Why Dresden was attacked
From Noble Frankland Sir: David Woodhead (Letters, 6 March) asks why, if it was legitimate to destroy Dresden because it was a communications and industrial centre, the RAF and USAAF (the USAF did not then exist) targeted the city centre rather than its communications and industry. The answer is that this was 1945 not 2004. Dresden's war industry was scattered — largely in small units — throughout the area and did not constitute a collective aiming point. The specific dislocation of the railway system at Dresden would have required a co-ordinated series of attacks starting with the repair facilities, the feeder lines, including viaducts and bridges, and finally dealing with the actual lines through Dresden. This, as was the case with the French railways leading to the Normandy invasion area, would have required a sustained campaign for which, in the case of the Dresden attack, there simply was not time. The hope was that a massive area attack would, largely by indirect means, dislocate industry and communications through the production of general chaos and, it must not be forgotten, disrupt a base upon which the German army was falling back.
As to Hugh Lunghi's observations (Letters, 6 March) about what the Russians did or did not ask for at Yalta, there is a pointblank inconsistency. He claims that General Antonov asked for the bombing of Dresden and also for that city to be among the markers for a bomb-line between east and west. A bomb-line, of course, is a line beyond which one must not bomb and therefore also up to which one must be extremely cautious. If the Russians asked for a bombline through Dresden, which the Yalta minutes and other evidence clearly shows that they did, they could hardly also have asked for the place to be bombed. The Yalta minutes — by which I mean the official ones and not versions printed in the New York
Times, etc. make no mention of a Russian request for the bombing of Dresden.
Lunghi's suggestion that mention of Berlin, Leipzig and Chemnitz might have been taken to include Dresden as that had been part of the August 1944 'Thunderclap' plan is quite extraordinary. The August 1944 'Thunderclap' plan was exclusively concerned with a massive knock-out blow against Berlin and had been discarded long before the Yalta conference.
Finally, I must observe that I have not had the advantage of hearing any of Mr Lunghi's broadcasts and lectures on the question of Yalta over the past 60 years. Nor, it seems, have any of the authorities in Washington or London. Had they but known of any concrete evidence that the Russians had asked for the bombing of Dresden, they would certainly have flung it in the face of the Soviet authorities at any time between 1948 and the demise of the Soviet Union.
Noble Frankland
Abingdon, Oxfordshire
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