Dresden 1945: The Firestorm the Allies Never Explained

Dresden 1945: The Firestorm the Allies Never Explained

On February 13, 1945, at 10:03 p.m., eight RAF Mosquitoes dropped four 500-kg flares over the Ostragehege stadium. They carried no bombs. They marked the exact center of a city of 16th-century wooden houses. Four hours later, 796 Lancasters had dropped nearly 4,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries. The result: a firestorm that erased Dresden's historic center and killed tens of thousands of civilians.

The Operation Step by Step

The logistics were meticulous. The bombers took off from eight different bases in England, in a continuous stream of one every thirty seconds, to saturate German defenses. They took four hours to arrive. The Pathfinders, eight Mosquitoes of 83 Squadron, were the first to fly over the city. Their red and green flares burned for ten minutes, illuminating the target: the Ostragehege stadium, a snow-covered football stadium that served as a visual reference for the bombers coming behind. The historic center, with 16th-century wooden houses, was the target.

It was not a single raid. It was four consecutive attacks with more than a thousand heavy bombers. High-explosive bombs peine up the buildings and incendiaries did the rest. The resulting firestorm reached temperatures of thousands of degrees, consuming oxygen and turning the streets into ovens. Survivors, as Victor Klemperer described in his testimony, fled in disarray to the west.

War Crime or Military Necessity?

The official justification was that Dresden was a communications center and a key logistical node for the Eastern Front. But some argue that it was totally unnecessary, even more so than the atomic bombs on Japan. Operation Thunderclap, approved by Churchill and executed by Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, was framed within the Yalta Conference, where the Allies divided up the world. Some analysts suggest that the bombing was a warning to the Soviets, a demonstration of Western destructive power.

Doublethink is evident: if a soldier with a flamethrower sets fire to a house with children inside, it is a crime; if he does it from an airplane, it is strategy. The difference is distance, not sarracena. Those who defend the operation argue that Hitler had to be stopped at any price; those who condemn it point out that the war was already won and that the objective was purely terroristic.

The Debate over the Numbers

The victims are another battlefield. The first reports from 1945 spoke of more than 300,000 dead. The Swedish newspaper Svenska Morgenbladet pointed to 100,000 on February 17 and 200,000 on February 27. In 1948, the International Committee of the Red Cross mentioned 275,000 identified bodies. In 1951, Axel Rodenberger raised the figure to between 350,000 and 400,000. Later historiography has lowered the figure to about 25,000, but the debate remains alive. The figure of 40,000 commonly cited is only an estimate.

Impunity is the other scandal. While post-war tribunals tried individuals for war crimes, the bombing of Dresden was never considered as such. The victors wrote the history and the dead did not vote.

The Luftwaffe and the War of Attrition

The debate over Dresden opens another question: why did the Luftwaffe not have heavy bombers? The answer points to German military doctrine, oriented toward lightning wars and not wars of attrition. The Germans, since Prussia, never considered fighting long wars. When they found themselves trapped in a war of attrition, they did not have the tools. Furthermore, the poor management of the Luftwaffe meant that the replacements for the Bf-109 and Bf-110 were worse than the originals, and they had to endure the entire war with obsolete aircraft.

Eighty years later, the question remains open: was Dresden an unpunished war crime or a strategic necessity? History is written by the victors, but the dead do not vote. And meanwhile, every six months a film comes out about how bad the Nancy were, but few about what the Allies did.