Dresden’s attackers were young men who had been granted the most extraordinary power, although it did not feel like that to them. They were undertaking a mission where both the advantageous weather conditions and the lack of any meaningful defence meant that their target was wholly vulnerable beneath them, theirs to incinerate, theirs to demolish. Yet they did not see themselves as avengers. Perhaps after flying so many missions and facing so much enemy fire, and inexplicably surviving where so many friends and comrades had been consumed in molten explosions – perhaps after all that, the capacity to imagine all those people thousands of feet below as living individuals had simply been cauterized. The bomber crews of the RAF might for once have had the almost unchallenged power of Norse gods, but they carried out their instructions without emotion. In operational terms, those at the head of the storm were almost preternaturally abstract about what they were soon going to do.
The war had acquired its own ever increasing velocity of airborne destruction. The Germans had some months previously subcontracted the task to blind machinery: the V-1 missiles (known as ‘doodlebugs’, the incongruously innocent-sounding nickname a reference to the insect-like whirring noise they made) and the V-2 rockets launched from the Low Countries at Greater London and towns on the east coast. The V-2 rockets were as tall as houses; the geometrically perfect parabola they described in the stratosphere before pointing down to streets, to homes, and then, with their impact, flattening, killing, deafening and blinding, had a particular edge of pure anarchy. Who needed pilots and crew when the most advanced technology, launched from another country across the sea, could deliver death so randomly? Well over a thousand of these rockets were launched at Britain. They killed over 3,000 people. A few days before the Dresden raids the east London suburb of Ilford had been hit by one such projectile that landed in a street of semi-detached houses, children playing in gardens while being watched by tired mothers. The impact atomized one house, demolished several others and took many lives. This was a recalibration of total war: civilians murdered by remote control.
But this Allied raid on Dresden had not been prompted by a desire for retaliation; not even by desperation. For the airmen, this was just another fear-filled night; and Dresden was just another target. In the sparse, comfortless aircraft interiors – dark greens, cold metals, utilitarian seating – there were countless distractions that somehow prevented minds from settling on what they were about to unleash. For some the cold was biting beyond discomfort, a result of the electrically heated flight suits malfunctioning. For others, there was the simple tight flutter of tension; the sense of having no agency on such an intensely lengthy mission. As the 244 Lancasters that made up the bulk of the first stage of the attack were propelled across the German skies, they had been overtaken by a small formation of eight Mosquitos, the nimbler aircraft there to help with the process of marking targets in the city far below. These Mosquitos in turn were catching up with an advance party of Pathfinder Lancasters; it was from these planes that the Christmas trees were dropped, hypnotically bright markers betraying the shape and contours of the target city with such lurid beauty.
In earlier stages of the war, the inaccuracy of RAF bombing raids had given cause for concern as synthetic-oil refineries escaped demolition while explosives landed in open country. As bomber pilot William Topper recalled, this was due in part to ‘scanty’ or indeed non-existent markers,1 but the guidance technology was improving, and by the night of 13 February 1945 target indicators, as they were known, were extremely effective. The unearthly light of a marker flare was carried in a bomb casing in the form of sixty magnesium flares; when ejected from the aircraft, the casings opened and each flare was fused to ignite in the air shortly afterwards. When falling to earth, these sixty incandescences would, according to Topper, look from a distance either like a bunch of grapes, or a magician’s bouquet, or more frequently an inverted fir tree, hence the ‘Christmas tree’ image. When these fiery flares landed, they would continue to burn and glow, throwing their light all around on the ground. Afterwards would come further target indicators – heavier illuminations of brightest red – dropped with even more precision from smaller Mosquito bombers. For the raid on Dresden, Topper was the lead target-indicator pilot. He and the other Mosquito pilots – their planes and their loads lighter – were able to race across the darkened skies to reach the east of Germany within about three hours. They knew next to nothing about the city’s defences; intelligence had not been able to penetrate that far. Their one feinting manoeuvre was to first point towards the nearby industrial city of Chemnitz and only at the very last moment bank towards Dresden. For Topper, the only unusual thing about that night, apart from the intense cold, was the distance they had to fly.
He was twenty-nine years old and a journalist by profession. Born in Lancashire, he had volunteered for the RAF instantly at the declaration of war in 1939. He proved so proficient as an all-rounder in training that he in turn became a flight instructor. The later years of the war had then seen him flying bombing raids over a variety of German targets – cities, factories and refineries. He remembered one occasion in the autumn of 1944 when the cloud cover was so low that, as his plane finally dropped beneath it, he found himself suddenly confronted with the prospect of tall refinery chimneys racing towards him.
Then he and his colleagues were briefed for Dresden. ‘We all knew it was a lovely city,’ he recalled. His assigned target was the Ostragehege sport stadium – one of three stadia in the city, as he recalled from the maps. Topper also knew, as did his colleagues, that the city ‘was full of refugees, it was full of art treasures’, adding, ‘We were told [that] it had been the Russians who asked for it.’ That briefing, he remembered, was explicit in setting out why the Soviets wanted Dresden to be targeted – the Germans, they were told, were sending vast quantities of supplies through the city to the eastern front. Topper also remembered that they were warned very cogently on no account to fly any further east if their planes ran into difficulty. They were left to draw their own conclusions, said Topper. He knew that the distance involved would be stretching the Mosquito to its outer limits, and there was also a precise choreography that had to be followed. The Mosquitos had to get out of the way fast so that the Lancasters following a matter of minutes behind could sweep through smoothly. Adding to the tension of precision timing, the Mosquitos had to follow a different course on the return to Britain, leaving space for the vast phalanx of second-wave bombers.
The weather conditions were by no means certain. Topper recalled that the Meteorological Office had seen the development of a serious cold front that would freeze the land and the skies from the east all the way to Britain. They could not be certain about the depth of cloud cover that night. Fortunately, not long before Topper and his colleagues were set to climb into the night there came reports of a favourable break in cloud over eastern Germany, a window of opportunity that would open after 9 p.m. From Topper’s point of view, the mission then became ‘almost a doddle’. There was little opposition as they flew at 30,000 feet; then, after three hours, and after the feint towards Chemnitz, the dramatic bank to Dresden and, suddenly, there it was. The river was visible winding through the city, which itself simply looked ‘cold and grey’. But the first of the Christmas trees were twinkling: green and silver.
Topper and his fellow Mosquito pilots had descended fast and were just a few thousand feet above the ground; they would drop further to not very much more than the height of a modern office skyscraper. Topper had an impression of the bridges over the river being busy with refugees. Then he saw the stadium and he knew it was time to begin. As well as the target indicators, each Mosquito was now also fitted with the latest in high-speed camera technology on the underside. When markers were dropped, the camera would take six photographs in fast succession, together with almost preternaturally bright flashes. Those flashes would cause several pilots a moment of blood-quickening fear, the certainty that they had been hit, and then the heavy pulse of relief upon remembering.
The phrase used over the radio between the planes was ‘Tally ho!’; part morale-boosting, part ironic, this cry was the preserve of country hunts, the riders in red coats pursuing the fox across green fields. Thought to have originated in the late eighteenth century, a corruption of the French ‘Taïaut!’, which was a cry to the hounds in deer hunts, it became associated most strongly with the rural English upper classes; an unthinking full-throated shout pitched with the hunting horn. By the 1940s, the phrase had been expropriated by working-class music-hall comedians in mockery; for the young men of Bomber Command, whose social backgrounds on the whole were not exalted, it was part of a rich and expansive self-conscious lexicon of RAF slang that made light of death.
Into the cold grey went the fiercely burning target indicators. A ‘large pool of red appeared in the middle of the stadium’, recalled Topper. The other Mosquitos were now dropping their own indicators, which spread out a little from the stadium and into the narrow streets of the Altstadt; their work done, they could now depart. Topper, though, as lead marker, was de facto deputy for the mission; he and his co-pilot instead turned away before circling, supervising from a distance. He watched as into that shallow valley of spires and domes, bridges and narrow lanes, ever more glittering lights fell from the sky.
In the streets of the city, a few allowed themselves to be captivated by these lights, even though they understood the danger very well. Norbert Bürgel was with his uncle, just outside the city centre; they had been on a tram heading back to the suburbs when the sirens began. According to Bürgel, the electric current was suddenly cut off and the tram came to a halt.2 The handful of passengers, on a street about a mile out of the city centre, watched as in the distance the sky lit up with white and green and red flares. Instinctively, Norbert and his uncle ran to the underside of a railway bridge, thinking that this might give them some cover against what was so clearly coming.
To the east of the city, Georg and Marielein Erler were sitting in their cellar beneath the grand apartment house they lived in. Some of their neighbours were present, but there were still a couple missing, even as the faint vibration of the first planes could be felt in the air. The Sieber family, who lived on the third floor, eventually materialized at the door of the cellar and took their places. They told the Erlers and the others that they had been looking at the descending lights from their windows. ‘This observation,’ recalled Georg Erler, ‘left no doubt that Dresden’s fate was set. For a defence by German flak against the impending attack was out of the question.’3
Young Dieter Haufe, to the north-west of the city, was looking out of the pavement-level window of the half-basement/workshop that he and his family were using as a shelter. Despite imprecations to come away from the glass, he could not stop staring at the red and yellow falling from the sky.
Closer to the centre, Winfried Bielss and his friend Horst could see that they were moments away from terrible danger and were running the last few yards to his apartment building in Sanger Strasse. ‘When we arrived back at home, it was almost like daylight,’ he recalled of the luridly lit city. ‘The cloud cover was yellowish coloured and … orange Christmas trees fell through the clouds.’4 When they arrived, Bielss found his mother more distracted and harassed than panicking; she had been working at her sewing machine and was determined before the attack began to get it and as many finished pieces of clothing as possible down to the basement shelter. She had heard the alert on the radio and had herself been mesmerized by the coming of that gaudy night, but now, with supreme practicality, she directed her son and his friend to grab all the pieces of clothing they could from the apartment and take shelter in the cellar. By this time, he recalled, the noise of the bombers was deafening.
The target indicators had been dropped over the Ostragehege by Topper, the first intense spot of red burning within the stadium and others fanning out like the spokes of a wheel, so that the bombs that followed might not all be concentrated on one small area. The angles of so many centuries-old streets were thrown into a terrible and lurid relief by the unnatural light. The deepening hum told all the sheltering citizens what was to come.