Dresden (2 page)

If there were any fire appliances they could never have traversed the huge mountains of bricks, concrete and burning timber that barred all progress, or the enormous craters that pockmarked the whole ghastly scene.

I was now part of a small group that had bonded as a unit, none of us knowing who the man in front or behind was, we just sort of glued ourselves together as if there was safety in numbers. Slowly we stumbled along the remains of a wide avenue. We were surrounded by fires and mountains of red hot wreckage. What saved me were the wooden clogs that our kindly camp commandant had given me to walk through the snow to the soap factory. The wooden soles of the clogs were so thick I could walk over the red hot cinders and burning rubble that was strewn everywhere.

Finally we found ourselves in open fields, ending up by a single railway line hidden from view down a steep embankment. We had reached safety. Through the dust and smoke we could just make out the outlines of what looked like the main railway station from which a huge column of smoke and fire was climbing into the sky. We still had the problem of the wounded men some of whom were in a very bad way. I was the odd man out and there wasn't a lot I could do. I couldn't understand a word of the jabbering that was going on around me, so I just kept quiet and followed the herd.

Then we saw another group coming towards us from along the railway line. This lot consisted of about two dozen men in uniform. They were pulling and pushing a large cart. It turned out it was full of picks, shovels, buckets , coils of rope and some cans of drinking water. The leader of the group was the only one with a hat, all the others wore the regulation steel helmet. I reckoned that they were firemen and I was right. The leader immediately had us all form up, selected those men whom he judged to be capable and fit and marched us off. He left the injured to fend for themselves. I don't remember being at all surprised at this action, it seemed like the right thing to do to round up anyone on the loose and make them help wherever was necessary. But not everyone wanted to offer themselves up as fuel to the raging furnace that was burning less than five hundred yards away. When the leader learnt that three of our group were refusing to follow he turned about, pulled a pistol from the holster attached to his belt, and shot two of them at point blank range, the third man started running as fast as he could to catch up with us. There were about thirty of us armed only with picks and shovels making our way back along the same track that we had fled along less than an hour before, led by a German Officer whose answer to a problem was to shoot first and ask questions later.

Thinking back through the years to this episode I cannot fault the action the man took. Chaos reigned everywhere and authority above all else was needed, even if it had to be exerted through the muzzle of a gun. I had been a front line soldier for six years and that is how I had been trained to think.

The leader didn't get it all his own way. The heat stopped us. Even so we came across people who had been caught out in the open and were still alive. By fixing bits of wood to our picks and shovels we turned them into stretchers to carry the injured.

At about midnight, or about two hours after the raid had finished our leader decided that enough was enough. There wasn't much more he could do until the heat lessened and the fires died down so very slowly we trudged back over the burning mounds and made our way back to the original starting point by the railway line. When we reached it we discovered that reinforcements and a food wagon had somehow had been shunted in from God knows where.

Then the sirens started their terrible wailing again.

A lot of survivors from the burning ruins were now out in the open, spread along this low embankment with no shelter or cover of any kind. The inferno was growing fiercer and noisier by the minute, but even so, above the noise I could hear the pulsating throb of hundreds of heavy aircraft bearing down on us. There was no need for flares to lead these bombers to their target, the whole city had become a gigantic torch and must have been visible to the pilots from a hundred miles away. The people around me started to gather in small bunches as if to shield each other from the onslaught. Dresden had no defences, no anti-aircraft guns, no seachlights, nothing. The planes were thousands of feet up but even so it was possible to make out their outlines reflected in the glow of the flames.

As the bombs struck the ground we realised that this second raid had nothing in common with the first raid. The new bombs were were so big that it was possible to see them falling through the air. Even the incendiaries were of a different type. Instead of the smallish metre-long sticks that had dropped the first raid, we were now subjected to huge four ton objects that hit the ground and exploded so that a ball of fire blossomed from the point of impact incinerating anything, man-made or human, within a radius of nearly two hundred feet. Raining down with this terror came the blockbusters, thin walled ten ton missiles that demolished whole blocks of buildings in one explosion.

Only five hundred yards of open land separated us from the heart of the first raid on the old part of the city and yet not one bomb landed on us. We laid our bodies down in submission to the slaughter we all sensed was coming. We could feel the terrible heat, our bodies shook as the ground vibrated with the impact as these enormous bombs hit the ground sending great clouds of debris up into the heavens above. As if this was not enough, another terror was making its presence felt.

It wasn't really what you could call a wind or even a gale, the air that was being drawn in from the outside to feed the inferno was like a solid object, so great was its force. The women were clutching onto the men sensing the danger of being sucked across the open ground into the centre of the enormous bonfire, that had once been the centre of Dresden. Further along the line the station was engulfed. I am not certain that this was the main Railway Station of Dresden but it was a station of sorts. I never got near it, so I cannot say.

It had a centre arch, we could all see, which suddenly collapsed and still not one bomb had landed on the lines leading into the city. As if it was a great car park in the sky, the heavens were full of airplanes. As they approached we could hear and see the bombs falling, dropping their loads of death and destruction. On the ground me and my companions were all helpless.

The second raid had been in progress for about a quarter of an hour when halfway between us and the station the ground erupted in huge clouds of smoke and flame. After the concussion came the enormous pull of the wind as air rushed in to replace the vacuum that had been caused by the blasts. It was a very testing time for those of us who could still maintain our composure. It was the officer who again stepped into the breach. He ordered us to move further down the line. In spite of the danger of staying where we were about half of the group, which now numbered about two hundred people, refused to move. We left them, there was nothing to be done for these people who were in a pitiless state, petrified with terror and unable to move their limbs.

Not so our gallant leader, who I believe wanted to take us back into the furnace once the second wave of bombers had concluded their business.

After half an hour the second wave, much stronger than the first, started to thin out although there were still some stragglers. It was what was happening on the ground that made the difference. Everything was in full flame, everything that could burn was alight including a lot of stuff I thought could never burn. The metalled roadways were like burning rivers of bubbling and hissing tar. Huge fragments of material were flying through the air, sucked into the vortex formed by the hurricane winds.

There were now less than a hundred of us in the group. The position we were in gave us a safe breathing space of roughly two hundred yards from the fires, in some places less. We could see people being torn from whatever they were hanging on to, picked up by an invisible giant hand and drawn up in to the ever deepening red glow reflected from the clouds of smoke that were swirling around. If we tried to help the heat drove us back, there was nothing we could do.

Try as we might there was no way that we onlookers could bring any assistance to the tragedy that was being played out on the stage.

A small group that had made it almost to the edge of the field tried to reach us, attempting to cross what once been a roadway, only to get themselves stuck in a bubbling mass of molten tar. One by one these unfortunates sank to the ground through sheer exhaustion and then died in a pyre of smoke and flame.

We watched, as if looking at a giant circus act. People of all shapes, sizes and ages got slowly sucked into the vortex by the force of the winds and then, with a final whisk, they were lifted up into the sky and into the pillars of smoke and fire that carried on up until they disappeared in the clouds above, with their hair and clothing alight. And as if the devil himself decided that the torment the people were suffering was insufficient, above the noise of the wind and the roar of the inferno around us came the interminable, agonised screams of the victims as they were roasted alive. It was these fiendish visions that brutalised my mind in later years.

Then, from out of the smoke and dust a new group joined us with the news that our position was completely cut off. The railway line that we had taken refuge along was now a tangled mass of twisted steel. As each of the buildings to our front collapsed a new, huge blast of heat enveloped our positions. What saved us was that we were on open ground with oxygen to breath. But we all knew that although the raids were over, the fires weren't dying down, they were getting worse.

Our leader had given up any idea he may have had about venturing into the furnace that was the once beautiful city of Dresden. The city to our front was now a mass of flame rising up into the night before finally disappearing into the cloud of smoke that filled the heavens above us.

All of us present thought that our last minutes of life were not far away. The heat was intense, but the real horror was the effort it took to breathe, the air was so hot that it was painful to inhale. The leader realised that if we were going to die it was better that we died trying to get away and so with a flourish of his hand he signaled the group to follow him. We did so in silence because the heat made it impossible for us to open our mouths. He lead us out to an island of safety and there he called a halt.

I am finding it impossible to describe the scene as it actually was, it had to be witnessed to be believed and those of us that were witnesses would be, for the rest of our lives, affected by the memories of that terrible night.

As soon as dawn broke through the dark caused by the smoke and flame, we saw that new gangs of men had arrived and were now filling up the huge craters along the railway and relaying the track. By what must have been mid-morning a small line of wagons were shunted up to a position alongside us. You had to hand it to these Krauts, the first thing they think of is invariably their belly, sure enough in the centre was a kitchen wagon complete with hot soup, black bread and a forty gallon drum of their erzazt coffee, made from crushed acorns.

Yet again our leader sorted out the men he believed would be able to attack his next move into the flames, and I was one of them. He approached me and said “You Tommy ya? To which I replied ‘Ya, ich bin Englander'. He gave me a grin, ‘Gut Englander Tommy, Sie Komm mit eins'. This meant I was to go with him which I didn't mind as it meant food, possible shelter, but most of all he represented order amongst chaos, which I didn't mind, even if he was the hated enemy. If he was brave and stupid enough to fight what I thought was the impossible then I, an Englishman, would match him.

And so that morning of the Fourteenth of February, Nineteen Forty Five our work party of about forty men trudged across the short open field and into the smouldering embers at the edge of the vast bonfire that was still raging less than five or six hundred yards away from us. Other small groups were already digging and shoveling at the piles of fallen masonry, trying to clear a pathway through the rubble so that the rescue gangs could make a start on uncovering the cellars, in the hope that there may be some chance of finding survivors. It must be said that, even though these gangs were made up of different nationalities, everyone set to it with a will.

We had been at it for about half an hour when our leader came over to me. He had noticed that I was struggling and was in pain. He gently lifted my coat and the dried out, brittle shirt from my shoulders to reveal a mass of blisters across my back. He called one of his mates over and must have instructed him to take me to one of the many aid centres that had sprung up just outside the city limits. It was while I was being attended to by a German doctor that the air raid sirens started up again.

This started a minor panic as the little aid centre was right out in the open, with no cover whatever. But the doctor carried on smoothing cream over the blisters on my sore back. Then the third raid started. Now it was the Americans who were flying over us and we reckoned they been told about the lack of air defences which, after the bombers had completed their satanic mission, enabled the escorting fighters to come down almost to street level. This time it was the the railway yards that were the target. Only a few bombs landed in the burning city centre. It meant that the population who had survived and escaped the night before were now getting the same treatment from the Americans. Luckily the American bombs were much less destructive than the ones the British had used. But, even so, five hundred and one thousand pound bombs kill in the same way that their big brothers, the five and ten thousand pounders, do. In this last raid the tally of the dead continued to rise.

When the raid ended everyone lifted themselves from the ground and by some quirk of fate or luck there were no dead bodies within the dressing station. The doctor arranged for me to have some food and a drink of the awful ‘coffee' and then I had to find my way back to the group that I now felt was my family.