Dresden (40 page)

The raid passed in din and impact tremors, dust and smoke. Then it was over. But soon the flames from the inevitable incendiary fires found their way down into the underground rooms used as shelters. The paneling in the cellar bar caught alight. Fortunately the cellar had alternative exits, and circus staff and sheltering neighbors were able to leave. All who took to the circus's air raid shelter, in either the first or second raid, survived. Once outside, however, they found the building on fire. An entire canister of incendiaries had crashed through the roof of the dome that surmounted the big top. By the time the staff and their helpers emerged from the shelter, the four-pound fire raisers had distributed themselves and caused many small blazes. The building was full of curtains and wood paneling, and the circus ring itself was carpeted with dry coconut matting; there were storerooms for saddles, harnesses, and costumes—all eminently combustible.

Curt Sonntag, the circus's air raid warden, recounts the grim tale of what came next:

The cupola of the big top finally and noisily collapsed at around 4
A.M
. Sonntag could nevertheless proudly report that no one who stayed in the circus building had died as a result of enemy action. Of the staff who perished, all were either with the doomed animals on the banks of the Elbe during the second attack—these included the star rider, Regina Beer, her body pierced by seventeen bomb splinters—or had set off for home after the first raid. They died at home or were killed in the streets, like so many other Dresdeners. One of the latter was the Chinese acrobat who, to the disgust of the racist Nazi authorities, had married a Dresden woman. He kissed his wife good-bye at a tram stop that afternoon before going off to work at the Sarrasani and she never saw him again.

Figures of at least a hundred dead at the circus continue to circulate. In fact, the main casualties seem to have been the helpless animals whose safety could not be secured before the fire took hold. David Irving reports the experiences of Reich Labour Service (RAD) Leader, who in the early hours of the morning of 14th February passed the Carolaplatz, on the Neustadt side of the river. There he saw the famous cupola of the Circus Sarrasini in flames and beginning to disintegrate. Not far away stood huddled a cluster of
terrified circus horses, still festooned in the colourful finery they had been dressed in for the special carnival show, which had been in progress when the first wave of bombers hit Dresden.

 

HIGH ART AND LOW,
Dresden lost everything during those desperate hours.

By the time the Circus Sarrasani's cupola collapsed during the small hours of the morning of February 14, 1945, all Dresden's other famous performance spaces were also either destroyed or burning inexorably to destruction: the opera house, the state theater, the Zwinger. As far as the galleries and the collections of artistic treasures were concerned, the really valuable or important works and artifacts had mostly been spirited away to places of safety.

On the night of the British raid, forty-two large paintings (too large to be moved) still hung on the walls of the royal
Schloss
in the center of Dresden. The building was still full of antique furniture. By chance, a truck full of more than a hundred paintings and other precious items was also parked in one of the inner yards, resting over night in transit from its former place of safety, now endangered by the Russian advance. It had been due to proceed next morning to Meissen. Everything burned.

In the royal Catholic Court Church (Hofkirche) stood beautiful wooden pews and carved panels, and, beneath the church, the crypt containing the coffins of members of the Saxon royal family going back hundreds of years. The last of the Wettin dynasty to be laid to rest there was Georg, the eldest brother of Prince Ernst Heinrich. Georg would have inherited the throne had the monarchy not been overthrown in 1918. Relieved of that responsibility, he became Father Georg, S. J., a Jesuit priest. His funeral in 1943 had brought the family together for the last time.

As for Prince Ernst Heinrich, the youngest son of the last king, in 1945 he found himself on February 13 back in the city where he was born. He had somehow survived the past eleven years—despite his democratic sympathies, which had almost seen him “liquidated” in the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934. His most recent brush with death at the hands of the regime had come on the turn of 1943 when the prince, serving as an officer with the German Intelligence
Service, the Abwehr, had suddenly been ordered into the doomed German cauldron of Stalingrad.

The Sixth Army had already been surrounded there for weeks—it amounted to a deliberate death sentence. The order must have come from right at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, because a special law generally barred members of German royal houses from active service. During the last few hours before he was due to fly into the beleaguered city on the Volga, Ernst Heinrich had seen himself as a “dead man walking.” He said his farewells to his children (his first wife had died young of a blood disease two years before). Then came an equally mysterious phone call from the Army High Command, canceling his posting to Stalingrad and releasing him from obligations to serve in the Wehrmacht. Someone equally highly placed must have stepped in.

The widowed prince had been living for years along with his children at the old royal hunting lodge at Moritzburg (where he had been arrested in 1934). He was now engaged to be married once more, to an actress—daughter of a distinguished cavalry officer—who lived in Dresden. This, and routine commitments to family business in the old capital, brought him into the city on February 13, 1945. Ernst Heinrich spent the morning at one of the royal palaces still controlled by the family, completing some administrative tasks, before a dentist's appointment. Only then was he free to visit his fiancée, Virginia (Gina) Dulon, at her apartment in the well-to-do “Swiss Quarter” of Dresden, south of the Hauptbahnhof.

After dinner Ernst Heinrich was considering setting off back to Moritzburg (about twelve miles north of the city) when the air raid warning sounded. He, his fiancée, and her sister took to the cellar of the villa, and emerged to find the house intact except for a few broken windows. The area had escaped lightly from 5 Group's attack. A glance in the direction of the city center almost two miles away revealed fires, but at this distance the effects of the raid appeared limited.

“This was,” as the prince remarked in typically understated fashion, “a great delusion.”

They decided to drive the short distance over to the Reichstrasse—where Gertraud Freundel and her father had first encountered the firestorm—to see Gina's parents, who lived in a boardinghouse there. The elderly couple had survived the raid. They took them back to the apartment and began tidying up. It was then they heard distant sirens
from the edge of town, heralding the approach of the second wave of British bombers. After the first raid, as the fires seemed to increase in the Altstadt, they had decided against trying to drive back to Moritzburg. Now Ernst Heinrich took charge. He told everyone—Gina, her parents, her sister, and a girlfriend—to get into his car. They must be out of the city before the new attack began.

The first bombs had started to fall as the group, crammed into the prince's little DKW sedan, reached the southern limit of the city, and took the main road toward the town of Dippoldiswalde. Ernst Heinrich was concerned about getting caught on the road, but could see no alternative except to proceed. Then Gina's girlfriend told him to stop. She knew there was tunneling going on beneath the road here; on a country stroll a short while before she had seen a huge pipe being laid, covered with twenty feet or so of earth, and had thought at the time that it would make a good shelter if there were bombing or fighting in the area. The prince stopped his car, and saw that the young woman was right.

Afterward they returned to the car. All its windows were shattered, but it started smoothly. They drove to the town of Dippoldiswalde and found temporary shelter for their passengers in the nearby village of Bannewitz.

From Bannewitz, standing on a hill in the small hours, looking through the darkness toward Dresden, Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony watched as the capital his ancestors had built burned to the ground.

The prince spent the remaining part of the night in a bed made up on the billiard table of the crowded local inn. He hardly slept. All through the night, streams of distraught refugees arrived, some almost zombielike in their passivity, some powered by a fragile hysterical energy. Everyone reported the terrible scenes, the appalling loss of life, the complete annihilation of the city's historic center.

The prince was up before dawn the next day. Once more he surveyed distant Dresden. If anything, the fires seemed worse, the huge shroud of smoke more vast and billowing. He got into his car and headed back to Moritzburg, making a long detour to the east to cross the Elbe at Pirna before looping back downriver.

When Prince Ernst Heinrich arrived back at the royal hunting lodge, with its ornamental lakes and parklands and woods, every stone and tile, every sculpture and painting, stood intact. It was once again as if nothing had happened, nothing had changed, and nothing ever would.

JUST ABOUT THE TIME
that Prince Ernst Heinrich and his companions reached the primitive safety of the inn at Bannewitz, in England more aircrew were being wakened from their chilly beds. This time not British and Commonwealth, but American.

The Eighth U. S. Army Air Force had originally been scheduled to go in ahead of the British against Dresden on February 13. The whims of the weather had changed that. Now they were going in after the British. This was not unusual. What was unusual was how much of the target city had already been wrecked—in the course of a single night—before the Americans even took to the air.

Not that their people could be expected to know that. Around 4
A.M
., when the wake-up calls started to go out to the big daylight bomber bases in East Anglia, the British aircraft of the second wave were still on their way back. No report or narrative had yet been drafted; the only thing that might have been known—through telephone calls or personal conversations—was that the RAF had hit Dresden hard. Harder than Hell's Angels or the other outfits that had attacked the place as a secondary in October and January had ever managed or been intended to do.

Sergeant William Stewart, a ball turret gunner of 325th Squadron, 92nd Group of the U. S. First Air Division, was awakened before dawn on February 14, 1945:

A total of 431 B-17s were under orders to bomb Dresden around noon that day. The force consisted of the entire First Bombardment Division, composed of twelve groups, which were divided into four combat wings. The Third Division was to follow the First. Its force (also twelve groups) was to attack marshaling yards in nearby Chemnitz. Second Division would bomb the hydrogenation works in Magdeburg, making a total of just over thirteen hundred American bombers operating against major German targets in the daylight hours of February 14.

There would be an awful lot of American aircraft in Saxon airspace this Ash Wednesday. Even more than the bomber figures imply—for the three divisions were to be escorted all the way by 784 P-51 Mustangs of Eighth Fighter Command. These were the long-distance fighters, with their drop tanks and high performance, which had transformed Allied fortunes in the spring of 1944 by providing, for the first time, armed escort to the vulnerable bombers all the way to their targets.

Protection for the First Division came from Twentieth Fighter Group, 352nd, 356th, 359th, and 364th. The Twentieth FG was to escort the spearhead units of the bomber force, the First Bombardment Wing, consisting of the 398th Bomber Group, followed by the 91st and 381st.

So, including the fighters, almost twenty-one hundred American aircraft were to be found over central and eastern Germany around the middle of that day. For the German population on the ground, it must have seemed that the sky was black with machines that meant them harm.

What kind of harm is a matter of discussion, but at 9:30
P.M
. the previous evening teleprinters rattled out the orders for the raid to the
American bomber bases (just as the RAF's 5 Group was making its turn down toward Dresden), defining the composition of the combat groups into which the force would be divided and stipulating the bomb loads to be carried. These were unusual—for American units. The entire First Division would deliver 678.3 tons of HE (“general purpose”) bombs and 400 tons of incendiaries. As things turned out, not all these would be dropped on Dresden, but the correlation remained the same. This was more like the proportion employed on British “city-busting” raids than he usual “precision” missions fastidiously undertaken by the USAAF. It was certainly more appropriate for attacking population and industrial centers rather than railways or communications.

There is some confusion as to the exact nature of the orders given to the First Division of the Eighth Army Air Force against Dresden.

The initial report, dated February 14, 1945, and distributed by teleprinter to senior officers, states the target as “Dresden Marshaling Yard.” The individual bomber groups' reports state it as mostly simply “Dresden,” or in one case “military objectives in Dresden” (303rd Bomber Group—which at the same time specifically refers to “Marshaling yard in Chemnitz”). On the other hand, the definitive report from the commander of the First Division, Brigadier General Turner, to Headquarters Eighth Air Force on the Dresden raid, dated February 25, states quite baldly:

In other words, if visual bombing is possible, the bombers are to attack the center of Dresden. If Dresden is swathed in cloud, but Chemnitz—a few minutes' flying time distant—is clear, then the smaller city's marshaling yards are to be attacked. If all are under cloud, then H2X (the equivalent of the RAF's H2S, or “radar bombing”) is to be carried out, once again on the center of Dresden. The “current bomb line” refers not to the line agreed at Yalta (operative
east of Dresden to avoid the Russians), but the security line protecting the Anglo-American forces on the western front from accidental bombardment. This begins to look like the other allegedly Thunderclap-style attack on the center of Berlin eleven days earlier, on February 3—except that the ratio of high-explosive to incendiary bombs in the Berlin raid was 90 percent to 10 percent, not 60 percent to 40 percent as it will be against Dresden.

Top Sergeant Harold W. Hall, a radio operator with a B-17 Flying Fortress of 527th Squadron, 379th Bomber Group, recalled the briefing for the mission:

William Stewart, ball turret gunner, does not record feeling any such compunction as he ate his breakfast and took a truck out to where his aircraft, a Flying Fortress, was waiting. It was dark and cold, a real East Anglian February morning. His squadron, based at Podington in the flatlands of the Northamptonshire/Bedfordshire border, had been due to take off at 7
A.M
., but as he perched in his bubble, testing his twin .50 caliber guns and doing his assigned checks, a voice over the intercom said they would be leaving an hour later. He was flying with a crew he did not know, which added to his apprehension. When they finally taxied out with the other Fortresses, it was getting light. A roar of the aircraft's four Wright Cyclone engines, a series of bounces, and they were airborne. Stewart wrote that he headed for Dresden that day huddled in his bubble “like an embryo in an egg.”

The swarm of fortresses—all three divisions together at this point—headed as usual over the coastal town of Felixstowe, then to the Zuider Zee in Holland. They proceeded eastward to 8 degrees of longitude somewhere northeast of Münster. There the Second Division left the stream and continued straight toward Magdeburg. The First
and Third Divisions turned southeast, a course they were due to maintain for about two hundred miles before orienting themselves toward their final destinations.

Some of the force of escort fighters had been with the bombers since they left the coast of England behind them. Some joined them only once they were across the North Sea. A number of these units had been stationed, since the end of 1944, on the continent. These included the 352nd Fighter Group (the “Blue-Nosed Bastards of Bodney”), who at the time of the Battle of the Bulge were transferred from Cambridgeshire to Asche in Belgium, and then a few weeks later to Chievres, west of Charleroi. It was from Chievres that, on February 14, 1945, they took to the air to act as escorts to the bomber stream heading for Dresden. Lieutenant Alden Rigby, from Utah, a faithful member of his church and, though only twenty-two, married with a baby daughter, was a Mustang pilot with 487th Squadron, 352nd Fighter Group.

Al Rigby had distinguished himself on January 1, when the Luftwaffe, in its final attempt at self-assertion, had launched Operation Bodenplatte (“floor slab”), involving surprise attacks by twelve hundred aircraft against Allied airfields in liberated France and Belgium. The German raid was quite successful. Scores of Allied aircraft were destroyed on the ground. A dozen Mustangs of Rigby's unit had been among the few that managed to fight back, taking off as the Germans strafed the airfield and downing more than a score of enemy FW 190s in the dogfights that ensued. Rigby shot down four Germans, which along with another “kill” back in November made him an “ace.” His P51-D Mustang was emblazoned with the names of his wife and baby daughter—“Eleen and Jerry.” Now, six weeks later, he and his squadron took to the wintry skies to protect the big bomber stream heading into Germany.

Al Rigby recalls it as being late morning when they began their duty that day. The trip was routine, and as far as he is concerned, it stayed that way. It is in his logbook as simply “Escort—Eastern Germany—Dresden—5 hrs 10 mins.”

The 67 P-51s of the 352nd Group slotted themselves at the back of the stream. They would cover the hindmost bomber groups all the way to Dresden and back. It was the “A” and “B” flights of the Twentieth Fighter Group, based in King's Cliffe, Northamptonshire, that flew in the vanguard all the way from England, accompanying the lead bombers to Dresden. Or that was the plan. Not for the first time when it came to bombing Dresden, the weather took a hand.

Over Holland they had run into a big weather front, bringing thick cloud. The lead 398th Bombardment Group had already gone somewhat off course around then. The division leader and his deputy found their Gee equipment faulty, and suffered from persistent German jamming activity. The division leader—call sign “Swordfish Able”—informed the Ninety-first Bombardment Group, just behind him, that he had decided to try to avoid the cloud by taking a more southerly course (a thirty-mile detour). The navigator of the Ninety-first's lead aircraft objected that this would mean overflying the flak hot spot around the city of Münster, but his superior decided to follow the 398th, as did the 381st in third position. So the entire First Bombardment Wing—three groups amounting to 137 aircraft, almost a third of the First Division—went on a supposedly temporary detour to avoid the cloud.

The rest of the bomber stream decided to fly over the cloud rather than around it, even though this meant increasing their altitude and thereby their fuel consumption. The 379th Bombardment Group was now leader of the nine remaining groups, at least until First Wing and its escorts, the P-51s of Twentieth Fighter Group, rejoined the stream. Flying at around thirty thousand feet (five thousand feet above their assigned altitude), the rest of the bombers proceeded to Dresden.

Meanwhile, the division leader and his three errant groups were getting into ever worse trouble. Over Münster the Ninety-first was shot up by flak. There were wounded, damage to aircraft, plus a further deviation from the assigned route. They were by now almost fifty miles off course. This found them liable to pay an undesirable visit to the heavily defended city of Schweinfurt, so they looped farther south to avoid this. They—and their fighter escort from the Twentieth
Fighter Group—were now sixty-five miles or so off course, and the bombers were having problems orienting themselves by radar. The bandwidth was not what it should be. Soon the lead aircraft's radar gave out altogether, and command had to be transferred to the deputy leader, whose radar seemed to be working. There were discussions with the weather pathfinders, who said it should be possible to find the main target. There was confusion between the secondary and the primary targets, and there were misunderstandings between the acting commander and his radar observer.

Suddenly, miraculously, they were presented with a break in the cloud. An urban area became visible, apparently the main target (Dresden). The deputy leader ordered an attack. With three minutes to go before the first bombs were due to be dropped, the deputy leader's radar also went completely out of commission. However, a short while later, to everyone's relief, the bombardier in the lead aircraft got a visual fix on the urban area, which lay to his right. A good-looking city with a river running through it. The aircraft banked around and started its run on the target.

The drop, forty seconds later, was successful. There was “meager to moderate flak” and no sign of enemy aircraft to trouble the fighter escort. The other Flying Fortresses of 398th Group followed in tidy sequence over the following few minutes.

Unfortunately, the city they had just bombed was not Dresden but Prague.