...surrendered in April 1945. As the aggressor, the U.S. will be hit again and again and again.
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Bombing of Dresden in World War IIThe bombing of Dresden, led by the Royal Air Force (RAF) and followed by the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between February 13 and February 15, 1945, remains one of the more controversial Allied actions of World War II. The exact number of casualties is uncertain, but most historians agree that the firebombing resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people. Historian Frederick Taylor says:
“ The destruction of Dresden has an epically tragic quality to it. It was a wonderfully beautiful city and a symbol of Baroque humanism and all that was best in Germany. It also contained all of the worst from Germany during the Nazi period. In that sense it is an absolutely exemplary tragedy for the horrors of 20th century warfare...<1>
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A Dresden police report written shortly after the attacks stated that the old town and the inner eastern suburbs had been engulfed in a single fire which had destroyed almost 12,000 dwellings including residential barracks. The report also said that the raid had destroyed "24 banks; 26 insurance buildings; 31 stores and retail houses; 6470 shops; 640 warehouses; 256 market halls; 31 large hotels; 26 public houses; 63 administrative buildings; 3 theatres; 18 cinemas; 11 churches; 60 chapels; 50 cultural-historical buildings; 19 hospitals including auxiliary, overflow hospitals, and private clinics; 39 schools; 5 consulates; 1 zoological garden; 1 waterworks, 1 railway facility; 19 postal facilities; 4 tram facilities; 19 ships and barges." The report also mentioned that the Wehrmacht's main command post in the Taschenberg Palais, 19 military hospitals and a number of less significant military facilities were destroyed.<21> Almost 200 factories were damaged, 136 seriously (including several of the Zeiss Ikon precision optical engineering works), 28 with medium to serious damage, and 35 with light damage.<22>
"British assessments ... concluded that 23 percent of the city’s industrial buildings were seriously damaged and that 56 per cent of the non-industrial buildings (exclusive of dwellings) had been heavily damaged. Of the total number of dwelling units in the city proper, 78,000 were regarded as demolished, 27,700 temporarily uninhabitable but ultimately repairable, and 64,500 readily repairable from minor damage. This later assessment indicated that 80 per cent of the city’s housing units had undergone some degree of damage and that 50 per cent of the dwellings had been demolished or seriously damaged." and that the USAAF "raids against the city’s railway facilities on 14 and 15 February resulted in severe and extensive damage that entirely paralyzed communications.…" and that "The railway bridges over the Elbe river — vital to incoming and outgoing traffic — were rendered unusable and remained closed to traffic for many weeks after the raids."<23>
The precise number of dead is difficult to ascertain and is not known. Estimates are made difficult by the fact that the city and surrounding suburbs which had a population of 642,000 in 1939<24> was crowded at that time with up to 200,000 refugees,<25> and some thousands of wounded soldiers. The fate of some of the refugees is not known as they may have been killed and incinerated beyond recognition in the fire-storm, or they may have left Dresden for other places without informing the authorities. Earlier reputable estimates varied from 25,000 to more than 60,000, but historians now view around 25,000–35,000 as the likely range<26><27> with the latest (1994) research by the Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert pointing toward the lower part of this range.<28> It would appear from such estimates that the casualties suffered in the Dresden bombings were similar to those suffered in other German cities which were subject to firebombing attacks during area bombardment.<29>
Contemporary official German records give a number of 21,271 registered burials, including 6,865 who were cremated on the Altmarkt.<30> There were around 25,000 officially buried dead by March 22, 1945, war related or not, according to official German report Tagesbefehl (Order of the Day) no. 47 ("TB47"). There was no registration of burials between May and September 1945.<31> War-related dead found in later years, from October 1945 to September 1957, are given as 1,557; from May 1945 until 1966, 1,858 bodies were recovered. None was found during the period 1990–1994, even though there was a lot of construction and excavation during that period. The number of people registered with the authorities as missing was 35,000; around 10,000 of those were later found to be alive.<27> In recent years, the estimates have become a little higher in Germany and lower in Britain; earlier it was the opposite.
There have been higher estimates for the number of dead, ranging as high as 300,000. They are from disputed and unreliable sources, such as the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda headed by Joseph Goebbels, Soviet historians, and David Irving, the once popular but now discredited self-styled 'historian'<32> who retracted his higher estimates.<33> Both the Columbia Encyclopedia and Encarta Encyclopedia list the number as "from 35,000 to more than 135,000 dead", the higher figure of which is in line with Irving's incorrect retracted estimates.
The Nazis made use of Dresden in their propaganda efforts and promised swift retaliation. The Soviets also made propaganda use of the Dresden bombing in the early years of the Cold War to alienate the East Germans from the Americans and British.
The tonnage of bombs dropped on Dresden was actually lower than in many other areas.<34> However, ideal weather conditions at the target site, the wooden-framed buildings, and "breakthroughs" linking the cellars of contiguous buildings and the lack of preparation for the effects of air-raids by Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann,<35> conspired to make the attack particularly devastating. For these reasons the loss of life in Dresden was higher than many other bombing raids during World War II. For example Coventry, the English city which is now twinned with Dresden, and is often compared and contrasted with it, lost 1,236 in two separate raids in 1940. In late 2004, an RAF man involved in the raid said in an interview on the BBC's Radio 4 that another factor was the lower-than-expected level of anti-aircraft fire, which allowed a high degree of accuracy on the part of the bombers.
Overall, Anglo-American bombing of German cities claimed between 305,000 and 600,000 civilian lives.<36> Whether these attacks hastened the end of the war is a controversial question.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II