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 3 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 raid had originally been intended to tar­get sub­urban in­dus­tries, rail­road classi­fi­cation (or 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/­31 square kilo­meters, set the Elbe River on fire, and burned, blew apart, or as­phyx­i­ated roughly 25,000 people as they huddled in base­ments and bomb shelters. Shortly after noon on Febru­ary 14, heavy bombers of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, which had set up shop in Britain in 1942, swept in, targeting Dresden’s rail yards and western neighbor­hoods and suburbs. About 380,000 people were made home­less in the 3 Allied air raids, while roughly 78,000 buildings were destroyed and tens of thousands more damaged.

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. (See photo essay below.) 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 30,000 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 5 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. Out of a pop­u­lace of 1 mil­lion, 800,000 were rendered home­less when 12 square miles/­31 square kilo­meters of the city were com­pletely leveled, causing an enor­mous humani­tarian crisis. A German offi­cial described Hamburg as “beyond all human recog­ni­tion.” 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 3 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: On September 10, 1939 (“Bloody Sunday”), the Luft­waffe launched 17 air raids on Warsaw, Poland’s capital. On Septem­ber 25, “Black Monday,” 1,200 sorties dropped 500 tons of bombs that gener­ated raging fires, as the city’s water mains had been badly damaged. Smoke from the infer­no rose 10,000 ft/­3,333 m into the air and was visible 70 miles/­113 km away. Never was such a vio­lent com­bi­na­tion of aerial and artil­lery bom­bard­ment inflicted on a Euro­pean city in the space of a month. By Octo­ber Warsaw, whose origi­nal 3 mil­lion resi­dents were reduced by 50–60,000 deaths, resembled a city of the dead.

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 after the bom­bard­ment, ravaging the city for weeks. Photo was taken after the removal of the debris.

Left: The Great Dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, undamaged, ringed by clouds of smoke rising from the burning city of London. John Topham’s iconic photo­graph 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”). Despite being 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, Dres­den was woe­fully unpre­pared for a major aerial attack. 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/­39 square kilo­meters and between 22,700 and 25,000 peo­ple. Temper­a­tures inside Dresden’s famous cathe­dral, the 18th-century Frauen­kirche (Church of Our Lady), reached an esti­mated 1,832°F/­1,000°C before the 300‑foot‑tall/­91‑meter‑tall church collapsed. Later the U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped 2,800 more tons of bombs on Dresden in 3 other attacks before the war’s end.

Above: Tokyo after the March 9–10, 1945, firebombing by 334 U.S. 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/­41.4‑square-kilometer area were devoured by raging fires 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/­227‑kilo­gram 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 lethal contents at 2,000 or 2,500 feet/­666 or 762 meters 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 feet/­30 meters 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