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Der Spiegel interviewed British historian Frederick Taylor, whose latest book argued that the destruction of the ancient city of Dresden by British and American bombers in February 1945 was not the unjustified slaughter it is now mostly said to be. Slaughter it was indeed, but Taylor says, “Dresden had war industries and was a major transportation hub.” That doesn’t mean he thinks the bombing was altogether justified, though.
The bombing of Dresden began at night by the Royal Air Force and was continued by day by the 8th US Air Force. It was one of the the most lethal bombing raids against any German city. The air raid was the brain child of British Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris.
In 1945, Arthur Harris decided to create a firestorm in the medieval city of Dresden. He considered it a good target as it had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns. The population of the city was now far greater than the normal 650,000 due to the large numbers of refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army.
On the 13th February 1945, 773 Avro Lancasters bombed Dresden. During the next two days the USAAF sent over 527 heavy bombers to follow up the RAF attack. Dresden was nearly totally destroyed. As a result of the firestorm it was afterwards impossible to count the number of victims. Recent research suggest that 35,000 were killed but some German sources have argued that it was over 100,000.
Controversy still obviously swirls concerning the destruction of most of the city, one of the oldest and most architecturally unique in Europe. One aim of the bombing was to destroy hubs of lines of communication - roads and rail lines - that converged on the city. This would hinder the ability of the Germans to defend against the advancing Soviet army advancing from the east. But an internal RAF memo also said explicitly in January 1945 that the destruction of the city would “show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.” After all, as 1945 opened it was clear to all the allied powers that victory was certain; the British much more than the Americans were already pondering the postwar balance of power with the Soviets.
After the war, Air Marshal Harris said,
I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself… .
These excerpts from this British site, which has more.
One of the less-examined aspects of Allied strategic aims against both the Germans and the Japanese is the the destruction of enormous numbers of civilians and urban areas was a deliberate, planned war aim. I covered this topic in 2002, but here is a pertinent excerpt that follows my explanation of the American myth of “precision bombing:”
The Americans rejected terror bombing, but not for long. As the war went on and on, and German and Japanese resistance failed to slacken, President Roosevelt decided that the German and Japanese peoples must realize after the war that not only had their armed forces been defeated: the entire nation, as a nation, had been beaten. He and Churchill were well aware that German militarism had survived World War I because its apologists had successfully propagated the myth that the Kaiser’s army had not really been defeated, it had been “stabbed in the back” by disloyal factions at home.
Hence, said, Roosevelt,
It is of utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize that this time Germany is a defeated nation. . . . The fact that they are a defeated nation, collectively and individually, must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war.
(Roosevelt’s policy seems not far from Civil War Gen. William T. Sherman’s observation of the Confederate States, “War, and war alone, can inspire our enemy with respect, and they will have their belly full of that very soon.”)
So, according to historian Richard B. Frank in his award-winning book, Downfall, the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire:
Viewed in this light, massive urban bombing complemented the aim of unconditional surrender. It was not just a handful of vile men who flaunted vile ideologies; whole populations imbibed these beliefs and acted as willing acolytes. Unconditional surrender and vast physical destruction would sear the price of aggression into the minds of the German and Japanese peoples. No soil would be left from which myths might later sprout that Germany and Japan had not really been defeated. These policies would assure that there would be no third world war with Germany, nor would Japan get a second opportunity.
One notes that Japan and Germany have been well behaved since 1945. But we also have to note that massive, destructive bombing was alone not the reason. It was simply impossible for either country’s armed forces to claim that they had prevailed, or at least held their own, on the field of battle. German and Japanese orphans, widows and grieving parents were in almost every other household, and a lie that their armed forces had not really lost could not possibly have found legs to stand on.
No doubt the controversies over the conduct of the war will continue. Historian Taylor gets the last word here, responding to a question of whether Dresden was the “Holocaust” of Allied bombings.
Half a million Soviet citizens, for example, died from German bombing during the invasion and occupation of Russia. That’s roughly equivalent to the number of German citizens who died from Allied raids. But the Allied bombing campaign was attached to military operations and ceased as soon as military operations ceased. But the Holocaust and the murder of all those millions would not have ceased if the Germans had won the war. Bombing is ruthless war making, but to use the word Holocaust to describe ruthless war making is to confuse two entirely different things.
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May 16th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
[…]
Dresden and the War on Terror
There should be a connection
Donald Sensing has an interesting post on the rationale for the WW2 bombing campaign against […]
May 17th, 2005 at 6:01 am
This all begs the question - will Arab militarism need to be crushed in the same manner as German and Japanese militirism?
May 17th, 2005 at 1:00 pm
As to the last question, yeah, probably.
The men who made the decisions about running WW II were veterans
or had lived as adults during WW I and were familiar with the
horrors. That the nation who inflicted the horrors on practically
everybody they could find on a map wanted to do the same again
must have generated fury. “Never again” is appropriate here.
Heard of the Morgenthau Plan to make Germany into the bucolic
idyll we see on beer steins? Germany couldn’t have fed its post-
war population that way, too bad, but they wouldn’t be starting any
wars, either.
There was never going to be an opportunity for another effort.
May 17th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
The comments about the complicity of civilian Germans and Japanese in their nation’s imperialist barbarism underscores several points:
1. The vast majority of Americans are thoroughly ignorant about the nature of modern warfare. One can’t neatly separate a population into “military” and “civilian” groups. The “civilians” are necessary to maintain civil order and keep the war industry going — especially in a totalitarian state. Look at the role American civilians played in the military industries during WWII, and America is a democratic republic.
2. The notion of “proportional response” so critical to Catholic “just war” theory (btw, I’m Catholic) denies the nature of modern warfare, in which the state marshalls every element of society to its cause.
3. What makes this rather difficult to apply to Islam is that Islam is technically not a state. It’s a religion crossing continental boundries. OTOH, Muslims consider the “ummah” (body of believers) as a kind of state governed by sharia, with the ultimate geopolitical goal being the re-establishment of the Caliphate. If such concepts as “unconditional surrender” are applied to Islam, it would mean the destruction of Mecca, Medina, al-Aqsa, al-Azhar and the Dome of the Rock, at the very least — and, perhaps, the major Islamic centers in other countries.
May 17th, 2005 at 8:23 pm
The destruction of Dresden in 2/45 cannot be justified. The German transportation system had collapsed so what use was Dresden as a hub? With the Russians within a hundred miles of Dresden its usefulness as a manufacturing center was doubtful especially since the power network and energy system was gone. So what was accomplished? Sure the Germans killed 500,000 Russians through bombing. The Western allies allowed the Russians to send over 3 million Germans to the gulags and over a million Japanese. Over a third of these never returned. Perhaps a like number of Eastern Europeans suffered the same fate. Over a million Russians were forced against their wills to return to the Russians where quick executions or slow deaths awaited them. So exactly what is the moral superiority of the West.
FDR agreed and drank to Stalin’s toast that 50,000 German officers
which horrified Churchill. The only thing this demonstrates to me
is the fate that awaits losers. We had better not lose.
May 18th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
Aw gee, why don’t we all just agree that WWII was a bad job all round. Hitler declared war on us. He represented an existential threat that needed killing. Fortunately the world at the time didn’t confuse itself by trying to debate just what finely calibrated form of teaching would be appropriate. Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind, not 24% of a whirlwind.
Today radical Islam and it’s practitioners are trying their best to become an existential threat to all non-muslims. It is their doctrine and core belief in their core document. They’ve tried very hard to make it very clear what their goals are. We have been much more circumspect so far in our application of power. I hope that this doesn’t prove to have been a mistake.
May 19th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Richard,
Germany didn’t inflict the horros on evrybody it could find, the goal was to take France out a squickly as possible. And the world would be a better if place if Germany had won the Great War.
May 22nd, 2005 at 12:00 am
I believe they are talking abotu WW2, not WW1.
May 22nd, 2005 at 12:59 pm
I am using my son’s computer, his e-mail address and his “handle”. I am old now but feel in a position rather unique to comment on the question of the Allied decision to destroy Dresden. You see, I was, as a 18 year old G.I., taken prisoner during the German counteroffensive known as the Bulge and was witness to some of these events. I can only comment on what I saw and not the grand strategy involved. Although I know that other “firestorm” attacks had been successful in Germany before Dresden and afterwards in Japan, when I look back to what I observed during the several days of bombing on such a massive scale and the chaos that followed, my views at “ringside”, so to speak, left me with a taste and touch of the horror of war that is still, after more than 60 years, impossible to forget or ignore. I do not think there has been one single night since that winter so many years passed that I have not woken up screaming and bathed in sweat. I am not a well-educated fellow and read only slowly-even with my new tri focals-but I will be glad to debate with the most distinguished scholar working from the most secret documents to tell this simple truth: The vast majority of persons killed in the Dresden raids were women, children and old men. Did they deserve to die? Did they need to die? This I can’t-or won’t-even try to decide. Except to historians who were not there, the Olympain ring of judgment about mass civilian deaths unbecomes a mere mortal. I saw these people die, of all ages and nationalities and sexes and whatever-some innocent of everything except original sin, others Nazi nutcases who’s loss to humanity even so many years later I still applaud. But death in a firestorm is a death unredeemed by anything-courage, sacrifice and the art of bravery are all useless. What Dresden was to me was the unmitigated triumph of the machine age destruction of everything once thought noble. Such concepts had died in the trenches of the Great War and were, when I was a witness, long dead except to me. At 18, I still believed in right and wrong and what I thought being an American meant. Silly, I know, but I still feel the same way today as I did then. Machines do not make the decisions resulting in the deaths of millions (and forget the scholarly numbers about Dresden, I tell you they are all wrong-the city was far more crowded, teeming with eastern refugees, and the death count was drastically underreported). While I learned to hate the Nazi’s with a hatred beyond redemption as I was an observer of their system and methods-I saw who they were and what they did-in no way does the horror or the Nazis reduce or mitigate the destruction of hundreds of thousands if not millions-as I believe based on what I saw-and the use of evil ends to combat evil seems more than a little self-serving. I can not take you back in time with me to Dresden-and if I could I would refuse-but so seared are those events upon my own life that even to this day as a old, tired man facing my own mortality, I tremble with the fear and certainty of meeting my maker. I wonder at a God who puts men in impossible positions and then holds them to account for their actions. I must settle the score not with the Almighty but with my own conscience but I have figured out one thing: Terror breeds terror and the world is never a better place because of it. Perhaps more able men then I ever became will study and debate and conclude that the death of Dresden was necessary-that the war ended sooner-that many lives-American lives-were saved. All this may well be true. But I tell you what I saw and I saw no justice, no mercy, only fire and screaming, all encompassing destruction of every living thing. I survived, made it home, raised a family, have grandchildren and good friends, I have led a good if not particularly notable life and am ready in some degree of peace to meet my maker. But I am still unequiped to face Dresden; That is for a better man than I ever was or ever will be.
May 22nd, 2005 at 3:56 pm
A comment to give you pause
Donald Sensing writes about the bombing of Dresden and determines that it was justified, but a comment written …
May 23rd, 2005 at 1:54 am
Nice post.
Whatever smug assertions Roosevelt or Stalin might have made, the Nazis weren’t beaten in January-February 1945.
They had surprised everyone with the ferocity of the Battle of the Bulge; they still had millions of expertly trained, expertly led, fanatical fighting men; and a highly efficient and resilient industry that against all predictions had increased production massively throughout the strategic air war. And (with occasional exceptions) they had the most technologically advanced army in the world - thousands of jet aircraft, superheavy ‘ubertanks’, long range missiles - nobody knew what they were capable of next.
We were ‘lucky’ (although we did not know it) that by this time Hitler was too far into madness to command an effective defence. But even so, rapid victory was not all assured, and the widely held German belief that they would be saved by their ‘miracle weapons’ may seem deluded now, but was a rational (though remote) possibility at the time.
Every day meant more unspeakable atrocities, more allied soldiers killed, many more thousands of concentration camp victims. 35,000 dead: that was about 4 days worth of killing at Auschwitz wasn’t it?
May 24th, 2005 at 6:59 am
Considering the tens of millions of people the British slaughtered in their own acts of aggression against e.g. India, Ireland and Australia, it’s hypocritical to launch accusations at e.g. the Japanese, German and Italian people in WWII. If the civilians in those countries were in some way responsible for the aggression of the Axis, then the British people must be held equally responsible for the genocidal series of artificial famines, massacres, wholesale attacks on villages that the British used to keep the native Indian population down after the 1857 Rebellion- or to come very close to exterminating the native Australian aborigines and Tasmanians for example.
As for Arthur Bomber Harris, he’s a war criminal full stop, and we don’t have to get into Dresden for that: Harris terror-bombed civilian villages in Iraq and East Africa in 1920’s as part and parcel of British policy, Guernica on steroids basically. The British show a degree of historical ignorance for honoring such an obvious war criminal with a statue- that statue should be pulverized, as should Harris’s name.
June 19th, 2005 at 1:57 am
It makes me cry to see the things do to one another. End of story.