Dresden (41 page)

 

MEANWHILE,
eighty miles to the north, morning had finally come to Dresden.

Dirty gray smoke drifted over what remained of the city area, blown by the same northwesterly that had carried 5 Group's first wave of bombers over its target with such fatal ease the previous night. In many parts of the city, survivors had not realized that it was light, so dense was the haze blocking out the winter-thin sun as it rose from the east. The firestorm had subsided from its height, but there were still a thousand individual fires burning in the ruins. A few survivors and rescue teams were starting to pick their way across the rubble, though many places were still too hot to enter. It was an unbearably bleak, inhuman prospect. Ash Wednesday.

Fourteen-year-old Günther Kannegiesser, in the refuge among the planks by the Elbe that he shared with the young women and their babies, regained consciousness with a start. It was still early, he recalls.

Günther's thoughts were for his mother, sister, and little brother, whom he had last seen between the two night raids. He had to find his way to the Zöllner Strasse, to their flat. The streets were blocked with rubble, thick with smoke. The fourteen-year-old realized he was entering a city of the dead.

Finally, Günther found the building where his family lived. Or had once lived.

The fire “in one corner” was where the stairs up from cellar had been. As young Günther stood atop the rubble, peering down into the gloom, he called out to his mother and the younger children. He got no reply. So he retreated to the street. He would never see his mother or his sister or little brother again. And he would never quite forgive himself for not having pressed on, despite the danger, into the burning air raid shelter.

Günther had agreed with his mother that if the family ever became separated, they would meet at her sister's house, in a village near Meissen. For now, though, he decided he would go to the agreed meeting point for local residents that the party's local group had stipulated. No sign of his family. He recalled his promise to the women in the plank city down by the river. When he returned they were still there. He escorted them eastward along the Elbe toward the waterside suburb of Laubegast, where one of them had relatives. It was still only midmorning.

At about this time, south of the Hauptbahnhof, Hannelore Kuhn and her family were still clearing up the mess. The villa had suffered broken windows and incendiary damage, but they had put all the fires out. They were in much better shape than most families in that part of Dresden. During the night, friends whose homes had been destroyed began to appear, seeking shelter. The family took them in. Even the parents of Hannelore's husband-to-be Fritz (at that time a prisoner of war in Russia), who were family friends, arrived. Their house in the Nürnberger Strasse, two blocks closer in toward the center, had been destroyed. No one slept much. They worked through the night, clearing up and repairing. “We put all this rubbish right out into the street. And I saw this bucket of rubbish out there and right in the middle, a bust of Hitler! Someone had chucked it out from sheer anger!”

In the morning they realized there was no running water. They needed to clean, to wash, and to cook for themselves and all their unexpected guests. “We heard that a few hundred meters away on the street there is a natural spring…So my mother got a little cart and put two buckets on it, and set off up there to get some water.”

 

WHILE “SWORDFISH ABLE”
and the three groups that had followed him were on their mistaken way to the Czech capital, the division leader had stayed in radio contact with the nine groups that had kept course
for Dresden. Still believing he was headed for the target himself, if somewhat tardily and indirectly, he nevertheless gave 379th permission to start the first bombing run on Dresden.

The Flying Fortresses began bombing sometime after noon.

At 12:17
P.M
., the thirty-seven aircraft of the 379th approached on a course east-northeast, exactly as ordered, at between twenty-seven thousand and twenty-eight thousand feet, and stayed at that height to bomb. Conditions were 7/10 cloud, with fires from the night raids continuing to burn. Smoke drifting southeast across the target (encouraged by the continuing northwesterly wind) was causing problems closer to the ground. In the end, the 379th bombed mostly where there was less smoke—the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards and industrial and residential areas to the west of the city center, which had been much less affected by the British attack than the Altstadt and the eastern suburbs.

The situation for the 303rd Group (“Hell's Angels”) was quite different. Though its aircraft began their runs only two minutes later, strong winds at high altitude had suddenly blown near 10/10 cloud over the city. This is reminiscent of the big February 3 raid on Berlin, where an equally sudden and dramatic obscuring of the target area between two waves of the attack may well have saved the heart of the German capital from a firestorm comparable to Dresden's. So, because of the sudden cloud, the 303rd and subsequent groups went in on H2X—radar bombing. The group's commander wrote in his report:

The general area in which these bombs fell was thought to have been southeast of the aiming point, which could have meant the Südvorstadt.

Some confusion ensued that would feature prominently in the reports submitted after the raid. The 384th, 92nd, 306th, and 401st Bombardment Groups also bombed by radar, though not always in correct squadron order. The 457th overshot the target area. Some
bombs fell in Neustadt up to one and a half miles from the aiming point. Some visual confirmation was claimed for the report that bombs damaged “an industrial area in Dresden-Neustadt and parts of a marshaling yard.”

The 305th Bombardment Group had the worst time of all. Shortly after crossing the coast onto the continent, the low squadron was separated from the other two (lead and high squadrons) “due to dense contrails.” Now, as they began their bombing runs, the two remaining squadrons found themselves flying a collision course with aircraft of the 379th. They separated rather hastily. Finally the high squadron dropped its loads on the “fresh smoke bombs of the 379th…photos show only clouds, but crews report that bombs hit in the built-up area of Dresden.” Meanwhile the scattered lead squadron reassembled in part, and on its commander's initiative, five aircraft flew south and attacked the Brüx synthetic oil plant, just across the border in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The rest of the lead squadron bombed Dresden on “unidentified smoke bombs.”

Less than ten minutes after the first bombs had fallen, the reduced daylight raid was almost at an end. It was extended only because the low squadron of the 306th, on its first approach, missed the aiming point. The Fortresses continued east for about thirty miles, turned near Bischofswerda, selected a new bombing route, and finally bombed Dresden at 12:30
P.M
., more than ten minutes after beginning their initial run, and several minutes after the rest of the force had left the area.

The American daylight-bombing raid on Dresden was over. The subsequent intelligence report spoke of “unobserved to fair results.”

 

“UNOBSERVED”
and only “fair” as their effects might have been, beneath these bombs was the young Götz Bergander, along with his family and other residents of the “industrial area” by the Friedrichstadt marshaling yards.

Given its position in the extreme west of 5 Group's bombing sector the previous night, the Bramsch & Co. distillery had experienced serious bombing only during the first part of the first wave. During the second British wave, at 1:30
A.M
., as the rest of Dresden burned,
everyone had once more taken to the distillery's state-of-the-art shelter—now crowded with bombed-out refugees from the city center. The shelter held.

After the second British raid, the Berganders emerged and went to the family apartment for some sleep. The next morning they were up inspecting the property:

No one in the shelter had been injured. But as far as Friedrichstadt was concerned, this counted as a more serious raid than the cataclysm that had struck central Dresden the previous night. The house and factory had now lost all their windows. The Ostragut area, not far to the west, was fully ablaze, and sparks and burning debris had begun to float toward the distillery and the Berganders' home. The danger was that these sparks would be blown into the buildings and start fires there—many homes, initially undamaged, had been lost that way in the hours following the air raids. The next few hours were spent ensuring that the buildings survived. The family's apartment was now, however, uninhabitable. They, and other staff and neighbors, had to move down into cramped bunk beds in the shelter, where they would spend their nights until the end of the war.

In the small hours of February 13–14, Günter Jäckel had lain in
his meadow in his pajamas and slippers and watched the second wave of the British attack on Dresden. When it was over, he walked back up to the street and saw his native city burning in its aftermath:

And then, astonishingly, they all went back to bed. The fever he had suffered from in the eight weeks since his wound became infected had disappeared. Jäckel himself is sure this was a psychosomatic reaction. In the morning he got dressed. The wounded from the schoolhouse were to be evacuated southward, toward the high ground outside the city. This process was under way when the 379th led in the noon attack.

The squadron-strength attack that Günter Jäckel describes, between his location close to Plauen and the Münchner Platz about a mile distant, was almost certainly the one that ruined the plans of Hannelore Kuhn's family.

The family had survived the horrors of the night raid, had begun
to pick up the pieces, and had made room for those less fortunate. Now, unbelievably, there came more bombs by daylight. Hannelore's mother had gone off to find water so that she could cook for everyone. “But she wasn't properly on her way when the midday attack came,” remembers her daughter. She now doesn't recall what nationality the bombers were. Most people did not realize at the time that these were American rather than British aircraft. Conditions were hazy. In any case, aircraft recognition was not a strong suit among Dresden's inhabitants—except the usual select group of militaria-obsessed teenage boys and young returned soldiers such as Günter Jäckel, who the previous autumn had spent a great deal of time in various foxholes in eastern France, carefully watching Allied bombers going overhead and waiting for the next low-flying P-47s or P-51s to make yet another attempt on his eighteen-year-old life.