After Dresden (13/2/45 - 13/2/18).

From 13 – 15 February 1945, RAF and US Air Force planes dropped around 2,400 tons of explosives and 1,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the German city of Dresden. The 805 British and about 500 American bombers inflicted destruction on an unimaginable scale on the virtually-undefended, refugee-crammed city’s old town and inner suburbs.

The hundreds of thousands of high explosive and incendiary bombs caused a firestorm that trapped and incinerated tens of thousands of German civilians. Some German sources put the human cost at 100,000 lives.

The air strike was designed to bring a conclusive end to the Second World War, but the humanitarian catastrophe that resulted from the attack has continued to bring up ethical  questions that are debated to this day.

The bombing of Dresden is sometimes given as an example of modern ‘total war’, meaning that the normal rules of war were not followed. Targets in total war are not only military, but civilian and the types of weapons used are not restricted.The fact that refugees fleeing the Soviet advance from the east caused the population to swell means that the amount of casualties from the bombing is unknown. Estimates put the number anywhere between 25,000 up to 135,000.

During the war American author Kurt Vonnegut was held in Dresden alongside 159 other US soldiers. The soldiers were kept in a meat locker during the bombing, its thick walls protecting them from the fires and blasts. The horrors Vonnegut witnessed in the aftermath of the bombings inspired him to write the 1969 anti-war novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’.

The late historian American Howard Zinn, who was himself a pilot in the Second World War, cited the bombing of Dresden, along with that of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Hanoi, as an example of questionable ethics in wars which target civilian casualties with aerial bombs. Here's a poem I've written:

After Dresden

Evil falls from all sides
Spits its deadly poison,
In Dresden everyone felt
Horror unimaginable,
No one left alive could escape
As people burned in flames,
Left a mark that forever stained
Releasing years of mental turmoil,
Burning phosphorus still today falls
From, Gaza, Iraq to Syria,
Civilian casualties lost forever
Vanished under cruel clouds of ideology
Skin and bone melting and disintergrating,
Rising today as spectral ghosts.

Poem can also be found here :

https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/after-dresden-13-2-45-13-2-18-by-dave-rendle/