Dresden (48 page)

“TO BURN AND DESTROY
an enemy industrial center,” read 5 Group's orders on February 13, 1945.

The brutally utilitarian description of Dresden willfully ignored the complicated nature of the target as well as the true aim of the raid, but at the same time was a horribly accurate summary of what happened on the ground. Dresden was indeed burned and destroyed, in the space of a night. Some of the city's industry was consigned to the flames with it. As were between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand human beings, an architectural heritage created over centuries, and a treasured, enviable way of life.

In 1942, almost exactly three years before the destruction of Dresden, the first area bombing directive had allowed bomber formations to attack housing and morale as well as obvious military and industrial targets. This had been a sign not of strength but of weakness. It had been an admission that accuracy by night was so poor that precision targets simply could not realistically be attacked. The choice had been between bombing urban areas in Germany by the square mile or not bombing them at all; and for a British military elite under huge pressure to “do something” against the Nazis, it was no choice at all. Lübeck and Rostock had been the immediate result. Then came the Ruhr, Hamburg, Berlin…And the German casualties mounted.

This British determination to strike back ruthlessly reflected the mentality of an island under siege, conducting forays against the enemy from within its sea moat. The Germans might have seized control of the continent, but they would not be safe in their dominance. Moreover, the average German, it was thought, would not—and
should not—be safe either. In 1870–71 and in 1914–18 the Reich's civilians (with the exception of those in East Prussia during the first weeks of the First World War) had looked on as their armies fought over other peoples' lands. As late as 1943 Goebbels had claimed with satisfaction that the extent of German conquests put the Reich in the position of being able to wage war—permanently as he then saw it—thousands of miles from its own borders. As far as land operations were concerned, this was true, but it did not reckon with Anglo-American air power. The RAF's bombing raids provided encouragement to the beleaguered British population and reminded the millions in Germany who had voted for and supported Hitler, and the millions more who tolerated him as long as he remained successful, that war always came at a cost.

As a leaflet dropped in many thousands over the Reich reminded the Germans: “Europe is a fortress. But it is a fortress without a roof.”

The British had discovered the firestorm at Hamburg, and had decided it was worth trying for that impressive phenomenon every time they attacked a city. Why not?

None of this is to say that area-bombing raids were all that Bomber Command could do. Their work against specialist German targets—above all the artificial oil plants—was efficient. The same went for attacks on rail and other transportation targets. Harris himself was amazed at how accurate his aircrew proved when assigned to daylight tactical bombing after D-Day (though it must remembered that the clear, long summer days were the best time for such attacks). By the autumn of 1944, when he was able to return Bomber Command to the task of bombing Germany, an Allied task force was firmly established on the continent, and Britain was no longer an island power at bay. Technology had improved. H2S and Gee, and all the other technical miracles had slowly increased the accuracy of the RAF's bombing, even at night and even in poor weather.

However, ineffective raids such as the near-fiasco at Chemnitz, less than twenty-four hours after the destruction of Dresden, also showed how easily things could go wrong. Even a short while before the end of the war, the Americans, though bombing in the daytime, were also still having problems with living up to their promise of “precision bombing” unless conditions were absolutely clear. Between September 1944 and April 1945, only 30 percent of bombs dropped by the
Eighth Army Air Force were aimed visually, while 70 percent were dropped blind using H2X. Of that 70 percent dropped by radar-aided means, it was estimated that only
2 percent
fell within one thousand feet of their aiming points. However, what were the western powers supposed to do? Ground their entire air forces except when conditions (in northwest Europe, in winter) guaranteed an accurate visual fix on the target? They could have. But they did not.

Respected historians of the air war, most prominently Anthony Verrier and Max Hastings, believe that after the summer of 1944 the RAF could and should have stopped bombing cities and concentrated on precision attacks. By not doing so, in fact by stepping up the bombing of Germany's urban populations, the British, and to some extent the Americans, lost the moral high ground. This may be true, and since the end of the war the priorities of Bomber Command have been subjected to intense examination and widespread criticism.

All the same, there are a number of problems with this belief, some political and some practical. It is hard to believe that in the winter of 1944–45 a voluntary Anglo-American withdrawal from city bombing would have been acceptable to Allied public opinion—especially after German resistance stiffened in the autumn, to be followed in December by Hitler's counterattack in the Ardennes, which cost tens of thousands of Allied (mostly American) casualties. And then there were the V-1 and V-2 raids on Antwerp, Paris, London and southern England, which cost thousands of civilian lives and were terrifyingly indiscriminate by their very nature. Not every English voter would have approved of the MPs who were constantly leaping to their feet in Parliament to demand that this or that undamaged German city be bombed with all urgency, but firm opposition to city bombing was confined to a minority, even late in the war. It was generally perceived that the Germans had “asked for it,” that they had “sown the wind and must reap the whirlwind.”

As for the proposition that such devastation came to be inflicted when the war was “almost over,” it must be said that no one knew when the war was going to end. The fact that Germany insisted on prolonging the battle long after defeat was inevitable (and therefore continued to bring retribution upon itself) if anything hardened the hearts of a war-weary, embittered Allied public.

Attitudes would, as we know, change, but not yet. “Bombing,” as
Professor Richard Overy has commented, “provoked a real heart-searching only once the conflict was over.”

On a practical level, aircrew had been trained, at enormous expense, to carry out the big “city-busting” raids. The huge bureaucracy of planners and administrators had been trained to support and guide them in their task. Area bombing had become a habit, even an addiction. The RAF knew how to do it. And it guaranteed a result. As the Anglo-German writer W. G. Sebald put it in his recently printed lecture on the German experience of the air war:

It would be nice to think that the deadly course of the bomber war was pursued as the result of continual moral struggle and reevaluation. Nice, but wrong. Sebald's explanation is frankly more plausible.

It was a matter of what worked (or was perceived at the time to work). The British Air Staff had originally learned lessons from its careful analysis of the German attack on Coventry in November 1940. The longest-lasting damage, and the most crucial, had been the harm done by the Luftwaffe to the city's sewage, power, and communications services. Factories can be moved, or put underground, or rebuilt fairly easy, but the complex and often convoluted systems for living that are developed in a city over decades can be far harder to put back together. As Goebbels observed in his diary after a meeting with Speer in April 1943, “Industrial damage can be dealt with far more easily than damage to private homes.” Hence the logic of concentrating the bombing not on the outskirts of Dresden, and the
Autobahn
and all the bridges, but the heart of the city, where housing is dense and everything comes together. And
that was exactly what 5 Group of RAF Bomber Command were good at. Burning and destroying “centers.”

In that sense, the attack on Dresden was routine. Many, perhaps the majority of Dresdeners who lived through the firestorm, believe that the attack on their city was somehow special in its malevolence, cunning, and destructive intent. So how truly exceptional was the bombing of Dresden? In its effects, certainly. A fine city filled with beautiful buildings was destroyed in the course of one terrible night and a morning. Tens of thousands of noncombatants died or suffered horrific injuries. The attack was planned with malevolent skill, and carried out efficiently. But in its conception? Perhaps not. The author of one of the authoritative German histories of the bomber war, Olaf Groehler—himself from Leipzig—comes closest to the truth when summarizing the escalation of bombing during the final months of the war:

In other words, in practical terms Dresden was one heavy raid among a whole, deadly sequence of massive raids, but for various unpredictable reasons—wind, weather, lack of defenses and above all shocking deficiencies in air raid protection for the general population—it suffered the worst. Even such a statement may not be entirely correct. Darmstadt, Kassel, Pforzheim, and Würzburg were smaller, but arguably they suffered no less. Proportionately Pforzheim suffered much more, losing a sixth of its population—17,600 human beings—
and an estimated 83 percent of its built-up area on the night of February 23–24, 1945. The bomber force that did this to the town at the gates of the Black Forest was less than half the size of that involved in the “double-punch” attack on Dresden ten days previously.

Groehler's remarks about the routine quality of the Dresden operation also leads to thoughts about one of the other postwar quandaries about the raid: that under the guise of aiding the Red Army on the eastern front, it was deliberately planned to intimidate (or deter) the advancing Russians. There is indeed a puzzle here, for in his magisterial work
The Bomber War Against Germany
, where he makes the remarks quoted above, at the same time the distinguished East German historian devotes a sizable excursus to asserting exactly that. In other words, the operation was routine, and proved awesomely destructive largely by chance—and yet it was also carefully planned (as Groehler put it) to “demonstrate the strength of British-American weaponry to the Soviet Union.”

The chief piece of evidence here is an internally circulated summary of the work of Air Intelligence from 1945, which was loaned to the author Max Hastings by a former officer at Bomber Command's headquarters in High Wycombe. It contains a copy of briefing notes sent out to squadrons and wings before the Dresden raid and reads as follows:

Of itself, the little sting in the tail of this document does not necessarily imply that the official plan was to intimidate the Russians, and Hastings does not dwell on this. It could be interpreted as a kind of “live” version of the somewhat macabre “blue books,” containing photographs of bomb damage in German cities, that Harris frequently sent to Moscow throughout the war to “show what Bomber Command can do,” and which Stalin is said to have examined with satisfaction.

More serious are the remarks made by the British master bombers for the two attacks on Dresden, Peter de Wesselow and Maurice Smith, to the author Alexander McKee in the 1970s. Groehler reports that de Wesselow said that the attack should “impress the Soviet Army with the power of Bomber Command” and in Smith's case that “the destruction of an untouched city of this sort would make a significant effect on the Russians.” Both these are accurate as far as they go, except that Groehler does not mention that Smith went on to add, slightly more enigmatically: “We had the impression that the Russians discounted what Bomber Command could do. Although we did not regard them like the other Allies, we respected the Russian army and wanted to help them against Hitler.” Likewise, the de Wesselow quotation is diluted if one quotes the entire sentence, which includes important qualifying words. “I
think
we knew,” de Wesselow recalled, “and were
probably
told that it was to help, and still more impress, the Russians with the power of Bomber Command.” More than thirty years later, who can be sure that what they
think
they were told was colored by subsequent reading and the power of postwar controversy?