Dresden (32 page)

This was where cooperation between pilot and navigator mattered to the fraction of a second. On either side of “U for Uncle,” just yards distant, was another Lancaster at the same altitude but two degrees off, preparing to go in. The pilot's job was to avoid collisions and be ready to turn onto the “heading” from which the bombing run would be directed. The navigator's job was to do his pinpoint calculations of wind and height and speed and position, and tell the pilot, his “skipper,” when that precise moment for the turn had come.

“Thirty seconds,” said the navigator. “I'll be turning you on thirty seconds.”

Over the radio, the calm, authoritative voice of the controller was encouraging the aircraft to go in, but the navigator took his time, held out for his calculated course. After months of training and an entire tour of duty survived together, the relationship of trust between pilot and navigator was intense, almost spiritual, and at such moments they paid little attention to outsiders, no matter how senior—and no matter how much, deep down, they themselves longed to get this job over.

“Turn now,” the navigator stated simply.

And Hay turned the aircraft smoothly onto course for the approach, briefly tipping into the curve. He straightened out and saw his two companion Lancasters still two degrees either side of him after performing the same maneuver with the same skill—“not wingtip to wingtip, but that was how it felt!” as Hay recalls. This was the precision 5 Group was known for, and which had cost so many thousands of German city dwellers their lives.

By now the bomb aimer had slipped down to his compartment at the front of the aircraft. Hay, the pilot, concerned himself only with acting on the data he was receiving about the aircraft's height, course, and speed. “Getting everything just on the right heading.” He went lower in his seat, and paid close attention to his instruments.

All this was happening two minutes before the scheduled bombing time of 10:15. As the urgings over the radio had indicated, the marking had been so quick, accurate, and trouble-free that the master bomber had decided to send the Lancasters in early. Why leave them waiting over the target, especially when it was impossible to tell if the break in the weather would last?

So in they went, crossing the city from northwest to southeast, the prevailing wind directly behind them. Their crews' specific instructions would see the Lancasters traverse the city center area at slightly but precisely differing angles. The strict, exact attack sequence of aircraft and squadrons was intended not only to guarantee the intensive bombing of the given area but also to avoid the ever-present danger of collision, or of aircraft bombing one another as they approached and released their loads from different directions and at different heights.

The bombing area, shaped like a wedge, extended just over one and a quarter miles along each edge and a little under one and three-quarter miles at its widest point. It took in the railway lines immediately in front of the DSC stadium, then its northern boundary traveled across the Elbe to clip a corner off the ministerial buildings on the Neustadt side of the river, violently embracing the Augustus and Carolabrücke road bridges (though it did not include the Marienbrücke railway bridge). Between this boundary and the southern edge, it then spread itself over the entire Altstadt, almost as far south as the Hauptbahnhof. The railway station was, however, like the Marienbrücke, not quite included in the designated bombing area.

“U for Uncle” carried one thousand-pound high-explosive bomb;
the rest of her load were four-pound incendiaries. All of 49 Squadron went in at between 12,000 and 13,500 feet—relatively low, because of the absence of flak. One aircraft every 7.5 seconds. All bombed between 10:14 and 10:16
P.M
. except for one aircraft which, according to the record, went in at 10:22.

During the approach, pilot Leslie Hay was no longer strictly in control of the aircraft. Once the bomb aimer felt able to assure his skipper that he had the heading and had set his bombsights accordingly, he was in charge. For however long it took for the bombs to leave the aircraft, he would direct the movements of “U for Uncle” and hold the lives of his fellow crew members in his hands.

On most trips, this was the hardest time. The voice of the bomb aimer as he gave running instructions over the intercom: “Steady, steady, steady, port, steady. Steady, port steady, steady, steady—and starboard steady, steady, steady, steady…”

The whole crew crouched tensed in their seats. They just wanted to get out of it. And they knew that even after the drop they would have to hold it for a minute for the photo flash. The bomb aimer's instructions were drawn out, in this case, because he had a problem. Visibility had seemed good, but just as “U for Uncle” started its runup, a thin veil of low cloud suddenly drifted over the target. Ground visibility was reduced to the dull glow of spot fires through this low haze—no view of the city itself. It was taking the bomb aimer a little time to work out from the dim pattern below where the aiming point must be. Then, as they approached, the marker flare force, seeing the difficulty for the incoming aircraft, put down some lights to illuminate the area a little better. A few moments later, at a signal from the bomb-aimer, the pilot opened the bomb doors, and there was the loud
bm-bm-bm
of the load being released into the night.

Bombs gone
.

The sudden lightening of the aircraft's load, as several thousand pounds of bombs and incendiary sticks spilled from its belly and began their tumbling journey to the earth, caused “U for Uncle” to shoot up very quickly. Hay, an experienced pilot, knew what was coming and steadied his aircraft. Soon he started to curve away again, leaving the bombing area. Hay headed southeast, following the stream of other Lancasters that had finished their job for the night.

Behind “U for Uncle,” more aircraft were making their runs under
the watchful eye of the master bomber, who hovered over Dresden at a mere three thousand feet. His aircraft, like all the small group of Pathfinder Mosquitoes, was unarmed, relying for safety on its exceptional speed, maneuverability, and ability to fly above the flak and the night fighters.

Way above the master bomber, the Lancasters fanned out over the bombing area. Down in the city, the lights of a thousand new fires burned. High-explosive bombs had punched holes in roofs and blown doors and windows out of buildings to provide the necessary draft. While the civilians crouched in their cellars registered mostly the terrifying force of the explosions, the four-pound Thermite-based incendiaries (wrongly referred to by German civilians as “phosphor bombs”) clattered down by the tens of thousands, lodging in roofs and attics and upper rooms and catching on whatever furniture and beams and household items made suitable fuel.

Already the bombers of “Plate Rack Force” were finding it hard to discern the individual red markers dropped by 627 Squadron. And already, thousands of feet below, tiny fires were starting to cluster and melt into ever-brighter conflagrations, breeding like glowing bacteria under a microscope.

“Good work, Plate Rack Force,” said the marker leader as he prepared to go home. “That's nice bombing.”

He was, by his own lights, correct. In Bomber Command's attack on Dresden, everything had so far gone terrifyingly right. On this night of February 13–14, 1945, the planners and the markers, the master bomber and his aircrews—not forgetting the ground crew back at base and the “lassies” who filled and packed those incendiaries in their little factories tucked away among the Scottish hills—had together created the rarest of things.

The perfect firestorm.

THE EXPERIENCE
of the first wave of the raid on Dresden was terrible, but did not yet seem cataclysmic. The beginnings seemed often to resemble something out of a beautiful but frightening fairy tale. Stories were told of sneaking outside to watch the glittering fall of the silver-trailed “Christmas trees” illuminating the wintry city beneath them—before the whistle of the first bombs sent even these bold observers back into their basements, hastily closing the doors behind them.

For most civilians in Dresden the raid was undergone in a modestly converted basement or cellar beneath an apartment block or a private house. There would be the sacks of sand, the buckets of water, the basic tools, but no firewalls, no air filters, no custom-built sealed doors. In the big public shelters of most major German cities, great portals would close inexorably when the raid was on. Filters and seals would keep breathable air circulating and poisonous gases out. Layers of reinforced concrete could withstand all but the most powerful, direct hit. Not so in Dresden. You took shelter in your immediate neighborhood. Occasionally someone would be caught away from home and take refuge with strangers, but mostly the people seeking safety beneath the city were people who knew each other well from years of everyday friendship and contact, who lived together. Tonight, in many cases, they would also die together.

Though it was just outside the bombing sector, plenty of bombs fell in Johannstadt during the first attack. Nora Lang recalls:

Her friend Anita Kurz, a couple of blocks away, was in their basement-cum-public-shelter:

People prayed and wept, bit their lips in silence, winced at the shudders of nearby bomb impacts, worried about the fates of their homes, their possessions, and their pets.

Günther Kannegiesser and his friend Siegfried never made it as far as Police District Four. They were compelled by the growing force of the bombing to take refuge in the air raid shelter in the Schumannstrasse. The lights went out. They felt repeated explosions. Then things seemed to go quiet. Eager to see what was happening, they sneaked out of the shelter exit and up to street level to examine the damage for themselves. They arrived in the lobby of the building just in time for more bombers to come overhead. Within seconds, tile-splinters crashed through the windows. Günther still has headaches from the tiny fragments that embedded themselves in his temples. The boys retreated hastily back down into the shelter and did not reemerge until the first raid was over.

A mile and a half to the west of them, in Friedrichstadt, Götz Bergander had returned home from his refugee work at the Hauptbahnhof only minutes before the first air raid warning sounded. He and his family tramped dutifully down to the custom-built shelter beneath the Bramsch distillery, where Dr. Bergander, a chemist, worked as technical director.

The Bergander family lived in an apartment on the premises, as did the managing director. A number of other civilians from the area also came to take advantage of the shelter whose sturdiness they had once mocked. These were middle-class people—there was considerable industry in Friedrichstadt, but also the hospital complex and some attractive apartment blocks dating from the early nineteenth century. The composer Wagner had lived just along the street while royal master of music in the 1840s. The shelter served them all well—now and over the next hours it almost certainly saved their lives. The factory was only a few hundred yards from the aiming point for 5 Group's bombers.

One Dresdener who, by coincidence, found himself in the center of the city that night was the anti-Nazi artist Otto Griebel, who had witnessed the burning of the Dresden synagogue almost seven years before. Now in his forties, Griebel had avoided the clutches of the Gestapo, but not of the Wehrmacht. He had carried out his army duties, as a technical draftsman attached to a company of engineers in
Poland, with appropriate ill grace and almost exultant inefficiency. The big Russian offensive enabled him to make his way back to Dresden, where he arrived on the last day of January.

On the evening of Tuesday, February 13, Griebel took a tram into the city from his apartment east of the Grosser Garten and got out at the Neue Gasse, on the edge of the Altstadt. As it happened, this was hard by the Bauer box factory, Henny Wolf's last place of employment. The landlady of a local bar, a friend from prewar bohemian days, had invited Griebel to a small party. The place was full of people Griebel knew and was pleased to see again. They drank and chatted. At around 10
P.M
. Griebel picked up his hat and coat and made ready to go home.

As Griebel went to pay his tab, the air raid warning sounded. One of the company, who had left her children at home nearby, turned pale and rushed from the room, but most still refused to believe this was anything more than the usual false alarm. When the full alert came, they piled down into the basement of the building, which was deep and capacious. Soon the first bombs started to drop on the center of the city:

Not all the people caught in Dresden that night had even the faint comfort of the company of friends and neighbors. At the overflowing Hauptbahnhof, the final air raid warning had caught hundreds of travelers and refugees on the concourse and the platforms, in the waiting rooms and restaurants, or crowded into departing trains. The express to Munich, which had been about to depart when the British raid
started, was stuck inside the station. Panic-stricken passengers pushed toward the supposed safety of the station's basement complex, in some cases forced to negotiate steep stairs, for the Hauptbahnhof was built on several levels.

Even though the main station was beyond the south edge of the designated bombing sector, inevitably quantities of both high explosives and incendiaries began to fall in and around the buildings. Perhaps this was when the master bomber had chided his aimers: “Try to pick out the red glow. The bombing is getting wild now…”

A fire started on the steps down into the cellars. Some passengers were trampled, others crushed to death or suffocated by billowing smoke in the enclosed space. A few tried to hide under the coaches of the trains. Some succeeded in reaching the cellars, only to find them already packed to overflowing with people and luggage; the access corridors were blocked by hordes of sheltering humans and their belongings.

So much for the “shelter” under the Hauptbahnhof. The authorities had been warned, but had done almost nothing to improve the public's chance of survival in Dresden's most vulnerable location.

The chaos had been bad enough during this first, fairly brief attack. There was a great deal worse to come.

 

THE TENS OF THOUSANDS
of civilians crammed into basements and cellars throughout the inner areas of the city could only wait and pray. Torrents of high explosives and incendiaries were falling on the Altstadt, the heart of the RAF's bombing sector. There was some drift to the north as the raid went on. Although only the immediate riverside had been included in the original plan, bombs also hit the residential and official quarters of the Neustadt, several hundred yards from the river. There was also some “overshoot,” taking the bombing eastward from the ordained curved edge of the wedge and causing quite extensive damage and fires in the area of the Grosser Garten and Johannstadt, but the bombing was on the whole executed with extraordinary efficiency.

Part of the reason for this near perfection of destruction, in the case of Dresden, was the absence of “creep-back.” The phenomenon, common throughout the war, came from a tendency by bomb aimers
to drop their loads too soon. It could cause serious cumulative inaccuracy as the raid progressed, and turn a potentially effective night's work into what the RAF's planners judged as a waste of men and aircraft. “Creep-back” was one of the reasons that those planners had learned to set their aiming points squarely in the centers of cities. Were an aiming point to be set in the suburbs—where industrial and similar targets might well, in fact, be situated—accumulated “creep-back” (the first aircraft drops a little soon, the next even sooner, and so on) could quite soon lead to bombs falling not onto urban or even suburban targets but onto open fields.

The problem was not officially admitted at the time, perhaps because it was felt to smack of “cowardice” on the part of aircrew. Air Marshal Harris admitted its existence only in a secret account written for Air Ministry reference, referring to it with unaccustomed delicacy as “undershooting.”

At Dresden there was not the usual intense pressure to bomb and get out. As everyone soon realized, there were no enemy antiaircraft guns and apparently no night fighters. The weather was also sufficiently benign to allow low-level, accurate marking. The crews themselves, relieved of the necessity of staying toward the limit of flak range, could moreover bomb in a careful and relatively relaxed fashion at a lower altitude than usual, in this case mostly between ten thousand and thirteen thousand feet. Perfect conditions. So no “creep-back.” And an extra reason that the bombing that night was so devastatingly accurate and effective.

In fifteen minutes that February night, 5 Group had unleashed a huge, carefully mixed quantity of air bombs on Dresden. This provided the high concentration required if there was to be a chance of a firestorm.

Through the Lancasters' bomb doors tumbled 172 four-thousand-pound air mines (“cookies”), 26 two-thousand-pound air mines,
72 one-thousand-pound high-explosive bombs, and 648 five-hundred-pound high-explosive bombs. In addition, the aircraft dropped, usually in the same loads, 128,550 four-pound stick incendiary bombs (individually released), 8,250 four-pound stick incendiary bombs fitted with explosive charges, and 68,628 four-pound stick incendiary bombs packed into cluster containers. The last were fitted with a barometric pressure trigger. The containers blew open to release dense showers of the sharp-nosed little fire raisers, usually at around a thousand feet from the ground. This ensured concentrated and even distribution. Four-pound incendiaries dropped individually from ten thousand to twenty thousand feet were notorious for drifting, in their long descent to earth, way off target and landing so widely scattered as to be all but useless.

Altogether, 881.1 tons of bombs fell on the central districts of Dresden between 10:13
P.M
. and 10:28
P.M
. Around 57 percent by weight were high explosive, 43 percent incendiaries.

The big air mines were not just for blowing apart buildings or causing huge craters in the streets, thereby causing access problems for firefighters and other emergency services, though they did both these things. These explosive monsters' function was also to create huge waves of high-pressure air, as they had in the packed tenement blocks of Hamburg in July 1943. Such waves blew out scores, even hundreds of windows and doors, swiftly increasing the through-draft needed for the little fires from tens of thousands of stick incendiaries to spread and combine as quickly as possible.