It happened just a few months before the end of World War II. Allied aircraft bombs landed on occupied Prague. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was liberated from great battles and lengthy conquests.

Prague has never experienced what Warsaw, Berlin or Stalingrad. The Nazi horse in the middle of Europe lived in relative peace and experienced war more in the form of repression, martial law and eternal stress from Nazi power. On February 14, 1945, however, Prague experienced a bombing, which, thank God, never happened again. Or yes?

One of three

The American bombs in Prague did not hit the ground for the first or last time that day. Already on November 15, a bomber appeared above the Holešovice power plant in the veil of secrecy.

However, it is possible that his goal was the adjacent bridge. However, it eventually remained intact, but two buildings in the power plant and sixteen residential buildings in the area were damaged by twelve bombs from a B-17 aircraft. Four people were killed and eighty-five injured in the bombing that day.

The third differed from the other two raids in that it was a consistently planned military action aimed at destroying strategic industrial targets at the northeastern tip of Prague. Specifically, these were Libeň and Vysočany.

More than 2,500 houses in Prague were hit by bombing on February 14, 1945, of which 68 were completely destroyed, 88 very badly damaged, 168 badly damaged and 2351 slightly damaged. The house on the corner of today’s Resslova Street and the Rašín embankment was badly damaged and had to be removed. The Dancing House did not grow in its place until 1996.

CKD operation only in 1944, Jagdpanzer 38 Hetzer shipped 1,200 fighterswhich acted as effective weapons on the fronts. Together with the factories, Kbely, Letňany and Čakovice airports also became the target of the bombing.

However, none of these attacks took as many innocent lives as the one on Ash Wednesday, February 14, 1945. Among other things, he also made a significant contribution to several Prague districts and definitively leveled some buildings to the ground.

A tragic mistake

More than two thousand Allied planes took off from Great Britain that morning, but they were heading for targets in Germany. Specifically, these were Wesel, Magdeburg, Saxony Kamenice and especially Dresden. 62 B-17 Flying Fortness aircraft found themselves over Prague due to a navigation error.

So the tragic events had a rapid decline. The first air bombs landed at 12:25 and the last nine minutes later. In such a short time, just over 152 tons of bombs were gradually caught in the districts in Radlice, Smíchov, Vršovice, Nusle, Žižkov and especially in Nové Město and Vinohrady.

The air alarm sounded late in Prague. The danger allegedly began to report when the first bombs landed in Radlice, but even so, the people of Prague decided in many cases not to take it seriously due to earlier false alarms.

Bloody Wednesday

That day Prague experienced an unprecedented tragedy that cost the lives of 701 German and mostly Czech inhabitants, 1,184 people were injured. Huge damage after a nine-minute storm was visible mainly in the New Town, where the Emmaus Monastery ended up in dust and flames, the Faust House was severely damaged, but in addition to several apartment buildings, the Palacký Bridge, the CTU building on Charles Square and the Jesuit College of St. Ignatius.

Mainly apartment buildings in Vinohrady were hit hard. A total of 21 houses fell here, 41 were fatally damaged and another 1,037 only slightly. Among the Vinohrady monuments that disappeared from Prague forever was also the largest Jewish synagogue.

The place where Franz Kafka’s fiancée, the fiancée’s fiancée, used to be the daughter of the caretaker began to burn after the raid, and the German authorities banned the building from extinguishing it and letting it burn down completely. The towers that remained of the synagogue were not demolished until 1951.

Unnecessary losses

Despite all the theories and Nazi propaganda, it was probably a fatal mistake. The squadron was forced to change course after the attack on the coast of the Netherlands.

Another difficulty that fundamentally affects the presence of aircraft over Prague was the weather. Fog and clouds in the orientation of American navigators made work uncomfortable. Such weather accompanied them to Prague, which with its profile of a flowing river resembles Dresden.

For a tragic mistake with four members 398th Bombardment Group they came in 2000 to apologize to the Emmaus Monastery.

source: pametnaroda.cz, vhu.cz

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