Beginning at 10:03 PM, RAF Bomber Command launched the first of four waves against Dresden, a city packed with refugees fleeing the advancing Soviet army. The resulting firestorm incinerated the historic city center, and American bombers continued the assault the following day. The raid remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of World War II.
Dresden had been spared major bombing for most of the war, earning a reputation as a cultural jewel untouched by the conflict, sometimes called 'Florence on the Elbe.' By February 1945, it was swollen with refugees fleeing the Red Army's advance from the east, its population far exceeding official figures.
At 10:03 PM on February 13, RAF bombers dropped incendiaries and high explosives in a carefully sequenced attack designed to create a firestorm, a self-sustaining inferno that generated hurricane-force winds and temperatures exceeding 1,000 degrees Celsius. A second RAF wave struck three hours later, targeting rescue workers and fresh fires. American B-17s continued the bombing the next day.
The attack killed an estimated 25,000 people, though wartime propaganda and later revisionist accounts inflated figures wildly, some claiming hundreds of thousands. Kurt Vonnegut, a POW in the city at the time, later immortalized the horror in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. The raid's necessity remains fiercely debated: critics call it a war crime against a city of limited military value, while defenders point to its rail hub and war industries.