Dresden, Bombing of (February 13–15, 1945) natural winds, then creating uncontrolled winds of its own, sucking fuel, broken buildings, and people into the flames The Germans lighted a decoy fire outside the city, but this was ignored by the Lancasters The next morning, 311 American B-17s hit the city, while other American bomber streams attacked Magdeburg and Chemnitz Prague was also bombed, in error The Americans followed up a day later when planes looking for a secondary target dropped another 400 tons of ordnance on Dresden The combined effect of the bombing was to create a firestorm in the center of Dresden The effectiveness of the follow-on bombing at Dresden was largely determined by the unusual accuracy of the initial target marking and by favorable weather The proportionate mix of high explosive to incendiaries dropped was not unusual In fact, fewer incendiaries were used against Dresden than in several other city bombings where firestorms did not result: the usual mix by 1945 of high explosives to incendiaries was 60:40 At Dresden the bombing created a devastating effect that was first seen in Hamburg, but was generally hard to achieve in Germany’s largely stone city centers In other German cities, wide boulevards had retarded creation of firestorms, but these were absent at Dresden In addition, civil defense measures made things worse: tunnels made to connect cellars in a system of makeshift underground shelters instead funneled the fire into new areas, and onto huddling refugees The tunnels also channeled large amounts of carbon monoxide into the cellars, poisoning those inside For decades, there was enormous controversy about casualty figures Wild claims of 120,000 or more were made at the time by Josef Göbbels These were repeated in the 1960s by the discredited falsifier of records and convicted Holocaust-denier, David Irving More honest historians have reached a modern consensus of 25,000–35,000 killed at Dresden Western Allied prisoners in the area, among them the writer Kurt Vonnegut, were forced to clear away charred corpses and rubble Controversy also attended responsibility for ordering the raid, with open criticism made shortly afterward in Parliament, from some pulpits, and in the British press In otherwise comprehensive memoirs, Winston Churchill elided over the bombing of Dresden and appeared to seek to shift blame to others Arthur Harris never repented from the general policy of area bombing conducted under his authority by RAF Bomber Command, or the Dresden raid He also tried to distance himself from criticism by suggesting that higher authorities insisted upon the bombing There was some effort by the British to later assert that Joseph Stalin specifically requested that Dresden be bombed That may in fact have occurred: it is certain that Stalin requested specific raids on Berlin and Leipzig, for instance It has been clearly demonstrated in recent histories that bombing Dresden was part of a more general air campaign to help clear the way for rapid westward advance of the Red Army by creating transportation confusion and otherwise inhibiting Wehrmacht movement in rear areas, including by deliberately sending hundreds of thousands of refugees onto the German road and rail systems The Dresden raid, above all others, came to symbolize the role that terror bombing played in the strategic air campaign against Germany It was even upheld by some as a key example supporting a specious 325