A little weird, but pretty good anyway. Marshall De Bruhl can’t quite decide if the three-wave bombing of Dresden on February 13/14, 1945, was a skillfully executed air attack on a very legitimate military target, or a terror bombing of the Florence of Germany. Fair enough; I can’t decide either. It’s just that the way he goes about writing what eventually ends up as a pretty balanced account; it’s almost as if the point of view changes every paragraph. On one page “Bomber” Harris is a psychopathic mass murderer on the next he’s just trying to save his air crews and get the war over with as soon as possible.


De Bruhl starts out with a brief history of pre-WWII aerial bombing, theory and practice, with the usual cast of characters – Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, B.H Liddell Hart and J.F.C. Fuller. Then follows the run-up: Rotterdam and Coventry (I don’t remember seeing either Guernica or Warsaw mentioned). And Bomber Command finally gets Lancasters and things start going poorly for German civilians. The U.S., of course, doesn’t believe British assurances that self-defending daylight bombers won’t “always get through” and has to learn the hard way.


De Bruhl, although castigating the advocates of “the Bomber will always get through” of the 1930s doesn’t mention two of the things that influenced them; one was the pre-radar difficulty of locating on oncoming bomber wave; the second was the assumption that the bombers would be carrying gas. It’s easy to dismiss some of the 1930s politicians as paranoid now, but they were assuming a single large bomber raid on London would cause 150000 civilian casualties from gas bombs and that there would be no warning until the attackers got in visual distance. With those sort of numbers in mind appeasement is a more understandable attitude.


That brings up the start of the massive Bomber Command raids in 1942. I’m a little disappointed here; this book was on the WWII reading list and the disaster response reading list; however, the early firestorm attacks only get a vivid account rather than an analytical one. There probably are some good books out there on how German fire and emergency crews reacted to attacks, but I expect they are probably in German which I read only slowly.


Then there’s a break for a description of Dresden history. It really was a beautiful city, especially if you’re a fan of Baroque. A series of Saxon Grand Electors displayed a taste for conspicuous consumption of several sorts; not only was there a burst of architectural exuberance, but Augustus the Strong had 300 illegitimate children. The history is described in such enthusiastic detail that, since I had a general idea of what was coming, I was thinking “Great, another Allied atrocity book”.


Then, however, De Bruhl turns around and points out that Dresden was a very legitimate military target indeed. Although the city had no enormous factories like the Ruhr, it was a major rail junction – it was the third largest freight handler in Germany. Unfortunately the rail yards were all close to the architectural heart.


De Bruhl is not a military technology expert – at one point, he says a B17 bombardier moved from the plane’s glassed-in nose to the chin turret as necessary, apparently not realizing that the chin turret was remote-controlled from the bombardier position. However, the description of the raid logistics is well done. The original plan was to have the 8th Air Force stage a daylight raid with high explosives to break water mains and block streets, then have Bomber Command follow with two successive night attacks a few hours apart – the first to start fires, the second to catch fire crews and rescue workers in the open. It didn’t work out that way – the 8th Air force was grounded due to bad weather, but it cleared up toward evening, with Bomber Command doing the scheduled night attacks and the US following the next day – Happy Valentine’s day, Dresden – and, ironically, also Ash Wednesday.


Dresden was virtually undefended; all the heavy antiaircraft guns had been removed and sent East, and only two Luftwaffe fighters were available. The city had been spared up till now; a few bombers that had missed or been unable to make their primary targets had unloaded there, and there had been a couple of small raids on the railroad yards. Dresdeners speculated that Churchill had a cousin there, or that the Allies were saving Dresden for the capital of a post-war Germany. Neither turned out to be the case. The first stages of the attack were pathfinders – Mosquitoes dropped aerial flares to light up the city, shortly followed by more Mosquitoes with TI – Target Indictor - bombs, which were very large incendiaries. Then the main Lancaster force showed up. The TI bombs were dropped very accurately, within 100 yards of the aim point – a large sports stadium on the Elbe. The regular bombers were increasing less accurate, especially as the city became shrouded in smoke. The regular incendiaries were small, soda-can sized phosphorous or thermite bombs that necessarily scattered all over – even though the bombers, finding no flak, had descended to much lower than normal altitude.


The first wave was bad enough, but the second really was tragic. The pathfinders couldn’t see most of the city, so they picked spots that weren’t burning to drop TIs. Unfortunately, these were mostly residential areas – except for one of the train stations, which was crowded with refugees trying to get out, and a large, open city park, also crowded with refuges. The park just looked like a large dark area to the pathfinders – so they lit it up.


The 8th Air Force raid was almost anticlimactic – there wasn’t much left to do but bounce rubble. However, the escorting fighters had been ordered to strafe if there was no air opposition, so they did so. Alas, a truck or train full of refugees doesn’t look much different from a truck or train full of Wehrmacht, especially during a 400 mph strafing pass.


The grisly descriptions of shattered landmarks carbonized corpses – accompanied by pictures and first person accounts – make you think that De Bruhl has now switched to the Allied atrocity camp again, but he surprises once more. First off, he reminds us that Dresden still had a Jewish population – 198 of them. These were Jews who were temporarily “exempt” because they had married Aryans. In theory, marrying a Jew made you a Jew, but the law was not enforced – until the very end. The remaining Jews of Dresden were being given notices to report to the train station for “labor” assignments – by now, of course, everybody knew what that meant. This round of notices was delivered on February 13th. The next day, the surviving Jews crawled out of whatever shelter they had found, looked at what was left of Dresden, looked at each other, stripped off their Jüden stars, and headed west. Then De Bruhl takes on Kurt Vonnegut and David Irving. He has a little sympathy for Vonnegut, who was actually in an Allied prison camp in the city during the raids and therefore can be cut a little slack, but Irving gets no slack at all. De Bruhl laments that Irving’s totally invented casualty figures are still the ones usually accepted for the Dresden attacks.


As I said, interesting and balanced in perspective if a little unbalanced in the way that perspective is presented. As usual, badly in need of maps – the bomber streams and a plan of the city, at least. Although there are references, they’re clumsy; instead of endnote numbers in the text, the reference section has page numbers and a phrase relating to the reference. Thus if you want to look up the source for a statement, you have to note the page number, go to the note section, see if that page is listed, then check to see if the reference page is included. ( )

IN Progress I love Dresden. I spent several weeks there in 2000 refreshing my German (I lived two years in Heidelberg as a child attending the public schools where we occasionally had a day off so they could dig up an unexploded bomb even though Heidelberg was technically an off-limits-to-bombing city.) Dresden, by 2000, had been mostly restored -- thanks to the industry and willingness of the East German regime -- to its former status as the most beautiful city in Europe. The Frauenkirche was being restored, stone by original stone. (It has since been finished.) (http://www.frauenkirche-dresden.de/ - have your speakers on)

Dresden was destroyed in a massive firebombing over a two day period from February 13-14, 1945. The British (who specialized in night-bombing – less risky) went in first, followed by the American Army Air Force, (which preferred daylight bombing as supposedly more accurate) obliterating the rescue and fire personnel who were dealing with the injuries and fires created by the British.

Why was Dresden bombed? The British had abandoned targeted bombing against military targets in 1942 with the issuance of Area Bombing Directive (General Directive No.5 (S.46368/D.C.A.S) when they decided to use bombing to destroy morale. Ironically the directive was issued exactly 3 years before the destruction of Dresden.

The efficacy of massive area bombing is still an article of faith among war planners even though the impact on non-combatants is greater than on military ones. The casual brutalities of massive bombing holds promise of a quick end in their minds.

to be cont....



References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II