
in his diary. ‘Churchill has already accepted the plan to compensate Poland
for areas east of the Curzon Line which have been annexed by the Russians, by presenting her with German territory. He has also agreed to the expulsion of seven to
eight million Germans from this territory, and has announced in the House of Commons that “war’s ups and downs” will create space in the rest of Germany for these
seven to eight millions. Apparently Stalin has now called his attention to the approaching end of the war and has suggested that it is time that room be made in the
way discussed.With Dresden, Churchill has fulfilled his first quota of , at one
fell swoop.’The British prime minister, the Nazi diarist continued, could be proud of
having killed , women, children, and defenceless civilians; it was something
that nobody in history had ever achieved before.
In fact we have already seen that at Yalta, nine days before Dresden, Mr Churchill
had indeed expressed a robust view on the expendability of the German population.
Discussing the very problem that Goebbels’ of⁵cial had mention, that of housing the
refugees fleeing before the Red armies, Churchill had mused: ‘Will there be room
for them in what is left of Germany? We have killed six or seven million Germans
and probably there will be an other million or so killed before the end of the war.’
Not the least disturbing aspect of the shock wave felt in Berlin after the Allies’
triple blow on Dresden was its effect on the higher echelons of the Nazi party and
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
government. For three months, in growing volume, Dr Goebbels had been preaching the story of the Morgenthau Plan – the American plan for postwar Germany
which the enemy were supposed to be discussing at Yalta. Now, suddenly and dramatically, the nightmare which they had created in their own disordered minds appeared to be coming true. Literally overnight, as the first figures current in Berlin
showed, ‘between two- and three-hundred thousand people’ had been slaughtered in
a great German city.
After the war, the controversy continued in the senior officers’ prison camps. In a
camp at Latimer, in Buckinghamshire in England, captured German generals were
forced to watch newsreel pictures of the atrocities found in camps in north-western
Germany. Karl Bodenschatz, who was Göring’s chief aide and on Hitler’s personal
staff, told another Luftwaffe general that the scenes were contemptible, a Schweinerei:
‘But – given what happened in Germany with the air raids on residential areas the
last two years there’s no comparison, none whatever: if you’d seen Dresden – I was
there, fifty-one thousand dead, women and children, in one night – then there’s no
comparison with photographs of three hundred or so people who’ve been shot. It’s
brutality, I grant you, but not in the same league.’
The Dresden figures quoted varied widely. Thinking themselves unobserved, two
German army generals were overheard saying they couldn’t understand why the S.S.
had not destroyed the evidence – ‘But the British too killed over two hundred thousand in Dresden,’ said one of them, in mitigation. Other senior officers held opposing views on the psychological effects of the triple blow. ‘When this catastrophe
became known to the whole of Germany,’ a colonel in the Luftwaffe’s experimental
research station admitted under interrogation, ‘morale disintegrated everywhere.’
The diary kept by Hitler’s doctor shows that it certainly had a shattering effect on
the Führer. Hitler’s morale was ‘poor,’ Professor Theo Morell had noted on February
in his medical diary: ‘Seems to be losing faith, thanks to the situation on the
eastern front and the air raids on Dresden.’
On the other side of the North Sea, in Britain, the next day, a British officer asked
a German general in captivity what the likely effect of such raids would be. ‘If Dresden is set on fire today,’ answered the general,‘you’d expect the public attitude to be,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
“We can’t go on like this, they’re smashing one city after the other.” The actual effect
on a large part of the people including the women is different: they say, “There you
have it – it’s pure destructiveness; they’re wrecking everything, unloading their bombs
onto innocent women and children.You can see they all hate us – they’re all criminals, even the British are just hiding behind a mask while in reality it’s the criminal
element, the Jews” – they don’t mean Jews as such, just the criminal element, the
diabolical. That will be the reaction, so that despite these colossal casualties after
every air raid, a sense of deep hatred is the outcome.’
This view seems to have been no exception. ‘The conflagration in Dresden nourished the suspicion that the western Allies were concerned only with the liquidation
of the German Volk,’ suggested the Inspector of German Fire Services in memoirs
written after the war. ‘For one last time Dresden brought the Germans together
under the swastika-banner and drove them into the arms of their propaganda service, which now more credibly than ever could lay the accent on fear: fear of merciless air raids, fear of the accepted Morgenthau Plan, fear of extinction.’
To those in Dresden who had survived the first attack, it seemed that all they had
been told about the Allies’ Morgenthau Plan was materialising only too quickly.
v
v
v
On the Altmarkt square in Dresden, under the victory memorial built after the
Franco-Prussian war, large static water tanks about ninety feet square had been built.
At the end of the first raid, this square, which had been in the centre of the No
Group attack sector, and thus also in the heart of the first fire-storm area, rapidly
filled with people from the surrounding buildings. The showers of sparks had begun
to set their clothes and baggage on fire. Several hundred had tried to save themselves
and extinguish their burning clothes by climbing into the eater tanks; but although
the tanks’ walls were about two and a half feet above the ground, in fact the water
was over right feet deep. The sloping walls of the concrete tanks made it impossible
to climb out again. Those who could swim were dragged under by those who could
not. When the rescue gangs cleared their way through to the Altmarkt square next
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
afternoon, the tanks were half empty – the water having evaporated in the heat – and
all the people were dead.
South of the central station the fire-storm had cut a swathe of death. Even in the
open squares the people had not been spared, but had died from heat radiation, from
lack of oxygen, and from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Here too, even for the victims whose bodies had been untouched by fire, the chances of identification were
slim. In hundreds of cases the clothing which would have contained identifiable personal effects had been torn off in the hurricane strength of the fire-storm.
The commanding officer of a Speer Organisation trucking company based on Dresden was faced with a terrible sight when he and his men finally struggled through to
Lindenau Platz, a square to the south of the central station where their headquarters
were situated. ‘Lindenau Platz measured about one hundred yards by yards,’ he
wrote. ‘In the centre lay an old man, with two dead horses. Hundreds of corpses,
completely naked, were scattered around him. The tram shelter was burnt out, but
the most extraordinary thing was the way the people were lying naked all round it.
Next to the tram shelter was a public lavatory of corrugated iron. At the entrance to
this was a woman, about thirty two years old, completely nude, lying face down on
a fur coat; not far away lay her identity card, which showed her to be from Berlin. A
few yards further on lay two young boys aged about eight and ten clinging tightly to
each other. Their faces were buried in the ground. They too were stark naked. Their
legs were stiff and twisted into the air. In a Litfass pillar [a cylindrical advertising
column] which had been bowled over were two more corpses, also naked. There
were about twenty or thirty of us who saw this scene; we felt weak and dazed and we
could not help weeping. As far as we could make out the people had stayed in their
basements too long. When they were finally driven out, the enormous heat outside
took them by surprise and they must have died of lack of oxygen.’ (In this case it is
unlikely that carbon-monoxide poisoning was the cause of death: rigor mortis would
not have set in as described.)
Some areas of Dresden had been so severely hit that it was unlikely that any people
had escaped with their lives. One of these areas was around Seidnitzer Platz. In this
square there was also a static water tank, some fifty feet square, converted from a
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
children’s playground. This tank was not as deep as the ones in the Altmarkt; many
people had either stood in the tank or had sat around the rim, waiting for the raids to
end. One or two hundred of them were still sitting there, just where they had been
on the night of the raid. There was a gap here and there where somebody had rolled
forward into the tank. But all, again, were dead. Once again, the lack of oxygen
which characterized the fire-storm had claimed the victims.
On the corner of Seidnitzer Strasse and this square there had been a local hostel for
RAD labour girls, and next to it a temporary hospital for legless soldiers. At the time
when the Full Alarm had sounded on February the girls and the soldiers had been
watching a carnival performance of a puppet show in the hospital basement. In the
hospital where the surviving RAD girls carried out rescue operations later they found
that between forty and fifty of the patients and two doctors had succumbed to the
fires; only two doctors and one nurse had escaped. ‘I had never realized that corpses
would shrivel up so small in the intense heat,’ said the leader of the RAD unit who
had herself already survived the earlier fire-storm in Darmstadt. ‘I had seen nothing
like it before, even in Darmstadt.’
The restaurant and ornamental palaces in the Grosser Garten had also without
exception been converted to military hospitals. All were damaged to some degree.
Along the southern edge of the Grosser Garten ran the rambling zoological garden,
which had housed one of the most famous menageries in central Germany.The bombs
that had struck the zoo had already released a considerable number of the animals
from shattered cages. During the second raid a giraffe was seen walking awkwardly
about the park looking for shelter, and tiny rhesus monkeys were springing from
branch to branch of the partly burning trees. (In Hamburg the famous Hagenbeck
zoo had been specially reinforced to prevent air raid escapes by wild animals. Cages
had been double barred and the zoo premises encircles by trenches and traps.) Here
in Dresden, most of the cages were shattered beyond repair; to prevent a mass escape army officers were called in to shoot all the animals remaining early in the
morning after the raids.
With the task of opening up streets and houses still incomplete, the day for the
recovery of victims from the public parks was still distant. Even ten days after the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
raids the victims had still not been removed from the green lawns of the Grosser
Garten. A Swiss resident described how two weeks after the raids he set out across
the devastated city to visit a friend in Gruna. His journey took him along the broad
boulevard of Stubel Allee, where the gauleiter of Saxony, Martin Mutschmann, had
his villa. It was heavy going, not only because of the craters and the rubble, but also
because of the sickening sight of heaps of air raid victims stacked up everywhere.
‘The sight was so appalling that without a second glance I decided not to pick my
way among these corpses. For this reason I turned back and headed for the Grosser
Garten. But here it was even more appalling: walking through the grounds I could
see torn-off arms and legs, mutilated torsos, and heads which had been wrenched off
their bodies and had rolled away. In places the corpses were still lying so densely that
I had to push them aside in other not to tread on arms and legs. The palace in the
Grosser Garten, one of the city’s finest baroque buildings, was of course burnt down.’
The disturbing account of the aftermath of the raids from which this excerpt is
taken was published for three days in a leading Swiss newspaper from March ,
after its author had smuggled the notes out of Germany. It shocked not only
the Swiss. Less than six days later the British Foreign Office made representations to
the prime minister, Mr Churchill, about the effect that bombing operations on this
scale were having on world opinion.
For the RAD, the labour service, the Dresden raids were especially tragic. Girls
were required to work for one year in this organisation, and six more months (by
Führer decree of July ) in the Auxiliary War Service (Kriegshilfsdienst or KHD),
working in the post office, bus and tram services, or hospitals. The male RAD units
came under Arbeitsgau XV, Dresden; but the RAD’s District VII, Dresden, directed
all female labour (RAD w.J.) units in Saxony, and this had received many requests
from parents to let their daughters serve their final six months KHD in what was
taken to be the comparative safety of Dresden rather than in the more endangered
areas of central and western Germany. The casualties among this section of the German labour front were correspondingly far heavier. As one of the female unit leaders
(Maidenführerin) estimates, during the triple blow on Dresden about
Kriegshilfsdienst girls had been killed. Their bodies were laid out in rows in König-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Johann Strasse for relatives and neighbours to identify. One group was of a dozen
KHD tram-conductresses, young girls in uniform; to one of them a card had been
pinned, reading PLEASE LET ME HAVE THE BODY. I WISH TO BURY MY DAUGHTER MYSELF.
Already word was spreading among the survivors about the crude mass burials of the
air raid victims outside the city.
When it came to salvage duties, it must be said that the RAD and KHD girls proved
as tough as the hardiest of the Ukrainian soldiers and forced labourers put to this
unappetising task. They did not flinch from entering the basements, even in the middle of the night – during the early days the rescue work continued around the clock
– and hauling the bodies out onto the sidewalks. All the victims were searched for
personal papers which could throw light on their identity. If the identity could be
established beyond doubt, it was written onto a yellow serial-numbered card which
was fastened with a skewer to the corpse. In addition to this, the girls were required
to open up the clothing of the unidentified victims and cut samples from the blouses
and undergarments, parts of which were pinned to the bodies, the remainder being
inserted in the envelopes of personal effects. Unidentified bodies were serial-numbered with red cards to avoid confusion.
For the RAD girls the most heart rending task was that of processing their own
colleagues. In the big hostel in Weisse Gasse, for example – a narrow street hard by
the Altmarkt – the basement was crowded with ninety girls, all of whom had died.
‘The girls sat there as though stopped in the middle of a conversation,’ described the
leader of the squad which first reached the hostel basement.‘They looked so natural,
even though they were dead, that it was hard to believe that they were not indeed
alive.’ (The communist German version puts a subtly different accent on this episode.‘In the Weisse Gasse many girls enrolled as tram-conductresses had been killed.
As the cellar was not safe, the girls had begged to be allowed to go home or to safer
basements.The leader of the hostel was a fanatical Nazi, and he forced them to stay in
the cellar for disciplinary reasons, and all of them were killed be high explosive
bombs that penetrated. The mutilated and shattered corpses of these girls were beyond identification.’) ‘They were all carried upstairs,’ continued the squad-leader’s
description, ‘and loaded onto wagons. That was about three days after the raids. As
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
one of the girls was being loaded onto a truck, a decontamination official noticed a
slight movement. She was taken to the hospital, where eight days later she recovered
consciousness. It was only eight days after that that she regained her memory.’
Many people must in fact have been buried alive. A man who was knocked unconscious by a near miss when he was sheltering near the Grosser Garten came to his
senses only as he was being carried on a wagon, under a layer of several corpses.
‘For the first three days,’ wrote one of the soldiers brought into the city from the
Neustadt barracks, ‘we just looked for survivors.’ He had fought on many battlefields
in this war, but he had seen nothing before like what he now saw searching through
the basements between the Altmarkt and the Post Office square. ‘My unit found only
about twenty people still alive and we took them down to the ships on the Elbe. We
noticed that all those we were able to save had been lying flat, while those who were
sitting and standing were all asphyxiated.’ In the few days that followed, his unit
recovered over one thousand corpses just from the cellars in the little area between
the Altmarkt and the Post Office square (mainly from Waisenhaus Strasse.) ‘How
many dead we got out in the three weeks I was doing this, I can’t estimate,’ he would
write. ‘And there were many, many such units from the Wehrmacht and other organisations.’
v
v
v
The Allied prisoners too entered into rescue operations with enthusiasm, developing their own primitive listening gear, driving gas pipes into the cellars to listen
for sounds of life and to provide air supplies for any survivors.Their working day was
between twelve and fourteen hours, the same as the German labourers. In several
cases however there were scenes of violence as the population vented its bitterness
on the helpless prisoners. They did not object to Germans being rescued alive by
Allied prisoners, but somehow it irked them to see their enemies handling their
dead. To the prisoners it was much the same whether they were recovering victims
alive or dead. It was in fact easier to salvage the dead ones, because they needed
handling less carefully. One British soldier, a veteran of the battle at Arnhem, was
clearing the entrance to a cellar when he saw a projecting arm. He thoughtlessly gave
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
it a tug and it come off in his hands. From seemingly nowhere a group of angry
Germans appeared and beat him up.
Some ten days after the triple blow Hanns Voigt, directing the VNZ dead persons’
section, was summoned by the squad leader of one SHD unit to a building near
Pirnaischer Platz: a group of Romanian soldiers was refusing to go down into one of
the basements. They had freed the steps leading to it, but clearly something out of
the ordinary had happened inside. The workers clustered sullenly around the basement entrance as Voigt, wishing to set an example, marched down the steps to the
cellar, an acetylene lamp in his hand. He was reassured by the lack of the usual smell
of putrescence. The bottom steps were however slippery. He took a pole and stirred
the darkness of the cellar entrance.The cellar floor, he found, was covered by a thick
liquid mishmash of blood, flesh and bone. A small high explosive bomb had penetrated four floors of the building and exploded here in the basement.Voigt instructed
the SHD officer not to attempt to recover any of the victims, but to spread chlorinated lime over the inside of the basement and leave it to dry out. An interview with
the Hausmeister (superintendant) of the building yielded the information that there
would have been two to three hundred people down there on the night, there had
always been that many during previous air raid alerts.
In Seidnitzer Strasse equally gruesome scenes presented themselves to the recovery teams. Even hardened old battle veterans could not take the strain for long. Two
men working on the recovery of bodies from the basements here refused to carry
on. They were ordered by their squad leaders to return to work, but again declined
to comply. Both were executed on the spot by a Party official.The bodies were loaded
onto the same horse drawn wagons as the putrefying bodies of the air raid victims.
Large mounds of corpses on the streets marked the numerous cinemas and hostelries in the city where the people had collected in their hundreds on the carnival
evening of the attack. At the time of the beginning of the first air raid the movie
theatres and playhouses had still had another hour to run; many thousands had been
trapped in them as the first bombs fell. In the basement of the Augustinus Keller, a
tavern in the Waisenhaus Strasse, some six hundred victims were found. ‘The whole
street was piled high with rubble up to the next storey,’ wrote one of the soldiers
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
engaged in recovery the bodies. ‘Entry to the cellars was possible only from the
other side fronting onto the Altmarkt.’ In the Rothe Bar not far from the Town Hall
a further sixty were found, and in the Johanneshof forty-four more victims.
The first thing that Voigt saw at the central railroad station was mounds of corpses
being stacked on the railway tracks in slabs some ten to twenty yards square and ten
feet high. The bodies of the soldiers who had been passing through the city or on
leave at the time were still being hauled out of the ruins and loaded onto wagons
standing on the squares outside, with all their heads pointing one way and their feet
the other. On the day he made his inspection the authorities released their first estimate of the number of victims at this station – between seven and ten thousand dead.
The survivors used every spare moment in the search for relatives. ‘I had some
good friends living in Moritz Strasse,’ wrote one man later. ‘I wanted to know what
had happened to them.When I reached the house however there was a half-full horsedrawn cart standing in front of it. The victims were being carried out of the cellars
on stretchers. Our friends too were among them, their bodies almost completely
decayed but their clothes still recognizable.The smell made me feel ill, but I held on.
The men hoisted up the stretchers and tipped the bodies onto the cart. Slurp! – That
was the sound made by the bodies of my friends as they slithered on top of the
others. That was their farewell. Can you imagine what that meant for me?’
It was one thing for a man to be the unwilling witness of the disposal of the remains
of his friends. For those who were detailed to undertake the recovery of the tens of
thousands of victims, to search them, to docket and identify them, and finally to
remove and bury them, the work began as a duty, but became a living nightmare.
v
v
v
The further the salvage operations were pressed into the centre of the city the
more hopeless seemed the ideal of total registration of all victims. Finally the salvage
squads were restricted by the sheer size of the task to removing wedding rings and
obtaining cloth-samples of all the garments worn by each victim. As the danger of
typhus epidemics grew, the previous system of leaving each victim out for inspection
was dispensed with. The victims were removed immediately after being dug out. In
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Dresden’s Leuben suburb Hanns Voigt had within a few weeks perfected an indexing
system simple enough to be operated easily by his limited staff, yet comprehensive
enough to afford every inquirer a positive chance of learning the fate of relatives
On April the mayor of Dresden announced that as his Central Bureau of Missing
Persons was now the most comprehensive source of data about victims, casualties,
and survivors the inquiry of⁵ce formerly operated by the criminal police in the ministry of the interior building would be closed down. the police unit’s data and collection of salvaged property together with the personal effects should pouring from the
recovery-gangs, would be redirected to the Central Bureau, and thence to the dead
persons’ section run by Hanns Voigt.
He had set up four filing systems, each housing different data.
The first contained several thousand ‘garment-cards’, onto which were pasted inchsquare samples of all the clothing found on unidentified bodies together with details
of the location, date of finding, place of burial and the universal serial number; the
garment cards were filed according to the streets and house numbers, and kept available for searchers in filing cabinets in a hut erected at the end of the office’s garden
(because of the smell of decay still clinging to them). Using these cards it was possible to clear up well over one thousand missing persons’ cases, related Voigt years
later. ‘By the time of the capitulation we had almost twelve thousands of these cards
completed,’ he stated.
The second indexing system provided filing cards, again organised street by street,
on which were indexed the miscellaneous personal effects of unidentified victims
found in or outside buildings. With the aid of these cards friend and acquaintances
were again often able to identify the victims.
The third index considered of a simple alphabetical register of bodies definitely
identified by identity cards or other personal papers found on them. This list, said
Voigt, was one of the shortest and was finally closed on April , .
The four list was the most poignant, a list of wedding or engagement rings recovered from the bodies. They had been cut from the lifeless fingers to provide further
identification – German custom required the initials of the wearer to be engraved
inside each ring. It should not be thought that all these rings belong to women, of
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
course; German custom was for men to wear wedding rings as well. By May ,
related Voigt, he had collected between ten and twenty thousand of these gold rings,
stored in two gallon buckets in the ministry of the interior building on Königsufer.
Voigt’s recollection was that using these four indexing systems his section was able
to establish the identity of some forty thousand of the dead. Another figure, not too
widely different, was provided to this author by the city’s civil defence engineer,
who wrote: ‘The official number of identified dead was announced as , up to
the morning of May , .’
These figures may be taken as the absolute minimum death roll in Dresden. Both
are some five thousand more than the total death roll consistently claimed by the
Soviet Zone publications about Dresden in post war years, a curious feature about
which more will be said later.
Voigt’s work was never completed. As the result of premature intervention by
officials from Berlin, the identification work was several times halted and even dispensed with. Early in March an S.S. Kommando arrived from Berlin, presented itself at the VNZ office, announced that the identification work being conducted by Voigt’s section was holding up the burial procedures and increasing the
danger of epidemics; they demanded that the identification work be partially transferred to the burial sites themselves. This was a less satisfactory arrangement, because at these cemeteries the authority passed out of the hands of the VNZ officials
into the hands of others.
History relates that the last mortal remains of , of the air raids’ victims
found their last resting place on the Heidefriedhof cemetery outside the city, where
the principal monument to them, a simple, ugly stone slab, stands to this day. The
figure reflects literally only the number of heads counted by the salvage teams. The
chief gravedigger of this cemetery would later point out however: ‘The mutilated
and charred corpses whose heads had been burnt off or crushed could be no more be
included in the count than those who had been incinerated alive in the fire-storm,
and of whom nothing remained but a scattered pile of ashes.’ In fact the few victims
of the little American air raid of January were still being buried at this cemetery –
these having at least the dignity of coffins to lie in – when the February triple blow
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
struck the city. These earlier casualties were now forgotten in the flood of new victims that engulfed the burial grounds. The gravediggers, for the most part airmen
summoned from the radar training and flying school at Dresden Klotzsche airfield,
were instructed to bury the victims without coffins or shrouds. Mass graves were
rapidly excavated by bulldozers. The ⁵rst victims to arrive were granted a space of
ninety centimeters each, about three feet. But as the endless columns of trucks and
wagons rolled through the cemetery gates it soon became obvious that this was too
generous. Since all but one of the city’s fifteen hearses had been destroyed in the
raids the farmers and peasants from surrounding villages were ordered to bring their
teams of horses into Dresden for the task. At the same time a stream of individuals
arrived, wheeling their own dead up to the cemetery in the hope of giving them
some kind of decent burial. The trickle grew to a flood, and swelled to a torrent: the
bodies came by coal truck and by tram; nobody was offended if the dead arrived
wrapped in old newspapers or brown paper tied in string (the RAD female units
were supplied with the paper-bag stocks of a cement factory to pack the remains
into.)
The recovery squads had been affixing yellow cards to the identifiable bodies, and
red cards to all the others.The cemetery had been divided into four plots.The identified
victims were laid to rest in the mass graves dug out in plots A and B, and the rest
were buried in plots C and D. As the risk of typhus grew, so did the impatience of the
S.S. and police officials with the lengthy identification procedures.They had brought
columns of police trucks from Berlin to assist in carrying the casualties up to the
burial sites. Police officers now ordered a whole lorry load of corpses tipped straight
into a mass grave, leaving the burial troops to sort out the tangled mass of corpses
and limbs in order to restore at least some kind of order to this wild necropolis. It
became obvious that the three foot allowance for each corpse was too generous, and
soon the bodies were being packed shoulder to shoulder in the mass graves.With the
arrival of the police authorities from Berlin the orders were amended again so that
the corpses were now buried three layers deep. The Heidefriedhof, several square
miles in area, would have offered ample space for a proper burial of all the victims;
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
but the warmer weather was approaching and a smell of decay settled across the city
that warned the officials that it as time to think of the safety of the living.
v
v
v
The army erected barricades around the centre of the old city, the area thus cordoned off being a square bounded by streets about three blocks to either side of the
Altmarkt. At first nobody even guessed what the restricted zone was for. Then the
body recovery squads received a change of orders: the bodies were no longer to be
taken to the burial sites outside the city, but sent to a central collecting area in the
Altmarkt. Burial in the Heidefriedhof entailed long columns of corpse-laden wagons
trekking through the still heavily populated areas of Dresden Neustadt which had
received hardly a single bomb during the raids. The authorities did not wish the
population here to have to witness this demoralising spectacle.
Nothign was yet said about how else the tens of thousands of corpses being recovered from the ruins each week could be disposed of. Identification of the victims was
becoming chaotic. Mounds of unidentified corpses were accumulating at the some of
the cemeteries. At some cemeteries officials were able to achieve near-miracles – at
the Johannis cemetery in Dresden Tolkewitz for example the police unit leader was
able to complete identification procedures with nearly all the victims. But at other
sites the rapid accumulation of unidentified corpses gave rise to worrisome complications. S.S. officials who returned to the Heidefriedhof and saw a mound of three
thousand unburied victims ordered their summary burial without further attempts
at identification. The bodies were merely bulldozed into the prepared grave.
The early March weeks were chilly, but in the middle of the month the weather
changed and an inordinately warm spring sun beat down on the dead inner city. The
ruined buildings dried out, but hundreds of the crushed and blocked basements had
still not been opened even weeks later. Unusually large rats were seen scurrying
about amongst the ruins, their coats streaked with the white lime that had been
spread inside the wrecked buildings. Soldiers working late at night in the cordoned
off Dead Zone reported seeing rhesus monkeys, horses, and even a lion hiding in the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
shadows where they had been living and feeding since their circus cages had been
destroyed two months before.
The Altmarkt Square however was already seeing more fearsome scenes than oncecaged animals prowling in the darkness.
Wilfried von Oven, Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende (Buenos Aires), vol.ii.
James F Byrnes’ shorthand note of Plenary Session at Yalta, Feb , (H S Truman Libr.,
Independence, Missouri).
Völkischer Beobachter,Feb , passim.
Karl Bodenschatz, conversation overheard in CSDIC(UK) Report SRGG. (PRO fileWO./
…); and the same figure is given by Bodenschatz in conversation with Kurt Bassenge, May –,
(PRO file WO./).
Private conversation between lieutenant generals Kurt Dittmar and [NAME] Holste, Jun –,
, reported in CSDIC(UK) report GRGG. (PRO file WO./).
Colonel Edgar Petersen, Jul , : quoted in Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The
Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.iii, . These officials historians
could equally have quoted Bodenschatz or the two generals quoted above, but they chose not to.
Diary of Prof Theo Morell, Feb , ; transcribed and edited by David Irving.
Remarks of Major-General Hans Bruhn, CSDIC(UK) report, GRGG., Feb , (PRO
file WO./).
General Hans Rumpf in his memoirs, Der hochrote Hahn (Darmstadt, ), .
Hanns Voigt and several others.
Hans Schmall to the author, Jul , .
Margarete Führmeister, interview with the author on Jun , .
Magdalene Ludewig, of Pfäffikon, Zürich, to the author; and Eva Antons to the author, May ,
.
Georg Feydt, loc. cit; and Hanns Schmall to the author, Jul , .
Wilhelm Sander, in Züricher Stadt Anzeiger, Mar , .
Oberfeldmeister Dr phil Wolfgang Scheibe, Aufgabe und Aufbau des Reichsarbeitsdiensstes (Leipzig,
).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Margarete Führmeister, interview with the author, Jun .
Author’s interview with Rademann, Apr , .
Richard Pierau to the author, Jun , .
Hermann Völker, Donzdorf (Württ.), letter in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Mar , .
Hans Voigt to the author, Jun , and interview of Jun , .
Margarete Führmeister, interview with the author, Jun , .
Hermann Völker, loc. cit. He speaks of dead found in the ‘Waisenhauskeller.’
Seydewitz, loc. cit.
Georg Feydt, loc. cit.
Obergärtner Zeppenfeld, quoted by Seydewitz.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
They Shall Reap the Whirlwind
I
has grown that out of the chaos of the triple blow and the
tragedy of a hundred thousand families a measure of peace, order, and discipline
had returned to the ruined Saxon capital it should be made clear that within
barely two months the arrival of warmer weather had thrown the salvage work and
identification procedures into confusion. A new urgency hastened the steps of the
salvage gangs: the real danger of a typhus epidemic.
People searched for many days for missing relatives so that they could be spared
the indignity of mass burial in a common grave. But while they departed to search
for wheel barrows or carts to remove the bodies to a cemetery to bury them themselves, all too often the tidy-minded SHD squads had already dragged the bodies
away and they were already lying stacked onto a jolting cart under a pile of thirty
other decaying bodies making its way in procession along the Grossenhainer Strasse
to the pine forests north of the city. Who was right? The relatives who wanted a
decent burial, or the authorities whose duty it was to avoid epidemics and try to
speed up the identification work at the cemeteries? Many of those who saw the endless caravans of horse-drawn carts and trucks trundling northwards out of the city
must have silently vowed that they would never let their relatives be carried to their
last resting place like that.
‘On Markgraf-Heinrich Strasse three men spoke to me,’ recalled an evacuee from
Cologne who was in the city. ‘They were carrying between them a black overcoat on
which lay a body. One of them asked me what kind of building that used to be? I told
them it used to be a school but it was converted to a military hospital before the
raids. All; he could say then was, “I have to bury my wife. I might as well do it here.
N CASE THE IMPRESSION
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Later on I saw them hollowing out a shallow grave. There weren’t any coffins, and
the man seemed to be a stranger to the city.”’
Some people would not realise, complained the harassed Hanns Voigt, director of
the dead persons’ section of the VNZ , that they did not have a personal right to the
bodies of their next of kin. In some cases the relatives dug up the corpses from the
mass graves, and took them away to family tombs. Thus the statistical position was
confused still further.
One man provides another instance of the prevailing desire not to let the recovery
squads get hold of the remains of next of kin. ‘In order to spare her parents a massburial my sister-in-law first of all took her father out of the city on a wheelbarrow to
bury him and then returned for her mother. But in the meantime a recovery gang
had taken her away. Thus most of the people who died were spirited away and their
death certificates read, like that of her two parents, DECEASED IN DRESDEN FEBRUARY ,
.’
Some parents cracked under the strain of looking for lost children or husbands.
One mother had lost her whole family on this one night, and spent weeks outside her
ruined house asking passers-by if they had seen any trace of her two young children
or her husband: the eight year old boy, she said, had been wearing a cowboy suit and
the girl was dressed as an Indian squaw; both were on their way home from a carnival
party.
Such was the effect of the triple blow on Dresden in terms of human suffering.
Analysed in statistical detail it was no less impressive. In so far as the attacks on
Dresden had been designed to destroy the residential areas of the city and to make it
impossible for the German army to billet soldiers in the town, the raids might indeed be described as a shattering success. One secret British assessment concluded
that the raids had seriously damaged twenty-three percent of the city’s industrial
buildings and heavily damaged fifty-six percent of the non-industrial buildings; this
assessment described , of the city’s dwelling units as demolished, , as
temporarily uninhabitable, with , more suffering minor damage. Sir Arthur
Harris, writing in his memoirs, would later suggest that ‘the area of devastation –
, acres – was considerably less than that in Hamburg.’ The British Bombing
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Survey Unit, basing its figures on aerial photography, estimated that , acres of
the ‘built-up (target) area’ had been destroyed.
In November however the Dresden city planning office completed its own
detailed survey of the damage and listed , acres as more than seventy-five percent destroyed; a further , acres outside this central area were more than twentyfive percent destroyed. Of the , residential buildings in the Dresden area, it
found only , undamaged. Expressed in terms of homes and apartments, of the
, living units, over ninety thousand were destroyed or rendered totally uninhabitable by the attacks. Expressed in terms of area, ,, square feet of living
space were completely destroyed, and ,, square feet had been moderately
damaged. Expressed in the dry terms in which German air raid statisticians excelled,
while by comparison in Munich there were · cubic yards of rubble per citizen, in
Stuttgart there were · cubic yards, in Berlin · and in Cologne , in Dresden,
for each of the citizens including those killed in the raids, there were fifty-six cubic
yards of rubble – more than eleven truckloads of rubble per inhabitant.
The police chief’s report on the damage gave more substance to these figures. By
early March Colonel Thierig had listed , residential buildings (not ‘homes’) as
totally destroyed, with a similar total of buildings heavily, less seriously, and slightly
damaged.) The raids had totally destroyed twenty-four banks and twenty-six insurance companies (including every one in the city centre), thirty-one department stores,
shops, sixty-four warehouses, two market halls, thirty-one major hotels including the famous Hotel Bellevue, and twenty-six hostelries. The Kristall-Eisfabrik und
Kühlspeicher in Magdeburger Strasse, the biggest cool-store in the Reich, was seriously damaged. The municipal slaughterhouse – the Slaughterhouse Five of which
Kurt Vonnegut would so movingly write – was badly damaged.
Further wrecked were sixty-two headquarters buildings including those of the
Nazi Party’s gauleiter (of Saxony) and Kreisleiter (of Dresden), the finance ministry
of Saxony, the provincial court and court of appeal, the old technical university, and
the Labour Front building; serious damage had been inflicted on the Saxon ministry
of the interior, the city hall and museum, the police headquarters, the prison, and
the new technical university. Besides Gottfried Semper’s famous Opera, three the-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
atres had gone up in flames – the Central Theatre, the Comedy House, and the Theatre of the People; the State Theatre and the world famous Circus Sarassani were
badly damaged. Sixteen movie theatres, eleven churches, six chapels, nineteen hospitals and clinics, six consulates (Finland, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Denmark, Hungary),
and one zoo and thirty-nine schools had been destroyed (with thirty-three more
schools badly damaged).
Irreplaceable architectural monuments had also been ruined including three palaces, the old city hall, the Zwinger (also designed by designed by Gottfried Semper),
the new Art Gallery, four museums, and the former Residence Church; the world
famous Green Vaults art gallery, architectural gems by Schinkel, and the Albertinum
with its priceless collection of sculptures and the art academy of arts had also perished in the flames.
The damage to the city’s infrastructure appeared insurmountable. Five hundred
kilometres of sewers and canals had been destroyed, , bomb craters remained
to be filled, and ninety-two kilometres of tram wires had been torn down;
streetcars and trailers had been completely wrecked, more damaged in varying
degree. (This latter statistic is perhaps illuminating. The tram cars could be considered to have been evenly distributed across the city at the time of the attack; yet
while in the whole week-long Battle of Hamburg in six hundred tram cars had
been damaged, in Dresden had been damaged in a single night.)
Less serious was the damage to the industrial section of the city. Here recovery
was swift, according to the post war interrogation of the German armaments minister Albert Speer.
The damage might at first have appeared mortal: of the twelve vital services and
power installations in the city only one had not been damaged; in fact the permanent
damage to power, gas, and water plants was found (according to the final police
report) to be slight, with total destruction only to the water pumping station in the
Grosser Garten, and serious damage only to one power station and two gasholders.
There was more than enough to supply the surviving population were it not for the
devastation of the underground gas, water, and power distribution networks.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
By February most of Dresden Neustadt was supplied with power again, and as
the swift resumption of the outlying tram services indicates most of the suburbs
were with electricity again within one week of the raids. The centre of the tramway
network had been punched out by the raids, with percent of the overhead lines
down and nearly two hundred streetcars smashed where they halted as the sirens
sounded.
By February however electric tram services had been resumed between the
Industrial Estate,Weixdorf, and Hellerau; between Weissig and the Mordgrundbrücke
bridge, soon to be extended into the devastated city itself; between Mickten and
Coswig; between Cossebaude and Cotta; and between Niedersedlitz and Kreischka.
On the Elbe stray bombs had sunk two steamships, one motor launch, five barges,
two houseboats, two dredgers and various other craft. To compensate for the total
destruction of the tram service across the inner city, an improvised shuttle service of
Elbe river-steamers was operated between Pieschen and Laubegast, between Blasewitz
and the old city, and between Dresden and Bad Schandau and Pirna; these services
were timed to connect with local tram services in the suburbs.
The industrial areas had been scarcely damaged in comparison with the rest of the
city, and of the major industrial plants in Dresden only the Zeiss-Ikon optical works
in Striesen was seriously damaged, according to the final police report, and could
not anticipate a date for production to resume; the works, in the area bounded by
Schandauer Strasse, Kipsdorfer Strasse, and Glashütter Strasse was just under three
miles east of the city centre, and on the fringe of the area of total devastation; it is
believed that Zeiss-Ikon was not able to resume production before May .
Of the other industrial installations none was totally destroyed, were badly
damaged, twenty-eight less seriously damaged, and thirty-five slightly damaged.Typical of the first category was the Saxon Serum Works, which had been knocked out of
production for the time being, others, reported the police chief, were expected to
resume fifty to one hundred percent operations within three to six weeks.
The two Sachsenwerk plants manufacturing electronic components in DresdenNiedersedlitz (five miles south-east of the city centre) and Radeberg (nine miles to
the north-east) had not been hit by explosive bombs; the Niedersedlitz plant was hit
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
by a few stray incendiaries which were tackled by the works’ fire-watchers, and
suffered only glass damage. On the morning after the triple blow, few of the staff of
this plant reported for work, and there was at first no electric power or gas supply.
The employees of the Sachsenwerk plants however suffered surprisingly few casualties: although all records relating to the plant were destroyed before the end of the
war, senior staff have reported that certainly fewer than three hundred of the five
thousand employees failed to arrive for work within a week and were assumed to
have been killed; of the eighty employees in the machine tool department, for example, all without exception reported for work within that time.
The explanation of this apparently remarkable resilience is in fact simple. On the
one hand, few of the Niedersedlitz plant’s workers lived in the town area, the majority having been recruited from over eighty surrounding villages; on the other
hand, the areas of total devastation in Dresden embraced the middle-class suburbs,
but left the working-class areas of Neustadt, Striesen, Löbtau, Friedrichstadt, Mickten,
and Pieschen more or less undamaged.
Similarly, the Zeiss-Ikon Goehlewerk fuse-factory in Grossenhainer Strasse, Dresden Neustadt, probably the only factory built in Dresden with the possibility of an
air raid in mind, was undamaged, as was the Industrial Estate on the site of the
former Arsenal in Dresden Neustadt. All of these plants and factories suffered of
course from the immediate indirect effects of an air raid: loss of power supplies,
demoralisation and depletion of labour forces, and shortage of transport. But in no
case except that of the Striesen Zeiss-Ikon works was the physical damage to plant
overwhelming.
v
v
v
How many had died in the Dresden fire-storm? In view of the controversy surrounding the total, it is worth quoting here the relevant paragraph of the “final report’ signed by Colonel Wolfgang Thierig, chief of staff to Dresden’s police chief, on
March , :
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
CASUALTIES: as of early March , : , dead, , seriously injured,
, lightly injured; , people homeless and long-term evacuees.
Not yet possible to break down the casualties by sex in view of the on-going
difficulties (departure of large sections of the population, transfer of a large part
of the injured to outside, complete carbonisation or putrefaction of the corpses).
By far the larger number are however women and children.
According to the criminal police it will prove possible in time to identify about
half the victims. From what has been seen so far the majority of the dead in or
outside the air raid rooms died directly or indirectly by the effect of fire or being
buried alive.
The police report noted that the second night raid had resulted in heavy casualties
in the open streets and parks. ‘On the basis of previous experience and determinations made during salvage operations the overall total of dead including foreigners is
now put at around ,.There are still probably many thousands under the masses
of rubble particularly in the city centre, and these cannot be recovered at all at present.
Precise determinations of the death toll will be possible only when the Missing Persons and Registration bureaux of the police authority have established which people
had left Dresden. There are currently about , listed as missing with the Missing Persons bureau and the city authority.’
There were only about one hundred dead from the armed forces counted so far;
the figure was low in consequence of orders placing the city off limits.
v
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v
At about the time that Thierig signed this report, a month after the air raids, the
order was given that all mass burials were to cease. Dresden’s newspaper carried a
special decree signed by the police president as district civil defence director: ‘Special circumstances constrain me to point out that entering areas outside the paths
already reopened to the public is strictly forbidden. Anybody encountered elsewhere
who cannot satisfactorily explain his purpose and establish his identity will be regarded as a looter and treated accordingly, even if nothing suspicious is found on his
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
person.’ Army, police, and Volkssturm patrols had been issued with these instructions, the notice continued; people who wished to go digging for their own property
were earnestly warned to report first to the appropriate police station for a guide.
Several weeks earlier the police authorities had already decided to adopt a measure
more dreadful than had been employed at any other stage of the British area bombing offensive. The remaining victims, and there were still thousands being dug out
each day, would no longer be carried to the pine forests and mass burial sites any
longer. The danger of spreading epidemics by these long caravans of decaying bodies
loaded onto carts was too great.
The whole of the city centre around the Altmarkt had already been cordoned off.
relatives who stumbled across the still-impassable streets of the inner city were waved
away by police and Party officials. Wagon loads of corpses were now being driven to
the frontiers of this cordoned area by SHD and forced labourers, and there handed
over to army drivers and officers. The wagons were driven on to the centre of the
Altmarkt, and there their terrible loads were tipped onto the cobbled paving.
Scores of police officials were at work here, making last efforts to identify the
people, and sworn to secrecy about what was happening. The Steel girders had been
winched out of the ruins of the Renner department store on the Altmarkt and these
had been laid across crudely collected piles of sandstone blocks. A gigantic grill over
twenty-feet long was being erected. Under the steel girders and bars were poked
bundles of wood and straw. On top of the grill were heaped the corpses, four or five
hundred at a time, with more straw between each layer. The soldiers trampled up
and down on top of this rotting heap, straightening the victims, trying to make room
for more, and carefully building the stack. Many of the dead children sandwiched
into these terrible pyres were still wearing the colourful carnival clothes that they
had donned so eagerly two weeks before.
Finally gallons of gasoline, sorely needed though it was throughout the whole Reich,
were poured over the stacks of victims. A senior of⁵cer cleared the Altmarkt square
of all unnecessary by-standers, and set a match to the heap. Once again thick black
smoke coiled up from the centre of the Dresden Altmarkt – as it had two weeks
before, and as it had indeed in : history records how almost six hundred years
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
earlier the Margrave of Meissen, Frederick II, had had his enemies burned at the
stake here in the Altmarkt; they were the Jews, accused of introducing the Plague. By
a cruel coincidence the burning had also fallen on Shrove Tuesday carnival day.
In the late hours of the evening the grill was re-erected over a different part of the
square. Nazi Party of⁵cials saw to it that the ashes and charred bones were collected
and taken to the cemeteries to be buried too.
In spite of their attempts to keep secret the fate of the victims who had been swallowed up by the ruined emptiness of the inner city, the story did leak out. Some
citizens, probably risking their lives, made their way to the Altmarkt to check on the
rumours. One man, Walter Hahn, a veteran photographer who had spent his life
capturing this ‘Florence of the Elbe’ and the surrounding countryside on film, obtained an of⁵cial pass signed by the gauleiter on February , and took a score of
photographs of the infernal scene in black and white and colour – photographs which
helped belay the allegations that the ‘mass funeral pyres’ were a product of Dr
Goebbels’ propaganda.
It took several small horse drawn carts and ten large trucks with trailers to carry
the ashes to the Heidefriedhof cemetery. Here the ashes of several thousand of the
victims who had thus been publicly cremated were buried in a pit twenty-⁵ve feet
long and sixteen feet wide. In Colonel Thierig’s report signed in mid March is this
paragraph confirming the numbers cremated by that date:
Because of the rapid decomposition of the bodies and the exceptional difficulties
encountered in recovering them as well as the lack of suitable transport to convey
them to the cemeteries, the approval of the Gauleiter [Martin Mutschmann] and
the city authority was obtained to cremate altogether , bodies on the Altmarkt.
The ashes of the victims were transported to a cemetery. Ownerless air-raid and
travel-baggage and valuables were also salvaged by the local civil defence director.
It was not in fact the first time that the suggestion had been mooted to cremate air
raid victims in public squares to speed the salvage operations. The report of the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
police president of Hamburg on the ⁵restorm there also described how ‘to prevent
epidemics and for reasons of morale it was decided to burn the bodies at the site
where they had been found or in the fire-storm area. But after due deliberation it
was determined that there was no risk of an epidemic so burial was resumed in
common graves.’
v
v
v
Raids on Berlin, on the Ruhr cities and on other industrial centres – these the
German leaders were prepared to accept as necessary and inevitable. But the ‘barbarians’ who had delivered the attacks on Dresden with such fearsome results encouraged some of the most powerful invective of the Party leaders. Dabbing at his
eyes Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring told interrogators, ‘It was terrible. The people of Dresden could not believe that you would bomb their city, because they thought
that Dresden was too well known as a cultural center.’
Dr Goebbels had seen Hitler for three-quarters of an hour on February , the day
after the raids, at : P.M. He had even demanded that Hitler stand Göring before
the People’s Court for negligence; but Hitler, who still had a soft spot for his air
force commander, weakly refused. On February Goebbels then proposed that
Germany formally repudiate the Geneva Convention (which Stalin had never signed
anyway). Why else should Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s pilots feel they could murder
with impunity? They should start executing Allied prisoners: one for each air raid
victim.
At first Hitler endorsed the proposal. Several people claimed the credit for preventing the plan from being implemented. Hitler told Goebbels later that he had
allowed Himmler, Keitel, and Bormann to talk him out of it. Goebbels’ chief propaganda speaker Hans Fritzsche stated afterwards that Hitler had decided to kill ‘forty
thousand’ Allied prisoners in retaliation for the bombing of Dresden – a clear indication of the kind of death-roll that had been notified to Hitler on a one-for-one
basis. But Baron Hans von Steengracht, who gave Ribbentrop the credit for staying
Hitler’s hand, put the figure higher, stating: ‘He prevented Hitler from slaughtering
eighty thousand American prisoners of war. After Dresden was bombed Goebbels
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
went to Hitler and said, “From now on one American must be killed for every German.”’ Steengracht warned Ribbentrop of this conversation, and Ribbentrop said:
‘Over my dead body,’ and went straight to see Hitler.
Dr Goebbels, the Reich propaganda minister, was left only with the destruction of
Dresden as a propaganda weapon. ‘It is the work of lunatics,’ he wrote. ‘It is the work
of one particular lunatic who recognizes that he lacks the ability to build mighty
temples, and so is determined to show the world that at least he is an expert in their
destruction. How can this wanton hooliganism against the irreplaceable treasures of
European civilisation be otherwise explained, except as the inferiority complex of a
man who is leader of a nation that has not produced one single famous architect, or
one sculptor of supreme power and vision, but only artists who are at best also-rans
in the compass of European art? This man can claim the bitter record of having deliberately and spitefully destroyed more treasures in the last few years of this war
than his country has been able to produce in its entire history. Not even a thousand
years to come will purify him of this guilt. Only when the dust and debris of this war
have settled, only when the misery has ebbed away, only when nations can one day
sine ira et studio draw up a balance sheet on this war, will people be able to perceive in
all their clarity the wickedness and perversity of this chapter in an altogether hideous world conflagration, and realise how mean and petty were the minds of those
who wrote it.’
The Dresden raids persuaded Goebbels to adopt one radical change in his propaganda tactics. Previously his attitude had been to put a hermetic seal around every
blitzed city to prevent the escape of details which might harm public morale. In one
widely reported remark he had said that he would ‘build a wall around the Ruhr with
its blitzed cities if there were no such things as telephones and letters.’ (This echoed
British government policy in the early s when the prime minister had asked
newspaper editors to play down air raid horror stories, while concentrating on the
human angle of the heroism of the rescue workers.) However just as the Allies had
soon learned the propaganda value of the brutal Luftwaffe raids, so Dr Goebbels too
was now beginning to realise the profit to be drawn from the Allied offensive. When
Coventry had been bombed the newspapers were permitted to give great promi-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
nence to stories of the massacre in the centre of the city; in the same year great
publicity had been accord to the (totally untrue) statement of the Dutch government in exile that the Nazi attack on Rotterdam in May had ‘brutally killed
thirty thousand civilians.’ (The figure was less than nine hundred). The Allied public
was rightly incensed at this Nazi Schrecklichkeit and not really satisfied until they
learned that the R.A.F. and the U.S. Army air forces were delivering raids on a
comparable scale.
Dr Joseph Goebbels’ sister-in-law Ello Quandt had, like Hitler’s half-sister Angela
Hammitsch, spent the night of the Allied raids in the outskirts of Dresden; thus he
had first hand reports about the catastrophe. Hitler certainly received a vivid letter
from Angela describing the horrors of that night. A few days later Das Reich, certainly
with Goebbels’ consent, published an account which left little to the imagination,
and which would have been unthinkable in or . ‘Tens of thousands who
lived and worked under the towers of the ancient city have been buried in mass
graves without even an attempt at identification having been possible.’ Many, the
article continued, had died swiftly of suffocation as the fire-storms consumed the
oxygen; the city had housed around a million souls that night, including several hundred thousand refugees, blitz victims, and evacuees in addition to the , inhabitants. After describing the four raids in some detail, Das Reich added, ‘Those are
the four acts of a coolly calculated murder- and destruction plan.’ The city centre
was totally destroyed, the report stated, with not a single building left standing and
not a living soul either, except those looking for the dead and missing.
Later in March Magda Goebbels paid a visit to the city. Here she visited her
sister-in-law and bosom friend Ello Quandt at her sanatorium on the Weisser Hirsch.
‘The new weapons will be our salvation,’ Magda remarked; then she sighed and admitted: ‘No, I’m talking nonsense. There’s nothing else. Germany’s defeat is only a
matter of weeks.’ A day or two after Magda’s return from Dresden, Goebbels set in
motion a cleverly designed campaign of whispers calculated to galvanize the German
people into a last horrified stand against the Allied invaders. For this purpose he
appears – though there is as yet no proof – to have started a rumour wildly exaggerating the death roll in Dresden.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
It is first necessary to consider the atmosphere in Berlin at this time. As propaganda
minister, it was Dr Goebbels’ wont to hold a morning ministerial conference every
day at eleven o’clock, at which strategy was discussed. At his conference on March
, he was especially bitter about the Reich Press Chief Dr Otto Dietrich,
whose censorship of perfectly acceptable atrocity stories against the Allies was beginning to irk him. ‘I often think we are dealing with idiots,’ he announced to his staff.
‘The British have got away with their fairy story about how we cut off children’s
hands in Belgium in front of the whole world. But we are lumbered with people in
responsible positions who are too prudish to release a proven fact for publication,
because they think the hair raising stories might lower the world’s opinion or our
veracity.’
‘I really am coming round to the view that what we lack in our propaganda system
is the Jewish element,’ he continued. ‘They are able to make an elephant out of every
fly. We however go to great pains to make out that the elephants who are trampling
down our people in the east and west are harmless little insects. Where is the German Ilya Ehrenburg who will transport the German people into a paroxysm of fanatical nationalism? We haven’t got one. We have a “Reich Press Chief.” Well, from
now on things are going to be different.’
That evening Hitler relieved Otto Dietrich of his post. Dr Goebbels had already
begun his propaganda machinations. Years later, a one-page document of unknown
provenance surfaced in west and east Germany, purporting to be the typescript copy
of an extract from the police chief’s report on the Dresden raids. It was dated ‘March
, ’ and headed ‘Order of the Day No ’. Most likely it had been drafted for
certain Berlin officials who could be relied on not to keep their tongues still. Not so
far () found in the original, and bearing no authenticating stamps or signatures,
this document gave the death roll in Dresden as ,. ‘In order to combat the
wild rumours the following is a brief extract from the final report of the police chief
of Dresden on the four raids of February , , and , .’ It concluded: ‘By the
evening of March , , dead, primarily women and children, and been
recovered. It is to be assumed that the total will reach ,. Only some thirty
percent of the dead could be identified.The regular police in Dresden (Schutzpolizei)
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
had seventy-three dead, and are missing who must mainly be presumed dead. As
the removal of the dead could not be effected fast enough, , dead* were cremated and their ashes interred in a cemetery. As the rumours greatly exceed reality,
public use can be made of these figures.The casualties and damage are grave enough.’
This document was not seen until after the war. It would be possible to dismiss it as
a crude post-war forgery along the lines of the famous ‘Göring’s last letter to Mr
Churchill’, were it not that with the minor exception of the casualties suffered by
the Dresden police all of the other data provided in the Grosse document tally exactly with those in Colonel Thierig’s secret report dated March , , the police
chief’s report retrieved by the communist authorities in : the times that the
raids began and ended, the police estimates of the numbers of H.E. and fire bombs
dropped, the precise numbers of banks, hotels, etc., destroyed or damaged. The
conclusion is clear: Whoever drafted the Grosse ‘Order of the Day’ had the original
Thierig document in front of him. It was, as stated, an ‘extract’. The Thierig document does not appear to show any signs of tampering, and it is moreover corroborated by extracts in finance ministry files in the west German archives.
Who was Colonel Grosse, who signed the ‘Order of the Day’? Colonel Gerhard
Gustav Hermann Grosse was the small, Junkerish, moustached chief of staff to Dresden’s Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei (commander of regular police); deeply religious
and not a member of the S.S., he had turned fifty-three on the morning after the
British raids. He had suffered losses of his own already: one son, Reinhold, had been
killed on the eastern front in July , another, four year old, son would be killed a
few weeks after the Dresden raids when Russian planes strafed his convoy of staff
cars as it pulled out of Dresden on the last day of the war. Grosse’s elegant, educated
wife Eva recalls her husband reporting every day to her on the mounting death roll,
the figure mounting by ‘some ten thousand a day,’ in her recollection twenty years
later. Grosse said to her that the final figure would be over a quarter-million – he said
this many times and it was later well imprinted on her recollection. It was his duty to
draft the overall report; General Karl Mehnert, the city’s commandant, was more
detached from these things.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Where did the Grosse report come from? It seems most likely that it was developed or adapted as a ploy by the propaganda ministry, although no overt propaganda
use of its statistics was made either then or later. The format of a document disseminated ‘to quell rumours’ conforms closely with propaganda circulars put out after
earlier air raid catastrophes – e.g. after the raids on Hamburg in . However even
this does not necessarily mean that the figures in Grosse’s ‘Order of the Day’ were
deliberately exaggerated: the figure contained in the propaganda ministry’s report
after the Hamburg raids was ,, substantially less than the final official death
toll.
v
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v
On May , Hanns Voigt of the VNZ’s dead persons’ section was summoned to
the criminal police headquarters in the Saxon ministry of the interior and instructed
to take over the stores of valuables and the buckets of wedding rings. The highranking Nazi officials in the city were apparently covering their tracks and heading
west. Seven or eight large buckets of wedding rings, mostly gold, had been collected
from all over the city.Voigt declined to accept responsibility for the valuables, worth
over a million pounds even then; they were still waiting on the right bank of the river
when the Russians arrived in the city two days later, on May . Professor Fetscher, a
local communist leader, went across the bridges with a white flag to greet the ‘liberators’; he was cut down by a salvo of machine gun bullets from the advancing Russian
troops. It was the last day of the war.Truly it could be said that the total destruction
of Dresden had not hastened its fall by one day.
Red Army officials moved into the ministry buildings and the complete collection
of valuables including the wedding rings was transported without further ado as
booty to the Soviet Union. Plundered too were the priceless collections of paintings,
including the Sistine Madonna which had survived the air raids in a railroad tunnel.
The three hundred and more clerks working in the VNZ organisation in DresdenLaubegast were evicted from their offices and all identification work ceased. Hanns
Voigt was instructed to remove the office and its records to new quarters in the
Dresden Leuben town hall. He was permitted to retain three clerks. Inevitably all
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
attempts at registering new victims ceased, and the work of Voigt’s staff devolved on
further processing the eighty to ninety thousand index cards he had collected for the
known and unknown victims during the months following the raids.
The Red Army took over the former offices of the dead persons’ section in Laubegast
and with their characteristic contempt for order had turned loose a score of stolen
pigs in the shed housing the clothing cards which were the last hope for identifying
some eleven thousand victims. A few days later Voigt heard that the cards had been
burned because of their offensive smell. The Russians ransacked the filing cabinets,
vandalised the registers in their search for valuables, and made a lavatory in the
middle of the volumes of the indexing and registering system which they had shredded. Communication with the seven districts was broken off. Voigt disbanded the
dead persons department of Dresden’s Missing Persons Bureau on June , .
True to their insistence that the Allied air forces were not an effective weapon of war
the Soviet authorities refused to accept his estimate of the death roll – he put it at
, – and, according to him, ‘simply struck off the first digit’ to arrive at their
figure of thirty-five thousand dead.
The post-war communist mayor of Dresden, Walter Weidauer, adopted the lower
figure in his own otherwise authoritative book on the raids. In the manner at which
the communists were adept, he polemicized against Hanns Voigt, who was by then
living as a teacher living in western Germany. Voigt bitterly rued the day he was
drawn into the controversy. Weidauer’s figure was adopted by the west German
government too, in place of the , estimated by its own Federal Statistical Office,
and they have used it consistently after reunification in . The German government has also urged the Dresden city authorities to abandon the annual commemoration ceremonies.
v
v
v
As the figure for the Dresden death roll has been widely disputed since the end of
the war, this study would be incomplete without some attempt to arrive at a best
figure for the numbers of those killed in the raids. At the time of the attacks in
addition to its full peace time population of , citizens Dresden was housing
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
perhaps three of four hundred thousand, and probably even more, refugees from the
east. According to one news report issued from Germany on February there were
two and a half million people crowded into Dresden on the night of the raid, but this
may be an over-estimate.
By chance, as was described in an earlier chapter, the last officially organised refugee trains from the eastern provinces to Dresden had been unloaded only on the day
before the first of the three raids. The first of the refugee trains westward was not
planned to leave for some days. For this reason, just on that night the population was
at its highest. The city had no shelters, no sirens (after the first raid), no defences,
and no experience of raids on a scale anything like these.These factors, coupled with
the most violent fire-storm in history, must inevitably have caused casualties substantially greater than in Hamburg.
In the heart of Hamburg’s fire-storm area about one person in three had been
killed in the raids. In the Hamburg district of Hammerbrook, the fire-storm
had killed people per thousand inhabitants. In Pforzheim, later in February ,
the British fire-storm raid also killed nearly one person in three, about twenty thousand people. If a death roll on this scale was possible in Hamburg, a city where the
most elaborate precautions had been taken, it seems reasonable to assume at least
the same proportion of fatalities during the triple blow raid on Dresden, where the
raids did not take place over a week of anxious, alert days and nights as in Hamburg,
but suddenly descended on the city, taking it all unawares, within the space of fourteen hours. In Hamburg, those who were most likely to lose their nerve – those who
by getting in the way of the fire fighters or panicking might have increased the death
roll – had long been evacuated. Dresden however was overflowing with these very
evacuees from the other German cities.
As in Hamburg, the Dresden fire-storm had embraced the most densely populated
area of the city; of the , homes in the city centre (Dresden IV, including districts , , , and ) the November survey showed , homes totally destroyed; a Dresden inhabitant returning to the city after the raids was informed at
the VNZ office that of inhabitants in Seidnitzer Strasse registered with the police
on the night of the attack only eight were known to have survived; at No Seidnitzer
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Strasse, his former home, he was told that of twenty-eight inhabitants, only one had
survived; of No , next door, he was informed that all forty-two inhabitants had
been killed.These two examples are more than sufficient to show the crushing effectiveness of the Allied raids on Dresden.
Immediately after the raids there was the usual tendency – encouraged on this
occasion, we suspect, by Dr Goebbels – to exaggerate the number of casualties.
While official sources in Berlin put the death roll in Dresden between , and
,, and propaganda ministry officials spoke of a figure between two and three
hundred thousand, a few days later the figure was more modestly estimated by the
authority responsible for relief measures in blitzed cities as ‘between , and
, people lost.’ This figure, reached only very shortly after the raids, was
close to the assessment by Hanns Voigt of the dead person’s section, perhaps the
Dresden official best placed to know.
The first edition of this work published in April accepted Voigt’s estimate of
, dead as ‘the best estimate’, with the limits sets by the Berlin authority as the
degree of doubt in the figure.
The subsequent discovery of the Dresden police chief’s report, with its substantially lower figures, must inevitably cast doubt on these estimates: in April ,
three years after THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN was published, the director of the Dresden city archives wrote to the author from the Soviet zone of Germany to reveal that
the ‘original order’ of Lieutenant-Colonel Wolfgang Thierig, who was in the
police commandant of Dresden, had turned up; and that this eleven-page document
mentioned an interim death roll of , identified victims.The Thierig report was
relatively early however – though dated March it reported only the state of affairs
up to eight A.M. on March , ).
It is an important document nonetheless. Headed “Höherer S.S. und Polizeiführer
in the Gau Halle-Merseburg and Gau Saxony and Wehrmacht District IV, and
subheaded “Commander of the Regular Police” (Ordnungspolizei), this is the only
known final report on the four air raids on Dresden on February , , and .
That this east German document was authentic was confirmed beyond doubt by
the virtually simultaneous discovery in the West German government archives, among
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twenty-five thousand newly accessioned files of the Reich ministry of finance, of the
‘Situation Reports on Air Raids on Reich Territory’ dated between February and
April , . Situation Report No , dated March , , contained as a
supplement the police report already quoted, repeating precisely the same data including the then (March ) current death roll of ,, the estimated final total of
twenty-five thousand, and reference to the thirty-five thousand persons still missing. Despite the reproaches of the publisher of THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, William
Kimber, the author felt bound to submit to The Times an immediate letter drawing
attention to these new documents, notwithstanding that the figures they contained
were at variance with those in his book.
So how many did die in Dresden? The key element is probably, over and above the
identified death roll, the vast number of missing people which even the Dresden
police chief put at thirty-five thousand. The police president of Darmstadt, in his
report on the raids of September , stressed that in catastrophes of this scale very
often whole families were wiped out, leaving nobody to report anybody as missing;
the same would go for the refugees. It is unlikely that given the magnitude of the
Dresden catastrophe the police authorities could have conducted a realistic estimate
in the short space between the raids and the reporting date, March , when much
of the city was still under rubble and ruins that have, indeed, not been excavated to
this day.
Sixty thousand or more; perhaps a hundred thousand – certainly the largest single
air raid massacre of the War in Europe. (The raid was thus comparable with the fire
attack on Tokyo on the night of March –, , delivered by the Superfortresses
of the United States st Bombardment Command; here , were killed, while
in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima five months later , Japanese were slaughtered.)
There was one small comfort. Dresden was the last great city which could expect
such devastation. ‘At least,’ Goebbels consoled himself, ‘we can expect that the tragedy of Dresden can never be exceeded.’
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Kate Jaeschke, of Köln-Klettenberg, to the author, Mar , .
Günter Arnold to the author, May , .
Air Ministry, RE., ‘Area Attack Assessment: Dresden,’ undated, filed Oct , . Cited by
Walter F Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of the – February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF
Historical Division Archives).This document estimated the likely casualties in the raid between ,
and , killed.
These Nov statistics included of course the damage done to the city by all the attacks
including the later American attacks as well. As this was not the principal area hit by the U.S. Army Air
Forces on March , April , and April , , it is difficult to understand the lower figures given
in the British Bombing Survey Unit’s statistics.
See too Dokumente deutscher Kriegsschäden, published by the Bundesministerium für Vertriebene,
Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte, vol.i, Bonn .
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–). – , heavily damaged, , less seriously, and
, slightly damaged.
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–). – It is worth noting that the ratio of injured to dead
active police officers (:) was .; the ratio of injured to dead fire brigade police officers (:)
was .. The ratio of injured to dead civilians identified by early March (,:,) was
..These figures show a large degree of conformity. – Lieutenant-Colonel (GS)Werner Bühlmann,
who was chief operations officer of IV Army Corps HQ in Dresden, wrote to the author on Jul ,
that on returning three days after the raids to his post he found that half of his colleagues were
dead or missing. (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Walther Hahn made the photographs available to the author when he visited Dresden in ; he
also furnished duplicates of the colour transparencies – alas, duplicated on communist East German
stock, which has faded over the years. In return for exclusive rights to use the photographs in the
west, the author supplied Hahn with stocks of high quality photographic paper unobtainable in the
east.When the boxes of paper arrived in Dresden they were useless; they were marked: ‘This box has
been of⁵cially opened and exposed to light.’ On the morning after Hahn’s death a few years later the
People’s Police surrounded his villa and seized his entire photographic collection ‘for the people’.The
communist authorities of the Fototek (city photographic archives) marked the most gruesome negatives with a red cross, never to be published. ‘For you, Mr Irving, of course we make an exception,’
they said when he next visited the city in , before reunification. Hahn’s original colour transparencies had vanished without a trace in the interval; the author’s duplicates alone have survived.
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
S.S. Gruppenführer Kehrl, ‘Bericht des Polizeipräsidenten in Hamburg als örtlicher
Luftschutzleiter über die schweren Großangriffe auf Hamburg in Juli/August .’
Seventh Army interrogation SAIC/X/ of Hermann Göring.
Helmut Sündermann, Deutsche Notizen, ‘Feb ,’ ; Interrogation of Baron von Steengracht,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
CCPWE No., DI–, Jul ; and by US State dept., Sep , .
A news item in Basler Zeitung, Feb , . This adds that Goebbels abandoned the plan because
the BBC revealed details on Feb ; at his next ministerial conference he threatened to strangle the
culprit with his bare hands.
Diary, Mar , . – On this subject see Ribbentrop, Von London bis Moskau, f; Jodl to
Hitler, Feb , (ND: –D) and notes, Jan , (Jodl papers); William Scheidt’s notes in
Echo der Woche, Oct , ; and the testimonies of Helmut Sündermann, Baron Steengracht, and
Hitler’s stenographer Ludwig Krieger (IfZ, Irving collection). Kaltenbrunner also claimed credit for
thwarting JG, in conversation with Dr Hermann Neubacher. USFET MISC CI–RIR/, Feb ,
(NA file RG., entry , box b).
Fritzsche’s testimony reported in NewYork Times, Jun , .
Conversation between Steengracht and others, Jul , (CCPWE No., Report X–P.
(PRO ⁵le WO./).
Wilfred von Oven, loc. cit., –.
‘Der Tod von Dresden’, in Das Reich, Mar , .
Goebbels diary, Mar , .
Ebermayer & Meissner, Revue, No., Jun , .
This Order of the Day is also quoted by Max Seydewitz, loc. cit.
Typed copy of document, signed ‘Für den Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei. Der Chef des
Stabes, gez. Grosse. Oberst der Schutzpolizei,’ headed: ‘Dresden, den .. [corrected in handwriting into: ]. Der Befehlshaber der Ordnungspolizei. Tagesbefehl Nr..’ In the author’s possession (Author’s microfilm DI–).
HSSuPf Elbe in den Gauen Halle-Merseburg, Sachsen, und im Wehrkreis IV: Befehlshaber der
Ordnungspolizei, ‘Schlußmeldung über die vier Luftangriffe auf den LS-Ort Dresden am ., .
und . Februar ’, signed [Police colonelWolfgang] Thierig, Eilenburg, den . März (Dresden city archives) (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Chef der Ordnungspolizei, ‘Lagemeldungen über Luftangriffe auf das Reichsgebiet,’ Nr.,
Mar , (files of Reichsanzfinanzministerium, Bundesarchiv, R./) (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
Author’s interview of Eva Grosse, Munich, Jul , (Author’s microfilm DI–). Gerhard
Gustav Hermann Grosse himself, born Feb , , died in . She showed the author her hus-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
band’s military papers, testimonials, and letters while in captivity, and these showed certain similarities in words and phrasing with the ‘Tagesbefehl.’ – In Feb Dankwart Guratzsch, a Dresdenborn postgraduate student of history in Hamburg, wrote to Rolf Hochhuth stating that he had an
original copy of the Tagesbefehl; he had retrieved it on a visit to Dresden a few months earlier. It had
been found by a pupil of his father, who had been a member of Dresden’s police in Feb and Mar
(nd precinct, in Circus Strasse, in the centre between Stübel Platz and Pirnaischer Platz); it was a
typed original with several handwritten corrections. – I also received a copy from Walter Hahn.
Grosse’s figures were allegedly provided by Dr med Max Funfack, described as the deputy surgeon-general of Dresden. Funfack, still living in the Soviet zone, protested on January , at
finding his name dragged into the newspaper columns of west Germany as a witness for the death roll
figures. He claimed to have learned such figures at third hand only, and never to have been deputy
surgeon-general (stellv. Standortarzt). He will have had good reason in the Soviet zone to express
himself thusly. He did not however take the opportunity to repudiate the figures.
Circular by Gau Hessen-Nassau, No./, Aug (NA film, T, roll , f); based on
Propaganda Parole No., signed [Alfred-Ingemar] Berndt and [Werner] Wächter, Aug , (NA
film T, roll , f).
In a famous public altercation with the author, Fetscher’s son Iring Fetscher claimed it was the
S.S. who had murdered his father; not so, wrote his mother to the author, apologising for her son’s
public attack on the author.
Walter Weidauer, Inferno Dresden (West Berlin, ).
Voigt wrote the author an angry letter in August : ‘The figures for seriously or slightly
injured are pure fiction as they could never have been determined.… None of these gentlemen,’ he
added, referring to Grosse and Thierig, ‘who signed these protocols and final reports, was actually
there, in direct contact with the tragic circumstances.’ He pointed out too that quantities of Missing
Persons reports submitted to the police authorities were returned to him, unprocessed, in May and
June .
In a letter to Welt der Literatur on Feb , General Hans Rumpf, inspector of Germany’s
wartime fire-fighting services, declared that the estimated Dresden death-roll of , issued by the
Federal Statistical Office (Statistisches Bundesamt) seemed most likely to him; but Rumpf was himself the originator of this figure to the federal office.
Hans Sperling, German Federal Statistical Office, to the author, Apr , .
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Dr Walter Lange (Stadtarchiv Dresden) to Irving, Apr , (Author’s film DI–)
I had asked the Bundesarchiv in Dec to comment on Grosse’s ‘Order of the Day.’ The
archivist Dr Boberach kindly drew this new discovery to my attention in May . Boberach
(Bundesarchiv) to the author, May , (Author’s microfilm DI–).
Chef der Ordnungspolizei, ‘Lagemeldungen über Luftangriffe auf das Reichsgebiet,’ Nr.,
Mar , (files of Reichsanzfinanzministerium, Bundesarchiv, R./) (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
David Irving, letter: ‘The Dresden Raids,’ The Times, Jul , (Author’s microfilm DI–).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Part Five
THE SCAPEGOAT
The Reaction of the World
FEW MINUTES before nine A.M. on February , , even as the new
formations of Flying Fortresses were already heading out toward Dres
den, the first full length bulletin announcing the execution of the R.A.F.
attacks of the preceding night was released by the British Air Ministry.
In a statement describing the target in perhaps unusual detail, the ministry stressed
the importance of Dresden to the enemy. As the centre of a railroad network and as
a great industrial town it had become of the greatest value for controlling the German defences against Marshal Koniev’s armies.The telephone services and the means
of communication were almost as essential to the German army as the railroads and
roads which met in Dresden. Dresden’s buildings had been desperately needed for
troops and administrative offices evacuated from other towns, the bulletin added.
With rather less accuracy, the statement pointed out that ‘among other war factories, Dresden had large munitions workshops in the old Arsenal, and a great number
of light engineering works engaged in war production of all kinds.’ There were important factories making electric motors, precision and optical instruments, and
chemicals. The city was comparable in size with Manchester.
In its own secret weekly digest, which was not intended to have the same wide
circulation as the Air Ministry bulletins, Bomber Command was satisfied with de-
A
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
scribing Dresden in the vaguest terms, as a city which had developed into a target of
first class importance, and of high priority as a communications centre and control
point in the defence of the eastern frontier of Germany.
The news of the attacks was released to the public by the British Broadcasting
Corporation in its six P.M. news bulletin. This B.B.C. bulletin described the raid as
one of the more powerful blows promised by the Allied leaders at Yalta. ‘Our pilots
report that as there was little flak they were able to make careful and straight runs
over targets without bothering much about the defences. A terrific concentration of
fires was started in the centre of the city.’ It is of possible significance that the open
admission that the raids on Dresden had been promised to the Russians at Yalta was
omitted from the main nine o’clock news bulletin that night. The raids on Dresden,
referred to as ‘a great industrial city’ comparable with Sheffield, were now termed
an example of the ‘further close co-operation between the Allies.’
When the full extent of the Dresden tragedy became widely known throughout
the world, and especially after the British prime minister had penned his reproach to
the bomber commanders for the triple blow, as we shall see, the temptation and the
tendency were to imply that the Russians had requested the raids. The Soviet zone
authorities for their part did not, in the Cold War period, miss the opportunity of
exploiting the apocalypse in Dresden to generate anti-western propaganda in eastern and central Germany; it became an annual event, every February , for the
church bells to be run throughout the zone from : until : P.M., the duration
of R.A.F. Bomber Command’s first attack on the city. To the embarrassment of the
western Allies, this custom even spread for a while to West Germany and it was in an
attempt to discourage this development that the State Department announced in
Washington on February , , to forestall further demonstrations, that the ‘destructive wartime bombing of Dresden was done in response to Soviet requests for
increased aerial support and was cleared in advance with the Soviet authorities.’
While, as we have seen, this announcement did not fundamentally contradict the
facts, it was plainly hoped that either in time or in translation this statement would
be quoted as proof of a Russian demand for an attack on Dresden, and not just complicity. If this was indeed the hope, the Americans were not disappointed for by
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
February , the tenth anniversary of the raids, even responsible newspapers like
the Manchester Guardian were readily recalling the bombing of Dresden as an operation which had been ‘carried out by British and American planes as a result of the
Soviet request to attack this important communications centre.’
v
v
v
In Germany itself the first terse report appeared on February in the official
communiqué of the German High Command (OKW):‘FEBRUARY , : Last night
the British turned their terror-raids to Dresden.’ In the German national newspapers there was no further direct mention of the raids or their consequences until
after the beginning of March. German foreign language broadcasts were not so reticent however and these unleashed a shrill storm of propaganda abuse against Britain
and America into the ether.
The B.B.C.’s monitoring service had published throughout the war a daily
confidential report on both Allied and Axis broadcasts, amounting to some seventy
or eighty pages each day. On February the main Monitoring Digest prefacing the
report was unusual in that it surveyed only one topic, the reaction not only of Germany but also of the neutral and Allied countries to the first news of the Dresden
raids. From all the German controlled stations it was apparent at once that the propaganda ministry was pulling out all the stops of its propaganda organ, and using every
possible means to exploit the tragedy to the full.
Thus at three P.M. that day the B.B.C. monitors picked up a transmission in an
Arabic tongue from a station calling itself Free Africa – obviously a clandestine German station: ‘It was reported from London,’ this spurious station announced, ‘that
the number of refugees in Dresden had increased enormously; at the same time the
British news service reported that Allied aircraft had launched the biggest attack in
history on Dresden. Such reports need no comment; it is obvious that these heavy
raids were directed against the millions of refugees and not against military targets.’
This served to provide a very clear picture of so-called Allied humanity, the broadcaster suggested: ‘But patience: tomorrow is not far away!’
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
At : P.M. the official German foreign information telegraphic service commented
bitterly on the B.B.C.’s description of Dresden as a major communications centre.
‘Dresden’s factories mainly manufactured toothpaste and baby-powder,’ the German service insisted. ‘Nevertheless, they were bombed. As in all large towns the
Dresden goods stations lie on the outskirts of the town; only the passenger station is
in the centre. But troops and war materials are not transported from passenger stations, only from goods stations.’The attack on the centre of Dresden could therefore
not be justified from a military point of view.
‘The Americans,’ the transmission continued, ‘who claim to possess the best bomb
sights in the world, have elsewhere proved that they can hit precision targets whenever they please. It would therefore have been possible to have spared the residential
districts of Dresden, and the historic town centre.The use of incendiaries proves that
the architectural treasures and residential districts were being deliberately attacked.
It is pointless to drop incendiaries on railway installations; they have never been used
to destroy railway installations in this war.’
With heavy sarcasm the bulletin concluded that the Allies were claiming to stand
on the threshold of victory, yet they had found it necessary to reduce Dresden and
Chemnitz to ashes. (The inclusion of Chemnitz was a characteristic Goebbels tactic:
although the latter raid was largely a failure, he had long recognised that if the enemy
heard from the Germans’ own broadcasts that a target was destroyed, they would be
less inclined to come again; Chemnitz, with its big tank-engine works, was a target
which needed a long respite.)
The neutral countries were evidently horrified at the stories reaching them from
their own correspondents inside Germany. At : P.M. on February a Swedish
news bulletin transmitted to occupied Denmark proclaimed that between twenty
and thirty-five thousand people were already known to have lost their lives in the
Dresden holocaust. ‘Yesterday morning six thousand victims were dug out,’ the station reported.
Fifteen minutes later the ‘New British Broadcasting Station,’ like ‘Free Africa’ a
clandestine German-controlled station, beamed to England a curious piece of propaganda about the raids which the B.B.C. Monitoring Service again deemed necessary
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
to transcribe in its entirety. ‘The night before last I was sitting with a colleague who
understands a bit of German, and we were listening to a special radio programme in
Germany which is supposed to let the German population know which part of the
Reich our bombers are attacking.’ So the bogus Englishman began. ‘The Jerry who
was speaking kept on breaking into the music with his guttural Achtung, Achtung!
Then my friend would translate what he was saying. I must say it felt damned queer
sitting there and hearing about the way our waves of bombers were going to unload
their cargoes of death and destruction on Dresden. One minute I found myself thinking, Well, against air war like this, the Jerry won’t be able to carry on for long. But
then the very next moment I found myself thinking, Who the devil is going to get
anything out of it? We contribute the bombs and the machines and the crews who
don’t return from these raids. The Dresdeners themselves don’t get anything out of
it, naturally.The only ones who look like getting anything are the Russians – they get
Dresden at our expense.’ ‘I wasn’t unduly worried about human considerations,’ the
voice concluded, broadly. ‘After all, we must win the war. But I don’t see any reason
why we should go and kill people for the benefit of the Russians alone. Do you?’
The next day, the German-controlled Scandinavian Telegraph Bureau reported that
Dresden was not ‘one great field of ruins.’ It added that all communications between
Dresden and the rest of Germany had been broken. The number of dead was reported to be seventy thousand. Now even the Moscow newspapers were reporting
the raids.
v
v
v
Unwilling to incur the further censure of world opinion, already deeply disturbed
by the accounts flooding the world’s telegraph wires of the fate of the eastern population centres, the American bomber commander had prudently dispatched his aircraft on Thursday February to attack oil targets at Ruhland and Magdeburg as
primary targets; eleven hundred Eighth Bomber Command aircraft undertook to
‘bring the oil offensive up to date.’
Fate was once again unkind to Dresden and Chemnitz; visibility over the primary
targets was poor, and the bombers were diverted to attack secondary targets – the
only primary target still clear for attack being the Brabag oil refinery at Rothensee
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
near Magdeburg; thus Fortresses were diverted from Ruhland to Dresden, where
exactly at noon they dropped tons of bombs, using instruments alone, on the
‘city area.’
Other Bombardment Groups, notably those of the First Air Division, had been
briefed for missions giving Dresden as a secondary target for attack but their whole
operations were scrubbed before take-off.
The bombs which were dropped on the Dresden were not, it must be said, particularly noticed by the population, and they must have seemed a paltry affair after what
the city had already suffered.
The Third Air Division, it might be observed, was briefed to attack Cottbus ‘city’,
a detail which has since gone down in the American official history as ‘Cottbus marshalling yards.’ One thousand tons of bombs were dropped here; the attack was reported, perhaps significantly, as being ‘in full view of the advancing Red Army.’
To critics in England who might be tempted to reiterate the observation that these
raids were serving only the Russians, the answer was officially given in a Times editorial in these words: ‘The Eastern and Western Fronts are now sufficiently close for
blows aimed at German cities between them to have an effect on both fronts simultaneously, and the targets were selected for that purpose.’
v
v
v
An ill-phrased news item published world-wide now brought things to a head.The
Allied air commanders at General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (S.H.A.E.F.), in France, must have realised that world opinion
was unsettled by reports of the massacres in first Berlin and now Dresden. It was at
this time, on the afternoon of February , when the German propaganda campaign
was approaching its climax, that the air commanders entrusted to a British air commodore the duty of informing Allied press correspondents of the new policy that
was being implemented for this offensive.
The officer, Air Commodore C M Grierson, had been seconded to S.H.A.E.F. as
A.C.S. (intelligence) of⁵cer; it was his task to motor once a week from Reims to
Paris to hold a press conference on the development of the air offensive against Ger-
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
many. The language which Grierson used in his briefing could have been more elegantly worded, given the background of the attacks on Berlin and Dresden – attacks which the British and American governments were still insisting had been executed solely against military targets in the cities.
The new Allied plan was, he said, to bomb the large population centres and then to
attempt to prevent relief supplies – food and medical supplies – from reaching them,
and refugees from leaving them.
There was worse. In the course of a reply to a question out to him by a correspondent, Grierson apparently referred to German allegations of ‘terror raids’; once
utilised, the phrase remained in the mind of the journalist representing the Associated Press, Howard Cowan. Within an hour the A.P.’s dispatch was being put out
from Radio Paris and cabled to the United States for inclusion in the next morning’s
newspapers. It read:
Allied air chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror-bombings of German population centres as a ruthless expedient of hastening
Hitler’s doom. More raids such as those recently carried out by heavy bombers of
the Allied air forces on residential sections of Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz, and
Cottbus are in store for the Germans, for the avowed purpose of heaping more
confusion on Nazi road and rail traffic, and to sap German morale.The all-out air
war on Germany became obvious with the unprecedented daylight assault on the
refugee-crowded capital, with civilians fleeing from the red tide in the East.
For one unhappy moment what might be termed the ‘mask’ of the Allied bomber
commands appeared to have slipped. Cowan’s and other press accounts of the
S.H.A.E.F. communiqué implied that the American and British air forces had begun
a deliberate campaign of indiscriminate ‘terror bombing’, thereby deviating from
long-established policies concerning the employment of Allied strategic air power.
The A.P. dispatch – which was a highly tendentious version of the air commodore’s
briefing – was broadcast throughout liberated France and printed across North
America as front page headlines: Not only R.A.F. Bomber Command, whose own
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
night air offensive had long been viewed with suspicion in the United States, but also
their own U.S. Strategic Air Forces were now delivering terror-raids on German
civilians.
At the time the news broke in America many people had just finished listening to a
radio message beamed across the Atlantic by German short-wave transmitters in
which the American bombers raid on Berlin raid was condemned: ‘General Spaatz
knew that it was taxing the ingenuity of German organisation to cope with the feeding and housing of non-combatant refugees, of whom hundreds of thousands have
fled before the organised savagery and terrorism of the communist Red Army invading East Germany. General Spaatz also knew that the available German air forces
were concentrated on the eastern front to combat the Red flood which threatens to
destroy Germany and all Europe.These are acts of exceptional cowardice.’The broadcast added, as a parting shot, that the German Wehrmacht had awarded General
Spaatz the Order of the White Feather for his part in this cowardly crime.
Such was the Nazi propaganda, and now it was apparently being confirmed by an
official spokesman from S.H.A.E.F, Air Commodore Grierson.
British listeners were fortunately spared the dilemma which faced the American
public.The British government, which received news of the unfortunate S.H.A.E.F.
press conference at : P.M. on the evening of February , imposed a total press
ban on publication of the dispatch only thirty minutes later.
Coupled with the stories coming through neutral countries about the carnage in
Berlin and Dresden, it caused extreme disquiet in Washington. On February General H H Arnold, commander in chief of the U.S. air forces, cabled Spaatz to inquire
whether there was any significant distinction between blind bombing by radar on
military targets in urban areas, as had been decided between Spaatz and Bottomley
over lunch that day in Bovingdon, and ‘terror’ bombing such as the S.H.A.E.F.
communiqué – as reported by the Associated Press – claimed the Americans were
now indulging in. General Spaatz replied perhaps a shade cryptically that he had
not departed from the historical American policy in Europe – not even in the cases
of the February raid on Berlin and the February raid on Dresden. The uproar
shocked Spaatz. He had only just sent General Eisenhower a fine set of photographs
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
of bomb damage to German targets; Eisenhower’s chief of staff Walter Bedell Smith
had written facetiously congratulating him: ‘They prove without question that you
have been a very busy woman the last couple of years.’
But people now were looking for scapegoats. On February General Spaatz cabled a circumspect reply to Arnold, ‘It has always been my policy that civilian populations are not suitable military objectives. Regret that I have caused you concern by
inadequate reporting of my Directives. Bottomley’s directives and mine although
generally parallel in priorities and issued after mutual consultation, often reflect the
difference in capabilities of the two forces. On this occasion I did not issue a complete new directive since it was necessary only to change emphasis within the Priorities of Directive Number Three. ... My instructions to Eighth Air Force as of Jan
are essentially paraphrased as follows: since attacks visually on Oil are first priority,
anticipate that bombing of targets in Berlin will be by Pathfinder methods. Bombing
of Berlin at this time takes Priority after visual bombing of major synthetic plants, in
the Leipzig area particularly, with next priority to lines of communication in the
Cassel-Ruhr-Cologne area. ... Bombing under such circumstances is not precise but
Berlin has such importance, particularly at this time, as a centre of communications,
administration and industry that its value as a military target justifies bombing from
time to time. ... Dresden has been attacked several times recently as a communications target important to the eastern front. ... I do hope this clarifies the matter to
your satisfaction.’
Arnold expressed continuing disquiet.
Major General Frederick L Anderson then signalled to Arnold on February : ‘I
assure you that there has been no change in the American policy of precision bombing directed at military objectives nor does the bombing of Berlin by HX create a
precedent.’ He quoted again his directive of January , explaining: ‘At that time the
Sixth Panzer Army was believed to be moving from the western front and there were
indications of other substantial reinforcements all heading for the eastern front.’
Berlin was a focal point in the defence against Zhukov’s spearhead. ‘Other key communications centres such as Dresden, Chemnitz, Cottbus, and Leipzig took on a
great significance which was appreciated both by the Russians and ourselves.’ He
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
concluded, ‘I have read the Associated Press story by Howard Cowan transmitted to
us this date and can appreciate the unfortunate effect that this article will have and
the great concern that it has caused you. My recommendations on the PR aspects on
this story are being forwarded separately.This is from Anderson. General Spaatz is in
Mediterranean and is being informed.’
That same day General George C McDonald, Spaatz’s Director of Intelligence,
sent a three-page memorandum expressing himself in the bluntest terms to Anderson
about the new directive to bomb cities like Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden, stating that
it put the American army air forces unequivocally into the business of area bombardment of congested civil populations. ‘No intelligence available to this Directorate indicates that destruction of these cities will decisively effect the enemy’s “capacity for armed resistance.”’ He continued: ‘Five years of indiscriminate aerial bombardment (latterly conducted on a stupendous scale) have produced no decisive results yet. They have not broken the German will to fight. Nor has the obliteration of
whole cities shown any signs of reducing the German “capacity for armed resistance.”’ The destruction of these cities had barely dented the German war economy
and the transportation links through the cities had barely been disrupted. McDonald
emphasised that he was flatly opposed to these terror raids, and went so far as to call
them the ‘extermination of populations and the razing of cities.’
This telegraphic discussion was conducted over vast distances, and the controversy
was gradually allowed to subside. General Spaatz determined not to deliver any more
raids on the pattern worked out between himself and Bottomley.
The German government was however aware in a way that neither the outside
world nor indeed its own public could be, of what had really transpired in the Saxon
capital and it had no intention of relinquishing such a meaty propaganda opportunity. The Associated Press dispatch had by now reached Berlin through Sweden. The
very manner in which it had been issued by S.H.A.E.F. and then hastily recalled, the
way in which the British government alone had clamped a total ban on its publication, suggested that there was much more to all this than met the eye.
While up to that point many Germans had dutifully described Allied raids on German cities in the standard jargon a ‘terror’ raids, now there were many who could
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
believed that perhaps that was what they really were. If the British government refused to tell the British people what was being done by R.A.F. Bomber Command
then the German government must take the necessary steps to do so.William Joyce,
the renegade Irish broadcaster for the German government, was instructed to include in his next Views on the News broadcast to England a speech on Dresden.
Since Joyce – known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ – was recognised to have millions of English listeners for each broadcast, the B.B.C. again felt it necessary to report on the
speech in full. At : p.m. on February the familiar and hateful voice of ‘Germany calling’ began the task of informing the British people of the terror-raids. He
began:
British propagandists are boasting that by attacking such cities as Dresden, the
R.A.F. and U.S. air forces are co-operating with the Soviets.They do not remember any occasion on which the Soviet High Command has troubled itself to cooperate with British efforts. Incidentally, Eisenhower’s headquarters have now
issued a stupid and impudent denial of the obvious truth that the bombing of
German towns has a terrorist motive. Churchill’s spokesmen, both in the press
and on the radio, have actually gloried in the air attacks on Berlin and Dresden,
on the refugees from the East. Various British journalists have written as if the
murdering of German refugees were a first-class military achievement. I shall
always remember how, alluding to the attack on Dresden , one B.B.C. announcer
happily prattled, ‘There is no china in Dresden today.’
That was, perhaps, meant to be a joke: but in what sort of taste? Far be if from
me to strike a sentimental note amidst the grim and dark realities of this phase in
a gigantic struggle, which is destined to decide more than the fate of porcelain…
Joyce concluded his acerbic broadcast by enumerating the architectural treasures
destroyed in Dresden, and describing the massacre of the refugees.
Faced with this massive propaganda barrage from every Nazi-controlled radio station in Europe, the only recorded Allied counter blast was a German language broadcast from France’s Radio Bir-Hakeim: broadcasting to Germany it announced that
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during the air raid on Dresden, fire fighting crews had been hastily organised consisting of HitlerYouth members and the elderly. ‘Instead of the fire-fighting implements
which they had expected and desired, they were given rifles, taken to the station and
forced to leave to the front without saying good-bye to their parents.’ Quite apart
from the painfully obvious detail that the Dresden railroad stations, as well as all
lines to the front, were supposed to have been totally destroyed in the raids, it will be
agreed that there were times when the German propaganda arguments had a definite
edge on those from the Allied stations.
On Saturday February S.H.A.E.F issued a second communiqué in which that of
the previous day was formally taken back. Unfortunately the briefing officer on this
occasion described the killing of refugees as being accidental: the Allied bombing
raids on German targets, it was now claimed, pursued the sole aim of destroying
towns as transportation or oil production centres. The attack on Berlin had been
made to destroy communications through the capital.The raid on Dresden, S.H.A.E.F.
now claimed, had had the same object; it was a pure accident that at the time of the
raids the city was crowded with refugees.
‘Ever since Air Chief Marshal Harris, the British bomber chief, stated that the
main object of the raid was to break the morale of the German civilians,’ commented
the German telegraph service two days later, ‘ever since the British prime minister
painted a grim picture of a Germany where starvation and would rot out Britain’s
enemies in the same way as air raids, there has been no doubt that the S.H.A.E.F.
war criminals have cold-bloodedly ordered the extermination of the innocent German public by terror-raids from the air.’
v
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v
From neutral countries reports word London of the horrors in Dresden. The Berlin correspondent of the Swedish newspaper Expressen was monitored cabling this
dispatch to Stockholm: ‘Berlin Government circles are greatly upset by the Allies’
most concentrated attack in this war, that is, the attack on Dresden. All communications with Dresden have been cut, as the main telegraph office, the post office,
the railway stations and the general headquarters were destroyed. For the first time
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
since the concentrated attack on Hamburg in July , the number of fatal casualties was disproportionately high, because the town was more crowded with refugees from Czechoslovakia and Silesia than Berlin, and all the barracks were crammed.
The number of dead is reported to be ,.’ On the following day another Swedish
newspaper reported that Dresden had been so completely destroyed that the order
for its total evacuation had been given. ‘The number of fatal casualties is now reported to be ,.’ A refugee who had travelled in an army vehicle car to Jüterbog
near Berlin had reported that the old part of Dresden was completely destroyed, and
that it was easier to count the houses which were still intact in the newer parts. ‘At
the time of the attack two and a half million (, normal) people were living in
Dresden. None of the neighbouring towns could send help because all the approaches
to Dresden were crowded with refugee columns, peasant carts, pushcarts and army
vehicles. Low-flying American aircraft strafed them, and military cars now bar the
roads.’
As the propaganda campaign against the British and Americans gathered momentum,
as the Swedish, Swiss and other neutral countries began to print horrifying descriptions for the world to read about what the Allies had done to Dresden, the German
information service, with its constantly reiterated claim that R.A.F. Bomber Command was delivering pure terror raids on German civilians, was gaining its most
surprising apparent convert in the British government – the one indeed who had the
most to know the real origins of the bomber assault on Dresden.
The bombing offensive meanwhile pressed on. On February , Nos , ,
and Groups of R.A.F. Bomber Command, with planes piloted sometimes by airmen with names like Ziegenhirte, Schlichtinger, and Schmidt – such is the irony of
war – carried out a nineteen-minute attack on the southern German town of
Pforzheim, famous as a centre of precious stones and jewellery.The Pathfinder force
employed for this raid some of the leading crews used for the attack on Dresden,
with the South African Edwin Swales of No Squadron (Pathfinders) as Master
Bomber. When the last of the bombers had withdrawn, they were lighter by
, tons of bombs that they had dropped; in the resulting fire-storm of the
built-up acres of the town were devastated. Of Pforzheim’s inhabitants, just
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under twenty thousand were killed in the attack, almost one in four of the town’s
inhabitants. Squadron Leader Swales was killed when his crippled Lancaster crashed
into power lines in Belgium two hours later, after his crew had baled out (he was
posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross).
The sudden death of twenty thousand people, burned alive in the space of twenty
minutes in their own homes, merited only the barest mention in the British press,
and even less in the German. In Britain’s Official History of the Strategic Air Offensive, published in , the Pforzheim raid rates two words in one footnote; such
was the face of the closing offensive against Germany’s cities.
Air Ministry Bulletin No.,, : A.M., Feb , (British Ministry of Defence).
Bomber Command Weekly Digest, secret, No.; quoted to the author by Air Ministry, Air
Historical Branch .
Six and nine P.M. news bulletin transcripts Feb , (BBC archives, Caversham).
NewYork Herald Tribune, Feb , .
Published in Völkischer Beobachter, Berlin edition, Feb , ; there is no further reference to
Dresden in the VB until Mar , .
BBC Monitoring Reports (confidential), Nos.,–,, Feb –, (Imperial War
Museum archives, London).
Daily Telegraph, London, Feb , .
This and the following are based on The Army Air Forces inWorldWar II: Europe: Argument toV–E day, Jan
to May (Chicago, ), vol.iii, –, and on the published histories of the th, th,
th, th, st, st, and th Bombardment Groups.
The Times, London, Feb , .
The Army Air Forces inWorldWar II: Europe:Argument toV–E day, Jan to May (Chicago, ),
vol.iii, –.
US War Dept., message CM–IN–, Feb , .
This follows information from Air Commodore C M Grierson to the author.
Associated Press dispatch, Feb , ; quoted by R Stokes. M.P., in Hansard, Parliamentary
Debates, vol., col.; Washington Evening Star, Feb , (Hoover Library: Frederick
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Anderson papers).
US War Dept., message CM–IN–, Feb ,
US War Dept., message CM–OUT–, , , Feb , , , , cited in The
Army Air Forces inWorldWar II: Europe: Argument toV–E day, Jan to May (Chicago, ), vol.iii.
Walter Bedell-Smith to Spaatz, Feb , (Library of Congress: Carl F Spaatz papers, box ).
Spaatz to Arnold, (UA ), Feb , (Library of Congress: Carl F Spaatz papers, box
; author’s film DI–); and US War Dept. messages CM–IN– and , Feb and ,
.
Arnold to Spaatz, Feb , War .
Anderson for Spaatz to Arnold, (UA) Feb , (Library of Congress: Carl F Spaatz
papers, box ; author’s film DI–).
General George C McDonald to Anderson, Feb , (Hoover Library: Frederick L Anderson
papers).
Berlin correspondent of Expressen, Stockholm, Feb : in News Digest, Feb , (English
translation) in pp. SHAEF file, ‘Dresden Attack,’ ca. Mar , document No..a (Maxwell
AFB: USAF Historical Division Archives).
Svenska Dagbladet, Feb : in News Digest, Feb , (ibid.)
Records of British Bombing Survey Unit.
Statistisches Jahrbuch der deutschen Gemeinde (th edition). – Pforzheim, a city of originally ,
inhabitants, had only around , on the night of Feb , . By Oct , with much of the city
still under ruins, , of the air raid victims had been buried, of whom , could not be identified.
In the city authorities published an initial estimate of the remaining casualties in Verwaltungsbericht
und Statistik der Stadt Pforzheim –. Das Stadtgeschehen – , p.. In Apr the city’s
statistical bureau concluded that at least , had died in the wartime air raids (including the
in the raids other than that of Feb , ); this figure was reached by adding the , officially
reported deaths to the , listed as still missing in the files of the police and the food office, and in
the evacuee register.
Esther Schmalacker-Wyrich: Pforzheim . Februar . Der Untergang einer Stadt (Pforzheim,
); and (using Allied archives) Ursula R Moessner-Heckner, Pforzheim. CodeYellowfin (Sigmaringen,
).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
A Serious Query
I
of the American secretary for war about public opinion
about the Dresden tragedy, a further American daylight attack was launched on
March , by the U.S. Strategic Air Force’s Third Air Division. Over ,
bombers, escorted by all fifteen fighter groups, took off soon after : A.M. to
attack oil refineries at Magdeburg, Ruhland, and Bohlen, and a tank plant at
Magdeburg. Once again as the result of weather unfavourable to precise attacks the
marshalling yards at Dresden and Chemnitz were reported as having been attacked
as secondary targets. In Dresden the attack was noted as lasting from : until
: A.M., the bombers flying over the city in wave waves and apparently attacking
many different targets. Local observers of the raids suggested that the attack had
been intended to destroy the Dresden–Pirna railroad line, but that the smoke-rocket
markers fired by the pathfinder aircraft had been displaced by the wind.
The presence of all fifteen fighter groups in this operation was an indication of the
extent to which the dreaded German Me– jets were staging a last stand. The
Germans had scrambled three large formations of fighters and directed them to Berlin, wrongly anticipating an attack on the Reich capital. Finally some seventy five of
them headed for Dresden and the nearby Ruhland area, where they pounced on the
Third Air Divisions Fortresses
At : A.M., with Dresden city still nine minutes’ flying time away, the first
formations of jets attacked the leading wing of bombers, while slower piston-engine
fighters attacked the rear groups decoying the escort American fighters from the
front.The thirty-five jets attacking the head of the formation peeled off and attacked
in wings of three jets each, closing in from all positions and levels. By :, when
N SPITE OF THE ANXIETY
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the jets withdrew through lack of fuel, six of the leading Bombardment Group’s
aircraft had been destroyed. The remaining bombers were recorded as having
attacked the ‘marshaling yards in Dresden’ in the Eighth Air Force Target Summary.
The reports of the individual Bombardment Groups suggest however that as before
the marshalling yards were just a euphemism for the city area. Thus the th Bombardment Group, a radar pathfinder force, which was heavily assailed by the jets,
being in the leading wing, found its mean point of impact in the ‘centre of the city,’
and the lead bombardier noted that the briefed purpose for the attack (according to
his private log) was ‘the complete destruction of the town.’ Similarly target photographs taken by the th Bombardment Group, while on the one hand displaying
a target city less than three-tenths covered by cloud, on the other hand showed the
carpet of bombs from the Group – five hundred pound general purpose explosive bombs and five hundred pound incendiaries – detonating in the township of
Dresden–Übigau two miles from the nearest railroad yards (and the site of the large
British prisoner of war camp, from which a large contingent volunteered to assist in
rescue work.)
Other Bombardment Groups were equally wide of the mark, if they were indeed
aiming for the Dresden-Friedrichstadt marshalling yards. All the patterns of bombs
were reported falling in areas widely separated from the yards. The th Bombardment Group report on its ‘Mission ’ explained that the crews were diverted from
the oil assignment to attack the great Dresden yards which had not been bombed
severely. The th Bombardment Group reported attacking the Dresden ‘factory
area’ as a secondary target after the failure of an attempt to bomb the Ruhland refinery,
with ‘good results.’
The damage was widespread, the only noteworthy success being the sinking of the
steamer Leipzig, which had been converted into a hospital ship to meet the needs of
the thousands of people injured in the main raids on Dresden two weeks before. The
stick of bombs straddled the steamer, blowing off the stern; the ship caught fire and
sank slowly, with few survivors. In another incident a stick of bombs destroyed the
camp; of Russian labourers at Laubegast.
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The Germans were still making propaganda capital out of the raids on Dresden,
although they were still under-estimating the death troll.The ⁵gure current in Berlin
government circles was over three hundred thousand, and the Berlin authority responsible for welfare in blitzed cities was conservatively preparing for a final toll of
, to half a million; although the numbers bulldozed into mass graves in Dresden exceeded thirty thousand already, as late as March a German official propaganda leaflet dropped on Italy still spoke only of the ‘ten thousand refugee children’
who had been killed. While on the one side it reproduced a dreadful photograph of
two burned and maimed children from the ruins of Dresden, on the other it awarded
the Order of the White Feather now to General Doolittle in these terms: ‘The people of Dresden, as well as the prisoners of war and the foreign workers there, hereby
award the Order of the White Feather and the Symbol of the Yellow Heart to Lieutenant-General James Doolittle of the United States Air Force for conspicuous cowardice – and for having turned into a sadist.’
On March the German propaganda campaign achieved a success that it could
hardly have hoped for: the occasion was the first full-scale debate on the air offensive
since February , when the Bishop of Chichester had raised the whole issue of his
government’s area bombing of civilian targets in Europe.This time when Mr Richard
Stokes took the floor at : P.M. he had the advantage of a British public more
sympathetic toward the question than previously. Dr Bell, the Bishop of Chichester,
had made his speech in the House of Lords in February at the height of the Baby
Blitz and public opinion in London was adamantly against him although he is known
to have received hundreds of letters supporting his stand. Now, in March , with
the end of the war coming into sight, and with only the V– rocket threat still looming over it, the public was more vulnerable to the descriptions, published in daily
newspapers, of the carnage wrought by these raids. As Stokes rose to speak, the
Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, pointedly rose and left the chamber;
he refused to be drawn back even when Stokes pointedly called attention to his absence.
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In his speech, Stokes returned to the theme that he had been pressing ever since
: that he was unconvinced by the minister’s repeated insistence on the precision
of Bomber Command’s attacks; that he doubted the advantage of what he announced
he would call ‘strategic bombing’, and that it was very noticeable that the Russians
did not seem to indulge in ‘blanket bombing’ but did well enough without it. He
could see the advantage, he said, of their being able to say later that it was the western capitalist states which had perpetrated all these dirty tricks, while the Soviet air
force had limited its bombing activities, as it had, to what Mr Stokes called ‘tactical
bombing’. (in saying this Stokes displayed a remarkable prescience, as post-war years
would demonstrate.)
The question was, he insisted, whether at this stage of the war the indiscriminate
bombing of large population centres was a wise policy. He read to the House an
extract from a report of the Manchester Guardian, based on a German telegraphic
dispatch, which contained the remark that tens of thousands of Dresdeners were
now buried under the ruins of the city, and that even an attempt at the identification
of the victims was proving hopeless. ‘What happened on that evening of th February?’ the newspaper had asked. ‘There were a million people in Dresden, including
, bombed out evacuees and refugees from the east. The raging fires which
spread irresistibly in the narrow streets killed a great many for lack of oxygen.’
Stokes observed that the Russians seemed to be able to capture great cities without
first blasting them to pieces, and he asked a question which clearly exercised even
the prime minister’s mind: ‘What are you going to find, with all the cities blasted to
pieces, and with disease rampant? May not the disease, filth, and poverty which will
arise be almost impossible either to arrest or to overcome? I wonder very much
whether it is realised at this stage. When I heard the Minister [Sir Archibald Sinclair]
speak of the “crescendo of destruction,” I thought,What a magnificent expression for
a Cabinet Minister of Great Britain at this stage of the war.’
Stokes called attention to the Associated Press dispatch from the S.H.A.E.F. headquarters, since recalled, and indeed read it out in full, thereby putting it on record
for posterity. He asked once again the question he had asked so often before: Was
terror bombing now part of official government policy? If sop, then why was the
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
S.H.A.E.F. decision released and then suppressed? And why was it that in spite of the
reports having been broadcast from Radio Paris and printed throughout America,
and even relayed back to the German people, the British people were, as he put it,
‘the only ones who may not know what is done in their names?’ It was ‘complete
hypocrisy’ to say one thing and do another.
In conclusion Mr Stokes asserted that the British government would live to rue the
day that it had permitted these raids and that the raids would stand for all time as a
‘blot on our escutcheon’. These sentiments were doubly significant in that – expressed in more formal language – they were to reappear in a minute addressed only
a few days later by the prime minister to his chiefs of staff, inviting Bomber Command to reconsider its terror campaign.
Stokes finished his speech shortly after three P.M., but he had to wait until nearly
eight P.M. for a reply from the government. Commander Brabner, the Joint UnderSecretary of State for Air, replied for Sinclair, although the latter had by now resumed his seat. He pointed out at once that although the S.H.A.E.F. report had been
received in London on February , it had been denied almost immediately. He took
this opportunity to repudiate the report as well, adding: ‘We are not wasting bombers or time on purely terror tactics. It does not do the hon. Member justice to come
here to this House and suggest that there are a lot of Air Marshals or pilots or anyone
else sitting in a room trying to think how many German women and children they
can kill.’
Stokes objected that when the Associated Press dispatch first circulated, and London raised objections to its publication, S.H.A.E.F.’s initial reaction was that it could
not be suppressed ‘as it represented official S.H.A.E.F. policy.’ Stokes promised to
back this up with documentary evidence. This time Sir Archibald Sinclair himself
sprang to his feet and retorted that the report was certainly not true, and Mr Stokes
might take that from him.
That was the end of the last wartime debate on Bomber Command’s policies. The
British government had been able to safeguard its secret from the day that the first
area raid was launched against Mannheim on December , , right to the very
end.
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A similar controversy had arisen over the Dresden and Berlin raids in Washington;
not the loud parliamentary wrangling which had characterised the dispute in London, but a more discreet exchange of letters between political and military leaders.
On March General George C Marshall was instructed to reply to an inquiry from
the American Secretary for War, Mr Henry Stimson, that Dresden had been bombed
because it was a communications centre of great importance through which reinforcements were passing to the Russian front; Marshall added that standard bombing
methods had been used in the Allied air attacks on Dresden and that the Russians had
‘requested’ its neutralisation. Post-war research by the American air force historian
Joseph W Angell Jr. has confirmed that no documentary evidence has ever been produced of any Soviet request specifying Dresden as a target for attack; Angell suspects
that General Marshall read too much into the original memorandum by the Soviet
General Antonov atYalta, which did mention two eastern population centres but not
Dresden. InWashington the controversy subsided peacefully, and behind closed doors.
In fact the Americans later launched their largest independent attack ( sorties)
on ‘the marshalling yards’ in Dresden on April – a raid which the American official
history does not mention.
In London, however, the private debate did not decline. Indeed when the first lurid
reports began to arrive in London from neutral sources it actually increased. Between March and March one of the leading newspapers in Zürich published
three articles by a Swiss observer who had witnessed the raids on Dresden. There
had been a sizeable Swiss population in the city. After the raids he had been able to
escape to Switzerland, and tell his story there. His report was one of the first authentic descriptions of the aftermath of the raids, and confirmed that the city had been
devoid of shelters, defences, and in his opinion real military targets.
It is also known that on February a representative of the International Red
Cross had visited Dresden to inquire after the fate of the prisoners of war; his report
to Geneva may well have contained other information than about the numbers of
prisoners among the casualties.
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The creation of a scapegoat who could convincingly be blamed for the brutality of
the bombing offensive presented few difficulties, given that the prime necessity for
the bomber weapon was past. ‘The prime minister and others in authority,’ wrote
the Official Historians in , in language that was of significant weight given that
Mr Churchill was still alive, ‘seemed to turn away from the subject as though it were
distasteful to them, and as though they had forgotten their own recent efforts to
initiate and maintain the offensive.’ ‘The conduct of the area offensive reinforced
the doubts which some people had long since felt about the strategic air offensive on
morale grounds,’ the Official Historians also commented. The Dresden operation
had been ‘undertaken for complicated reasons not wholly connected with the general area campaign’, and ‘even led to some severe words, though not on morale
grounds, from the prime minister, though it was he himself who contributed much
of the incentive to carry it out.’
What had led to these severe words? Originally Mr Churchill, then still at Yalta,
had paid little attention to the raids and their outcome. A telegram had gone to him
from London reporting the day’s war events, and in this the bombing of Dresden had
been reported in the barest outline, as the tenth of eleven items. But during March
Anthony Eden had spoken to him about the mounting foreign concern at the
carnage, and the prime minister himself had spent several days in Germany to watch
Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery’s crossing of the Rhine; here he had seen
much evidence of the damage that his bombers had caused.There was certainly mounting disquiet about continuing the bombing on this scale. General Eisenhower’s adviser Major General Everett S Hughes wondered in his diary during February whether
the American bombers had not of late actually hampered the war effort, and he
made this note: ‘Urge Ross to object to any more bombing of railroads in Germany.
We will need them.’
Something of the same reflectiveness motivated Mr Churchill. On March he
signed an extraordinary minute on the subject of the continued air offensive against
German cities, and addressed it to his Chiefs of Staff committee and to Sir Charles
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Portal. It was a remarkable document and owed much of its argument to the original
warning of Richard Stokes in the House of Commons.
It seems to me [wrote Mr Churchill] 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.We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing
materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision
would have to be made for the Germans themselves.
Where Mr Stokes had spoken of Dresden as an eternal ‘blot on the escutcheon’ of
the British government, the prime minister was more keen to accord the blame to
the bomber commanders:
The destruction of Dresden [Churchill continued] remains a serious query against
the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must
henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests rather than that of the
enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for
more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and
wanton destruction, however impressive.
Two interpretations have been placed upon this unusual document: either it was
worded in haste, in the heat and turmoil of great events, and at a time when the
Prime Minister was under great personal strain; or it could be construed as a carefully phrased attempt at burdening for shifting the responsibility for the Dresden
raids onto his Chiefs of Staff and, perhaps more appositely, onto Bomber Command
and its commander-in-chief Sir Arthur Harris. Whatever the reason, it stands out as
an unabashed attempt at denigrating a senior Allied commander in the field and to
mask from the view of future historians the more than constitutional responsibility
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that the prime minister in fact bore for the February bombing offensive against the
eastern population centres.
The senior officers at Bomber Command headquarters learned of the existence of
the Churchill minute almost immediately. Sir Robert Saundby, Harris’ deputy at
High Wycombe, had a daily telephone conversation with Sir Norman Bottomley on
the scrambler telephone, and the deputy Chief of the Air Staff told him of the row in
London, and of the consternation felt by the Air Staff at this ‘monstrous insinuation’
by the prime minister – namely that he had been deliberately misled by his military
advisers. What the Air Staff found surprising, Saundby learned, was Mr Churchill’s
suggestion that Bomber Command had been waging a purely terror offensive on its
own initiative, ‘though under other pretexts’. Had not Mr Churchill written dozens
of minutes in precisely the opposite sense, demanding the pounding – indeed, the
‘basting’ – of German cities and refugees within them? ‘To the chiefs of staff,’ said
Saundby, ‘it looked as though it was an attempt on [the prime minister’s] part to
pretend that he had never advocated or even ordered that sort of thing. It was felt
that it was not a fair picture of the prime minister to put on record, in view of what
he had previously said and done.… At that stage, however, the prime minister was
beginning to look beyond the end of the war.’
It was to the credit of the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, that he declined
to accept the Churchill minute of March .With more indignation than veracity he
explained to his fellow chiefs of staff the next day that in bombing large cities their
aim had always been to destroy the industries and transportation services centred in
those cities ‘and not to terrorise the civilian population of Germany.’ Churchill, he
told his colleagues, had evidently written in haste or fatigue, although it was admittedly an important issue, and he felt it would be ‘unfair to the prime minister himself’ to allow the document to stand in the existing form. He promised to tackle Mr
Churchill about it that evening. When did so the prime minister had no alternative
but to agree that his minute had been ‘rough’, and to withdraw it; he invited Portal
himself to rephrase it in silkier terms.
It was not often that Mr Churchill was obliged to eat his words; but this time he
did. The resulting new draft omitted any direct reference either to Dresden on the
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one hand, or to the advantage of ‘terror bombing’ to the enemy on the other; it still
began with the ambivalent reproach: ‘It seems to me that the moment has come
when the question of the so called “area bombing” of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests,’ and it added in significantly
different terms from those of the captious minute of March : ‘We must see to it
that our attacks do not do more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the
enemy’s immediate war effort.’This minute was accepted without reservation by the
Air Staff; as Sir Robert Saundby has pointed out, it tallied closely with their own
opinions in any case.
Churchill accepted the new wording and the rest of the redrafted minute and signed
it on April . That he was not happy with this markedly milder minute was indicated by the abbreviation of its terms in his published memoirs. If, as officers at
Bomber Command had suspected when they first learned of the contents of his March
minute, it had been his intention thus to divest himself of responsibility for the
Dresden tragedy – ‘looking beyond the end of the war,’ as Saundby had put it – the
attempt had come to grief on the unprecedented reluctance of the Air Staff to accept
the document with the deceptive language in it was first couched.
Two facts seem significant. Firstly, that provided the reference to the Allied bomber
commands’ burden of guilt for the Dresden raids was omitted, the Air Staff, who
were well aware of where the responsibility lay, raised no further objection to the
minute, although the unbridled reference to ‘terror’ raids appears to have perturbed
them too. Secondly, that as early as that date the prime minister had fully grasped the
nature of the charge which was to be levelled in post-war years against the western
powers for the Dresden massacre, and he was reluctant to share in the recriminations which were bound to ensue.
Sir Charles Portal passed his views on the controversy on to General Hap Arnold
in Washington. Arnold wrote informing Spaatz that there was no further point in
area attacks on German cities. The reference to ‘area attacks’ touched raw nerves.
General Anderson wrote to Spaatz, ‘The U.S. Strategic Air Forces have not at any
time had a policy of making area bombing attacks on German cities. Even our attacks
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
against the Berlin area were always directed against military objectives.’ The difference was purely semantic.
In post-war years the prime minister continued his policy of dissociating himself
from having ordered the attack and even from having known that Dresden was packed
with refugees. His mind already failing, he asked Victor Gollancz, a publisher friend,
‘Is it true that some sixty thousand refugees were killed in the air raid on Dresden?’
The publisher replied that it was beyond question that a large number of refugees
had been killed; the only question was, how many. He had read in an American
services newspaper – so far as he could recollect – that the number killed was far
higher than the sixty thousand he had mentioned, and in fact something more like
two hundred thousand. To this Mr Churchill replied, ‘Shocking, shocking.’ ‘Mr
Gollancz,’ he said, according to another version, ‘they never told me we were bombing civilians.’
In , when Churchill’s memory was fading – though he still had fifteen years to
live – Hilary St George Saunders, the official historian of the Royal Air Force, asked
him for his recollections of the air raid on Dresden. ‘In February ,’ he told the
prime minister, ‘there was a bomber attack on Dresden. Not less than , persons were killed. It was the most serious single blow against Germany by Bomber
Command.’ Churchill however professed not to recall anything about it. ‘I thought
the Americans did it,’ he told the historian, and he advised: ‘Air Chief Marshal Harris
would be the person to contact.’
This was of course several years before the publication in of the official history of the Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, and it is perhaps unkind to recall
here how on January , the prime minister himself had asked the Secretary of
State for Air, Sinclair, whether ‘Berlin and no doubt other large cities in Central
Germany’ should not now be considered especially attractive targets, as main communications centres through which the bulk of the refugee traffic was moving; it was
as the direct result of this prompting that Sir Arthur Harris was directed to have his
bombers attend to Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz.
The hostility of the foreign secretary to the bombing offensive on this scale, as
expressed in the second paragraph of Mr Churchill’s original draft minute, was also
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
of relatively recent origin. Only three years before, in a letter to Sir Archibald Sinclair,
Mr Eden had advocated attacking German towns even though they might contain no
major targets of importance:
The psychological effects of bombing [he wrote] have little connexion with the
military of economic importance of the target; they are determined solely by the
amount of destruction and dislocation caused.… I wish to recommend therefore
that in the selection of targets in Germany, the claims of smaller towns of under
, inhabitants which are not too heavily defended, should be considered,
even though those towns contain only targets of secondary importance.
Sir Arthur Harris remained loyal to his friend and prime minister until the end of
the war. Never once in the post-war years did he call public attention to the part
which Mr Churchill had himself played in initiating the Dresden raids. Characteristically, even when he was personally informed that the official history included this
evidence of the manner in which the prime minister had attempted to disown him
and the destruction of Dresden, Harris refused at first to believe it could be true.
‘Looking back on it now,’ said Sir Robert Saundby, Harris’s deputy, years later, ‘I
think few people would say that it really was a military necessity. It was one of those
terrible things that do happen occasionally in war.’ ‘Those who approved it,’ he continued, ‘were neither wicked nor cruel. But I think that it’s possible that they were so
remote from the harsh realities of war that they didn’t fully realize the appallingly
destructive character of their bombardment by the spring of .’ Wing Commander Maurice Smith, whose tactical expertise as Master Bomber during the first
raid had ensured its brilliant success, would say: ‘I don’t feel I could say anything
useful about whether it was justified. I don’t think one looks for justification in war
time. Certainly the young man in uniform [does not]. I did as I was told.’
The prime minister, in his memoirs, glossed over the enormity of the Dresden
massacre in two lines, describing the city as a ‘centre of communications on the
eastern front’; he made no attempt to depict the horrors inflicted on the city, nor the
controversial background to, and consequences of, the raids. Harris was an officer
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
who was neither vindictive nor demonstrative, and even if he had learned the nature
of the March , minute which the prime minister had intended to address to
the chiefs of staff, it is unlikely that he would have commented on it.
In the years that passed following the Dresden affair, the number of times that
Harris expressed himself in print about the part which he and his gallant force had
played in winning the war were few indeed; not so reticent were his critics, of whom
there were legion. The post-war Labour government refused to accept his official
Despatch (allegedly on the grounds that it contained no statistical appendices).The
government harboured a deep resentment against a man who had commanded such
admiration and respect among his men, and who had inevitably in the course of the
war tangled with many of the Labour Party’s leading members. Clement Attlee, the
post-war Labour prime minister, went on record in as saying that Harris was
‘never frightfully good’; he insisted that ‘all that attack join their cities’ did not pay as
much as if he had made more effective use of his bombs – he might, for instance,
have ‘concentrated more on military targets.’ Harris contented himself with replying that the strategy of the bomber force which Earl Attlee was criticising was decided by His Majesty’s Government, of which Attlee was for most of the war himself
a leading member.‘The decision to bomb industrial cities for morale effect was made,
and in force,’ Harris insisted, ‘before I became C.-in-C. Bomber Command.’ No
commander-in-chief would have been authorised to make such decisions. Even
then Harris afterwards admitted his regret at having been stung in participating in
the public bombing controversy.
Up to May , as we have seen, the British public had been kept securely in the
dark about every aspect of the continued strategic air offensive against Germany.
Then, with the laying down of arms, the first flow of British civilians and service
personnel to the continent began. Mercifully for the wartime British government,
Dresden, where thousands of victims were still being recovered each week from the
ruins, was now behind the Iron Curtain which Adolf Hitler’s newspapers had already
proclaimed to be descending across Europe, on that morning of February , ,
the day of the R.A.F.’s first raids on the city; the Soviets would not permit even the
American strategic bombing survey teams to visit the wrecked city. For a few weeks
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
the survey teams made feverish notes in Leipzig, Magdeburg, and Halle – cities still
behind the American lines – before in accordance with the international covenants
these cities too were relinquished to the Russians. Mercifully, as the Military Tribunal opened in Nuremberg, the Russians showed little inclination to ‘expose’ the Allied massacre in Dresden.
Harris did not lack his champions in the House of Commons. Many former Bomber
Command officers and personnel were among the new Members returned in the
election. One of them called attention on March , to the question
whether Bomber Command’s operations in World War Two were military and strategically justified:
This matter is precipitated in my mind by the signal fact that in the terminal
honours, at the end of last year, in the New Year’s Honours List, the name of the
chief architect of Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, was a conspicuous absentee. I know it will be agreed that in the Honours List six months previously
the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command received the Order of the G.C.B.
[Garter Companion of the Bath]. But he retired from the Royal Air Force without
any public expression of gratitude for the word – not that he had done – but
which his Command had done under him. He left the country in a bowler hat …
There is a feeling amongst the men who have served in Bomber Command that
what appears to be an affront to the commander-in-chief of that Command is in
fact an affront to the people who served in that Command, and of course to those
who suffered casualties.We feel that if our organisation did a good job of work in
all respects,. as we believe it did, the least that should be done is that an honour
should be conferred on its head, comparable to the honours paid to the commanding officers of similar units, particularly in the other services.
Sir Arthur Harris proved the perfect scapegoat for what had happened in Dresden.
He remained unhonoured (apart from a belated baronetcy in ) and unsung,
with the men of his former command neither remembered in a national memorial
nor even allowed a campaign medal for their pains, for their service in the most
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
bloody and long-drawn out battle of the war. His squadrons had dropped ,
tons of bombs – two-thirds (, tons) on Germany, most of the rest on France.
They had lost , bombers in the process. For one year Harris stayed silent
about his part in the war; then he decided to leave the United Kingdom to take up a
commercial appointment in South Africa where he had spent most of his youth.
On February , , the former commander-in-chief of R.A.F. Bomber Command sailed from Southampton on the first stage of his journey into voluntary exile.
That night, throughout eastern and central Germany, at : P.M. the church bells
began to peal. For twenty minutes the bells rang out across the territories now occupied by a force as ruthless as any that the bomber offensive had been launched to
destroy. It was the first anniversary of the worst single massacre in European history.
The Army Air Forces inWorldWar II: Europe: Argument toV–E day, Jan to May (Chicago, ),
vol.iii., ; the author has also relied on the records of former Dresden citizens, and the account in
the th Bombardment Group’s publisher history. Details were supplied by Lieutenant Malcolm E
Corum, lead bombardier of the th Bombardment Group, Third Air Division. Further information
was extracted from the published histories of the th, th, st and th Bombardment Groups;
also from the Camp Diary of Arbeitskommando in Dresden’s Scharfenberger Strasse.
Propaganda leaflet /–, ‘The White Feather for General Doolittle.’
G C Marshall, memorandum for Stimson, Mar , , drafted by Loutzenheiser, cited by Walter
F Angell Jr., ‘Historical Analysis of the – February Bombings of Dresden.’ (USAF Historical Division Archives); cf. The Army Air Forces inWorldWar II: Europe: Argument toV–E day, Jan to May
(Chicago, ), vol.iii..
Sherrod East, Chief Archivist of World War II Records Division, National Archives, Washington,
to the author.
Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO,
London, ) vol.iii.
COS to Churchill, ‘Fleece’ No., Feb , (PRO file, PREM.//).
Everett S Hughes diary, Feb , , (Library of Congress, Manuscript Division: Everett S
Hughes papers)
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Churchill, personal telegram to COS, D./, top secret, Mar , (AHB file CMS.;
copied in Christ Church, Oxford: Portal papers: PM file (); and PRO file PREM./); cf. Dr
Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London,
) vol.iii, .
COS Committee, Mar , (AHB file CMS.; and PRO file CAB./).
Portal to Sinclair, Mar (AHB file CMS.); and to Churchill, Mar , (PRO file
PREM./).
Churchill, personal telegram to COS, D./, top secret, Apr , (PRO file PREM./;
copied in Christ Church, Oxford: Portal papers, PM file []); cf. Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles
Webster, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.iii, .
Winston S Churchill, The SecondWorldWar, vol.vi, –.
Arnold to Spaatz, Apr ; Anderson to Spaatz, Apr , (Library of Congress: Carl F Spaatz
papers, box ).
Mr Victor Gollancz to the author. Gollancz had hoped to published the first edition of this book,
but when his agent Michael Sissons asked if the author was a ‘fascist’ the author dismissed Sissons and
signed the book up with William Kimber Ltd instead.
Henry Regnery, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher (New York, ), f.
Telephone conversation, May , ; and Churchill’s note of Mar , (Churchill Papers,
file /a; cited by Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vi: ‘Road to Victory, –’ (London,
), n.
Eden to Sinclair, Apr , , reproduced in Dr Noble Frankland & Sir Charles Webster, The
Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (HMSO, London, ) vol.iii, .
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation television interview transcript, (Author’s microfilm
DI–).
Sir Arthur Harris to the author.
The Sunday Times, Nov , .
Ibid., Jan , .
Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, vol..
Lord Cherwell, minutes dated Apr , May , (Nuffield college, Cherwell papers).
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Index
page numbers refer to printed book only
Addison, Air Vice-Marshal E B, ,
Air-Ministry communiqués, –,
Altmarkt square, , , ; mass cremations in, , –
Alvensleben, Ludolf von, S.S.-Gruppenführer, police chief (Höhere S.S.- und Polizeifuhrer)
at Dresden, , , , –
Anderson, Frederick L, Major-General, , , ,
Angell, Joseph W, Jr, American historian, xi, , , ,
Antonov, Soviet General, requests Berlin, Leipzig raids, ,
Ardennes offensive,
Area attacks, theory of, at Coventry, ; at Kassel, ; denied by authorities, –, , –
; climax approaching, ,
Arnhem–Deelen, German fighter control bunker at,
Arnold, H H, General, mentioned, , , –,
Arsenal, in Dresden, former, , ,
Associated Press, –,
Atomic bomb, German, Hitler hints at having,
Attlee, Clement,
Auschwitz, slave labour camp at, vii, ix, xii; survivors witness Dresden raids,
BdM (Bund deutscher Mädchen),
Bedell-Smith, Walter, General,
Bell, Dr George, Bishop of Chichester, ,
Bennett, Donald, Air Vice-Marshal, assisted author, x; and attack on Hamburg, , ; and
low-level marking, , , ; and No Group successes, , , ; plans Dresden tactics, –, ; lays on diversions, –; queries order to bomb Dresden,
Bensusan-Butt, David, reports on bombing accuracy,
Berlin, bombed before London, August , –; August , –; Battle of, ;
February , –, ; mentioned, , , , , , , ; in connection with Thunderclap , –,
Bernal, J D, professor,
Blackett, Patrick, physicist, and bombing research, -; and Lindemann Minute, ,
Bodenschatz, Karl, General,
Böhlen, attacked, , –, , , , ; in March , ; failure of attack,
Bomber Command HQ (at High Wycombe), , , , , , , ; operational research section, ; surprise at Dresden listing,
Bomber’s Bædeker,
Bombing Restriction Committee,
Bomb tonnage on Dresden,
Bombs, British, lethality of, –; and see Zuckerman.
Bonn, decoy raid on, , , ,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Bormann, Martin, argues against repudiating Geneva Convention,
Bottomley, Sir Norman, deputy chief of air staff, , , –, , , –,
Brabner, Commander,
Bremerhaven, attacked, September ,
Breslau, declared fortress, ; final evacuation, ; demand for attack on, , ; cut off,
–,
Briefing, aircrew, for Dresden, , , –, –
British Bombing Survey Unit, , ,
British Broadcasting Corporation, news bulletin, –; monitoring reports, –
British Military Mission in Moscow,
Brooke, Sir Alan, General, ,
Bruneval, Commando raid on,
Brunswick, attacked October , , , –; ARP measures, –; bomb tonnage,
Bufton, Sidney O, Air Commodore, Director of Bomber Operations,
Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives), permanently bans the author in , ix, x; finds
corroboration of Dresden casualty figures,
Burrows, M B, Lieutenant-General,
Cabinet War Room, Mr Churchill’s, vii,
Canterbury, Archbishop of,
Carbon-monoxide poisoning, as cause of death in air raids, –, , , , , ,
,
Casablanca Directive, , , ,
Casualty figures, in Rotterdam, , –, ; in Wuppertal, ; in Guernica, ; in Coventry,
; in Hamburg, –, in Kassel, , –, , ; in Berlin, ; in Dresden, viii,
xi–xii, , , , , , , , , –, , , –, , ,
–; overall in Germany,
Chaff, see Window
Chamberlain, Neville, British prime minister, opponent of bombing civilians,
Chemnitz, attacked, ; attacked February , , ; attack unsuccessful, , ;
death-toll in, ; as refugee city, , –; mentioned, , , , , , ,
, , –, ,
Chernakovsky, Soviet Marshal,
Cherwell, Lord; formerly Professor Frederick A Lindemann, Churchill’s adviser, ; proposes area bombing of civilians, –, , , ; and Window,
Cheshire, G L, Group Captain, –
Child evacuee train, caught in Dresden station, –
Churchill, Winston, Prime Minister, Cabinet War Room of, vii; disposes of Chamberlain’s
guarantee, ; area bombing to support Soviets, ; gas warfare advocated by, –,
inebriated at the time, .
Relatives rumoured living in Dresden, ; Dresden first drawn to his attention, ; leaves
London for Crimea, ; part in Dresden attacks, , .
Proposes ‘basting’ German refugees, , ; on need to kill a million Germans before
war ends, , ; preoccupied, ; moves to disown raids on Dresden, , ,
, , ; minutes to Air Staff, , –; glosses over Dresden raid in his memoirs, .
Mentioned, xi, xii, , , , ,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Circus, Sarassani, Dresden; performance on night of raids, , , , , , ,
Clarion, operation, ,
Cochrane, Sir Ralph, Air Chief Marshal, assisted author, x; and Group rivalries, , ; and
Darmstadt attack, ; and Brunswick attack, ; and Heilbronn attack, ; to deliver
first attack on Dresden,
Codebreaking, of Japanese ciphers, ; of German police reports at Dresden, , ,
–, , ;
Cold War, Dresden raids as a weapon in, ix, ,
Collins, Canon L John, –, and Christian Fellowship at Bomber Command,
Cologne, as target, , –, ,
Combined Chiefs of Staff (C.C.S.),
Combined Strategic Targets Committee (C.S.T.C.), , , , ,
Constantine, H A, Air Vice-Marshal, commands No Group,
Corona, transmitter used for decoys, –,
Corwin, Elizabeth, American researcher, ix,
Cottbus, attacked, ,
Coventry, attacked (November ), -; casualties, ; propaganda,
Cowan, Harold, American journalist, , –
‘Creep-back’ phenomenon, , ,
Crimea conference, see Yalta
Cripps, Sir Stafford,
Crossman, Richard, Labour politician, vii
Cunningham, Sir Andrew B, Admiral,
Dams, Ruhr, breached,
Daniels, S P, Group Captain,
Darmstadt, attacked (September ), –; J-bombs used in, ; A.R.P. measures,
–; casualties, –,
de Wesselow, Squadron Leader C P C, Master Bomber, assisted author, x; controls second
raid on Dresden, , , –
Deane, General John R, , ,
Decoy tactics, British, –, , , , ; German, –, ,
Deutsche Soldatenzeitung, viii
Dietrich, Dr Otto, Reich press spokesman,
Dietrich, ‘Sepp,’ S.S.-Obergruppenführer, ,
Directives, to Bomber Command, February , –; Casablanca, , , , ; No
to Strategic Air Forces, January , –, ,
Döberitz, German fighter control bunker at, , –, ; loses contact, ,
Doolittle, James H, Lieutenant-General, , ,
Dortmund, decoy raid on, , ,
Double blow, strategy of, –, , , , –
Dowding, Sir Hugh, Commander-in-chief of RAF Fighter Command,
Dresden, sirens first sound (), ; figures on target lists, , , .
Attacked October , –, ; January , –, ; March , , –
; April , ; claimed attacked November , –.
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
First RAF attack (February ) planned, –, ; executed, –, ; first
USStAF attack planned, cancelled, –, ; second RAF attack planned, –;
executed, –, ; third (USStAF) attack planned, , –; executed, ,
–; , ; also attacked February , , , .
Aircrew briefing for, RAF, , , ; bombs loads, , –, –, , ,
; bomber statistics, , , , , , , ; belief in immunity, ,
, , , , ; industrial significance of, –, –, , , ; military significance of , , , , ; as a railway centre, , , , , ,
, , , , , .
Gun defences of, –, , ; fighter defences during attacks, –; an undefended city by February , , , ; fighter airfield, see Klotzsche.
Cycle stadium as aiming point, , , –, .
Sirens at, , , , , , , , , , ; did not sound, , –,
, ; ARP measures in Dresden, , , –, ; ⁵re brigades at, ,
–; telephone system breaks down, –, -, ; wall-breaches, , ;
tunnels, –.
Damage to city, area, , , , –; damage statistics, –, ; damage to
buildings in detail, , , , –, –; industrial damage, –.
Railways not destroyed, , –; RAF photo interpreters disagree, –; railways,
, , –, , , , ; station gutted, .
Altmarkt, , , ; mass cremations in, , –.
Hospitals in, , , , , , , , , –, , , , , ;
hospital trains, , , ; hospital ship Leipzig, sunk, .
Population figures, , , , , , –, ; refugees in, overcrowding in
Dresden, , , , , , , ; killed, , .
Casualty figures, viii, xi–xii, , , , , , –, , , dif⁵culties in
assessing, , –; immense, ; estimated, , , –, , –, ,
, –, –, –, , , ; inflated by Goebbels, –, ; relief
measures in, –.
Police headquarters, , , –, , , , transferred out of Dresden, ;
police chief’s report, extracts from conclusions of, , , –, , , ,
, , , , –, , .
Morale in Dresden, –; German propaganda about raids, ix, –, , , ;
Communist propaganda about, ix, .
Rescue operations, , ; victims, , –, –, –, ; identification
problems, , –, –, , , , , , , ; recovery of victims, , , –, , , ; burials, , , –, , ; mass
public cremation, , –, –; looters shot, –,
Duisburg, as target, ; attacked (October ), ,
Düsseldorf, as target,
Eaker, Ira C, General, opposed terror raids,
Economic Warfare, Ministry of,
Eden, Anthony, Foreign Secretary, ; advocate of terror bombing, –
Eder, Ruhr dam breached,
Eisenhower, Dwight D, General, –, , , ; and terror raid on Berlin, ; and
Dresden, , ,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Euthanasia hospital, in Dresden,
Fetscher, Professor, communist, shot by Soviet troops,
Feydt, Georg, Dresden civil defence engineer, , ,
Film Unit, R.A.F., filmed second attack on Dresden, ,
Firestorm, defined, ; at Hamburg, –, ; at Kassel, –; at Darmstadt, –;
at Brunswick, –; at Dresden, , , , , , ; aftermath of, –,
; at Pforzheim, ,
Flak (anti-aircraft artillery) defences, at Dresden, –, ; at Ruhland, ; at Berlin,
Foreign Office, British, ; and see Eden
Frankland, Dr Noble, British historian, x, , , , , ; official history by,
Frauenkirche, , ; finally collapses,
Free British Corps,
Freiburg im Breisgau, attacked (May ), –; mystery solved, ; attacked (November
),
Freiheitskampf, Der, Dresden’s Nazi Party newspaper, , ,
Fritzsche, Hans, propagandist,
Führer, see Hitler
Führer-programme, civil defence construction,
Funfack, Dr Max, Dresden official surgeon, ,
Funkhorchregiment West, German monitoring station,
Galland, Adolf, General, Inspector of Day Fighters,
Gas warfare, advocated by Churchill, –, ; advocated by Goebbels, –
Gee, radio-navigation device, range inadequate for Dresden, –, ,
Geneva Convention, on prisoners of war, Goebbels proposes repudiating, –
German Air Force, KG, ; KG, ; KG, –; KG, ; KGr, –; KGr, ;
LG, ; Luftflotte , ; Luftflotte Reich, ; NJG, ; fighter defence of Dresden,
, , ; First Fighter Division, ,
German Federal Statistical Office (Statistische Bundesamt), ,
German High Command (OKW), , , –, –
Gibson, Guy, Wing Commander,
Giesing, Dr Erwin, Hitler’s ear specialist,
Gilbert, Sir Martin, misquotes ‘basting’ document,
Giles, Barney M, Lieutenant-General,
Goebbels, Joseph, Reichsminister for Propaganda, , , –, , , , , , ,
, , , ; Hilfszug (relief convoy) ‘Goebbels,’ ; proposes repudiating
Geneva Convention as riposte, –, ; propaganda tactics on Dresden, –;
relative in Dresden,
Gollancz, Sir Victor, British publisher, ,
Göring, Hermann, Reichsmarschall, x, , , –, , , , , ; Hilfszug (relief
convoy) ‘Hermann Göring,’
Grierson, C M, Air Commodore, –
Grosse, Gerhard, Colonel, police official, air raid final report (Order of the Day) allegedly
signed by, –,
Grosser Garten, park in Dresden, , , , , –, , , , ,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Groups, Bomber, see R.A.F.
Guernica, attacked (), casualties,
Gumbinnen, Soviet atrocities at,
HS radar, · cm, Mark IIIF, , , , , , , ,
HX radar,
Hague Regulations, ,
Hahn, Walter, photographer of Dresden and its destruction, ix, ,
Halle, mentioned, ,
Hamburg, attacked , –; attacked (July-August ), , –, , , ;
A.R.P. measures, , , ; casualties, , –, , , ; fire-storm
analysed, –, ; mass cremation of victims considered, ; mentioned, ,
, , , ,
Hammitsch, Angela, in Dresden,
Hampe, Erich, General, ,
Hanke, Karl, Gauleiter of Silesia, –
Harriman, Averell,
Harris, Sir Arthur, Air Chief Marshal, assisted author, x; mentioned, xii, , –, , ,
, , , , , , ; dubbed ‘Butcher’, ; not originator of area attack
decision, ; and use of Window, –; and ethics of bombing, –, ; and Dresden
intelligence dossier, , ; and Thunderclap, , –; opposed to oil offensive, –
; instructed to include Dresden, ; authorises Dresden query, –; comments in
memoirs, , ; issues executive order to attack Dresden, , ; plans double
blow, –; selects No Group to lead Dresden attack, ; wants firestorm as
beacon, ; misgivings, ; success of attack reported to, ; and attacks on
Chemnitz, , ; and Churchill’s accusatory minute, –
Harrison, Richard, Air Vice-Marshal,
Hayward, Joel Stuart, New Zealand historian, xi
Heidefriedhof cemetery,
Heilbronn, attacked (), ,
Herrmann, Hajo, German air ace, –, –, , –,
Hildebrandt, Richard, S.S.-Obergruppenführer, sent to Dresden,
Hill, Edmund B, Major-General, –
Himmler, Heinrich, S.S.-Reichsführer, rebuke to Dresden police chief, ; argues against
repudiating Geneva Convention,
Hiroshima, casualties, xii,
Hitler, Adolf, vii, , , , , ; persuaded against repudiating Geneva Convention,
–; relative in Dresden,
Hochhuth, Rolf, German playwright,
Hopkins, Harry L,
Hospitals, in Dresden, , , , , , , , , –, , , , ,
; hospital trains, , , ; hospital ship Leipzig, sunk,
Hughes, Everett S, Major General,
Independent Labour Party,
Industrial importance of Dresden, –
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Irving, David, author, referred to, vi, xi, ; how he came to write and publish The Destruction of Dresden, vi–vii, xii; fobbed off by USAF, xi; amends Dresden casualty estimate,
–
J-Bombs, , , ; used at Königsberg, ; not used at Dresden, ; Germans believe
used,
Jeschonnek, Hans, German air force chief of staff,
Jews, killing of, vii, xii, ; émigrés working for Bomber Command, , , ; burned
in Dresden in , ;
Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.), American,
Joint Intelligence Committee (J.I.C.), reports (January ), –; report mentioned,
Joyce, William (‘Lord Haw-Haw’), broadcaster,
Kammhuber, Hans, German air force general, ; Kammhuber Line, , , , –
Karlsruhe, raid on, controlled by same Master Bomber,
Kassel, attacked October , –, ; casualties, , –, , ; A.R.P. measures, –, , , –
Kaufmann, Karl, gauleiter of Hamburg,
Kehrl, S.S. Gruppenführer, police chief of Hamburg, –, –,
Keitel, Wilhelm, Field Marshal, argues against repudiating Geneva Convention,
Kesselring, Albert, Field Marshal, ,
Kiel, warships in Canal attacked, ; bombed,
Kimber,William, first publisher of The Destruction of Dresden, vii, xii–xiii, ; misgivings of,
Kingsdown, radio monitoring station,
Klotzsche, airfield, , , , –, , ; airfield undamaged, , ; meteorological section at, –
Koch, Erich, Gauleiter of East Prussia,
Koniev, Soviet Marshal I S, , ,
Königsberg, attacked, , , ; evacuated,
Krupps, steel firm in Essen, bombed, , ,
Kreuzkirche, children’s choir,
Kuter, Laurence, General, , ; kept in dark,
L.M.F. stamp (‘lack of moral fibre’),
Lange, Walter, Dresden city archivist, ix,
Le Good, H J F, Wing Commander, deputy Master Bomber,
Leahy, William D, Admiral, Roosevelt’s chief of staff,
Lindemann, Professor Fredrick A, see Cherwell, Lord
Link aircraft, radio, recorded transcript of, –,
London, attacked after Berlin (August ), –; ; attacked ,
Loran, used at Dresden, –, , ,
Lovett, Robert,
Lübeck, fire-bombing of,
Luftgau IV, Dresden air zone headquarters, ,
Luftwaffe, High Command of (O.K.L.), viii, , , ; and see German Air Force
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Machine gunning, alleged, of civilian targets, , , , –, , , , ,
Magdeburg, attacked (February ), , , , , –, , ; attacked
(March ), ; mentioned, ,
Magic, see Codebreaking
Mandrel screen, ,
Manchester Guardian, ,
Marshall, George C, General, U.S. army chief of staff, , , –
Master Bomber, first employed, at Munich, , ; at Königsberg, ; at Bremerhaven,
; at Heilbronn, ; at Dresden, , –; psychological function of, ; See
De Wesselow, Smith, Le Good
Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir David, British prosecutor at Nuremberg,
McDonald, George C, General,
McKee, Alexander, author, vi
McKee, William F, US airforce general, xi
McLachlan, Donald, first editor of Sunday Telegraph, vii
Mehnert, General Karl, city commandant,
Metz, German fighter control bunker at,
Milch, Erhard, Field Marshal,
Missing Persons bureau, set up in Dresden, ; and see Voigt
Montgomery, Sir Bernard, Field Marshal,
Morgenthau, Henry R, Jr, plan of, ,
Morale, German, as target for attack, –, –, , ; and Hamburg raids, ; in
Dresden; within RAF Bomber Command, ,
Morell, Professor Theo, Hitler’s physician,
Munich, attacked April , –; Marshall suggests terror raid on, –; damage to,
Mutschmann, Martin, Gauleiter of Saxony, , , , , , , , ,
Navigation, devices, German, –; British, see Loran, HS, Gee, Oboe
Newhaven, Pathfinder technique, , , ; seen from the ground, , ,
NSV (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt),
Nuremberg, bombed (), ; in , , , ; International Military Tribunal at,
–,
Oboe, British radar blind-bombing device, , –; range limitations of,
Oil refineries, German, as a target system, –, , , , , , , –, ,
Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), American,
Offset marking, at Königsberg, –; at Darmstadt, –; at Bremerhaven, ; at Brunswick, –
Opera House, Dresden, –, ,
Ortloph, fire brigade director at Dresden,
Oshima, General Hiroshi, Japanese ambassador in Berlin,
Oxland, Air Marshal R D,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Page, Flight Lieutenant, Master Bomber’s navigator, ,
Panacea targets, Harris against attacks on, ; and see Oil refineries
Paramatta, Pathfinder technique, ,
Pathfinder Force, attacks Wuppertal, ; Hamburg, –, –; attacks Kassel, ; attacks
Stuttgart , ; marks second raid on Dresden, –, , –; attacks
Chemnitz, ; not suited for precision attacks, ; Light Night Striking force, ,
, , , ; and see Bennett
Peirse, Sir Richard, Air Chief Marshal, British chief of air staff, ,
Pforzheim, fire-storm casualties in, , , ,
Police, Dresden, headquarters, , , –, , , , transferred out of Dresden, ; police chief’s report, extracts from conclusions of, , , –, ,
, , , , , , –, , ; and see Alvensleben, Grosse, Thierig
Pölitz,
Population figures, Dresden, , , , , , –,
Portal, Charles, British chief of air staff, , , , , , , , ; at Yalta, ,
suggests Russians bomb Dresden, ; and Churchill’s accusatory minute, –
Prague, believed attacked in error, –
Prisoners, Allied, in Dresden, , –, , , , , , , , ; in relief
operations, , –, , , , –; shot for looting, –
Private Eye, magazine, caricature of Churchill in, vii
Propaganda Ministry, German, see Goebbels
Public Records Office, Kew, xi
Purbrick, E, Labour MP,
Quandt, Ello, in Dresden,
R.A.D. (Reichsarbeitsdienst), in Dresden, , , –; in rescue operations, ,
Railways, in Dresden, –, , , , –, , , , , , , ;
events in during the raids, –; damage to, , ; not destroyed, , –;
RAF photo interpreters disagree, –; station gutted, .
Recktenwald, Dr Wolf, survivor, ,
Red Cross, International, visits Dresden,
Refugees, treks set out, –, –, ; arrive in Dresden, , , –, , –;
suggested as a bombing target, , –, , , ; overcrowding in Dresden, ,
, , , , , ; killed, ,
Ribbentrop, Joachim von, argues against repudiating Geneva Convention,
Rich, James R, Captain, bombardier,
Roosevelt, Franklin D, President of the United States, mentioned, xi, , , ,
Rositz, oil refineries at, attacked, –
Rotterdam, attacked (May ), –; exaggeration of death roll, , –, ,
Royal Air Force units:
No Bomber Group, mentioned, , , , –, , ,
No Bomber Group, mentioned, , , , –, ,
No Bomber Group, mentioned, , , ,
No Bomber Group, mentioned, ; attacks Stuttgart, –, ; attacks Königsberg,
–; attacks Munich, –; attacks Darmstadt, –; attacks Bremerhaven, ; attacks Brunswick, ; attacks Dresden, , , , ; attacks Rositz, –;
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Base, , , , ; Squadron, ; Squadron, –, , , , ;
Squadron, , , ; provides Links, ; Squadron, , ; to mark Dresden,
No Bomber Group (Canadian), mentioned, , , ; attacks Böhlen, , ,
; attacks Dresden, , ,
No Bomber group, see Pathfinder Force, Squadron, ; Squadron, ; Squadron, ; Squadron, ; Squadron attacks Magdeburg, ; Squadron,
; Squadron, ; Squadron, , ; Squadron, , , ;
attacks Dresden, , –, ; attacks Pforzheim,
No Wing,
No (Radio Counter-Measures) Group, mentioned, , , , , , ,
,
Ruhland, attacked (November ), –; mentioned, , , , , , –
Rumour-mongers, shot,
Rumpf, Hans, General, inspector of fire services, ,
Ruhr, Battle of the,
S.H.A.E.F., co-ordinates Dresden attack, , , , , –, ; Press communiqués,
–, –; communiqué retracted, , ; mentioned,
S.H.D. (Sicherheits- und Hilfsdienst), in action in Hamburg, ; in Dresden, –, ,
Sandys, Duncan, vii
Satterley, H V, Air Vice-Marshal, ,
Saundby, Sir Robert, Air Marshal, assisted author, x; mentioned, ; realism of, , and
target maps, –; and Dresden target map, ; and ethics of bombing , –; queries Dresden order, ; lays on attack, , ; and Churchill’s accusatory minute,
,
Saunders, Hilary St George, historian,
Scapegoat for Dresden raids, need to find a, , , ; Harris, the perfect scapegoat,
Schinkel, Karl-Friedrich, master architect,
Schleissheim, German fighter control bunker at,
Schwarz van Berg, Hans, German radio commentator,
Semper, Gottfried, Dresden’s master architect, , –
Shinwell, Emanuel, Labour MP,
Silesia, evacuation of, –, , ; Western Silesia evacuated,
Simpson, Albert F, American historian, xi
Sinclair, Sir Archibald, Secretary of State for Air, , –; lies about area bombing, ,
–, , ; and Prime Minister, –,
Sirens, in Dresden, did not sound, , –, ,
Sissons, Michael, agent, insults author,
Smith, Maurice A, Wing Commander, assisted author, x, –; master bomber in raid on
Heilbronn, , ; in first raid on Dresden, viii, –, , , , , –,
, ,
Snow, Sir Charles P, author, Science and Government,
Soviet Army, General Command apprised of Dresden attacks, ; mentioned,
Soviet Government; asked to bomb Dresden, ; alleged responsibility of, ,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
Spaatz, Carl A, General, mentioned, xi–xii, , , ; part in modified Thunderclap,
-, , ; executes terror attack on Berlin, –; authorises raid on Dresden,
, ; Nazi criticism of, ; answers allegations, –
Speer, Albert, Reich minister of munitions, on Hamburg raids, , ; on Dresden, ;
Speer organisation,
Squadrons, see Royal Air Force
Stalag IVB,
Stalin, Joseph, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, mentioned, xi, -
Steengracht, Baron Hans von,
Stettin harbour, as a target,
Stimson, Henry L, US Secretary for War, , –
Stokes, Richard, Labour M.P., , –, –,
Student, Kurt, German paratroop general,
Strafing, see Machine-gunning
Stuttgart, attacked, –; Churchill advocates gas attack on, ; damage to, ; J-bombs
used in,
Swales, Edwin, Squadron Leader, Master Bomber at Pforzheim,
Sweden, planes routed over neutral, ; reports via, , ,
Swinemünde, shipping at, bombed,
Switzerland, reports from,
Sylt, seaplane base attacked,
Target maps, Wuppertal, ; Dresden, , , , –,
Technische Nothilfe,
Technische Spezialtruppen, , –
Tedder, Sir Arthur, ,
Terror raids, alleged at Dresden, –, , –
Thierig, Colonel Wolfgang, police chief of staff at Dresden, , –, , ; report
by discovered in , , ; and see Police
Thunderclap, operation, , –
Tizard, Sir Henry, professor, –,
Tokyo, casualties in fire raid,
Topper,William, Flight Lieutenant, Marker Leader in raid on Heilbronn, , ; on Dresden, , , –;
Transportation, German, as a target system,
Unconditional surrender, ,
Ultra, see Codebreaking
Uris, Leon, novelist, xii
U.S. Military Mission in Moscow,
U.S.S.B.S., United States Strategic Bombing Survey, , , ,
U.S.St.A.F., and Thunderclap, –, ; First Air Division, –; Second Air Division, ,
Fighter Groups, th, –; th, th, th, ; Third Air Division, ,
; Bombardment Groups, th, , ; th, ; th, ; th, , ,
; th,
U.S. State Department, announcement by, ,
THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN
V-Weapons, , ; research in Dresden, ; manufactured in Kassel,
Vermissten-Nachweis (Missing Persons Bureau), see Dresden, and Voigt
Voigt, Hanns, in charge of registering Dresden casualties, , –, , , –,
–,
Vonnegut, Kurt, author of Slaughterhouse Five,
Wanganui, Pathfinder technique, , ,
Watt, Donald Cameron, British historian, x
Webster, Sir Charles, British historian, x, , , , ; official history by,
Wehrkreis IV, Dresden military headquarters, ,
Weidauer, Walter, postwar mayor of Dresden, ,
Weldon, T D,
Window (‘chaff’), at Hamburg, , –; at Bremerhaven, ; at Dresden , –,
, , ; at Berlin, ; mentioned,
Woodroffe, J, Wing Commander, Master Bomber at Königsberg, ; at Darmstadt, –;
Wuppertal, attacked (May–June ), –, ; bomb tonnage dropped, ; casualties,
,
Würzburg radar, , , , , , ,
Yalta conference, , , ; mentioned, , , , –, , –, ,
Zeiss-Ikon factory, ; damage to, –,
Zhukov, Georgi K, Soviet Marshal,
Zoo, Dresden municipal, ,
Zossen, near Potsdam, bombed,
Zuckerman, Sir Solly, Professor, defence scientist, tests bombs, –, ; and railway
campaign, ,
Zwinger, destroyed,
Source Exif Data:
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