Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945
Frederick Taylor
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 0060006773
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For decades it has been assumed that the Allied bombing of Dresden -- a cultured city famous for its china, chocolate, and fine watches -- was militarily unjustifiable, an act of retribution for Germany's ceaseless bombing of London and other parts of England.
Now, Frederick Taylor's groundbreaking research offers a completely new examination of the facts and reveals that Dresden was a highly militarized city actively involved in the production of military armaments and communications. Incorporating first-hand accounts, contemporaneous press material and memoirs, and never-before-seen government records, Taylor proves unequivocally the very real military threat Dresden posed -- and how a legacy of propaganda shrouded the truth for sixty years.
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Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945
trapped fumes, the close contact with poisonous chemicals—and perhaps the stress of serving a capricious and remorseless master—had consigned him to an early grave. Meanwhile, what became known as Meissen porcelain (and abroad as Dresden china) had been born. It was dubbed the “white gold” of the eighteenth century, much imitated elsewhere but rarely equaled for its perfection of material and its delicacy of style. After Böttger’s death, efficient managers of money, men, and talent greatly
beam of a newly developed German direction-finding device known as the X-Gerät. This worked by a system of staged, intersecting beams sent out from two coastal transmission stations on the French side of the channel, one in Cherbourg and the other in Calais. The device not only enabled the aircraft to pinpoint their target to within a few score yards’ accuracy over hundreds of miles, but also, by linking the operations of a special clock in each aircraft to a series of automatically triggered
despair: Another shower of incendiaries fell, four of them appearing to strike the roof of the Girdlers’ Chapel above its east end. From below a fire was seen blazing in the cellar. Above on the roof smoke was pouring from three holes and a fire was blazing through. These were tackled by all of us at once, but, with the failing of our supplies of sand, water and physical strength we were unable to make an impression; the fire gained ground and finally we had to give in. Almost every street
running double shifts for their students. A worthy “Law for the Protection of School-Aged Youth” of January 1943, which provided for all children to take refuge in school shelters in case of air raids, was in fact bound to be ineffective from the outset. By 1943 almost all the schools in Dresden were devoted to the military or war-related uses, whether as stores, offices, or accommodation. This made the provision of adequate teaching space, let alone easily accessible air raid protection,
longer appear, in recognition of harsher military realities. What the maps cannot show is what was actually being produced in those industrial areas and factory buildings. It seems likely that the best British intelligence could do in this respect was to extrapolate from prewar patterns of production. This, as has been seen from the quite radical nature of the switch from the manufacture of consumer goods to armaments and war-related production in Dresden since 1939, would have given a less than
