...should look like this Dresden pic
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.”
-RAF General Arthur 'Bomber' Harris
My most proudest time of service was the year I served under Curtis LeMay. He was a real warrior, we felt invincible and really were.
Just like in that war; until someone with the stones to order bombings against Arab cities; the strongholds of terrorism, the home of their supporters, there is no point in fighting.
You've hit the nail right on the head in each paragraph! One reason Mecca wasn't turned into an empty sandpile on 9/12 was our "guilt" from WWII!
Well put - even Churchill realized that Dresden was not a legitimate military target.
From Wikipedia, "Churchill, who approved of the targeting of Dresden and supported the bombing prior to the event, distanced himself from it.[44][45][46] On March 28, in a memo sent by telegram to General Ismay for the British Chiefs of Staff and the Chief of the Air Staff he wrote:
It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land… The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. I am of the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests than that of the enemy.
The Foreign Secretary has spoken to me on this subject, and I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive."
If people claim that the terror bombings of German civilians was a legitimate tactic in Dresden, then Al Queda's justification of 9/11 would be that terror bombing civilians in the World Trade Center is also a legitimate tactic. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so to speak.
This is why sensible people do not attempt to justify terror bombings (like Dresden) aimed at civilians - the next bombing may be in a city near you.
I agree with zook. In WWII, we did whatever it took to win. Some of it was brutal, but we won.
The Germans didn't surrender until the Red Army took Berlin, and we were facing the same problem with Japan.
My dad and his brother were in combat zones in the ETO. Not long after V-E day, they were told their units might have to go to the Pacific. If we had been forced to defeat Japan by invading the Home Islands, I wonder how many of our fathers would have died, and how many of us wouldn't have been born?
Your father must have seen some difficult days at Salerno. Too few people know how bloody that invasion was.
I used to feel that Dresden was egregious and unnecessary but I have come to see that it was, in fact, necessary. Actions like Dresden may not have affected the course of the war itself but did affect the course of the peace. It was not only necessary to defeat the German army, it was necessary to defeat the German people, to stun them so that they were ready to accept any form of rule the Allies determined to impose on them. The result is modern Germany. The same can be said for Japan. Germany was part of Western Civilization and not unfamiliar with Western ways and still it had to be totally defeated in order to remold it into what it is today. We eschewed that principle in Iraq and because of that the country is doomed to incessant civil chaos until it comes again under the iron hand of absolute tyranny. It will be like that in Iran but it will be then a much more serious question, and we will fight Iran directly sooner or later. If later, then we will have to do it also to Pakistan, perhaps, and Saudi Arabia, etc. This thing will grow if it is not firmly squashed and the squashing will take progressively more effort and damage on the home front the longer we postpone the reckoning.
I wish Bush had done a Dresden on Fallujah instead of sending our boys door to door like Avon ladies and then investigating one of them for shooting a wounded terrorist when the MSM got it on tape. We should have killed another 2-300,000 Iraq civilians in this war and many more Afghans as well. MacArthur himself hung nearly 1,000 Japanese agitators in a relatively peaceful occupation. In Iraq we let Al Sadr murder Americans left and right and did nothing while pretending one idiot Arab stooge "PM" after another was "in charge". What a joke. We early on focused stupidly on trying to build a "democracy". We forgot that these are savages, and the enemy. Had we gone in with our bloodlust unchecked, nobody today would be whining out an "Iraqi quagmire".
General Curtis LeMay had the right idea...Bomb 'Em Back to the Stone Age. He fire bombed Tokyo and killed more than were killed in Hiroshima and did much more damage.
...should look like this Dresden pic
I notice you have nothing to say about German terror bombing.
You nailed it. I'd support dumping the heaviest of fire on Iraqi or Afghan towns giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Again, I agree. War is not nice, especially with uncivilized opponents like Nazis, Communist, WWII-era Japanese, and fanatical moslems.
But the west's guilt comes from Nazi Germany (supposedly the epitome of "the west") in WWII, and now we're feeling guilty for bombing the Nazis themselves?
Unless we rid ourselves of this PC worship of the "otherness" of our enemies and our self-hating guilt we will never win another war.
Damn right, tell my grandmother, mother and two aunties who lived through eighteen months of the Blitz in London...the Germans killed 40,000 and injured 135,000 civilians...they dropped 1400 incendiary bombs in one day...they bloody started it...
Well guess what? The Krauts killed members of my family, my Dad fought them for 4 years, and as far as I am concerned its too bad the atomic bomb wasn't ready in time to hit its FIRST intended target - Berlin.
I have the greatest and utmost respect for the Japanese culture (see my home page). Its the LAST bastion of sane civilization left on earth.
The Germans can go and ***k themselves. Its too bad we didn't kill every single last one of them - and distributed their women of marriageable age as war reparations.........
So........the attacks on 9/11 were justified because we had been systematically wiping out all muslims and bombing their cities to ruble, enslaving them by the millions in death camps and were well on our way to bombing the entire world in order to rule everyone?
Is that the justification for 9/11?
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