Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [154]
The fires continued to rage unabated, but two nights later the British came back and did it again, hitting parts of the city that had so far escaped with minor damage. Finally, on the night of August 4, the British launched their last attack. They planned to hit with everything they had, but heavy weather made it impossible for anything but the Lancasters, who could get above the storm, to fly. Even so another 1,400 tons of bombs fell on the ruins of the city that night.
As the last R. A. F. bombers droned away to the westward, they left behind them a scene of awesome destruction. The fires, the rescue work, the opening of shelters full of dead, the mercy-killing of the hopelessly burned, went on for days. The worst German attack on Coventry had destroyed about a hundred acres; Operation Gomorrah wiped out 6,000 acres of Hamburg; more than half the city was destroyed, 300,000 homes were burned, three-quarters of a million were homeless, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 were dead. In spite of all the German efforts to keep the disaster quiet, a wave of dread swept over Germany. The Royal Air Force had finished with Hamburg; the battle of Berlin lay ahead.
For all its suffering and devastation, Hamburg was but a curtain raiser to events to come. By 1945 the wiping out of the great city was past history. The Allied bombers, escorted by their long-range fighters, ranged unceasingly over the battered Reich. Their mastery of the air was no longer a matter of dispute and the vaunted Luftwaffe, that had brought Poland, the Netherlands, and France to their knees, could rarely put planes in the air. There was little fuel for operations and less for pilot training. Still the Allied armadas droned on. By the last months of the war, they were hard put to find useful targets. Out of their search came the raid on Dresden.
The capital of the old state of Saxony, Dresden was a city of immense age and charm. Napoleon had fought a battle near there back in 1813, but the twentieth century seemed largely to have passed Dresden by. By February of 1945 the Germans were reeling, and the bomber offensive had in large measure been diverted to the disruption of German communications, as an adjunct to the ground campaign now being fought on the western borders of the Reich itself. “Bomber” Harris, however, still believed in the efficacy of strategic bombing; Dresden was to be his last “big raid,” ostensibly because it was thought to be a communications center for the eastern German armies, more probably because it had not previously been hit, and it seemed about the right size for a full-scale strike.
Dresden was hit, first by the R. A. F., then by the Americans, in mid-February. The city was virtually destroyed, and upward of 60,000 people were killed. Two months later the strategic bomber campaign was called off; shortly after that the war ended.
Final judgment on the bomber offensive remains elusive. Its cost, in allocation of resources, in aircraft, and in aircrew, was heavy. The bombers never achieved what their original champions claimed they would do; German morale never cracked, and only at the very end of the war did the German ground forces suffer any real shortages of supplies that could be traced to the bombing. Yet the shortcomings of the bombers seem to stem more from the exaggerated prior claims of their supporters, rather than from their inability to achieve striking results. For certainly the results were striking; Germany lay in ruins, hundreds of thousands of her citizens were dead, further hundreds of thousands had had to be diverted into civil defense or countering the bombers by military means. No one who saw the ruins of Hamburg or Berlin would question