Dresden (31 page)

On February 13, 1945, there was no school, because there was no coal to heat the classrooms. Such shortages were now a frequent problem. Even when the coal could be mined, it could not necessarily be transported. As so often in the past few months, they had collected assignments from school. These they would deliver when circumstances allowed. Things had gotten so bad that Anita's grandfather, who worked in the railway yards in Friedrichstadt, had to help out with the family
rations by getting biscuits from the British prisoners of war he worked with, who continued to receive quite lavish parcels from the International Red Cross. Her grandmother, in exchange, did the prisoners' laundry. That night the children in the block had been playing Fasching with improvised masks, for a while after dark within the apartment house. Then they all went back to their homes, including Nora:

The place where they hurried to take refuge was actually just a cellar.

Almost exactly the same situation occurred in the basement of the nearby building where the family of Anita Kurz—Nora's best friend—lived, though it had a street entrance for the public and was signed as an air raid shelter. The one advantage was that it had electricity. Anita remembered:

For the two Johannstadt boys, things were different, partly due to more pronounced class divisions.

Christoph Adam's family were middle-class. A thoughtful, serious boy of fourteen, he lived on the Dürerplatz, one of the largest squares in Dresden. Its solid apartment houses, at that time about fifty years old, were grouped around a green central square, running a hundred yards along the south side and two hundred yards from south to north, almost a village within the suburb. Academically clever, Christoph was a student at the famous Kreuzschule, a high school attended by the sons of Dresden's middle and upper classes and internationally famous for its choir:

As far as he recalls, life went on with something approaching normality. Even with the Russian advance units just a couple of hours' drive away, there was talk of whether, under the tenancy agreement, the landlord was due to repaint the building. Dr. Adam—as he now is—adds that “things were rationed, but it's not as if Germans went hungry. I didn't. I was well clothed and well shod.” And it was
Fasching, and there were festivities—decorations in the stairwell, children in improvised costumes.

Günther Kannegiesser's father was a fitter. By the latter part of the war he had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht. To help make ends meet, his mother worked at a camera shop. Günther was a handsome boy with a roguish smile—a tough, resourceful city kid. He was also fourteen, but his parents didn't have the money to finance any further education. Soon he would be looking for a job.

Meanwhile, young Günther was his mother's mainstay. He used to take his four-year-old little brother to kindergarten in the mornings so that his mother could go to work. His eight-year-old sister went to the same school as he did. After lessons, he then cleaned, fetched coal, and often did the shopping, before he could play with his friends.

Since the previous autumn, Günther had also been a war worker, acting along with some of the other neighborhood boys as a messenger and emergency helper for the local police headquarters, Police District Four, in Dinglinger Strasse. Every other evening the boys would report to the police station. There, though sleeping in bunk beds in the basement, they were on call in case of emergency. In exchange they received 1.50 Reich marks and a small extra ration token. The night of the RAF raid followed a regular sort of day:

As they approached the police station, the British aircraft were already overhead. The boys could see them and hear them. They gazed up in adolescent wonderment at the display. Then they realized they could also hear explosions.

They hurried on, toward the deceptive security promised by the headquarters of Police District Four.

BY THE TIME THE
244
heavily laden Lancasters reached the end of their five-hour flight and started to curve down the Elbe toward the night's target, 5 Group's master bomber and his team of eight marker aircraft had been waiting and making their preparations above Dresden for about ten minutes.

At 7:57
P.M
., the master bomber had taken off from Coningsby in Lincolnshire. He flew in Mosquito KB 401-E, accompanied by navigator Pilot Officer Leslie Page. They quickly climbed to thirty thousand feet in their fast, wood-framed aircraft, and set course for Germany. At exactly the same time, Flight Lieutenant William Topper, in Mosquito DZ 631-W, and his navigator, Flight Lieutenant Davies, left Woodhall Spa. Topper, as lead marker among eight Mosquitoes of 627 Squadron, would have the job of marking the aiming point for the first wave of the main force. He and his fellows would carry out the low-level marking operation in a fashion peculiar to 5 Group.

To further confuse the German air defenses, the master bomber and the marker aircraft flew in close parallel with part of the diversionary Mosquito force heading for Magdeburg before slipping away over south-central Germany to make for Chemnitz and thence Dresden. Despite leaving almost two hours later than the main Lancaster force, 5 Group's master bomber and his marking team, riding the brisk northwesterly winds, got there before them, all according to plan.

Wing-Commander Maurice Smith, the master bomber, had already gained experience controlling attacks on sizable German cities, including Karlsruhe and Heilbronn. He was considered a specialist in “sector bombing,” a refined form of area bombing practiced
by 5 Group. Smith's job was to remain in direct contact both with HQ in England and with the aircraft taking part in the raid (in the latter case through the newly developed VHF short-range radios that the bombers now carried on board). He was therefore not just High Wycombe's liaison man on the spot but, in effect, director of the first act of the drama due to take place over Dresden shortly after 10
P.M
. that night.

Smith's Mosquito, and the marker aircraft, also carried the new navigation aid LoRaN (
Lo
ng
Ra
nge
N
avigation), an American-developed device, similar to the Gee target-finding system but operating over more than twice the distance. Gee's use was limited by the curvature of the earth. Loran operated on a much longer wavelength and therefore was not restricted in this way. The disadvantage was reduced accuracy (its best use as a navigational aid was at sea), but loran was precise enough to enable lead and pathfinder aircraft—which on distant trips like Dresden would otherwise have been out of range of Allied transmitters—at least to be sure they were over the right city before beginning their marking operations.

Specifically, it was Smith's task to ensure that the marking was carried out accurately and then, observing the waves of Lancasters embarking on their carefully choreographed bombing runs over the target, to correct any mistakes, or bomb-sighting errors that might threaten to diminish the effectiveness of the bombing. The master bomber's duties were not only supremely responsible but also highly dangerous. Whatever perils arose from the enemy's flak or fighter defenses, he was duty-bound to remain in the target area for the entire duration of the attack, often flying at low altitude to observe the outcome of the bombers' efforts.

From its bunker deep beneath the Albertinum, in the heart of Dresden, the Local Air Raid Leadership (Örtliche Luftschutzleitung = ÖL) had been tracking the Mosquitoes for the past ten minutes or so, since they had overflown Chemnnitz.

For an hour it had been clear that a
dicker Hund
(“fat dog”), as the German air defense controllers called a big enemy bomber formation, was on its way to central or eastern Germany. On the basis of information from the Reich Air Defense Leadership, Dresden's Air Raid Police had already been placed on alert at 9:15
P.M
. At 9:39
P.M
. a general
Fliegeralarm
(enemy aircraft warning) was issued for the city,
though it was still far from clear where exactly the bomber force was headed. Leipzig still seemed the most likely target. It was probable that this warning would count, for the Dresden population, as just another among scores of false alarms. Then, at 9:59, the ÖL reported: “Enemy combat units in the area of Dresden-Pirna, circling.”

The main Lancaster force had also been spotted twenty minutes previously, but the dropping of window and other deception/evasion measures were still proving successful in confusing the enemy. Specific final-stage air raid alarms had been issued in Leipzig, but still not in Dresden.

Meanwhile, acting on orders from the Luftwaffe's First Fighter Division HQ at Döberitz near Berlin, the small German night fighter force at Klotzsche airfield had already been alerted. Its “A” group of ten Messerschmitt BF 110s had been “scrambled” in anticipation and was soon in the air, but it would take the night fighters up to half an hour to climb and get into an attack position. Even as these few protectors started to gain height, however, the marking of the target was under way, and the main bomber stream drawing close. It was already unlikely that the tiny gang of night fighters would trouble the execution of the attack, and so it proved.

One of the Messerschmitts was downed by unknown fire as it climbed. One account has it that the light flak still remaining at Klotzsche panicked and mistook it for an enemy intruder as it circled at some height. Another suggests the fighter might have had the misfortune to fly through a dense hail of just-released British incendiaries. One British Lancaster was also lost in this way over the city.

At 10:03
P.M
. the first marker group started to get to work. These were Lancasters from 83 Squadron, the advance guard of the main force. Crisscrossing the city, they dropped green marker flares to delineate the city area, and the first of almost one thousand white magnesium parachute flares cascaded to illuminate the ground. These latter were the notorious “Christmas trees” that so many Dresdeners who survived would later recall seeing from half-open cellar doors or glimpsing as they rushed to public shelters. Almost simultaneously, the ÖL received confirmation that “the attack is intended for Dresden.”

Three minutes later, at 10:06
P.M
., the ÖL finally broadcast over the
Drahtfunk
, the wire-borne radio found in shelters and other public places, its final-stage, definitive warning:

Dresden had heard this twice before, on October 7 and January 16. It was not until this moment that they knew their city was going to be bombed. But by now the Mosquitoes of 627 Squadron had already begun to swoop down on the agreed aiming point, just to the west of the city center. Here, led by Flight Lieutenant Topper, they began drop the red flares that would guide more than 240 bomb aimers during the attack itself.

 

THE OSTRAGEHEGE STADIUM
of the Dresden Sport Club (DSC), located by the main railway bridge, the Marienbrücke, was one of several large sports grounds in the city, and the home ground of the city's most popular soccer team, winner in both 1943 and 1944 of Germany's national soccer championship. In 1945 the DSC ground was selected as the aiming point for the first wave of the bombing of Dresden.

The wind that night was in the northwest, the same direction from which the bombers were approaching. The technique for the first wave of attack was sector bombing, first used in 5 Group's awesomely efficient raid on Braunschweig in October 1944. This involved marking a fixed aiming point and then assigning to the individual aircraft not just different headings for their approach—two degrees' variation at a time—but also progressively differing timed overshoots of the aiming point. The aim was to ensure an even and devastating density of bombing over a fan-shaped sector. If achieved, and with the right mix of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, this might well result in a firestorm. It had almost happened at Braunschweig—only the swift intervention of the experienced fire brigade had prevented it.

As soon as the first red-flare Mosquito went down to two or three thousand feet to mark the aiming point at the DSC stadium, what had been suspected for a while now became obvious. Dresden was undefended by antiaircraft artillery.

One of the three “Link” aircraft, all Lancasters, attached to the Pathfinder force, had a wire tape recorder aboard. From this we have a
record of the exchanges between the master bomber and his markers. It was Topper, marker leader, who took this first aircraft down. At three thousand feet the master bomber asked him, “Do you see the green yet?” “Okay, I see it,” confirmed Topper. And then the job was on.

As Topper dove down to two thousand feet and then less, he called into his VHF microphone: “Marker leader: Tally-ho!” This was the agreed signal to deter other markers who might think it was time to make their run. It was also a call closely identified with British blood sports.

At less than eight hundred feet, Topper opened his bomb doors and released a thousand-pound target-indicator canister, which was set to burst at seven hundred feet, scattering a cascade of red plumes of light. His Mosquito swooped across Friedrichstadt—over the Friedrichstadt hospital complex, over the stadium, then over the hospital's rail siding, where a train was currently unloading. As it did so, a special camera fitted to the bomb bay, using a flash cartridge system developed to automatically take a photograph every second over the aiming area, was doing its work. There were three flashes in quick succession on the south side of the Elbe, followed by a fourth as he passed over the river into the Neustadt, catching an image of a locomotive puffing along near the Japanese Palace.

Topper turned away from the city, climbing swiftly as he did so. Immediately the second marker followed him, ready to check the leader's indicator for any overshoot. A second target-indicator canister was loosed. The leader's marker had hit the ground just a hundred yards east of the exact aiming point. Then came the next and the next, each repeating the litany: “Tally-ho!”

The process would take two to three minutes. The area of the DSC stadium was turning into a flickering forest of red markers.

Down below in the Albertinum, the ÖL had announced—one minute after the final-stage air alert for the city—the “first bombs dropped on the city.” The big marker canisters must have been mistaken for bombs.

On the first night of the series of Allied raids on Hamburg in July 1943—it was the second night that produced the infamous firestorm—the Pathfinder markers had fallen anything from half a mile to
seven miles
wide of the official aiming point. The intervening year and a half had brought huge improvements in technique and equip
ment. Compared with the early years of the war, this was sensationally precise, even pinpoint marking. No one could ever say that what happened at Dresden was an accident.

Now, as the last markers went in, it was a question of checking visibility, to ensure it was sufficient for the waiting Lancasters of the main force to see the markers and therefore to bomb as accurately as the indicators had been placed. A Lancaster of 97 Squadron, waiting at eighteen thousand feet, had been equipped and positioned to this end. Its name for the night was Lancaster Check 3.

The wire recording captured the moment Check 3 joined the process:

Communication continued between the marker aircraft and the controller, simultaneous to that with Check 3. After a brief discussion, the marking was considered complete. The master bomber told the markers to drop any remaining flares and get out before returning to his dialogue with Check 3:

This confirmation of sufficient visibility was the signal for the attack proper to begin. The 244 fully laden Lancasters of 5 Group, code-named “Plate Rack Force,” could now start bombing. The master bomber issued the order that sealed Dresden's fate:

“U FOR UNCLE,”
as part of 49 Squadron, was one of the early attackers. The bombing run was almost always the most tense part of a trip, though with tonight's weather better than expected and no sign of antiaircraft fire or enemy night fighters, the pilot could concentrate just that little bit more completely on the task in hand. The precision sector bombing system developed by 5 Group was especially demanding. Each squadron of sixteen aircraft was given an arc of thirty-two degrees to cover. They operated in exactly this close formation throughout the attack, ideally maneuvering as one.

Leslie Hay takes up his story once more: