Firestorm [The bombing of Dresden]

Front Page Magazine ^ | 2/15/'07 | David Forsmark

[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.”

[Howard Jarvis Admirer]

Per RAF Air Marshal Saunders that "the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book (The Destruction of Dresden), will believe."

The target city was among Germany's largest, but it alone had developed no single major war industry. The German authorities had made it a centre for the evacuation of wounded servicemen, and by February 1945 most schools, restaurants, and public buildings had been converted into military hospitals. In selecting Dresden for this purpose, the German government probably hoped that this, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, often compared with Florence for its graceful Baroque architectural style, would be spared the attentions of the allied bombers. By 1945, the legend was deeply entrenched in the population's mind that Dresden was a city that would never be bombed.

It was not to be.

In the summer of 1944, the Allies had shelved as inopportune a plan to cripple German civilian morale by delivering one 'shattering blow' as R.A.F. staff officers termed it on one selected German city.

But in February 1945, with the Soviet armies making striking advances in their invasion of Silesia and East Prussia, and when the war's political and military directors were meeting at Yalta, Mr Winston Churchill was urgently in need of some display both of his offensive strength and of his willingness to assist the Russians in their drive westwards. The 'shattering blow' plan was brought out and reexamined.

Dresden, the 'virgin target' just seven miles behind the eastern Front, became the victim of Mr Churchill's desire for a spectacular blow.

By a combination of delays and poor weather, the raid, the climax of the strategic air offensive against Germany, and the most crushing air-raid of the war, was not delivered until the day that Mr Churchill was departing from Yalta.

In this work, a considerably revised and updated edition of his famous book THE DESTRUCTION OF DRESDEN, the author shows how the Dresden raid drew on each of the earlier fire-storm raids on Germany, those on Hamburg, Kassel, Darmstadt and Brunswick, and then combined the vital elements of success.

The city was undefended -- it had no guns, and even the German night-fighter force was grounded by Bomber Command's brilliant tactics of deception and trickery. It had no proper air-raid shelters. On the night of the attack, Dresden was housing hundreds of thousands of refugees from Silesia, East Prussia, and from western Germany in addition to its own population of 630,000.

Between fifty and a hundred thousand people were killed that night.

Yet until the author's first book on it appeared in 1963 the raid on Dresden scarcely figured in any official indices of the war. Politically and strategically, the raid was the fore-runner of the U.S. Air Force's atomic blows on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but the Dresden death-toll was probably larger than either.

Why was there this official silence about the Dresden tragedy?

Certainly little discredit reflected on the officers and men of the bomber forces; equally the two commanders, Sir Arthur Harris and General Carl Spaatz, were not acting out of hand. The directives and orders confronting them were painfully clear.

The British Prime Minister, however, was stung by public reaction throughout the world to news of the new St Valentine's Day massacre to pen an angry minute to the Chief of Staff warning that "the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of allied bombing". It is from this remarkably forgetful minute that the subtitle of this documentary account is taken. For the first time the full story, omitting nothing, of the historical background to this cruel blow and of its unexpected political consequences, is told.

First three, and now thirty years' research in England and Germany, and the active cooperation of the military authorities in London Washington and Moscow, produce a detailed account of this tragedy.

Even Air Marshal Saunders admitted "that the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book (The Destruction of Dresden), will believe. . . He (Air Marshal Saunders) is careful to disclaim any responsibility for ordering the attack on Dresden. (For a simple reason, it lacked military targets, was filled with refugees from the Red Army, and was an open city.) Saunders did not want to take responsibility for ordering a war crime aka atrocity.

[Howard Jarvis Admirer]

The truth is that the communists were far worse than the Germans - compare the treatment that U.S. POW's got from the Germans (Hogan's Heroes) versus the Communists (Hanoi Hilton). According to ICEBREAKER, by a former GRU officer Viktor Suvorov, Stalin had secretly helped Hitler achieve power in order to trigger WWII and destroy the capitalist countries. Stalin's plan was to let the Germans and the Allies fight each other to exhaustion then attack the survivor by surprise. Stalin's plan almost worked - if it had, Americans, Germans, and British would all be working as slaves on communist collective farms. Just think about what your life would be like in a North Korea type communist system - hell on earth.

[syriacus]

Could you provide a link to your source?

[California Patriot]

Thanks. Very interesting. Definitely a worthwhile perspective on Dresden.

[streetpreacher]

I didn't compare it to the Holocaust. That's ridiculous to assert that I did. I was commenting on both the author and Holocaust skeptics tendency to claim "it wasn't really that bad".

When they do it, it's considered hate speech; when this writer does it, it's considered legitimate debate.

I think neither subject should be off the table when it comes to historical debate nor should we allow either subject to fall into the hands of historical revisionists.

[avenir]

Wise words.

[Vietnam Vet From New Mexico]

Dropping the atomic bomb on Japan was probably the only way to end the war without an invasion of the home islands, and therefore saved millions of American and Japanese lives.

That said, I think the allied bombing campaign was a tragic error.

First, deliberately targeting civilians violates the basic principles of civilized war, and Christian morality. The fact that the Germans and Japanese did it (first or not does not matter) does not justify it. The Japs tortured our POWs, but we treated Jap POWs as a civilized nation should.
Second, it was not very effective militarily. German armament production increased in spite of the bombing. If the time, money and men poured into the bombing of civilians had been devoted to attacking true strategic targets, to tactical air support, or to better tanks, etc. the war would have been won sooner.

[TheLion]

Germany started the "terror bombing". Many other German cities went up in firestorms. I guess everyone just likes to choose this one to make their point. Germany had four different V rockets being fired at London during the war.

The Germans executed Russian prisoners of war on the Eastern front where they stood....One of the reasons the Russians fought so ferociously. Nobody talks much about the rape and pillage of Germany by the Russians. The Germans reaped what they had sowed.

They really had this destruction coming to them.

[Howard Jarvis Admirer]

The cite is from the Foreword to the original edition of David Irving's famous bestseller: The Destruction of Dresden

---

FOREWORD
by

AIR MARSHAL SIR ROBERT SAUNDBY
K.C.B., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., A.F.C.

Saundby is at right of this jacket image of US Bantam Books edition
WHEN the author of this book invited me to write a foreword to it, my first reaction was that I had been too closely concerned with the story. But though closely concerned I was not in any way responsible for the decision to make a full-scale air attack on Dresden. Nor was my Commander-in-Chief, Sir Arthur Harris. Our part was to carry out, to the best of our ability, the instructions we received from the Air Ministry. And, in this case, the Air Ministry was merely passing on instructions received from those responsible for the higher direction of the war.

This book is an impressive piece of work. The story is a highly dramatic and complex one, which still holds an element of mystery. I am still not satisfied that I fully understand why it happened. The author has, with immense industry and patience, gathered together all the evidence, separated fact from fiction, and given us a detailed account as near to the truth, perhaps, as we shall ever get.

That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe . . . "

[TheLion]

It was right, but then again it isn't? Which is it?

WWII was brutal and you and all the rest of us would have never been here if it had been in the hands of Japan and Germany.

They must have convinced most of the world back then they merited this kind of destruction. They sure brought it upon everyone they could.

[TheLion]

It is nice that we can look back at these incidents and argue whether they were justified.

Taken in the context of what was going on back then, I can easily see them coming about.

Germany had pissed off the world by this time with their barbaric deeds. I don't think the Allies were spending all of their time pondering niceties.

The Allies also firmly believed that bombing German cities would shorten the war. At that time, shortening the war was of paramount importance.

[Howard Jarvis Admirer]

As is pointed out above in Post 52:

"I notice you have nothing to say about German terror bombing".

For a simple reason - well educated persons know that the British, not the Germans, started the cycle of terror bombing civilians. The RAF Air Secretary admitted it in his book.

From: Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare from Sarajevo to Hiroshima (Paperback)
by Frederick J. Veale (Author) on Amazon.com

". . . The accusation leveled against the Germans that they deliberately caused harm to civilians is refuted by the fact that the British started this breach of international law. Veale cites J.M. Spaight's book BOMBING VINDICATED to prove that the British started the deleiberate of German civilians on May 11, 1940 which Spaight called the "Splendid Decision." While the battle for France was being waged hundreds of miles from German civilians, the British, who should have focused their bombing to military targets such as bridge networks in France, bombed innocent civilians who had nothing to do with the Battle of France. In fact, Veale makes a good point that had the British concentrated their bombing on these bridge networks, destruction of these networks would have stopped Hitler's mechanized forces due to the lack of getting gasoline supplies. The German offensive would have stalled and would have been defeated."

I think it is good that you are trying to contribute to the discussion - but your opinion is not based on facts that were even admitted by the RAF Air Secretary.

[TheLion]

I know a lot more about WWII than you seem to. Terror bombing was started by the Germans and not the British!

The Germans did everything they could to bomb the piss out of London, throughout the War. They even designed 4 versions of the V rocket for this purpose. They would have destroyed everyone in England if they could.

You need to stop supporting the liberal appologies and expand on your reading.

[Howard Jarvis Admirer]

The V type rockets were named V for Vengeance - the Germans were retaliating for the British terror attacks on German civilians.

You apparently think that you know more about terror bombing and WWII than the British Prime Minister and the RAF officials who ordered the attacks - Winston Churchill and Air Secretary Spaight.

Where are you getting your facts? Please give quotes and cites that disprove what Churchill and Spaight said. Good luck.

[Erasmus]

An excellent source on LeMay's bombing philosophy can be found in Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb."

[TheLion]

You found someone who claims that one esoteric incident, nobody probably ever heard about, is somehow proof 60 some years later that England started terror bombing Germans first....hardly believable.

[volunbeer]

"The pu$$ies of the world dont win wars, Men do."

I fear this is why the most capable military in history quickly won the battle but will lose the occupation/rebuilding since it is being conducted like a police patrol in Philadelphia with the NAACP, ACLU, and defense attorneys riding shotgun.

Whatever happened to the idea about one of ours being worth 10000 of them? (Patton, I believe)

[ozzymandus]

This theory is a couple of years old. More of that "Them dirty krauts deserved to die" stuff the armchair commandos love to spout.

[smoketree]

Really????????????
I had never heard about the Russian plan to rule the world and their invasion of Europe to accomplish that end.
I never heard about all the Russian submarines off our coast and in the Atlantic sinking our ships.
Somehow I missed where Russia was bombing England and threatening invasion of England.
So the Germans were just peacefully going about their business until we started fire bombing their cities in order to terrify the German people?
Kind of like al qaeda being justified in attacking us on 9/11 because we had been bombing their cities and enslaving their people?
I think you are suffering from some kind of arm chair general fireside with a drink rewriting history after you've forgotten that you never were involved in what you are rewriting.

[chuckles]

My father flew in a B-24 in WWII. He was a bombardier, and a bottom turret gunner, mostly a turret gunner.( He was 5'3" and sometimes they had no volunteer's. The belly turret was a volunteer situation.)

I asked him when I was about 12 or so( we always watched anything we could on TV about WWII), how he felt about bombing cities and the bombs could hit schools and hospitals. He replied that we were at war with Germans and Germany, not just soldiers. He related the stories of his buddies bailing out and the Hitler youth running to the fields to stick the airmen with pitchforks. He also talked of the soldiers in prison camps that got no medical care, and in fact were experimented on and tortured. He taught me that when you are at war, you kill, and kill, and kill, until the enemy surrenders. The Germans were just glad to be alive after we got through with them and were manageable after the war. Just killing the soldiers, would not pacify the people back home and we would still be fighting guerrilla's to this day.

Same with Japan. We knew there would be millions of casualties trying to storm the Japanese mainland. We ended the war by ONLY killing a few 10's of thousands. More people died in the fire bombings than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. It did show the Japanese however that we had superior technology and they had no chance. They had the same attitude as the people we fight today. They would commit suicide before surrender and they would have been a terrible foe for our soldiers to try to discriminate the women and children from the "enemy".

The first Gulf War was fought correctly. We overwhelmed them with firepower and they surrendered in droves. The mistake was to not go into Baghdad then, and hang the SOB when we had the chance. That was the difference between Colin Powell and Swartzkoff. We will NEVER be allowed to win a UN war.

The Iraq war could end in a week, if Bush had the gonads to tell Baghdad that they will pacify or be wiped off the map. The carpet bombing of Sadr city would be a wake up call, that everyone in the US isn't a wussy. You could hear all the protests and whining form every corner, but in reality, what are they going to do about it. They won't help us, so F them.

The biggest pain I feel over this war is we sent young men over there to die and bleed, and were not committed to win the war at all costs, INCLUDING NUKES. An American soldier should never think his life is so cheap we can throw it away and then barter a half ass-ed deal down the road. Just ask a Korean vet what they think was accomplished or a Viet Nam Vet. We were lulled into felling we won the Korean war because they went behind some fictitious line on a map. They are still there, they never surrendered, and as you can see, they are still a pain in our ass. If we don't get some sort of "no doubt about it", bonified, kick ass victory in Iraq, we will be haunted by that failure for decades to come. Bin Laden himself has used the Viet Nam defeat to prove we can't stomach a "real" war". The Dems will prove him right and we will be attacked until we are willing to kill women, children, dogs, and livestock, along with the throat cutters until they say "we quit".

I'm a fat, broke down, bad back, retired guy, but the enemy should know if they come here, I will kill them until they kill me. It would be a mistake to let me live because I was a "harmless" old man. They will receive no mercy from me as long as they are in my country. We, as Americans, must realize they feel the same about us. We shouldn't expect to be treated well because they are women and children. They will tie TNT to their baby's diaper and send them to the US soldiers camp. They must believe they will not survive as a race of people if they don't pacify. That would actually end the war quicker and with fewer casualties on both sides. They have yet to believe we are really serious. Maybe we aren't.