Dresden (27 page)

That night the British in fact carried out an area raid on the center of Magdeburg, 120 miles to the northwest. A total of 371 aircraft dropped a lethal mix of high explosives and incendiaries that lit numerous fires. These in turn rapidly combined to form one huge
conflagration. The resulting firestorm was claimed to have destroyed 44 percent of Magdeburg's historic heart. Some 4,000 people died, more than 11,000 were injured, and 190,000 were made homeless.

Unlike Dresden, Magdeburg had an extensive and efficient air raid shelter system. The relatively high fatality rate might have been due to the fact that the alarm was raised only a few minutes before the British bombers appeared over the city, so that many citizens did not have time to reach the safety of the public bunkers before the destruction began—and the sealed doors were closed.

 

THE NEXT DAY,
January 17, after more than five years of unimaginably cruel occupation, the last German forces withdrew from Warsaw. For most of the eighteenth century this had been Dresden's Polish sister city and alternative residence of the Wettin monarchs—indeed their refuge during the years of Prussian occupation and exploitation of Saxony. After bloodily suppressing the Warsaw uprising the previous autumn—forty thousand civilians were executed, a quarter of a million died in the subsequent fighting—on Hitler's orders German forces proceeded to systematically raze the Polish capital to the ground. Between October and January they destroyed 80 percent of its center street by street, building by building “as if it were a latter-day Carthage or Persepolis.”

The Poles of Warsaw, with the Red Army at their gates the previous August, had hoped to liberate their own capital before the Russians arrived. But all those months, as the unequal fighting raged inside the city, Stalin's forces had waited on the eastern side of the river Vistula, close enough to hear the gunfire and see the smoke rising from the burning buildings. On January 17, as the Germans left, the Russians and their puppet Communist government took charge of a city that, thanks to Himmler's SS killers, had been transformed into one vast, wretched, unresisting ghost town.

Meanwhile in London, responding to the request by the deputy chief of the Air Staff, the Joint Intelligence Committee had begun to draw up a paper on the possibility of using Bomber Command to help the Russians on the eastern front—in the first place asking about an intensive bombing of Berlin but also stimulating other suggestions that boded ill for the people of Dresden.

WHILE THE STATESMEN
and their entourages pondered and haggled in the mild, almost balmy conditions of Yalta, much of Europe still lay swathed in cloud and snow.

From a meteorological point of view, for the Anglo-American air forces this was the most difficult winter of the war. February's operations started a little better than January's, but briefings followed by cancellations remained depressingly frequent. Three days into the Crimea conference, on February 7, the weather over Germany lifted, allowing substantial attacks. The first were in support of British land forces, directed against the fortified west German towns of Goch and Kleve. Major RAF operations on Thursday, February 8, included an attack by almost five hundred bombers on the Pölitz synthetic oil plant close to the Baltic coast, which put the works out of action for the remainder of the war. Then 228 aircraft, mostly Halifaxes, attacked the fuel storage facilities at Wanne-Eickel near Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr, while 151 Lancasters bombed railway yards near Krefeld.

The original Dresden plan had been for an attack similar to that on Magdeburg the previous month—a midday visit by the Eighth U. S. Army Air Force, to soften up the city and get some fires burning, followed by a nighttime “double punch” from the RAF, guided by the still-blazing daytime targets. This was supposed to be precision followed by area bombing, but of course these definitions always did depend to a great extent on the weather. And the weather turned bad for both forces.

February 9 was the day after the Target Committee's revised target list, with Dresden prominently displayed, had been issued to the Anglo-American air forces. The RAF was pretty much grounded by
bad weather all over northwest Europe. A Halifax of 100 Group (support) flew a routine RCM (“radio counter-measures”) jamming operation. Night operations connected with the resistance in occupied Europe were undertaken by seven Stirlings of 3 Group, of which one was lost. More RCM operations. On February 10, during the day, RCM. On the night of February 10–11 eighty-two Mosquitoes went to Hanover and eleven to Essen. There were patrols and more of the relentless RCM. On the night of Monday, February 12, seventy-two Mosquitoes went to Stuttgart—another large “nuisance” raid—while small numbers of the high-flying fighter-bombers visited other cities, presumably to make sure the inhabitants had to trek down to their shelters for at least part of the night. This was not the impressive crescendo that many had expected to coincide with the conference of the “Big Three.”

The Eighth Army Air Force was in scarcely better shape than Bomber Command. After the big Berlin raid on February 3, there was a three-day lull. On February 6 the Americans, unable to go for precision oil targets because of the weather, attacked “marshaling yards” at Chemnitz and Magdeburg. The official history reported coyly that they destroyed “structures of cultural and historic importance as well.” On February 7 and 8, U. S. bomber forces left for Germany but were recalled because of extremely poor conditions. On February 9 a window of opportunity resulted in some fairly successful daylight attacks on the oil plant at Lützkendorf between Leipzig and Halle, an oil storage depot at Dülmen, and an ordnance plant at Weimar, the town where the poet Goethe found refuge and usefulness for most of his life. Here the feared Me 262 German jet fighters put in an appearance, dancing in among the bomber stream, which was shepherded by P-51 long-distance fighters in the now-standard fashion, but dancing a little too fancily to shoot down more than one of the American intruders. The jets were a reminder that the once-mighty German fighter defenses had not been eliminated from the equation, but for the next three days the chief enemy was once more the weather.

As February 13 dawned, it was clear that the situation remained hopeless, at least as far as daylight sorties were concerned.

The Yalta conference had been over for two days. For a little more than a week, Churchill and his aides had slept in their Soviet-assigned residence, the Gothic/Moorish Vorontsov Villa. Prince Vorontsov, the
czar's ambassador to Great Britain at the time of Queen Victoria's coronation in 1837, had been much impressed by the variety of building styles in England. He had built his curious summer residence in the fond belief that he was creating a piece of architecture
à l'Anglais
. From there the slightly bemused British delegation had been shuttled every day to the conference itself.

As soon as the talks were concluded on the afternoon of February 11, Churchill left the Vorontsov Villa and transferred to the British naval vessel
Franconia
, two hours' drive away in the harbor of Sebastopol. The former Cunard luxury liner, used as a troopship throughout the war, had recently been adapted as HQ ship for the conference and as alternative VIP accommodation. There Churchill stayed for almost three days, relaxing and enjoying lavish meals prepared by navy cooks with unrationed ingredients. It must have been a hard place for the prime minister to exchange for an English winter—and indeed he was to decide on visits to Athens and Cairo before finally returning to London. If such a prospect was a trial for him, how much more so for the shivering air force personnel at home, for whom the weather had been grim reality since the previous November.

At that time of year the eastern counties are the least hospitable part of England, open to penetratingly cold winds that seem to sweep right in off the Russian steppes. It was bad enough for the idle aircrew, often itching to get their “ops” done and finish their tours of duty, but as twenty-seven-year-old Flight Lieutenant Leslie Hay of 49 Squadron, 5 Group, observed:

Added to this was the fact that most aircrews had just had their tours extended. A bottleneck in the training schedule had apparently led to personnel shortages. Leslie Hay, for instance, completed the final (thirtieth) operation of his tour just before Dresden. This achievement, since crews were usually given a six-month respite before starting a twenty-op second tour, would have seen him and the
other crew members of his aircraft, “U for Uncle,” out of active danger for the rest of the war—and would have meant no trip to Dresden—but it was not to be. The same went for another crew whose bomb aimer, Miles (“Mike”) Tripp, later became a well-known English writer. His crew had their tour extended twice. He and the other noncommissioned members of the crew had slept in following a night raid over western Germany in early February. Shortly after noon their Australian skipper, nicknamed “Dig,” came into their hut and woke them with the unwelcome news:

They were, as it turned out, about to be grounded for several more days and nights. Before the tour extension order, the heavy bomber crews affected had been eager to get on and finish their tours. Now they were back in the long-term routine of survival, of getting the job done and getting back—and blanking out every other consideration.

 

WHILE THE AIRCREWS
cooled their heels and the bomber squadrons' maintenance mechanics chilled their bones dealing with the stop/start whims of an air campaign in bad winter weather, the high-ups and the planners were perfecting the details of the plan for the big attacks on eastern Germany. Above all, the meteorological officers were scouring their reports for a possible break that would enable those attacks to take place with a chance of real success.

The weather was the most important factor conditioning the destinations and the styles of attack that the planners would approve. Nevertheless, there were other influences. It was Air Marshal Harris's
job, supported by his command staff, to make those operational decisions, within the framework supplied by the Air Staff in Whitehall, and ultimately the Royal Air Force's political masters, the secretary for air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, and the prime minister. Churchill gave no further impetus to the Dresden project, at least on the record, once Sinclair and the chiefs of staff had agreed and Bottomley had issued the order to Harris. Whether the prime minister was consulted or involved in any way while at Yalta was not known, though it seems both unlikely and unnecessary.

In practical terms, the absence of Churchill and Chief of Air Staff Portal meant that Deputy CAS Bottomley and Air Minister Sinclair were minding things on a day-to-day basis. Harris and his planners, as long as the order remained in force, stayed in charge of the details of the raid.

Apart from the weather, Harris had other practical problems, which helped dictate his actions. With large expanses of western Germany, Berlin, and the central German cities now in ruins, incendiary bombs were not the ideal tool for continuing destruction. Rubble burns poorly. If Harris was to continue attacks on the already much-devastated urban areas of the Ruhr and the Rhineland—which he would expect to do with the Allied ground forces now so close—with any hope of effect, he had to drop a preponderance of high explosives. The same applied to the key oil plants, which were truly vulnerable only to the penetrative power of high-explosive bombs.

Of these last items there was now, owing to the RAF's Herculean bombing activities since the previous autumn, a shortage. During the last six months of the war Harris, as he admits in his memoirs, had to beg for supplies of high-explosive bombs from the Americans. This made “virgin” or near-virgin targets such as Dresden and other, smaller cities (Pforzheim and Würzburg were two of the most notorious cases) correspondingly more attractive. Such targets burned easily and well. Raids against them ate up mostly supplies of incendiaries, which were relatively plentiful.

As for aircraft numbers to be allocated, it was already apparent that the coming raids on eastern Germany, including Dresden, were going to be big ones. Not freakishly huge, though, by the standards of the time. Raids involving six, seven, eight hundred aircraft were now fairly commonplace. For the attack on Dresden, 796 Lancasters would
take to the air (making over eight hundred aircraft altogether if we include the nine Mosquitoes of the Pathfinder force and the master bomber who coordinated the attack). Bomber Command's schedules between mid-September 1944 and mid-March 1945 evidenced fifteen attacks involving more than seven hundred aircraft, and nine calling on more than eight hundred. The most powerful forces dispatched during this period, against the Ruhr cities of Essen and Dortmund on March 11 and 12, consisted of 1,079 and 1,108 bombers respectively.

With the numbers of aircraft now at his disposal, Harris could afford to think big on more than one target per night. He could use largely for decoy purposes substantial forces that two years earlier would have represented Bomber Command's entire operational strength.

Just how routine the sending of these kinds of numbers against distant enemy targets had become was indicated that same February. As part of an ongoing discussion about using the Soviet air facilities at Poltava in the western Ukraine for “shuttle bombing” against eastern Germany, a note to the Air Ministry, signed on Harris's behalf by his deputy, stated, “It will seldom be worth bombing any target in Eastern Germany with less than two hundred heavies. Usually I shall want to employ at least four or five hundred.”

The Americans' now-delayed role was still dependent on the weather. They had nevertheless, on February 12, let the Soviet General Staff know, through their military mission in Moscow, of their plans to bomb “the marshaling yards” in Dresden “on the following day.” This was strictly in accordance with the bombing lines agreement demanded by the Soviets at Yalta. The British were criticized for arrogance in not also formally advising the Soviets of their own linked raid. If the Russians, as Churchill's interpreter, Hugh Lunghi, asserts, specifically requested on two separate occasions at Yalta that Dresden be bombed, then there would be even less reason for the British to feel compelled, less than ten days later, to dispatch a formal notification of such an intention. The object of the agreement was, in any case, supposed to avoid accidental bombing of Russian forces, and the front was still at least sixty miles distant.

When Harris and his staff assembled for the early conference—known to the regulars as “morning prayers”—at Bomber Command headquarters on February 13, it was clear that the original Magdeburg
style collaboration with the Americans for the bombing of Dresden was not going to be possible. Should the raid against Dresden be confirmed, the British would be going in that night and going in first. Also up for discussion were the supplementary raids, mostly intended to draw the remaining German fighter protection away from the main Dresden-bound force.

As it happened, the senior meteorological officer's weather forecast for the night to come was now reasonably optimistic. Cloud cover was expected to be 10/10ths (total) over most of the route, tops lowering to 6,000 feet beyond 05-07 degrees East, with a chance of breaks to 5/10ths (medium) in the Dresden and Leipzig areas. Just as importantly, conditions over the home airfields were predicted to be good enough, toward the end of the night of February 13–14, to allow homecoming bombers to land safely on their return from their long, fuel-hungry flights.

The meteorological officer's prediction of weather over Dresden doomed the city. A little before 9
A.M
. Bomber Command's liaison man at SHAEF headquarters confirmed the Supreme Command's approval for the night raid. Harris would later state that the attack on Dresden—for which many in the following years have held him totally, indeed personally, responsible—was “at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.” This was certainly literally true. Orders had now officially come from the very highest level. Further execution of them was now down to the planners and aircrew over whom Harris exercised his appointed command.