The air offensive against Germany was born of desperation.
In the summer of 1940, her armies driven from continental Europe at Dunkirk, Britain stood alone and impotent, threatened by invasion. A strategic review concluded that if it was to survive the present danger, the British army would have to reach a maximum strength of 60 divisions by 1942, but it would still be no match for the might of the Wehrmacht and a German war economy drawing on the resources of all of Europe.
A three-part strategy was drawn up to compensate for this military inferiority, consisting of a naval blockade, subversion and a bombing campaign to destroy the German industrial base and the morale of the civilian population. Survival and stalemate were the best that Britain could hope for.
"When I look around to see how we can win the war, I see that there is only one sure path," Winston Churchill wrote to Lord Beaverbrook at the Ministry of Aircraft Production on July 8, 1940. "We have no Continental army which can defeat the German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm him by this means, without which I do not see a way through."
Expanding on the theme, he told the War Cabinet at the height of the Battle of Britain that "the Navy can lose us the war, but only the Air Force can win it. Therefore our supreme effort must be to gain overwhelming mastery in the air. The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide the means of victory."
Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, was convinced that Germany could be defeated by a massive bombing campaign. Following America's entry into the war in December 1941, he recommended around-the-clock bombing by a combined force of at least 4,000 heavy, four-engined bombers. He calculated that such a campaign would render 25 million Germans homeless, breaking civilian morale and bringing war production to a complete halt.
Portal also believed an invasion of the Continent would be unnecessary and that ground troops would only be required as an occupation force. "It is imperative," he informed Churchill, "if we hope to win the war, to abandon the disastrous policy of military intervention in the land campaigns of Europe, and to concentrate our air power against the enemy's weakest points."
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Dresden, a triumph of European baroque architecture, a city of no military importance, shared Hamburg's fate on Feb. 13-14, 1945, in the most controversial raid of the war. The city, widely known as Florence on the Elbe, had survived the war largely unscathed, and many residents felt it would never be bombed because of its cultural significance.
Indeed, there were no anti-aircraft defences. All the flak guns had been removed a month earlier to counter the Soviet offensive rolling in from the east, and fighters at nearby airfields were grounded because fuel was in short supply as a result of Allied attacks on oil refineries.
Civil-defence precautions adopted in other German cities to mitigate the effects of firestorms were never implemented in Dresden. Now, on Fasching or Carnival Night, crowded with refugees from the east, wounded soldiers, and prisoners of war, it would be attacked by waves of bombers supposedly in support of the renewed Russian offensive. Over the course of 14 hours and 15 minutes, three separate attacks resulted in the deaths of anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 men, women and children.
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The first assault occurred at 10:15 p.m., when 144 RAF Lancasters dropped high explosive bombs and incendiaries. In the resulting firestorms, temperatures within an eight-square mile area reached more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, creating tornado-like ground winds.
The second attack came in the early morning hours of Feb. 14 -- ironically, Ash Wednesday -- and involved 529 Lancasters, fully loaded with incendiaries. They had no difficultly locating the target. Canadian James Letros recalled: "It was terrible. You could see fires 200 miles away. The whole sky was lit up ... The streets of the city were a fantastic lattice-work of fire. It was as though one was looking down at the fiery outlines of a crossword puzzle; blazing streets etched from east to west, from north to south in a gigantic saturation of fire."
The third wave consisted of 1,350 American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators.
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When the sirens sounded, 24-year-old Margaret Fryer, like so many others in Dresden, assumed it was a false alarm. Nevertheless, she grabbed a ready-packed suitcase she kept on hand for emergencies and made for the shelter in the basement of her apartment building as the night sky lit up with the dreaded Christmas Trees -- target markers dropped by the Pathfinders.
She was joined by 43 other women, terrified, weeping and praying as the walls and ceiling shook and the lights failed. When the All Clear sounded, she made her way upstairs, dragging her suitcase.
"I saw people right in front of me," she later wrote. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then -- to my utter horror and amazement -- I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. I had a feeling they were being shot, but my mind could not understand what was happening. Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen. They fainted and then burnt to cinders."
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