World War II caused unimaginable human suffering as millions lost their lives and many thousands were orphaned, displaced and disabled. Many of those who survived were scarred by mental trauma for life. Another terrible legacy of the war was near destruction of the architectural heritage of many cities wrought by the merciless bombing, both by the Germans and the Allies. Many destroyed buildings were painstakingly reconstructed after the war but many beautiful landmarks were lost forever. Dresden in Germany was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and many Germans had believed that the British would never bomb the city out of respect for preserving its cultural heritage just as the Germans had refrained from bombing Oxford, which was also renowned for its beautiful architecture and historical landmarks.
The war was near its end and Germany was already on its knees and in no position to fight back but the Allies still went ahead with a series of merciless bombing raids which turned German cities and their inhabitants into fireballs. Was this really necessary? Seventy years after the World War II, debate still rages on and has been reignited on the 70th anniversary of the bombing of beautiful Dresden.
British and American bombers dropped 3,900 tonnes of explosives on the Saxony city during four raids between February 13 and 15, 1945, in the process killing some 25,000 people and reducing the city to rubble. The bombing, which was ordered by Royal Air Force (RAF) marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, was widely criticised because of its ‘blanket bombing’ that targeted military and civilian areas, hence killing thousands of innocents. As 722 heavy bombers of RAF and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) turned the city into a sea of flames and rubble, the resulting firestorm is said to have reached temperatures of over 1,500 degree C and destroyed over 1,600 acres of the city centre. The victims were mostly women and children, torched alive in the savage firestorms whipped up by the intense heat of 2,400 tonnes of high explosives and 1,500 tonnes of incendiary bombs. The city centre firestorm also decimated some 12,000 houses, including shops, schools, pubs and the city zoo.
Among the deadly bombs dropped were the ‘blockbusters’, so called because these thin-walled, massive missiles could demolish whole blocks with one explosion. As British planes pounded the town, incendiaries rained down from the sky turning men and women into human torches and Dresden reverberated with the screams of those who were being burnt alive. Desperate people didn’t know where to run. Everywhere they turned, there were flames, smoke and dust and blocks of debri falling from the sky. When the noise from the planes died down, people stumbled out of huge mounds of rubble which a while back had been their homes.
The authorities had built huge concrete water towers but only a few of these had been filled with water. This proved to be tragic for many people who had climbed into them to escape the flames and found it impossible to climb back out and were trapped in boiling water.
Everything that could possibly burn was alight and mountains of red hot wreckage blocked all paths. Even the roads were like burning rivers of bubbling and hissing tar and those who tried to cross what had once been a road got themselves stuck in a bubbling mass of molten tar. Those who had tried to hide in cellars did not stand a chance. After the raids ended, the cellars had to be prised open with pickaxes and crowbars and the victims’ bodies were found, shrivelled to half their sizes. Children under the age of three or four had simply melted although most of them looked as though they had died peacefully due to lack of oxygen making them lose consciousness in the process. Some of the corpses found were so brittle that they crumbled into clouds of ash and dried flesh.
Although no one was ever charged over the bombings, several historians both in Germany and former Allied nations aver that the bombing was a war crime. Although British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was ultimately held responsible for the attack, he later conveniently distanced himself from the bombing of Dresden.
An RAF memo issued to airmen on the night of the attack said — ‘Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester is also the largest unbombed builtup area the enemy has got. In the midst of winter with refugees pouring westward and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium, not only to give shelter to workers, refugees, and troops alike, but to house the administrative services displaced from other areas. At one time well known for its china, Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance.... The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front... and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.’
Incidentally, the Bomber Command suffered the highest casualty rate of any British unit, losing 55,573 of its 125,000 men and got a memorial in 2012.