For this post, I am again stating that the people who died in Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig, and in any city hit by strategic bombing on all sides of the war, were people. Reducing their experiences to statistics is not the purpose of this or any project I will publish on this site. We must remember that humans are humans, not numbers to be analyzed.
In compiling the data for this chart, I noticed something strange between Dresden's bombing when compared to Hamburg and Leipzig. Dresden was the worst bombing by far in terms of proportional population loss as shown in a prior post, yet Dresden was hit with less incendiary bombs than the other cities I have researched thus far. I have since found slightly better numbers for their population from a more authoritative source and Dresden's population dropped 43% between 1939 or 1940 and 1945.1 Hamburg and Leipzig saw much less population destruction despite the use of a greater percentage of incendiary usage when compared to Dresden, losing 23% and 18% of their population respectively.2 Why then, was Dresden hit so much harder in comparison? If incendiary bombs (IB) were more effective, then why was Hamburg not the worst hit of all of Germany? As the chart above shows, Hamburg was hit by many more tons of IB than Dresden and more tons of total bombs overall. Granted, the majority of the Dresden bombing happened within a few days whereas Hamburg was bombed multiple times throughout the war. For my next project, I would like to organized and track down what actions, tactics, and technology made Dresden's bombing so much worse.
- The reason I list two numbers here is that the US listed both years as having the same information in multiple sources, implying that they did not have a better number for 1940 or that they simply did not know, so they used the number they had. The 1945 numbers all come from Wikipedia since the USAF did not have population numbers for that year either and Wikipedia cites the Federal Bureau of Statistics of Germany for their numbers.; USAF Historical Division Research Studies Institute, “Historical Analysis of the 14-15 February 1945 Bombings of Dresden,” 13 April 1953, Air University, 22, https://web.archive.org/web/20130218171142/http://www.afhso.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-110208-030.pdf, Accessed 29 September 2024; United States Strategic Bombing Survey, “Fire Raids on German Cities,” 1947, 6a, https://aul.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01AUL_INST/u9e6on/alma995580593406836, Accessed 5 October 2024, “Wikipedia: Dresden,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified 3 October 2024. [↩]
- I had the same issue here as mentioned in note one, The USSBS did not list any population numbers for 1945 for Hamburg or Leipzig either, so I have chosen to use the Wikipedia numbers for that year since they cite the Federal Bureau of Statistics of Germany as well.; US Strategic Bombing Survey, 1947, 6a.; “Wikipedia: Hamburg,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified 7 October 2024.; “Wikipedia: Leipzig,” Wikimedia Foundation, last modified 13 October 2024. [↩]