Quote:
Originally Posted by Oski
It is easy to point at a result like the Dresden bombings and say "bad, bad, bad. War atrocity, there was no justification for that. Someone has to answer for these Allied atrocities. On the other hand, please remember, the German people are people too, with feelings and dreams just like you and me ... they were so surprised when they found out about the Holocaust - It pretty much ruined their day."
I've only just noticed this thread, and most of it's four years old, but what the hell. It still astonishes me how little people know about the Second World War, considering that it is the defining event in modern history since the French Revolution.
There was every reason for the Allies to bomb Dresden, since by February 1945 it was the single largest intact concentration of munitions production remaining in the Third Reich, with some 140 war factories producing machine guns and ammunition, aircraft and U-boat instruments and optics, gunsights, bombsights, bomb fuses, shell fuses, torpedo fuses, torpedo steering and guidance systems, V-1 cruise missile steering and guidance systems, V-2 ballistic missile steering and guidance systems (V-2s were still raining down around my family's heads in London at the time), jet-fighter tail units, field radios, field telephones and any other precision-light-engineering military kit you can think of.
'Area bombing' was adopted by the British as a result of studying the German bombing of British cities, specifically Hull, Birmingham and Coventry. It was found that the destruction of individual factories (such as the Alvis factory in Coventry, building armoured cars, specifically targeted and destroyed by the Luftwaffe in the notorious November 1940 raid on the city) was nothing like as inconvenient as the destruction of a city's essential services, what we would now call 'infrastructure'. The Alvis factory was simply rebuilt a short way down the road in a short time. But the damage to the city's gas and power mains, transport, workers' housing and telephone lines... that was a lot harder to put right. And a lot costlier in money and man-hours.
The Air Staff's preference was for 'precision bombing', and they wanted to take out the forty-odd coal-hydrogenation plants that produced Germany's synthetic fuel, that being the enemy's most obvious weak spot, but German air defences ruled out precision attack by day, and at night it became clear that bombers simply could not find or hit such small targets. And in 1942, the US Eighth Air Force in England determined that there would only be 12 days a year when, even in daylight, they would encounter clear conditions over the target to allow visual aiming with the famous Norden bombsight, and only 30 days a year when they would encounter anything less that 10/10 cloud.
The RAF, meanwhile, had developed ground-mapping radar, which the USAAF soon adopted, and radar-ranging technology that allowed Mosquito pathfinders to drop precision marker flares within radar-horizon range of England, which covered the industrial Ruhr but nowhere further until the Allies could set up ground radar stations on the Continent after the invasion. Gen. Doolittle, commanding US Eighth Air Force, said, 'The British precision-bomb "area targets" and we area-bomb "precision targets" and it comes to the same thing.' Actually, by 1944 the British were also precision-bombing precision targets and put 50 per cent more tonnage on those critical coal-oil refineries than the USAAF did, shutting down synthetic-fuel production completely. At Dresden, of course, the Americans named 'marshalling yards' as the precision target on the operation order but in fact, as usual, they area-bombed the city on radar through cloud and one entire bomb group misnavigated and bombed Prague instead.
Dresden was not an unusual raid and the enormous death toll occurred due to poor air-raid precautions on the ground. Unlike Berliners, Dresdeners were unused to being bombed and many of them unwisely believed the Reich government's advice to stay in shelter. As Berliners knew, you actually had to send someone up from the cellar every five minutes to check the building for incendiaries, and call for help if there was a problem, and tell everyone to get out if the fires were out of control.
Many Dresdeners did do this, out of common sense, and in the interval of some hours between the bombing and the firestorm untold thousands just walked away from the city centre and survived. (Including Gotz Bergander, then in his teens, who wrote the classic book Dresden Im Luftkrieg which dispelled all the bien-pensant/Nazi/neo-Nazi/Soviet propaganda about the raid.)
Twenty-five thousand people failed to take any notice of what was going on, obeyed the Reich government's instruction to 'stay in shelter' and died of asphyxiation in their sleep as the fires ate all the oxygen in the air. They went to a far better and more peaceful death than the one to which they had cheerfully consigned almost all their Jewish neighbours. (Almost all. Of the 200 Jews left in Dresden that night, about 180 survived the raid and, the next morning, since the RAF had scored a direct hit on the Gestapo HQ and killed all the Gestapo and destroyed all their records, the Jews -- all of whom assembled as of one accord that morning where the Gestapo office used to be, to make sure it had gone -- simply tore off their yellow stars, assumed 'Aryan' identities and joined the refugee outflow from Dresden as the normal citizens they always should have been.
The next night, the RAF carried out an identical attack plan against Chemnitz, 800 Lancasters in two waves. The cloud was so thick and the winds were so high that the Pathfinders had to use parachute-flare sky-markers that rapidly drifted off target and the Master Bomber was heard to say over the R/T (radio-telephone), 'The hell with this, I'm off. See you at breakfast.' The bombing was so scattered that most people in Chemnitz were unaware that they had been the target of a major raid.
Sir Arthur Harris explained the sentimentality over Dresden very well, in his memo of 29 March 1945. 'The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of those things.'
When British bien-pensants began to make a hypocritical fuss over Dresden around that time, with the usual 'innocent civilians' line (people making components for U-boats or Focke-Wulf 190s are killing Allied servicemen and are not in any way 'innocent'), George Orwell was characteristically repelled, asking, 'And what, precisely, is so moral about killing young men who happen to be in uniform?'
Last edited by 57 On Red; 10-22-2015 at 02:45 PM.