Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Bruce A Thompson]

That is a fair evaluation

However, it does not take into consideration what was actually going on in theater.

First and foremost, it was not Curtis Lemay who made the decision to bomb Dresden. That decision came all the way from the top.

Just prior to the bombing, the German armies were retreating from the eastern front with Russia hot on their tails. The Germans were mobilizing several divisions in the west and preparing to send them east to join up with the retreating armies. Successful joining of the two forces would have bogged down the Russian advance and prolonged the war at great cost to Allied forces in lives lost.

Curchill had few options. His war planners came up with the idea of clogging the transportation arteries with masses of refugees from the eastern cities thus slowing down the reinforcement effort and ending the war much earlier. The plans were brought up to bomb Berlin and three other eastern cities, one of which was Dresden. These plans were brought up, shelved, and brought up again.

The actual command and control for the eventual bombing raids was the RAF. Not Curtis Lemay.

This article goes into it in great detail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

The US Air Force Historical Division wrote a report in response to the international concern about the bombing, which was classified until December 1978.[31] This said that there were 110 factories and 50,000 workers in the city supporting the German war effort at the time of the raid.[32] According to the report, there were aircraft components factories; a poison gas factory (Chemische Fabrik Goye and Company); an anti-aircraft and field gun factory (Lehman); an optical goods factory (Zeiss Ikon AG); as well as factories producing electrical and X-ray apparatus (Koch & Sterzel AG); gears and differentials (Saxoniswerke); and electric gauges (Gebrüder Bassler). It also said there were barracks, and hutted camps, and a munitions storage depot.[33]

The USAF report also states that two of Dresden's traffic routes were of military importance: north-south from Germany to Czechoslovakia, and east-west along the central European uplands.[34] The city was at the junction of the Berlin-Prague-Vienna railway line, as well as the Munich-Breslau, and Hamburg-Leipzig.[34] Colonel Harold E. Cook, a US POW held in the Friedrichstadt marshaling yard the night before the attacks, later said that "I saw with my own eyes that Dresden was an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery and miles of freight cars loaded with supplies supporting and transporting German logistics towards the east to meet the Russians."[35]