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.”
Oh yes. Another thing. You are a historical ignoramus with a malfunctioning center for logical analysis of evidence (if it even exists).
Thanks! Added to the list!
< /sarcasm>
Well, we were after un-conditional surender. This is how you get it. The pussies of the world dont win wars, Men do.
Mr. Simmons - I quoted Winston Churchill who admitted that the RAF was terror bombing and I excerpted F.J. Peale's book which quoted the RAF Secretary as saying that Britain starting bombing civilians and that it was "a Splendid Decision".
Feel free to back up your opinions with cites and quotes from the British Prime Minister and the RAF Air Secretary (notorious Nazi sympathizers for saying so - per you) - I backed up my opinions by quoting them. I didn't see any evidence supporting your arguments.
For more information on WWII history and a discussion of the difference between tactical bombing and terror bombing, read "Advance to Barbarism" and "Crimes Discreetly Veiled" by F. J. P. Veale, an English barrister.
Interestingly, your "Churchill quote" refers to footnote [46], the book, Dresden, by Frederick Taylor which defends the bombing of Dresden.
Frederick Taylor's well-researched and unpretentious book is a robust defence of the Dresden raids that counters recent attempts to recast the nation that gave the world Auschwitz as the second world war's principal victims, attempts that stretch back to the time of Goebbels.Other footnotes which are on the Wikipedia web page which you cite (such as #13), contain rebuttals to David Irving's book on the Destruction of Dresden, which is filled with inaccuracies. David Irving is a Holocaust denier and a Dresden liar.Undoubtedly, the most fascinating theme, which Taylor does successfully develop, is how, and why, targets were acquired by RAF and intelligence planners. He convincingly rebuts - one hesitates to write 'demolishes' - the legend that Dresden was purely a cultural centre, since even the (neighbouring) Meissen porcelain manufacturers had been converted to produce military teletypers ...
Taylor skilfully interweaves various personal accounts of the impact of the raids on the permanent or temporary population of Dresden, including its slave-labour force.
But the main thrust of his book is to defend a mission that was merely successful rather than exceptional. It came at the conclusion of a long war that, while generally brutalising and dulling moral sensitivities, also had clear enough justification in the fight between good and evil’
Irving’s account of the bombing of Dresden manipulates and invents material, misinterprets documents, and gives weight to unreliable documents. He also gives undue weight to eyewitness testimony when it suits him, and falsifies statistics in order to put the behaviour of the Allies and particularly Churchill, in a negative lightYa gotta see the big picture once in a while, if you want to survive in a world which has real "bad guys" You don't want to end up on the side of the Holocaust deniers.
The man was a genius.
Tamerlane
Just another rail stop for that nobody Wernher von Braun and his buddies.
I imagine her stories were more interesting than she thought...
Besides Rotterdam in 1940, I'm pretty sure the Luftwaffe intentionally bombed civilian targets in Poland in 1939, including Warsaw.
Quite an important little town, too. One of the V-2's made there landed in the next street over from my grandparents' house in North London.
-ccm
It is a big blow to moral when you have to slog your way across the frozen fields of France and the Soviet Union or up the rocky mountains of Italy in your bare feet.
Excuse me but you implied that the 9/11 attack was a justified act of war.
Where were we bombing their cities and destroying their countries in order to justify 9/11?
Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander is what you said.
Could you tell where we were doing that?
The easiest way to determine the truth is by admissions against interest.
Churchill's admission that the RAF was terror bombing is an important admission. The Air Secretary's admission in "Bombing Vindicated" that Britain started the terror bombing of civilians is an important admission. Analysis by historians trying to contradict these admissions years later is worth far less than the admissions by important British persons as to what really was going on at the time.
For a modern example, if OJ had admitted that he killed Nicole and Ron Goldman (an admission against interest) and years later a writer puts out a book saying that OJ didn't kill Nicole - who would you believe? OJ or the writer "researching and reasoning" why OJ really didn't kill Nicole or Ron Goldman years later?
Just out of curiosity would you have not cone everything you could to stop the larger more aggresive Nazis at the start of WWII?
Do you not believe that all out war saved the free world or would you have perhaps lost in order to be kinder and gentler towards your conquering horde?
Aren't you somewhat grateful that we are not posting in German now?
Yup. My old man was a fighter pilot in the RAF. His squadron spent the summer of 1945 training for the final invasion of the Japanese home islands. They were told it would result in 90% casualties.
Thank God for the atomic bombs. Too bad we didn't impose Pax Americana on the whole world the very next day, and ruthlessly obliterate any nation that dared challenge our nuclear supremacy.
-ccm
Was Churchill speaking for everyone? Is he being quoted in context? Was terrorism the only reason for the bombings? What was the alternative? How many Allied Deaths and civilian deaths would have occurred without the Dresden bombings?
Or as TR called him "Timur the Limper"...
People's interests vary from moment to moment.
You'd think Hillary would feel it was against her best interest to appear to be a liar, or an idiot, or a paranoid individual when she publicly blamed her husband's infidelity on a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy rather than on his own lack of control.
It's apparent that she thought it was in her interest to make that very unrealistic statement.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.