Dresden (28 page)

In the final phase, this is their story—and the people of Dresden's.

 

ACCOUNTS OF THE AIRCREWS'
preparations for the Dresden raid vary in detail, but the basic sequence is clear, and it wasn't much different from the usual.

Preflight meal was in the midafternoon, and briefings—depending on whether the crews were going in with the first or second waves—took place from the late afternoon into the early evening. Many would already have found out that their aircraft were being filled with a maximum load of fuel, indicating a “deep penetration” trip, but the actual destination was supposed to be a secret until all the aircrew had entered the briefing room.

Leslie Hay describes the Dresden briefing as he recalls it today, with the careful precision of the civil servant he had been before the war and afterward became again:

All the aircraft going in the first wave were from Bomber Command's 5 Group. This force's reputation stood very high. Sir Arthur himself had commanded the group for fourteen months in 1939–40, before being posted to Washington—from where he returned to take overall charge of Bomber Command. Based from the end of 1943 at Morton Hall in Lincolnshire, the group had become renowned for bold, innovative, and very skillful operations. These included the Bremen raid of October 1941 (the largest single raid so far in the war), the attack on the Schneider armaments factories in central France (October 1942), and the famous “dam buster” operation, in which the Möhne and Eder dams in western Germany were breached using a specially designed “bouncing bomb.”

In 1944 a system of low-level target marking was developed, largely by 617 squadron, commanded by Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire. This system was later taken over by 627 squadron, which now became in effect 5 Group's own Pathfinder section. This routine, peculiar to 5 Group, distinguished its operations from those in which the general Pathfinder force (8 Group) prepared the targets. The system enabled it to bomb enemy communications targets in occupied France during the period before D-Day with greatly enhanced accuracy. In June 1944 aircraft from 5 Group dropped the first twelve-thousand-pound “Tallboy” bombs, blocking the Saumur tunnel and thereby cutting off the area of the Normandy landing from southern France. In August they caused heavy damage to the all-but-impregnable U-boat pens on the French Atlantic coast. In November bombers from 5 Group also sank
the Tirpitz in Tromsö fjord in Norway, one of the great precision attacks of the Second World War. For this they flew a round trip of more than two thousand miles from an advanced base in Scotland.

Inasmuch as the RAF had an elite bomber force, 5 Group was it. Its fourteen squadrons, theoretically totalling around 250 aircraft (244 took off for Dresden), represented a formidable attacking force. Operating as a unit against Darmstadt in September 1944, a total of 226 Lancasters and 14 Mosquitoes of 5 Group had unleashed a savage firestorm, which had devastated the center of this city of 120,000 inhabitants and caused the deaths of around 12,000 people. Their lethal effectiveness was put down to the group's sophisticated marking methods, which “produced an outstanding and concentrated raid on this almost intact city.” Ominously, this degree of mayhem had been caused by just one wave of bombing. In the case of Dresden, also an “almost intact city,” there was a second wave planned for three hours later, involving more than twice as many aircraft.

But for now the men of 5 Group were concerned with finding out the whys and hows of this new deep-penetration excursion into Germany. Like Leslie Hay, bomb aimer John Aldridge, a quietly spoken Norfolk man, was also at 49 squadron's briefing. The intelligence officer concentrated on the supply and reinforcement aspect of the coming attack on Dresden:

He was not to be the only man listening to the briefings who felt a little uncomfortable at the mention of refugees—had not the Germans been pilloried earlier in the war for their ruthless strafing and harrying of refugee columns? But most, perhaps, accepted as John Aldridge did that in a situation such as this, the lines of supply and of retreat were the same. Incidental destruction was inevitable.

Leslie Hay also registered the talk of German reinforcements and supplies, but also a little more detail of the intelligence officer's talk and his references to a large map showing the city's position as a center for both north-south and east-west movements:

The fullest intelligence from that time is preserved in the Dresden target information files that can be consulted in the London Public Records Office. It is undated (probably 1942—an ancillary document, dealing with the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards, originates from February 27 of that year) but includes a large “zone map” of the city specifying (accurately) the density of buildings in various parts of Dresden, fanning out from the very high-density Altstadt and also marking areas of industrial development (again also matching the actuality), plus the garrison areas and the main utilities.

Such zone maps were produced in 1942–43 for most major German towns in accordance with the new policy of “area bombing,” where population and building density became key factors in target choices. Attached to the zone map is an “information sheet” (three pages foolscap). This contains general “Bomber's Baedeker” information about Dresden, its area and population, and “Lay-out.”

“Dresden,” it tells us accurately, “is the historical center of Saxony, its present administrative center, and an industrial center of considerable importance. It is one of the finest residential cities in Germany.”

The city is divided on the map into five color-coded areas or zones:

1. Central city area (very densely populated).
   
2. Compact residential areas (divided into fully built-up areas and partly built-up areas).
   
3. Suburban areas (“they consist mainly of single family areas and are very open and scattered”).
   
4. Industrial areas.
   
5. Railways and ports.
   

Public buildings are also listed and located, though not color-coded. Hospitals, which had been marked on earlier maps—supposedly as places to be avoided—no longer appear, in recognition of harsher military realities.

What the maps cannot show is what was actually being produced in those industrial areas and factory buildings. It seems likely that the best British intelligence could do in this respect was to extrapolate from prewar patterns of production. This, as has been seen from the quite radical nature of the switch from the manufacture of consumer goods to armaments and war-related production in Dresden since 1939, would have given a less than adequate picture. There is no mention in the accompanying information sheet of war industries as such.

Two years later a separate target information sheet dated September 29, 1944, correctly surmises—and marks on an excellent July 1944 aerial photograph—the position of two war-related factories in the shape of the Universelle J. C. Müller Factory (Target A) and the neighboring aircraft components production facilities in the former Feldschlösschen brewery (Target B), a few hundred yards southwest of the Hauptbahnhof. It is noted that “in Target A the buildings have been darkened to tone in with the surrounding area. No camouflage is visible on Target B.”

The box factory in the area between Friedrichstadt and the Alberthafen river port gets it own target file (dated December 15, 1944), which also describes the oil storage tanks in the neighborhood, their approximate capacity (38,165 tons), their lack of camouflage, and the fact that, although a protecting wall was being erected around one of the forty-foot tanks at the Rhenania Ossag depot, “the other tanks remain unprotected against blast.”

The railway stations and yards are also fairly well covered, but there is almost no detail about the other major factory complexes in Dresden.

It seems that toward the end of 1944 Bomber Command started to take a little more interest in Dresden—perhaps due to a growing awareness of how much of German industry was being transferred to “less endangered” areas—though intelligence on Dresden was sparser than on most other cities in eastern Germany. Leipzig and Chemnitz were of course well known for their involvement in the large-scale manufacture of aircraft and tanks, so would naturally have attracted more attention than Dresden's light industries and smaller, more “high-tech” factories.

So briefing officers on the afternoon of February 13 kept it general. What they didn't say was that the aircraft being dispatched to Dresden on the night of February 13–14 had the task of simply destroying as much of the vital center of the city as possible. That didn't mean that Dresden was not a significant industrial and military center, and thereby a “legitimate” target. But this attack was about creating overwhelming disruption, as near to a perfect state of chaos as could be inflicted.

It is true that the Pathfinders had to be issued with a fairly crude photomontage put together in November 1943 instead of the more usual sophisticated multicolor target map showing full details of defenses and individual targets. This first comprehensive photo map was the result of a Mosquito photographic mission in September 1943, probably connected with the coming attacks on Berlin (other major east German cities such as Leipzig and Stettin were systematically photographed at the same time). There was actually a lot of photographic material about Dresden in British and American hands at the time, although it had in many cases not yet been processed sufficiently to provide the basis for the more usual kind of target map. Aerial photography had continued throughout 1943 and 1944, and then there was the material from the American raids on Dresden in October and January. Such files often took some time to be processed, evaluated, and used at the central photographic evaluation office at Medmenham, near High Wycombe, where pressure of work ensured ruthless prioritization, but by February 13, 1945, the Allies knew enough about Dresden to attack it successfully, as events would prove.

After the intelligence briefing came the meteorological officer. He summarized the official Bomber Command forecast that Harris and his staff had been given that morning when pondering their decisions. At first, there was little to cheer the crews, as Leslie Hay remembers:

Then the meteorological officer added a personal touch. Hay, who trusted him and often chatted with him in his office between operations, listened keenly:

And that was that. There was some more technical stuff, but soon it was time to leave the briefing room and get the crews together.

At this point, the aircrew about to go on an operation would all empty out their pockets and put the contents in a bag. This they would then hand in, so they carried nothing that would give information to the enemy if the crew was brought down over Germany. For the Dresden raid, since it was so close to the Russian lines, they had each also been issued one special piece of equipment: a Union Jack to put across their chests, printed with the words—in Russian—“I am an Englishman.”

These items were supposed to ensure their safety if they landed in Soviet-held territory. As John Aldridge commented dryly, aware of the Russians' trigger-happy reputation: “We thought they were not much of an asset—rather they would present a better target!”

Finally they collected their flying gear, received their flasks of hot tea and their sandwiches from the mess, and headed out to their aircraft.

The long night had begun.