World War II Day by Day

Dresden, Germany · February 13, 1945

On this night in 1945, Shrove (or Fat) Tuesday, and over the next day, Ash Wednesday, some 1,300 Brit­ish and Amer­i­can bombers appeared over largely un­touched Dres­den in east­ern Ger­many. A city of 642,000 (1939) swelled by 300,000 refugees fleeing from fighting on the East­ern Front, Dres­den was the ancient capital of the German state of Saxony and the Third Reich’s seventh largest city. In three suc­ces­sive waves the bombers delivered a mas­sive on­slaught of almost 4,000 tons of ord­nance—high explo­sives followed by incen­di­aries—on the city long known as the “Florence of the Elbe” on account of its churches, concert halls, beau­ti­ful palaces, and public gardens. The Dresden raids had orig­i­nally been in­tended to tar­get sub­urban in­dus­tries, rail­road marshaling yards, and bridges over which more than 20 German troop trains passed to and from the East­ern Front nearly every day in early Febru­ary. In­stead the bombs fell on the cen­turies-old baroque city center. Fires started by the first wave of Brit­ish bombers were aug­mented by incen­di­aries dropped by the second. The flames quickly com­bined to form a raging ter­ror storm that con­sumed more than 12 square miles and burned, blew apart, or as­phyx­i­ated roughly 25,000 people as they huddled in base­ments and bomb shelters. The U.S. Eighth Air Force targeted Dresden’s mar­shaling yards and western neighbor­hoods and suburbs on the after­noon of Febru­ary 14. About 380,000 people were made homeless in the three air raids. Six years before, on Septem­ber 25, 1939, the German Luft­waffe had in­tro­duced the con­cept of fire­bombing major pop­u­la­tion centers by dropping in­cen­diary and high-explo­sive bombs on the Polish capi­tal, War­saw. Less than a year later, on May 14, 1940, the Luft­waffe bombed the Dutch city of Rotter­dam, ig­niting a fire­storm that killed nearly 900 civil­ians and left 80,000 home­less. The Luft­waffe carried out fire­bombing raids on an ever-larger scale with night­time attacks on the Brit­ish capital, London, and other British cities in 1940–1941 (Blitz). On July 24, 1943, a Brit­ish bomber fleet over the north German city of Ham­burg upped the ante when it dropped high-explo­sive bombs, followed by incen­di­aries, for a total of five times the ord­nance of any Ger­man raid on Lon­don. The fire­storm in the third wave of Opera­tion Gomor­rah killed 45,000 Ham­burg resi­dents and refugees. The Japa­nese capi­tal, Tokyo, was the worst-ravaged city of any fire­bombing when on March 9–10, 1945, 90,000 civil­ians were killed and 40,000 more swept up as the con­fla­gra­tion spread. How­ever, the Dres­den bombing, coming in the last three months of the war, emerged as one of the most controversial episodes of World War II.

Inflicting Material Destruction from the Air: German and Allied Examples

Left: The Luftwaffe began fire­bombing of the Polish capi­tal on Septem­ber 25, 1939. Over the next several days in intense fighting, Warsaw suffered approx­i­mately 40,000 civil­ian deaths, saw 40 per­cent of its buildings damaged, while another 10 per­cent of the city’s buildings were destroyed.

Right: On May 14, 1940, German bombers razed Rotterdam’s medie­val city center to the ground in less than an hour, killing nearly 900 inhab­i­tants, destroying 25,000 homes, 24 churches, and 62 schools. Roughly 80,000 resi­dents were rendered home­less not only by the after­noon’s bombing but also by the fires that raged on after the bom­bard­ment, ravaging the city for weeks. Photo was taken after the removal of the debris.

Left: The iconic photo, St. Paul’s Survives, was taken on Decem­ber 29, 1940, the 114th night of the London Blitz. The Luft­waffe dropped more than 24,000 high-explo­sive bombs and 100,000 in­cen­diary bombs on the British capital that day and the next. For 57 con­sec­u­tive nights heavy German raids damaged or destroyed more than a million buildings. About 20,000 Londoners died in the raids.

Right: The ruins of Dresden’s city center (“Altstadt”). Dres­den was home to 127 medium-to-large fac­tories and work­shops that sup­plied the Ger­man army with matériel (per the Ger­man Wea­pons Office), such as air­craft engines, machine tools, small arms, optical instru­ments, and poison gas, and em­ployed 50,000 workers. Some 1,249 British and Amer­i­can bombers un­loaded more than 3,900 tons of in­cen­di­ary and high-explo­sive bombs on the center of the city, causing a fire­storm that incin­er­ated 15 square miles and between 22,700 and 25,000 peo­ple. Temper­a­tures inside Dresden’s famous cathedral, the Frauen­kirche (Church of Our Lady), reached an estimated 1,832°F (1,000°C) before the 300‑ft‑tall church collapsed. Later, the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped 2,800 more tons of bombs on Dresden in three other attacks before the war’s end.

Above: Tokyo after the March 9–10, 1945, firebombing by 334 B‑29 Super­for­tresses stationed in the Marianas. The Dante-esque raid, known as Operation Meeting­house (“Meeting­house” being a code term for the urban area of the Japa­nese capital), proved the single-most destruc­tive bombing raid in history: 267,000 mostly wooden buildings in a 16‑square‑mile area were destroyed and an esti­mated 100,000 killed—the highest loss of life of any aerial bom­bard­ment of the war. The Super­forts’ pri­mary wea­pon was the finned 500‑pound E‑46 “aim­able cluster” bomb, typically 40 bombs to a plane. Each bomb con­tained 47 small napalm- (jelled gasoline-) filled bomb­lets, called M‑69s (nick­named “Tokyo Calling Cards”). The M‑69s were packed inside the E‑46 mother bomb, which was designed to open and scatter its con­tents at 2,000 or 2,500 ft above ground. Upon colliding with an object, the M‑69 timing fuse burned for 3–5 seconds and then a white phosphorus charge ignited and propelled the incendiary up to 100 ft in several flaming sticky globs, instantly starting multiple intense fires. Other wea­pons in the March raid were the E‑28 incen­diary cluster bomb and the M‑47 petroleum-based bomb.

Dresden: Bombed and Rebuilt