The night of 13th/14th February 1945.

borebage53

Knife & Fork pending
796 bomber planes flew in from the west and “opened the gates of hell” on the German city of Dresden in Saxony. RAF Bomber Command by night and USAF 8th Air Force in the later hours of the morning. In that one “infernal” night and the following morning an estimated 25000 people were killed.
Similar to the “firestorm” that engulfed Hamburg earlier in 1943 when 37000 people perished.
Tons of incendiaries showered from above;the fires had started,windows shattering,roofs buckling.
And pilots above in the orange skies had watched with wonder as flames joined with flames across narrow streets,and joined into an ever larger cauldron of fire that began to bend the elements:air was sucked away,hurricane-force winds of searing heat blew upwards to the sky,and those people who had not simply been burned or baked to death found themselves instead suffocated,their lungs sharp with fire with every increasingly futile breath.
The same had happened to Cologne,Frankfurt,Bremen,Mannheim,Lubeck and many more other cities too.
Two weeks after Dresden it was the turn of the smaller town of Phorzhiem,statistically the most devastating area bombardment of the war, if such a savage thing can be in any way quantified. Some 17600 people,or 31.4% of the towns population,were killed. About 83% of the town’s buildings were destroyed,two-thirds of the complete area of Pforziem and between 80% and 100% of the inner city!
 
I remember reading that when the USAF went in for the last ‘attack’ there was literally nothing left to bomb. They were embarrassed and I believe many didn’t drop their bombs on Dresden but jettisoned them in the countryside. Is that right borebage?
 
Just started reading Dresden:The Fire and the Darkness. Ironically a lot of the prewar industry in Dresden included high class typewriters,household appliances and bicycles not dissimilar to Coventry. But of course by 1945 it was all turned over to the Nazi war effort. Precision instruments for weapons,aircraft and military equipment and there were large marshalling yards and an important railway hub.
Stalin had insisted at the then recent Yalta conference of the “big three war leaders” that Dresden should be bombed by the British and US allies. The writing was on the wall so to speak.
At the time of the ensuing air raid the Red Army was only 60 miles away from Dresden and the horror of Auschwitz had only been discovered on January 27th when the Soviet’s entered the camp.
Dresden was one devasting aerial bombardment whereas Hamburg had been a week long (8 day, 7 nights) “campaign” in July 1943. But the effects on Dresden would have been no less traumatic.
At Hamburg “Operation Gomorrah” caused 37000 killed and 180000 wounded. It caused a firestorm on the heaviest bombing night when 19000 were killed alone. The tornadic maelstrom created a huge inferno with winds up to 150mph,reaching temperatures of 800 degrees centigrade(1,470 degrees Fahrenheit) and a vortex rising 1000 feet into the air,incinerating 8 square miles of the city.
So 25000 killed in one night in similar circumstances in Dresden. One chilling element was of the many people who tried to find safety by jumping desperately into the River Elbe only to be drowned. Large stretches of the river through the engulfed city were ablaze. Phosphorus was floating on the surface!
 
Might be worth sending a copy to President Putin
A more pertinent comparison would be the situation in Berlin 1945-49. After the Russians ‘liberated’ Berlin they then had a 4 month start of looting and misappropriating literally everything they could lay their hands on until the US and British arrived into their western sectors of the city. Then came 4 years of Soviet dirty tricks,propaganda and subterfuge. They tried to rig elections packed with Communist candidates but the women of Berlin thwarted that. “Why would we vote for the Russians who raped us and our city?”. It was the turning point as the Western Allies now joined by France sensibly switched from a policy of punishing Germany to saving and reconstructing it.
The final Russian attempt was their 1948/49 ‘blockade’ of West Berlin,cutting off the 110 mile autobahn and the rail links essential to supply the city from the western zone and ringing the perimeter of the city with tanks, threatening to starve the city into submission.
Even then the Americans wavered and said any proposed “air lift” to save the city was bound to fail. At the highest level the US were contemplating pulling out altogether.
It was British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin,supported by Prime Minister Clement Atlee, who came to the rescue and convinced the Western Powers to stand fast. Bevin rather cleverly cornered the Commander of the USAF in Europe with his withering statement to his face of “Well I never thought I would live to see the day that the United States Air Force would ever say it could not do what the RAF can”!
It worked.The US from President Harry Trueman down were “galvanised” and the air lift was on. Bevin knew that it would need the US abundance of aircraft and supplies to make it all possible. His ‘bluff’ had worked and he now knew that Europe as it stood then was saved.
The American Air Force called in William Tunner. Tunner had orchestrated the re-supply from India of arms,food and war materials into China in their fight against the Japanese. Flying there and back at 18000ft over 15000ft mountains for his squadrons to deliver the essential aid to the Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. “Cometh the moment,cometh the man”.
Tunner organised an ‘arc’ of airbases to supply West Berlin. Into Gatow and Tempelhof Airports and during the blockade the Yanks built a third at Tegel from scratch. 500 aircraft flying round the clock,landing and unloading then taking off again in a matter of minutes. The Soviets had no choice but to finally lift the blockade in 1949.
It ushered in the Trueman Doctrine,the Marshall Plan, the United Nations and NATO and any thought of future US ‘isolation policy’ gone forever.
US Colonel Howley the firebrand leader of the Western policies in Berlin had said all along “The Soviets are only prepared to use force if they think they have a reasonable chance of success but stand firm and disavow them of that notion and they will invariably back down”!
 
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I’ve not heard of Pforzheim. I wonder what they were doing there? It’s only small.
Jewellery and Watch making. Thus the Allies believed it was producing specialist instruments for the Nazi war effort as well as being a conduit for troop movements. I don’t think it took too much by 1945 to end up being put on “the list”. At the end of the war it was in the French occupation zone!
 
An American report that remained classified until released in 1978 cited 110 factories and 50000 workers producing materials for the German war effort in Dresden at the time of the raid. Aircraft components, poison gas,anti-aircraft and field guns,Zeiss Ikon Cameras and optical goods,electrical and X-Ray apparatus,gears and differentials and electric gauges.
At the time Dresden was the 7th biggest German city and the largest to remain unbombed up to that moment.
There were no deep air raid shelters in Dresden and very few shelters anyway because the Gauleiter of Saxony,Martin Muschsmann,had forbidden their construction. He did have one constructed for himself and his prison in the city was notorious for it’s near medieval imprisonment and torture of political dissidents,Jews and captured POW’s. As in most of Germany by that time the Guillotine was used for judicial executions after brief trials at a Nazi People’s Court.
He built himself a palatial hunting lodge in the forest where he could hunt deer and wild boar!
 
There was however a deep bunker reserved for Dresden’s collection of art treasures and Old Masters paintings.
How deliciously ironic that all the European priceless collections of art and paintings stolen and hidden away by the Nazi’s would then in turn be found by the Russians,especially after the fall of Berlin, and end up in Moscow!
 
Saw a veteran speaking about it . He was on the outskirts of Dresden and saw fleeing people trying to cross a road . He couldn’t understand why they were screaming, until he realised women and children were literarily up to ankles in melting asphalt . He had clearly been traumatised by it and broke down .
 
The tactics of RAF “Thousand Bomber Raids” were honed into 3 waves. The first dropping ‘blockbuster’ bombs to smash down upon roofs and open the buildings up ready to receive the following waves of incendiaries. Countless fires burst into life,timbers crackled and twisted, rail track warped,ironwork and Church bells melted. The perfect “firestorm” had begun. It reproduces the same effect as American or Australian bush fires. But where those are spreading rapidly and uncontrollably usually over wide areas and relatively sparse populations,until they burn themselves out, the same effect on the much more populated German cities was entirely catastrophic with the desperate inhabitants reduced to a grim state of human gridlock.
The fire created hurricane-force winds,the effect of which was akin to a blast furnace.Clothes were shredded,torn off by the air itself;internal organs roasted and eyes burnt out of their sockets.
The terrifying inversions of gravity that ensued,trees,animals and human bodies plucked from the ground (those not already baked into the viscous melted asphalt) into the maw of the superheated inferno. They would simply have melted.
In some cases,depending on where the victim had been in relation to the fire,corpses might look little more than sunburnt. Conversely,in the worst instances,parts of them had been liquefied.
Wooden buildings just disappeared,the rest became nothing but dust and stumps of stone.
 
It took Bomber Command a long time to fully comprehend all the hazards that their crews faced in the air. It was assumed for some time throughout 1943 and 1944 that crews in exploding planes that had not been hit by enemy fire had fallen victim to mid-air collisions. The tightness of the bombing formations,the requirement to sweep in en masse surely meant that such contact was sometimes inevitable.
But there was another element of mortal danger about which Bomber Command was as yet unaware. Pilots sometimes returned from missions with the sinister impression that the German night fighters were somehow invisible.
Step forward another young brilliant mathematician,Freeman Dyson, working for Bomber Command. Dyson speculated that the Germans might have achieved what had once been a theoretical dream:not invisibility,but on-board weaponry for their night fighters that could be fired upwards at an angle - optimally between sixty and seventy-five degrees - as the enemy planes flew beneath bombers unseen. He was correct. The Germans had perfected the technique,which they dubbed “Schrage Musik” (crooked music)!
 
And yet the Allied Bomber crews would soon be employed to fly deeper and deeper into Eastern Germany than they had ever done before,putting their lives at even greater risk. The Joint Intelligence Committee,the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Air Ministry had been studying with interest the vast numbers of German refugees pouring out of the East,fleeing the terror of the oncoming Red Army. Here was a chance to cause both severe disruption and confusion. The fact that it would involve the most desperate and vulnerable of human collateral seemed not to resonate in any way any longer with the Senior Allied Chiefs. They had apparently passed beyond regarding German civilian life as having any intrinsic value.
Winston Churchill was impatient to hear more of the possibilities.
Was a vast raid on Berlin possible?
And what of these other cities in the east of the country?
Thus it was that Chemnitz,Leipzig and DRESDEN were added to the hit list!
 
All of the material gathered from the destruction of Phorzheim, was used to create an artificial hill called the Wallberg.

aerial-photos-kunst-installation-freilichtskulptur-monte-scherbelino-halde-truemmerberges-wallberg-pforzheim-baden-wuerttemberg-295086.jpg
 
It took three years to clear all the rubble. Due to the shortage of available men, it was often left to women and children to clear the human remains and clean bricks for reuse. For the women the job was further complicated by repeated rape attacks, especially from Moroccan soldiers during the French occupancy.
 
Only last December,2021,an undiscovered 550lb bomb exploded on a railway construction site near Munich Station injuring 4 people.
Police said it happened during drilling work inside a tunnel near the Donnersberger Bridge close to Munich Station. As well as the injuries a large excavator was overturned by the force of the blast.
70,000 people in Frankfurt had to be temporarily evacuated from their homes when a 1.4 tonne British “blockbuster” bomb was discovered there in 2017.
Most discovered unexploded WW2 bombs are safely diffused.
Each German state still has to legislate for and provide bomb disposal teams.
All construction and building sites in Germany still have to be carefully examined and searched before any work can begin.
Experts estimate that there could be between 135,000 and 270,000 tons of unexploded WW2 bombs remaining in Germany’s soil. An average of 2,000 tons are discovered every year.
The RAF and USAAF dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Germany during the Second World War.
In certain conditions it can take hundreds of years before unexploded bombs can degrade and become inactive and the explosives within become dormant. Over years the detonator and main charge will first deteriorate,frequently making them more sensitive to any disturbance.
In June 2010 a bomb disposal team were called to an unexploded Allied 1,100lb bomb at Gottingen buried 23ft below ground. While the EOD team were preparing to disarm it suddenly detonated killing 3 and injuring 6 others.
 
As a comparison,between 1965 and 1975,the United States and it’s Allies dropped 7.5 million tons of bombs on Vietnam,Laos and Cambodia - double the amount dropped on Europe and Asia during WW2.Pound for pound,it remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history!
 
I’ve been to Wesel. Rees, Kleve and Goch were heavily bombed too in the build up to ‘Operation Plunder’, the Crossing of the Rhine between Rees and Wesel. ‘Operation Varsity’ was the associated Airborne drop over the Rhine centred on Wesel and the village of Hamminkeln and the Diersfordter Forest. 3 bridges needed to be taken on the River Issel on the eastern side of the Rhine.
2 Airborne Divisions (6th British and US 17th) totalling 16,000 paratroopers.It was the largest single-lift airdrop conducted on a single day of WW2. It was timed to be shortly after the initial land assault of 21st Army Group over the Rhine and a shorter distance for the join up to avoid the mistakes of Arnhem. All the Airborne objectives were taken and secured for the 21st Army Group push into Northern Germany.
 
Famous American actor James Stewart was a USAAF Officer and Pilot at this time. He flew many missions over Germany. He didn’t take part in the Dresden raid but flew many times elsewhere close to that date. He was well respected by fellow Officers and air crews as a good leader and a brave airman.
The experience visibly aged him,turning his hair prematurely grey and his lean figure more gaunt.On his return to Hollywood after the war he played a lot of ‘character’ parts where he looked older than he actually was. Such as It’s A Wonderful Life, Rear Window and Vertigo.
His actor friends Burgess Meredith and Walter Matthau(radio operative and gunner) also served in the USAAF in Europe during the war!
 
Band Leader Glenn Miller was killed when his single-engined UC-64 Norseman aircraft “disappeared” over the English Channel on December 15th,1944. He was flying from an airfield near Bedford en route to Paris with 2 other USAAF officers on board. The incident spawned many ‘conspiracy theories’ including that his aircraft had strayed into an area where returning Lancaster’s usually jettisoned any unused bombs from aborted missions and he was hit by a bomb or a nearby blast. Another was that he died of a heart attack in a Paris brothel shortly after arriving in Paris.
The most likely scenario was that he had flown into cold weather and experienced carburettor icing,causing the aircraft to lose power and crash into the cold sea. Any survivors would have died of hypothermia in about 20 minutes!
 
Usually by this stage of the air war on shared targets the USAAF would go in first by day followed by the RAF at night. Due to adverse weather conditions earlier this Dresden raid would be about faced with the RAF first at night and the Americans to follow the next morning.
So just after 6pm on the 13th February the 2 waves of Lancaster’s began their take offs from their Lincolnshire and Suffolk bases. 796 bombers with around 5,500 airmen on board. There were other nearby targets and feints to other Cities that night to confuse Luftwaffe defences. All told some 1,400 British bombers would be in the air en route to their missions.
At a distance of nearly a thousand miles the Raid on Dresden would take 4 and a half hours to reach and a round trip of 9 hours in the air. The airmen had electrically heated flying suits as the Lancaster had only rudimentary heating systems and the temperatures flying at high altitude would be near freezing. Even then cases of frostbite were not uncommon amongst returning airmen.
For this trip the flying suits had Union Jack Flags carefully stitched on them with the words “I am an Englishman” added spelled out in Russian. Due to the close proximity of the advancing Red Army to Dresden,and in the event of any aircraft being shot down,then this was deemed necessary to try to avoid any “unfortunate misidentification” on the ground.
Meanwhile the citizens of Dresden were going about their early evening lives as yet unaware of the horrors that were soon to be unleashed upon them!
 
Great read but also sad to see what we are capable of doing to each other, always watch WW11 documentaries and find some of them quite harrowing especially the loss of civilians.
Watched one about the German U Boats and didn’t realise that just days after Japan bombed Pearl Harbour the German U Boats sneaked into the Gulf of Mexico and sunk a good few moored US merchant ships…
 
Very interesting Borebage. A lot of stuff there that I didn't know about.
I watched a programme a few weeks ago about how difficult it was advancing through Normandy following D-Day. It took something like 80 days before we were in the ascendancy & it was brutal fighting, the hedgerows and narrow roads causing a lot of the problems.
 
Very interesting Borebage. A lot of stuff there that I didn't know about.
I watched a programme a few weeks ago about how difficult it was advancing through Normandy following D-Day. It took something like 80 days before we were in the ascendancy & it was brutal fighting, the hedgerows and narrow roads causing a lot of the problems.
At times in Normandy the casualty rates for both sides were approaching those of the trenches on the Western Front in WW1.
 
Getting all ready for flying out to Denmark on Tuesday. Will have to finish reading the Dresden book when I get home. It’s as good as anything else I have read on WW2!
(Dresden:The Fire and the Darkness, by Sinclair McKay)
 
Getting all ready for flying out to Denmark on Tuesday. Will have to finish reading the Dresden book when I get home. It’s as good as anything else I have read on WW2!
(Dresden:The Fire and the Darkness, by Sinclair McKay)
Just bought a copy on EBay, £3.09, feckin bargain…
 
On Discovery History (Sky 177) now a programme called Greatest events of world war 2. This first hour is about the Battle of the Bulge.
At 9.00 1 hour on The Dresden Firestorm
 
A Squadron of Mosquito’s and the Lancaster Pathfinders started dropping the target indicator’s and various coloured flares at 10.03pm,with the air raid sirens sounding the warning.It lit up Dresden like daylight. Then came the hum of the first wave of 244 Bombers. They came over the city, a Lancaster at a rate of every 5 to 10 seconds at 10-13,000 feet.
They dropped two forms of lethal weapons:incendiary device’s,intended to start fires in and around the wood-filled buildings,preceded by high-explosive ‘Blockbuster’ or ‘Cookie’ bombs,mostly 4,000lb in weight. These bombs were about the size of 3 men standing in a huddle. When the plane’s bomb aimer pressed the release mechanism,they dropped through the sky nose-first. Primed to detonate on contact with any hard surface,they delivered simple annihilation,the term ‘Blockbuster’ signalling their capacity to bring down entire blocks and terraces. A direct hit from such a bomb would simply take the architecture of a building apart with a shock wave that would radiate with such strength that even an aeroplane a few thousand feet up would be buffeted. The incendiaries,bound together in clumps,were more insidious. These were intended to capitalise on the dislocations caused by the bombs,dropping down through gaping roofs and catching fire,flame gradually joining with flame across the fresh ruins of even the grandest institutions.

(There follows descriptions of the fate of people huddled in cellars and out in the streets that are utterly shocking and catastrophic. A full trainload of people waiting to leave Dresden Station incinerated in a matter of a few seconds)

There was a human crush of all the people on the Station staircase to the shelters below,those at the bottom crushed and asphyxiated in the mass panic,while those above were burned,disfigured and torn apart by shrapnel.
Even those who were not pulverised or shredded by metal and stone shrapnel,or simply burned alive,could not escape the lethal effects of the high explosives.
The bombs changed the very air itself,replacing breathable oxygen with a momentary supersonic shock that could either dismember a human body in under a second or leave it’s internal organs squeezed,lungs drawn almost inside out. Hearts would be violently contracted and expanded;innumerable blood vessels and veins and arteries would burst at once.
As the blast radiated out,the composition of the atmosphere was elasticated,expanding and instantly compressing as though the sky itself was struggling to breathe!
In the space of just a quarter of an hour,that first wave of 244 bombers and 9 Mosquito markers had dropped some 880 tons of bombs on Dresden,57% high explosives and 43% incendiaries. The hundreds and thousands of incendiaries,primed to ignite with different triggers and delays to keep fuelling the fires.
All the flak and anti-aircraft guns had been moved from Dresden and taken further east to face the threat of the rapidly advancing Red Army.

The bass hum of the first wave of bombers was now receding into the night,leaving not silence but the cracks and crashes of structural collapse.
The cruellest noise of all,however,might have been the lighter notes of the all-clear sirens that echoed from distant,as yet undamaged streets around 30 minutes after the first marker flares had been dropped. This was the signal to those in the cellars to emerge. It was unintentionally cruel because the civic authorities were mistakenly telling the people of Dresden that the worst had passed!
 
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