Dresden Bombing

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Mitch86 said:
Tomorrow is the anniversary of the first day of the Dresden bombing in WW II in 1945.
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Something worth remembering:

The air raid on Coventry on the night of 14 November 1940 was the single most concentrated attack on a British city in the Second World War. Following the raid, Nazi propagandists coined a new word in German - coventrieren - to raze a city to the ground.

Codenamed 'Moonlight Sonata', the raid lasted for 11 hours and involved nearly 500 Luftwaffe bombers, gathered from airfields all over occupied Europe. The aim was to knock out Coventry as a major centre for war production.

14 November was a brilliant moonlit night, so bright that the traffic could move around on the road without light. The Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of high explosive, 30,000 incendiaries and 50 landmines. It was also trying out a new weapon, the exploding incendiary.

Coventry lost not only its great medieval church of St Michael's, the only English Cathedral to be destroyed in the Second World War, but its central library and market hall, hundreds of shops and public building and 16th century Palace Yard, where James II had once held court.

The smell and heat of the burning city reached into the cockpits of the German bombers, 6,000 feet above. More than 43,000 homes, just over half the city's housing stock, were damaged or destroyed in the raid.

The fire at the city's huge Daimler works was one of the biggest of the war in Britain. Up to 150 high explosive bombs and 3,000 incendiaries turned 15 acres of factory buildings into a raging inferno. At midday the next day in Coventry, it was as warm as spring and almost dark because of the effects of the firestorms.

King George VI is said to have wept as he stood in the ruins of the burned out Cathedral, surveying the destruction. The people of the city were traumatised. Hundreds wandered to the streets in a daze and little children were seen trying to burrow their way through solid brick walls to escape the terrifying noise.

One of the city's three statues of Peeping Tom was blown out of a niche in its high building and lay in the street, where shocked passers-by mistook it for another human corpse in the blackout. One man recalled being pursued down a street by a knee-high river of boiling butter from a nearby blazing dairy.

At one point during the night, an abandoned tram was blown clean over a house and into a garden. It landed with its windows still intact. The official death toll from the night was 5540, but the real figure could have been much higher with many people unaccounted for. As help poured in the next day, demolition crews had to be prevented from pulling down the Cathedral tower. They didn't realise it had been leaning for at least 100 years.

On the day of the mass funerals, fighter patrols were sent up into the skies above the city. It was thought that the Germans might try to bomb the cemetery. Yet by 1947, Coventry had adopted its first German twin city, Kiel. Dresden followed in 1956. The ruined Cathedral now stands for international peace and reconciliation.
 
OldFeller said:
It's been long since restored and it looks good from the many pictures on the internet.
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Yep, I saw it just after the wall came down, before restoration. At that time they were carefully scanning all of the rubble and debris to enable use of as much of the original material as possible. I bought a watch with a small piece of the church on it to help fund the reconstruction. I hope to one day see it again.

The Communist government left it pretty much untouched after the bombing.

Frauenkirche
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenkirche,_Dresden
 
I was a 10 year old at school when I first remember being taught about this. The one thing that stuck in my mind back then was when the teacher talked about the firestorm it created. With wind speeds well above 100 mph.
 
Oh great. My mother's home city. I'll never know if my mother was born to be the nut she was or if living through that helped create the nut she was. I think people may forget there are still living people affected by it. If they were there or not.
 
I doubt we will ever know the full story of the firebombing of Dresden. It wasn't a prime military target, and not that important in the war. The reasons to raise Dresden to the ground may have been a political statement rather than military objective. It does show how ineffective bombing was in WWII. While there was large scale destruction, little of it was critical, or war related. It doesn't change much on the front lines that Aunt Martha's home was raised.
It always amazed me that when Germany blitzed the UK, the Brits were always "plucky", and determined to see it through, their resolve only grew. But when the Brits bombed Germany, the Brits strangely couldn't understand why the German resolve only grew?
 
My father, a prisoner of war, was held in a camp about twenty miles away from Dresden, he came home emaciated. He never spoke of his ordeal, but something he did finally tell me after watching the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral. He thought himself lucky, he knew that black prisoners of war faced mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis, who did not uphold the regulations imposed by the Geneva Convention (the international agreement on the conduct of war and the treatment of wounded and captured soldiers). Black soldiers of the American, French, and British Armies were worked to death on construction projects or died as a result of mistreatment in concentration or prisoner-of-war camps. Others were never even incarcerated, but were instead immediately killed by the SS or Gestapo. Black prisoners received harsher treatment and less food than white prisoners, and whilst most white prisoners were imprisoned, many of the black soldiers either worked until they died or were executed.

When I asked if he heard, or knew of The Dresden bombing, all he would say was, it's a long time ago. Dresden, February 13, 1945.
 
horseless carriage said:
When I asked if he heard, or knew of The Dresden bombing, all he would say was, it's a long time ago.
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A good answer, and what I'd expect of a vet and former POW like your father. He probably had to endure some really tough times, tougher than most of us could imagine or understand...

War is hell, a wasteful awful thing. Sometimes unavoidable, when fought in defense, but never anything but awful...

Doesn't do a lot of good to go back and try to analyze our motives for things like the Dresden bombing, its hard to know what was in the mind of people making decisions then. However it is good to remember how terrible war is.
 

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