Bombing of Dresden

The Bombing of Dresden appears as a stark measure of the destruction aerial warfare had come to inflict on civilians by the final winter of the war in Europe. In three February 1945 raids, two British and one American, incendiary bombs set off a firestorm visible for 200 miles; an estimated 135,000 people died. The book recalls Dresden not as an isolated catastrophe but as part of a widening history of attacks on cities, a history that unsettled the moral language with which the war had begun.

The February raids

The raids combined incendiary attacks into a firestorm on a scale that could be seen far beyond Dresden. The account gives both the distance of its visibility and the estimated death toll, making the destruction legible through stark measures: 200 miles and 135,000 lives. It identifies three raids, with two carried out by British forces and one by American forces, but does not supply their individual dates or describe their separate courses.

A changing view of civilian bombing

Dresden is recalled in a discussion of how attitudes toward bombing civilian targets changed as the war continued. The account contrasts the response to the bombing of Shanghai in 1937, then regarded as an appalling atrocity, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1939 appeal to both sides to refrain from bombing civilians with the later destruction of European and Japanese cities. The contrast does not erase the earlier condemnation; it shows how the language of restraint became harder to sustain as the conflict widened and the scale of aerial devastation grew.

Dresden in the later debate

On June 6, Stimson raised concerns with Truman about the devastation caused by B-29 fire raids in Japan. In that discussion, Dresden served as a recent and devastating precedent: its dead and its vast firestorm belonged to the same history of city bombing that framed the debate over the consequences of continuing attacks. The narrative places the raids alongside the bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities to show how civilian destruction had become an urgent moral and military question. Dresden’s place in that retrospective is consequential, but the text does not claim that the raids themselves determined the later decision about the atomic bomb.