The doubts and the qualms – and then the quiet, reflective horror – came later. The young American was a nose gunner; a staff sergeant who had already completed twenty-seven missions across Europe. His position in flight inside a transparent bubble of perspex, gun in readiness, enabled him to see approaching enemies and their fire, and also the daylight glitter of rivers far below, snow-topped hills, the built-up rectangles of city and industry, smoke and fire rising from the bombed streets and plants. Howard Holbrook would later recall, in a tone intended to be light rather than laconic, that he had seen many ‘life and death situations’.1 Given the mortality rates among American as well as British airmen, this was a deliberate understatement, though he added that he received no injuries. This was quite remarkable: among USAAF bomber crews, it was later calculated, the average life expectancy was fifteen missions; not even a full tour. Like their British counterparts, American airmen were shot out of the skies in colossal numbers.
Now, on the morning of 14 February 1945, as the dark skies over the east of England became greyer and lighter, Howard U. Holbrook was among hundreds of American airmen staring at the freshly revealed map, with its red-coloured thread denoting route and destination. If he was dismayed by the distance to this city deep in Europe, he would not later recall it. ‘At briefing, we were told we were going after railroad yards,’ he remembered. ‘But my plane was loaded with firebombs.’2
Holbrook was twenty-four years old; he had joined up three years previously. He had been born in Coeburn, Virginia, a tiny town deep in the Appalachian countryside, on the Lonesome Pine trail that was almost as far from the ethos of the big city, geographically and psychologically, as it was possible to be.3 Holbrook was among some 450,000 US airmen who had volunteered from across the United States, men representing a wide tapestry of backgrounds and beliefs, many with names that spoke of German or Italian heritage. Holbrook was a member of the Baptist Church. He was a man of strong faith. Yet within just a few hours of that morning briefing, Holbrook and his fellow airmen would be regarded by the people of Dresden as a demonic force motivated not by moral fervour but by some darker malice. Their attack would be seen as unfathomable; with the streets deep in human dust, cellars filled with the dead, and the survivors, traumatized, wounded, already seeking to match body parts to the identities of loved ones, how could the ‘American gangsters’, as they came to be known to post-war Dresdeners, possibly justify swooping in once more? But these Americans had, like the British the night before, been told of troop movements, and of the need to sever communication and transport lines. And was not daylight bombing a means of at least giving civilians a chance?
The US Strategic Air Forces Intelligence Office in early 1945 considered that the Luftwaffe had ‘rebounded to a degree not considered possible by Allied Intelligence’;4 the Nazis were fighting back with real venom and energy. Nor had the fighting on the ground become any less intense; quite the reverse. In the cold of that European winter, during the bitter slog through forests and rivers, the number of US soldiers killed or seriously injured was increasing dramatically. Perhaps the resolution of the conflict seemed predetermined: but even with the knowledge that the Allies and the Soviets were between them ineluctably closing in from either side, Hitler’s Nazis were clearly not going to consider surrender. As veteran and literary critic Paul Fussell wrote years later: ‘We knew the Germans had lost the war, and they knew it too … It was the terrible necessity of the Germans pedantically, literally enacting their defeat that we found so disheartening. Since it was clear that we were going to win, why did we have to enact the victory physically and kill them and ourselves in the process?’5
In the higher reaches of both British and American bomber commands, the gravity of war blunted any lingering concern for civilians. Although Sir Arthur Harris was the most brutally straightforward of them all when articulating what he saw as the necessity of deliberately bombing cities, his superiors and their American counterparts were by 1945 philosophically close to his position. The commander of the US Strategic Air Forces, Carl Spaatz, had, at the beginning of February, come to agree that attacks on Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden were both justifiable and desirable. This was not malice, nor was it quite the ruthless urge to eradicate all traces of the enemy. But there was a decisive cognitive shift, the turning of a blank face to the civilians who would endure the full pain of these raids. The aim, as stated, was to create ‘disruption and confusion’;6 these words are kinetic, suggesting chaotic movement, ungovernable crowds making life impossible for ordered civic authorities. What they do not suggest is corpses sitting in cellars with melted, fused organs.
In addition to all this, for airmen such as Howard Holbrook, to fly over Germany bathed in full sunlight required as much courage as night-time bombings: the planes, silver and flashing in the sky, were very much easier for the Germans to target. In the early weeks of 1945 Holbrook and his fellow B-17 crew members had flown missions that targeted synthetic-oil plants and railway lines, dropping bombs over Mannheim and Lützkendorf. The US missions were always presented to the aircrews as against infrastructure and fuel supplies, as though smashing a machine rather than its operator. However, the truth was that the B-17 bombers were never as scalpel-sharp accurate as they might have believed or hoped. Many of their bombs fell literally miles off target. In the case of vast industrial plants surrounded by scrubby country, this mattered little, but in the case of railway marshalling yards close to city centres, precision was paramount if accompanying terrible civilian casualties were to be avoided.
Holbrook and his fellow crewmen in 384th Group were stationed at Grafton Underwood in Northamptonshire. Though the airfield was as bleak as all the others, the village itself was very pretty: thatched houses composed of milky-brown stone, a brook running alongside the main road. This quiet remnant of English rural life must have offered some peace away from the mayhem of war. During several recent missions, Holbrook’s plane – which the crew had named ‘Danny’ – had run low on fuel and had had to find alternative airfields to land on, once in the (now Allied controlled) Low Countries.
That morning of 14 February, Holbrook and his comrades felt no sense that the war was coming to its close. Like their countrymen, they were reading not merely about European casualties, but also about the toll of the war against Japan, which had its own intensity. As the flock of B-17 bombers took off from airfields around England that morning, their bomb bays were stacked with both explosives and incendiaries. Not all were destined for Dresden; there were to be simultaneous attacks on Chemnitz and Magdeburg. Yet underlying these general aims was little precision. Cloud cover was making navigation difficult that day, and of the twelve divisions of bombers that traced their contrails above German skies, three tacked too far south and ended up accidentally bombing Prague, then in the Nazi-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
But Holbrook’s plane steered its course effectively, and he recalled many years later that, as they flew closer to Dresden that lunchtime, the smoke visible from many miles away, it became clear that the city was defenceless. It was just a few minutes after noon when they arrived at their target. A total of 311 American bombers were rushing through the clouds towards the still-burning city. Their focus – the railway marshalling yards in residential Friedrichstadt – was almost wholly obscured by the toxic smoke rising from the seething ruins. There was no possibility that any of these bomb aimers were going to be able to release their payloads with complete accuracy. It was for this reason that this fresh wave of bombing was viewed from below with a horror that for many turned gradually to hatred, and indeed had a direct effect on the way that Dresdeners recalled their own personal experiences on that day. For those who were not wounded, or related to fatalities, the impact was not immediate; it was an epilogue to the trauma of the night. In time, and with growing anger, collective memory would change.
Before the Americans came, fatigue had crept over both Winfried Bielss and his mother; despite all he had seen and felt, the boy was overpowered by the need to sleep. His eyes closed, and the next he knew, his mother was waking him several hours later.7 The hand-held sirens had once more been sounding through the city. The bombers were coming back. In his recollections, Bielss seemed to register neither surprise nor shock nor outrage at this, but he clearly felt keenly the pain of those who had suffered through the night. Bielss recalled noting with interest the musical timbre of the approaching force; the slightly lighter note that suggested they were fewer in number than the night-time raiders. ‘This air attack lasted thirteen minutes,’ he said. From the ground, there was little indication that the target was the railway marshalling yards. Bombs were falling on streets already strewn with cadavers, and on the distraught grandparents, aunts and uncles who were scrambling through still-smoking ruins in the mad and desperate hope that they would find loved ones alive and whole. In the Bielsses’ apartment, the power suddenly failed as an American bomb hit one of the city’s major power cables. Remarkably, the electricity supply was restored after twenty-four hours; the determination of those city workers to see that the entire town was not reduced to a primitive state despite the primordial assault was intense.
A neighbour of the Bielsses, Frau Wack, had earlier gone to the Altstadt, where her daughter Margot lived; the last she had heard was a telephone call the previous night that Margot had managed to make from a police station. After that, she had made for one of the innumerable cellar shelters. Frau Wack located the shattered block that was her daughter’s address; the cellar had not withstood the bombardment or the poison air and she was told that all its occupants had perished. Such was Frau Wack’s distress that the fact of a fresh daylight raid appeared not to have entered her conscious thoughts. In some terrible way, she herself had become inured. She later told the Bielsses that, according to the rescue teams, the entire inner city was burned out.
Some friends of Frau Wack arrived at the Bielsses’ apartment block from the bombed-out neighbourhood of Johannstadt. They had survived in their basement even as the buildings on their street were battered, fragmented and eaten from within by the incendiaries. Again there was little if any mention of this new air raid, or of the bombs that were dropping upon still open wounds. The people were simply too exhausted. Bielss recalled that they ‘smelled smoky’ and were extraordinarily dirty. Their immediate desire was for water to quench their terrible thirst. All their local supplies had been cut. Fortunately, the Bielsses’ water was still running. The Johannstadt refugees slept for the rest of that day and all through the night that followed; the extremes of physical terror could only be borne consciously for so long.
For Helmut Voigt, 14 February and the attack from the US planes had in a sense been prophesied. He had heard it from local soldiers, aware that the British bombed by night and ‘the Americans will come in the day’.8 Just after noon, he heard a warning whistle; heads jerked upwards to scan the muddy clouds. He did not remember hearing the approach of the planes at all, but he did recall seeing at a distance the little black dots falling and then hearing the first detonations. Then he suddenly became aware that other planes were coming in their direction. He and the neighbours ran for the cellars – a return to the sooty darkness and then the noise from above of repeated beating. Voigt’s apartment block was hit and several bombs crashed into the communal gardens. No one could quite believe that the Americans had returned to strike an already gravely wounded city. Voigt and his neighbours were fortunate still to have shelter. Many others did not.
Georg and Marielein Erler, walking the cracked streets of Johannstadt that late morning, their eyes flickering over the stray body parts, had met up with a few familiar neighbours; these included Frau Zaunick, who, like Erler, was an air-raid warden. She had managed to gather a few residents together and she and Herr Erler made a plan that they should leave the city and find a village for badly needed sustenance and rest. Like so many other Dresdeners, the yearning for sleep was extremely powerful. Herr Erler wanted to round up some more of the residents under his charge, and it was decided that they would rendezvous near the Great Garden park. Marielein elected to stay with Frau Zaunick as her husband walked off.
Weary and nerve-stretched, Frau Erler sat down on the fringe of the park: here were flower beds and bushes that had somehow evaded the bombs and the fire, splashes of green and pale blue in a city limned with grey. After five minutes there was a rush of feet and a cry: ‘They’re coming back!’9 The drone from above was sudden; and Marielein experienced the cold horror of being out in the open air with no possibility of reaching shelter. Instinct impelled her to push her way into the heart of a large rhododendron bush. She knew as she did so that it was ‘ridiculous’; yet what else might she have done? And now, with hideous speed, the bombardment started again. Marielein Erler, crouched in that bush, recalled that it was like boulders falling from the sky. All around her were screams; then there was the flash of an explosion nearby. Frau Erler was hit in the head with a shard of shrapnel. ‘I felt the warm blood on my face and neck,’ she remembered, surprised to find herself still alive.
The attack passed over, leaving fresh casualties in its wake. Marielein emerged from her hiding place to the sound of ‘children screaming’. Other children, she recalled, lay dead. She made her way to a bench and sat down; all she could think was that she must wait for her husband to return. To the west of the city, fresh plumes of smoke rose. Marielein, immobile on her bench as all around her people moved back and forth, was approached by a man concerned at the blood streaming from her head. He insisted that she should seek medical attention, but she had no intention of moving until she was reunited with her husband. Impatiently, the man seized hold of her, pulled her up from the bench. With some vehemence she extricated herself from his grip, and returned to where she was sitting. The man – a rescue worker, perhaps – told Marielein that he would give her five minutes to wait for her husband, but it could not be more because she was bleeding to death.
The man walked off, presumably to help elsewhere, and time for Marielein Erler became disjointed. She looked on impassively, her eyes still fogged and painful, as volunteers began lifting corpses, gathering them together on that road. She was aware of other injured people around her, knew they were being led away. Still she sat, immobile and immobilized.
Above her, a British plane was circling through the dirty clouds, a Mosquito capturing on film the extent of the damage wreaked by the Americans. The 311 Flying Fortresses, in their efforts to target the Friedrichstadt marshalling yards through dense brown smoke, had had some success: rails were buckled and snapped, sheds and carriages burned. A number of the incendiary bombs, however, had fallen elsewhere: four-storeyed residential buildings that had escaped the fires and the sparks of the night now had their roofs punctured, their inhabitants forced once more into cellars where the air was fast becoming toxic. Hit too in greater numbers were the factories that before the war had produced so many sewing machines and typewriters and bicycles. In that sense, the raid was effective: these converted armaments works, industrial fortresses filled with precision-instrument production lines, had essentially been demolished. The nearby Friedrichstadt hospital sustained some minor damage too, yet it was into these wards that the freshly wounded would be brought: bloody wounds to dress, the acute distress of the more seriously maimed and mutilated, and the efforts to somehow dull the fires of their pain.
In a matter of minutes, the American crews were returning above the white cloud base to England. The next day they and British bombers would take off once more, reaching deep into Germany to attack other targets: Chemnitz, Magdeburg. Dresden was, for them, unexceptional; simply another objective. Only very much later did some of them reflect on the deeper import of that raid; one ball-turret gunner, Harold R. Nelson, accepted that ‘the bombing of Dresden was really nasty’. But he was also quite sure that, in its own way, the raid had helped to ‘shorten the war’.10
The people of Dresden, though, were already beginning to form their own interpretation of what had happened. For Margot Hille, the American raid was a ‘crime against humanity’;11 many years later, she recalled hearing about how ‘low-flying’ aircraft had deliberately shot at the assorted refugees – rural and local – who were gathered helplessly on the Elbe meadows. This was to become a recurring leitmotif in the city’s story about itself, but it was not true. Although there had been fighters escorting the bombers, they were not ‘low-flying’, and no such strafing had taken place. (Similar stories would emerge from Britain: children who distinctly remembered not just German planes swooping down, but even, and impossibly, the faces of the pilots.)
This might have been an instinctive and subconscious means of channelling anger against an attacker that was otherwise faceless and blankly impervious. Better a remembrance of vengeful sadism than the almost industrial and passionless production-line process of death.
In Dresden, such ‘recollections’ were painted even more vividly. For example, Gisela Reichelt and her mother had been in a horse-drawn cart out in the countryside, part of a procession of exhausted citizens hoping to be billeted on farms on the uplands, when she saw the planes once more approaching the city behind her.
What could they want? The city was ‘already broken’.12 There was more: she remembered the human convoy being attacked ‘again and again’ by low-flying aircraft, the planes shooting at anyone not under cover. But memory can play false, and it is possible that what she actually saw were in fact Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes trying to assess the damage; and that the gunfire was an illusion produced by the terrified and panicked reactions of the adults around her. If the child was surrounded by grown-ups who were understandably agitated by the sight of any aeroplane, then she would have been certain, as she flung herself down, that this was an attack. Certainly, she recalled no one being hit; the group all reached their ordained village later that day.
Others had the most explicit memories of being dive-bombed out on the meadows by the Elbe; and so closely that they could describe the malicious American pilots. One person was adamant that they had been attacked by a black pilot – an unlikely identification, given not only the blurring speed and altitude of fighters but also the fact that their pilots wore oxygen masks.
Such stories spread rapidly among the thousands of displaced Dresdeners who, late that afternoon, were still almost catatonic with shock. People who, amid the still hissing pipes and the loud creaks of near-demolished flats and shops, searched single-mindedly for their loved ones, alive or dead. Whatever terrible abuse their bodies might have suffered was seemingly of no matter. They had to be gathered up properly. More practically, the civic authorities knew that this landscape of illimitable corpses had to be cleared before it brought lethal infection to the living population. There was no time for fastidiousness. And as the salvaging of mutilated and fragmented bodies began properly that afternoon, so too did many other Dresdeners begin dazed, dream-like journeys out into the country, wafting like dandelion seeds and with seemingly as little agency. It had been only eighteen hours since that first wave of bombing.