It was about nine p.m. on February 13, 1945; eight hundred and five British planes dropped twenty six hundred tons of bombs on Dresden. Soon the city was an inferno. The next morning six hundred American planes bombed the city again, and again on the fifteenth of February. Dresden burned for seven days. Only eight Allied planes were shot down. No one knows how many people died, but estimates the death toll at between twenty-five and hundred and thirty five thousand.
             During World War II, both the Allies and Axis powers destroyed military targets in Dresden, but also railways, docks, factories and landmarks. This inevitably meant killing civilians. Before long, the belief was that if you bombed and killed civilians that it would sooner or later destroy morale and the will to fight. At the time this was seen as a legitimate and necessary policy in order to win the war. One of the most supportive reasons for the bombing of Dresden was the German attack on Britain. Germany had bombed civilians in Coventry and London on November 1940, so it was seen as a payback to the Germans for the innocent lives that they had taken. Another supportive statement for the bombing of Dresden was that precision bombing was very difficult. Many pilots lost their lives trying to make sure that the city was destroyed. Bombing whole cities was easier and it guaranteed that targets were destroyed. Also, Dresden was protected by antiaircraft defenses, antiair!
             craft guns and searchlights, in anticipation of Allied air raids against the city.
             From a moral perspective Dresden was a center of cultural and architectural wonders, including the famous Zwinger Museum and Palace and the Cathedral Frauenkirche. There were no military objectives of any consequence in the city and its destruction could do nothing to weaken the Nazi movement. It is a proven fact that it would have been easier for the Allies to bomb the railway lines between Dresden and ...