Until the Night (The Bomber War Book 1)
I just sat down and tried to empty my mind and clear away the residues of the nightmares that I still occasionally suffered from. My justification for still harbouring these attitudes is the events in European history since the ending of the second world war. The massacres in Bosnia at Srebrenica , the hurling of Tomahawk missiles by British naval cruisers into the centre of an inhabited Benghazi , the manner in which as a nation we still tend to be sympathetic to the use of superior aircraft strength to bomb overcrowded refugee centres. These are the reasons my anger has refused to subside.
Perhaps I should be more realistic and knuckle down to the concept of the brutality of the human race, but I have always been a stubborn individual. I am not a diplomat.
I just happen to have witnessed the worst that man has to offer and I like it not one bit. Bearing in mind that I care deeply about the future of all my children and grandchildren, please allow me to express my anger. Topics Second world war Opinion. Military War crimes Royal Air Force comment.
Order by newest oldest recommendations. Show 25 25 50 All. Overy traces the origins of the bombing war back to 10 May , the same day that Germany began its attack on the West and Churchill replaced Chamberlain as British prime minister. The RAF altered its strategy of focusing on precise targets when it saw how effectively the German air force attacked clusters of targets in industrial and commercial areas. The bombing war only really escalated in when Harris finally felt ready to launch three major offensives: Overy cites a German doctor who says he had to estimate the number of dead by measuring the ash left on the floor.
Looking desperately among the historical rubble for a positive response to a campaign which saw roughly 50 per cent of bomber pilots lose their lives during airborne sorties, Overy, suggests that. The ruins of Hamburg after Allied bombing, July Tobias Grey 26 October 9: Europe Richard Overy. Most Popular Read Recent Read. The nine lessons of Brexit Ivan Rogers. Corbyn tables a motion of no confidence in May — will it backfire? Opposition to Brexit is sincere, but it has nothing to do with democracy Stephen Daisley. The first group to arrive over the target was the st, but it missed the city centre and bombed Dresden's southeastern suburbs, with bombs also landing on the nearby towns of Meissen and Pirna.
The other groups all bombed Dresden between They failed to hit the marshalling yards in the Friedrichstadt district and, as on the previous raid, their ordnance was scattered over a wide area. Dresden's air defences had been depleted by the need for more weaponry to fight the Red Army, and the city lost its last heavy flak battery in January By this point in the war, the Luftwaffe was seriously hampered by a shortage of both pilots and aircraft fuel; the German radar system had also been degraded, lowering the warning time to prepare for air attacks.
The RAF also had an advantage over the Germans in the field of electronic radar countermeasures. Of a total of British bombers that participated in the raid, six bombers were lost, three of those hit by bombs dropped by aircraft flying over them. On the following day, a single US bomber was shot down, as the large escort force was able to prevent Luftwaffe day fighters from disrupting the attack. It is not possible to describe! It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare.
So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe.
It was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mother's hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub.
We saw terrible things: The sirens had started sounding in Dresden at The lead aircraft of the major enemy bomber forces have changed course and are now approaching the city area". To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me.
They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground.
Bombing of Dresden: Background
Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen. They fainted and then burnt to cinders. Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: I do not know how many people I fell over. I know only one thing: There were very few public air raid shelters —the largest, underneath the main railway station, was housing 6, refugees.
The idea was that, as one building collapsed or filled with smoke, those using the basement as a shelter could knock the walls down and run into adjoining buildings. With the city on fire everywhere, those fleeing from one burning cellar simply ran into another, with the result that thousands of bodies were found piled up in houses at the end of city blocks. A Dresden police report written shortly after the attacks reported that the old town and the inner eastern suburbs had been engulfed in a single fire that had destroyed almost 12, dwellings. The Wehrmacht 's main command post in the Taschenbergpalais , 19 military hospitals and a number of less significant military facilities were also destroyed.
An RAF assessment showed that 23 percent of the industrial buildings, and 56 percent of the non-industrial buildings, not counting residential buildings, had been seriously damaged. Around 78, dwellings had been completely destroyed; 27, were uninhabitable, and 64, damaged, but readily repairable. During his post-war interrogation, Albert Speer , Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich, indicated that Dresden's industrial recovery from the bombings was rapid. According to official German report Tagesbefehl Order of the Day no. Between , and , refugees [88] fleeing westwards from advancing Soviet forces were in the city at the time of the bombing.
Exact figures are unknown, but reliable estimates were calculated based on train arrivals, foot traffic, and the extent to which emergency accommodation had to be organised. The uncertainty introduced by this is thought to amount to a total of no more than A further 1, bodies were discovered during the reconstruction of Dresden between the end of the war and The results were published in and stated that a minimum of 22, [3] and a maximum of 25, people [4] were killed. Development of a German political response to the raid took several turns.
Initially, some of the leadership, especially Robert Ley and Joseph Goebbels , wanted to use it as a pretext for abandonment of the Geneva Conventions on the Western Front. In the end, the only political action the German government took was to exploit it for propaganda purposes. How much guilt does this parasite not bear for all this, which we owe to his indolence and love of his own comforts.
On 16 February, the Propaganda Ministry issued a press release that stated that Dresden had no war industries; it was a city of culture. On 25 February, a new leaflet with photographs of two burned children was released under the title "Dresden—Massacre of Refugees," stating that , had died. Since no official estimate had been developed, the numbers were speculative, but newspapers such as the Stockholm Svenska Morgonbladet used phrases such as "privately from Berlin," to explain where they had obtained the figures.
Taylor writes that this propaganda was effective, as it not only influenced attitudes in neutral countries at the time, but also reached the British House of Commons when Richard Stokes , a Labour Party Member of Parliament MP , a long term opponent of area-bombing, [98] quoted information from the German Press Agency controlled by the Propaganda Ministry.
It was Stokes' questions in the House of Commons that were in large part responsible for the shift in the UK against this type of raid. Taylor suggests that, although the destruction of Dresden would have affected people's support for the Allies regardless of German propaganda, at least some of the outrage did depend on Goebbels' massaging of the casualty figures.
The destruction of the city provoked unease in intellectual circles in Britain. According to Max Hastings , by February , attacks upon German cities had become largely irrelevant to the outcome of the war and the name of Dresden resonated with cultured people all over Europe—"the home of so much charm and beauty, a refuge for Trollope's heroines, a landmark of the Grand Tour. The unease was made worse by an Associated Press story that the Allies had resorted to terror bombing.
First of all they Dresden and similar towns are the centres to which evacuees are being moved. They are centres of communications through which traffic is moving across to the Russian Front, and from the Western Front to the East, and they are sufficiently close to the Russian Front for the Russians to continue the successful prosecution of their battle. I think these three reasons probably cover the bombing. One of the journalists asked whether the principal aim of bombing Dresden would be to cause confusion among the refugees or to blast communications carrying military supplies.
Grierson answered that the primary aim was to attack communications to prevent the Germans from moving military supplies, and to stop movement in all directions if possible. He then added in an offhand remark that the raid also helped destroy "what is left of German morale. There were follow-up newspaper editorials on the issue and a longtime opponent of strategic bombing, Richard Stokes MP , asked questions in the House of Commons on 6 March. Churchill subsequently distanced himself from the bombing. It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.
Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified.
But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect.
Must-Read World War II Books | Book Riot
I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. 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 these things.
Hitler didn't start indiscriminate bombings — Churchill did
The phrase "worth the bones of one British grenadier" echoed a famous sentence used by Otto von Bismarck: It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of the so called 'area-bombing' of German cities should be reviewed from the point of view of our own interests. If we come into control of an entirely ruined land, there will be a great shortage of accommodation for ourselves and our allies. We must see to it that our attacks do no more harm to ourselves in the long run than they do to the enemy's war effort. After the war, and again after German reunification , great efforts were made to rebuild some of Dresden's former landmarks, such as the Frauenkirche , the Semperoper the Saxony state opera house and the Zwinger Palace the latter two were rebuilt before reunification.
In , Dresden entered a twin-town relationship with Coventry. As a centre of military and munitions production, Coventry suffered some of the worst attacks on any British city at the hands of the Luftwaffe during the Coventry Blitzes of and , which killed over 1, civilians and destroyed its cathedral. The Dresden synagogue , which was burned during Kristallnacht on 9 November , was rebuilt in and opened for worship on 9 November and is called the New Synagogue.
The original synagogue's Star of David was installed above the entrance of the new building—Alfred Neugebauer, a local firefighter, saved it from the fire and hid it in his home until the end of the war. Dresden's Jewish population declined from in , to in the eve of the implementation of the Nazis' extermination programme , to just a handful after almost all of those who had remained were forcibly sent to Riga Ghetto and Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps between and But as one of them, Victor Klemperer , recorded in his diaries: In , after the fall of the Berlin Wall , a group of prominent Dresdeners formed an international appeal known as the "Call from Dresden" to request help in rebuilding the Lutheran Frauenkirche, the destruction of which had over the years become a symbol of the bombing.
One of the gifts they made to the project was an eight-metre high orb and cross made in London by goldsmiths Gant MacDonald, using medieval nails recovered from the ruins of the roof of Coventry Cathedral , and crafted in part by Alan Smith, the son of a pilot who took part in the raid. British historian Frederick Taylor wrote of the attacks: It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany.
It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th century warfare and a symbol of destruction". Several factors have made the bombing a unique point of contention and debate.
- Bombing of Dresden in World War II.
- Twenty-Five Years;
- Las Vegas Soul.
- Cookies on the BBC website!
- The White Tornado;
- The Air War, and British Bomber Crews, in World War Two.
First among these are the Nazi government's exaggerated claims immediately afterwards, [15] [16] [17] which drew upon the beauty of the city, its importance as a cultural icon; the deliberate creation of a firestorm; the number of victims; the extent to which it was a necessary military target; and the fact that it was attacked toward the end of the war, raising the question of whether the bombing was needed to hasten the end.
The Hague Conventions , addressing the codes of wartime conduct on land and at sea, were adopted before the rise of air power.