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The Bombing Atrocity Of Dresden
By Austin J. App
First published in The Voice of the Federation, December, 1963
The nationally known magazine Esquire in November, 1963, carried the best article so far to appear on the Allied air war on civilians, Apocalypse at Dresden by R.H.S. Crossman, an Englishman, sub-titled "The long suppressed story of the worst massacre in the history of the world". He writes:
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, because the Red Army was approaching, only 60 miles away a million refugees had swollen the population of Dresden, a totally non-military art city and hospital center, to 1.250.000, British and American bomber loosed three waves of bomb attacks within twelve hours and followed with Mustang divers to snipe off any fleeing survivors. Out of 28.410 houses in the inner city, they left 24.866 destroyed, eleven square miles devastated, 35.000 recognizable corpses, and an estimated 100.000 unrecognizable ones! By contrast, Hiroshima's atom bomb casualties were 71.879.
How did this Allied mass atrocity came to be perpetrated? Because Churchill wanted "a thunderclap of Anglo-American aerial annihilation so frightful" as to impress Stalin on the eve of the Yalta conference! On January 25, 1945, the order to wipe out Dresden was given, and the night designated for it was February 13, when on Shrove Tuesday a maximum of children in Carnival garb might be expected about! So, at 10:09 p.m. while "gangs of little girls (were) wandering about in fancy dress," the British for 24 minutes created a firestorm over the city, ripping off roofs, sucking oxygen out of air-raid shelters, converting the inner city "into a sea of flames".
When, by 1:22 a.m. some 10.000 wretched survivors had crowded into the Grosse Garten, the second wave of bombers deliberately directed their terror on this garden, and on the hospitals. "Of its nineteen hospitals sixteen were badly damaged and three, including the main maternity clinic, totally destroyed." Heroic nurses managed to drag "thousands of crippled survivors ... to the banks of the River Elbe, where they were laid in rows on the grass to await daylight."
But the Anglo-American "re-educators" of Germany had not enough sadism yet. At 11:30 a.m. 211 American Flying Fortresses blasted what was left of the city and parks so that for five days and nights the city burned. Yet even this third all-out massacre did not content the Churchill- Roosevelt- Morgenthau sadists. So that, if possible, not one single woman or child might drag themselves to safety, they sent in:
... Scores of Mustang fighters diving low over the bodies huddled on the banks of the Elbe, as well as on the larger lawns of the Grosse Garten in order to shoot them up. Other Mustangs chose as their targets the serried crowd that blocked the road out of Dresden. No one knows how many women and children were actually killed by those dive-bombing attacks. But ... they have become the symbol of Yankee sadism and brutality. (p. 151)
So much for the Esquire article, for which all decent Americans ought to be grateful. I myself know a survivor who was in a straggling group pursued by these Mustangs. Every few minutes they had to fall flat. One old man beside her reacted too slowly - and died of a low- diving sniper's bullet, just as mortally as President Kennedy died of Communist Oswald's shots. And of a deed that was every bit as much of a murder.
Those Allied leaders who ordered such sniping from low diving Mustangs are war criminals! Those who obeyed such orders, the snipers in the fighter planes are war criminals too, every bit as Eichmann (who also obeyed orders)! It is high time that Britain, America, and Israel acted to bring these war criminals to judgement - and in the meanwhile be too ashamed to keep harping on Nazi crimes (for which the German people have atoned bitterly and tried to make restitutions)!