Fire storm

As the swathe of smoke drifted down the River Elbe toward Czechoslovakia, the people in the towns and cities over which it passed must have guessed that here were the results of no ordinary raid, that these were in fact the last mortal remains of a city which twelve hours earlier had sheltered a million people and their property.

As the smoke pall was driven ever further from the burning city, the air cooled; as the air cooled, the damp clouds, heavy with dust and smoke, broke. The rains fell along the length of the Elbe valley.

Not only rain descended from the sky: the countryside to the leeward of Dresden was drenched with a steady shower of wet and sooty ash. British prisoners of war working in the large parcels sorting dump at Stalag IVB over twenty-five miles south-east of Dresden noticed that the smoke pall lasted three days and that partiples of smouldering clothing and charred paper were still floating down over the camp for many days after that.1 The owner of a house in Mockethal, some fifteen miles from Dresden, found his garden littered with prescriptions and pill-boxes from a chemist’s shop; the labels showed them to have come from the heart of the Dresden inner city.2 Papers and documents from the gutted Land Registry in the inner city likewise showered down in the village of Lohmen, near Pirna, some eighteen miles away; schoolchildren had to spend several days scouring the fi elds for them.3 These were the manifestations of the most terrible fire storm in the history of the R.A.F.’s area offensive against German cities. According to the police report the fire-storm appears to have erupted between half an hour and forty-five minutes after the first attack began, and to have subsided only gradually until, with the fall of a light rain toward three A.M., it could be said to have worked itself out and lost its fury; but it had itself caused the deaths of thousands of frail and elderly people who otherwise would have been able to fight their way out of the encircling ring of fire.

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The Battle of Hamburg in July 1943 had brought Germany’s first such fire storm: eight square miles of the city had burnt as one single bonfire. The air raid on Pforzheim, a little jewellery-manufacturing town in Württemberg, ten days after the destruction of Dresden would create the last fire-storm of the war, killing 17 600 people—almost one in four of the town’s population—in the space of twenty minutes.

So horrific was the phenomenon in Hamburg that the police president had ordered a scientific investigation of the causes of such fire-storms, so that other cities might be warned. ‘An appreciation of the force of this fire-storm,’ reported Hamburg’s police president, ‘could be obtained only by analysing it soberly as a meteorological phenomenon: as the result of the sudden linking of a number of fires, the air above was heated to such an extent that a violent updraught occurred which, in turn, caused the surrounding fresh air to be drawn in from all sides to the seat of the fire. This tremendous suction caused movements of air of far greater force than normal winds.’ In meteorology [he continued] the differences of temperature involved are of the order of 20° to 30° Celsius. In this fire-storm they were of the order of 600°, 800° or even one thousand degrees Celsius. This explained the colossal violence of the fire-storm winds.

The Hamburg police president’s gloomy forecast was that no kind of civil defence precautions could ever contain a fire-storm once it had begun.4 The fire-storm was a man made monster which no man would ever tame.

In Dresden the fire-storm appears by examination of the area more than seventy-five percent destroyed to have engulfed some eight square miles: some of the city’s authorities after the war put the area as high as eleven square miles. It was unquestionably the most devastating fire-storm that Germany had experienced. All the signs observed in Hamburg were repeated in Dresden, multiplied in scale many times. Giant trees were uprooted or snapped in half. Individuals were flung over and bowled like tumbleweed along the streets as the hurricane ripped all the clothes from their bodies. Crowds of people fleeing for safety were seized by the tornado, hurled into the flames and burned alive—a holocaust in the truest sense of the word. The rapacious moloch found constant nourishment to feed its furious appetite. Gables of roofs, and furniture that had been stacked on the streets after the first raid were plucked up by the violent winds and tossed into the centre of the burning inner city.

The fire-storm reached the peak of its strength in the three-hour interval between the raids. This was the very period in which those sheltering in the cellars and vaulted corridors of the inner city should have been fl eeing to the safer surrounding suburbs.

As one S.S. officer reached the Post-Platz—formerly a hub of Dresden’s traffic, but soon to become a desolate wasteland of ruins, weeds, and shrubs—the brilliant ‘Christmas trees’ appeared in the sky heralding the start of the second raid. Without further thought he clawed his way feet first into a sewer shaft which opened onto the pavement’s edge. From here he had an eerie peephole onto the infernal scene all around. The fire-typhoon was thundering through all the streets and alleys with such strength that it was feeding human beings into the grasp of the fires like dry leaves.

‘Their clothes literally flew off their bodies,’ he described. ‘Then they slithered, slipped and rolled a hundred yards into the flames as though drawn by an invisible but mighty magnet.’5 A railroad worker also sheltering near the Post-Platz observed how the hurricane seized a woman with a perambulator and tossed her brutally into the flafes.6 Other people, running for their lives along the railway embankments which were the only escape routes not badly cratered or blocked by rubble, reported how railway trucks on exposed portions of the lines had been blown over by the gale.7 Even the open spaces of the large squares and great parks were no protection against this unnatural hurricane. Several thousand people had fled into the rectangular Grosser Garten, the one mile long park in the heart of the southern city, where surrounded by lakes, shrubs, wooded groves and ornamental palaces they had felt some measure of security. ‘We were running across one of the lawns of the Grosser Garten,’ reported one man, ‘when something white flew through the air toward me. I grabbed at it, and my hand closed on a large feather eiderdown. At the same time we heard some hundred yards away a giant oak tree crashing down. We pulled the branches aside and crawled beneath the trunk.’8

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Once the fire-storm had erupted there was nothing that the fire fighting forces could do to contain it. In all the great German fire-storm raids the swift and unhindered emergence of the storm had been prospered by the early disruption of telephone communications between civil defence control rooms and external reinforcements.

In Germany, as in England, the fire brigades had been reorganised during the war on nationwide, paramilitary lines, one feature of which was the constant mobile reserve of fire fighting regiments held outside the danger zones.

Most of the major cities had at this stage of the war been equipped with alternative telephone communications and with radio links between important control posts. But invariably these were unreliable when it came to the test, and the civil defence authorities had to fall back on the standard Post Office telephone network. Much therefore depended on how long this system functioned in an emergency before it was overwhelmed. In the Battle of Hamburg in July 1943 the telephone communications had very soon broken down, and when the fire-storm broke out on the third night the service had still not been adequately restored. Added to this, as we have seen, the burning down of the police headquarters which housed the civil defence control room had for a while seriously hampered fire  fighting. In Kassel in October 1943, the telephone exchange had been hit twenty minutes after the start of the attack, and the motorcycle dispatch rider service had proven inadequate for this emer-gency. For this reason fire brigades arriving in Kassel from nearby cities had waited for several hours without any definite orders for action.

David Irving
Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden