As Dresden smouldered and local emergency services struggled to come to grips with the scale of the damage, Flying Officer Bruce Otton was in one of sixteen Halifaxes from 466 Squadron that flew to Chemnitz, sixty kilometres from Dresden, on the night of 14 February. Another 202 Halifaxes and 499 Lancasters joined Bruce in the raid on the city’s industrial base and rail network. Bruce, who grew up in Sydney, was just twelve days away from turning twenty-one and it was his first trip as a pilot on operations. All did not go to plan, as he recalled later.
We climbed to some 6000 feet to cross the coast and then climbed to operating height. Suddenly the rear gunner came up and sat beside me. I said, ‘What the so and so are you doing here?’ He said, ‘My oxygen’s not working.’ So we were weaving practically all the way to Chemnitz because we didn’t have a rear gunner. I later found out he had checked his oxygen on the ground and it hadn’t been working then. He never did that again.
I didn’t turn back because, quite frankly, I believed that you could get away with it if you didn’t have a gunner in the rear turret. I warned the rest of the crew to keep their eyes open and had him glued to the windscreen on the starboard side to see what he could see. I felt we could get by.
Engaging in ‘judicious weaving’, Bruce and his crew survived the op in spite of themselves. They arrived over the target to find it covered by cloud, and while many areas of the city were hit, many bombs fell in open country. Later, during daylight on the 15th, the US Eighth Air Force made a follow-up attack, but, although civilian and industrial property suffered badly during this series of raids, the rail facilities at Chemnitz were relatively unscathed, and they did not cause civilian panic or general administrative breakdown as happened at Dresden.
The Dresden raid itself had been a big one, but no bigger than many others at that time directed against German cities. The severity of the firestorm was unforeseen, being a product of the ideal conditions and grossly inadequate measures to deal with such an attack.
Of the Australians involved in the bombing, there was general support for the attack, even if there were reservations about some aspects of it. Don Huxtable felt they had not been given all necessary information at the pre-flight briefing. ‘The thing was,’ Don said, ‘there was a lack of intelligence. We were not told that while we were bombing the railway yards there were about 30,000 people running away from the Russians in the tunnels.’ But he had no doubt the raid was justified. ‘At the same time, it was not just the city. The watch companies, for example, were making compasses for the German air force and many other firms were contributing to the German war effort as well.’ Bomb aimer Jack Rose dismissed the critics. ‘They have no right to pluck just one aspect of World War II out as horrific. As far as we were concerned we were just doing what we were told to do. The critics were not there, so how can they lucidly criticise it?’
Flying Officer Austin Dowling, a twenty-year-old from Ballarat who piloted a 460 Squadron Lancaster on the Dresden raid, had no qualms about an operation he regarded as a success. To him, it was just another operation. He remembered being emotionally detached from the consequences when he called his navigator out from his enclosed cabin to survey the scene below. It was another incident altogether that night that touched Austin more deeply and personally.
On the return journey, a long haul across Germany, a flash of tracer in the night caught my attention about half a mile on the port beam. A Lancaster immediately burst into flames and slowly dived downwards. We saw no one bail out before it was too far away to tell if they had. I had the same feeling of sadness, mixed with fear due to identifying with them, that I always felt when I saw someone shot down and the sensation stayed with me for perhaps half an hour or so, as it always did, before the continuous alertness needed and the other happenings up and down the stream drove the reaction away.
I felt sorrow then, for the loss of my fellows in that Lancaster but none for the people on the ground in Dresden.
To Alick Roberts, Dresden was ‘a massive glow on the horizon’ and a ‘pillar of fire’. At debriefing he and the rest of the crew estimated the height of the flames at 10,000 feet.
We were, at height during bombing, normally rather remote from the terrible work we had to do. It was almost a clinical detachment. To me it always seemed no different from an exercise over a practice bombing target. That night flying past on our way home all members of our crew joined in making an assessment of the height and extent of the flames. Without exception each expressed his sympathy for the unfortunate people back there.
He was convinced, however, that the raid was strategically sound.
Even without the firestorm, which I am sure was not anticipated, the disruption of utilities and transport, and absenteeism, consequent upon a sustained series of area bombing attacks such as Dresden suffered would have impacted seriously upon military control, supply and reinforcement, as well as upon defence production in the area. Dresden must have had significant military value or the USSR would not have called on its allies for their assistance by attacking it. They were always reluctant to admit that they could not meet such needs themselves. In the absence of specific target location information, which the USSR obviously had not provided and most likely could not provide, area bombing would have been the only effective method of attack.
Some years later, Alick met two Jewish women at the Jewish Centre’s Holocaust Museum in Sydney. Both had survived the Dresden raids. One told Alick that she had been in a train of cattle trucks taking several hundred people to an extermination camp. During the bombing they were left in the train while their guards took shelter. The journey never resumed. ‘You saved my life!’ she told Alick. The second woman had been a slave labourer in a Dresden munitions factory. She told Alick: ‘Angels must have guided you to miss the ammunition factory in which we were forced to work under inhuman conditions. During the bombing we were locked inside the factory. Some of the bunkers where the SS hid were hit. It was a miracle.’
Another Australian, twenty-two-year-old pilot Geoff Taylor, who was imprisoned near Dresden after being shot down in October 1943, was pleasantly surprised when he saw the bombing from a distance. Geoff, a Melburnian posted to 207 Squadron RAF, had been in Stalag IV-B, a large prisoner-of-war camp about fifty kilometres north of Dresden, the night of the attack.
This noise woke us. It was like the sun had come up, an unearthly thing. We didn’t know why fires like that would be burning. Our reaction in the camp, after we got over the shock, was, ‘You bloody beauty, let’s get the hell out of here.’ It sounds like a terrible thing to say, but our main concern was that they didn’t make a mistake and hit the camp. The war had reached the stage where moral attitudes had given way to pragmatic ones. We wanted to survive the war.
After six years of warfare, there were many who shared Geoff’s pragmatism. They wanted the struggle over and, in Geoff’s case, to be liberated from the POW camp holding him and 30,000 others in appalling conditions. Tuberculosis and typhus were rife, resulting in the deaths of 3000 men and women. But Geoff would have to wait another two months for his freedom, when the Russians liberated the camp.
In Berlin, news of the disaster in Dresden quickly spread as Goebbels attempted to capitalise on the consequences of the attack with his grossly inflated death toll. The anti-Nazi journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich noted in her diary: ‘Dresden was a glorious city, and it’s a little hard getting used to the idea that Dresden, too, no longer exists. I almost feel like crying.’
Breaking German morale had been a contentious issue for Bomber Command since early in the war. In 1941 the British Chief of Air Staff, Charles Portal, justified attacks on civilian sites with the argument that ‘the most vulnerable point in the German nation at war is the morale of her civilian population under air attack, and that until this morale has been broken it will not be possible to launch an army on the mainland with any prospect of success’.
Sir Winston Churchill—despite his support for the area bombing of cities in eastern Germany, was shaken by the reaction to the bombing—both in Dresden and in Britain. At the start of the war, he had believed that only Bomber Command could ‘provide the means of victory’. Now, the scale of the destruction in Dresden and the huge (falsified) death toll made him question the merits of ‘bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts,’ and call for ‘more precise concentration of military objectives’. Under pressure from the General Staff, who reacted with concern, and an outraged Arthur Harris, Churchill withdrew the memo.
During the post-war years, Dresden came to represent the unacceptable side of warfare in public consciousness. In the Cold War, East German communists used the fabricated death toll for political propaganda against the West. But in Dresden today, the Stadt Museum offers a frank assessment of Germany’s own part in the destruction of the city. The museum graphically shows the extent of the awful destruction and loss of life that the city suffered. But it does not back away from Dresden’s contribution to the war effort and its role leading up to the night of 13 February 1945. Alongside the photos of bodies piled high and burning in the Altmarkt and of bodies of people who tried in vain to save themselves by climbing into a fire reservoir, there are photos of Hitler addressing a huge rally on the banks of the Elbe in 1944, and of women working in the Sachsenwerk munitions factory, contributing to the war effort. And a video on continuous loop shows the destruction caused by Nazi bombing in Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry and London. The video includes Dresden as part of this process. The message is that no one can claim the moral high ground on this issue.
The museum’s written commentary accompanying the display ultimately lays the blame for the city’s destruction on the Nazis. While the bombing of Dresden destroyed ‘an outstanding ensemble of European architecture’, it notes, other cities, like Magdeburg, Chemnitz, Pforzheim, Hamburg and Würzburg were similarly destroyed before the end of the war. Moreover,
The destruction of entire cities had been part of German war strategy since the air raids on the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937. All the same, the propagandistic Nazi claim that the destruction of Dresden had been singular, that Dresden had been an innocent city that was destroyed for no military gain influenced the historical evaluation of events even decades later.
It is simplistic to say that the bombing of Dresden was morally and militarily unjustified. To the people who were fighting it, the war in February 1945 was anything but over, and the Ardennes offensive two months earlier had made the Allies believe that Germany was rallying. The harshest critics have accused the Allies of being motivated by bloodthirsty revenge for the bombing of London during the Blitz and by anti-German zeal. But the true, dramatically smaller death toll, and recently uncovered information on the role of Dresden in the German military machine make clear that the issue is much more complex. In Dresden, as the Stadt Museum points out, there is recognition of the need to ‘relativise German crimes’ during the war. This, of course, is a clear reference to the Holocaust. Ultimately, while it can be argued that the attack on Dresden was justified militarily, the question of morality will continue to be debated. Nonetheless, the men of Bomber Command have had to wear the blame for the destruction wrought on the city for far too long due to their political leaders distancing themselves from responsibility.