75 YEARS AGO
A US War Story
Dresden, Germany
Piles of corpses in front of
destroyed buildings in Dresden after air raids on February 13 and 14,
1945.
Westerners are aware that
the Americans fire-bombed the city of Dresden in Germany at the end of the
Second World War, but most of the truth was suppressed as soon as it happened.
Dresden was Eastern Germany’s cultural centre, a city filled with museums and
historic buildings, historians unanimously agreeing that Dresden had no
military value. What little industry it did have produced only cigarettes and
china.
Neither Churchill nor
Roosevelt were interested in ending the war or attacking military installations
that still existed 100 Kms. outside of Dresden. At the time, the
Russian army was advancing, and there is some truth to the story that the
Americans wanted to show the Russians the awesome power of a truly advanced
military force, to prevent Russia from harboring ambitions about Europe. It
seems that both British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and
US President Roosevelt wanted what they called “a trump card”,
a devastating “thunderclap of Anglo-American annihilation” with which to
“impress” Stalin. But this could have been accomplished in many other ways and
places. Dresden was not selected for this reason. There were two other prime
motivations which will soon be apparent.
The fire-bombing of Dresden
is one of many historical events that have been heavily sanitised by the
victors, with casualty claims by so-called historians ranging as low as 25,000
or 30,000 when the likely tally was at least 30 times that number. Most cleansed versions of this holocaust tend to
virtually ignore or deliberately underestimate the vast stream of refugees that
had been flowing into Dresden for weeks; the most accurate estimates I have seen
range upward from 500,000, this in addition to the regular population. Both
Churchill and Roosevelt were fully aware of this huge and defenseless horde
and, in their search for their “trump-card thunderclap”, were quoted as
actively looking for “suggestions on how to blaze 600,000 refugees”. The
Internet on this topic is very heavily sanitised.
An important point
historians have chosen to overlook is that the Americans and British
fire-bombed not only Dresden but hundreds of smaller towns surrounding Dresden,
many of which were so totally destroyed they were never rebuilt. The reason was genocidal, one small part of
the overall intent to totally destroy Germany. With the utter
destruction of these smaller towns, the population was being driven – herded like
animals – into larger cities like Dresden where they could be annihilated in
one massive single strike. The initial bombings encircled areas like Dresden,
driving the people out of their towns and into the larger centers where they
might find food and shelter and perhaps medical care. Often, the Allies
bombed surrounding roads and railroads to prevent the escape of refugees in
those directions, relentlessly herding them to the slaughter-houses. The plan
was to exterminate as many Germans as possible. By the date of the bombing, the
city was filled with increasing hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing other
areas under attack.
Another item historians
refuse to face is that Dresden was specifically selected for extermination not
in spite of, but because of, its cultural value, to drive a stake into the
heart of German cultural heritage and leave a wound that could never heal, by
the permanent destruction of irreplaceable portions of the German soul, to open
a wound in the German psyche that would never heal.
In successive waves of
bombing with incendiaries, the Americans turned the entire city into one
massive firestorm, killing perhaps a million civilians. With the high number of refugees, the real
totals will never be known, but it was one of the worst single-event massacres
of all time. As author Kurt Vonnegut wrote later,
“You guys burnt the place
down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the
firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
combined”.
That evening in 1945 was “an
orgy of genocide and barbarism against a defenseless German city, one of the
greatest cultural centers of northern Europe”. More than 700,000 phosphorus
bombs were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people. The
temperature in the centre of the city reached 1800°C, melting the surfaces of
the streets and instantly incinerating more than 500,000 women, children and
the elderly.
The massive Allied bombers
attacked Dresden repeatedly, and after completing their third wave, the US sent
in P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft that strafed everything that moved. They flew along the Elbe River where the
banks were loaded with still-arriving refugees, and killed almost all of them.
They strafed columns of ambulances and rescue vehicles trying to evacuate
survivors, they strafed hospitals and machine-gunned helpless patients. They
machine-gunned all the animals in the Dresden zoo. Dresden truly was
an orgy of death and destruction, but it was more. It was a celebration of
evil. This was not part of a war; it was killing for the sake of killing, and
for the enjoyment of it. After the war, Churchill was knighted for
his success while the Americans celebrated their supremacy in civilian
pacification, and yet others celebrated another chapter in the destruction of
Germany.
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Larry Romanoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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