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Op maandag 20 september 2004 19:22 schreef CherrymoonTraxx het volgende:
Dan ben ik benieuwd wat Harris er over schreef. Wellicht was het een gedachte of een mogelijkheid...
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After the Second World War Air Marshall Arthur Harris came under attack for the bombing raid on Dresden. In his autobiography he explained why he ordered the bombing of the city in February, 1945.
With the German army on the frontiers of Germany we quickly set up GH and Oboe ground stations close behind the front line and this ensured the success of attacks on many distant objectives when the weather would otherwise have prevented us from finding the target. At the same time the bombers could fly with comparative safety even to targets as distant as Dresden or Chemnitz, which I had not ventured to attack before, because the enemy had lost his early warning system and the whole fighter defence of Germany could therefore generally be out-manoeuvred.
In February of 1945, with the Russian army threatening the heart of Saxony, I was called upon to attack Dresden; this was considered a target of the first importance for the offensive on the Eastern front. Dresden had by this time become the main centre of communications for the defence of Germany on the southern half of the Eastern front and it was considered that a heavy air attack would disorganise these communications and also make Dresden useless as a controlling centre for the defence. It was also by far the largest city in Germany - the pre-war population was 630,000 - which had been left intact; it had never before been bombed. As a large centre of war industry it was also of the highest importance.
An attack on the night of February 13th-14th by just over 800 aircraft, bombing in two sections in order to get the night fighters dispersed and grounded before the second attack, was almost as overwhelming in its effect as the Battle of Hamburg, though the area of devastation -1600 acres - was considerably less; there was, it appears, a fire-typhoon, and the effect on German morale, not only in Dresden but in far distant parts of the country, was extremely serious. The Americans carried out two light attacks in daylight on the next two days.
I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself, and that if their judgment was right the same arguments must apply that I have set out in an earlier chapter in which I said what I think about the ethics of bombing as a whole.
Echter:
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John Black, The Truth about the 1945 Bombing of Dresden (23rd February 1995)
Dresden was a center of cultural and architectural wonders, including the famous Zwinger Museum and Palace and the cathedral, the Frauenkirche. There were no military objectives of any consequence in the city - its destruction could do nothing to weaken the Nazi war machine. U.S. and British air warfare had left Dresden intact until that point.
By February 1945, refugees fleeing westward before the onrushing Red Army had doubled Dresden's population. The Soviet military forces were poised to seize the city from the Nazis. It was at that moment that the military and political strategists of Britain and the United States decided to launch a terror bombing attack.
Winston Churchill was Britain's prime minister then. He was also responsible for war strategy, especially regarding its political aims. Churchill's goal in Europe was not only to destroy the military machine of Britain's imperialist rival - Germany - but to stop the advance of the Soviet Union. With the latter in mind, he decided to bomb Dresden...
Official figures issued by the new city government of Dresden, set up in the wake of the city's surrender to the Red Army, indicate that 35,000 people - mostly women, children and older people - suffocated in the firestorm or burned to death. Other studies give a much higher casualty figure for the attack. The presence of so many refugees made accurate counts difficult.
During three waves of attacks, over 1,300 British and U.S. bombers dropped more than 3,300 tons of bombs on Dresden. Many of the bombs were incendiaries.
The incendiaries dropped on the old city center started a firestorm--a huge blaze that sucked the oxygen from the air. Temperatures soared as high as 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. This had not been seen before in Europe, although U.S. bombing started a firestorm in Tokyo and the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki also set off firestorms.
Low-flying planes machine-gunned the fleeing population along the banks of the Elbe river. A fourth attack on Dresden concentrated its bomb load on the roads used by the fleeing population.
The cultural center of the city was totally destroyed. Meanwhile, the only possible military or economic targets--the barracks in the city's north and the train station where trains carrying reserves for the Eastern Front might depart--were left untouched.
A look at aerial maps of the city before and after the terror attacks clearly shows the large white oil tanks owned by British-controlled Shell Oil. These tanks remained entirely untouched by the bombardment.
Official figures issued by the new city government of Dresden, set up in the wake of the city's surrender to the Red Army, indicate that 35,000 people--mostly women, children and older people--suffocated in the firestorm or burned to death. Other studies give a much higher casualty figure for the attack. The presence of so many refugees made accurate counts difficult.
Apologists for the bombing point to Nazi Germany's own crimes. Following the war's end, however, the U.S. and Britain occupiers were quick to allow all but the top Nazi leaders to play a role in western Germany - to gain these criminals as allies against the USSR. To reach the same political goal, the U.S. and British rulers could easily sacrifice more than 35,000 non-combatants with the bombing of Dresden.
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David Pedlow, letter to The Guardian (14th February, 2004)
My father was one of the "anonymous RAF meteorological officers (who) finally sealed Dresden's fate". A chronically short-sighted school teacher, he went into the Meteorological Office at the beginning of a war that he had hoped would not happen, but that he felt was utterly necessary. He knew he would be part of a process that sent young men out to risk their lives, and that inevitably - given the inadequacies of bomb-aiming and weather-forecasting techniques - would lead to a considerable number of civilian casualties.
The Dresden briefing was only one of many that he routinely attended, and even before the crews left the ground he was troubled because of one notable omission from the routine.
Normally, crews were given a strategic aiming point - anything from a major factory in the middle of nowhere to a small but significant railway junction within a built-up area. The smaller the aiming point and the heavier the concentration of housing around it, the greater would be the civilian casualties - but given that the strike was at a strategic aiming point those casualties could be justified.
Only at the Dresden briefing, my father told me, were the crews given no strategic aiming point. They were simply told that anywhere within the built-up area of the city would serve.
He felt that Dresden and its civilian population had been the prime target of the raid and that its destruction and their deaths served no strategic purpose, even in the widest terms; that this was a significant departure from accepting civilian deaths as a regrettable but inevitable consequence of the bomber war; and that he had been complicit in what was, at best, a very dubious operation.