This day. Anniversary of Dresden fire bombing – Allied war crime prelude to the Cold War

Aftermath of the 1945 bombing of Dresden, Germany by Allied forces – at the Old Market, following bombings on 13 February 1945 | WALTER HAHN/AFP/Getty Images

By DOUGAL MACDONALD

On the night of February 13-14, 1945, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) bomber command carried out two devastating attacks on the German city of Dresden. At the time, Dresden’s pre-war population of 640,000 had been swelled by the presence of an estimated 100,000-200,000 refugees. Seven hundred and twenty-two aircraft dropped 1,478 tons of high explosives and 1,181 tons of incendiaries on the city. The resulting firestorm destroyed an area of 13 square miles, including the historic Altstadt Museum. Shortly after noon on February 14, a fleet of 316 U.S. bombers made a third attack, dropping a further 488 tons of high explosives and 294 tons of incendiaries. On February 15, two hundred and eleven U.S. bombers made a fourth attack, dropping 466 tons of high explosives. [Dresden was attacked again on March 2, this time by the Americans alone. Mustang fighter escorts machine-gunned fleeing civilians while the heavy B-17s achieved the singular distinction of sinking a hospital ship on the Elbe, filled with injured from the earlier raids.–ed.]

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Demolition of anti-fascist memorials in Poland: Falsifications about country’s liberation from Nazi rule

Monument in Rzeszow celebrating the liberation of the city from the Nazis. In 2016 the city rejected calls from Poland’s historical legacy institute to remove such memorials.

By DOUGAL MACDONALD

On June 22, 2017, the Polish government’s lower house voted to amend the “decommunization laws” to demolish all monuments and memorials honouring the Soviet Union’s liberation of Poland from the Nazis. The fact that the amendments were passed on the 76th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union would appear to be no accident.

Dresden and Poznan: Two different ways to wage war

The Liberation of Poznan by the Soviet Red Army

By YURIY RUBTSOV

The Red Army and British-American forces had one enemy – the German Wehrmacht – but quite often they waged different wars. The liberation of the Polish city Poznan by the Red Army and the bombing of Dresden by [other Allied countries] – one event following one week after the other – 70 years ago in February 1945. These two examples provide a good illustration of this.

‘Operation Unthinkable’: Churchill’s planned invasion of the Soviet Union, July 1945

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In late May 1945, Josef Stalin ordered Marshall Georgy Zhukov to leave Germany and come to Moscow. He was concerned over the actions of British allies. Stalin said the Soviet forces disarmed Germans and sent them to prisoners’ camps while the British did not. Instead they cooperated with German troops and let them maintain combat capability. Stalin believed that there were plans to use them later. He emphasized that it was an outright violation of the inter-governmental agreements that said the forces surrendered were to be immediately disbanded. The Soviet intelligence got the text of a secret telegram sent by Winston Churchill to Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, the commander of British forces. It instructed to collect the weapons and keep them in readiness to give back to Germans in case the Soviet offensive continued.

TML publishes special online supplement ‘The 70th Anniversary of the Defeat of Fascism in Europe’

8 May marked the 70th anniversary of the surrender of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in Berlin in 1945 and the defeat of Nazi Germany in Europe – a date recognized throughout the world with the photograph of the flag of the Soviet Red Army flying over the Reichstag, the German Parliament. To this day, that flag is recognized as the Victory Banner.  It is called Victory in Europe Day and other countries of the former Soviet Union where it marks the victory of the Great Patriotic War. It marked the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, as well as the founding of the United Nations.

More than 80 countries and regions and about two billion people in Asia, Europe, Africa and Oceania were engulfed in the flames of war and suffered grave disasters. The defeat of fascism in Europe was a historic event with a permanent significance not only for the Soviet Union and Europe but for all peoples, who made the greatest contribution to its defeat. Imperialists and fascists can be stopped; their weapons can be silenced; freedom, liberation and the very right-to-be can be won.

Activities to commemorate the occasion were held in major Canadian cities including parades of World War II veterans from the former USSR together with the veterans from Allied countries, meetings, banquets, and presentations. As part of the international commemorations, the editors of TML Weekly published an informative special online supplement on the significance of the victory of the peoples of the world and related events. As one commentary underlines gravely: “To forget the past means to betray; to tamper with history means the start of following the same disastrous road.”