February 13, 1945: The Firebombing of Dresden

February 13, 1945: The German city of Dresden is "firebombed." In a joint effort, the U.S. Army Air Force (forerunner of the U.S. Air Force) and Britain's Royal Air Force drop nearly 4,000 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, which was the capital of the State of Saxony.

The incendiary devices started fires that destroyed more than 1,600 acres of urban space, and it is believed that about 25,000 people were killed, most of them civilians. The Nazis, showing that chutzpah was one Yiddish word they understood, called it a "holocaust."

The necessity of the bombing has been debated ever since. At the time, the city was a major industrial center, thus making its incapacitation a reasonable goal. And it was not clear that the Third Reich was on the verge of collapse. The advance of the Soviet Union's Red Army was not yet fully taken in by the U.S. and Britain.

Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time. He survived, and adapted his experiences for his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. It was made into a movie in 1972. In the preface to a later edition of the book, Vonnegut wrote:

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.

Today, Dresden remains the capital of the State of Saxony, and is home to about 800,000 people, with about 1.3 million in its metropolitan area.

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February 13, 1945 was a Tuesday. British historian Simon Schama was born. This was also the day of the martyrdom of Maria Onosa. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There was 1 game played in the NHL: The Boston Bruins beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 3-2 at the Chicago Stadium.