The Bombing Of Dresden
Wikimedia CommonsA pile of bodies, victims of the bombings, awaits cremation in February 1945.
For three days and nights starting on February 13, 1945, 1,249 American and British bombers dropped 3,900 tons (that’s 30 times the weight of a blue whale) of explosives and incendiary devices on the German city of Dresden, killing an estimated 25,000 people.
It wasn’t the deadliest bombing campaign of the war — nearly four times that many people died in a single U.S. raid on Tokyo a month later — but it was different. While the legality, and of course the morality, of the war’s deadlier bombings (Tokyo, Hiroshima, Hamburg, Nagasaki) remain the subject of debate, Dresden is still unlike the others.
Wikimedia CommonsA view of Dresden reduced to rubble taken from the top of the Rathaus (city hall).
The scholars who believe that the bombing of Dresden constitutes a war crime claim that the Allies knowingly chose a civilian target, applied unnecessary force to that target, needlessly pounded an enemy that was already on the ropes, purposefully ignored the few military and industrial targets that were actually in the city, and may have even conducted the entire operation at least in part to show their might to the Soviet armies approaching the city from the east.
Historians have uncovered evidence that could indeed support all of these claims: A British Air Force memo issued to bombers on the first night of the raid claimed that the campaign would “show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.”
Then there’s the fact that Dresden’s industrial targets largely on its northern outskirts were indeed relatively unscathed. As Alexander McKee writes in Dresden 1945: The Devil’s Tinderbox:
“The standard whitewash gambit, both British and American, is to mention that Dresden contained targets X, Y and Z, and to let the innocent reader assume that these targets were attacked, whereas in fact the bombing plan totally omitted them and thus, except for one or two mere accidents, they escaped…The bomber commanders were not really interested in any purely military or economic targets, which was just as well, for they knew very little about Dresden; the RAF even lacked proper maps of the city. What they were looking for was a big built up area which they could burn, and that Dresden possessed in full measure.”
AFP/Getty ImagesPeople work to remove debris from Dresden’s Muenzgasse Street in front of the ruins of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in January 1952, a full seven years after the bombings.
Two official U.S. inquiries — one by the Army Chief of Staff and one by the U.S. Air Force Historical Division — analyzed all of this evidence and found that the bombings were justified. Some scholars, of course, outright dismiss these reports as the biased whitewashing of one of the bombing’s very perpetrators.
But whatever historians and the U.S. government make of it, the bombings were never able to officially be declared war crimes — but not necessarily because they didn’t indeed fit the bill. International laws regarding aerial warfare were simply inadequate during World War II; the law had not caught up to the technology.
Had the necessary laws been written just a little bit sooner or had the bombings been carried out just a little bit later, the legal aftermath of this horrific event may very well have looked a whole lot different.
After learning about the most gruesome American war crimes of WW2, have a look at the worst war crimes in history. Then, read up on the four most devastating moments from the Nazi occupation of Europe.
