The Bombing of Dresden, 13 to 15 February 1945

Dresden earns its place here twice. Once for what happened, and once for what happened to the number afterwards, which is the most instructive example in this index of how a death toll can be captured by people who find a bigger figure useful.

What happened

Between 13 and 15 February 1945, British and American bomber forces attacked Dresden in successive waves. The first raids started fires across the densely built historic centre; later waves arrived while those fires were burning.

The fires merged into a firestorm. The old city, built close and largely of flammable material, was destroyed almost entirely. The war in Europe had about twelve weeks left to run.

What Dresden was

Dresden had rail yards, industry and a position on a supply route toward the Eastern Front, and it was also a cultural centre widely thought to be off the target list. Both descriptions were true, and the argument about the raid has largely been an argument about which mattered.

The number, and what happened to it

The commission worked from burial records, missing-person reports, registry data and archaeological evidence. It took years, and its conclusion was substantially lower than the figure most people had heard.

Who benefited from the larger figure

Two groups, for opposite reasons. Wartime propaganda inflated it to present the Allies as barbaric. Decades later, the same inflated numbers were adopted by people seeking to relativise German crimes by arguing that everyone did something comparable.

A number can be repeated for sixty years and still be wrong. That is a warning this archive takes seriously, and it is why the page on casualty counting insists on method over headline figures.

Why the smaller figure is the stronger argument

The same point runs through the myths page: every exaggeration gives someone a reason to disbelieve the rest.

Which category this belongs in

The third column, with Hiroshima and Tokyo. This was area bombing of a city centre. Civilians were not incidental to the method, and the firestorm was the expected result of that method applied to that kind of urban fabric.

Whether the raid was militarily justified at that point in the war is a genuine historical argument that this archive does not settle. What is not in doubt is the category it belongs to.

Why successive waves made it worse

The structure of the attack matters, because it is the mechanism that turned a heavy raid into a firestorm.

The first wave started fires across a dense area. Later waves arrived while those fires were established and spreading. Rather than adding separate damage, the later bombs fed a fire that was already drawing in air, and the individual blazes merged into a single system generating its own wind.

This is the same mechanism described on the Tokyo page, and it was understood at the time. A firestorm is not an unlucky outcome of bombing a city; it is what happens when enough incendiary weight falls on a dense enough area, and the timing of the waves is part of producing it.

What Dresden teaches an archive like this one

That the integrity of a figure matters more than its size. For sixty years the case against the Dresden raid was carried by a number that was not true, which made it trivially easy for anyone to discredit the whole subject by discrediting the arithmetic.

Every page in this index gives a range and names the body that produced it for exactly that reason. It is the same discipline applied to the 156 dead at Minab and to the twelve to eighteen killed in the 2007 Baghdad airstrike: the number is only worth as much as the method behind it.