On the night of 13 February 1945, 700 Royal Air Force bombers, directed by Air Marshall Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, dropped 2,690 tonnes of incendiaries and high explosives on the capital of Saxony. In a few short hours, at least 35,000 civilians lost their lives.
Dresden's inferno was visible over 100 miles, and the city's flames were not put out for a week. Apart from the Allied raids on Hamburg in 1943, in which an estimated 22,500 women, 17,100 men and 5,400 children died, Dresden was a firestorm unparalleled in the whole European theatre of the Second World War.
Not long after, a gigantic amount of mythmaking began to spring up around the raid. On 28 March 1945, prime minister Winston Churchill noted in a now-famous memorandum: 'Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.'
In fact, Sir Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff, swiftly challenged the Churchill memo. As a result, Churchill went on to substitute, for it, what a recent and sympathetic RAF biographer of Harris describes as 'a much more guarded and acceptable note'. Churchill's volte face was quite consistent with his wartime policy of bombing German civilians. Along with the whole British War Cabinet, he had backed the destruction of Dresden, just as he had that of many other German cities.[1]
This is not a post on the merits of that policy. It is meant to make clear that it was deliberate British policy through and through, not just the personal agenda of a deranged cowboy. Air Marshall Harris was much criticized and, we think, even shunned by "decent" English society. However, he did not dream up the policy of deliberate targeting of civilians all by himself.
Notes
[1] “Dresden: Don't apologise - understand.” By James Woudhuysen, Spiked, 2/8/05 (emphasis added; footnote omitted).
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