Dresden Read Free Page A

engineers to build sturdy shelters beneath both his office and in the garden of his personal residence. In the latter case he has put a reinforced concrete shield several meters deep between himself and the bombs he has always insisted will never fall.
    Meanwhile, after four hours in the air, the bombers are reaching the end of their outward flight. The Luftwaffe has not contested the airspace (the only enemy aircraft shot down that night will be anunlucky German courier plane which crosses the path of the British air armada en route between Leipzig and Berlin). The visibility remains poor, even as the Lancasters begin their final approach to the target. Only now, as they track the southeastward curve of the river Elbe, does the cloud cover begin to disperse. The bomber aircrew, whenever there are gaps in the cloud, can look down and glimpse landmarks, roads and railways, occasional lights three miles or more below them. They wait, watch for enemy night fighters, and fly on over darkened woods and fields, over the icy ribbons of the country roads that link the neat, slumbering villages of Middle Germany.
    So far—and the aircrew know to be thankful for this—it is an altogether uneventful trip. Even now, few in the target city have any inkling of what is to follow. There had, after all, been no “prealarm.” In the industrial center of Leipzig, fifty miles to the west and already subjected to heavy bombing earlier in the war, specific warnings have already been issued over the radio. But in the target city the authorities have chosen not to place their fellow citizens on any kind of special alert. At this point the controllers at the Luftwaffe’s tracking stations know that one of the major eastern population centers is being targeted. However, they share Germany’s and much of the world’s conviction that Dresden will never be subjected to serious bombing.
    One of the myths, then and now, is that this city has been completely spared until tonight. Over the previous few months there had been a scattering of daylight raids by American formations on the suburban industrial areas and on the marshaling yards just outside the city center. Adjacent residential blocks had actually been hit a month previously, at the cost of more than three hundred civilian fatalities. But most citizens put these incidents down to mischance or poor navigation, and still consider the city inviolable. There are many rumors about why Dresden has not been, and will not be, subjected to the massive destruction meted out to other towns in the Reich.
    Ten minutes after the first air raid alarm, an advance guard of fast, light RAF De Havilland Mosquito Pathfinders from 627 Squadron swoop unchallenged over the darkened buildings. Their job is to identify and mark the target. They begin to drop the marker flares—known to German civilians as “Christmas trees.” These will enable the huge force of following bombers to find their targets. Their focus is the stadium of the city’s soccer club, just to the west of the old city. Itis suddenly clear from this that the bombers are aiming not just for the city’s industrial suburbs and adjacent marshaling yards but its treasured historic heart. Only when they hear the Mosquito’s engines overhead do the local civil defense authorities, on alert in their bunker beneath police headquarters, realize that their city is actually going to be bombed. The frantic voice of an announcer comes on the local cable radio, telling citizens to get off the streets on pain of arrest—to take the best cover they can.
    There are no antiaircraft guns to be readied. No searchlights probe the skies. Just a few weeks before, the sparse flak defenses of the city—much of it light guns and captured Soviet pieces not thought highly of by their crews—were dismantled and shipped away, some westward to the heavily bombed Ruhr industrial districts and others to the hard-pressed