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

by Richard Overy

Consistent with the new directive, Spaatz ordered a major daylight raid on Berlin on February 3, 1945, with 1,000 B-17 Flying Fortresses and almost 1,000 fighters. For once he ordered the aircraft to attack the center of the city along the lines first suggested in Operation Thunderclap, despite Doolittle’s unhappiness about the deliberate targeting of civilian areas. On the operational directive Spaatz scrawled, “Beat ’em up!” (though much later he chose to remember the raid as just another military target). The toll was high for an American raid, indeed the highest German death toll from any of the raids on the capital. An estimated 2,890 were killed and 120,000 rendered temporarily homeless. A second heavy raid on Berlin with 1,135 bombers was made on February 26.134 On February 6, Chemnitz was also hit, by 474 American bombers; on February 14–15 a second attack was made by Bomber Command with 499 Lancasters, though cloud obscured the city and most bombs fell wide of it; a further raid was made by the Eighth Air Force on March 2. Seen from this perspective, it is evident that the raid on Dresden was made as part of a series of agreed attacks on the cities of eastern Germany. All of these raids, and not just the attack on Dresden, were undertaken in the full knowledge that these cities were filled with civilian refugees from farther east, and that their destruction was likely to cause not just dislocation but high casualties as well.