Dresden (35 page)

For the moment, they had escaped the fate of the city's center and inner-eastern suburbs. The Südvorstadt would not be so lucky the next day.

 

THE REICH CHIEF
of fire-fighting services, Major General Rumpf, who had by chance been in Leipzig when it had narrowly escaped just such a fate in December 1943, later reported on Dresden as well. He described what happened in the Dresden Altstadt after 5 Group's initial raid:

The rubble from the tall, close-packed buildings both created an insuperable barrier against attempts to escape from the endangered area and also, in many cases, buried the exit routes from the cellars and basements in which the people of the Altstadt had taken refuge when the air raid warnings sounded. Yes, it was sometimes possible, with difficulty, to overcome these barriers, but this took time, and time was too short for the unlucky inner city dwellers.

Rumpf described the rapidly developing firestorm with a seasoned expert's eye:

Nora Lang tells of how, with her parents busy in the apartment trying to salvage what they could, she was delegated to look after her little brother. She and the five-year-old positioned themselves in a spot on the burning Dürerplatz, where so many survivors were still to be found after the first raid. Nora waited patiently, clutching the boy's hand and minding a suitcase filled with the family's most precious belongings. Still her parents did not emerge from the building. Eventually a young mother from their block said they must leave and seek the safety of the Elbe. Nora followed reluctantly.

Dresden had been hit badly. Still, until the warning sounded for the second raid, most people there thought it was all over. Hundreds—even thousands—had died, but now it was a matter of fighting what fires could be fought, saving the living, tending the injured, and recovering the dead.

After the first wave of bombers had gone, eighteen-year-old Günter Jäckel, recovering from his wounds in the southern suburb of Dresden-Plauen, was soon back on the surface. He suffered from claustrophobia.

Then the warning siren sounded again. Could this really be another attack? Either way, Jäckel decided he couldn't bear being shut up in the hospital cellar again.

Günter Jäckel followed his companions into the meadow in Dresden-Plauen. From there he would watch the second, even more devastating air attack on his native city.

BY THE TIME
5
GROUP
had left the Dresden Altstadt burning, a second group of more than 550 British bombers was on its way to hit the city again.

The second wave—more than twice the size of the first—started taking off from their airfields in England just as the first wave had begun to turn toward their target. By shortly before 10
P.M
., they were all in the air. Like the first wave, they had gathered over Reading, and from there headed down across Beachy Head and over the French coast around Boulogne. It was a vast stream of aircraft, more than 120 miles long.

In contrast to Leslie Hay, the fact that Dresden was a relatively unknown quantity cheered Miles Tripp, a bomb aimer with 3 Group, which formed part of the second wave. It wasn't the Ruhr or Berlin, with their massed antiaircraft defenses and their experienced gunners. It would, however, be the longest trip that the crew of his Lancaster, “A for Able,” had flown until this point. They would be carrying one four-thousand-pound “cookie”—a “blockbuster”—and canisters of incendiaries.

Derek Jackson was a nineteen-year-old from Manchester who had planned to become a commercial artist until the war made such jobs, at least for the duration, a thing of the past. He had been an apprentice with a painting company until his eighteenth birthday, meanwhile joining the Air Training Corps, and had applied for the RAF as soon as he was old enough. Like most young men he had wanted to be a pilot, but of these there was an oversupply by this stage in the war. Derek instead trained as a gunner on bombers. In late November 1944 he joined 149 Squadron, 3 Group, in Norfolk.

His first “op” was on December 15, 1944. It was a daylight raid on German troops said to be concentrating at a railhead in the Ruhr area. Of his thirty missions, he reckons half were daylight, usually involving airfields, ammunition dumps, troop concentrations, and so on (especially during the Ardennes offensive). The others, at night, were city operations. The weather was mostly filthy. He recalls trips to Nuremberg, Munich, Cologne, and Frankfurt before Dresden.

The main thing that worried him was the length of that night's flight. Gunners harbored a special hatred of long trips. They had nothing to do but watch and wait. Their turret spaces were narrow, confining. Other members of the crew at least got to move about a bit.

At around a quarter past midnight, the main force burst through the Mandrel screen, whose jamming had kept the German defenses unaware of their approach. At this point, in the vicinity of Luxembourg, further confusion was created by a windowing force of sixteen Mosquitoes from 100 Group, which veered off in the direction of Cologne/Koblenz, successfully simulating a significant attack on this area. Further “spoof” attacks would draw the enemy controllers' attention to Dortmund, Bonn, Nuremberg, and Magdeburg. All the same, a force this big was hard to miss. As the great stream of aircraft passed over the Mainz-Mannheim “flak belt,” they were protected by the cloud and the continuing lack of moonlight. Their luck would hold good until they were over the target.

The first wave had engaged in quite complex changes of direction to keep the German defenses guessing. This second wave followed the first's course as far as the border of the Reich. But where 5 Group had abruptly moved north-northeast toward the Ruhr, the first of several deceptive maneuvers, three hours later the force kept flying pretty much straight, a little to the south of 50 degrees latitude, until its foremost aircraft were well into Central Germany.

At eight minutes before 1
A.M
. on February 14, according to a report found in the Dresden Air Defense Leadership's bunker beneath the Albertinum, the following message was logged:

What was not yet clear was its precise destination. Only when its vanguard reached the Thuringian town of Gera, around seventy-five miles short of its destination, and adjusted its course to north-northeast—heading for Dresden—must the target must have seemed sickeningly apparent.

At 1:07
A.M
. air raid sirens sounded in the undamaged suburbs of Dresden. A few of those who were on the edge of the afflicted areas heard those often faint, distant wails of warning. Otherwise, with the power supply gone throughout the center of the city, the people knew nothing of the new attack until they saw the new marker lights, heard the monotonous growl of engines and the whistle of the bombs. Until, in many cases, it was too late.

There seems to have been some disappointment felt among the crews of 8 (Pathfinder) Group as they approached the target, this time not down the line of the Elbe but from the southwest. The light from the fires raging through Dresden were visible from fifty or more miles distant. Their rival pathfinders in 5 Group had done their job so well that further marking might be superfluous. In addition, the weather had improved still further since 10
P.M
. If the weather for the first wave had been satisfactory, for the second conditions over the target would be almost ideal. The problem now was not cloud but the smoke arising from the burning Altstadt. The strong northwesterly wind was blowing these great, miles-high columns of smoke before it, spreading it over the area to the southeast of 5 Group's original bombing sector and concealing this more effectively than the densest concentration of cumulonimbus. Nevertheless, 8 Group's Lancasters dutifully swooped low to drop their illumination flares over the designated area, though the entire city was revealed in the light of the monstrous fire.

The extraordinary success of 5 Group's marking and bombing had created another unexpected problem. There followed an urgent discussion on VHF radio between the master bomber, the Canadian squadron leader CPC De Wesselow (call sign “Cheesecake”), and his
chief marker, Wing Commander Le Good, as they hovered at around eight thousand feet over the city.

“Dresden. Clear over target, practically the whole town in flames. No flak,” reported Le Good, an Australian.

Should they instruct the bombers to drop into the existing area of fires, thus probably uselessly duplicating the destruction, or—since their brief was to maximize chaos—extend the bombing over other areas of the city outside the districts already attacked? The assigned aiming point for the second wave was the Altmarkt—the historic marketplace between the Altstadt and the
Schloss
. But this area, which had lain within 5 Group's bombing sector, was already a sea of flame. To bomb from this point would be to simply drop precious ordnance into the raging inferno.

It was decided, in an ad hoc decision, to move the attack into new territory.

The Blind Illuminator (one of the six categories of supporting crews in each squadron) Lancasters had dropped parachute flares, using H2S, but these had vanished into the maw of the fire. Shortly after 1:30
A.M
., De Wesselow ordered green markers to be dropped visually onto the fringe areas. The bombers were to release their loads two seconds after crossing the green markers. This moved the attack away from the Altstadt. The new distribution meant that the very first bombs from the 525 aircraft that had arrived at the target dropped southwest and west of the Altstadt, in Löbtau and Friedrichstadt.

Following the continuing distribution of markers, the next wave hit the Südvorstadt, and with it the Hauptbahnhof, which had been seriously but not catastrophically affected by 5 Group's attack. Now the horror really started for the refugees and all the others trapped there in its underground vaults.

Farther south, the suburbs of Räcknitz, Zschernitz, and Plauen (where Günter Jäckel was crouched in his meadow, watching the “surreal” scene), were subjected to a nasty scattering of bombs.

But then came the really big attack on Johannstadt and on Striesen (just southeast of Johannstadt), where many new storm showers of incendiaries further fed the already awe-inspiring blaze. In Johannstadt were Nora, her little brother, and the woman with the baby who had befriended them, and Anita and her parents, and
Günther Kannegiesser, who had taken makeshift refuge in the entrance to the hospital. They were all caught by the new wave of bombing.

A mixture of high-explosive and incendiary bombs rained down on the Grosser Garten, where Dresdeners, obeying the authorities' instructions, had assembled after escaping their burning homes. Here were Christoph Adam and his family, and the painter Otto Griebel, whose home was close to the park. And thousands more, wrapped in damp blankets and coverlets, handkerchiefs over their mouths, watching the exploding trees, hearing the screams of the injured and dying—and praying that somehow they would be spared, for they had nowhere else to go.

It now seemed that the British were bombing the dispossessed and the homeless. The park, the zoo, the lodges, exhibition buildings, and restaurants were all sacrificed to explosion and flame. This was starting to look like sadism, and that would be the view of many observers after the war. To the aircrew, most of whose knowledge of the cityscape of Dresden and its amenities was at best cursory, the evidence is that it just looked like an area that needed to be bombed.

Squadron Leader De Wesselow's decision to spread the damage was now creating a new, wider arc of concentrated devastation. It would lend the bombing of Dresden, it seems, a dubious distinction: that of the greatest area destroyed in a single night. After the green markers had been bombed, red markers were spread in the burning area and the new Lancasters told to aim for those. At 1:42
A.M
., with the bomb aimers no longer able to recognize any markers, De Wesselow gave his final order for them to bomb “the middle of the fires.”

The actual bombs dropped on Dresden during the half-hour or so of the second wave tell the story:

8 Pathfinder Group—60 Lancasters (includes master bomber, markers, and illuminators)

Bombed from 1:21 to 1:45
A.M
.