Today, February 13th, marks the 77th anniversary of the destruction of Dresden. It was the seventh largest city in Germany at the time. On this date in 1945, with the outcome of the war long decided, Allied warplanes obliterated the city in three waves of heavy bombing. Dresden was known as a European cultural center with little to no strategic value.
It was Shrove Tuesday and a festival had taken place earlier that day. Little children had been dressed in special costumes made for the event. The people of the city had no idea of the tragedy and horror that was about to unfold. The first sirens sounded just before 10 PM that evening. The incendiary bombs that began to fall caused maximum damage even spawning a fiery vortex in the city center that cremated people where they stood. The second wave came three hours later. It caught rescue crews, and others who had come out of hiding, exposed in the open and delivered further carnage to the already burning city.
The third wave came after dawn when bombers swept in to deliver perhaps the cruelest blow to the now near dead city. They would pound the rubble for another forty minutes. Afterwards, in complete absence of mercy, U.S. mustangs appeared low over the city and began strafing anything that moved including rescuers rushing to evacuate survivors. A group huddled in blankets on the banks of the Elbe River were massacred by machine gun fire from the American planes in broad daylight.
While official history lists the death toll at 40,000, most unbiased estimates set the actual number at well over 100,000, and even several times that. The overwhelming majority of the casualties were women, children, the elderly, recent refugees, even injured Allied PoWs who died in hospitals which were also targeted. If higher estimates of 300,000 or more dead are correct, then more German women and children died in just one night of fiery Allied terror than all British civilians through five years of war. The massive and unnecessary raid has been criticized by a few brave historians as an outright orgy of vengeance and hate. Dresden held the name "Florence of the Elbe" for its culture and architectural beauty and significance—its main industry cups and saucers.
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