The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War Over Europe 1940-1945

by Richard Overy

Unlike any of the other major raids in the last months of the war, the Dresden attack had immediate repercussions on Allied opinion. Two days after the raid an RAF officer at SHAEF headquarters gave a news conference in which he talked about bombing cities deliberately to cause panic and destroy morale. An Associated Press correspondent, Howard Cowan, filed a report successfully past the SHAEF censor, and by February 18 the American press was full of the news that the Allies had at last decided “to adopt deliberate terror bombing.” Arnold was compelled to run a campaign to reassure the American public that Dresden had been attacked, like Chemnitz, as a major communications center, entirely consistent with American bombing policy.136 It was hard to stifle the debate. Goebbels released to the neutral press news that 250,000 people had been killed in Dresden (by the judicious addition of an additional zero to the provisional casualty estimate). In Britain and America news of the death toll was soon public knowledge. The Bombing Restrictions Committee in London publicized the figure of 250,000 at once and provoked a furious correspondence accusing the committee of acting as the mouthpiece for German propaganda. Air Ministry statements in the House of Commons dismissed the accusations of terror bombing by claiming that no one, air marshals or pilots, was trying to work out “how many women and children they can kill.”137 But for the first time the real nature of area and blind-b...