The RAF had attacked and bombed the non-military target of Berlin six times before the Luftwaffe retaliated against London.

 

The campaign of the Bomber Command of the RAF was perhaps the most gruelling continuous operation in military history. It began in 1940. He (Winston Churchill) was convinced that raids of sufficient intensity could destroy Germany's morale, and so his Labour dominated war cabinet planned a campaign that abandoned the accepted practice of confining their attacks to the enemy's armed forces, and, instead, made civilians the primary target.

Night after night, RAF bombers in ever-increasing numbers struck throughout Germany, usually at working class housing, because it was more densely packed. Berlin itself became the most bombed place on earth at that time." - - Angus Calder The People's War, (London) Jonathan Cape, 1969. P.286)
 

A GREAT CITY WIPED FROM THE MAP OF EUROPE

The annihilation of the German city of Dresden and its swollen population of refugees has been a running sore of official obfuscation since the night of 13th February 1945 (St. Valentine's Eve) when the RAF struck.

Three quarters of a million incendiary bombs cascaded over the undefended city, turning the region into a holocaust such as has never been witnessed in the history of mankind.

Unusually, no war correspondents were allowed on any of the aircraft involved so there were no eyewitnesses. The only accounts were the garbled comment of a few of the aircrew who had been told, "They were attacking German Army Headquarters', 'Destroying an arms dump', 'knocking out an industrial area', more ludicrously, 'wiping out a large poison gas plant.'

Clearly, before the raid had even started those responsible were well aware of the carnage that would result and were already making their excuses.

The firestorms raged creating hurricane force winds feeding the flames. Civilians died by their tens of thousands, consumed, incinerated to ash. Conservative estimates exceed 130,000. These figures greatly exceed the numbers killed at Hiroshima.

Apologists often mention Coventry in the same breath as Dresden but during the entire course of the war 380 in Coventry died as a result of bombing raids. No one will ever know how many lost their lives in Dresden that fateful night. Realistic estimates put the death toll above 300,000 but how does one count ash?

The free press in Europe immediately denounced such barbarity and reluctantly, on February 17th at a briefing of Allied Supreme Headquarters in Paris the men responsible armed the compliant Associated Press correspondents with these words: "Allied Air Chiefs have made the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombings of German population centres as a ruthless expedient of hastening Hitler's doom.

The report had been widely broadcast in America and by Paris Radio. It was suppressed in Britain for fear of public revulsion. In a minute dated 28th February 1943 Sir Archibald Sinclair explained to Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, that it was necessary to stifle all public discussion on the subject because if the truth had been disclosed in response to the enquiries being made by influential political and religious leaders, their inevitable condemnation would impair the morale of the bomber crews and consequently their bombing efficiency.

R.H.S Crosman, the Labour Minister of Housing (Sunday Telegraph, October 1st 1961) wrote: "One of the most unhealthy features of the bombing offensive was that the War Cabinet - and in particular the Secretary for Air, Archibald Sinclair felt it necessary to repudiate publicly the orders which they themselves had given to Bomber Command." The Government Minister summed up his feelings by saying: ""The devastation of Dresden in February 1945 was one of those crimes against humanity whose authors would have been arraigned at Nuremberg if that court had not been perverted."

When during the Paris briefings, the Allied Air Chiefs had claimed that Dresden 'was the long awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombings of the German population,' this too was a bald lie.

Even Winston Churchill who had airily dismissed the deaths of up to six million Germans half way through the war, and correctly presumed to double that figure, was himself repelled by the scale of the slaughter: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed." (Winston Churchill to Chief of Air Staff Sir. Charles Portal, March 28th 1945).

In fact the only prompt, factual and comprehensive report at this early stage was that of Rudolph Sparing, war correspondent of the German Overseas News Agency. He wrote: "The Dresden catastrophe is without precedent. In the inner town not a single block of buildings, not a single detached building, remains intact or even capable of reconstruction. The town area is devoid of human life. A great city has been wiped from the map of Europe." – Daily Telegraph, March 5th 1945
 

BULLDOZED HUMAN REMAINS

Such was the scale of ruin of Dresden, and so damning the hundreds of thousands dead. Much of the human remains were virtually unrecognisable, as in the ruins of Pompeii. Bulldozers were brought in to scrape the surfaces of monstrous mounds of congealed human beings, nearly all of them civilians, among them thousands of children. These mounds of incinerated human beings were bulldozed into pits. You will find precious little recognition of this, the real holocaust.

On the morning after the attack a sick-minded BBC newsreader sneeringly said; "There is very little china left in Dresden today!"

Such is the shame of Dresden that even today the feeble-minded number-crunches who pluck figures out of the air for fanciful Jewish and homosexual victims of Nazism deny the monstrousness of Dresden's death toll. The actual figure for the dead at Dresden in March 1945, was estimated as between 250,000 and 350,000 by the city's Chief Medical Officer.

Few if any have ever denied that the Germans were if nothing else punctiliousness on matters of fact.

 

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