Dresden casualties

[BeauBrummie]

Out of interest, a former Lancaster tail gunner I talked to a couple of years ago told me he did 27 ops and then the end of the war in Europe brought his only tour to an end. When I asked him if he was relieved about that, he emphatically was!

Yes especially when some times flying to the target wasn't enough to count towards your tour. I've read of many crews who had to come back with their bomb load for mechanical or damage reasons and were gutted as they know it wouldn't count.

Beau

 

[hairyspin]

I recently re-read Paul Brickhill's The Dam Busters and Guy Gibson's Enemy Coast Ahead and was struck by how inaccurate much of the bombing was in practice. 617 Squadron got very good when they got properly going, but they were among the very best and the best equipped.
I can't help thinking how easy it is to think poor aiming for a particular target is just indiscriminate bombing, but I fear this ground has been gone over many times already.

 

[guzler]

Squiffy, he's 14 according to him and i stongly suspect that he won't be with us much longer due to his use of language and lack of respect. Ordinarily I wouldn't publicly post about this stuff, but the kidd needs to learn a lesson about manners, and respect and he also needs to learn to think before specking, albeit virtually.

Apart from his language, I personally think this guys comments have been mis-read. I don't think he lacks respect (again apart from the language, which does appear to be provoked), he is merely asking questions and appears quite naive and doesn't necessarily realise how sentimental some older members are to historical events.

Please can't we judge members on their enthusiasm, not on their general knowledge and maybe this banning wouldn't of happened.

My two penneth guys.

 

[grandguy]

I couldn't get on my comuter for a couple of days and I am pleased to see so many responses. I am not surprised that the name Dresden is not widely known, it all happened sixty odd years ago. It is as if , when I was a youngster, someone had mentioned "Andersonville", a notorious Civil war prison. About twenty years ago I happened to say about a young woman who had lost a lot of weight, "You look like you came out of Belsen!". This was met by blank stares and , "What is Belssen?" Immediately after the end of the war, everybody knew the names of the worst concentration camps, all of the newsreels in the movie houses ran them regularly, much as shortly after 9/11 the TV news was filled withy images of the towers crashing down. Belsen was particularly notable for starving, (to death), women.
I answer to a query, yes I did take part in big city raids. In another thread I described our daylight bombing of Hamburg and being attacked by ME 262s. I should say it was likely that we bombed Hamburg, it was covered in heavy cloud and we bombed red smoke puffs over the clouds that had been released by the Pathfinders. Prior to that we had bombed Hamburg at night, just a huge area of flame, much like flying over a huge, city size, campfire. The pathfinders who flew almost ten or fifteen thousand feet below us, called out instructions like, "Bomb the column of smoke, or "bomb the red fire!" These bombings were at the end of the war and it was surprising that there was anything left. As the Germans found out when they bombed British cities, it takes an unbelievable amount of explosive to cripple a large city. Hamburg had had a couple of major attacks much earlier in the war and I understand that most of the damage was caused by firestorms.