February 13

February 13, 1945 was one of the most horrific bombing campaigns in WWII.  The city of Dresden was bombed for 3  days and almost totally destroyed.  It was the most controversial attacks made by the Allies in WWII.  Dresden had no industry and military value, but they decided to bomb it anyway. 

On the evening of February 13, 1945, the most controversial episode
in the Allied air war against Germany begins as hundreds of British
bombers loaded with incendiaries and high-explosive bombs descend on
Dresden, a historic city located in eastern Germany. Dresden was
neither a war production city nor a major industrial center, and before
the massive air raid of February 1945 it had not suffered a major
Allied attack. By February 15, the city was a smoldering ruin and an
unknown number of civilians–somewhere between 35,000 and 135,000–were
dead.

By February 1945, the jaws of the Allied vise were closing
shut on Nazi Germany. In the west, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s desperate
counteroffensive against the Allies in Belgium’s Ardennes forest had
ended in total failure. In the east, the Red Army had captured East
Prussia and reached the Oder River–less than 50 miles from Berlin. The
once-proud Luftwaffe was a skeleton of an air fleet, and the Allies
ruled the skies over Europe, dropping thousands of tons of bombs on
Germany every day.

From February 4 to February 11, the "Big
Three" Allied leaders–U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British
Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin–met
at Yalta in the USSR and compromised on their visions of the postwar
world. Other than deciding on what German territory would be conquered
by which power, little time was given to military considerations in the
war against the Third Reich. Churchill and Roosevelt, however, did
promise Stalin to continue their bombing campaign against eastern
Germany in preparation for the advancing Soviet forces.

An
important aspect of the Allied air war against Germany involved what is
known as "area" or "saturation" bombing. In area bombing, all enemy
industry–not just war munitions–is targeted, and civilian portions of
cities are obliterated along with troop areas. Before the advent of the
atomic bomb, cities were most effectively destroyed through the use of
incendiary bombs that caused unnaturally fierce fires in the enemy
cities. Such attacks, Allied command reasoned, would ravage the German
economy, break the morale of the German people, and force an early
surrender.

Germany was the first to employ area bombing tactics
during its assault on Poland in September 1939. In 1940, during the
Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe failed to bring Britain to it knees by
targeting London and other heavily populated areas with area bombing
attacks. Stung but unbowed, the RAF avenged the bombings of London and
Coventry in 1942 when it launched the first of many saturation bombing
attacks against Germany. In 1944, Adolf Hitler named the world’s first
long-range offensive missile V-1, after Vergeltung, the German word for "vengeance" and an expression of his desire to repay Britain for its devastating bombardment of Germany.

The
Allies never overtly admitted that they were engaged in saturation
bombing; specific military targets were announced in relation to every
attack. It was but a veneer, however, and few mourned the destruction
of German cities that built the weapons and bred the soldiers that by
1945 had killed more than 10 million Allied soldiers and even more
civilians. The firebombing of Dresden would prove the exception to this
rule.

Before World War II, Dresden was called "the Florence of
the Elbe" and was regarded as one the world’s most beautiful cities for
its architecture and museums. Although no German city remained isolated
from Hitler’s war machine, Dresden’s contribution to the war effort was
minimal compared with other German cities. In February 1945, refugees
fleeing the Russian advance in the east took refuge there. As Hitler
had thrown much of his surviving forces into a defense of Berlin in the
north, city defenses were minimal, and the Russians would have had
little trouble capturing Dresden. It seemed an unlikely target for a
major Allied air attack.

On the night of February 13, hundreds of
RAF bombers descended on Dresden in two waves, dropping their lethal
cargo indiscriminately over the city. The city’s air defenses were so
weak that only six Lancaster bombers were shot down. By the morning,
some 800 British bombers had dropped 1,478 tons of high-explosive bombs
and 1,182 tons of incendiaries on Dresden, creating a great firestorm
that destroyed most of the city and killed numerous civilians. Later
that day, as survivors made their way out of the smoldering city, over
300 U.S. bombers began bombing Dresden’s railways, bridges, and
transportation facilities, killing thousands more. On February 15,
another 200 U.S. bombers continued their assault on the city’s
infrastructure. All told, the bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force
dropped 954 tons of high-explosive bombs and 294 tons of incendiaries
on Dresden. Later, the Eighth Air Force would drop 2,800 more tons of
bombs on Dresden in three other attacks before the war’s end.

The
Allies claimed that by bombing Dresden, they were disrupting important
lines of communication that would have hindered the Soviet offensive.
This may be true, but there is no disputing that the British incendiary
attack on the night of February 13-14 was conducted also, if not
primarily, for the purpose of terrorizing the German population and
forcing an early surrender. It should be noted that Germany, unlike
Japan later in the year, did not surrender until nearly the last
possible moment–when its capital had fallen and its Fýhrer was dead.

Because
there were an unknown number of refugees in Dresden at the time of the
Allied attack, it is impossible to know exactly how many civilians
perished. After the war, investigators from various countries, and with
varying political motives, calculated the number of civilians killed to
be as little as 8,000 to more than 200,000. Estimates today range from
35,000 to 135,000. Looking at photographs of Dresden after the attack,
in which the few buildings still standing are completely gutted, it
seems improbable that only 35,000 of the million or so people in
Dresden that night were killed. Cellars and other shelters would have
been meager protection against a firestorm that blew poisonous air
heated to hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit across the city at
hurricane-like speeds.

At the end of the war, Dresden was so
badly damaged that the city was basically leveled. A handful of
historic buildings–the Zwinger Palace, the Dresden State Opera House,
and several fine churches–were carefully reconstructed out of the
rubble, but the rest of the city was rebuilt with plain modern
buildings. American author Kurt Vonnegut, who was a prisoner of war in
Dresden during the Allied attack and tackled the controversial event in
his book Slaughterhouse-Five, said of postwar Dresden, "It
looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There
must be tons of human bone meal in the ground."

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