Legitimacy of Bombing - Taylor + Cox

The theory of Dresden as an industrial target is currently lead by Frederick Taylor who provides it as the reason Dresden was bombed. He describes the work done by those before him as unjustly causing “unmitigated shame”¹ and queries the nature of Dresden as a industrial city at the beginning of Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 saying, “The notion that Dresden, a city of almost three-quarters of a million hardworking human beings in one of the oldest industrial regions of Europe, concerned itself only with harmless pottery.”² Taylor provides evidence that Dresden was a target, “the city of Dresden contained 127 factories that had bee assigned their own three-letter manufacturing codes,”³ and using the details of converted factories assumes that, “Dresden quickly followed the rest of Germany into an integrated war economy.”⁴

Cox supports this stating that:

“Dresden was ranked at number twenty in the list of the hundred German towns of leading economic importance to the German war effort......Thus, although Dresden was 80 percent larger than Chemnitz in terms of population, the latter's economic importance on this measure was ranked three places higher at seventeen.”⁵

Cox is establishing that Dresden is a significant military target based on British Army Intelligence assessments. Dresden had been, “ranked number twenty..... for economic importance to the German war effort.”⁶ which was given in 1943, certainly implies that this report was not merely written to give a legitimate, though fake, excuse for the attack as it.

1Taylor, op. Cit, p. xi

2Ibid., p. xii

3Ibid., p. 169

4Ibid., p.170

5Cox, op. Cit, pp. 54-55

6Cox, op. Cit, p. 53