The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945
by Jorg Friedrich, translated by Allison Brown
(Columbia University Press, 552 pages, $34.95)
Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of
Dresden
by Marshall De Bruhl
(Random House, 368 pages, $25.95)
Sixty years after the event, the mass bombing of Germany still
raises anxious thoughts, and reading these two impressive books is
a sad experience. Jorg Friedrich’s volume is the first
comprehensive and deeply researched book on the subject written
from a German point of view, while Marshall De Bruhl’s study of
what is widely regarded as the worst atrocity, the attack on
Dresden in February 1945, is the best book on this subject I have
read, obliterating the effect of the earlier and sensational work
by David Irving, which we now know to be grossly exaggerated.
I was an English schoolboy, 11-16, while the bombing campaign
was taking place, and listened daily to the BBC bulletin which gave
all the German cities bombed the previous night. Nobody I knew, or
heard of at the time, had a word to say against the bombing or did
anything but rejoice at what we believed to be its triumphant
effectiveness. It has to be remembered that in the first half of
the war, right up to the victory of Alamein in November 1942,
Britain experienced an unrelieved succession of defeats, and for
most of the time was fighting Nazi Germany alone, without the
smallest prospect of winning the war. The one powerful weapon we
possessed was Bomber Command, under its redoubtable and ruthless
commander, Air Marshall Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, and the use of
this weapon was the only way in which we could damage Germany’s
war-waging capacity, and “make the Germans pay” for starting the
war in the first place. So we used it for all it was worth, with
the backing of the entire nation. Only once was the moral issue
raised publicly, by the Bishop of Chichester, and he found few
supporters.
The policy of giving mass-bombing of German industrial areas
high priority was throughout decided by the War Cabinet, and Harris
merely carried out orders. Wherever possible specific targets were
selected, whose destruction had a direct impact on the Nazi
war-making capacity, and this was the avowed object of U.S. bombing
policy, after America joined the war and became an enthusiastic
partner in the effort. But high-altitude night bombing by Bomber
Command was inaccurate at this stage, and “area bombing,” as it was
sometimes called, was indiscriminate but justified on the grounds
that it demolished the housing of the workers in the war factories,
when it did not actually kill them.
The policy was costly in aircraft and crews. On the other hand,
it forced Germany to divert air defense and fighter resources from
the eastern front and thus made it easier for the Russians to win
the ground war there. And many of Germany’s smaller war-industry
towns were completely destroyed. At Pforzheim, for instance, a
precision-engineering center with hundreds of small workshops, 80
percent of the buildings were wrecked and 25 percent of the
workforce killed.
Dresden was Germany’s seventh largest city and perhaps its
finest art and architectural center, so the huge raid on February
13, 1945, was more controversial. But De Bruhl concludes that
Dresden, “with its pre-war light industries retooled and revamped
to provide vital military goods and services, and with its vast
network of railroads, highways and river traffic, was clearly a
viable military target. No responsible military planner could
ignore it. The city was an important component of the Nazi war
machine.” Moreover, he adds, the raid, plus American follow-up
attacks, successfully knocked the city out of the war.
IT HAS ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME that the bombing of Germany, though
justified in the years 1940 to 1944, became progressively less so
as Soviet advances in the East, and the success of Operation
Overlord in the West made Nazi defeat on the ground increasingly
certain. Churchill sensed this. He wanted some German industry
preserved to help rebuild Britain, and he was uneasy about German
civilian casualties. On March 28, 1945, he minuted his chief of
staff General “Pug” Ismay, “It seems to me that the moment has come
when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of
increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be
reviewed.” But by then the war was practically over, and the crime,
if it was a crime, had been committed.
After the war, when Churchill was replaced by Clem Attlee and
his Labour government, uneasiness about the bombing grew, and was
expressed in a characteristically English way. Attlee and Labour
had been in the wartime coalition and endorsed the bombing policy,
so they could not repudiate it openly. But Harris was left out of
the victory honors list. Leaders of comparable seniority in all
three services received peerages but Harris was denied one. He, and
the survivors of Bomber Command, bitterly resented this cowardly
snub.
Jorg Friedrich tells the story from the viewpoint of the bombed
with, it seems to me, great skill and objectivity, and with many
gruesome details. Some of the photos are horrifying, particularly
one of the massed corpses of the Dresden raid piled on iron
gratings for incineration. Yet the numbers killed were, bearing in
mind the huge bomb weights and the firestorms raised, surprisingly
few. German morale held up well, despite the failure of Hitler’s
rockets offensive, which Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry hailed as
“retribution.” There were some incidents in which angry mobs of
civilians attacked Allied prisoners of war believed to be
bomber-crews. Friedrich says over a hundred Allied pilots were
lynched in the last years of the war, sometimes with the connivance
of the Nazi authorities. Only a tiny number of top Nazis were
killed by bombing. One exception was Roland Friesler, the vicious
and hysterical judge who presided over the trials of those involved
in the July 1944 anti-Hitler plot. He was buried in the rubble of
his own courtroom. Our wartime experience suggests bombing is not a
successful way of eliminating individual enemy leaders.
It has also been frequently cited as proof that bombing is not a
war-winning strategy in general. But the evidence of both these
books is more nuancee. And certainly Harris himself to his
dying day believed he and his men had made a decisive contribution
to victory. He was a curious and rasping figure about whom many
tales were told. He drove to his headquarters at High Wycombe every
day in a huge Packard (then a very uncommon car in the UK), often
at high speed. On one occasion he was stopped by a country
policeman, who gave him a rustic lecture on the risks of speeding.
“Why, Sir, one day if you’re not careful, you might even kill
someone.” “Young man,” said the “Bomber,” “every night I kill
thousands.”
