When US airpower struck targets in Baghdad during the first days
of Gulf War II, the media brought up the name of a historic European
city almost as often as they mentioned the Iraqi capital itself.
That city was Dresden.
It was a potent symbolic reference, intended to suggest cruelty,
horror, and unjustifiable overkill. On Feb. 13-14, 1945, two waves
of Royal Air Force firebomb attacks and a follow-up US Army Air
Forces raid all but obliterated Dresden, an old and graceful German
city on the Elbe River. Huge incendiary assaults created a firestorm
that consumed everything in its path.
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The Price. Dresden
paid a price for Nazi Germanys sins. As Soviet forces
closed in from the east, the citys fate was determined
by its strategic location along rail and road lines of communication
that could facilitate a German counterattack. In this famous
photo taken from Dresdens Townhall Tower, a sculpture
titled The Goodness appears to be surveying the
wreckage. |
Germany surrendered three months later, but by then the world had
already begun to hear a legend of Dresden, one formed
and promoted by Nazi propagandists. According to this legend, the
destruction of Dresden was not a valid military operation at all
but was at best a vicious attack of questionable value and, at worst,
a war crime against defenseless civilians.
The legend grew in postwar years. Dresden was in Soviet-occupied
East Germany, and Moscow put the 1945 event fully in the service
of anti-American and anti-British propaganda. Many western writers
did their part, too. In the 1960s, Kurt Vonneguts best-selling
novel, Slaughterhouse 5, delivered a memorable fictional rendering
of Dresdens blazing streets and burned bodies.
Critics persistently raised questions about why this Florence
of the Elbe had evidently been singled out for such a ferocious
attack, and so near the end of the war, when it had been hit only
a few times before February 1945.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and ... Dresden
This legend of Dresden was part history, part propaganda, and part
outright myth. Other cities such as Berlin and Hamburg suffered
far worse attacks. Still, Dresden has surpassed them in the public
mind as a symbol of brutal conventional bombing and morally questionable
target selection. Only Hiroshima and Nagasaki have higher revulsion
quotients.
Thus, Dresden is a well-established reference point, guaranteed
to prompt debate on city bombing, civilian casualties, and the morality
of Allied operations.
Which brings us to Baghdad. In early 2003, the ghost of Dresden
was an ever-present touchstone for antiwar forces.
Recently, a debate over whether the Allied bombing of
Dresden was a war crime has preoccupied the German press,
observed columnist Anne Applebaum.
Dresden 1945. Baghdad 2003: The Same Crime, read
a placard in a Berlin protest spotted by a New York Times reporter
after the start of Gulf War II.
After the bombing of Baghdad, Some excited TV commentators
likened the scene to the devastation caused by the extensive bombing
of Dresden and other cities during World War II, observed
a New York Times editorial.
It was also a marker for the coalitiona dont
go there. Baghdad will not be like Dresden,
vowed an Air Force colonel conducting a Pentagon background briefing
on airpower just before Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
What makes Dresden stand out is the sense that the Allied attack
was disproportionate. In the laws of war, proportionality is key.
Claims that Dresden was not a legitimate military target, that the
attack came too late in the war to make a difference, and that the
firebombing tactics were cruel and unusual are at the center of
the debate.
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Decision. Gen. Arthur Harris,
head of RAFs Bomber Command, got the go order
Jan. 27, 1945. Harris viewed Dresden as a mass of munitions
works, an intact government center, and a key transportation
center. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS) |
Ernest W. Lefever, a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, D.C., summed up the case against the Allies
with this charge: Hitlers barbarity didnt justify
the fiery obliteration of beautiful Dresden.
Dresden also provides a major count in the indictment of RAF Bomber
Commands doctrine of nighttime area bombing.
Denouncers of the Dresden attack come from different points on
the political spectrum. For instance, neo-Nazi groups promote the
legend of Dresden via Internet postings in order to show that non-Jewish
Germans suffered in the war.
What, exactly, happened at Dresden in 1945? And why has it remained
a powerful symbol nearly 60 years later?
When World War II began, Dresden was the seventh largest city in
Germany. Official statistics put Dresdens population at 642,143.
It had been a popular tourist destination because of its marvelous
cathedral, synagogue, palaces, gardens, and avenues radiating out
from the medieval city center.
For all of its charm, however, Dresden had an ugly side. Its leaders
and public generally welcomed the Nazis rise to power.
Dresden is a pearl, and National Socialism will give it a
new setting, Adolf Hitler boasted in 1934. Most resistance
to the Nazis in Dresden was stamped out by 1935, according to historian
Frederick Taylor in his comprehensive 2004 book, Dresden: Tuesday,
February 13, 1945.
Even while Dresden was being converted to a Reich stronghold, observers
outside Germany paid attention only to its cultural beauty and luxury
industries. This was true despite contrary evidence. In fact, said
Taylor, an official 1942 guide described the German city as one
of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich.
Dresden shifted to a wartime footing, with the large Zeiss-Ikon
camera factory converted to make fuses and bombsight optics. The
United States Strategic Bombing Survey listed at least 110 factories
and industries in Dresden. Some 50,000 people worked in munitions
and armaments production.
Too Far East
Still, Dresden was not a target of Allied air attack until 1944.
It was too far to the east. In the early years of the war, RAF Bomber
Command and the US Army Air Forces had their hands full attacking
Nazi-held France, Holland, and western Germany. Then came concentrated
attacks on major industrial targets and the all-important preparations
for the Normandy invasion.
In those early years, bombers that found themselves over Dresden
generally were strays from raids on Berlin. Dresden recorded just
12 air raid warnings in all of 1940, seven in 1941, and four in
1942. Most came to nothing. Dresden took its first air raid casualties
only in August 1944, when some bombs from a raid on the nearby town
of Freital fell in its outskirts.
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The Route. This mission map
published in David Irvings famous 1965 book, The Destruction
of Dresden, shows the route flown by two waves of RAF bombers
on the night of Feb. 13-14, 1945. |
According to official Air Force reports, Dresden was not targeted
deliberately until 30 B-24s of Eighth Air Force on Oct. 7, 1944,
struck the rail marshaling yards with more than 70 tons of high-explosive
bombsa comparatively light raid. Eighth Air Force returned
to Dresdens marshaling yards with 133 bombers on Jan. 16,
1945, dropping 279 tons of high explosives with 41 tons of incendiaries
in the mix.
As the war closed in, it was the strategic location of Dresden
along rail and road lines of communication that would determine
its fate.
By January 1945, one of the most important elements in the Allies
strategic calculus was the new Russian ground offensive. Gen. Dwight
D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, had the Battle of the
Bulge under control and Allied forces in the west were ready to
move into Germany itself. To end the war by summer 1945, the Allies
would have to coordinate the eastern and western drives as never
before.
Russias winter offensive began from Poland on Jan. 12, 1945,
and made remarkable progress, as Eisenhower said in
his memoirs, reaching German soil a week later.
Though the ring was tightening on Germany, Berlin had a compensating
benefit: shorter internal lines of communication. The smaller battle
area meant that the German Army could redeploy its forces from one
front to another rapidly. According to historian Matthew Cooper,
Hitler immediately began shifting his forces, but significant Panzer
forces remained in areas like Hungary.
Soviet Jeopardy
By Feb. 2, 1945, the Russians were near Frankfurt, but Moscows
drive now formed a bulge 400 miles long at its base with northern
and southern flanks over 100 miles deep. Even this juggernaut was
vulnerable to flank attacks from areas still held by the German
Army. Dresden was a major rail junction controlling German movement
on that front.
A big question was how best to use Bomber Command and Eighth Air
Force to support the Russian effort.
Britains Joint Intelligence Committee had a detailed answer
to that question. Composed of representatives from military intelligence
service, counterintelligence, naval intelligence, the Air Ministry,
and the Ministry of Economic Warfare, this powerful committee tracked
the status of German forces and produced papers on the likely outcome
of courses of action. According to Taylor, the JICs Jan. 21,
1945, report put it bluntly: Germany might be able to reinforce
the Eastern Front with up to 42 divisions pulled from France, Norway,
Italy, Latvia, and elsewhere.
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Round 3. The day after the
RAFs nighttime attacks, 316 bombers of the US Eighth Air
Force attacked Dresdens marshaling yards outside the city
center. Taking part were B-17 Flying Fortresses. |
Thus, it was a race between Russian offensive operations and the
arrival of German reinforcements. Half a million men pouring eastward
was the last thing the Allies wanted. More alarming, the JIC laid
out a timetable predicting the Germans could complete the reinforcements
by March 1945. The JICs research was backed up by supersecret
Enigma-code intercepts.
The JIC had no doubt that the success of the Russian offensive
would have a decisive effect on the length of the war.
Then came the recommendation: We consider, therefore, that
the assistance which might be given to the Russians during the next
few weeks by the British and American strategic bomber forces justifies
an urgent review of their employment to this end.
It got more than a review. On Jan. 27, 1945, Gen. Arthur T. Harris,
head of Bomber Command, got his orders from his RAF boss. The chief
of the Air Staff would allow one big attack on Berlin, but he also
ordered 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.
The idea of US and British air support for the Russian campaign
was hardly new. Eisenhower himself used exactly the same technique
to support his own Normandy landings in 1944. He was counting on
airpower again in 1945 to prevent the enemy from switching
forces back and forth at will against attackers.
What was good for the Western Front also was good for the Eastern
Front. In December 1944, the US ambassador to Russia, W. Averill
Harriman, had talked over the idea with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Stalin got the same message in a mid-January 1945 meeting in Moscow
with Eisenhowers deputy, British Air Marshal Arthur W. Tedder.
Tedder briefed him on application of the Allied air effort
with particular reference to strategic bombing of communications
as represented by oil targets, railroads, and waterways, and
they also discussed how to bring airpower into the fight as Germany
began to shuffle forces.
Call for Help
At Yalta on Feb. 4, 1945, Gen. Alexei Antonov, Red Army chief of
staff, briefed Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill on the Russian offensive
and asked for US and British help. He wanted them to speed up the
advance in the west, crush the Ardennes salient once and for all,
and weaken German ability to shift reserves east.
The Russians wanted to begin a new phase of advance in February.
To do so, Antonov wanted air forces to pin down German forces in
Italy and to paralyze junctions in eastern Germany. That meant Leipzig,
Berlin, and Dresden.
The Allies were now committed to an attack on Dresden designed
to choke off transport through the city. How would they achieve
those effects?
The answer lay partially in the history of the air war to date,
starting with the Nov. 14, 1940, German bomber attack on Coventry,
England.
Coventry, like Dresden, was a major manufacturing center built
on a medieval city grid with small workshops and factories interspersed
through the city. More than 500 German bombers attacked with loads
of incendiaries. As the fires combined, they sucked oxygen from
street level so that many of Coventrys 538 victims died of
asphyxiation.
The main damage to Coventrys economy came from the combined
effects of burned houses, factories, and city infrastructure. Instead
of counting on the near-impossible task of precision bombing of
industrial sites, the Luftwaffe had brought war work to a halt by
destroying all the secondary mechanisms that fed the life of the
city. This was a new level of annihilation, commented
historian Taylor.
Bomber Command soon figured out how to create firestorms of its
own. The attack on Hamburg that began on July 27, 1943, provided
a weapons-effectiveness model for Dresden. Nearly 800 bombers headed
for Hamburg and masked their approach with one of the first operational
uses of Window, Britains new chaff strips that fuzzed German
radar at ground stations and in night fighters. The firestorm killed
about 40,000 and compelled even Hitlers war production chief,
Albert Speer, to admit that more attacks like Hamburg would derail
German war production.
This was the same method chosen by Bomber Command for the Dresden
attack. Less than two weeks after Yalta, Bomber Command and Eighth
Air Force got the weather they needed for the Dresden attack. The
Russians were notified a day in advance via the US military mission
in Moscow.
In England, 722 bombers formed up to attack in two main waves.
Leading the first wave was Bomber Commands veteran 5 Group,
once commanded by Harris himself. Their primary aircraft was the
newer, faster Lancaster bomber. Light wood-frame Mosquito pathfinder
aircraft led the formations using a radar beacon system to locate
city targets with far greater precision than in the early years
of the war.
Grim News
Many of the 5 Group veterans preparing to fly that evening had
just heard grim news: Their initial tours of duty were being extended
from 30 missions to 40 missions. We shant make it,
commented one aircrew member cited by Taylor. Their pessimism was
well-founded, for as late as 1944, official Bomber Command statistics
forecast that less than 25 of 100 bomber crews would complete even
30 missions without being shot down. Losses from 1939-45 averaged
60 killed out of every 100 aircrew members in Bomber Command.
Flying so deep into Germany also got the attention of Bomber Commands
crews. As one bombardier from 5 Group later recalled, They
said the reason for the raid [on Dresden] was chiefly ... blocking
the supply to the Russian front, ... and we were out to knock
it out.
Still, conditions favored Bomber Command that night. German air
raid warnings went off shortly after 9 p.m. Pathfinders dropping
flares from 800 feet marked the targets accurately. RAF 5 Group
hit the city at about 10:15 p.m. Ten minutes later, the blaze began.
As the old buildings burned, the firestorm spread and created the
howling street-level winds that depleted oxygen from the atmosphere.
Those who survived escaped the heat with wet blankets and clothing
wrapped around them, running through burning streets and reaching
either the river or high ground away from the flames.
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Workhorse. The heart of the
RAF long-range bomber force was the fast-flying Lancaster (shown
here). The Lancaster was the RAF analogue to the USAAF B-17
and B-24 bombers. It saw heavy action over Dresden. (©
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS) |
Now Bomber Commands second wave was on its way. The second
wave released weapons from 1:21 a.m. to 1:45 a.m. All told, Bomber
Command dropped 1,477 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,181 tons
of incendiaries on Dresden that night.
Although this was Dresdens first heavy attack, the tonnage
was not high by Bomber Command standards. For example, Cologne,
Hamburg, and Frankfurt-am-Main had all been bombed with mixes including
3,800 to 4,100 tons of incendiaries, more than triple Dresdens
totals. The total of 7,100 tons of bombs of all types dropped on
Dresden during the war hardly compared to the 67,000 tons of bombs
that fell on Berlin or the 44,000 tons on Cologne.
The next day, Feb. 14, 1945, 316 bombers from Eighth Air Force
attacked Dresdens marshaling yards outside the city center.
The mix was 487 tons of high-explosives and 294 tons of incendiaries.
Another 200 bombers of Eighth Air Force returned to hit the same
target the next day.
Dresden still burning from the night attacks, noted
Kay Summersby, Eisenhowers British driver, who also kept an
official headquarters diary.
Gruesome Result
The human toll was high. POWs were detailed to excavate the bodies,
giving Vonnegut, who was a prisoner there, the subject of his novel.
Accounts of groups of 10 to 20 people found untouched, but dead
of carbon monoxide poisoning in basement shelters, helped to give
the Dresden raid its gruesome reputation.
Casualty estimates became a source of ongoing debate. At the time,
the British estimated the firestorm killed up to 16,000. One 1948
estimate by two German generals went as high as 250,000. Some British
historians in the 1950s and 1960s settled on numbers near 100,000
by adding together known casualties plus estimates of people missing.
However, the true number was probably closer to the 25,000 to 30,000,
now cited in official Air Force historical statistics. Taylor backed
the number, too. He cited records recovered from the Dresden archives
in 1993, listing the number of people buried after the attack in
municipal cemeteries at 21,271. All sources agreed on one fact:
A contributing factor in the number of casualties was that Dresden
lacked proper air raid shelters for civilians.
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Aftermath. Dresden was a scene
of devastation after the raids. Within days, Nazi propaganda
chief Joseph Goebbels had launched the legend. It
was, said one historian, Goebbels final, dark masterpiece.
(AP photo) |
Harris was unapologetic. Dresden, he said at the time, was
a mass of munitions works, an intact government center, and a key
transportation center. He added, It is now none of those
things.
The attack on Dresden achieved its goal of unhinging the city as
a rail transport and communications center. Official USAF figures
show that 23 percent of Dresdens industrial buildings were
destroyed or severely damaged, along with more than 50 percent of
its houses. In total, 80 percent of the buildings in Dresden suffered
some form of damage.
The war continued, with Bomber Command recording its heaviest totals
of munitions dropped in the entire war during the month of March
1945. The bloody Russian advance went forward, too, and Russian
troops actually entered Dresden on the last day of the war in Europe:
May 8, 1945.
The distortion of the Dresden raid began almost immediately, and
it came from two sources. The first was an ill-advised Feb. 18,
1945, release by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
(SHAEF). It trumpeted the effect of terror bombings. SHAEF tried
to recall the statements, and, at Gen. Henry H. Hap
Arnolds direction, the Air Staff in Washington launched an
immediate investigationbut not before the Dresden terror raid
story made the front page of newspapers around the world.
The furor led no less a figure than Army Chief of Staff Gen. George
C. Marshall to issue a definitive statement on Dresdens significance
in early March 1945. When Dresden was bombed, the Russian salient
was only 70 miles from the city, he said. Russian positions were
still vulnerable to German counterattack, and, indeed, counterattacks
elsewhere on the Eastern Front cost the Russians very heavy casualties.
There was no way the Allies could let the Dresden rail and communications
nodes open the gates for German reinforcements. According to a memo
signed by Marshall, he concluded that communications through Dresden
were made impossible by the Allied bombings, and the Russian salient
was thereby protected.
Goebbels Strikes
The second source was Nazi Germanys propaganda chief, Joseph
Goebbels. The foreign news service and the state-run Das Reich newspaper
started bumping casualty estimates from around 25,000 to around
200,000 and emphasizing Dresden as a lost cultural treasure. A
city skyline of perfected harmony has been wiped from the European
heavens, Das Reich said in early March 1945.
Goebbels did his job well. Soon, Dresden was under Russian control,
and it became impossible for decades to sort out the facts. In 2004,
Taylor came to a conclusion: [The] ripple of international
outrage that followed the Dresden bombing represents, at least in
part, Goebbels final, dark masterpiece.
No doubt the view of Dresden as overture to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
also played its part. So did the nuclear balance of terror during
the Cold War, where the destruction of Dresden stood as a graphic
warning of what nuclear war might do to Europe. Yet even after the
Cold War ended, Dresden was held by some to be a black mark against
airpower. The strategic and tactical setting of the raid in support
of the Russian offensive was long since lost.
In the 1990s, Britain took a special interest in Dresden, by then
a part of unified Germany. In 2000, London goldsmiths donated a
replica orb and cross as part of the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche
cathedral.
The true surprise is that the Dresden legend has lived on and has
been used to prompt comparisons between that long-ago operation
and present-day American- and British-led air operations. No incendiary
raids devastated Baghdad in the Gulf War of 1991. In 2003, it took
neither firestorm nor 300-bomber raids on railroads to stop effective
maneuver of the Republican Guard around Baghdad. That was the work
of truly modern airpower: precise, discriminate, and employed with
maximum care to avoid collateral damage.
Dresden will never be forgotten, but its place in the record of
airpower belongs only in the past.
Rebecca Grant is a contributing editor of Air Force Magazine.
She is president of IRIS Independent Research in Washington, D.C.,
and has worked for Rand, the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Chief
of Staff of the Air Force. Grant is a fellow of the Eaker Institute
for Aerospace Concepts, the public policy and research arm of the
Air Force Association’s Aerospace Education Foundation. Her most recent
article, “The Missing Aces,” appeared in the September issue.
Copyright Air Force Association. All rights reserved.
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