Just after ten o’clock on the night of Tuesday, February 13, 1945, 300 Lancaster bombers from RAF Swinderby in Lincolnshire dropped high explosive and incendiary bombs on the ancient city of Dresden, starting a firestorm in the densely populated medieval centre. A few hours later, a second wave of 500 Lancasters stoked the inferno, and the following morning 300 Flying Fortresses and Liberators of the US Army Air Force completed the destruction.
In all, about 4,500 tons of high explosives and incendiaries fell on this “Florence on the Elbe”, laying waste 13 square miles and killing 25,000 people, a large number of whom were women, children and old men, including refugees from the Red Army’s advance 60 miles to the east. They were atomised, suffocated, burnt, baked or boiled.
The city was defenceless and had no war industry — a cultural centre of world importance, an “innocent” city. With an end to war in sight, its destruction was senseless, wanton, cruel — terror bombing on a par with Guernica, a stain on the Allies’ record; even, as some would have it, “the German holocaust”. This is the “legend” of Dresden.
The author of this impressive book challenges such a reading, wanting, in his words, “to reveal a more complex and ambivalent moral framework than has hitherto been generally recognised”. He begins by demonstrating that Dresden was not an “innocent” city, rather “a normally functioning city (both in the universal sense and in the context of Nazi Germany), made extraordinary by its beauty”. It was, by his account, as thoroughly Nazified as any other. By 1945 “most Dresdeners were employed on war work or in armaments factories”. He does not say that Dresden deserved to be bombed, only “that it was by the standards of the time a legitimate military target”. The judgment as to whether it was morally correct to attack a legitimate military target in such a way he leaves to readers.
Frederick Taylor has spent many years studying Nazi Germany. His visceral loathing of the regime is rarely concealed, and his sympathy with the few remaining Jews of Dresden in their ambivalence towards the first bombs that fell a few months earlier is evident. Jews were not permitted to use the public air-raid shelters, and on the day of the raid they had been served with notices of deportation, which meant only one thing — the death camps. Many of those who survived the bombing were able to tear off their yellow stars, escape the city and assume “Aryan” identities claiming that their documents had been destroyed: “an ill wind”.
He exposes the negligence of the Nazi authorities in failing to put in place proper air-raid precautions: shelters were woefully inadequate, and even the sirens failed to work after the first wave of bombers, so that those who emerged to fight the fires were caught unawares by the second wave. There were no anti-aircraft guns; they had all been moved to protect higher value industrial or military targets (manned, in large part ironically, by Dresden youth: as Taylor succinctly puts it, 15 and 16-year-olds trying to shoot down 18 and 19-year-olds).
The authorities were somehow convinced that Dresden lay too far east to be within range of the Allies (the Russians left strategic bombing largely to the British and Americans), and that the city’s historic buildings and art gave it special status, notwithstanding the Wehrmacht’s designating it a “military defensive area”. They took no notice of an improvised raid by 30 US bombers the previous October, which killed 270 people. Taylor points out that at the height of the Luftwaffe’s offensive against London the daily death toll rarely exceeded 250, evidence that air-raid protection worked when there was a will. But when on February 14 it came to disposing of bodies on an industrial scale, the authorities knew where to look: the SS from Treblinka were called in to advise, which throws interesting light on “connectivity” in Nazi Germany.
Taylor weaves a chilling narrative from eyewitness accounts and painstaking documentary research, particularly with German sources. He explains the conceptual and strategic background with admirable clarity. His account of the air operation itself is quite superb (the Lancasters flew most of the way in 10/10ths — total — cloud), although he acknowledges his debt to the official history and to Henry Probert’s recent acclaimed biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Commanding-in-Chief, Bomber Command. He shows that the tactics of such raids (the firestorm was not unique to Dresden) were, far from being gratuitously destructive, a calculated doctrine of cause and effect: the purpose of the huge “air mines” was to blow out doors and windows so that air could feed the incendiaries’ flames; and the high-explosive bombs, besides their blast destruction, kept the population in the shelters rather than fighting the fires. The aim was unequivocally to cause chaos: Dresden was a key communications centre close to the eastern front, specifically requested as a target by the Russians at the Yalta conference only weeks before. Indeed, Taylor briefly examines the suggestion that the bombing was a case of “shock and awe” directed at the Red Army, a warning not to advance beyond the agreed limits. Ruthless the bombing of Dresden was, but gratuitous it was not.
However, Goebbels was handed a propaganda victory in the weeks that followed. When a highly coloured report appeared in the US press, the Labour MP Richard Rapier Stokes, a decorated Great War officer and later a minister in the Attlee Government, protested in the Commons at the “terror bombing”. He was given short shrift by a junior minister. But what Taylor does not mention is that Stokes had allegedly been a member of a prewar anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi group, the Right Club, and that in 1943 the New Statesman had described him as “a pacifist or near-pacifist” — more evidence, perhaps, of the “complex and ambivalent moral framework” to which the author refers.
But even Churchill seems to have been discomfited, minuting the Chiefs of Staff Committee a few weeks later questioning whether it was time to review “the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts". Taylor calls the minute "a thunderbolt in the corridors of Whitehall". But here he may exaggerate: not once in Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke's diaries (chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee), which are meticulous in chronicling every vexation with Churchill and war strategy, is there any reference to Dresden. It seems that concern over the destruction of one more German city was self-indulgent at this stage of the war. Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris was certainly indignant at the term "terror bombing", but forthright on the choice of target: "The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden could be easily explained by a psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre and a key transport centre. It is now none of these things." He added, in ironic parody of Bismarck, that he did not consider "the whole of the cities of Germany worth the bones of one British grenadier". Churchill, in effect, withdrew the memorandum. This, as Taylor, concludes, is what total war brings men to.
Across the Atlantic, however, "German bands and Dresden shepherdesses" had more resonance. At the top of the target list for the first atomic bomb was the ancient Japanese imperial city of Kyoto. Henry Stimson, Roosevelt's Secretary for War, struck it out and placed there instead a name virtually unheard of outside Japan: Hiroshima.
