Very true and its a sentiment I have actually heard once before.
My Grandad built Mosquitos at the factory in West London. He was decanted there along with the entire East London furniture industry in 1939 to build the 'Wooden Wonder'.
The street he and his 6 brother and sisters were born on in Bow was bombed in the Blitz and then cleared by the council after the war. Grandad was a personal friend of Lansbury before the War and Churchill had something of a mixed reputation in the old Eastend in peacetime.
But I remember very well, when I once said something 'clever' and irreverent about the Churchill statue in Parliament Square as a young man my dad telling me, very seriously but gently, that 'if it wasn't for him (Churchill) they would have taken your grandad and your uncles as slaves to Germany'. It was something his dad had said to him.
There was no hyperbole or exaggeration in that. I still find it moving when we pass that statue.
“There was no hyperbole or exaggeration in that”. I know it was a cherished family moment, but objectively it is highly dubious. Churchill didn’t declare war, Chamberlain did. Chamberlain massively boosted defence spending and introduced conscription. More importantly, how on earth COULD the Germans defeat the British Empire? They tried, they failed, and in 1941 they gave up and turned on the Soviet Union.
"Dresden is perhaps, after Hiroshima, the name most synonymous with slaughter from the air, and in Britain at least the most controversial."
Interesting. I think you are acually correct but not too long ago I would have suggested - as this article mentions - Rotterdam and Coventry. We have gone from victims to perpetrators in the popular imagination.
In the US at least Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" popularized (if that's the right word) the fire bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut like the book's main character Billy Pilgrim was a POW held just outside the city and thus a witness to event and its aftermath.
It's possible that the fire bombing of so many German and Japanese cities in the last few months of the war may have produced a "mild" nuclear winter effect via soot lofted into the upper atmosphere via the firestorms. The spring of 1945 was uncommonly cold-- German POWs after the mass surrender sometimes died of hypothermia.
People make moral choices in the dark. The Allied leaders knew that the war had to be fought and won, and they thought that intensive aerial bombing of cities was a strategic necessity to win it. We need not judge them in hindsight for the decisions they made in a desperate situation, and many of the people who do so have an agenda - generally they start from a Marxist perspective and want to argue that there is not much difference between liberalism and fascism.
However, the question of whether aerial bombing was, objectively speaking, the right thing to do is surely a more interesting one. Albert Speer (obviously not a disinterested witness) argued soon after his capture in 1945 that the bombing of cities was counterproductive. According to historian Norman Stone, he said "that the aerial destruction, by flattening small civilian enterprises, had simply caused an increase in employment in arms factories and thereby caused an increase in their output. It was higher in 1944 than ever before; a matter in which Speer, the organiser, took pride." Perhaps he was wrong, and lying, or flattering himself. But if he was right, it's just possible that, had the Allies eschewed aerial bombing of the civilian districts of cities, and focused on bombing factories, warehouses, military bases, railways, etc, we might have won the war more quickly.
I think it's also clear that the acceptance of aerial bombing of civilian targets as a legitimate practice in war has had appalling consequences. If the Allies had managed to win the war without it - if they been able to win by bombing only targets of evident military significance - then the bombing of cities would have been something that only fascists did. In the postwar period, it would have been as deeply stigmatised as the use of poison gas - something that has largely been avoided since the First World War, and something which immediately makes those who deploy it into pariahs. Or even more so, perhaps, since both sides used poison gas in World War I, whereas, had only the Nazis resorted to bombing civilian targets, we would think of it as another of their many uniquely awful crimes against humanity. And after all, aerial bombing should be stigmatised - it's the most indiscriminately destructive tool we have. Actually I'd rather modern wars were fought with poison gas, since at least then the survivors would still have homes to go to.
I don't see any need to condemn Churchill, Bomber Harris and the other Allied leaders for choices they made in desperate circumstances. I do think we should, nevertheless, acknowledge that the normalisation of aerial bombing in warfare was one of the many ways in which the twentieth-century world as a whole stepped back into barbarism.
Thank you. Wonderful piece. Recently read “Empire of the summer moon” about the Comanches and settlers. Brutal. The Comanches held to and followed their espoused principles the settlers did not. We didn’t follow our espoused principles at Dresden, Hiroshima, My Lai, etc.
I would say that the accepted principles in a Western culture with Christian roots is you do not attack/kill non-combatants- women and children. You do not attack non-military targets.
If you can find it, I can recommend an excellent book on the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany. It’s called Brandstätten (Fire Scenes) and it’s by Jörg Friedrich. It’s in German, but there are lots of (pretty horrific) archive photos.
Regarding bombers being notoriously inaccurate: I was in Bayreuth years ago, which was heavily bombed in early 1945. The opera house (the old 18th century one, not Wagner's one) and the synagogue, which stood back-to-back, were both unharmed. They stood right in the centre of the Old Town, and many of the surrounding buildings were flattened. A sweet middle-aged lady who lived locally explained to me: "The Nazis left the synagogue alone on Kristallnacht because it was joined to the opera house, and the Allies left the opera house alone during the bombing raid because it was joined to the synagogue." She'd clearly believed that edifying little story her whole life. I didn't have the heart to tell her that aerial bombing back then wasn't anything like precise enough for that kind of picking and choosing, and that it was sheer luck that had left both buildings standing.
Bishop George Bell of Chichester was opposed to the bombings at the time, which didn't make him particularly popular
My grandfather flew a Lancaster bomber as a pilot during the war, although I don't recall him being involved in the bombing of Dresden (I know he flew in North Africa). My mother tells me he did not like thinking about what he had to do.
Another superb piece of writing! I look forward to the next chapter even if it means the destruction of Dresden. It's tragic that the tactic of bombing cities became a thing, and so much beauty and history has been destroyed. Unfortunately, it does seem it was inevitable, especially with the imprecise nature of the aerial munitions of the time.
Yes, an outstanding piece. I, too, look forward to the next episode. I've spent my (long) lifetime thinking about the 'ethics' of Dresden, and as a lover of all things German I've come to the conclusion that it had to be done. Few Germans would disagree: to this day, many public parks have a list of concentration camps below a heading which says "Orte des Schreckens dass wir nie vergessen müssen" (Places of horrors we must never forget). As with so many modern conflicts, when discussing 'proportionate response' it helps me to ask the question 'who started it?'.
Orville Wright: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’
It's hard to understand how anyone could have thought this
"Orville Wright later said that: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’"
After all railways had been used in the American civil war to transport troops only a few decades before hand.
Also don't forget that - as Bell reminds us - the Allies weren't bombing cities gratuitously. The idea was to destroy Germany's industrial capacity. A valuable side-effect was to cause the enemy to divert huge resources into air defence.
The RAF and USAF bombed Dresden in the sincere belief that doing so was a military necessity. Not just regarding the city's industrial parts, but of the city as such, which was a hub of German resistance.
The civilian casualties are to be blamed on the Nazi refusal to surrender to the Allies, not upon the Allies themselves.
Any wartime atrocity could be justified using that logic. "If we're at war and we burn tens of thousands of your women and children to death, it's not our fault; you basically made us do it by not surrendering."
Dresden was a key centre impeding the advance of Stalin's Red Army to victory in Berlin. And it was under pressure from Stalin that Churchill and the Americans undertook the bombing of the city.
Good article, as always. Thoughts about 1) WWI: as well as the fixed-wing bombers attacking London, there were Zeppelin raids (!) on the naval base at Chatham, as well as in London and elsewhere. 2) Coventry was a major site of aircraft construction, which was ostensibly the primary target - but the Germans did seem to delight in the extent of the destruction to the city generally 3) The V1 attacks on London - the Doodlebugs - did carry on until nearly the end of the war, but they were mainly used in 1944, to be superseded by the fearsome V2. The V translated as “pay-back” or slightly less accurately “vengeance” for the Allied heavy bombing of Germany. As the article says, they were only neutralised by Allied soldiers pushing towards the launch sites in France and then the Netherlands. Robert Harris wrote a great book about the V2, called, um, it’s on the tip of my tongue - V2!
I recently had the privilege of working with Colin Bell, the 105 year old veteran Mosquito pilot, on his autobiography https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bloody-Dangerous-missions-Germany-first-hand/dp/0349148996/ref=sr_1_1?crid=247WORC78AV3Y&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.LEAjyUB7cHFRwemYlWAGHA.uxZv3n4Po07jx5nYfnb-4_yHMkQCmqK1Swl_ZJGJcfU&dib_tag=se&keywords=bloody+dangerous+colin+bell&qid=1770982227&sprefix=%2Caps%2C113&sr=8-1 Discussing the ethics of Dresden, he wonders aloud how the conversation might go had we lost the war and people were living as slave labourers with concentration camps for dissenters outside every city.
Very true and its a sentiment I have actually heard once before.
My Grandad built Mosquitos at the factory in West London. He was decanted there along with the entire East London furniture industry in 1939 to build the 'Wooden Wonder'.
The street he and his 6 brother and sisters were born on in Bow was bombed in the Blitz and then cleared by the council after the war. Grandad was a personal friend of Lansbury before the War and Churchill had something of a mixed reputation in the old Eastend in peacetime.
But I remember very well, when I once said something 'clever' and irreverent about the Churchill statue in Parliament Square as a young man my dad telling me, very seriously but gently, that 'if it wasn't for him (Churchill) they would have taken your grandad and your uncles as slaves to Germany'. It was something his dad had said to him.
There was no hyperbole or exaggeration in that. I still find it moving when we pass that statue.
“There was no hyperbole or exaggeration in that”. I know it was a cherished family moment, but objectively it is highly dubious. Churchill didn’t declare war, Chamberlain did. Chamberlain massively boosted defence spending and introduced conscription. More importantly, how on earth COULD the Germans defeat the British Empire? They tried, they failed, and in 1941 they gave up and turned on the Soviet Union.
"Dresden is perhaps, after Hiroshima, the name most synonymous with slaughter from the air, and in Britain at least the most controversial."
Interesting. I think you are acually correct but not too long ago I would have suggested - as this article mentions - Rotterdam and Coventry. We have gone from victims to perpetrators in the popular imagination.
Is that peculiar to my own uprbringing?
In the US at least Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" popularized (if that's the right word) the fire bombing of Dresden. Vonnegut like the book's main character Billy Pilgrim was a POW held just outside the city and thus a witness to event and its aftermath.
It's possible that the fire bombing of so many German and Japanese cities in the last few months of the war may have produced a "mild" nuclear winter effect via soot lofted into the upper atmosphere via the firestorms. The spring of 1945 was uncommonly cold-- German POWs after the mass surrender sometimes died of hypothermia.
People make moral choices in the dark. The Allied leaders knew that the war had to be fought and won, and they thought that intensive aerial bombing of cities was a strategic necessity to win it. We need not judge them in hindsight for the decisions they made in a desperate situation, and many of the people who do so have an agenda - generally they start from a Marxist perspective and want to argue that there is not much difference between liberalism and fascism.
However, the question of whether aerial bombing was, objectively speaking, the right thing to do is surely a more interesting one. Albert Speer (obviously not a disinterested witness) argued soon after his capture in 1945 that the bombing of cities was counterproductive. According to historian Norman Stone, he said "that the aerial destruction, by flattening small civilian enterprises, had simply caused an increase in employment in arms factories and thereby caused an increase in their output. It was higher in 1944 than ever before; a matter in which Speer, the organiser, took pride." Perhaps he was wrong, and lying, or flattering himself. But if he was right, it's just possible that, had the Allies eschewed aerial bombing of the civilian districts of cities, and focused on bombing factories, warehouses, military bases, railways, etc, we might have won the war more quickly.
I think it's also clear that the acceptance of aerial bombing of civilian targets as a legitimate practice in war has had appalling consequences. If the Allies had managed to win the war without it - if they been able to win by bombing only targets of evident military significance - then the bombing of cities would have been something that only fascists did. In the postwar period, it would have been as deeply stigmatised as the use of poison gas - something that has largely been avoided since the First World War, and something which immediately makes those who deploy it into pariahs. Or even more so, perhaps, since both sides used poison gas in World War I, whereas, had only the Nazis resorted to bombing civilian targets, we would think of it as another of their many uniquely awful crimes against humanity. And after all, aerial bombing should be stigmatised - it's the most indiscriminately destructive tool we have. Actually I'd rather modern wars were fought with poison gas, since at least then the survivors would still have homes to go to.
I don't see any need to condemn Churchill, Bomber Harris and the other Allied leaders for choices they made in desperate circumstances. I do think we should, nevertheless, acknowledge that the normalisation of aerial bombing in warfare was one of the many ways in which the twentieth-century world as a whole stepped back into barbarism.
Well said.
Thank you. Wonderful piece. Recently read “Empire of the summer moon” about the Comanches and settlers. Brutal. The Comanches held to and followed their espoused principles the settlers did not. We didn’t follow our espoused principles at Dresden, Hiroshima, My Lai, etc.
I would say that the accepted principles in a Western culture with Christian roots is you do not attack/kill non-combatants- women and children. You do not attack non-military targets.
Which Dresden was, on the Eastern Front.
You are purporting no non-combatant killed in Dresden? Purely military targets? Please
What were our espoused principles?
See above
Above where?
If you can find it, I can recommend an excellent book on the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany. It’s called Brandstätten (Fire Scenes) and it’s by Jörg Friedrich. It’s in German, but there are lots of (pretty horrific) archive photos.
Regarding bombers being notoriously inaccurate: I was in Bayreuth years ago, which was heavily bombed in early 1945. The opera house (the old 18th century one, not Wagner's one) and the synagogue, which stood back-to-back, were both unharmed. They stood right in the centre of the Old Town, and many of the surrounding buildings were flattened. A sweet middle-aged lady who lived locally explained to me: "The Nazis left the synagogue alone on Kristallnacht because it was joined to the opera house, and the Allies left the opera house alone during the bombing raid because it was joined to the synagogue." She'd clearly believed that edifying little story her whole life. I didn't have the heart to tell her that aerial bombing back then wasn't anything like precise enough for that kind of picking and choosing, and that it was sheer luck that had left both buildings standing.
Did anyone in Britain complain in February 1945 about the bombing of Dresden ?
Thought not.
Like all the hand-wringing over Hiroshima it's merely a parlour game for the chattering classes and philosophy dons.
Bishop George Bell of Chichester was opposed to the bombings at the time, which didn't make him particularly popular
My grandfather flew a Lancaster bomber as a pilot during the war, although I don't recall him being involved in the bombing of Dresden (I know he flew in North Africa). My mother tells me he did not like thinking about what he had to do.
Another superb piece of writing! I look forward to the next chapter even if it means the destruction of Dresden. It's tragic that the tactic of bombing cities became a thing, and so much beauty and history has been destroyed. Unfortunately, it does seem it was inevitable, especially with the imprecise nature of the aerial munitions of the time.
Yes, an outstanding piece. I, too, look forward to the next episode. I've spent my (long) lifetime thinking about the 'ethics' of Dresden, and as a lover of all things German I've come to the conclusion that it had to be done. Few Germans would disagree: to this day, many public parks have a list of concentration camps below a heading which says "Orte des Schreckens dass wir nie vergessen müssen" (Places of horrors we must never forget). As with so many modern conflicts, when discussing 'proportionate response' it helps me to ask the question 'who started it?'.
Orville Wright: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’
Er, why?
Probably thought of it as a superweapon, as we think of nuclear weapons.
I wondered if Orville mistakenly believed he had invented the 'Iron Dome' rather than a plane.
It's hard to understand how anyone could have thought this
"Orville Wright later said that: ‘When my brother and I built the first man-carrying flying machine we thought that we were introducing into the world an invention which would make further wars practically impossible.’"
After all railways had been used in the American civil war to transport troops only a few decades before hand.
Also don't forget that - as Bell reminds us - the Allies weren't bombing cities gratuitously. The idea was to destroy Germany's industrial capacity. A valuable side-effect was to cause the enemy to divert huge resources into air defence.
The RAF and USAF bombed Dresden in the sincere belief that doing so was a military necessity. Not just regarding the city's industrial parts, but of the city as such, which was a hub of German resistance.
The civilian casualties are to be blamed on the Nazi refusal to surrender to the Allies, not upon the Allies themselves.
Any wartime atrocity could be justified using that logic. "If we're at war and we burn tens of thousands of your women and children to death, it's not our fault; you basically made us do it by not surrendering."
Dresden was a key centre impeding the advance of Stalin's Red Army to victory in Berlin. And it was under pressure from Stalin that Churchill and the Americans undertook the bombing of the city.
As allies must, of course, be assisted.
Good article, as always. Thoughts about 1) WWI: as well as the fixed-wing bombers attacking London, there were Zeppelin raids (!) on the naval base at Chatham, as well as in London and elsewhere. 2) Coventry was a major site of aircraft construction, which was ostensibly the primary target - but the Germans did seem to delight in the extent of the destruction to the city generally 3) The V1 attacks on London - the Doodlebugs - did carry on until nearly the end of the war, but they were mainly used in 1944, to be superseded by the fearsome V2. The V translated as “pay-back” or slightly less accurately “vengeance” for the Allied heavy bombing of Germany. As the article says, they were only neutralised by Allied soldiers pushing towards the launch sites in France and then the Netherlands. Robert Harris wrote a great book about the V2, called, um, it’s on the tip of my tongue - V2!