Dresden (36 page)

 

The infernal glow in the distance was astonishing even to experienced bomber crews as they turned east over the Saxon town of Döbeln, halfway between Leipzig and Dresden, and began their final runs. The fires were totally visible even from that distance. Bomb aimer Miles Tripp prepared to do his job.

The second wave bombed from up to twenty thousand feet, much higher than the first. Even the master bomber stayed at around eight thousand feet. According to some witnesses, the gunners from their turrets could see not only the flames of Dresden but, sixty or seventy miles beyond them to the east, the flash of the artillery on the Silesian front, where savage fighting was in progress between Russian and German forces. The glow of Dresden burning was visible far to the east. It is not difficult to imagine the desperate feelings of those hard-pressed German troops as they scanned the landscape to their rear—the homeland they were supposedly defending—and made out the sight of Dresden on fire.

At Klotzsche airfield to the north of the city, morale must have been even worse. The night fighters were once more ready for takeoff. This time, however, not even the privileged “A” Group was given permission to start. Eighteen pilots sat helplessly on the apron in their Messerschmitt Bf 110s, waiting vainly for orders, while on the horizon
Dresden burned and the British bombers fed the flames with utter impunity. The fighters' sense of vulnerability was increased by the fact that, with transport aircraft to and from besieged Breslau regularly using the airfield, their base commander continued to illuminate the runway at intervals throughout the night, almost as if signaling to the British to attack.

A film was shot during the second wave of the attack. Cameras had been mounted on the upper gun turret and crew access door of a specially adapted Lancaster “Y” of 463 Squadron Royal Australian Air Force, which had long been associated with the RAF film unit. The aircraft's cameras had captured the dramatic sinking of the German battleship
Tirpitz
in Tromsöfjord the previous November. Its bombers, which were a normal part of 5 Group, had accompanied the first wave to Dresden on normal bombing duties; “Y” escorted the second wave alone.

The aircraft circled over the doomed city for eight and a half minutes between 1:28 and 1:37
P.M
., recording one of the most chilling vistas of the air war. Shot from almost three miles above the inferno through cold, clear skies, the film shows the outlines of streets etched in fire; the “Christmas trees” descending into the great pillars of smoke below; the plainly discernible explosions of the big four-thousand-pound air mines, which rise out of the general conflagration like small mushroom clouds, reminiscent of the atomic bombs dropped a few months later on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Perfection of destruction. What this felt like on the ground is virtually impossible to imagine.

Not everything went smoothly for individual aircraft. When “A for Able” came in for its bomb run, control of the aircraft passed effectively to Miles Tripp as bomb aimer. The aircraft's Australian pilot, nicknamed “Dig,” asked him to give a course. Tripp realized that the master bomber could no longer be heard on the R/T (Radio Télephony). No more calm, precise instructions. Tripp made a decision, and with a clear conscience:

At the time Tripp erroneously assumed the master bomber had been killed. Comparing his navigator's log with the sequence of events during the raid, he later decided that the radio silence must have occurred while De Wesselow and Le Good were privately discussing whether to change tactics due to the invalidation of the original aiming point. Tripp insisted thereafter that if he had been given instructions, he would have obeyed them unconditionally. But he wasn't, so he didn't.

Doug Hicks, a nineteen-year-old Canadian serving with 550 Squadron, was rear gunner with a “virgin” crew—this was their first-ever operation. Only their aircraft, “V for Victory” was a veteran—it had survived more than ninety raids—and that was considered good luck. Hunched in his tiny rear-gunner's turret for almost five hours, watching the sky for enemy aircraft, Hicks found himself surprised that so little talk went on between crew members; no banter, not even when they saw the huge glow of the target fifty miles ahead. This was unlike anything they had ever heard about:

Bomber Command's Intelligence Narrative of Operations No. 1007, sent out the next day by teleprinter to the Air Ministry and all group and station commanders, with copies to First, Second, and Third Divisions USAAF, gives a cool, professional, preliminary overview of the second wave's work:

DRESDEN—OLD, CLOSELY BUILT
Dresden—was on fire well before midnight, and probably most of it could not have been saved, even had the second wave of bombers never arrived over the city. The death toll would have been high, comparable with other similar raids on historic town centers in the air war. Dresden would have joined Darmstadt, Kassel, and the rest of the towns from Germany's golden past as a chilling footnote in the history books. The Saxon capital's special inadequacies in matters of shelter provision would have made rich matter for expert discussion.

It was Squadron Leader De Wesselow and Wing Commander Le Good's joint decision, as the second wave surged toward Dresden, to abandon the designated aiming point, and bomb outside the already burning areas of the city, which turned the raid into a byword for slaughter. Their move doomed not only large areas of the residential suburbs but also the great gathering places of the homeless and the de-housed (as the Air Ministry experts had always called them)—the Hauptbahnhof, the Grosser Garten, and the banks of the Elbe. These would become killing grounds without compare.

Many, many died in the streets as they tried to flee—burned, asphyxiated, dragged into the hot, hungry mouth of the firestorm—but for those who did not even try, death was near certain. The terrible thing about the second wave was that, in the center of the city, it came without warning. Rudolf Eichner was another young soldier from Dresden, wounded at the front and recovering in his home city. He was at the old Vitzthum High School, on the southern edge of the
Altstadt, which had been turned into a reserve military hospital, caring for around five hundred soldiers.

Many of the surrounding buildings in these close-packed residential streets (marked in the RAF zone map as the most densely populated) had been set ablaze by the first wave. The fatal problem, Eichner remembers, was that their inexperienced inhabitants—mostly women, children, and the elderly—instead of fighting the fires, seemed concerned mainly with securing their valuables and prized possessions. All the same, the school-cum-hospital remained more or less undamaged. And since it was full of soldiers, there was at least an element of discipline to the proceedings.

The hospital's trained firefighters had successfully neutralized the incendiaries that had lodged in the attic areas. The wounded who were able helped to move inflammable furniture, beds, and equipment into the corridors. The other inmates stayed in the basement shelter. Had the bombing ceased after the first wave, Rudolf Eichner believes the hospital and those sheltering in its cellars could have been saved. He and his comrades were determined to stop fires spreading to the building, and if necessary prepared to work through the night to this end. Then came the second wave.

This was just the first stage of Eichner's ordeal. Out on the street, in the Dippoldiswalder Gasse, the firestorm was at full, raging power, the air a maelstrom of burning chunks of wood and metal and paper. Blazing tree limbs flew past the terrified young soldier, all kinds of half-recognizable objects caught up in the searing tornado—including, he realized, helpless human beings. He dropped into a crouch, and then crawled on all fours to the far side of the street. In the front garden of a nearby property he spotted a space that was not only partly sheltered from the burning winds, but seemed a little more open and therefore less likely to be affected by collapsing masonry. He stumbled over to it and found five other comrades who had escaped the Vitzthum High School.

The half-dozen survivors formed into a circle, standing with hands on each other's shoulders. They had wet cloths over their faces, which helped them to breathe, but their clothes were bone-dry and liable to be set alight by the host of sparks flying around the area. It was the task of each man to beat out any small fires that started on the clothing of the man in front of him. They did this for six hours, until the storm began to die down, and with it the fires. So they were among the few who survived the immolation of the shelter at the Vitzthum High School Reserve Military Hospital.

 

AT THE HAUPTBAHNHOF,
the second wave caused terrible damage. The entire area was subjected to a rain of bombs—the Bismarckstrasse, the Wiener Platz, leading into the first buildings of the elegant shops and cafés of the Prager Strasse—and the station itself. Its high glass roof was shattered. Trains still waiting at the platforms were blasted and burned. In the network of cellars underneath, where the vast majority of travelers had taken refuge when the sirens had first sounded, the scenes were appalling.

It was not, for the most part, the fire or the blasts that killed them. At least not directly. It was the air. Or the lack of it. With no filtered air supply and few emergency exits—in any case mostly blocked by human bodies and belongings—as the firestorm sucked the oxygen out of the air in the vastly overcrowded underground complex, many hundreds died of simple asphyxiation. A few managed to find their way out of the labyrinth and stagger back out to the surface, but not many.

One survivor, a woman refugee from Silesia, passed through some hours later, helped out by an army officer “through a long passage.” She added: “We passed through the basement. There must have been several thousand people there, all lying very still.” Lack of oxygen, smoke poisoning, and carbon monoxide poisoning had once again done their work, as so often in Dresden that night.

Outside the station, the situation was unpredictable. Gertraud Freundel's family lived in the Reichstrasse, a wide street that ran south from the station toward the Technical University and the Münchner Platz law court complex, and from there into the higher ground of the southern suburbs.

The family's apartment was in an old building that abutted the Bismarckplatz, just in front of the Hauptbahnhof. This large square was planted with trees, giving the whole area an airy, spacious feel. For this reason, after they had survived both raids in the sturdy cellar, many in the shelter argued there would be no problems with oxygen shortage—so it would be safer to stay there until they could be sure the danger had passed. Similar decisions were being made all over Dresden in the small hours of February 14. For some, tragically, it had already been made by the bombs—buildings had collapsed, burying alive those sheltering beneath. But for the survivors, with the disappearance of the bombers came a testing time of courage and imagination. Gertraud's father showed both those qualities that night. He said firmly to his daughter that they must go up and out. Even as they left the cellar, others lingered uncertainly in the entrance.

Pets were not permitted in shelters. To Gertraud's surprise and delight, the family's pet dachshund, Jockely, had survived both raids shut inside their apartment. He had somehow escaped from the building—probably through a blown-out window or door—and enthusiastically greeted Gertraud and her father as they emerged. They dipped their hats and scarves in one of the buckets of water provided at the
basement doorway and splashed some over their coats for good measure. Gertraud wet her handkerchief and wrapped it around the little dog's nose. She scooped up the animal and cradled him in her arms as they prepared to flee.

Before being called up for the Volkssturm, Gertraud's father ran a state-licensed lottery ticket shop near Postplatz—during his absence, Gertraud and her mother had taken over the business. After the first raid, they had tried to make their way through the underpass to the other side of the Hauptbahnhof, from where they could walk to the shop and check it for damage. Ominously, they had immediately come across burned corpses, blazing buildings, and just a little farther on a police patrol, which turned them back.

So now, three hours and a second devastating hail of bombs later, they knew that the only viable escape route was one that led out of the city. Their agreed destination was the semirural southern suburb of Mockritz. At Mockritz there would be higher ground, fresh air, and, with luck, no bombs. It was about a mile and a half distant. But first they had to get across the Reichstrasse.

This was where they encountered the horror of the firestorm. Here it ruled, as it ruled all the wide streets radiating from the Altstadt, the fire's core. It seemed to claw jealously at those who tried to escape the conflagration:

Bent forward to avoid the suck of the storm, they made their way southward, past a group of half-intact buildings, which provided some shelter. Progress was slow but sure. Then, just as they fancied they were putting distance between themselves and the firestorm, came a shock.

They never went on to Mockritz. They had found what they needed: an open place where there was less danger from collapsing buildings and greedily spreading fires. The air quality was just adequate for survival. There, with a large group of other exhausted and terrified survivors, they spent the rest of the night. As the cloth over her mouth dried out, Gertraud began to find breathing more difficult. A lady matter-of-factly offered to have her little boy urinate on the cloth to restore its moistness. Gertraud summoned the dignity to deliver a polite refusal.

At first light Gertraud, her father, and the little dachshund made for the southeastern district of Strehlen, where they had relatives. The family had long ago agreed to meet there if they got separated in an air raid. It was a plan they had never imagined would be necessary.

Many of the people who took shelter in the center of the city burned to death. Those who somehow made it out alive will never forget the smell of burning flesh rising from the basements and cellars of the old town. Nevertheless, the overwhelming recurring factor in the stories of such survivors (and being survivors, they are naturally a self-selecting group) is the fierce, concentrated quality of the fight for survival; a fight first against suffocation, and then against the tornadoes of burning sparks and debris that threatened to blind and disfigure them as they struggled to find their way out of the maze of the Altstadt—usually, by some almost animal instinct, heading for the river.

Escape from the central districts of Dresden was a Darwinian busi
ness. Success usually fell to the young, and the mentally and physically strong. Berthold Meyer, a twenty-one-year-old engineering student, was determined to reach the Elbe after narrowly escaping the basement of a burning house in the Blochmannstrasse, east of the city center:

Anita Kurz and her parents survived the second wave of the raid, though there were no happy endings in view for this close little family.