The story of the last months of desperate German resistance is now well known, but at the time the intelligence picture for the Allies was less coherent and full of potential menace. Persistent rumours of German plans to build a ‘redoubt’ in southern Germany or the Alps were taken more seriously than they deserved. The capacity of the Red Army to complete its victory on the Eastern Front was regarded as more imponderable than it should have been. These uncertainties help to explain the decision that led on the night of 13–14 February in the Saxon city of Dresden to the third major firestorm of the war, which killed approximately 25,000 people in a few hours. No other raid of the war, not even Operation Gomorrah, has generated so much critical attention. Harris has regularly been blamed for conducting a needlessly destructive and strategically unnecessary raid against Dresden, but the irony is that the purpose on this occasion was dictated by the conditions of the ground war rather than the area campaign. It was Dresden’s misfortune to be not only in the path of the oncoming Soviet armies, but a possible transfer route for the phantom last stand of German armies in the south. Although the city was ranked number 22 on the MEW list of target cities, with a key-point rating of 70, Harris had not yet attacked it in force, partly because of the long distance, but almost certainly because it contained no major industries linked to the current directive.342 By the autumn of 1944 Dresden was also routinely included on target lists issued to the Fifteenth Air Force stationed in Italy, along with other targets in southern and eastern Germany, but had not yet been attacked.343 When the Combined Strategic Targets Committee met in late November 1944, it listed cities for possible area attack when blind-bombing was necessary, with an ‘x’ to indicate oil targets present and ‘+’ to indicate a key communications centre. All 13 cities in western Germany had one or both targets indicated; of the 11 selected in eastern Germany, seven were marked ‘+’ but four – Dresden, Leipzig, Dessau and Danzig – had no key target marked.344
The origin of the decision to bomb Dresden has been obfuscated by the long post-war debate over who should accept responsibility or blame for what happened. The historical narrative seems, however, clear enough. The possibility of an area attack on Dresden first surfaced in October 1944 when Portal responded to a request from Churchill for a list of ‘area targets’ that the advancing Soviet Air Force might be able to bomb, which included Dresden among the seven suggested.345 Discussion about bombing cities in eastern Germany was always related to the progress of Soviet forces and the possibility of helping their advance by a display of Allied air power. In mid-January 1945 Tedder met with Stalin to discuss the progress of the campaign against oil targets. Stalin showed great interest in the effects of bombing on German military fuel supplies and then showed Tedder the Soviet plans for the main Oder operation, launched five days later, on 20 January.346 This discussion seems to have prompted two separate responses. The JIC on 25 January concluded that the Soviet offensive would be greatly helped by heavy attacks on Berlin, though priority was still to be assigned to oil targets. Portal and the Air Staff assessed the evidence but were unconvinced, and on 26 January their preference was still for attacks on oil and jet-fighter targets.347 However, the same day Churchill, who must have read the report, asked Sinclair whether there were any plans to help the Soviet offensive. Dissatisfied with Sinclair’s equivocal response, he dashed off a note on 26 January demanding to know whether Berlin ‘and no doubt other large cities in East Germany’ were now to be considered valuable targets. Sinclair replied on 27 January that Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz were all now on the list for possible attack when the weather had improved.348 The next day Portal wrote to Churchill that oil targets remained a key priority of the bombing war, but added the following: ‘We also intend, as you know, to apply as much bomber effort as we can to the cities of Eastern Germany, including Berlin: but oil must come first.’349 Two days later Portal and Churchill both travelled to Malta for discussions with the Americans before going on to the conference at Yalta.
The second response was to set in motion actual operations. On 27 January Bottomley sent Harris the JIC report and asked him to prepare attacks on Berlin, as well as the three principal Saxon cities, Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz.350 He then drafted a paper for the chiefs of staff meeting, due to convene in Malta on 31 January, which effectively summarized the grounds for the bombing:
Evacuation Areas: Evacuees from German and German-Occupied Provinces to the East of Berlin are streaming westward through Berlin itself and through Leipzig, Dresden and other cities in the East of Germany. The administrative problems involved in receiving the refugees and re-distributing them are likely to be immense. The strain on the administration and upon the communications must be considerably increased by the need for handling military reinforcements on their way to the Eastern Front. A series of heavy attacks by day and night upon these administrative and control centres is likely to create considerable delays in the deployment of troops at the Front and may well result in establishing a state of chaos … It is for these reasons that instructions have been issued for heavy scale attacks to be delivered on these centres at the earliest possible moment.351
The initiative now passed to Tedder at Eisenhower’s headquarters in Paris. After discussions with Spaatz and Bottomley, he drew up a planning document on 31 January incorporating the city attacks, which would involve both British and American bombers. Spaatz, who thought that Operation Thunderclap was now the plan, preferred a heavy attack on Berlin, with high casualties, but he did not demur at a broader programme.352
The only barrier to carrying out the raids was raised by the Soviet delegation at the Yalta conference. The Soviet side demanded agreement on a formal ‘bombline’ in eastern Germany, running through Berlin, Leipzig and Vienna, beyond which Western air forces would not bomb for fear of hitting Soviet forces and equipment. The discussions at Yalta were resolved on 7 February by agreeing on the term ‘zone of limitation’ to describe areas which either side could currently bomb, freeing Dresden and other cities from the Soviet proscription. It has often been argued that the Soviet side at Yalta asked for raids on Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden, but the discussion with the Soviet chief of staff, Marshal Aleksei Antonov, recorded in the minutes, only mentions the bombing of Berlin and Leipzig; Portal seems to have insisted on including Dresden, since this was already on the list of cities suggested by the Air Ministry.353 Though Harris later argued at the height of the Cold War that the request to bomb Dresden had come ‘from the other side of the Iron Curtain’, there can be no doubt that the plan was always a Western one.354 On 7 February the American military representative in Moscow, General John Deane, was notified by Spaatz that the bombing had been planned, and Soviet leaders were finally told five days later that the raid on Dresden was imminent. On 8 February SHAEF issued a formal operational instruction to Bomber Command and the Eighth Air Force to attack cities in eastern Germany when the weather was favourable.
The question for Dresden and the other cities of eastern Germany was not why they were attacked, which conformed with Allied policy on raids in support of the ground war, from Monte Cassino to Le Havre, but the way in which the raids were conducted and the weight of attack. Consistent with the new directive, Spaatz ordered a major daylight raid on Berlin on 3 February 1945 with 1,000 B-17 ‘Flying Fortresses’ and almost 1,000 fighters. For once he ordered the aircraft to attack the centre of the city along the lines first suggested in Operation Thunderclap, despite Doolittle’s unhappiness about the deliberate targeting of civilian areas. On the operational directive Spaatz scrawled ‘Beat ’em up!’ (though much later he chose to remember the raid as just another military target). The toll was high for an American raid, indeed the highest German death toll from any of the raids on the capital. An estimated 2,890 were killed and 120,000 rendered temporarily homeless. A second heavy raid on Berlin with 1,135 bombers was made on 26 February.355 On 6 February Chemnitz was also hit, by 474 American bombers; on 14–15 February a second attack was made b
y Bomber Command with 499 Lancasters, though cloud obscured the city and most bombs fell wide of it; a further raid was made by the Eighth Air Force on 2 March. Seen from this perspective, it is evident that the raid on Dresden was made as part of a series of agreed attacks on the cities of eastern Germany. All of these raids, and not just the attack on Dresden, were undertaken in the full knowledge that these were cities filled with civilian refugees from further east, whose destruction was likely to cause not just dislocation but high casualties as well.
The Dresden raid on 13–14 February 1945 was carried out by Bomber Command in two successive waves with 796 Lancasters, carrying 2,646 tons of bombs (including 1,181 tons of incendiaries). Light defences resulted first from the transfer of anti-aircraft artillery to the Eastern Front, and second from a successful diversionary raid which attracted the nearby night-fighters. The first wave was not very effective, but the follow-up raid with the bulk of the Lancaster force in clear conditions achieved an exceptional level of concentration. Low humidity and dry, cold weather, combined with a very large number of small fires quickly started, proved ideal conditions for the generation of another firestorm. The flames consumed 15 square miles of the city, an area that exceeded the damage at Hamburg. Recent estimates from a historical commission in Dresden have confirmed that the original figure suggested by the police president of Dresden in March 1945 of approximately 25,000 dead is the best available estimate. Out of 220,000 homes, 75,000 were destroyed.356 The firestorm, like the Hamburg conflagration, left bodies mummified or reduced to ash, making the final count difficult. A further 1,858 skeletons were unearthed when the city was slowly rebuilt after 1945. The aiming point in this, as in all area attacks, was the historic city centre, which was entirely burnt out. The next day the Eighth Air Force carried out its first raid on the marshalling yards of the city, but the smoke from the previous night’s bombing obscured the target and the 700 tons of bombs destroyed more of Dresden’s hapless streets. In the afternoon 210 B-17s, unable to bomb their primary oil target, blind-bombed the city with another 461 tons. In all, almost 4,000 tons of bombs were dropped on a single target in less than 24 hours.
Unlike any of the other major raids in the last months of war, the Dresden attack had immediate repercussions on Allied opinion. Two days after the raid an RAF officer at SHAEF headquarters gave a news conference in which he talked about bombing cities deliberately to cause panic and destroy morale. An Associated Press correspondent, Howard Cowan, filed a report successfully past the SHAEF censor, and by 18 February the American press was full of the news that the Allies had at last decided ‘to adopt deliberate terror bombing’. Arnold was compelled to run a campaign to reassure the American public that Dresden had been attacked, like Chemnitz, as a major communications centre, entirely consistent with American bombing policy.357 It was hard to stifle the debate. Goebbels released to the neutral press news that 250,000 people had been killed in Dresden (by the judicious addition of an additional zero to the provisional casualty estimate). In Britain and America news of the death toll was soon public knowledge. The Bombing Restrictions Committee in London publicized the figure of 250,000 at once and provoked a furious correspondence accusing the committee of acting as the mouthpiece for German propaganda. Air Ministry statements in the Commons dismissed the accusations of terror-bombing by claiming that no one, air marshals or pilots, was trying to work out ‘how many women and children they can kill’.358 But for the first time the real nature of area and blind-bombing attacks came under public scrutiny.
This may explain Churchill’s now well-known decision to send a minute to Portal on 28 March 1945 protesting that the policy of bombing ‘for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed’. He asked Portal to focus on oil and transport, as the strategic directives had intended, instead of ‘mere acts of terror and wanton destruction’. Harris was told of the document by Bottomley, who suggested that Churchill might have been worried about the shortage of German building materials, but Harris was outraged. He replied that city-bombing had always been strategically justified because it would shorten the war and save the lives of Allied soldiers, an assertion difficult to reconcile with the five long years of British bombing. Portal persuaded Churchill to moderate his original minute for the chiefs of staff, which he did, but area bombing’s days were now numbered. Churchill did not indicate his motives, and the entire episode of Dresden is missing from his history of the Second World War. It is possible that the publicity surrounding bombing as a result of Dresden worried Churchill as he contemplated a general election at some point in the next few months; it probably reflected his persistent ambivalence about bombing ever since its first disappointments in 1940 and 1941; or it may be that he finally realized, as Allied forces now poured into the broken cities of the Ruhr, just what bombing had done (on 26 March he lunched on the banks of the Rhine with General Montgomery) and was affected by its enormity, as he had been when he wandered through British cities during the Blitz. Harris much later in life dismissed the episode as unimportant; he told his biographer that Churchill’s attitude to him did not alter ‘in any perceivable way’ between 1942 and 1945. But the rift was important enough to be suppressed until its publication in the official history in 1961.359
Whatever Churchill’s misgivings, British city-bombing continued in ways that were evidently punitive in nature and excessive in scale. Just 10 days after Dresden, Bomber Command attacked the small town of Pforzheim. The marking worked well and the bombers dropped their loads from just 8,000 feet (instead of 18,000–20,000 feet on raids against defended targets); the subsequent conflagration consumed 83 per cent of the city area, until then the worst in any raid of the war, and killed an estimated 17,600 people, though the death toll, the third highest in the European bombing war, has never had the publicity accorded to Dresden. The ruins of Cologne, hit by more than 250 wartime raids, were raked over again by a massive Bomber Command attack on 2 March by over 700 Lancasters, just four days before it was occupied by American forces. Essen suffered the same fate on 11 March, with a macabre finale by over 1,000 bombers dropping 4,661 tons on a desolate landscape only hours before it fell to the advancing army. On 24 March Bomber Command headquarters portentously announced that, thanks to bombing, the ‘Battle of the Ruhr’, then in its last furious days of ground combat, ‘is already over – and Germany has lost it’.360 On 16–17 March, 1,127 tons of bombs were dropped on the small medieval city of Würzburg, killing between 4,000 and 5,000 people and destroying 89 per cent of the city, a wartime record. Hildesheim was half destroyed on 22 March (the town centre ‘should make a good fire’, the crews were told).361 The small city of Paderborn was destroyed on 27 March, and half of Plauen on 10–11 April. The final catalogue of area attacks could not be restrained even by Churchill. On 4 April Portal, spurred perhaps by Churchill’s minute, had notified the chiefs of staff that area attacks on industrial districts for the sake of destruction would now cease. When Harris destroyed Potsdam in a devastating raid on 14–15 April, Churchill wrote angrily to Sinclair ‘What was the point of going and blowing down Potsdam?’ Portal replied a day later assuring the prime minister that Harris had already been told to discontinue industrial area attacks.362 The directive sent to Harris on 16 April for the first time since February 1942 no longer contained industrial areas or morale as dedicated objectives.363
The American air forces wound down operations in April 1945. Much of the bombing since the February attacks was tactical in nature, directed at almost any target that could be deemed to be an element of German resistance. Operation Clarion was carried out with mixed success against a range of smaller communications targets. On 5 April all objectives were defined henceforth as tactical, but American bombing of the shrinking German area reached a climax, dropping 46,628 tons in 19 days of raiding, almost the same weight dropped during the German Blitz, but in just three weeks. The last raid by the Eighth Air Force was made on 25 April against the Skoda works at Pilsen;
the last by the Fifteenth was on 26 April against the Austrian city of Klagenfurt.364 Spaatz attended the surrender ceremony in Berlin on 8 May as the senior air commander in Europe. The Soviet delegation, however, refused to allow him to sign as the equal of Marshal Zhukov, the conqueror of Berlin, and he had to add his name underneath as a witness.365
Spaatz already knew that the Eighth Air Force was destined to go to the Pacific under his command to help complete the defeat of Japan. British bombers were also expected to contribute, and preparations were already in hand to undertake operations against Japanese cities that had already been reduced to ash in a series of extensive incendiary attacks carried out by the former Eighth Air Force divisional commander, Curtis LeMay. RE8 produced a report on 25 May 1945, two weeks after the German surrender, on ‘Area Attack Against Japan’, recommending that since everything easily combustible had already been burned down, Bomber Command should use 4,000-lb blast bombs to destroy any urban areas or industrial targets still standing. From previous analysis carried out on the vulnerability of Japanese housing, it was calculated that each bomb would destroy more than 10 built-up acres, whereas in Germany the figure had been only 1.5.366 The air war in Europe was over, but Japan was soon to profit from its grim lessons.
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