Dresden

On the 13^th of February, 1945, 75 years ago, over 760 Brutish Avro Lancaster heavy bombers, flying from bases in England, bombed the German city of Dresden. Dresden, a city of minimal military importance, was in eastern Germany and directly in the path of the advancing Red Army. A city of cultural buildings, it was known as the Florence On The Elbe and, moreover, was swollen to the brim with refugees from the collapsing Eastern Front.

The Brutish air raid came in two waves. The first was preceded by Mosquito light bombers, dropping flares to mark the target for the Lancasters. These then inundated the city with a mix of high explosive bombs (called “cookies”, basically two ton steel drums packed with explosives, lacking fins or any other control surface and therefore completely unusable to target any specific objective) and incendiaries. Despite the later Brutish allegation that it was bombing a “strategic target”, a claim uncritically parroted by Wikipedia, the evidence of the ordnance itself (also reported by Wikipedia) proves it to be a lie. Cookies weren’t targetable bombs; they could not have been used to target specific installations, like the contemporary Grand Slam and Tallboy bombs the Brutish also used. Cookies were meant to blow the roofs off houses and destroy water mains (also something Wikipedia, operating on the principle that its readers lack critical thinking faculties, reports without attempting to create new “facts”, but give it time).

In fact, by 1945 the Brutish had turned city bombing into a highly “scientific” procedure, optimised to destroy as much civilian infrastructure as possible. The idea was that Mosquito light bombers would mark the target by flares, and guide in the first bombers, Pathfinder squadrons, which would then illuminate the targets by sticks of flares. The main force of bombers, arriving shortly thereafter, would then bomb the illuminated city with cookies, blowing off roofs (these, in 1945, were of slate and would be blasted off by concussion) to expose the interiors of the houses to the incendiaries, which would then set off mass fires. The cookies would also blow apart water mains, thus making the task of extinguishing the fires nearly impossible. As the fires built up, the geography of the city would decide what would then happen. If the surroundings were relatively flat and allowed free air movement, the heat of the fires would cause the air around them to rise, forming a low pressure area. Winds from outside would then rush into this low pressure area, acting exactly like a fan to the flames. This phenomenon could either cause a wall of flame to be blown across the city at storm wind speed (known as a firestorm) or drive fires together to create a single massive central fire (known as a conflagration). A firestorm, being blown across the city and igniting areas not directly struck by the bombing, would be more devastating than a conflagration. Like Hiroshima a few months later, Dresden was to suffer a firestorm, one of such magnitude that survivors talk of seeing others being blown by the winds into fires that they were in the process of escaping. This firestorm would also have the charming effect of consuming the breathable oxygen in the air, handily suffocating civilians cowering in air raid shelters who might avoid being blown to pieces by the cookies or incinerated by the firestorm. Afterwards, rescue teams would find cellars full of corpses suffocated to death and then turned by the heat into a formless slag.

If you think that was bad enough, we haven’t even started yet. Three hours after the first wave of bombers, a second wave of Brutish Lancasters turned up over Dresden for another bombing run. Why three hours? Actually, even that was a planned delay. The Brutish had calculated that in three hours the German air raid wardens, rescue teams from the TENO organisation, firemen and ambulance workers would be at their jobs attempting to save the survivors of the first wave who were buried under the rubble. Yes, exactly like Barack Hussein Obama’s and now Donald Trump's drones would later do in Yemen and Afghanistan, Somalia and Pakistan, Iraq and Whoknowswhereistan, the intention of this second wave was to deliberately murder rescue workers, and nothing else. Wikipedia, still imagining that nobody has any thinking ability, manages to report this in the same article that claims that the objective was to destroy a “strategic target”

The next day, and the day after that (14^th and 15^th February, 1945) – while the city was still burning – over 500 Amerikastani B 17 heavy bombers, with an escort of almost 800 Amerikastani P 51 fighters, bombed Dresden in more air raids. The B 17s could only carry about half the bomb load of the Brutish Lancasters, and  the city was covered in haze from the fires, so these raids did much less damage. However, German fighter opposition was nonexistent (only one B 17 was shot down by anti aircraft fire), so the P 51s expended their ammunition by strafing refugee columns fleeing the charred city. For some reason most accounts of the bombing omit this. Perhaps because said accounts are mostly from Amerikastani sources (or from Amerikastani vassals like modern day Germans, about whom I’ll have something to say in a little bit), and they want to portray the Brutish as the sole villains of the piece. At most they’ll grudgingly say that, yes, Amerikastani bombers did bomb Dresden, but they’ll leave out the psychopathic strafing of helpless refugee columns.

Despite the claims of it being a “strategic target”, the fact is that there never was any military necessity for the firebombing of Dresden. As this became clear, the Brutish, changing their stance, claimed that it was to help the Red Army by disrupting German troop movements to the Eastern Front. This is hogwash. The Red Army, which was taking cities without having to burn them to ash first, had made no such request for assistance. The reasons, as anyone who has read extensively about the bombing can tell you, were twofold:

First, pure bloodlust on the part of the Brutish, who wanted to kill Germans for the crime of being a threat to Brutish world domination. The Brutish Bomber Command head, Air Chief Marshal Harris (known to its aircrew as “Butcher Harris”) was such a psychopath that even the monstrous war criminal Churchill was disgusted by it. The bombing had nothing to do with defeating Hitler because Dresden was not a city in any way important to Nazism, like Berlin or Nuremberg for example (Hitler would probably have called its art and architecture "decadent", anyway). And I recall reading that one Brutish officer (who did not take part in the actual attack) told the aircrew to be sure to bomb the city's central square because he had once stayed in a hotel at the square and thought the management had cheated him. Such petty reasons were used to justify the incineration of tens of thousands of human beings.

In Len Deighton's novel Bomber, a brilliant book on the RAF bombing of German cities, a disillusioned Brutish bomber pilot makes a telling point: the bombing effort was always directed at the centres of German cities, which never had anything of military value. There were old buildings of wooden construction, narrow alleys, and civilian residential districts around it. The industrial section was always in the suburbs, which were never bombed. This, of course, wasn't unknown to the Brutish Bomber Command, which knew perfectly well that all it was doing was killing civilians. Incidentally, for some reason, Bomber has never been made into a film, despite being eminently filmable, with the Brutish bombing campaign against German cities being shown not just from the point of view of the aircrew but also of the German civilians on the receiving end. Total coincidence, I’m sure!

Second, Dresden was bombed as a warning to the Soviets of what the Amerikastanis and Brutish were capable of. It had nothing much that was vital in the way of military facilities or production, and even those that were, were not bombed. The one allegedly strategic purpose was to destroy the railway to prevent Germany moving forces to the front against the Red Army; and this railway was so untouched that three days after the bombing, while the ruins of the city were still on fire, German military trains were already moving down that same railway, quite unmolested. Therefore, far from helping the Red Army, the bombing was intended to scare it. In addition to that, Dresden was to fall in the pre-agreed Soviet zone of occupation and the Brutish and Amerikastanis wanted to destroy everything in it that they could in order to deny it to the USSR.

How many were killed in Dresden? This is not a small matter, because it’s become a major bone of contention. According to many, many amateur critics of the bombing, the number killed was 250,000, or, even more fancifully, 500,000. David Irving, who wrote an otherwise excellent book on the bombing, at first repeated this 250,000 figure. However, the Dresden city authorities at the time of the bombing itself cited 20-25000 dead, and Irving himself has now accepted those figures. However, like the Holocaust fetishists with their six million carved in stone figure, there are immense numbers of people who still insist, almost as a matter of holy writ, that 250000, or 500000, or maybe even more must have died in the bombing. Must have, they insist.

I don't see how it helps to insist that a particular - and evidence-free - number of civilians died in Dresden; whether the number was 2, 2500, 25000 250000, or 2.5 million, it was an equally vile war crime and the Brutish and Amerikastanis were trying to murder as many civilians as they could. That they didn’t murder more was not for want of trying.

However, there is a major problem with quoting David Irving's initial figures of 250000 dead in Dresden: Irving himself reduced those figures to 20-25000, saying that his initial estimate was based on wrong information. It gives an opening for apologists for the bombing to divert the question to the casualty figures while ignoring the central crime itself. Which, let me repeat, remains a vile war crime no matter whether two people or two hundred thousand were murdered.

This, however, does not seem to be something comprehensible to Germans of today, who have apparently been so systematically brainwashed by their Amerikastani overlords over the past 75 years that if you check any YouTube video of the activities of RAF Bomber Command, you’re sure to find Germans cravenly thanking the Brutish – and Amerikastanis, of course – for bombing their cities (not to mention their parents and grandparents) to “free them”. This despite the fact that Nazi Germany was in no shape or form a democracy, so, of course, the German civilians incinerated by the bombing bore no responsibility for the actions of their regimes. Unlike the Brutish, Amerikastanis, and Germans of today, who vote for war criminals who invade and occupy defenceless countries on the other side of the planet and murder their civilians exactly as the Brutish and Amerikastanis murdered the civilians of Dresden 75 years ago.

In commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of the bombing, I did this painting.

Title: Dresden

Material: Acrylic on wooden board.

After taking the above photo, I applied varnish on the painting, and then took another photo of the painting with the varnish just applied, totally wet, and gleaming in the room's lights. The reflections actually make it look as though the glare is part of the painting, an effect that goes rather well, though it does obscure some details. I suppose a combination of the two works best, so here you have both the wet varnish and, above, without. When it dries it will look like the unvarnished version, albeit slightly more gleamy.