Fire Bombing of Dresden

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a look at the events that led up to the eventual fire bombing of the city of Dresden in 1945 and the impact that this had on the Germans, Romanians, Bulgarians and Japanese. It also reviews the British plan, Thunderclap. The paper further discusses how the bombing destroyed the baroque magnificence of central Dresden.

From the Paper:

"On February 4, as the dust settled in Berlin, the Combined Chiefs met their Soviet counterparts at Yalta. General Antonov, the Red Army's chief of staff, suggested that the Western air forces paralyze enemy communication centers like Berlin and Leipzig; he neither mentioned Dresden nor excluded it. On February 5, when proposing a bomb line, east of which Western bombing would be forbidden, he left Dresden open to Western air attack. Contrary to later claims, the Soviets never specifically asked for an attack on Dresden. The implication of their request was probably for more strikes on marshalling yards in eastern Germany, rather than area attacks. Antonov was probably thinking of attacks like the one on Berlin the previous day. Later Soviet propaganda exploitation of the bombing of Dresden tempted some Westerners to try to shift some or all of the blame for it onto the Soviets, but the record does not support this. "Just as the first target markers began to fall over Dresden, a second group of 550 British heavy bombers was taking off from Britain" (Biddle 2005). The number of victims at Dresden was never accurately known. The city's population had been swollen by refugees, and those who dealt with the disaster had more to worry about than an accurate tally of corpses. Wild stories of over 200,000 dead circulated; even in 1963, David Irving's well known book The Destruction of Dresden claimed that as many as 135,000 people had been killed, which would make Dresden by far the most destructive air attack in history. The true number of the dead was probably 35,000--still horrible and almost as many as those killed at Hamburg. But Dresden left a uniquely bad taste in many people's mouths. Hamburg had been a major industrial city and had been attacked in the middle of the war. The heavy loss of life, then and there, had been relatively acceptable. But Dresden was bombed late in the war, and it was widely realized even at the time that it was not of much significance to the enemy war effort."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Hertel, C. 2000. Dis/continuities in dresden's dances of death. The Art Bulletin, 82(1):83.
• Record, J. 2004. To destroy a city: strategic bombing and its human consequences in World War II. Parameters, 34(1):137.
• Selden, M. (1991). The United States, Japan and the atomic bomb. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 23(1):3.
• Clayton, A. (1997). War and faith in dresden. History Today, 47(4):6.
• Biddle, T. D. (2005). Sifting dresden's ashes: sixty years after the allies' bombing of dresden enveloped the city in flames, controversy persists over whether the attack was militarily justified or morally indefensible. but another question, no less crucial, is seldom asked did wartime conditions allow military leaders to look away as they violated their own principles?. The Wilson Quarterly, 29(2):60.

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• Book Review # 98089 : "Slaughterhouse Five"

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