Dresden (13 page)

Under most rules of war, the attack on Guernica was strictly speaking justified. It amounted to an act of interdiction—the forcible prevention of an army from retreating away from its victorious opponents and thus regrouping to fight another day. But Guernica was also a town, and a historic one at that, known since the Middle Ages as a center of Basque language and culture, where councils had traditionally met under the shade of an ancient oak. The Condor Legion's intervention was also spectacularly bloody and dramatic in a way that was rightly recognized at the time as setting a new, ghastly pattern for warfare, and that—scale apart—was to be followed with eerie similarity from Coventry to Dresden and on to Vietnam and Iraq.

Guernica was crowded, it is said, not just with fleeing Republican soldiers and civilians, but with shoppers, for it was market day. Even in the middle of the worst war, farmers must sell their produce, and people must eat, and with the Nationalist ground forces still miles away, there was no reason to believe that the town would be subjected to attack just yet. This was an assumption that no civilian population would ever be able to make again. The first German Ju-52s appeared over the town at about 4:30 in the afternoon. Bombs began to fall on the market square and the bridge leading into the city. The attack went on for some hours, with the German pilots using the existing fires as markers and therefore tending to drop even more bombs on the town center. After the bombers had finished, fighters came in and flew low to spray cannonfire through the streets.

The casualty figures of Guernica are still disputed more than sixty years later. The numbers of fatalities quoted still range between three hundred and sixteen hundred (if true, the latter representing almost a quarter of the town's population). There seems general agreement that around 70 percent of the town was destroyed. At the time Franco denied that the raid had occurred—or that, if it had, the Republican air force was to blame. Commenting in the 1950s, the German air ace Adolf Galland, who had taken part in the raid, described Guernica as a “regrettable mistake…of the kind that would be repeated countless times later during the Second World War.” The world was learning that the air war—fallible human beings operating at high speed from high in the sky against targets that were hard to define or even find—
was especially prone to error, and that those errors could have truly terrible consequences.

Nor, as both reporters and historians would later realize, were the errors confined to the planners or the aircrew, or the weasel claims of “official spokesmen.” If air attacks were the half-blind work of an instant for the perpetrators, for the human beings on the ground they amounted to an unimaginable melange of horror, fear, and loss: all the car crashes, house fires, and physical assaults that could be imagined, all rolled into one. Understandably, when questioned later, eyewitnesses offer accounts that vary wildly; the “facts” they quote (and that find their way into newspaper accounts, newsreels, and history books) are sometimes objectively disprovable, or their memories are found to be at fault or “tainted” by mixture with extraneous received wisdom.

A German historian from Dresden visited Guernica many years later, in the company of a Spanish colleague. The German was introduced to an elderly man who had been in Guernica when it was bombed, who proceeded to give a passionate, detailed, and heartrending account of the raid. As they walked away afterward the Spanish historian smiled and said that very little of what the eyewitness had told them was accurate. So was he lying? Of course not. He was telling the younger men
his
experience of April 26, 1937,
his
memories,
his
Guernica, and in that regard everything he said was the absolute truth for
him
. For the individual, memory is truth (for how else does a life recalled make any sense?), but for the historian it is just one factor, to be balanced and checked and seen as part of a whole.

Picasso's famous painting
Guernica
quotes no figures, gives no details, and yet says everything. It shows above all the horror, the fear, and the unnatural malevolent physicality of that day's mayhem. The mother/victim, wracked with anticipation, looks helplessly, in brutally distorted mimicry of a hundred painted pietàs, up to heaven, whence for countless generations her ancestors had expected not destruction but salvation. No longer. One moment a familiar, beloved town is there, just as it has been for hundreds of years, shaped by and shaping the land surrounding it. It is under threat, but the enemy troops are still, by traditional standards, quite distant. There is time for those planning to stay to buy and sell, and for those planning to escape to make their way across the river and continue on their journey. Then the planes come, and a few hours later the town is gone, a ruin, with
many hundreds dead, injured, forever traumatized. This is war as it has never been experienced before. War at a remote distance, coolly impersonal, but more deadly than ever. Literally inescapable.

Franco's soldiers arrived two days after the raid, to occupy the ruins. Soon the Condor Legion would turn to bombing the city centers of Madrid and Barcelona in an attempt to wear down their citizens' stubborn resistance to Franco. Another experiment that would be repeated ad infinitum, over the cruel years to come. The Japanese had already used their increasingly powerful air force to bomb Chinese cities in their war against Chiang Kai-shek's regime, with devastating results. By the late 1930s it was clear that, whatever inhibitions politicians and voters in the democratic states might have about the use of air power to kill large numbers of civilians in towns and cities, it had already happened and was going to continue to happen for as long as war itself could not be prevented.

And it could not.

WITHIN HOURS
of the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the neutral United States, made a plea to the major combatants to confine bombing to strictly military targets. The British and French signed on to the president's plan the next day (September 2). The Germans waited. Finally, after their forces reached Warsaw (which thereby became technically a “military target” and exempted from the agreement), they added their assent on September 18.

There were rather ineffectual British attacks on Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, important German naval bases, but by and large in that winter of the “Phony War,” both sides stuck to their pledge. It suited them. The British could build up their productive strength, and supply the expeditionary force they now had in place in France, without the constant nagging worry of massive German air raids on London and other major cities. As late as 1938, despite rapid expansion of the RAF, whose strength tripled between 1934 and 1939, the development of promising new fighter aircraft, and above all the installation of the revolutionary new radar defensive system on the coasts facing the continent, the official view remained colored by former Prime Minister Baldwin's 1932 dictum that “the bomber will always get through.” The authorities feared that something like 150,000 casualties could result from just the first week of Luftwaffe raids against London, the country's all-too-vulnerable capital. The British public's fear of extinction from the air was heightened not just by news reports of devastating bombing raids on towns in Spain, China, and
Poland, but also by screen fictions such as the film
Things to Come,
which featured an Armageddon-like war and the threat of worldwide destruction.

Nevertheless, the British public seemed to be of two minds. Following the attacks on the north German ports in the first week of September, the government ordered the RAF to concentrate on an operation code-named Nickel, which consisted entirely of dropping vast quantities of discouraging literature over the western provinces of Germany. If bombing techniques were still in their infancy, so were the RAF's leaflet distribution skills. The bricklike bundles each contained about fifteen hundred leaflets, held together by a rubber band. These were in turn combined in larger packs of twelve, done up with string. Over the “target,” a crew member had to find the space to cut the string and feed the sections out through the flare chute. Once they emerged, the aircraft's slipstream was expected to free the leaflets from their restraining rubber bands and send them floating to earth over a suitably wide area. One of the early Nickel leaflets gives some of the flavor:

The notion that the “German people” had been able to “insist” on anything of any importance since the summer of 1933 was almost touching. Another leaflet, dropped over Berlin at the beginning of October 1939, went for the scandal sheet approach:

As the writer and cabaret artist Noël Coward remarked with typical acerbity, this was beginning to look like a campaign to
bore
the Germans to death. “But do we have the time?” he asked plaintively.

With reports coming in every day of devastated Polish towns and cities, there were murmurings against keeping such an expensive air force in near idleness, but the government still did not order major bombing attacks. Perhaps the idea was,
pace
Coward, to buy time, for every month that passed enabled Britain's factories to produce more fighters and bombers and thus lessen the gap between the Luftwaffe's seeming invincibility and the RAF. The government duly started emphasizing that these were not merely leafleting trips but reconnaissance missions, spying out the enemy's weaknesses.

The war against Poland might have been the “Blitzkrieg,” but the winter of 1939–40 witnessed the “Sitzkrieg”(sit-down war). The Anglo-French forces, dug in behind the Rhine defenses and the Maginot Line, spent a freezing winter staring at their victorious German opponents and perhaps asking themselves if the promise to aid Poland had been such a good idea after all. This was when British minister Sir Kingsley Wood, asked to approve a scheme to bomb the Black Forest and set it on fire, is said (possibly apocryphally) to have replied: “Are you aware it is private property? Why, you'll be asking us to bomb Essen next!” It was also when Marshal Göring, World War I ace and creator-commander of the Luftwaffe, made one of his most notorious and probably most unfortunate remarks: “If a single enemy plane reaches Reich territory, you can call me Meier”—meaning “I'm a monkey's uncle.”

The “Phony War” ended in April 1940 with the successful German attack on Norway, where the Luftwaffe's command of the air over the Baltic enabled use of airborne troops and also provided almost faultless cover for the forces being poured in by sea. Another key element was the revolutionary degree of coordination between ground and air forces through radio contact (techniques way ahead of the Anglo-French capability, developed above all by Wolfram von Richthofen during his time as chief of staff in Spain and Poland).
Come the attack against France and the Low Countries just over a month later, and the Luftwaffe seemed to be transforming itself into an invincible legend, the airborne equivalent of Frederick the Great's famous Prussian grenadiers.

Skillful propaganda also enhanced the German air force's prestige. Two major propaganda films had toured the world during the first winter of the conflict, both of them dealing with the Polish campaign, and both building up the Luftwaffe into a glorious, unbeatable, and above all terrifyingly adept instrument of Germany's national will. The first film,
Feuertaufe
(
Baptism of Fire
), showed the role of the air force in the fall of Warsaw, and spared little effort in showing just how destructive German bombers could be. In the second,
Kampfgeschwader Lützow
(
Combat Squadron Lützow
), the crew of a low-flying Heinkel 111 swoops down over a Polish road, recognizes not just a column of kidnapped ethnic Germans but also manages to distinguish between them and their cowardly but bombastic Polish guards—successfully picking off the latter in true movie-hero style and leaving the innocent Germans unscathed. The film managed to present one of the standard propaganda justifications of Hitler's invasion of Poland (ethnic Germans had to be saved from brutal Poles). At the same time, like
Feuertaufe
, it also emphasized in wildly exaggerated style the superhuman skills of Luftwaffe aircrew, thereby presenting a warning of what would happen to those hapless nations that opposed the Third Reich in its march to power.

The second great example of the woes that would befall those enemies came after Hitler sent his forces, without declaration of war, into wealthy, complacent, and traditionally neutral Holland. Many key defenses were captured by German paratroopers during the first few hours of the surprise attack. When the garrison of the Netherlands' second city and largest port, Rotterdam, refused to surrender, the Wehrmacht sent in the bombers, destroying large areas of the old city and killing hundreds and possibly thousands of civilians as well as soldiers. Since the Netherlands never expected to be involved in a European war, air raid defenses and shelters were minimal, and this contributed to a higher-than-necessary death toll.

Rotterdam became notorious, as Guernica had been, and as Coventry was to become. The Germans argued that it was a mistake (again), resulting from, among other things, glitches in radio commu
nications and the fact that Holland at that stage set its clocks twenty minutes ahead of Greenwich mean time. The British and their allies, to whom Rotterdam was a genuine horror but also a propaganda boon, pointed out that incendiary bombs had been used, that excessive force had been brought to bear against a city that was about to surrender in any case, and that Holland was traditionally a peaceful country (at least as far as its relation with European countries was concerned—those absorbed into its extensive and profitable Far Eastern empire might beg to differ). The time had come, evidently, for the restrictions adopted at Roosevelt's behest to be reconsidered.

Attempts by British bombers to intervene in the ground conflict, as the Luftwaffe had done so brilliantly in Poland and Norway, had been disastrous. On May 10, the day the Germans broke through the Allied lines, thirty-two near-obsolete aircraft, Fairey Battles, were sent in to attack the southernmost German armored columns, which were racing through Luxembourg toward the French border. The Battles flew at low level—250 feet—to avoid German fighters, but instead were greeted with withering antiaircraft fire. Thirteen of the thirty-two were shot down, the rest damaged. The next day an early air raid by German fighters caught one of the two squadrons of the slightly more up-to-date Blenheim bombers on the ground. That same day eight of the hapless Battles tried again against the German armor. Seven were shot down, and the only surviving aircraft crashed when landing back at base. On May 12 nine Blenheims of 139 Squadron sought out German armor on the Maastricht-Tongres road, this time keeping to six thousand feet to avoid the fate of the low-flying Battles. Predatory Luftwaffe fighters ambushed them. Only two Blenheims survived. Heroic failure became the pattern, accompanied by unacceptable loss rates of both aircrew and machines. Raids on the bridges over the Albert Canal in Belgium (four out of five planes destroyed) and against road junctions and bridges at Maastricht (fourteen out of twenty-four lost) continued the sorry tale.

Within forty-eight hours the RAF bomber force operating on the continent had lost almost half its aircraft. On May 14 the remaining planes were called out by a desperate High Command, at the request of the French, to help close off the German bridgeheads just established across the Meuse. A further forty Battles and Blenheims were lost to enemy fighters and antiaircraft fire. This reduced the force to a
quarter of its original strength. One of those who survived wrote of his comrades' vomiting from sheer terror and exhaustion before climbing into their aircraft and flying off to do battle with an enemy whose equipment was superior to theirs in every way.

The unequal fight could not go on. A few days later, after more disastrous losses, the RAF policy switched to night bombing. Less accurate, but much safer. Losses dropped dramatically. The failure of the bombers in a tactical role played a part in other decisions made during these grim days. The Air Staff had considered that if the Germans invaded the Low Countries, it would be time to “take the gloves off.” Even when that happened, the politicians still hesitated. Then came Rotterdam. The next day the War Cabinet approved the plan long supported by the Air Staff and Bomber Command. Attacks against German targets.

Bomber Command had already been carrying out night raids against marshaling yards and communications inside Germany but only west of the Rhine (that is, immediately behind the front), reckoning that these would count as legitimate attacks by any international standards. The decision of May 15 permitted British aircraft to cross the Rhine into the industrial powerhouse of the Ruhr area and bomb oil plants, prominent, self-illuminating industrial targets such as blast furnaces and coke ovens, plus the usual transport and communications facilities. The RAF's ambitions were dual: to show they could hit vulnerable enemy assets, while at the same time (they hoped) drawing back into a defensive struggle inside Germany the Luftwaffe forces that were creating such mayhem in France. In doing this, the RAF dropped bombs not on troop concentrations or defended fortresses but on quasi-civilian targets—the kind of targets, now and later, whose legitimacy would be endlessly argued over.

The raid on the night of May 15–16, 1940, involved a large-for-the-time force of ninety-six Whitley, Wellington, and Hampden bombers. It was not especially successful. Seventy-eight were given oil plants to attack, of which only twenty-three reported actually finding the targets. Sixteen aircraft—one-sixth of the force—failed to make any kind of attack at all. On the other hand, only one aircraft failed to return, having crashed into a hillside in France on the return trip. So was completed the first operation in RAF Bomber Command's campaign against the interior of the Third Reich. The attacks may have
contributed to hesitation by the Germans in the period before Dunkirk, but the effect was not major.

From these ineffectual but low-cost beginnings would follow five years' expenditure of blood, toil, and treasure by Britain and its allies, and untold suffering for the civilian population of Germany.

 

WITH THE UNITED KINGDOM
standing alone and bracing itself for a possible German invasion, the primary aims of most British military plans during the fateful summer of 1940 were defensive ones.

Just a week after Rotterdam's immolation and surrender to the Germans, British bombers attacked the city's oil refineries in an attempt to deny their use to the enemy. London's propaganda might bewail the “barbaric” Luftwaffe bombing of Holland's second city, but war was war. In June Blenheims hammered German airfields at Rouen on the channel coast, Amiens, and Schiphol in Holland (now the site of Amsterdam airport). Factories, especially those connected with aircraft manufacture and supply, were attacked at Bremen (Focke-Wulf), Gotha (Messerschmitt 110), Deichshausen (Junkers 52) and the Rhineland, including Cologne. Plants to produce artificial oil from coal, built at enormous expense by the Reich to make its armies and air force independent of vulnerable foreign oilfields, were also targeted, including those at Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr and the giant works at Leuna, near Halle in Central Germany, which was troubled by ten visits from the RAF from mid-June to mid-August 1940.