The bombing of Prague

On 14 February 1945, Ash Wednesday, shortly after noon, some 150 tonnes of high-explosive and incendiary bombs fell on Prague. They were dropped by American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers of the Eighth Air Force, which that day were supposed to attack Dresden – the city that had burned under RAF bombs the night before, in the bombing of Dresden. According to the reports of both bomb groups, the raid lasted a mere two minutes, from 12.25 to 12.27 p.m. It killed 701 people and injured 1,184, and some 11,000 inhabitants lost their homes. It was the deadliest raid of the entire war on the capital of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia – and a raid that nobody had planned.

It is often said that “American aircraft bombed the wrong city”, and that is essentially accurate. According to the histories of the American bomb groups and the studies of Czech historians (among them Michal Plavec and Filip Vojtášek), Prague was neither the primary nor the secondary target of the mission; the bombers mistook it for Dresden as a result of a navigational error. The claim that the attack was deliberate surfaced later in propaganda and journalism, but it finds no support in the documents.

Prague – a city on the margins of the air war

For most of the war Prague was considered a safe city. It lay far from the bases in England, and its armaments industry – above all the ČKD works in the eastern districts – was for a long time not a priority target. Until 1945 only isolated aircraft appeared over the city: in October 1941 British bombers dropped a few incendiary bombs, and on 15 November 1944 two aircraft, probably American, bombed the municipal power station in Holešovice, injuring more than a dozen workers. Over the Czech lands the air war tended to strike Plzeň with its Škoda works, Brno or the refinery at Pardubice.

Among the inhabitants a conviction took hold that Prague – a Czech rather than a German city – was in no danger, and even that the Allies had struck it off their list of targets. Air-raid alerts were sounded often, but the aircraft always flew on, so people went down to the shelters less and less. This indifference, as Czech studies emphasise, contributed significantly to the death toll on 14 February.

In the winter of 1945 the Protectorate itself was a hinterland of the embattled Reich, with the fronts drawing closer. It was formally governed by President Emil Hácha, by then seriously ill, and from 19 January 1945 the Protectorate government was headed by Richard Bienert. Real power was exercised by the German Minister of State, Karl Hermann Frank, the most important figure in the occupation apparatus in Bohemia and Moravia since the assassination of Heydrich. In the east the Red Army, after the Slovak National Uprising and the fighting in the Carpathians, was approaching Moravia, and in Silesia it already stood beyond the Oder.

A navigational error

On 14 February the Eighth Air Force was carrying out the second phase of the attack on Dresden: at noon more than 300 of its bombers struck the city’s railway junction. The mission also involved B-17s of the 1st Air Division, including the 91st and 398th Bomb Groups, flying from airfields at Nuthampstead and nearby. The number of aircraft that eventually bombed Prague is given variously: English-language studies speak of about 40 B-17s, Czech researchers of 62 aircraft from the two groups.

Dense cloud lay over Europe, and a strong wind pushed the formation south-east of its planned course. According to the history of the 398th Bomb Group, the lead aircraft’s navigational radar was malfunctioning and the dead reckoning was out by some 70 miles (more than 110 km). Czech authors add that the navigators mistook Plzeň for Zwickau – the point from which the run to the target was to begin; Prague lies roughly the same distance from Plzeň as Dresden does from Zwickau. Both cities also lie on a river, and through the gaps in the cloud only stretches of the Vltava could be seen. The bombing was carried out “blind”, using the radar picture. Some of the navigators are said to have noticed the mistake but – as Czech studies relate – had to keep formation. The designated secondary target was Chemnitz, not Prague.

According to Czech sources, the alarm was sounded in the city only a few minutes before the first bombs fell. Prague’s fire brigade was weakened – part of it had reportedly been sent to help burning Dresden – and the Luftwaffe was no longer able to defend the Czech skies.

Destruction and casualties

The bombs fell in a wide swathe from Radlice and Smíchov on the left bank of the Vltava, across Vyšehrad and the New Town, to Nusle, Vinohrady, Vršovice and Pankrác. The worst-hit area stretched from the Palacký Bridge through Charles Square to Vinohrady. According to Czech tallies, more than 2,500 buildings were hit; 68 were completely destroyed and several hundred badly damaged. Some 40 tramcars were also destroyed or seriously damaged.

Among the historic buildings, the most painful loss was the Gothic Emmaus Monastery, founded in the 14th century by Charles IV – the bombs destroyed its church together with its Baroque towers. The Faust House on Charles Square, the Grébovka park with the Gröbe Villa and the Vinohrady Theatre were damaged, and the neo-Renaissance Vinohrady Synagogue, one of the largest in Central Europe, was so badly damaged that its ruins were demolished after the war. On the site of a destroyed corner building on the Vltava embankment the Dancing House was built in 1996, while the rebuilt Emmaus church was given its distinctive modern concrete spires in the 1960s.

The victims were almost exclusively civilians. Among them were Eva Ladová, daughter of the painter Josef Lada, illustrator of The Good Soldier Švejk, and the mountaineers Vlasta and Otakar Štáfl (he was also a painter). More than 80 people were declared missing; the remains of some of them were found only in 1971, in a buried cellar shelter of a house on Vinohradská Street. The military effect of the raid, by contrast, was negligible: according to Czech studies no important military installation or armaments plant was destroyed, and the minor damage to Prague’s railway junction was repaired within a few hours.

Propaganda

The occupation authorities immediately exploited the tragedy. The German-controlled press called the raid an act of terror, blaming both the Allies and the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London, which had been seeking recognition in the West since 1940. On 18 February a funeral ceremony for the Czech victims was held on what is now Míru Square (náměstí Míru) in Vinohrady, attended by Prime Minister Bienert and Minister of State Frank; the Germans were buried separately, after a ceremony in front of the Rudolfinum.

After 1948, in turn, Czechoslovakia’s communist regime presented the raid as an example of American barbarity and sometimes suggested that it had been deliberate. Historians who studied the American documents and airmen’s accounts after 1989, including Plavec and Vojtášek, describe it, however, as the result of a navigational error in conditions of complete cloud cover. American veterans repeatedly expressed regret for what had happened. Accounts that circulated later of airmen supposedly admitting to a deliberate attack on the city centre do not stand up to the facts – according to Czech researchers, the places named in them were not hit at all on 14 February.

Place in the war

The raid of 14 February was one of many cases in which bombs dropped through cloud fell far from their intended targets – on towns in neutral Switzerland or in occupied countries. For Prague it was an unprecedented experience: in two minutes more people died than in all the earlier raids put together.

Prague suffered two more blows from the air. On 25 March 1945, Palm Sunday, some 650 bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force from Italy carried out the only planned raid on the city – against the ČKD works in the eastern districts and the airfields at Kbely, Letňany and Čakovice; according to various tallies, more than 200 people were killed. In May, during the Prague uprising (5–9 May 1945), the city was bombed by the German air force. Even so, Prague – unlike Warsaw, Dresden or Budapest – came through the war with most of its historic centre intact. Memory of “Bloody Ash Wednesday” nevertheless remains alive in the Czech capital, and the victims are commemorated by plaques on the rebuilt houses.