The fire bombing of Dresden, Germany

Recently the forest fires in California have inspired a great deal of talk about the destructiveness forest fires and fires in general.

Throughout history there have been many cases of great fires. Some of our largest cities were destroyed, or nearly so. In the last few centuries, London, in 1666 was nearly leveled in a great fire, which began in a baker's shop and destroyed over 13,000 buildings and homes. In 1871, Mrs. O'Leary's cow was said to have kicked over a lamp in Chicago, which started the fire that destroyed 17,000 structures over 2000 acres, and killed 300 people. These cities consisted largely of wooden buildings. The fires inspired building codes, which required brick buildings, and imposed much stricter regulations. These have made cities everywhere much safer.

In 1906, San Francisco suffered a very powerful earthquake, and fires sprouted up everywhere from overturned lamps and candles, caused by the tremors. The city's water mains were destroyed by the quake, making it almost impossible for the firemen to do their job. The fire lasted three days, until firemen dynamited entire blocks to contain the blaze. When the carnage was over 3000 lives had been lost and over 300,000 homes and businesses had been destroyed.

We are quite confident that these disasters had natural causes (with the possible exception of Mrs. O'Leary's cow). However during World War II there were attempts to do great damage to cities by warring factions on both sides. In early 1942 Gen. James Doolittle led a bombing raid on Tokyo, hoping to set fire to the flimsy Japanese houses and business buildings in Tokyo.

This was strictly a propaganda raid, however, in retaliation to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and did little real damage. Nor did the subsequent Japanese Paper Bomb raids on Northwest United States a year or so later, which failed to slow the American war effort.

In 1945, though, Allied fire bombing inflicted real damage on the enemy. In February Dresden and other Eastern German cities were hit with conventional incendiary bombs, and in August Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, were hit with Atomic Bombs.

Dresden, a beautiful, old, Saxon city, south and east of Berlin near the Czech border had been largely spared throughout the war. It was an arty city, home to many artists and musicians and enjoyed its reputation as "The Florence of the North."

A particular white porcelain, produced there, enjoyed a world-wide reputation for beauty. It was accepted that Dresden would be an "Open City" throughout the war. Without fortifications, it was lightly defended and had been left untouched by Allied bombs.

But in 1945 Dresden assumed another role, through no desire on its part. The Nazis were being defeated on the Eastern front in the war against the Russians, and 10s of thousands of German troops were retreating into Eastern Germany. British General Portal, Chief of the Royal Air Force, proposed a plan to help the successful Russian forces and one which he argued would shorten the war.

His plan was to step up the bombing of the Eastern German cities (Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz, and Leipzig) by the RAF, and to interrupt the bombing raids on oil fields and munitions factories by the American planes and divert them for massive attacks on these same cities.

General Portal's plan (and subsequently Prime Minister Churchill's as well) was to cause confusion in the cities bombed, clog up the supply lines -- thus hampering German retreat from the east and to prevent German troops in the west from aiding the German forces to the east, who were attempting a counter attack on the Soviets.

Though never stated directly, a third reason for the massive bombings was no doubt a political strategy. Churchill never really trusted the Soviets and it was inferred that he wished to subtly demonstrate to Soviet leader Josef Stalin, the massive power of the combined American and British Air Forces. If so, he did a good job.

At that time of the war Dresden, normally a city of about 600,000 had swelled to almost double that population, with wounded German soldiers and refugees from the Russian front. So many of those visitors fleeing the Soviets had chosen to come to Dresden because it was generally assumed that the city would not be bombed.

However the belief that Dresden would be a place of refuge was wrong. General Portal was able to convince the other Allied Commanders, and most importantly, Winston Churchill of the worth of his plan. For over 24 hours Dresden was bombarded by countless numbers of RAF bombers by day, followed by United States bombers by night, which dropped an estimated 700,000 incendiary bombs on the city -- one bomb for every two people. The damage was particularly effective because during that 24 hour period in Dresden the weather conditions were almost perfect for delivering bombs, and great numbers of the bombs found their target.

It is difficult to comprehend the destruction that the incendiary bombs dropped by the Allied planes did to the city. Wave after wave of bombers hit the center of the city, setting fire to a number of big buildings. Subsequent incendiary bombs fed the fire till the flames reached "critical mass", at which time the Dresden bombs literally created a weather system of their own.

Temperatures reached an estimated 2800 degrees Fahrenheit. The rising hot air sucked up cold air from ground level, and even underground air raid shelters with hurricane type winds, drawing building wreckage into the inferno, so that the fire became self-sustaining. People died from suffocation as the air was pulled out of the buildings they were in.

When the fire was finally over, Dresden, The "Florence of the North" was no more. Eleven square miles of Dresden, in the center of the city was absolutely gone. The estimates of loss of lives in the attacks range from 70,00 to 135,00 or even more. (As a way of comparison, it is estimated that 110,000 lives were lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the day of the atomic bombings on those cities and that many more died later as a result of radiation effects.)

The writer Kurt Vonnegut, an American GI, who was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and later taken to Dresden as a prisoner, lived through the Dresden bombings and described the conflagration in his best-selling book, "Slaughterhouse Five."

So, if the Dresden bombings were to aid the Soviets and shorten the war, were they effective? Perhaps they did shorten the "Hot" war in Europe. That has been endlessly debated.

The Nazis, desperate for any means to extend the war, immediately used the Dresden bombings as propaganda, criticizing "Churchill the Butcher" and calling the incident a "Holocaust" -- as a means to blunt World-wide criticism of their own Holocaust (the Nazi treatment of the Jews in World War II).

And the Soviets, whom the Allies were trying to aid, used the Dresden incident extensively as a propaganda weapon against England and America, in their efforts to bring the Eastern European countries into the Soviet web. Certainly, the bombings had a definite effect on beginning of the "Cold" War.

That war, between the Soviet Forces and America and her Allies, lasted for more than 40 years ---the effects we still feel today.

Source: Firebombing of Dresden at Everything2.com