Allied Bombings of Prague

Despite the terrible suffering  resulting from Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during WWII, very little of the damage was caused to the infrastructure. Prague can be considered lucky that they escaped most of the bombings that left other ancient cities throughout Europe in ruins. There were only 2 exceptions during WWII. The first bombing was due to a navigation error by U.S. B-17 squadrons on a bombing mission of the nearby city of Dresden. The mission was being conducted at high altitudes, above the cloud cover and Prague was mistaken as the target. In the image below you can see the 2 bombing runs and how close they were to each other.

During this bomb run, over 700 civilians were killed and over 90 buildings were destroyed. Despite this navigational error, the city of Dresden was completely destroyed as seen in the image below:

While the second bomb run was intentionally targeting industry, as Prague had many arms facilities supplying the Nazi war machine during this time, it should be noted that there were very few casualties. Out of the wreckage of the first bomb run there was one site that was used to build the Dancing House, which I mentioned in an early blog post.