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DZ Season 004 Part 04 Mareeba Bomber - What Was It Like on the Receiving End of a Night Bombing Raid in Germany.
On 9 November 1934, five years before World War 2 began, a schoolboy in the German city of Dresden, wrote an essay on aerial warfare. He imagined what would happen if some enemy decided to bomb his city. He wrote:
“The sirens howled and the people fled into their air-raid shelters. The bombs fell with deafening noise, blowing in windows and destroying all the houses.. Vast flames rage over Dresden. A second wave of enemy bombers come, dropping gas bombs. Almost everyone in the bomb shelters were killed. Ashes and rubble were all that remained. The raid was a total catastrophe.”
His teacher was furious. He wrote on the boys paper:
“It can’t get any worse! Stupid! Evil! It’s not so simple to lay waste to Dresden. You write almost nothing about defences. The essay is crawling with errors.”
Fifteen years later, by which time our student had undoubtedly volunteered or been conscripted to fight in the German Wehrmacht (their word for the armed forces), and had possibly been killed, the British did their last major night bombing raid of World War 2. On 13 February 1945 Dresden was bombed.
With the Russian army approaching, the city’s anti-aircraft defences had been moved to the front to fight the Russians. Dresden itself had not been bombed during the war and it looked highly unlikely that it would be.
Just like our student had written, the city had no defences. The next day the Americans carried out two raids over the city. A firestorm was created. Freakish, cyclone like winds, that engulfed the whole city in flames. 25,000 people were killed.
One of the people there during these air raids was an American prisoner-of-war – Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote about his experiences of this bombing in the novel, “Slaughterhouse Five”.
Of all of the actions of the war, this raid drew the most criticism for the allied programme of indiscriminate bombing of cities.
The men of Bomber Command became the forgotten soldiers of World War II. But things weren’t that simple. In this programme I’m going to give you a feel for what it was like being in a city while it was under attack from British bombers, and then in my last programme in this series, I’m going to tell you some remarkable things about the bombing policy on Germany and its effect on the German people.
Tag words: Dresden; Bomber Command; Kurt Vonnegut; Slaughterhouse Five; Lancaster bomber; Cookie; Len Deighton; Bomber; Nazi Party; Joseph Goebbels; Bomber Command Memorial;
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By Paul FordyceOn 9 November 1934, five years before World War 2 began, a schoolboy in the German city of Dresden, wrote an essay on aerial warfare. He imagined what would happen if some enemy decided to bomb his city. He wrote:
“The sirens howled and the people fled into their air-raid shelters. The bombs fell with deafening noise, blowing in windows and destroying all the houses.. Vast flames rage over Dresden. A second wave of enemy bombers come, dropping gas bombs. Almost everyone in the bomb shelters were killed. Ashes and rubble were all that remained. The raid was a total catastrophe.”
His teacher was furious. He wrote on the boys paper:
“It can’t get any worse! Stupid! Evil! It’s not so simple to lay waste to Dresden. You write almost nothing about defences. The essay is crawling with errors.”
Fifteen years later, by which time our student had undoubtedly volunteered or been conscripted to fight in the German Wehrmacht (their word for the armed forces), and had possibly been killed, the British did their last major night bombing raid of World War 2. On 13 February 1945 Dresden was bombed.
With the Russian army approaching, the city’s anti-aircraft defences had been moved to the front to fight the Russians. Dresden itself had not been bombed during the war and it looked highly unlikely that it would be.
Just like our student had written, the city had no defences. The next day the Americans carried out two raids over the city. A firestorm was created. Freakish, cyclone like winds, that engulfed the whole city in flames. 25,000 people were killed.
One of the people there during these air raids was an American prisoner-of-war – Kurt Vonnegut. He wrote about his experiences of this bombing in the novel, “Slaughterhouse Five”.
Of all of the actions of the war, this raid drew the most criticism for the allied programme of indiscriminate bombing of cities.
The men of Bomber Command became the forgotten soldiers of World War II. But things weren’t that simple. In this programme I’m going to give you a feel for what it was like being in a city while it was under attack from British bombers, and then in my last programme in this series, I’m going to tell you some remarkable things about the bombing policy on Germany and its effect on the German people.
Tag words: Dresden; Bomber Command; Kurt Vonnegut; Slaughterhouse Five; Lancaster bomber; Cookie; Len Deighton; Bomber; Nazi Party; Joseph Goebbels; Bomber Command Memorial;