A. Stvzvm'! MncDmm/d D.F.C., MD. C..M.

Section 4 DRESDEN

It makes me mad when I hear people who were not present, or in many cases not even born, talk about

the bombing of Dresden, the old capital of Saxony, on February 13/14, 1944. They would like to execute Bomber Harris for allowing the raid on a city of Germany in the latter part of the war.

The critics do not recall, or wish to recall, the hardship placed on the English cities by German Bomber Command, especially on London during the earlier part of the war. In fact, the Germans were pouring in on the city, during the raid of Dresden. The new German number of Vl’s and V2’s was Hitler’s idea of destroying English towns - we hear little of the V1 and V2 and their destructive nature in the earlier stages of rockets - what about Coventry? No doubt we settled the score of Coventry, but in over 30 bombing raids over Germany, we did not go after civilians. Twenty of these raids were over the industrial area of Ruhr which had the heaviest flak in Germany; we called it “Happy Valley" - many Canadian airmen met their doom over this area. As I recall, when we were getting briefed for the raid on Dresden, it was just another city which was deep in Germany. When one figures that the total capacity of both tanks of the Lancaster, was 2,254 gallons; in average flying time gasoline consumption was about 200 gallons an hour; so, in 11 hours you could use at least 2,200 gallons.

All I can say of Bomber Harris - a man I never met, but as I flew a complete tour of operations over Europe, I observed that he was quite careful with his decisions. If by some reason a target was scrapped for fog or other

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