Dresden was a legitimate target. As the war closed in, it was the strategic location of Dresden along rail and road lines of communication that determined its fate.
By Feb. 2, 1945, the Russians were near Frankfurt, but Moscow’s drive now formed a bulge 400 miles long at its base with northern and southern flanks over 100 miles deep. This salient was vulnerable to flank attacks from areas still held by the German Army. Dresden was a major rail junction controlling German movement on that front.
At Yalta on Feb. 4, 1945, Gen. Alexei Antonov, Red Army chief of staff, briefed Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill on the Russian offensive and asked for US and British help. He wanted them to speed up the advance in the west, crush the Ardennes salient once and for all, and weaken German ability to shift reserves east.
The Russians wanted to begin a new phase of advance in February. To do so, Antonov wanted air forces to pin down German forces in Italy and to paralyze junctions in eastern Germany. That meant Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden.
According to historian Fredrick Taylor, Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) Jan. 21, 1945, report put it bluntly: Germany might be able to reinforce the Eastern Front with up to 42 divisions. The JIC recommended “that any assistance which might be given to the Russians during the next few weeks by the British and American strategic bomber forces justifies an urgent review of their employment to this end.”
Thus, it was a race between Russian offensive operations and the arrival of German reinforcements. Half a million men pouring eastward was the last thing the Allies wanted. More alarming, the JIC laid out a timetable predicting the Germans could complete the reinforcements by March 1945. The JIC’s research was backed up by Enigma-code intercepts.
All told, Bomber Command dropped 1,477 tons of high-explosive bombs and 1,181 tons of incendiaries on Dresden on the night of Feb 13. Pathfinders dropping flares from 800 feet marked the targets accurately.
The tonnage was not high by Bomber Command standards. For example, Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt-am-Main had all been bombed with mixes including 3,800 to 4,100 tons of incendiaries, more than triple Dresden’s totals. The total of 7,100 tons of bombs of all types dropped on Dresden during the war hardly compared to the 67,000 tons of bombs that fell on Berlin or the 44,000 tons on Cologne.
The next day, Feb. 14, 1945, 316 bombers from Eighth Air Force attacked Dresden’s marshaling yards outside the city center. The mix was 487 tons of high-explosives and 294 tons of incendiaries. Another 200 bombers of Eighth Air Force returned to hit the same target the next day.
When Dresden was bombed, the Russian salient was only 70 miles from the city. Russian positions were still vulnerable to German counterattack, and, indeed, counterattacks elsewhere on the Eastern Front cost the Russians very heavy casualties. There was no way the Allies could let the Dresden rail and communications nodes open the gates for German reinforcements.
Bob C