All language subtitles for greatest.events.of.world.war.ii.in.hd.colour.s01e08.1080p.web.x264-stout-eng

Hello, Skip.
The first plane is just going down.

If your intention
is to kill civilians,

how would you define the atrocity?

Steady.

Bombs down.

Dresden was the raid
that went horribly right.

Super-hot air spreading the fire
underground.

People in terror
trying to escape,

separated by buildings
that were exploding.

We just don't know how long
the Germans will fight

and possibly have to kill everyone,
because they were not stopping.

He is the most controversial
British officer of the Second World War.

He is a fanatic.

Was it justified morally or not?

That really is
the million-dollar question.

The bombing of Dresden
is one of the most controversial events

of World War II.

Now rare footage from around the world,
expertly restored in full color,

tells the story
as you've never seen it before.

The morning
of the 15th of February 1945,

the eastern German City of Dresden
lies in ruins.

Further evidence of
the Allies' total dominance of the skies.

But within days, the Dresden story
is turned on its head.

A hidden source inside Germany
feeds shocking pictures to the press.

And a previously unreported level
of civilian suffering and destruction

is revealed to the world.

All of a sudden
people in the United Kingdom

and the United States were saying,
"How on Earth, in our name,

are our planes actually producing terror
against civilians?

It's completely unacceptable."

It's reported that Dresden
was a city of culture,

with no military value.

And allegedly, hundreds of thousands
of men, women and children

have been killed.

The Allies, seen for so long
to be fighting evil,

look to have perpetrated an atrocity.

It's a totally different situation
in the Second World War.

All the rules have been torn up
and kicked into touch.

So how did Britain
and the United States come to this?

What is the truth about Dresden?

Six years earlier,
Nazi Germany sweeps through Europe,

powered by an era of mechanized warfare,

both on the ground and in the air.

The French, Belgians,
and Dutch are overwhelmed.

And the British Expeditionary Force
is chased off the beaches of Dunkirk.

By the summer of 1940,
Britain stands alone

and under attack by the Luftwaffe.

But Britain's new prime minister
refuses to surrender.

You ask, what is our policy?

I will say: It is to wage war
by sea, land, and air,

with all our might.

To wage war against a monstrous tyranny,
that is our policy.

To try and win favor
with the British public,

Hitler tells the Luftwaffe
not to attack Central London.

But that August,
a sortie mistakenly hits Oxford Street.

Winston Churchill strikes back
with a small shock raid of his own

on Berlin.

The attack prompts
a fearsome response from Hitler.

And if the Royal Air Force

throws 2,000, 3,000
or 4,000 kg bombs on us,

then we will throw 150,000, 180,000
230,000, 300,000 kgs in one night.

The time will come
when one of us will break,

and it will not be Germany!

The Luftwaffe launch
an unprecedented bombing campaign

designed to break Britain's morale.

Mass raids
drop incendiary bombs,

loaded with flammable material,

like thermite,
on dozens of British cities.

There are major fire attacks
on Liverpool, Birmingham, and Coventry.

And London is hit by a blitz
for over 50 consecutive days.

The campaign against London
is a 24-hour campaign

almost from the beginning.

They see and hear the air battle going on
as it comes towards them,

so it makes Londoners very much feel
that they are now a part of the battle.

The German air raids
in Britain kill over 40,000 people.

Angered and fighting
for her very existence,

there is now an appetite in Britain
to strike back,

and make mass bombing a major part
of its own war strategy.

Churchill's stance
over area bombing

during the Second World War
seems to move.

In the early stages,
he voices quite a lot of reservations

that actually, it doesn't do the job.

It's not going to break the enemy morale,
in fact, it could stiffen it.

On the other hand, it was an opportunity
to strike back at the Germans

at a time when the Germans
seemed to be victorious

in pretty much every other
theater of war.

If you had asked British people,
particularly following the Blitz,

going into 1941, if they could fight
with as much force as possible,

the answer would have been an overwhelming
"yes" from almost everybody.

The RAF's own bomber division,
known as Bomber Command,

has been launching targeted raids
against Nazi Germany since 1939.

Initially they fly day sorties,
aiming for precision targets

like airfields and oil refineries.

But flying in the broad daylight

leaves the bombers horribly exposed
to attacks by the Luftwaffe.

Within a year, the RAF is forced
to switch most of the fleet

to bombing at night.

Night timers are safer,
you have the cover of the darkness.

The only real problem with bombing,
there's no way attacking at night

at high altitude you could hope
to hit anything, you know,

of a small nature on the ground.

The bombers' rudimentary
targeting technology

is hopelessly ill-equipped
for the challenge

of night-time precision bombing.

In the summer of 1941
there is a notorious report,

and they discover that hardly anyone's
even getting within five miles

of hitting their target,
let alone a few hundred yards.

In the first two years
of operations,

Bomber Command makes little impact
on the Nazi war machine.

The campaign comes at a huge cost.

Germany's bristling air defenses

are slaughtering RAF air crew.

These young sons,
boys, were killed in tens of thousands

by German night fighters and flak.

I mean, they had a huge death toll.

Where is he, rear gunner,
can you see him?

Jerry planes are behind us.

Just keep weaving,
there's some flak coming at me.

Down!

About 55% of the men
who served in Bomber Command died.

There was enormous fear that they tried
to keep under control

by various coping strategies,
including often very heavy drinking,

because the mathematics
were simply overwhelming

that a large proportion of them
would not survive their tours.

By 1942, morale inside
Bomber Command is rock bottom.

That February,
a new commander in chief is appointed,

with a remit to turn things round.

His name is Arthur Harris,

he soon becomes known as "Bomber" Harris.

He was stubborn, opinionated,
to the point of rudeness.

Believed passionately in air power.

He was an attack dog, basically,
hired by the British government

to do what they felt was now a key job.

If you individually succeed,
you will have delivered

the most devastating blow
against the very vitals of the enemy.

Let him have it, right on the chin.

He is a fanatic.

He is someone who,
once he gets an idea in his head,

finds it impossible to change it.

On the other hand, he would have been
brilliant to serve under.

He looked after his men
extraordinarily well,

provided them with the best
equipment possible,

and gave them as much
support as possible.

Arthur Harris spearheads
an entirely new approach

at Bomber Command.

Night raids that no longer rely
on precision targeting,

Harris targets entire German cities.

What they can do
is hit a city-sized target.

You don't have to be accurate,
you have to hit something

the size of Hamburg, you know,
one of the biggest cities in Germany.

It really comes
to a cold calculation of war.

Arthur Harris is adamant
that in his hands,

city bombing can force Germany
to surrender.

Because he plans to up the ante

and carpet bomb not just industry
and infrastructure,

but also civilian housing.

Harris believes
the new approach,

coldly titled "Worker Dehousing",

will deprive the Nazis of the manpower
they need for their war economy

and cripple German manufacturing.

The concept was,
there is no difference

between combatants and non-combatants.

Because the civilians,
by their sheer existence,

they're producing something
and they have a value for the war.

No civilized country, like Germany,
can wage the war without its cities.

If we destroy their cities,

if we burn down their cities,

then we have won.

There are a lot of people
who say that bombing can never win a war.

Well, my answer to that
is that it has never been tried yet.

Germany will make a most interesting
initial experiment,

and we shall see.

Harris has a potent new weapon
to execute his strategy,

the RAF's rapidly expanding fleet
of heavy bombers.

The famous bomber,
the Lancaster,

one of the most famous bombers
of the Second World War,

is a brilliant night-time bomber.

It can fly high,
it's a very stable platform,

and it can carry a heavy bombing load.

There was no way Britain
could fight a land war against Germany,

we didn't have the manpower.

What it did have were resources,
technology, and a huge pool of volunteers

to call on for building a large air force.

The heavy Lancaster bombers
are also developing new technology

like ground-scanning radar
and radio navigation.

Harris trains and organizes
his new fleet.

When in 1942 the United States
joins the war in Europe,

they base hundreds of their own
B-17 Flying Fortresses in Britain.

The Allied air fleet
is now too big to be stopped.

They served the wind and now,

they are going to reap the whirlwind.

In the entire Blitz of London,
from September to May 1940,

the Germans only dropped 18,000 tons
of bombs on London.

In 1944 the RAF is dropping on Germany
over half a million tons.

Off the radar in terms of increased scale.

It was absolutely huge.

If you have a hammer,
you're going to go around

looking for nails.

And in the RAF we had a very big,
very expensive hammer.

It acquired a momentum of its own.

On the 24th of July 1943,

Hamburg, Germany's second largest city,

is hit in a joint Allied raid
called Operation Gomorrah.

A fire storm grips the city.

Sixty percent
of the residential area is destroyed…

and over 43,000 people are killed.

The devastation wrought
on western Germany

is a shock even to Winston Churchill.

Churchill is shown film
of a Ruhr City being bombed

and he almost wept and said,
"Are we beasts to be doing this?"

So one has this strange duality
in Churchill running a war

and this actually proved to be the case
with the bombing campaign too.

That year, with the Allied
bombing campaign escalating,

Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels,
calls on every German civilian

to join the war effort
in what he calls total war.

Do you want total war?

But the grizzly aftermath
of the bombing raids

is played down in the German press.

The Allies monitor and sanitize
their news reports as well.

The public are told
the city bombing campaign

is focused on military targets.

One of the greatest
serial stories of the war,

the battering of Hamburg.

The cargoes of our bombers
shattered military objectives in the city

and started hundreds of fires.

The general population
seems happy enough with the policy.

The British people had been attacked
in their cities from 1940 onwards.

Some think the Germans almost deserve it.

Harris's bombing campaign
is relentless.

As the German war machine
begins to falter,

dozens of her industrial cities,
including Karlsruhe,

Bremen, and Stuttgart

are smashed by Allied raids.

We propose to entirely
emasculate every enemy center

where production is necessary.

We are well on the way now to that end.

War is a race.

And the prize is victory.

But whilst the destructive
city raids drain the Nazi's resources,

still they refuse to surrender.

That level of destruction
usually does the trick,

but it doesn't in the Nazi state
because of that iron grip of the Nazis,

because of this black and white
world view that Hitler has

of either the Thousand-Year Reich
or Armageddon.

Then in the summer of 1944,

the whole focus of the Allied war effort
changes with D-Day.

The largest land invasion force
in history storms the Normandy beaches

and pushes into occupied France.

Harris' deputy
dismisses the operation

as an unnecessary boating expedition.

But to most observers,
it's now the surest route to victory.

Many senior Allied generals
want Bomber Command

to stop the city attacks
and support the ground war.

They know the Lancaster's
accurate new targeting technology

is now more than capable
of hitting precision military targets.

But Harris viewed this
as a complete waste of time and effort.

And same goes for repeated American
requests for Bomber Command

to try and hit targets like oil fields,
oil refineries, factories.

His bombers had helped
drive Germany out of the war

and provided this role, so he continues
wanting to devastate the cities.

And so Harris,
the right man for the job,

but perhaps a bit of a liability
in some ways in terms of his refusal

to contemplate how his force
could be better used.

Despite Harris's reluctance,
Churchill tells him to comply.

His Lancaster bombers are pressed
into service as transportation.

And a new city bombing campaign
against Berlin,

called Operation Thunderclap, is shelved.

It looks like area bombing
has had its day.

But that winter,
the Allies' ground war

grinds to a halt.

Hitler launches
a surprise counter-offensive

in the Ardennes.

The Battle of the Bulge.

Ninety-thousand American troops
are killed.

And the British Army is a spent force.

The British perspective was,
we just don't know

how long the Germans will fight,
and possibly have to kill everyone

because they were not stopping.

They were not stopping,
they were not giving up.

We have to end this damned war.

The only Allied advance
is on the Eastern Front.

The Soviet Red Army is pushing on
from their decisive victory at Stalingrad.

The offensive is brutal

and it's costing the Soviet Union
millions of men.

That February,
the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin,

asks President Franklin Roosevelt
and Churchill

to Yalta in Crimea for urgent talks.

Relations between Roosevelt,
Churchill, and Stalin

were noticeably more strained
at the Yalta Conference

than at previous meetings.

Joseph Stalin felt the Soviet Union
had been left deliberately

to take the vast majority of the losses
and the causalities of the war

against Germany.

If Churchill and Roosevelt
want a quick end to the war,

they need to keep the Red Army
on the move.

The Western Allies don't have the will
or the means to offer manpower,

but they do have a huge air force.

Western air superiority
can solve their problem.

Churchill's misgivings
about the morality of area bombing

are set aside.

This is something that Churchill
and Roosevelt were very, very keen

to provide because it was well within
their capabilities,

as well as visually impressive.

Bomber Commands' moth-balled
Operation Thunderclap

is revived and refocused
for the Eastern Front.

RAF strategists believe
that attacking fresh cities

in the east of Germany
will cause chaos and destruction

behind enemy lines
and aid the Red Army's advance.

The Germans are having
to move men and material

up to the Eastern Front
to fight the Russians.

And they have to go through
these cities.

If those cities are attacked by bombers,

it will put greater pressure
on the Germans,

it will cause confusion in those cities,

it will stress the resources
that the Germans have.

Soviet strategists
give their approval to the plan.

Once again, the city bombing campaign
is at center stage.

Harris is given a target list
of eastern German cities

and told the objective
is to cause chaos and disruption.

Harris just absolutely wants to show,

as many ways it's self-vindication,

he wants to show that he's right,
prove he's been right.

Nightfall on the 13th
of February 1945.

A stream of RAF Lancaster bombers
take off from bases in eastern England.

They make their way across the Channel
into liberated France,

through Belgium and down
into Nazi Germany.

By now they are on enemy radar.

The bomber formation tries to throw
the Germans off the scent.

The British come up
with quite ingenious inventions

to try and confuse German defenses.

One of the most famous is Window,
which is to drop a huge amount of chaff,

just strips of aluminum,
that they would drop into the air,

like aluminum foil
and they'd fill the air

with aluminum foil
and the radar would go haywire.

Which meant that the Germans
essentially saw nothing

but a kind of curtain,
behind which they could not see

until the bombers emerged from it.

And that kept the Germans
from knowing precisely

where the bombers of Bomber Command
were headed that night.

Finally at around 9:00 p.m.,
the Lancasters emerge

from behind the cover of their chaff.

They're heading south east
across Germany.

Even under the cover of darkness,
a bombing raid is fraught with danger.

Creeping across the sky in a slow,
heavy bomber,

with no fighter planes for protection.

And this time, the crews are heading
deeper into enemy territory

than ever before.

They're covering
an enormous distance,

probably the longest raid most of them
would have carried out

during the whole of the Second World War.

And of course they're vulnerable
during that period,

from anti-aircraft fire and also
from interception by German fighters.

You never quite know
when something's going to hit you,

and it must have been quite scary.

Going this far east in particular
was something that the crews dreaded.

But the thrill of, you know,
being in these mighty things,

thundering across,
particularly on moon-lit nights

with the kind of silvery clouds
and things, you know,

a lot of them kind of had moments
of elation in between sheer terror.

On this sortie, however,
the German Luftwaffe

are nowhere to be seen.

Their numbers have been slashed
by constant combat

and dwindling resources.

And tonight they fail to respond
to the Lancaster's raid at all.

It's an unusually clear winter's night.

The pathfinder and marker planes
at the lead

can see their target perfectly.

It's the eastern German city
of Dresden.

The unsuspecting inhabitants below
are just finishing the day

of carnival celebrations.

Dresden has told themselves
nobody will want to bomb this city

because it's so beautiful.

Sadly, they were wrong.

Dresden is the capital of Saxony

and one of Germany's most historic
and cultural cities,

layered with centuries-old architecture.

It was called
the Florence of the Elbe.

It was a city that many westerners
loved to visit during the interwar years.

It had exquisite architecture,
lots of art.

And so it was a city
that was very deeply appreciated

by the cultured classes,
the educated classes.

It's not just
the cultural center,

it played the role in the Third Reich,
economy, administration,

in the world of Nazi Germany.

There were Jews hunted down, killed.

The whole dark side of Nazi Germany.

The city has been virtually
untouched by bombing.

It has become a place
of safe harbor for refugees

from other war-torn German territories.

And by now,
the inhabitants of Dresden are sure

the city is protected
by a special status.

People told themselves
all kinds of stories,

they felt that their city,
preserved as it was

with its beautiful palaces,
would somehow be a possibility

for being the Allied capital
after the war.

And there was a funny story of,
circulating,

saying that Dresden will not be attacked
because Churchill's aunt is living there.

Who this aunt was supposed to be,
I do not know.

The local Nazi leader
in Dresden is so complacent,

he makes no preparations
for an air attack.

Apart from the one deep concrete bunker
he has constructed for himself,

there are very few bomb shelters
in the city.

So, the whole city was in the end
not prepared for an air attack.

Nobody expected Dresden to be attacked.

But for RAF Bomber Command,
the reality of Dresden is very different.

Germany's seventh largest city
is also important to their war economy.

Harris has only spared the city
because until now,

the Lancaster's fuel tanks
weren't large enough to reach it.

Allied intelligence was aware
of significant military production

within Dresden itself.

There were factories
making machine guns, rifles,

there's a factory making
tank landing ships.

Dresden is a major rail hub.

From Dresden troops are being sent
to the Eastern Front,

they're being sent down to Verona,
to the Italian Front a well.

It is not the fault of RAF Bomber Command
that air raid shelters

have been given such scant regard.

At 10:00 p.m.,
RAF pathfinder planes

swoop down on the city.

They face almost
no anti-aircraft fire.

The Nazi high command
has moved all the guns

to the front line in the east.

The scene is set for a perfect storm.

The pathfinders drop their marker flares
uncontested

and with unerring accuracy.

The target they've been given by Harris
and Bomber Command

is the central stadium,
right next to the marketplace,

the heart of residential Dresden.

Why isn't it the railway?

It's absolutely the glue which is keeping
the German war effort together.

The markers go on the old,

the Altstadt, the old town.

Dresden was not
a military target for the British,

this is quite clear.

Of course Dresden
had war industry factories,

but these were more on the outskirts.

But this was not the aim
of the British bombers.

The aiming point of the British bombers
was the marketplace, the Altmarkt.

Whilst we were preparing
some scrambled eggs

we heard the warning,
which was this time the real thing.

And it was right above the city.

Okay, boys, okay.

Left, left.

Under normal conditions,
the bombers would avoid anti-aircraft fire

and drop their payloads far away
from the target area.

Will you put the revs up please?

But tonight
it's like a training maneuver.

Hello Bombardier,
okay when you are.

Bomb doors open.

Bomb doors open, Bombardier.

Steady.

Steady.

Bombs gone.

Two hundred and forty-four
Lancaster's drop all their bombs

in the space of just 15 minutes.

The sound of the falling bombs
came closer and closer.

And I thought,
"Well, when will the next come?

And will it fall onto our house?"

It was a fright which shook the knees
and the teeth were chattering

and, uh, one was numb.

Huge high explosive
blockbuster bombs

and 200,000 clustered incendiaries

smash into the historic center of Dresden.

The precise combination
is deliberately designed

to get inside the buildings
and start fires.

Large explosives,
like the 4000-pound cookie,

blow the roofs off a street
or a square of houses,

and then hundreds of light incendiaries
fall into those open roofs

and set everything on fire.

And the combination, of course,
blew buildings apart

and then lit many fires.

And once those fires got on the way,

they began to converge
and converge and converge.

Dresden's tightly packed
medieval streets and wooden houses

are the perfect fuel for the flames.

And tonight, a steady wind
fans them across the city.

Fire fed itself
and it started to pull oxygen in

from all around, a self-feeding fire.

Something that one can't even begin
to imagine,

it's kind of an outer ring
of Dante's Inferno.

And just a few hours later,

a second huge wave
of over 500 bombers arrives.

A coldly calculated tactic
Harris has picked up from the Luftwaffe.

This second raid
was deliberately timed

to give the firefighters on the ground
enough time to get out there

and try and put out the fires.

And then another enormous
quantity of bombs rains down.

And the second raid started,
it was more frightening

because we were outside.

My sister was hysterical,
I had to calm her down.

By now the rare conditions
have come together

to form an unstoppable high-speed inferno,

known as a firestorm.

It effectively creates a tornado
on the ground.

Super-heated air that automatically
sucks at very high speed,

air in from the surrounding area
and creates very high winds,

strong enough to lift people,
uproot trees,

move vehicles and suck them all
into the flames.

The destruction of the city
is much, much more effective.

As day breaks,
the Americans arrive.

Their bombers are heading
for Dresden's military marshaling yards

and industry.

The American Air Forces
liked to state

that they only engaged
in precision attacks.

But when they bombed Dresden,
of course the city was covered

in a great rolling cloud of smoke
from the previous night's raids.

So essentially, they engaged
in another area attack.

One bomb group actually completely
misidentified the target

and bombed Prague instead of Dresden.

When the Lancaster bombers
land back in Britain,

RAF Bomber Command is astounded
by the effectiveness of the mission.

They've lost just six planes
from a sortie of 800.

The next day, the Allied press
trumpet the success of the raid.

Bomber Command
was using the techniques

that it used at Dresden routinely.

And it just so happened that everything
at Dresden went perfectly,

it just ran like clockwork.

Just a few days later,
a German backlash gathers momentum.

Rumors coming from inside Germany
hint at the scale of the human tragedy.

And anger grows among the population

to the complete absence
of air raid defenses.

The Nazi Elite is worried about,
is there is going to be this implosion,

that everyone's going to go,
"Do you know what, I've had enough of this

and I'm just going to surrender."

Party Boss, Mr. Mutschmann,
fled Dresden

and was somewhere
in the surrounding mountains.

He was a deserter and a pig.

People said
they would kill Hitler

if they got their hands on to him.

But to everyone's surprise,
the Nazi regime does little

to suppress the details
of the horrific Allied raid.

With the enemy now at the gates,
the Nazi's propaganda chief,

Joseph Goebbels, takes a bold new tack,

and spins the bad news.

Goebbels decided
that not to minimize Dresden

but to maximize it,
to go right up to the max.

What he's trying to do
with Dresden, he's going,

"You know, this is the barbarity
that we're dealing with,

you know, these awful people
who are wanting to destroy everything

that is good about Germany,
but you've got to keep going,

you've got to keep fighting
because the alternative

is complete annihilation
and destruction."

Goebbels unleashed something
very wild after the Dresden raid.

I mean, you could almost call it
like a sort of propaganda plague,

and it was infectious.

Goebbels leaks horrific photos
and eye-witness testimony

from inside Dresden anonymously

through the neutral press
in Sweden and Switzerland.

SWEDISH DAILY NEWS
25th FEBRUARY 1945

He tells them

Nearly 200,000 victims
of the Dresden raid.

That up to 200,000 civilians
have been killed.

It was useful to Goebbels

to interpret this as a terror attack,

in his attempt to win
world public opinion,

and in his attempt to paint the Allies
as terrorists.

And so he was very aggressive
in trying to reach the neutral press

in particular, to tell the tale
of this awful thing

that happened to Dresden,

to rally the German people
and to shock the rest of the world.

It would have been very easy
to have gotten shocking pictures

of deaths of non-combatants at Dresden.

I think for a propaganda minister
that would have been easy work.

Many of the inhabitants
believed the city was immune from bombing

and didn't take the air raid siren
seriously at first.

The eye-witness reports and pictures
reveal the merciless hell

at the Dresden firestorm.

The story of Dresden transforms

from Nazi failure into Allied cruelty.

The scene would have been
one of complete havoc.

People in terror trying to escape,

trying to keep track of their children
or their loved ones,

people calling out for one another,

people being separated by buildings
that were exploding.

The terrible winds that children
wouldn't have been able to stand up in.

I can't even imagine
what it would have been like,

especially as a mother
with a young child,

trying to keep a child safe
in this kind of environment.

I ran through the burning streets

and my face and hair was singed.

There was some awful scenes,
a number of people died

when they passed an open entrance,
the suction was such

that they couldn't fight it

and were dragged
into the burning building.

Those who could,
ran to the park or into the reservoir.

But they were boiled alive or blasted

by the second wave of bombers.

Some took refuge
in the old interconnected cellars

under their homes,
as they'd been told to.

But they were cooked alive by the heat.

The super-hot air
started infiltrating,

coming down through the cellars
and actually shooting

through the breakthroughs,
even faster in some ways

than it was spreading above ground.

So there really was no escape
and this is the true horror

of the Dresden firestorm.

Bodies are being melted.

Enormous numbers of casualties
on the ground actually lost their lives

as a result of suffocation or poisoning,

rather than they were actually
burnt to death.

There was really no escape
except to run, but then where?

People tried to tramp through
melting streets

and found their shoes
stripped off their feet,

and they could no longer move
and died where they stood.

Whether you survived
was simply a matter of luck.

Two days later,
Dresden is still burning.

It takes a recovery team seven hours

to get into the city's one main
air raid shelter.

Once inside, they find nothing
but green, brown liquid, and bones,

all 1,000 people inside
have simply melted.

Well, it was horrendous
quite honestly.

My father was found
only identified by his teeth.

There were a lot of German soldiers
who were on their stations

in the Altstadt,

and people really got killed.

Bodies and bodies, hanging heads down
and legs down.

Bombing the city centers,
and by this, causing chaos,

we have to focus
that it was about killing civilians.

Kill as many civilians as possible.

And the more civilians you kill,
the bigger the chaos will be,

the greater will be the effect
on ending, shortening the war.

But of course it was not worth it.

We have no evidence whatsoever
that it achieved any effect.

The main streets were again serviceable
after a couple of days.

And even the factories were not destroyed.

The factories, the airfields,
all things you could use

for military purposes were not destroyed.

News of the indiscriminate
targeting of civilians in Dresden

soon reaches Allied journalists.

A young American reporter
sneaks the phrase "terror bombing"

past the sensors and it's published
all over the United States.

The story shocks
a previously insulated public.

It just sounds different
from what we've heard before,

exploiting refugees in a crowded city.

And the reporters picked up on that.

There was a media storm produced
in the western press,

this was the point at which questions
were beginning to be asked

in the British Parliament,
and you very much got

the British Government
on the back foot now.

Goebbels' master plan
starts to play out.

A catastrophic failure
of the German air defense

evolves into a model crisis
for the Allies.

And when he seeded the story
in the neutral press,

Goebbels lied.

He exaggerated the death toll,

taking the true figure
from the Dresden police report

and adding a zero.

The real death toll is 25,000.

Goebbels produced
this huge figure for Dresden

that's one of the most successful pieces
of fake news

in the history of fake news.

So, it's not the numbers
which were announced by Goebbels,

so in the 200 thousands.

The town of Dresden
a couple of years ago

set up an academic committee

who should definitely clear
how many people were killed in Dresden.

And their maximum estimate is 25,000.

It's a huge number,
but it's not ten times that number.

And when you go to concentration camps
and you see the monstrous way

in which the Nazis behaved,
and what they did to others,

the idea that they've got the nerve
to challenge what the Allies were doing

on something like Dresden
is absolutely outrageous.

The Allies take the bait
nonetheless and turn on each other.

The United States blame the British

for the indiscriminate bombing
at Dresden.

The Americans worked very hard
to distinguish themselves

and claim that they were not doing
area bombing.

They didn't want to be tarred
with the same brush as Bomber Command.

With the US Air Force
denying responsibility,

the actions of RAF Bomber Command
come under scrutiny.

And Winston Churchill fears
he might be held responsible.

By now the prime minister
has no need for the bombing campaign.

The Western Front is moving again

and the Soviets are deep inside
Nazi Germany.

So that March,
he starts to distance himself

from the policy of city bombing.

He's always been slightly torn
over the bombing of cities,

the area of bombing.

He's flip-flopped really between the two.

And I think the storm of protests
that there was after Dresden

has actually made him pretty guilty
about the whole thing.

He began to worry about how
his own actions

might be judged by historians.

And at this point,
he basically changed course

and sent a minute saying
that we really shouldn't engage

in this kind of activity anymore,
and we should avoid anything

that even remotely looks like
terroristic bombing.

As Churchill distances himself
from area bombing,

the blame for the Dresden attack shifts

to Bomber Command's ruthless leader,
Arthur Harris.

Now clearly, Harris was willing
to carry out the campaign,

that was his job.

But increasing attention
focused on Harris as the person

who had envisioned the raid,

but in fact, Churchill himself
had been critical

in spurring the Dresden Raid.

Harris is fairly incensed by it

and famously expresses the opinion

that Dresden is not worth the bones

of one British grenadier.

After Dresden,

the reputation of Bomber Command
and Arthur Harris

lies in tatters.

Harris after the war
becomes somebody

that no one wants to embrace.

He's not a hero.

In many ways the single largest part
of the British war effort,

Bomber Command, becomes someone
that no one wants to be associated with.

The final snub for Bomber Command
from Churchill

is that in his VE speech, he mentions
just about every branch

of the armed service and what they’ve done
and where they’ve served,

apart from one
and that is Bomber Command.

It takes 67 years

for the 55,000 men who served
and died in RAF Bomber Command

to finally get a memorial in London,

alongside the other British Armed Forces.

And the morality of the area bombing
of Dresden

is a difficult question,
debated to this very day.

We have to balance our great
sympathy for the Germany civilians

who were caught there and destroyed,

with the knowledge that hundreds
of thousands of people

will be killed by Germans
in the coming months.

So, Dresden is a legitimate target
and also Germany is resisting.

It's an odd thing. It's almost like
the victory of the Allies

in the Second World War was so complete
that the Germans have become victims.

It's, of course,
hard for a democracy

who fights against Hitler.

It's a bit like,
"Definitely, good against evil."

But there was no limit.

The more civilians we kill,
the better it is.

There's nobody who says,
"Stop, we can't do that."

And there's a point
at which you have to look at yourself

and say,
"What have I become in doing this?"

and I think this is where Dresden
is relevant.

It's a warning.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE
blu.duaine@protonmail.com