Countdown to Victory: February 1945

In February 1945, 81 years ago this month, the Allied armies in Europe were poised to achieve a final victory over Nazi Germany.   As we discussed in my last blog, the Russian army had made dramatic advances across Poland in January—advancing 400 miles in less than three weeks—and now stood on the Oder, only 40 miles from Berlin. In Belgium and Holland, the American, British and Canadian armies had recovered from the bruising Battle of the Bulge and were now preparing to cross the Rhine into Germany.

While the Allied armies were making ready for their final assaults, crushing the remnants of Hitler’s Third Reich between them, let’s shift our focus to two other theaters of operations: the diplomatic war being fought at the Allies’ conference tables and the war being fought in the skies above Germany.

Yalta

The ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders—Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin—met at Yalta in the Crimea on the coast of the Black Sea early in February. The purpose of the conference was to settle the political map of post-war Europe.

The Big Three

The Yalta conference began on February 4^th, two days after the Russians reached the Oder. The remarkable Russian advance across Poland and the effective stalemate on the western front in January had a crucial effect on the outcome of the war, and the future of Europe.

Stalin sat down with a sudden huge advantage: he had de facto control of eastern Europe and would soon attack and occupy Berlin, while American and British forces still hadn’t been able to cross the Rhine and were hundreds of miles from Berlin.

Stalin controlled Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldovia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and parts of Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria. In addition, the Communist Party was the largest and best organized political party (often including well-armed resistance fighters) in Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, and France.

The western Allies, by contrast, had France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, most of Italy and parts of Holland.

The Yalta agenda can be summarized as follows:

• Churchill and Roosevelt wanted all the European countries to be restored as sovereign democracies, in accordance with the Atlantic Charter. In particular, they wanted Poland restored—after all, the British and French had gone to war with Hitler in 1939 to save Poland. In return for paying lip service to these objectives, Stalin demanded the annexation of eastern Poland, to which Roosevelt and Churchill (shamefully but helplessly) agreed.
• All three men agreed that they would insist on unconditional surrender by Germany and would not make separate ceasefire agreements. This was important as, two months later, the Germans repeatedly tried to surrender to the British and Americans but not to the Russians.
• Roosevelt wanted a new organization, the United Nations, to replace the failed League of Nations. Stalin agreed to join—provided he had a veto.
• Most of all, Roosevelt wanted Stalin to commit to declaring war on Japan as soon as the war in Europe was over. American forces were still a long way from the Japanese home islands and the war in the Pacific was a devastating meatgrinder. US Marines landed on Iwo Jima just after the conference ended, a battle in which the Japanese fought literally to the death, suffering a 99% casualty rate. Stalin made the commitment to declare war—but did not honor it for several months.

It can be argued that Stalin’s determination at Yalta to keep the eastern European countries under his control—in his iron grip—marks the real beginning of the Cold War. I would also argue that the fact that the conference took place in Soviet Crimea, with lots of T44 tanks parked outside the conference buildings, and that Roosevelt was ailing and exhausted and had only two months to live, both contributed to Stalin’s dominance.

Dresden

The Yalta conference ended on February 11^th. The RAF and the USAAF bombed Dresden February 13^th to 15^th.

Chapter 19 of the book of Genesis says that: ^‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire.’ In this case RAF Bomber Command and the US 8^th Air Force rained down 4,000 tons of incendiaries upon Dresden.

On the night of February 13^th/14^th 772 RAF bombers, mostly Lancasters, dropped approximately 2,700 tons of bombs on the city center. On the 14^th and 15^th 527 USAAF B17s dropped an additional 1,200 tons, primarily on the railroad marshalling yards.

Dresden was an important railroad and transportation hub in Saxony in eastern Germany but not a vital industrial or military city. It had a population of 600,000 but there were also at least 250,000 refugees fleeing ahead of the advancing Russian armies.

The RAF attacks were highly successful, igniting a firestorm which destroyed the city center.

The ‘Usual’ Lancaster bomb load—Usual was the code word for the incendiary load type—consisted of one 4000lb explosive ‘Cookie’ and 12 Small Bomb Containers, each with 236 4lb incendiaries for a total of 2,832 bombs. Thus the RAF Lancaster force dropped over 2 million incendiaries. Each small bomb had a magnesium shell filled with thermite which burned at 4000ºF. Thermite requires no external oxygen to burn and cannot be smothered. Pouring water on thermite simply results in violent explosions of steam.

The 2-ton Cookie (the blunt cannister in the photographs) was designed to crash through the roof and upper floors of a building, creating a chimney, before exploding at ground level and blowing out the windows, creating the physics of a furnace. Incendiaries would then fall into the buildings before bursting into flames, with the resulting inferno fanned by air rushing in through broken doors and windows and up through the newly created ‘chimney.’

The RAF raid consisted of two waves, three hours apart. This was partly to reduce congestion over the target and partly so that the second wave could catch the firefighters and rescue teams at work, rendering them helpless to deal with the new fires.

The world was shocked by the intensity of the Allied bombing attacks. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry claimed that 200,000 civilians had perished. (It is possible that Goebbels took the local police estimate of the casualties, added a zero, and leaked it to the Swedish press.) In reality approximately 25,000 people were killed, and 2.5 square miles of the city were burnt out.

The Allies mishandled their announcements and, as a result, public opinion in Britain and America turned against ‘carpet bombing,’ as it was known. Churchill was concerned—primarily at the adverse publicity rather than the morality of bombing civilians.

Of course, other cities had been bombed far more severely. The RAF had firebombed Hamburg in 1943 with a much greater loss of life, for example, and other German cities were being reduced to rubble.

But it seems that, late in the war, people were beginning to say, ‘enough is enough.’ John Kenneth Galbraith, for example, then working in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) wrote: “The incredible cruelty of the attack on Dresden when the war had already been won—and the death of children, women, and civilians—that was extremely weighty and of no avail.”

Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist, was an American POW imprisoned in a cellar beneath an abattoir in Dresden and survived the raid. His experiences formed the basis for his book Slaughterhouse Five.

From a historical perspective the bombing of Dresden, although horrific, was not the worst raid of 1945. Operation Meeting House, the first firebombing of Tokyo, was only 3 weeks away in March, when over 100,000 civilians would die in a single night in a conflagration that destroyed 15 square miles. More firebombings, and ultimately Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would follow in the coming months. But the raid on Dresden lives on in infamy.

 

March 1945 will be a much better month for the Allies, I promise you, and we’ll look at that next month.