Posted on 02/15/2007 5:43:06 PM PST by Zionist Conspirator
Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden
By Marshall De Bruhl
Random House, $27.95.
One of my favorite talk radio hosts recently interviewed a member of the evangelical Christian left who expressed sentiments -- to call them arguments would be an overstatement -- against the war in Iraq. The conversation, fairly typical of such exchanges, went something like this:
“When have you been in favor of the United States actually using military force?”
“Well, I guess you would have to say World War II was what you would call a good war."
“What about Dresden? You bring up Abu Ghraib all the time, are you OK with Dresden?”
“Well, horrible things happen in every war, I guess. That’s the problem with Just War theory."
And on it went. Somewhere along the line, majorities on both the right and left have accepted the notion that the Allied bombing raid on the German city of Dresden in February 1945 was tantamount to a war crime. This, in turn, works for the rhetoric on both sides. Conservatives can skewer liberals who use a small incident to justify their opposition to recent wars by throwing Dresden in their faces; while the Left is all too willing to believe the worst of Western militaries in every case.
Even many conservatives who defend the nuking of Hiroshima — and not just those in the Buchanan Brigades — accept that Dresden was an atrocity. Over the years, the politically correct version of Dresden has nearly become the official story.
The rationale behind the conventional wisdom of the Dresden raid as a war crime usually rests on the following assertions:
1. Dresden was not a military target; the bombing solely targeted the civilian population. Critics note the number of museums and cultural treasures of the “Florence of the Elbe,” as if the city were an island of peace and culture in a sea of Nazism. Often mentioned is the number of refugees who had flooded into a city largely ignored by bombers.
2. The war was all but won by the time of the raid, and thus was completely unnecessary. This assumes that Winston Churchill, Arthur “Bomber” Harris and Gen. Spaatz just wanted to kill a large number of German civilians while they still had an excuse.
3. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died. Taking a page from some discredited German bestsellers of the 1950s, novelist Kurt Vonnegut-- who witnessed the bombing as a POW-- famously claimed that more people died in Dresden than in atom-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. The raid, indeed, played a key role in his best-selling Slaughterhouse Five.
4. The Dresden raid was a unique event. Despite the Blitz and the “around the clock” bombing of German cities, critics contend that this was a cold-blooded experiment in incendiary bombing that removes it from the context of the raging “total war.”
But Marshall De Bruhl begs to differ. In his forcefully argued and remarkably clear-eyed Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden. De Bruhl sifts through mountains of primary sources to vividly recreate the mission and, most importantly, puts the event in its proper context.
De Bruhl spends most of his book detailing the escalation of the air war in Europe that led to the Dresden raid. Ironically, the first blow was struck when German bombers got lost and mistakenly hit London. Churchill ordered that Berlin be struck in retaliation. Ironically, Churchill’s action led to Hitler ordering the Luftwaffe to concentrate on London rather than airfields, which probably saved the Royal Air Force and its ability to defend home turf in the Battle of Britain.
This, however, does not mean that cities were not valuable military targets. As De Bruhl points out, German industry was located in cities, and the so-called “precision bombing” of targets -- with American assertions that a B-17 could put a bomb in a “pickle barrel” -- was mere posturing. In reality, American daylight bombing was only marginally more accurate than British night bombing, though it bore a far greater cost in airmen’s lives.
America's celebrated Norden bombsight and advances in technique over the period of the air war merely meant that progress was made from less than one out of five bombs hitting near the target to just under half.
In short, the only way to stop war-supporting manufacturing in a German city was to bomb in such a way that the whole city paid a heavy price.
De Bruhl answers each of the major myths about the Dresden raid.
1. Dresden was a manufacturer of armaments and a communications center for the Nazis. Yes, the city was filled with refugees and museums. However, it also had many factories of war material. The chaos from the Dresden raid pulled German troops away from the Eastern and Western fronts, and no armaments were manufactured in Dresden after Feb.14, 1945.
2. The war was still on when Dresden was bombed. It’s easy to say in hindsight that the Germans were all but defeated, but the Dresden raid came a few short months after the Battle of the Bulge. Before that surprise setback, “Christmas in Berlin” had been a common battle cry.
3. Civilian deaths, while numerous, are greatly exaggerated by the activists. The chaos of war makes counting difficult, but casualties have been “estimated” at up to 250,000. De Bruhl argues that 25,000 is a more realistic figure, with 35,000 the maximum. At least 50,000 residents worked in producing war material.
4. The Dresden raid was the deadly culmination of a steadily escalating air war against cities by both sides. The Dresden raid was only unique in its effectiveness, not its methodology. The Allies’ air superiority had led to such a pounding of German cities that debate had begun in some quarters over the morality and necessity of “morale” bombing. However, the German V-rockets and the terror they brought ended that debate. In fact, Churchill considered “morale” bombing the only appropriate response as the German rockets had no other purpose than civilian deaths.
Far from being the cold and calculating experiment painted in some accounts of Allied generals seeing how many civilians they could kill for the sheer hell of it, De Bruhl writes that the targeting of Dresden was partially a quirk of the weather.
Operations had been planned for massive bombing to support the Soviets on the Eastern Front on the day of Feb. 13. These missions were scrubbed because of weather — but skies cleared over Dresden long enough to allowed for a rare one-two punch of American daylight and British night bombing. This doomed Dresden, which had seldom been bombed because it was in the eastern part of Germany and was known as “Germany’s bomb shelter” by many of the refugees from the Red Army who were streaming into the city.
De Bruhl illustrates the uncertainties of precision bombing, and undercuts the notion that Dresden was a premeditated atrocity. For instance, the commander of the second wave of British bombers widened the target area on his own because the first wave had been unusually — and unexpectedly -- effective.
So while the wave of American B-17s, which hit the next day, might seem like overkill in hindsight, knowledge in wartime 1945 was not exactly comparable to the instant satellite reconnaissance we take for granted today. In fact, 150 of the B-17s bound for Dresden bombed another city on the bend of a river, the Czech capital of Prague by mistake.
Of course, De Bruhl reminds us that even as Lord Haw Haw’s propaganda broadcast accused Gen. Spaatz of war crimes for the Dresden raid, thousands were being systematically exterminated in concentration camps in the Reich. But then as now, liberal elements in British Parliament and press picked up on enemy accusations and began wringing their hands. Their tears were shed over the abandonment of “precision bombing” — an outcry that led Churchill to begin to backtrack in private memos until Harris brought him back into line.
Bomber Harris remained publicly unapologetic. He was convinced that the bombing helped to shorten the war and save the lives of Allied soldiers.“I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British grenadier,” he defiantly declared.
The mythology of Dresden was solidified by Vonnegut in the liberal mind. Witnessing the awful firestorm and slaughter was a defining moment in his life -- though leftist Vonnegut ironically draws on “The Destruction of Dresden,” a 1963 book by Holocaust denier David Irving. De Bruhl effectively deconstructs both writers.
To add injury to injury, De Bruhl concludes, Dresden fell into Soviet hands, and Germany’s most beautiful city was rebuilt very slowly, often with “ugly socialist architecture” (what P.J. O’Rourke calls “Commie concrete”) with much of the city left in rubble.
That is changing today, De Bruhl writes, as freedom is finally alive in Dresden, with surprisingly little antipathy to outsiders. On the 50th anniversary of the raid, Dresden’s mayor said it best, putting the blame where it really belongs: “We started the fire, and it came back and consumed us.”
You do not speak German.
You're welcome.
They were prisoners of concentration camps. How do you find that objectionable???????
Nope. He lost the President's race to a conservative. But, no party won an outright majority in the Reichstag, so the Nazis as the largest party were asked to form a coalition government. They made Hitler the Chancellor. Then, in the following months they pulled off what amounted to a coup d'etat. It was the last free election until after the war.
That said, I will concede that as long as Hitler was winning, he seemed to have much popular support.
No, what I am saying is that the Irish didn't want the Brits in Ireland and many Iraqis (mostly Sunnis) don't want the U.S. in Iraq. There are inhumane methods of dealing with guerillas, some of which have been suggested here, like terror bombings or doing a Dresden on Fallujah . . . .
As to a book that would solve the Iraq war - if you discover it, let General Petreus know about it immediately.
The only method I can think of that would stop the Iraq war without further death is deportations to a distant land, like the British shipped their convicts to Australia. Say an area like Fallujah or the Anbar province persists in attacking U.S. troops, all residents would be shipped to (fill in the blank - Kenya? with payment for their lost property) Result: no more fighting in Fallujah and no more deaths either of U.S. troops or local residents and no terror bombing.
....One reason Mecca wasn't turned into an empty sandpile on 9/12 was our "guilt" from WWII!....
Drivel, absolute drivel.
For those of you in Rio Linde, Mecca is in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi's are our friend and ally.
And al qaeda and Syria and Iran and other jihadi's don't want us in Iraq.
Iraq is not a local "don't want you here" type situation. It is war with fundamental Islam.
Children are taught to hate us as soon as they can read.
The war is just simmering now but does not campare with small local problems like Britain had.
At some point it is going to start to boil. But before that we need ot deny them any country to base in.
Auschwits was a prison camp so calling the people who were there prisoners is appropriate. Birkenau was the death camp. It's in Schindler's List. Oh boy, I know petronski wishes he had posting rights again otherwise he'd be all over this thread.
One of the most amazing things about WWII that I realize, as I learn more and more about that war is why the Nazis never used nerve gas on London.
One of the most amazing things about WWII that I realize, as I learn more and more about that war is why the Nazis never used nerve gas on London.
There were three camps - Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and Auschwitz III (Manowitz - Buna).
Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was "Vernichtungslager." (extermination camp) Standard Oil's syntetic rubber factory was located in Auschwitz III (Buna)
Auschwitz III was a work camp on paper but NO inmates got out of there alive. They were starved and worked to death. Buna was a death camp, just like Birkenau, only the method was different. Inmates were not fed at all, only given some chemical concoction called "Buna soup" that allowed body to metabolyze their own body fat and proteins at fast rate. In a week, they would get speciffic look and would die soon afterwards. A starving human could survive for 40 days. None of them survived that long.
This savagery is among the most inhuman among the numeorous Nazi atrocities, yet, it is rather little known.
Saying that Allies did not bomb Buna because of "the prisoners" is rather cynical.
The point I wanted to make:
-civilians of German cities were bombed, yet it did not change Nazi resolve to fight till the Ruskies came to Berlin
-Nazi industrial output was mostly unaffected by aerial bombardment(according to McNamara).
All this at horrible 50% casualty toll on USAAF.
Yet, the railway infrastructure leading to extermination camps was not destroyed and extermination camps worked till the Nazi bitter end.
Okay point taken but Standard Oil synthetic rubber????
Hadn't that already been proven in 1943 with the fire-bombing of Hamburg?
And God bless the veterans and the memory of those who have left.
Now that´s one of the dumbest justification for Dresden I´ve heard. Are you comparing Germany/Japan with the Muslim countries? It didn´t need to simply burn civilians to make the minds of the surviving accepting the following occupation. The military defeat and occupation would have been enough, simply because the Japanese and Germans aren´t self-destructive just like the Jihadists.
Oh sure, the civilians surely bombed London before, they had this coming to them. Tell your words the people in the graves.
Really? Did Goebbels ask every German, from the newborn up to the old Granpa? And they all said "Ja"?? It´s more that the audiance was carefully selected, so that nobody could screm "Nein".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech
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