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Today is the 60th anniversary of the Dresden Firestorm. From "The Scotsman":
The Dresden Firestorm
By Caroline Gammell, PA Deputy Chief Reporter
On the evening of February 13, 1945, hundreds of RAF bombers set out for the eastern German city of Dresden.
Upon the instruction of then Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Dwight Eisenhower, the Allies were ordered to carry out a firebomb attack.
Dresden, a city of 1.2 million people, was known for its culture and beautiful buildings and the Germans considered it to be out of reach of Allied attack.
As a result it was poorly defended and the damage wrought by the Bomber Command was catastrophic and sparked a controversy over the rights and wrongs of the raid.
The weather was fine as the bombers passed over the city just after 9.30pm, unleashing their deadly load on the city below.
The following day, yet more misery was brought when US bombers swooped in for a second attack.
Around 35,000 people are thought to have died, but some estimates put the figure into the several hundreds of thousands.
The city was laid to waste, fires raged for several days and piles of corpses lay in the streets.
Film footage showed buildings ablaze and people running for their lives. Tens of thousands of people were buried in the rubble.
The attack took place just 12 weeks before the end of the war, causing many to ask if the brutality and scale of the raid was justified.
It was claimed that Dresden was not a military target â “ it had not been attacked before that point in the war.
But British historian Frederick Taylor recently argued it was a strategic communications centre, providing aid to those German troops fighting the Soviets in the east.
â Å“Dresden was a Nazi stronghold even before Hitler took power,â ? he wrote in his book Dresden.
Indeed, the request to bomb Dresden initially came from the Soviet Union and was approved by the Allies.
Although the end of the war was so near, for those still fighting there was no real idea of how close the end really was.
With the Allied forces yet to cross the Rhine and the Germans still bombing London with V2 rockets, the British thought the war was anything but over by February 13, 1945.
The Dresden Firestorm
By Caroline Gammell, PA Deputy Chief Reporter
On the evening of February 13, 1945, hundreds of RAF bombers set out for the eastern German city of Dresden.
Upon the instruction of then Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Dwight Eisenhower, the Allies were ordered to carry out a firebomb attack.
Dresden, a city of 1.2 million people, was known for its culture and beautiful buildings and the Germans considered it to be out of reach of Allied attack.
As a result it was poorly defended and the damage wrought by the Bomber Command was catastrophic and sparked a controversy over the rights and wrongs of the raid.
The weather was fine as the bombers passed over the city just after 9.30pm, unleashing their deadly load on the city below.
The following day, yet more misery was brought when US bombers swooped in for a second attack.
Around 35,000 people are thought to have died, but some estimates put the figure into the several hundreds of thousands.
The city was laid to waste, fires raged for several days and piles of corpses lay in the streets.
Film footage showed buildings ablaze and people running for their lives. Tens of thousands of people were buried in the rubble.
The attack took place just 12 weeks before the end of the war, causing many to ask if the brutality and scale of the raid was justified.
It was claimed that Dresden was not a military target â “ it had not been attacked before that point in the war.
But British historian Frederick Taylor recently argued it was a strategic communications centre, providing aid to those German troops fighting the Soviets in the east.
â Å“Dresden was a Nazi stronghold even before Hitler took power,â ? he wrote in his book Dresden.
Indeed, the request to bomb Dresden initially came from the Soviet Union and was approved by the Allies.
Although the end of the war was so near, for those still fighting there was no real idea of how close the end really was.
With the Allied forces yet to cross the Rhine and the Germans still bombing London with V2 rockets, the British thought the war was anything but over by February 13, 1945.