The Bombing At Dresden – World History

Table of Contents

BACKGROUND

By February 1945, the jaws of the Allied vise were closing shut on Nazi Germany. In the west, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945) 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 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.
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.
On the night of February 13, hundreds of RAF bombers descended on Dresden in two waves, dropping their lethal cargo indiscriminately over the city.
By the morning, some 800 British bombers had dropped more than 1,400 tons of high-explosive bombs 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, more than 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. 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.
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 Hitler 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 at the time were killed.
At the end of the war, Dresden was so badly damaged that the city was basically leveled.