Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don't by Ulrike Meinhof

Author:Ulrike Meinhof
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2010-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

DRESDEN

(1965)

Twenty years ago, during the night between Fat Tuesday and Ash Wednesday, February 13 and 14, 1945, the largest air attack by allied bomber squadrons ever flown in the Second World War was unleashed against a German city. It was the attack on Dresden. The city was bombed three times within fourteen hours. The first attack lasted from 10:13 pm to 10:21 pm. When the English bombers flew off, they left behind them a sea of fire that set the sky ablaze over eighty kilometers. The second attack took place between 1:30 am and 1:50 am. When the bombers departed they could see Dresden on fire from a distance of three hundred kilometers. The third attack was flown by an American squadron of bombers from 12:12 pm to 12:23 pm.

More than 200,000 people lost their lives. In his book The Fall of Dresden, David Irving, an Englishman, wrote that it was the first time in the history of the war that an air raid had so destroyed its target that there were not enough uninjured survivors to bury the dead.

Dresden had a population of 630,000. On the day of its destruction, over a million people were in the city (estimates range from 1.2 to 1.4 million): refugees from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia, evacuees from Berlin and the Rhineland, transported children, prisoners of war, and foreign workers. Dresden was a collection point for wounded and recovering soldiers. Dresden had no armaments industry. Dresden was a city without defenses, without Flak or anti-aircraft capacities. In all of Germany, Dresden was considered a city that would never be bombed. There were rumors that the British would spare Dresden if Oxford were not attacked, or that after the war, the Allies would make Dresden the capital of Germany and would therefore not destroy it. There were other rumors too, but basically, no one could imagine that a city that was setting up new civilian and military hospitals every day, a city that was receiving hundreds of thousands of new refugees every day, refugees that were mainly women and children, would be bombed.

The only point of military interest in Dresden was a large train yard used to transfer goods and troops. But in the three attacks—the first that dropped mainly highly-explosive bombs to burst windows and break down roofs so that trusses and apartments would have that much less protection against the next load of fire bombs; as all these attacks ran according to plan and with the greatest precision—this train yard was hardly hit. A few days later, when heaps of dead bodies were stacked in the halls of the train yard, the rail lines had already been repaired. But Dresden burned for seven days and eight nights.

The English soldiers who flew the raids were not told the truth. They were told that their fleet would be attacking the head military command post of the army, located in Dresden. They were told that Dresden was an important center for supplies to the eastern front.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.