Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden

329 Pages·2006·3.22 MB·English

by  Marshall De Bruhl

ALSO BY MARSHALL DE BRUHL
Sword of Jacinto: A Life of Sam Houston

Copyright © 2006 by Marshall De Bruhl All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House,
Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All photographs, with the exception of the image of the reconstructed Frauenkirche, are from the collection of the Sächsische
Landesbibliothek-Staats-und Univeritätsbibliothek Dresden/Abt. Deutsche Fotothek. Photographers are listed with their individual
works.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALO GING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA De Bruhl, Marshall.
Firestorm: Allied airpower and the destruction of Dresden/by Marshall De Bruhl.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-30776961-9
1. Dresden (Germany)—History—Bombardment, 1945.
I. Title.
D757.9.D7D4 2006 940.54’2132142—dc22 2006041059
www.atrandom.com
Title-page photograph, Mathildenstrasse, by Paul Winkler, Stadtmuseum, Dresden, 1945
v3.1
FOR BARBARA
PREFACE
D
uring a visit to the coast of France in the summer of 1984, I found myself
standing on a platform at the top of a stairway that led down to a beach. It was a
beautiful day, warm and sunny. From far below I could hear the squeals of
children splashing in the mild surf, young men shouting to one another as they
kicked a soccer ball around, and, occasionally, music being borne along on the
slight breeze.
It was a very different scene from that of four decades earlier, when the
sounds coming from the beach below were those of one of the most desperate
struggles of modern times. For this was Normandy and that place was Omaha
Beach.
I was on my own pilgrimage, just a few days after thousands of veterans and
world leaders had come to this site for the fortieth-anniversary celebrations of
the Allied invasion. I was just a boy in a small town in North Carolina when the
Allies landed here to free Europe from the Nazis, but I vividly remember how
my family gathered around the radio in our living room and listened to the live
broadcasts from the landing sites.
My thoughts that morning in June 1984 were of the cousins and uncles who
had been with the invasion force. One of them, an infantry officer, saw his
promising professional baseball career ended by a German bullet in the left lung.
Another, the executive officer of a paratroop unit, was killed just a few days
after landing behind the beaches—coincidentally, not far from where his father
was killed in World War I.
My sad but proud reflections were interrupted by the laughter of a young
woman and two young men who were making their way up the long stairway
from the beach. As they reached the landing where I stood, the girl suddenly
exclaimed, “My God. What is this place?” The three of them fell silent.
Spread out before them in perfectly ordered rows were the 9,387 marble
Christian crosses and Stars of David of the United States Military Cemetery at
Colleville-sur-Mer. Most of the men buried there were about the ages of these
young people when they died on the beach below, or fighting their way up the
very same steep bluff, or during the bloody advance inland after D-day.
Those young people had come to spend a few hours at the beach, not to visit a
battlefield or a war memorial, but they listened attentively to my brief but
emotional account of the Normandy invasion, of which they knew nothing. It
was as distant to them as the wars of ancient Greece. They then quietly took their
leave to wander among the graves.
The ravages of the Second World War are hardly to be seen today as one
travels through the cities and countryside of Europe. There are war memorials to
be sure—obelisks, vast monuments to the dead, eternal flames, and in some
cities the hulk of a burned-out building left untouched as a reminder to the
passersby that something terrible happened here over a half century ago.
Most Americans, however, are so inured to seeing cities being torn down and
rebuilt that they are like those carefree students on their holiday. They seem not
to be aware, or much care, that the lovely beaches, the beautiful orchards and
vineyards, and the rolling fields of France and Belgium and Germany were once
soaked with the blood of hundreds of thousands of young men.
For a truer picture of the carnage of World War II, one must look to the cities,
not the battle sites, which, often as not, now resemble well-tended parks. The
healing power of nature is evident in the countryside. Vines, wildflowers, and
grasses cover the shell holes and bomb craters. Bones of unknown war dead still
work their way to the surface or are accidentally turned up by plows and spades,
and hapless farmers still occasionally fall victim to the random unexploded shell
or land mine long buried in the soil. But instead of ravaged farmlands and the
lanes and byways ripped up by the passage of thousands of tanks and trucks and
armored vehicles, the fields are much as they were before total war came to
these bucolic regions.
Man-made structures can be restored and reconstituted only by other men,
however, not by nature. And it was the urban environment—with its villas,
houses and palaces, apartment blocks, factories, government buildings, churches
and cathedrals, schools, and shops—that was the scene of the greatest
devastation. This sort of destruction could never be imagined until the twentieth
century and the birth and development of a new form of warfare.
This new war bypassed the armies clashing in the field. It was waged
hundreds, often thousands, of miles from any battlefront. This campaign was
against the civilian population, which, as war has become more brutal, has
increasingly become the target and borne the brunt of military operations.
In the great cities of Germany, visitors are largely oblivious to what predated
the ubiquitous glass towers, the pedestrians-only shopping areas, and the almost
too wide streets and expressways. To be sure, many historic structures, indeed
whole areas of cities, have been reconstructed exactly as they were. But prewar
urban Germany—that congested, vibrant, thousand-year-old architectural
museum—was washed away in a rain of bombs and could never be wholly
reclaimed.
For some cities, such as Berlin, the rain of fire was constant, day after day,
night after night. But for one city, there had been only two raids in the more than
five years that Germany had been at war. Both had been relatively minor attacks,
so the people of Dresden were lulled into that false security that is often a
prelude to a great disaster. When their storm came, it was a firestorm, and the
destruction and death were on a scale not hitherto imagined in warfare.
The Dresden raid, on 13–14 February 1945, by an Anglo-American force of
over a thousand planes, has been a source of controversy, debate, and denial for
six decades. It is one of the most famous incidents of the war, yet one of the least
understood. It has led to rumors and conspiracy theories, to wrecked reputations,
and to charges of war crimes. And it is another reason for the question that has
been asked millions of times after the battlefields have been cleared, the
wounded gathered up, the dead buried, and the monuments raised. It is a simple
question: Why?
The Dresden story is one with particular relevance to our own era. The moral
issues presented by war and, especially, aerial bombardment are timeless. The
efficacy of bombing continues to be an article of faith among not only leaders of
armies but leaders of nations—even though noncombatants, people far from the
lines of combat, are most often the victims. In Germany, hundreds of thousands
of civilians—mostly women, children, and old men—died as the cities were
blasted away.
Since the advent of airpower in World War I, the bombardment of civilians
has been decried but never stopped. Indeed, as historian Michael Sherry has put
it, “Limited or ambitious men, both in and out of the military, often sanctioned a
kind of casual brutality.” For almost a century, military planners and political
leaders have been beguiled by this particular form of warfare—believing that it
holds the promise of a quick and speedy end to hostilities.
The lessons of Guernica, London, Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Berlin,
Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nanking, Nagasaki, and Shanghai are consistently ignored.
More recently, the massive bombardments during the Vietnam War and the
reprisal bombing in Cambodia, the destruction of Afghanistan, the bombing of
Iraq in the two gulf wars, and the devastation of the cities and villages of the
former Yugoslavia remind us that airpower still reigns supreme among the
planners.
However, there have been raids so controversial as to raise serious doubts
about the usefulness and certainly the morality of the bombing of cities. Since
1945, the debate has centered for the most part on the atomic bombing of two
Japanese cities—Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The horror of those two events has
overshadowed the destruction of dozens of other cities by more conventional
means. Nagasaki and Hiroshima served for the last half of the twentieth century
as the greatest symbols of the horrors of nuclear warfare, and the result has been
rather a tolerance of bombing as long as it is not nuclear. However, the great air
raid and firestorm that consumed Dresden, Germany, was as awesome and
dreadful as any raid of the war. Both the physical destruction and the casualties
were truly horrific.

I first became interested in the Dresden raid in the summer of 1965, when I
made a trip to Coventry to see the new St. Michael’s Cathedral, designed by Sir
Basil Spence. The medieval church was destroyed in the famous raid by the
German Luftwaffe in November 1940. Early on, it had been decided to leave the
ruins and tower of the old church as a memorial and build a new, modern St.
Michael’s immediately adjacent.
During my tour through the church much was made of the comparison
between the bombing of Coventry and the raid on Dresden four years later. And
in spite of the fact that we were then in the midst of the Cold War and Dresden
lay in one of the most extreme of the Soviet satellites, a certain understanding
had developed between the two cities. The new cathedral, in fact, featured a
cross made from melted and twisted metal from the ruins of Dresden.
The next summer I went to Dresden. Even after two decades, signs of the war
were still evident everywhere. What had once been one of the busiest
thoroughfares in the world—the Pragerstrasse, which ran from the central train
station to the city center—was still a vast open field, through which one walked
to the rebuilt Zwinger, that rococo exuberance that houses one of the world’s
greatest art collections. The museum had been faithfully restored and reopened
as both a symbol of civic pride and propaganda for the Communist regime.
Ruins can inform, and it was not too difficult to reconstruct, in the mind’s eye
at least, the grandeur that was Dresden. And, of course, to mourn its loss. The
blackened ruins of the royal palace, the opera house, the theater, the Albertinum
museum, the great cathedral, or Hofkirche, along with dozens of other ruined
buildings lay behind chain link and board fences, where they awaited a promised
restoration—which, in some cases, would not be done for decades. Indeed, the
restoration still continues, most recently with the reconstruction of the symbol of
Dresden, the Frauenkirche. The ruins of the Church of Our Lady—a vast pile of
rubble in the Neumarkt—served for fifty years as a war memorial and the center
of the annual commemoration of the bombing.
The questions that have since 1945 swirled around the great raid that
destroyed what was arguably the most beautiful city in Germany and for many
the most beautiful in Europe have never been satisfactorily answered.
I can only hope, as all chroniclers of history must hope, that my work
contributes to a better understanding of those times when no weapon was
considered inappropriate and all targets—whether persons or places—were
considered appropriate.