Dresden 60 Years ago: Simply for the sake of increasing the terror on the civilian population

In world war II, perhaps the greatest single act of Allied war terror was the fire-bombing of “the Florence of the Elbe.” An undefended city of 630000, in February of 1945, Dresden was packed with hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing the Red Army.

As the Washington Post’s Ken Ringle wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the raid, “if any one person can be blamed for thetragedy at Dresden, it appears to have been Churchill.”

Before leaving for Yalta, Churchill ordered Operation Thunderclap, the use of Allied air power to “de-house” German civilians to make them refugees so they would clog the roads over which German soldiers had to move to stop the winter offensive of the Red Army. It was British Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris who put Dresden on the target list. As Ringle describes the first night of the raid, 770 Lancaster bombers arrived over Dresden around ten p.m.

In two waves three hours apart, 650000 incendiary bombs rained down on Dresden’s narrow streets and baroque buildings, together with another 1474 tons of high explosives.

The morning after the Lancasters struck, five hundred American B-17s arrived over Dresden in two waves, with three hundred fighter escorts to strafe fleeing survivors.

The fires burned for seven days. More than 1600 acres of the city were devastated (compared to 100 acres burned in the German raid on Coventry) and melting streets burned the shoes off those attempting to flee. Cars untouched by fire burst into flames just from the heat. Thousands sought refuge in cellars where they died, robbed of oxygen by the flames, before the buildings above them collapsed.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, one of twenty-six thousand Allied prisoners of war in Dresden who helped clean up after the attack, remembers tunneling into the ruins to find the dead sitting upright in what he would describe in Slaughterhouse-Five as “corpse mines”. Floating in the static water tanks were the boiled bodies of hundreds more.

Estimates of the dead in the Dresden firestorm run from 35000 to 250000. Even Churchill acknowledged what it had all been about: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.” (emphasis added)

Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong, New York 2004, p. 119f, ISBN 0-312-34115-6.