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The Bombing of Dresden in World War II (1945) - The Allied Bombing of Germany

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Nina Terzens-Karklis Remembers Dresden Bombing

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Why the Allies bombed German cities | The strategic bombing campaign

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bombing of Dresden, during World War II, Allied bombing raids on February 13-15, 1945, that almost completely destroyed the German city of Dresden. The raids became a symbol of the "terror bombing" campaign against Germany, which was one of the most controversial Allied actions of the war.

Throughout the war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had called for increased British air raids against the population centres of Germany in order to swamp German authorities and services, particularly transportation, with hordes of refugees. As the Allied forces closed in on the Third Reich in 1945, such targets became more feasible because of the air superiority and improved navigation techniques of the Anglo-American bomber force.

Before World War II, Dresden was called " Florence on the Elbe" and was considered one of the world's most beautiful cities because of its architecture and art treasures. Having never previously been attacked in the war, the city offered increased value for terror bombing against an inexperienced population. On the night of February 13, the British Bomber Command hit Dresden with an 800-bomber air raid, dropping some 2,700 tons of bombs, including large numbers of incendiaries. Aided by weather conditions, a firestorm developed, incinerating tens of thousands of people. The U.S. Eighth Air Force followed the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and carried out yet another raid by 210 bombers on February 15. It is thought that some 25,000-35,000 civilians died in Dresden in the air attacks, though some estimates are as high as 250,000, given the influx of undocumented refugees that had fled to Dresden from the Eastern Front. Most of the victims were women, children, and the elderly.

After the war, German and Soviet authorities considered leveling the Dresden ruins to make way for new construction. But local leaders forced a compromise for rebuilding part of the city centre and placing the modern construction outside-in effect, encircling old Dresden with a newer city. After reunification in 1990, Germany undertook the extensive reconstruction of the inner city as a moral and political objective, unveiling new works at various stages with much fanfare in an effort still ongoing in the 21st century. Dresden has returned to much of its former grandeur as a centre for art and culture.

The bombing of Dresden was a historic benchmark that demonstrated the power of strategic bombing. Critics say that the military value of the bombing did not justify Dresden's near destruction and that the city could have been spared, like Rome, Paris, and Kyōto. Given the high number of civilian casualties and the relatively few strategic targets, some even called the bombing of Dresden a war crime, though both the British and the American militaries defended the bombing as necessary.

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Bombing of Dresden | History, Deaths, & Facts

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Bombing of Dresden, during World War II, Allied bombing raids on February 13-15, 1945, that almost completely destroyed the German city of Dresden. The raids became a symbol of the 'terror bombing' campaign against Germany, which was one of the most controversial Allied actions of the war.

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The Bombing of Dresden, Germany stands as one of the most controversial events of the Second World War and is a stark symbol of the devastation wrought by aerial warfare. In February 1945, this once-picturesque city, known as "Florence on the Elbe" for its stunning architecture and art, became the target of an Allied aerial assault, and its fate during the final months of the conflict left an indelible mark on the collective memory.

Strategic importance of Dresden during World War II

As World War II raged on, Dresden's strategic importance became increasingly significant. Located in eastern Germany, it wasn't just a picturesque city with Baroque architecture and cultural treasures; it was also a vital transportation hub.

Railways running from the area connected the Eastern and Western Fronts, allowing for the swift movement of German troops and equipment - it was just 155 miles from the East. This logistical significance made Dresden a target of interest for the Allies, who sought to disrupt the Germans' military operations and hasten the end of the war.

Moreover, Dresden housed important industrial complexes that contributed to the German war machine. While not as heavily industrialized as other cities, its factories produced precision optical equipment, electronics and military hardware; Dresden's infrastructure supported German war efforts subtly but critically.

What led up to the Allied bombing of Dresden?

The Allies' desire to bomb key areas of German-occupied land wasn't a secret during the Second World War, with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill calling for increased British air raids throughout the conflict. These only increased as the 's strength decreased (particularly following Operation Bodenplatte) and the size of the Allies' bomber fleets increased.

The decision to launch an aerial assault on Dresden was influenced by the desire to aid the Soviet advance and undermine the morale of the German populace. The city swelled with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Red Army's advance into Silesia, adding to the complexity of the situation.

As the plans for the assault were finalized, little did the residents of Dresden know that their city would become synonymous with one of the most controversial bombings of the Second World War.

Dresden engulfed in flames

As the bombing of Dresden commenced, the city was soon swallowed up by an inferno that scarred its landscape and history. Beginning at around 10:00 PM on the night of February 13, 1945, the British sent 800 bombers, led by pathfinders dropping flares, to attack the city, which dropped 2,700 tons of incendiaries and explosives over the German city. While there had been hopes the air raid would begin earlier, poor weather prevented daytime action.

The amount of munitions dropped from overhead created a massive firestorm, a phenomenon that occurs when fires become so extensive that they create their own weather system. The temperature soared, and the air itself seemed to ignite, turning Dresden into a literal furnace. The firestorm was so intense that it could be seen from miles away.

The next day, the Eighth Air Force, under the US Army Air Forces (USAAF), dropped another 400 tons of bombs from Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses, with the assault coming to a close on February 15, after nearly 4,000 tons of munitions had been deployed.

Dresden was destroyed

It's estimated that between 22,700 and 25,000 civilians lost their lives in the bombing of Dresden, with many of the deceased treated poorly over fears of disease.

A 1953 report found that 50 percent of residential buildings and 23 percent of industrial structures had been destroyed or severely damaged, with over 90 percent of the city center obliterated. In contrast, the Allies only lost seven aircraft. The Americans saw one destroyed, while the British experienced six, three of which were the result of hitting each other with their own bombs.

In the wake of the Allied bombing, Dresden's historical center lay in ruins, with landmarks like the Zwinger, the Semperoper and the Cathedral severely damaged or destroyed. The air raid decimated the city's infrastructure, leaving survivors amid a landscape of ash and rubble. The impact was felt not just in the immediate loss of life and destruction of property, but in the deep wounds it inflicted on the cultural heart of Dresden.

Controversy surrounding the bombing of Dresden

The bombing of Dresden has long been mired in contention, sparking debates that question the necessity and morality of the air raid. Critics argue the city was of limited strategic value, suggesting the assault was excessive and even a war crime. They point to its reputation as a cultural landmark, rather than an industrial powerhouse, and the high civilian casualties as evidence that what occurred wasn't justified by military necessity.

The German regime used this point as propaganda, arguing that Dresden wasn't home to anything that aided the war effort and claiming that upwards of 200,000 civilians had been senselessly killed.

This controversy is fueled by varying casualty estimates and the fact the Second World War was nearing its end following the high German losses during the Battle of the Bulge, leading some to believe the bombing was more of a political statement or an act of retribution, rather than a strategic move.

Even Winston Churchill, for all his talk, questioned the bombing, writing in a memo, "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. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing."

On the other side of the debate, defenders emphasize the city's role in German military logistics, including the transportation and communication networks critical to the war effort. They argue that Dresden was a legitimate military target, meaning any inaction would have hindered the upcoming Soviet offensive.

Furthermore, they contend the attack hastened the war's end, saving lives that would have been lost in a protracted conflict.

Rebuilding Dresden following World War II

In the wake of the bombing of Dresden, the city was left in ruins. The immediate aftermath was marked by a staggering loss of life and the immense challenge of addressing the humanitarian needs of survivors. Yet, amid the devastation, the spirit of Dresden's citizens shone as they embarked on the arduous journey of rebuilding their beloved city.

Reconstruction efforts began soon after WWII came to a close, with it initially proposed that the entire city be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up. This didn't sit well with locals, who took the lead in clearing debris and salvaging what they could from the wreckage. The priority was to create habitable spaces and restore essential services.

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Over the subsequent decades, Dresden underwent a transformation, with care taken to reconstruct historic landmarks like the Frauenkirche and the Semperoper.

June Steele is one of the authors writing for WAR HISTORY ONLINE

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Was the Allied Bombing of Dresden a Crime or Wartime Necessity?

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The bombing of Dresden in February 1945 remains one of the most controversial Allied attacks of the Second World War.

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1,659 Dresden Bombing Stock Photos, High-Res Pictures, and Images - Getty Images

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Explore Authentic Dresden Bombing Stock Photos & Images For Your Project Or Campaign. Less Searching, More Finding With Getty Images.

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On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, reducing the "Florence of the Elbe" to rubble and flames, and killing roughly 25,000 people. Despite the horrendous scale of destruction, it arguably accomplished little strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender.
READ MORE: Why Was Dresden So Heavily Bombed?
Among the conclusions reached at the February 1945 Yalta Conference of the Allied powers was the resolution that the Allies would engage in concerted strategic bombing raids against German cities known for war-production and manufacturing, in an effort to bring the Nazi war machine to a crashing halt. The tragic irony of the raid on Dresden, a medieval city renowned for its rich artistic and architectural treasures, is that during the war it had never been a site of war-production or major industry. Both Allies and Germans alike have argued over the real purpose of the firebombing; the ostensible "official" rationale was that Dresden was a major communications center and bombing it would hamper the German ability to convey messages to its army, which was battling Soviet forces at the time. But the extent of the destruction was, for many, disproportionate to the stated strategic goal-many believe that the attack was simply an attempt to punish the Germans and weaken their morale.

More than 3,400 tons of explosives were dropped on the city by 800 American and British aircraft. The firestorm created by the two days of bombing set the city burning for many more days, littering the streets with charred corpses, including many children. Eight square miles of the city was ruined, and the total body count was between 22,700 and 25,000 dead, according to a report published by the city of Dresden in 2010. The hospitals that were left standing could not handle the numbers of injured and burned, and mass burials became necessary.

Among the American POWs who were in Dresden during the raid was novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who conveyed his experience in his classic antiwar novel Slaughterhouse Five.

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On the evening of February 13, 1945, a series of Allied firebombing raids begins against the German city of Dresden, reducing the "Florence of the Elbe" to rubble and flames, and killing roughly 25,000 people. Despite the horrendous scale of destruction, it arguably accomplished little strategically, since the Germans were already on the verge of surrender.

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The bomber raid on Dresden was a controversial and highly destructive combined operation by Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers and United States Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress bombers on 13, 14, and 15 February and 2 March 1945. The raid was part of Operation Thunderclap, which aimed to strike Berlin and other cities in eastern Germany, causing logistical chaos to support the Russian advance on the Eastern Front.

Dresden was a key transportation hub and possessed several factories important to the German military. However, the strike against civilians, consequent firestorm, and high death toll led to some questioning the necessity to hit the city at all. The Western Allies had promised the USSR that they would conduct bombing raids in eastern Germany to support the Eastern Front, but Dresden seemed to some to be one blitz too many in a war that Germany was already well on the way to losing. Around 30,000 civilians were killed in the raid (although estimations vary wildly), and Dresden was all but flattened. The raid has raised questions ever since as to the validity of area bombing in the Second World War (1939-45) and its moral repercussions.

The Thousand-Bomber Raids

The Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command from February 1942 to the end of the Second World War was Arthur Harris (1892-1984), and he had very definite ideas on the best and quickest way to win the conflict. Harris, and it should be noted others in high command such as Chief of the Air Staff Sir Charles Portal (1893-1971) and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965), firmly believed that extensive and sustained area bombing (aka carpet bombing) - bombing a large area simultaneously - conducted against Germany's most important industrial cities might well bring about an early surrender.

C-in-C Harris received support from the highest level for Operation Thunderclap: attack Berlin & other cities in eastern Germany.

There were other reasons for the raids on cities, notably that in the early years of the war because a land invasion in Europe was impossible, air attacks were the only way to directly hit Germany and its allies. Another reason was to crush German civilian morale and boost civilian morale at home after the devastation caused when the Luftwaffe (German airforce) bombed British cities and carried out the London Blitz. Finally, strategic targets like factories and U-boat bases proved too difficult to hit accurately with the technology available, considering that such attacks had to be conducted in daylight, which made bombers easy prey to enemy fighter planes like the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Reconnaissance showed that only one in three aircraft dropped its bombs within 5 miles (8 km) of the intended target. Area bombing seemed the much better use of resources. The downside, of course, was that many civilians would be killed in such raids. While many military commanders and politicians had serious misgivings about attacking cities, both sides did conduct such attacks.

Massive bombing raids were, then, conducted, very often containing around 1,000 heavy bombers, against specific German cities and the Ruhr industrial area. The first such attack was the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne in 1942. Other cities hit the same way included Bremen, Essen, and Berlin - the capital suffered a sustained campaign from November 1943 until March 1944, known as the Battle of Berlin (Air). The most devastating attack of all was Operation Gomorrah against Hamburg in the summer of 1943 when the RAF and the United States Air Force (USAAF) combined their bomber strength. This raid, conducted over several days, caused a firestorm, which resulted in 46,000 civilian deaths.

Dresden, contrary to popular myth, was an industrial city with many factories important to the German war effort.

The British considered the big raids successful. Factories and infrastructures were damaged (although production was usually revived a few months after a raid), and vital resources were diverted to defend Germany. The idea of amassing such a large force of bombers to overwhelm the enemy air defences had indeed worked and reduced bomber losses to an acceptable level. German civilian morale did not crumble, though, despite the onslaught, but even if it had, it is difficult to imagine what ordinary people could have done against the totalitarian regime in which they lived. The logistics involved in the "1,000-bomber raids" meant they could not be conducted in rapid succession on different cities, a tactic that might have had better results in crushing civilian morale.

Thunderclap: Why Dresden Was Targeted

In any case, Arthur Harris remained undeterred, and he planned more big raids. The Air Chief Marshall again received support from the highest level for what became known as Operation Thunderclap, the bombing of Berlin (yet again), various targets in Eastern Germany such as Magdeburg and Chemnitz, and the large city of Dresden, the capital of Saxony. The Western Allies were motivated to continue conducting heavy bombing since the USSR was insisting some help in that direction be given them as the Red Army pushed ever-westwards. The Western Allies were especially keen to make good on their promise of aerial assistance to help break down German resistance in the east before all the Allied leaders met at Yalta in February 1945. Already, the stream of civilian refugees surging westwards was causing havoc with the German transport networks. It was hoped that Thunderclap would cause even more disruption, particularly to the resupply of German troops on the rapidly evolving eastern front. The fact that both air forces were deployed over Dresden illustrates that this was a joint mission given approval at the very highest level, and it was not, as is commonly believed, the sole responsibility of 'Bomber' Harris.

The choice of Dresden was itself controversial since the city did not possess as much heavy industry as other potential targets, which was why Dresden had only been attacked two times previously in the war in October 1944 and January 1945, both times by USAAF bombers primarily aiming for an oil refinery (but also inadvertently hitting the city centre). However, Dresden, contrary to popular myth, was an industrial city. The Allies were not first and foremost intent on bombing civilians. Important industrial targets which the Allies hoped to wipe out with their carpet-bombing strategy at Dresden included the oil refineries outside the city, the Siemens glass factory, the Zeiss-Ikon optical factory, various factories crucial to anti-aircraft defences, factories making cockpit parts for Messerschmitt fighter planes, and a Junkers aeroplane engine factory. It is estimated that 10,000 people living in Dresden worked in these factories. The German authorities insisted after the raid that Dresden's factories were mostly involved in making toothpaste and talcum powder, but this was mere propaganda. Significantly, the same German authorities had never listed Dresden as an 'open city', that is one with no military targets.

Besides industries important to Germany's war effort, Dresden was a transportation hub, and damage to transport infrastructure, particularly the train marshalling yards, would have serious consequences for the supplies of men and material to the Eastern Front, which was then less than 100 miles to the east (160 km). It would also disrupt the passage of refugees moving from the east to the west. That specific bomber groups were directed to target the transportation network of Dresden is attested by the RAF and USAAF pilots themselves who learnt of their targets from their pre- and post-mission briefings.

Other points to consider are that Dresden was not very well-defended in terms of anti-aircraft guns since most had been moved to the Eastern Front, and it was easier for bombers to find than many other targets due to its location on a major river. Sadly for posterity, Dresden had much fine architecture and a global reputation for its fine porcelain manufacturing, which included the nearby potteries at Meissen. The fine old city would never be the same again.

The Bombers & Attack Strategy

The RAF's best heavy bomber was the four-engined Lancaster bomber, capable of carrying a bomb load of up to 14,000 lbs (6,350 kg). 796 RAF Lancasters and 9 de Havilland Mosquito fighter-bombers (target markers) made up the raiding force against Dresden. The USAAF part of the operation used several hundred Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, each capable of carrying a bomb load of around 6,000 lb (2,722 kg).

The RAF attack strategy was to use the bomber stream formation, which had first been used against Cologne back in 1942. Designed to overwhelm enemy defences, the bomber stream was a tight formation of the entire bomber force, although it could still cover a length of up to 70 miles (112 km) and a depth of around 4,000 feet (1,200 m). The staggered height of the bombers reduced the chances of mid-air collisions. Harris had added a new tactic to this, and it would be applied to the Dresden raid. This was to split the bomber force into two separate groups, the second following on from the first after an interval of around three hours. The idea was that when near or over the target, enemy fighters would engage the first wave but then have to refuel and rearm, which might leave the second wave of bombers unmolested.

Bombing Dresden

Dresden was selected to be hit in early February, but poor weather conditions delayed the operation. The original plan had been for the USAAF to conduct a daylight raid on the city, which would then be followed up by an RAF night-bombing attack. The bad weather necessitated the cancellation of the USAAF part of the operation. On the night of 13 February, still with far from ideal weather conditions, the RAF bomber stream took off from Britain.

The bombers were guided on a moonless night into the target area by the city's location along the River Elbe. Reaching the target, successive waves of bombers dropped their loads every few minutes. The whole force of two large groups passed over Dresden in a total attack period of less than five hours. As was by then usual, the bombers dropped a mix of explosive bombs (1,478 tons in all) and incendiary bombs (1,182 tons). The first type destroyed the roofs and internal structures of buildings, and then the second type was dropped to create fires within the ruins. The lethal combination, as at Hamburg two years earlier, created a terrible firestorm. The fire services could not cope with the scale of the damage or the raging fires, which created very strong winds and extreme heat.

Ursula Gray, a Dresden resident, gives the following eyewitness account of her view on the ground during the bombing raid:

The only idea was to get out in an open space and our house was situated close to a beautiful area called The Great Garden, which had lovely old oak trees, three hundred years old, and beautiful little pavilions. By that time already there were buildings falling apart and you had to make your way over stones and rubble and killed people and you just didn't care - you stepped on whatever you could just to get out and away from it all. Many other people already had gathered. They had the same idea, to get away from the burning houses, from that ocean of fire and bombing, and huddled up under the trees. While we were sitting there they sent bombs which kind of illuminated the city in red and green and for a moment it was a very strange picture. I will never forget it: it looked like windows of a cathedral. After this raid was over the city was just an ocean of fire, thousands and thousands of people killed, killed right beside us, around us, and screams and smells. The most gruesome picture was the nakedness of the people killed by the bombing: the tornado or the air pressure of the bombs had apparently torn their clothes to shreds. (Holmes, 311-2)

To add to the misery of Dresden's civilians, the USAAF then carried out the raid originally planned for the day before. On 14 February, 311 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers dropped their loads on Dresden. The bombers' aiming point was the train yards. The escorting USAAF fighters, once the bombers had turned back, "followed by machine-gunning and strafing of the streets...which had become a standard tactic of US fighters after their escort duties had been completed" (Neillands, 366). More USAAF bombers returned on 15 February and 2 March.

As the homeless fled the city, Gray again describes the scene:

The third raid was by the Americans and they concentrated on strafing people. There was no defence., we had no defence at all, and they concentrated on getting these people who were trying to save their lives and get out into the suburbs and go into the country. All the people who were gathered on the meadows along the river, they went right down and strafed the people and killed them one by one.

(Holmes, 439)

Another view of the bombing comes from Ben Halfgott, a Jewish prisoner in the nearby Nazi concentration camp:

We saw the bombing of Dresden from the satellite camp at Schlieben, where we worked with German women making Panzerfausts, anti-tank rockets. The fires in the sky, a huge red glow - it was like heaven for us. We went out to watch and it was glorious, for we knew that the end of the war must be near and our salvation was at hand. I was fifteen years old when the Russians arrived and I weighed 50 kilos. You could see all my bones.

(Neillands, 359)

Legacy

The RAF and the USAAF deemed the raid a success. Dresden's light air defences meant that only six Lancasters were lost over the city. Three more bombers crashed on the return to Britain. Thunderclap's objectives became public knowledge following a leak at a press conference, and a story then appeared written by an Associated Press reporter that the Allies were resorting to "terror bombing" (a phrase the Nazi propaganda machine had long been using). The politicians did an about-face, including Churchill, who wrote to the British Chiefs of Staff in March 1945 that "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 rather than that of the enemy" (Neillands, 372).

It is estimated there were around 30,000 civilian deaths in the four Dresden raids, although historians cannot agree, and some estimates are considerably higher. The numbers were difficult to accurately assess because of the high number of refugees in the city at that time. For an increasing number of people in the West, Dresden was one bombing raid too many. The Pointblank Directive (June 1942) of the Allied high command had agreed that bombing targets of military and strategic value was the priority over civilian targets in preparation for the forthcoming land operations in Europe (although the directive was ambiguous since it did include lowering civilian morale as a legitimate objective). Perhaps the proximity to the closing stages of the war affected public opinion more than the earlier raids had done. At the end of the war, Harris became something of a scapegoat for the area bombing campaign, despite the obvious fact that others had repeatedly supported the execution of the strategy. It was true that some high-level commanders had preferred to attack targets specifically connected to Germany's oil supply, and there were still others who wished to attack only transport networks, but the majority had gone along with the area bombing campaign. Harris remained convinced of the validity of bombing cities as the best way to ultimately lessen the inevitable casualties of land operations, commenting that he did not consider "the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier" (Dear, 242).

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There is a continuing debate as to whether the bombing of cities during the war can be considered a war crime. That both sides bombed civilians is not an argument against such a classification, certainly. There is the important distinction that the German cities targeted were industrial cities (and not, for example, seaside resorts or spa towns), and both the RAF and USAAF reiterated in public announcements that their raids were aimed at industrial targets, even if the bombs, in reality, fell on civilians. It may also be inappropriate to judge history through the lens of the present and with the gift of hindsight. As the aviation historian R. Neillands notes:

The order to attack Dresden was not illegal. There were cogent reasons for bombing Dresden and, though hindsight indicates that it probably was an unnecessary operation, that was not the opinion at the time. (393)

Despite the moral questions posed following the Dresden raid, that city was not to be the last to be heavily bombed in the war. In 1945, many Japanese cities faced equally massive and even more destructive bombing raids as the US sought to avoid a dangerous and lengthy land invasion, a campaign of calculated terror which culminated in the total devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki using atomic bombs.

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The bomber raid on Dresden was a controversial and highly destructive combined operation by Royal Air Force Lancaster bombers and United States Air Force B-17 Flying Fortress bombers on 13, 14, and...

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They had heard the "whump a whump" of distant aerial bombings many times before. But on February 13, 1945, the American prisoners of war heard Dresden's fire sirens howl right above their heads. German guards moved them two stories down into a meat locker. When they came back to the surface, "the city was gone," remembered writer and social critic Kurt Vonnegut -one of the American POWs who witnessed the bombing of Dresden.

The punishing, three-day Allied bombing attack on Dresden from February 13 to 15 in the final months of World War II became among the most controversial Allied actions of the war. The 800-bomber raid dropped some 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries and decimated the German city.

As a major center for Nazi Germany's rail and road network, Dresden's destruction was intended to overwhelm German authorities and services and clog all transportation routes with throngs of refugees. The Allied assault came a less than a month after some 19,000 U.S. troops were killed in Germany's last-ditch offensive at the Battle of the Bulge, and three weeks after the grim discovery of the atrocities committed by Nazi forces at Auschwitz.

In an effort to force a surrender, the Dresden bombing was intended to terrorize the civilian population locally and nationwide. It certainly had that effect.

Dresden Bombing: A Barrage of Explosives and Incendiaries

In the time that Vonnegut and others hid underground, the British Bomber Command's Blind Illuminator aircraft had rained explosives and incendiaries over the city. Then, "visual marker" aircraft swooped low to drop thousands of flares and fire-target markers. The main attack formation followed: over 500 heavy "Lancaster" bombers loaded with explosives and incendiaries. The U.S. Eighth Air Force attacked the next day with another 400 tons of bombs and launched yet another raid with 210 bombers on February 15.

With the German Luftwaffe destroyed and anti-aircraft defenses in shambles, the Royal Air Force lost only six planes. On the ground, however, thousands of small fires merged into a powerful firestorm that created such powerful winds that it sucked oxygen, fuel, broken structures, and people into its flames.

"Those who have unlearned how to cry," lamented Nobel Prize recipient and Prussian dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, "will learn it afresh on the destruction of Dresden."

Controversy in Counting the Dead

Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Initial-and partisan-estimates of the number of dead seemed to suggest that the Dresden Bombing was uniquely cruel. David Irving would claim in his 1963 book, The Destruction of Dresden, that the bombing was "the biggest single massacre in European history." His estimate of 150,000 to 200,000 dead was long accepted without dispute. But his assertion that Dresden was the "Hiroshima of Germany" quickly drew serious criticism, not just for its lack of evidence, but also for ignoring the Holocaust. (Irving later earned notoriety-and a criminal conviction -as a holocaust denier.)

In part to prevent right-wing ideologues from exploiting wide-spread speculations about the death toll, the city of Dresden set up an historical commission in 2004 to produce more precise data with historical, military, forensic and archeological research. In 2010, it published a revised estimate of 22,700 to 25,000 dead.

As shocking as such an enormous number of dead is, it did not stand out in the war's history of "strategic bombing" of cities. Most German cities had been flattened by 1945, and many left higher proportionate death rates and degrees of destruction. The bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 generated the first large firestorm and killed more than 30,000 civilians. And while the German Blitz over England became the subject of many books and movies, the Luftwaffen raids on Eastern European cities such as Belgrade (more than 17,000 dead) or Warsaw (up to 25,000 dead) were far more deadly-to say nothing of non-nuclear city bombings in Japan.

On the ground, however, the scale of death and devastation seemed beyond compare to witnesses like Vonnegut.

Assigned to a sanitary clean-up crew after the bombing, POW Vonnegut had to dig into shelters and basements which "looked like a streetcar full of people who simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in their chairs, all dead,"-robbed of oxygen by the all-consuming firestorm.

Dresden Was Known as the 'German Florence' on the Elbe

Deutsche Fotothek/Picture Alliance/Getty Images

Observers noted early on that the bombing of Dresden did not only mean the death of civilians, but the destruction of a center of European culture and Baroque splendor. Since the rule of August the Strong (1670-1733), the "German Florence" on the Elbe, was home to famous collections of art, porcelain collection, prints, scientific instruments, and jewelry.

Many Germans perceived a particular injustice in the late bombing of Dresden in February in 1945-a sentiment that gained some international traction in the postwar years. Dresden was a densely crowded city in the winter of 1945, filled with refugees fleeing the advancing Red Army. For most of them, the end of the war looked near and inevitable and a full-scale attack unnecessary.

Allied strategists, however, were afraid of allowing the Wehrmacht to regroup within Germany's border if they eased on their pressure. The U.S. Army alone had suffered almost 140,000 casualties from December to January 1945 and 27,000 in the week prior to the Dresden bombing alone-the heaviest losses in the Western Allies' war against Hitler.

So while the Dresden bombing was a terror campaign that dealt a devastating assault on civilians and cultural sites, it was part of a war in which such tactics had been widely-and grimly-deployed. Less than three months later, and eight days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker, the German High Command signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces.

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They had heard the "whump a whump" of distant aerial bombings many times before. But on February 13, 1945, the American prisoners of war heard Dresden's fire sirens howl right above their heads. German guards moved them two stories down into a meat locker.

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The bombing of Dresden was a British/ American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place during the Second World War in the European Theatre.