Dresden (24 page)

Sinclair's proposals were sensible enough, but unexciting—at least for Churchill's current mood. The prime minister wanted to know that decisive action was in hand—perhaps because he would soon be away from London for some weeks, preparing for and then attending the “Big Three” conference at Yalta. Churchill responded:

A foray into eastern Germany to cause serious mayhem and thereby support the Russians was looking like a certainty, especially now that the prime minister was taking an interest in the matter.

With a minute about all this from Portal on his desk, and Churchill on the warpath, Bottomley went ahead and issued orders to Bomber Command. His letter to Harris, dated January 27, 1945, attached a copy of the JIC paper of January 25 (pointing out that it had not yet been considered by the chiefs of staff):

Sinclair sent a minute to Churchill, conceding that “available effort should be directed against Berlin, Dresden, Chemnitz and Leipzig or against other cities where severe bombing would not only destroy communications vital to the evacuation from the East but would also hamper the movement of troops from the West.” The secretary for air added: “The use of the night bomber forces offers the best prospects of destroying these industrial cities without detracting from our offensive oil targets…” Churchill acknowledged the communication without comment on January 28. That same day Portal and Bottomley talked the plans over with Spaatz, who was on a brief visit to England from SHAEF HQ. Spaatz and Bottomley, it was decided, would consult with Air Chief Marshal Tedder, Eisenhower's British deputy at SHAEF.

Churchill's departure from London happened a little earlier than planned. Forecasters warned of a storm, approaching from the Atlantic. To keep ahead of the bad weather, the prime minister set off at around 9
A.M
. the next day, January 29, from Northolt Aerodrome, and flew to Malta. There he and his chiefs of staff would be spending six days with President Roosevelt and his senior military men, preparing for the conference with Stalin at Yalta in the Crimea. The chiefs of staff would be out of the country until February 11. Churchill himself would not return to London for three weeks. From now on, communication with superiors would be by signal. And decisions would have to be discussed and confirmed at a distance.

On January 30, at a meeting in Whitehall of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Sir Douglas Evill, vice chief of the Air Staff, confirmed that the Air Staff had “studied the feasibility of carrying out an attack of the scale suggested.” The minute of Evill's statement continued:

In other words, Thunderclap was to be replaced by a number of very powerful—but not, in numbers of aircraft dispatched, freakishly large—air raids on eastern German cities, including Dresden. The statement was copied to Portal in Malta for his approval.

In a further note to the Chiefs of Staff Committee on February 1, Sir Douglas Evill spelled out the priorities in rather more detail and with added frankness, beginning with oil targets and tank factories before making the nature of the big-city attacks in eastern Germany quite clear. The note was headed “Evacuation Areas”:

Evill makes clear that disrupting mass movements of civilians is one element—perhaps the key one—in the calculations of damage to be inflicted during the next weeks. The chilling implication is that, if the plan is to cause maximum disruption to movements of any kind within and through a given city, the place to strike that city will be in
its heart. In the center are to be found not just the main railway junctions, but also the communications systems, the administrative headquarters, the utilities, the key junctions of all those networks of streets and wires and pipes and cables. Destroy and disrupt these, and you have chaos not just in the city but also in the entire surrounding area, even perhaps the broader region that depends on these services.

This was one of the key lessons that British planners had learned long ago from the German bombing of Coventry. The damage inflicted on the city's infrastructure had lasted far longer and caused more long-term difficulties for war production than the actual bombing of the industrial plants.

The first objective would be the hearts and brains of the eastern German cities, then their viscera—the transport links—and finally any industrial manufacturing.

 

WEATHER CONDITIONS
in the first and second weeks of February were, as so often in the winter of 1944–45, poor. Despite this, a massive attack was indeed mounted against Berlin by the Eighth U. S. Army Air Force, just as General Spaatz had promised. On February 3, almost a thousand B-17 Flying Fortresses attacked Berlin in daylight. Marshaling yards and railway stations throughout the vast urban area were the official targets, with the importance of the raid underlined by the belief that the Sixth Panzer Army was moving through the German capital on its way to the Russian front.

The first wave of more than four hundred B-17s of the First Bomber Division, escorted by P-51 Mustang fighters, arrived over Central Berlin at one minute past 11
A.M
. and bombed the entire area beneath them. The attack definitely caused massive damage and started major fires. However, by the time the second wave—this time almost five hundred aircraft of the Third Division—swept in, a little less than half an hour after the first bombs had fallen, a strong southwest wind had blown clouds over Berlin. These, combined with the smoke and fug from the first attack, inhibited the kind of accurate bombing that their comrades had achieved just a short while earlier. Instead of adding to the blazing inferno in the city center, as had been planned, the bomb aimers of the second wave scattered their loads over wider areas of Berlin, including the working-class residential districts farther east.

The Berliners' relative good fortune once again provides vivid illustration of the role of chance in deciding whether a population exposed to bombing lives or dies. Over two thousand tons of air ordnance were dropped in less than an hour, including more than six thousand high-explosive bombs, a thousand air mines, and about the same quantity of liquid incendiary canisters. A witches' brew fit to make a firestorm. But the failure of the second wave to capitalize on the concentrated bombing achieved by the first saved central Berlin from the fate of Hamburg and Kassel.

Later claims by the American authorities put the death toll at a cataclysmic twenty-five thousand. German estimates are lower and almost certainly more accurate: just fewer than three thousand dead, with two thousand injured. This figure nevertheless represents the largest number of Berliners killed in a single air raid—during a war in which the city was bombed 363 times by the British and the Americans over a period of almost five years, losing a total of more than fifty thousand of its citizens. Most German cities died a death of a thousand cuts; only a handful suffered swift execution.

One thing was true: The February 3 raid on the heart of the Reich capital was awesomely destructive. Many familiar streets and quarters, churches and landmarks known to Berliners for decades, even centuries, were destroyed. The royal Hohenzollern castle was burned to a shell, which was eagerly dynamited by the German Communists after the war. Some claimed that this was “area bombing” by the Americans in all but name, and in this they had some justification.

The next day, February 4, with the ruins of Berlin's Regierungsviertel still smoldering, the “Big Three”—Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin—began their first formal meeting, in the Grand Ballroom of the Livadia Palace near Yalta, summer residence of the last czar of Russia. If the notoriously poker-faced Stalin was impressed by what the Eighth Army Air Force had done to Berlin, he did not see fit to mention the fact. But he did have some wishes, as the Allies had already guessed.

 

THE QUESTIONS
dominating discussions between the Allied leaders meeting in the threadbare splendor of the Crimea had much more to do with the postwar settlement than with immediate wartime exigencies. The fate of Poland, where Stalin was busy installing a govern
ment of Russian stooges, in a coup that was to dictate a pattern in postwar eastern Europe. The final boundaries of the occupation zones in Germany, the feeding of the German population, and the treatment of Nazi war criminals. Soviet entry into the war against Japan. The problem of Greece, where since the German withdrawal a developing civil war between Communist guerrillas and British-backed royalists threatened to create the first fratricidal skirmish of the cold war. But there were military discussions and briefings, both in the main sessions and in subsidiary talks between the chiefs of staff who had accompanied their leaders to this balmy prerevolutionary playground.

As far as bombing was concerned, there were two main issues, both connected with the recent rapid Russian advances. The first had to do with the establishment of a “bomb line,” attacks to the east of which would require consultation with the Soviets. The purpose of this was to avoid accidental bombing of Russian positions. The second issue was, how could the western Allies' air forces best support the Red Army's advance into Germany? General Antonov, the Red Army's deputy chief of general staff, first broached the issue of support for the Russian advance in a lengthy presentation to the plenary conference on the afternoon of the first day. After giving his view of the military situation, he asked that the western Allies “by air action hinder the enemy from carrying out the shifting of his troops to the East from the Western front, from Norway, and from Italy. In particular, to paralyse the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig.” Antonovs last request was in line with decisions already authorized by SHAEF even before the British delegation left London.

And Dresden? There is no formal mention of the city in the official transcript of the session, except when referring to the bomb line, which the Russians requested should run through Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna to Zagreb.

But Hugh Lunghi, the young army officer who was one of the interpreters accompanying the British delegation (and who translated from Russian into English for both the prime minister and the chiefs of staff), firmly maintained that the idea of bombing Dresden was brought up by the Russians and discussed on two separate occasions:

It might be argued that the question of whether the Russians specifically requested a major air raid on Dresden is merely a technical one, especially since the attack had already been ordered in Bottomley's letter to Harris of January 27, 1945. But what we do know is that the combination of the bomb line demand, and the accompanying discussions about targets in eastern Germany close to and behind the front, caused a flurry of communications between Portal and Bottomley. Portal was certainly unhappy about the bomb line, fearing that it was too far west and would inhibit Anglo-American attacks against important targets. On February 5 (before the second reported mention of Dresden at the chiefs of staff meeting) he signaled Bottomley, asking him to supply some good objectives east of the bomb line that it would be desirable to keep bombing until the ground situation dictated otherwise. Bottomley replied the same day with a list that, along with a selection of oil plants and tank and aircraft factories, specifically included the cities of Berlin and Dresden.