Lancaster Men

by Peter Rees

  In February 1945, these enterprises were reported to have employed 50,000 workers in arms plants alone. As the Dresden Stadt Museum today acknowledges, ‘Many Dresdeners participated—as soldiers or in the war industry—in the Second World War, and many local businesses profited from the exploitation of prisoners of war and forced labourers.’ Nonetheless, compared with military manufacturing centres such as Nuremberg or Essen, Dresden was well down the scale.

  Besides the contribution it was making to Germany’s total war effort, Dresden was also a key rail hub, with lines running north– south to Berlin-Prague-Vienna as well as east–west to Munich-Breslau and Leipzig-Hamburg. By October 1944 twenty-eight military trains, carrying almost 20,000 officers and men, were passing through the city each day. Dresden was not only a German administrative, industrial and communications centre, by early 1945 it was near the front line—and increasingly prominent on the Allies’ radar.

  The initial strikes against Dresden were to have been made by the US Eighth Air Force on 13 February, but these were called off because of poor weather and it was left to Bomber Command to open the campaign that night. In a statement to groups and squadrons outlining that night’s op, the Command made it clear that the raid would provide support for Soviet Marshal Ivan Koniev in his push towards Dresden.

  Dresden, the seventh largest city in Germany and not much smaller than Manchester, is also the largest unbombed built-up 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, and like any large city with its multiplicity of telephone and rail facilities, is of major value for controlling the defence of that part of the front now threatened by Marshal Koniev’s breakthrough.

  The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front, to prevent the use of the city in the way of further advance, and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.

  The attack, by two waves of bombers, was intended to cause massive disruption by destroying as much of the city centre as possible. But because of the need to carry extra fuel for the long flight, bomb loads would be smaller than usual.

  All the aircraft going in the first wave came from 5 Group, including fifteen from 463 Squadron and seventeen from 467 Squadron. Mid-upper gunner Brian Fallon was one of the airmen in 463 Squadron who read the message as he prepared for what would be the twenty-fourth op of his tour in Bomber Command. Brian, who had just turned twenty, came from Northbridge in Sydney and had enlisted two years earlier. He was now in pilot Don Huxtable’s crew. They carried one, 4000-pound Blockbuster and 5000 pounds of incendiaries when they joined 244 Lancasters and nine marker Mosquitos in the first wave of the attack.

  Also on the battle order for that night was Gel McPherson, rear gunner with 186 Squadron RAF. He would be in the second wave.

  At [the] briefing we were informed that Russian authorities had requested the raid because their offensive about 40 miles from Dresden was temporarily held up by German troop movements flowing through Dresden. We were also informed that precision instruments such as binoculars and bombsights etc. were manufactured in Dresden for the German Armed Forces. It was also announced that a diversionary raid would be made on Chemnitz, a city south west of Dresden.

  Gel’s Lancaster was loaded with a Blockbuster and four cans of incendiaries. At 44 Squadron, Alick Roberts attended the specialist briefing for bomb aimers, where he was told that they would drop their Blockbuster from 30,000 feet. ‘We were briefed on how the aiming-point would be marked, and were told that each aircraft would run in on a pre-determined heading with a delayed release to be timed by the navigator. Obviously it was to be in our jargon a “Blitz”, the area bombing of a city,’ Alick recalled.

  At the main briefing, the station commander announced that the op was to be a special one to a target beyond the normal range of operations, and that it was being mounted at the specific request of the USSR in support of their front line. Wall charts were uncovered and the target revealed as Dresden. ‘We were told the identities of three German army headquarters and four major supply organisations with their depots stated by the Russian authorities to be located in Dresden,’ Alick said.

  After a pre-flight meal, the bomber force took off shortly before 1800 hours and, still cautious about night fighters despite the Luftwaffe’s weakened state, zig-zagged their way over France and Germany towards Dresden, intent on keeping the German defences guessing. Don Huxtable remembered that ‘We did not have much trouble.’ But the nervous strain was too much for the Canadian navigator in 467 Squadron pilot Bill Kynoch’s Lancaster. They were beyond the half-way point when he suddenly fell off his stool and blacked out on the floor. Thirty-year-old Bill, from Melbourne, had no option. He told his crew: ‘We’re going back, no point going on without an accurate fixing.’ To Bill, Dresden was ‘just another target, and that was it’.

  With about twenty minutes to go, the bomber stream set course directly for Dresden. It had been a mild, pre-spring day and in the city’s streets, the Shrove Tuesday celebrations had wound down. At 2200 hours, the Pathfinders began marking, dropping green flares to define the city centre, followed by 1000 white magnesium flares to illuminate the ground. Red flares were then dropped to mark the aiming point, a football stadium just west of the Elbe river.

  As he approached, Alick Roberts saw that the outskirts of the city were clearly visible in the light of perhaps 100 parachute flares. Alick noted that the first wave’s timing was impeccable.

  We had a copybook bombing approach with only light opposition. After release, checking bomb bay clear and calling ‘bomb doors closed’ it was my duty on the run out to keep a watch for other aircraft as well as observing the target area. There was the usual pattern of cookies exploding within an increasing perimeter, followed by the development of a swathe of twinkling white lights across the area of each explosion as the incendiaries ignited. We soon lost sight of the target as we headed for our western-most turning point, from where we clearly saw artillery explosions along a portion of the Eastern Front.

  The first Blockbuster ‘cookies’ fell just after 2200 hours. From his vantage point, flying on a lower course than Alick Roberts, Brian Fallon noted that the markers were accurate. Dropping the bombs ‘resulted in a horrific firestorm’. In fifteen minutes, the first wave dropped 881 tons of bombs, of which almost 380 tons were incendiaries. Their task was made easier by the lack of anti-aircraft guns, most of which had been moved to the eastern front.

  Three hours later, as firefighters struggled to control the fires from the first attack, 1 and 3 Groups hit the city even harder with bombs from 529 Lancasters, twenty-four of which came from 460 Squadron. Sitting in the rear turret of his 186 Squadron Lancaster, Gel McPherson looked down on Dresden and saw a mass of flames. ‘At this point I was mostly concerned that if German night fighters were above us, they could easily spot us with the fires below. There didn’t appear to be much flak over the target.’ His bomber had dropped one Blockbuster and four cans of incendiaries. The second wave dropped more than 1800 tons of bombs with great accuracy.

  On the streets below, a disaster was unfolding. City leaders had failed to prepare Dresden for an attack, lulling the population into a false confidence that this city of fine architecture and art would be spared. Ironically, while Dresden produced anti-aircraft guns, it had almost none for its own defence, and few effective air-raid shelters except those reserved for the city’s Nazi hierarchy. In 1940, Dresden had been omitted from a government list of eighty-one cities and towns ordered to begin building bomb-proof shelters. Its preparations consisted almost exclusively of air-raid drills and the outfitting of cellars and basements as shelters. So basic were the precaut
ions that Dresdeners were merely encouraged to keep buckets of sand and water at hand to deal with fires.

  When the bombers arrived, thousands of civilians trooped into their underground shelters only to be buried alive, suffocated to death or poisoned as the raging firestorms sucked oxygen from the air and produced deadly carbon monoxide. Old timber buildings were quickly consumed in the spreading bonfires. There was mass panic.

  Dresden’s agony did not end with Bomber Command returning home. The next day, which aptly happened to be Ash Wednesday, the USAAF sent 310 Flying Fortresses to shower another 750 tons of bombs through the vast pall of smoke still rising to 15,000 feet above Dresden. Melbourne-born bomb aimer Jack Rose, a flying officer in 15 Squadron RAF, had been in the last Lancaster through Dresden. When he rose from bed at midday on Wednesday, he heard the news of the American bombing. ‘We just looked at each other and said, “What for?”’

  The bombing devastated thirty-four square kilometres of Dresden and obliterated its factories, stores and rail facilities. A month later, on 15 March, a final Dresden police report sent to the chief of police in Berlin estimated the death toll as at 10 March at 18,375, with 2212 seriously injured and 350,000 homeless. Shortly after, the death toll was revised to 20,204, with a predicted death toll of up to 25,000. Josef Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry multiplied this figure by ten and released to the press via German embassies in neutral countries the total of 202,040.

  Accusing the Allies of abandoning strategic bombing for terror tactics, the reaction was just as Goebbels wanted. Years later, even the American author Kurt Vonnegut Jr, in his novel Slaughterhouse– Five, perpetrated a figure of 135,000 dead—a figure he drew from the discredited historian, David Irving. The Dresden Commission of Historians concluded in 2010 after a five-year study that the original figures were essentially correct: between 18,000 and 25,000 people had been killed. By then, however, the Nazi figures had taken hold in popular consciousness, making Dresden a symbol of area bombing’s horrendous destructive power.

  42

  AN UNEARTHLY THING

  As Dresden smouldered and local emergency services struggled to come to grips with the scale of the damage, Flying Officer Bruce Otton was in one of sixteen Halifaxes from 466 Squadron that flew to Chemnitz, sixty kilometres from Dresden, on the night of 14 February. Another 202 Halifaxes and 499 Lancasters joined Bruce in the raid on the city’s industrial base and rail network. Bruce, who grew up in Sydney, was just twelve days away from turning twenty-one and it was his first trip as a pilot on operations. All did not go to plan, as he recalled later.

  We climbed to some 6000 feet to cross the coast and then climbed to operating height. Suddenly the rear gunner came up and sat beside me. I said, ‘What the so and so are you doing here?’ He said, ‘My oxygen’s not working.’ So we were weaving practically all the way to Chemnitz because we didn’t have a rear gunner. I later found out he had checked his oxygen on the ground and it hadn’t been working then. He never did that again.

  I didn’t turn back because, quite frankly, I believed that you could get away with it if you didn’t have a gunner in the rear turret. I warned the rest of the crew to keep their eyes open and had him glued to the windscreen on the starboard side to see what he could see. I felt we could get by.

  Engaging in ‘judicious weaving’, Bruce and his crew survived the op in spite of themselves. They arrived over the target to find it covered by cloud, and while many areas of the city were hit, many bombs fell in open country. Later, during daylight on the 15th, the US Eighth Air Force made a follow-up attack, but, although civilian and industrial property suffered badly during this series of raids, the rail facilities at Chemnitz were relatively unscathed, and they did not cause civilian panic or general administrative breakdown as happened at Dresden.

  The Dresden raid itself had been a big one, but no bigger than many others at that time directed against German cities. The severity of the firestorm was unforeseen, being a product of the ideal conditions and grossly inadequate measures to deal with such an attack.

  Of the Australians involved in the bombing, there was general support for the attack, even if there were reservations about some aspects of it. Don Huxtable felt they had not been given all necessary information at the pre-flight briefing. ‘The thing was,’ Don said, ‘there was a lack of intelligence. We were not told that while we were bombing the railway yards there were about 30,000 people running away from the Russians in the tunnels.’ But he had no doubt the raid was justified. ‘At the same time, it was not just the city. The watch companies, for example, were making compasses for the German air force and many other firms were contributing to the German war effort as well.’ Bomb aimer Jack Rose dismissed the critics. ‘They have no right to pluck just one aspect of World War II out as horrific. As far as we were concerned we were just doing what we were told to do. The critics were not there, so how can they lucidly criticise it?’

  Flying Officer Austin Dowling, a twenty-year-old from Ballarat who piloted a 460 Squadron Lancaster on the Dresden raid, had no qualms about an operation he regarded as a success. To him, it was just another operation. He remembered being emotionally detached from the consequences when he called his navigator out from his enclosed cabin to survey the scene below. It was another incident altogether that night that touched Austin more deeply and personally.

  On the return journey, a long haul across Germany, a flash of tracer in the night caught my attention about half a mile on the port beam. A Lancaster immediately burst into flames and slowly dived downwards. We saw no one bail out before it was too far away to tell if they had. I had the same feeling of sadness, mixed with fear due to identifying with them, that I always felt when I saw someone shot down and the sensation stayed with me for perhaps half an hour or so, as it always did, before the continuous alertness needed and the other happenings up and down the stream drove the reaction away.

  I felt sorrow then, for the loss of my fellows in that Lancaster but none for the people on the ground in Dresden.

  To Alick Roberts, Dresden was ‘a massive glow on the horizon’ and a ‘pillar of fire’. At debriefing he and the rest of the crew estimated the height of the flames at 10,000 feet.

  We were, at height during bombing, normally rather remote from the terrible work we had to do. It was almost a clinical detachment. To me it always seemed no different from an exercise over a practice bombing target. That night flying past on our way home all members of our crew joined in making an assessment of the height and extent of the flames. Without exception each expressed his sympathy for the unfortunate people back there.

  He was convinced, however, that the raid was strategically sound.

  Even without the firestorm, which I am sure was not anticipated, the disruption of utilities and transport, and absenteeism, consequent upon a sustained series of area bombing attacks such as Dresden suffered would have impacted seriously upon military control, supply and reinforcement, as well as upon defence production in the area. Dresden must have had significant military value or the USSR would not have called on its allies for their assistance by attacking it. They were always reluctant to admit that they could not meet such needs themselves. In the absence of specific target location information, which the USSR obviously had not provided and most likely could not provide, area bombing would have been the only effective method of attack.

  Some years later, Alick met two Jewish women at the Jewish Centre’s Holocaust Museum in Sydney. Both had survived the Dresden raids. One told Alick that she had been in a train of cattle trucks taking several hundred people to an extermination camp. During the bombing they were left in the train while their guards took shelter. The journey never resumed. ‘You saved my life!’ she told Alick. The second woman had been a slave labourer in a Dresden munitions factory. She told Alick: ‘Angels must have guided you to miss the ammunition factory in which we were forced to work under inhuman conditions. During the bombing we were locked inside the factory. Some of the bunkers
where the SS hid were hit. It was a miracle.’

  Another Australian, twenty-two-year-old pilot Geoff Taylor, who was imprisoned near Dresden after being shot down in October 1943, was pleasantly surprised when he saw the bombing from a distance. Geoff, a Melburnian posted to 207 Squadron RAF, had been in Stalag IV-B, a large prisoner-of-war camp about fifty kilometres north of Dresden, the night of the attack.

  This noise woke us. It was like the sun had come up, an unearthly thing. We didn’t know why fires like that would be burning. Our reaction in the camp, after we got over the shock, was, ‘You bloody beauty, let’s get the hell out of here.’ It sounds like a terrible thing to say, but our main concern was that they didn’t make a mistake and hit the camp. The war had reached the stage where moral attitudes had given way to pragmatic ones. We wanted to survive the war.

  After six years of warfare, there were many who shared Geoff’s pragmatism. They wanted the struggle over and, in Geoff’s case, to be liberated from the POW camp holding him and 30,000 others in appalling conditions. Tuberculosis and typhus were rife, resulting in the deaths of 3000 men and women. But Geoff would have to wait another two months for his freedom, when the Russians liberated the camp.