Allied bombing destroyed part of Prague 75 years ago
And the account of this only about four-minute raid? A total of 701 dead, 1184 wounded, 93 houses completely destroyed, 190 buildings suffered severe and 1,500 light damage. 11,000 Praguers were left homeless. The bombs did not escape monuments such as the Emmaus Monastery or the nearby Faust House. But the blocks of buildings in Vinohrady suffered the most, where some streets literally turned into ruins. The attack of 62 American bombers from the Eighth Air Force began at 12.24, a total of 152.5 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, of which 371 were fragmentation and 8,000 incendiary.
According to historians, over 60 American bombers broke away from the union due to bad weather and a navigational error, and in the belief that they were attacking Dresden, they were destroying Prague. Between February 13 and 14, Dresden was the main target of Allied troops. The oversight was also caused by the failure of the main navigator’s radar, which could not pinpoint the target.
The fateful day of February 1945 was Wednesday and the sirens above Prague sounded shortly after noon. The problem was that the people of Prague got used to the fluctuating sound of sirens announcing “acute air danger” during the war and did not take it too seriously. It was mostly a false alarm. And so even this time, many of them did not rush to the shelters.
Consequences of the bombing of February 14, 1945
Photo: ČTK
The first bombs landed in Jinonice a few minutes later. The planes then continued through Pankrác, the upper part of Nové Město and Vinohrady. The interventions ended in Riegrovy sady on the territory of today’s Prague 2. In Vinohrady, among other things, was the Great Synagogue in Sázavská Street, the largest and most ornate Jewish church in Bohemia. The main nave of the synagogue burned down completely, leaving only the side wings, the torso of the temple was then blown up in mid-July 1951.
The German air force was very exhausted at the end of the war, suffered from a lack of fuel, and so did nothing to defend. The liquidation of the direct consequences of the raid was also hampered by the fact that the Prague fire brigades left to help the burning Dresden before the attack.
The bombing of the severely damaged Emmaus Monastery
Photo: VHÚ
The February air raid is most often associated with the destruction of the building of the Emmaus Monastery, which burned for several days after the intervention. Three bombs completely destroyed the monastery church, and a unique cycle of Gothic paintings from the time of Charles IV suffered. Although the monastery was restored in the 1950s, it was also nationalized and did not serve its purpose until 1989. As Pryor Englehardt, the monastery’s superior, confirmed to US military representatives during their visit to Emmaus in 2000: “You don’t have to apologize, our monastery has suffered more from the Soviet occupation of the past 40 years than from the bombing.”
Other Prague architectural gems were also damaged, such as the Church of St. Wenceslas in Zderaz or the building of the Vinohrady Theater. The Faust House on Charles Square, around which the bombing was concentrated, was also hit. Palacký Bridge, where the bombs damaged Myslbek’s sculptural group Přemysl and Libuše, did not work without scars either. The raid also indirectly affected the National Theater, when bombs hit its painting shop in Apolinářská Street, a subsequent fire destroyed a number of unique painted decorations.
Gaps arose in the places of the bombed houses, the extension of the stops permanently for many or several decades. The last of the buildings to be built on the bombed site was the Dancing House on the Rašín embankment, completed in 1996.
A house damaged by bombing on the corner of Rašín embankment.
Photo: VHÚ
When they flew back, the bombers dropped the remaining bombs because it was dangerous to fly and land with them. The apartment house in Břevnov, where about 20 people died, was hit.
The last major air raid on Prague took place on March 25, 1945, when 500 American planes bombed factories in Liben and Vysočany and three airports in the northeastern part of Prague.