A raid too far?
The morality of bombing cities
Read part one here and part two here
I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in my early twenties, aware that the book was considered one of the great anti-war novels. It had been inspired by the author’s experience as an American prisoner of war during the destruction of Dresden, and was influential in educating large numbers of young readers about the inhumanity of aerial bombing.
What I remember finding curious was the mention of a noted historian who had chronicled the senseless evil of Allied bombing in his 1963 work The Destruction of Dresden. The historian, of course, was David Irving, who by the time I was reading the novel in the late 1990s was a somewhat more controversial figure, having been ‘cancelled’ just for denying the Holocaust. (Indeed, he was sent to an Austrian jail for the ‘offence’, which seemed like a bizarre idea to Englishmen back when we weren’t imprisoned for saying things.)
Irving was treated like a ‘celebrity’ when he visited Dresden in 1990, months after the downfall of the regime which had ruled since the Soviets had taken the city in May 1945. Despite the ideological differences between the British historian and the East German authorities, over the previous 45 years the Marxist-Leninist rulers had played a significant part in creating the idea of Dresden’s bombing as a ‘war crime’ – in today’s discourse it would probably be called a ‘genocide’, what with the huge inflationary pressure on that term.
Irving wasn’t alone in believing the raid to be wrong, even among his own countrymen, and Dresden certainly gnawed at many a conscience in Britain at the time. The scale of the human suffering was immense, and as Frederick Taylor put it in his 2005 history of the attack: ‘Dresden remains a terrible illustration of what apparently civilised human beings are capable of under extreme circumstances, when all the normal brakes on human behaviour have been eroded by years of total war.’ Yet, as Taylor argued, a horrible thing done is war is not the same as a ‘war crime’, and much of the subsequent historiography was certainly influenced by communist and neo-Nazi propaganda.
At the time of the attack the Russians had recently crossed the river Oder, and were still losing men in large numbers. Stalin had called for western bombing of key transport hubs serving the eastern front, the most prominent being Berlin, Leipzig - and Dresden. Since the PM was away at Yalta, the decision to bomb the city was signed off by Churchill’s deputy and successor, Clement Attlee.
Aerial bombing had come to be extremely effective at crippling the enemy’s war machine, but an extremely costly one in terms of the thing the Western Allies valued most - lives. A Bomber Command crew member had a less than 50 per cent chance of surviving the war, and many others were injured or taken prisoner, although if they were lucky they could bail out beyond the front lines and hope the Soviets didn’t mistake them for a German before they pulled the trigger. Those heading to Dresden on 13 February, undertaking a 1,700-mile trip that involved various feints and diversions, had been issued with a Union Jack to put on their chest with Russian text bearing the words: ‘I am an Englishman’.
The crew were aware that they would certainly kill large numbers of civilians. Most just wanted the ordeal to be over, and each mission brought them closer to the end, although it is clear from personal accounts that some Allied airmen felt uneasy.
