80 years ago: American bombs fell on Prague
On February 14th 1945, a deadly bombing raid claimed hundreds of lives when the city of Prague became an unexpected target of the US Army Air Forces. In this first part of our series '80 years ago: How did WWII end in the Czech lands?', we examine the events of that terrible day in Prague’s twentieth-century history.
Unlike previous conflicts, victory in the Second World War was decided not only on land and at sea, but also in the skies. Nazi Germany’s bombing campaign against the UK between 1940 and 1941, known as the Blitz, was intended to damage the country’s industry and drive the British towards surrendering. The Blitz included devastating attacks on the cities of London, Birmingham and Coventry, and these horrors would have remained in the minds of the Allied forces as the war turned and they undertook bombing campaigns on the cities of the German Reich.
On February 14th, the primary target of five hundred B-17 bombers of the American Eighth Air Force was the city of Dresden, with some other cities designated as lesser targets. The attack on Dresden, which had begun with a night raid by eight hundred British Lancaster and Halifax bombers, pulverised the capital of Saxony and even triggered firestorms. However, a group of sixty-two B-17 Flying Fortresses dropped around 152 tons of bombs on another city instead: Prague.
Michal Plavec, a historian and the curator of the Aviation Collection at the National Technical Museum in Prague, describes the attack:
"The first bombs fell on Malvazinky, then further down in Radlice and around the Smíchov railway station—though this was not the intended target. The raid continued over Charles Square (Karlovo náměstí) to Vinohrady, with the last bombs landing near the freight station in Žižkov. When plotted on a map, the impact points form a short, straight flight path precisely aligned with an axis.”
The bombing caused the deaths of 701 people and wounded a thousand others. It lasted a mere five minutes. The number of 701 deceased was only reached in 1971, when excavators at the Vinohrady Market discovered the remains of twenty-three people who had tried to hide there. All the casualties on February 14th were civilians, rather than the occupying German forces, and none of the city's factories were damaged. Among the most famous victims was the daughter of the painter Josef Lada, Eva.
Being far away from the western and eastern fronts and not a major industrial centre, Prague did not expect an air attack. It was therefore seriously unprepared for one, as Michal Plavec explains:
"Prague was partially prepared for air raids, but it was not enough. In the summer of 1944, State Secretary Karl Hermann Frank issued a report on the adequacy of the city’s air-raid shelters. While the situation improved somewhat between the publication of that report and the spring of 1945, the shelters in the capital could still accommodate less than 13% of the population.”
The bombing did colossal damage to the buildings of Prague, with almost seventy houses completely destroyed. This left a legacy that can be clearly seen today. The Emmaus Monastery, which overlooks the Vltava, was hit and was rendered no more than a shell, and this then led to the building of its iconic two-peaked roof in the 1960s. Prague’s famous Dancing House, designed in 1992, stands on the site of an apartment building destroyed in the attack. The late Milena Hübschmannová, Czechia's foremost scholar of the Romani language, recounts her mother’s experience of the bombing in that area:
"Next to this building [the Dancing House] there is a house which was built after the war. It was bombed, it fell down into ruins. This was in February 1945. My mother went for a walk with my little brother, who was about three years old at the time, and the wind took her hat. So she went into that house and she wanted to comb her hair and put her hat on her head, because there are mirrors in the halls of those old apartment blocks. So she combed her hair and she went home. As soon as she got home there was a bombing raid, and this house fell down."
So, how could this have happened? What led the American Eighth Air Force to attack Prague, when the main target was Dresden? Historian Michal Plavec again:
"First of all, the weather conditions were poor, with almost no visibility. The pilots of this wing struggled to orient themselves after flying above the clouds for an extended period. Another challenge was a strong crosswind that pushed the formation south of the planned route. By the time they began running low on fuel, the formation's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis P. Ensign, was considering whether to return to base."
At that moment, American navigator Captain Brown spotted a town through the clouds, believing it to be Zwickau – but it was actually Plzeň. From there, he led the bombers along the railway line to Prague, where they arrived shortly after noon. On returning to base in Britain, the pilots themselves were surprised to learn that Prague had been bombed.
It remains plausible that the raid was simply the tragic result of a navigational mistake, with the American navigators confusing Prague with Dresden. Both are cities with wide rivers running through them, yet the two also have clear differences, leading some to question the view that the February 14th bombing was entirely accidental. It is the only raid in the war for which American servicemen later publicly expressed regret.
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80 years ago: How did WWII end in the Czech lands?
Eighty years ago, the most destructive and lethal war in history approached its end. In this series we map the last stages of the war and its aftermath on Czech territory.
