A lot of things happen in war. Most of them are not very nice. If you have a major war that lasts any amount of time, there are bound to be things that happen that are extremely controversial. As time goes by these controversial. events get even more controversial, it is just the way of the world. World War II was not an exception to this fact. People are still talking today about some of the things that happened in the war. The dropping of nuclear weapons on cities is one of these things. Another is the devastating fire bomb attacks on Tokyo and yet another is the bombing of Dresden in Germany.

One of the reasons that the attacks on Dresden are still argued today is that they took place late in the war. Some say that it was just a matter of months before the war was over and there was no need for such major devastation. Others say that there was just no need to destroy a city of such beauty and that it should have been treated like Heidelberg which was off limits to bombs. Of course there is always the other side of the argument that states that the sooner a war ends the less personnel will be killed and wounded and to end a war you have to make it so tragic for the other side that they will surrender out of sheer horror and a sense of helplessness. This is one of the main reasons we felt that we had to drop nuclear weapons on Japan. It was felt that we could have up to one million casualties if we had invaded the Japanese islands. As things turned out this was the right move because Japan was planning to drop a dirty bomb on the west coast of the U.S. using German nuclear material, but we didn't know this at the time.

The attack on Dresden was one where fire bombs were used. Many main train terminals were in Dresden and they had been bombed a few times before but with high explosives. The Americans were to begin the fire bombing campaign on the city, but it didn't work out that way. The raids were delayed because of bad weather and the English actually launched the first fire bombing raid on the city. Now I could talk about the amount of planes used, the type of bombs and so on but I would rather concentrate on the event itself. The city was bombed simultaneously with high explosives and fire bombs. A wicked combination. Wave after wave of British planes pounded the city and then American planes joined in. The way the bombing worked was that high explosive bombs were dropped and they would blow off many roofs of buildings and then fire bombs would be dropped and many would fall into the buildings burning them to the ground. This was also the method that had been used in Japan about 10 days before on the city of Kobe. The raid on Kobe had been considered so successful that it had been decided to continue the practice.

Dresden became engulfed in a fire storm and the temperature in the area rose to 1500 degrees centigrade, far above the highest temperatures that human life can exist in. With a temperature this high, cold air rushed in to the center of the fire storm, pulling people into it and to their destruction. Oxygen was burned up and some people suffocated. 88% of all homes in the center of the city were completely destroyed. This amounted to almost 25,000 buildings. In one area that was about 10 miles square there wasn't a structure standing. Dresden was about 200 square miles in size during the war. The population of the city had been estimated at about 640,000 residents along with 200,000 refugees and thousands of wounded soldiers along with some healthy ones. No one knows how many were killed during the raids. When the raids finished the allies estimated that they had killed about 60,000 people but as time went on, the estimates began to get smaller and today the most accepted one is that about 30,000 people had died. This does not figure in casualties The U.S. Air Force figures differ in that they state that Dresden had a population of 1,000,000 and almost 42,000 died.

So why was this city singled out in Germany for such massive destruction? According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, it was actually a British idea. The idea was to cause confusion in the eastern section of Germany so as to aid the Russian advance. It was also thought that this would hinder troop movements to the west. There was actually four cities that were slated for this type of treatment and they were Dresden, which we are talking about here, Berlin, Leipzig and Chemnitz. It was also said that Churchill himself had told his staff that Germany's big eastern cities would now make good targets and asked his staff what was being done to facilitate their destruction. The allies believed that that the Germans could reinforce the eastern front with over half a million men and this bombing would disrupt that and this would shorten the war because it would make it easier for the Russians to advance. The irony of all this is that at the start of the war, Germany and Russia were allies.

The opinion of the U.S. Air Force today is that Dresden contained 3 major railroad trunks and at least 110 factories as well as being in a strategic location and was one of the major commercial centers of Germany. It was a producer of poison gas, field guns and aircraft parts to name a few things. The Air Force states that all these things made it a legitimate target.

Was Dresden really a legitimate target or was there some other reason that it was bombed? Why was Churchill so interested in bombing the eastern cities of Germany and why would he be have been interested in helping out the Russians when he clearly did not trust Stalin? Could the motive for the bombing have been revenge for the bombing of London and the other cities in Britain? Could it have been that the Americans decided to carry out the raid to keep Churchill happy? Maybe they thought that it was as good a place to bomb as any and since Churchill wanted eastern German cities bombed they would oblige. I guess we will never really know the answer to this question and as time passes and all those involved die, the secret will be locked into the vault of history, a vault that it is almost impossible to crack.