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The Bombing Of Dresden. Sixty years ago, on the evening of February 13, 1945, 234 British bombers set off for the German city of Dresden. They were followed a few hours later by an additional 538 and the next day by a wave of 311 US bombers. Laden with high explosives and some 700,000 phosphorous incendiary bombs, the 14-hour long bombing operation laid waste to Dresden, killing tens of thousands of people and devastating one of Europe’s finest centres of culture and art.
Dresden was of no military significance in World War II and had few, if any, strategic targets of importance to the war effort. In the briefings before the mission, bomber crews were not given any specific details on bombing runs or targets. The whole city of at least 1.2 million people including non-combatants, refugees, the wounded and prisoners of war was the target. Dresden had become, above all other things that she was, a city of children, of women, of refugees, and of the injured and maimed who were recovering from their wounds in her many hospitals.
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These women and children, these wounded soldiers, these infirm and elderly people, these refugees fleeing from the brutal onslaught of the Communist armies to the East, had come to Dresden because it was commonly believed at the time that Dresden would not be attacked. Its lack of strategic or military or industrial significance, and the well-known presence of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian refugees and even Allied prisoners of war, seemed to guarantee safety to the city. Surely, it was thought, not even a the most powerful and determined enemy would be so depraved and sadistic, and so wasteful of that enemy's own resources, to attack such a city. But the people of Dresden, who were happily attending the cinema or eating dinner at home or watching the show-horses in the circus on that fateful night were wrong. And their leaders were also wrong, for the city was virtually open and undefended and only minimal civil defense preparations had been made.
Dresden's population had almost doubled in the months before the attack, mainly as a result of the influx of refugees from the Eastern Front, most of them women and young children. According to British historian David Irving, the briefings given to the British bomber squadrons before the attack on Dresden were curiously different. In one, the soldiers were told that their target was the railway center of Dresden. In another, they were told that the target was a poison-gas factory. In yet another, they were told that the target was a marshalling-grounds for troops in the city. Another was told that the target was a major arsenal. These were all lies.
