UK Edition
Review
Was the bombing of Dresden legitimate – or a war crime?
Saul David reviews 'Dresden' by Sinclair McKay
The destruction of Dresden, the “Florence on the Elbe”, by British and American bombers in February 1945 was one of the most controversial Allied operations of the war.
In just a few fateful hours, three waves of attacks unleased a firestorm that levelled more than half of the city and killed 25,000 people, most of them civilians.
The argument still rages: was the city a legitimate military target, as British bomber supremo Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris always insisted? Or was its bombing “a last act of atavistic mass murder in a war already won”, an unnecessary act that we should acknowledge as a war crime?
Any British author prepared to tackle such a sensitive subject should be congratulated. The harsh decision by Winston Churchill to deny the brave men of Bomber Command a campaign medal was undoubtedly influenced by German accusations of “terror bombing” in the wake of the Dresden operation.
Churchill himself, though he had approved the principle of area bombing, regretted Dresden, and accused Harris of perpetrating “mere acts of terror and wanton destruction”.
There was hypocrisy here, a desire to wipe the stain of Dresden from the historical record.
“Having proudly trumpeted British success in the Battle of Britain, the war in the desert, the campaigns in Italy, D-Day and the push through Europe,” writes Sinclair McKay, “firestorms were not going to be woven into this national tapestry of gallantry and courage.”
It is, therefore, a difficult subject to sell to a British readership, but a necessary one. McKay’s canny approach is to concentrate on the human story of the civilians and servicemen involved on both sides.
The campaign came about, he explains, because Harris had long believed “that the conflict could be won decisively from the air”, and that the most effective way to do this was by indiscriminate area bombing that would target civilian housing and infrastructure, and destroy morale. Such had been the argument for bombing Hamburg in July 1943, when a firestorm killed 37,000.
Some at the Air Ministry thought Harris should concentrate on specific military targets like synthetic oil plants and refineries, and ball-bearing factories. But Harris always felt that such “panacea” targets carried the double risk of a low success rate and high mortality among British airmen.
By the summer of 1944, even senior airmen like Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, were coming around to Harris’s way of thinking. It was Portal who suggested Operation Thunderclap, a huge area raid on Berlin that would, he hoped, precipitate the collapse of Nazi authority.
Portal would later change his mind and Thunderclap never took place. Yet its underlying assumption – “that the virus of Nazism lay deep within the flesh of German society as a whole” – was one Harris believed passionately. “I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany,” he wrote after Dresden with characteristic bluntness, “as worth the bones of one British grenadier”.
He got his way over Dresden – as part of a wider strategy to knock out Germany’s central and eastern industrial areas – because others in the Joint Intelligence Committee, Ministry of Economic Warfare and Air Ministry concluded that targeting the huge wave of refugees pouring into Germany from the east would cause “severe disruption and confusion”, and aid the Soviet advance.
“The fact,” writes McKay, “that it would involve the most desperate and vulnerable of human collateral seemed not to resonate in any way”.
The graphic account of the raid is poetic in its grim intensity: “the fires criss-crossing, filling every small street and passage so that from above it looked as though the roads of Dresden were a dark mould into which molten gold had been poured”.
One RAF bomb aimer, observing the “fantastic latticework of fire” below, told his pilot to bank right in the hope that his bombs would miss their mark. McKay doubts this helped, as the bombs probably exploded “in peaceful streets on the outskirts, simply sparking yet more fires”. Other crew – probably the majority – had few regrets. “We were very young,” said one, “and we lost so many boys ourselves.”
So where, in the end, do McKay’s sympathies lie? With all sides, it seems. “War”, he writes, “creates its own nauseous gravity, and towards the end of a six-year conflict, with millions dead, all sides exhausted, could it be that these city bombings were not vengeful or consciously merciless, but ever more desperate reflexive attacks launched to make the other side simply stop?”
This, in my view, is too generous. Harris was convinced that area bombing helped to shorten the war – ignoring all evidence to the contrary – and, unlike Churchill, he never regretted Dresden.
The destruction of it and other German cities had, he wrote in March 1945, “fatally weakened the German war effort and is now enabling Allied soldiers to advance into the heart of Germany”.
But if McKay fudges the question of whether Dresden was a war crime or not – asking instead what is to be gained “by pursuing legally precise accusations?” – it is a minor blemish in a carefully researched, finely written and moving account of one of the great tragedies of 20th-century history.
Dresden is published by Viking at £20. To order your copy for £16.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop