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33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Military logic - or military minds run amok?, January 14, 2007
This review is from: Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (Paperback)
`Dresden' - the book - is Taylor's contribution to the revived controversy surrounding the 1945 firestorm bombing of the city of Dresden. While extremely interesting and recounted in great detail, I still had mixed feelings about some of his conclusions. Taylor who is out to dispel the "myths" surrounding the notorious saturation bombing totes a questionable fine line as to whether he is arguing a case for military target legitimacy... or for complete annihilation.
He spends much time building a case for why Dresden was a legitimate military target. Nearly every German city had by this time been conscripted to the war effort, and yes, Dresden may have had legitimate targets, but the destruction inflicted upon the civilians was so ferociously excessive contrasted with the relatively minor damage done to military infrastructure, that it makes the argument almost moot.
The first RAF bombing raid excluded the Marshalling yards, Hauptbanhof, Marienbrücke railway bridge and troop barracks... obvious military targets if you are bombing to disable troop movement. It was -only- during the 2nd bombing raid, seeing that the Altstadt was completely engulfed in flames, that the RAF bomber leader made a snap decision - on his own - to target the fringes, otherwise the second target drop would have been exactly as the first.. the Altstadt itself. This is as much of an admission as you are ever going to get that the 1st and 2nd RAF raids were sent not so much for its military targets but for sheer chaos or "dehousing" as it was called.
The author however, does an excellent job revealing the lack of preparedness for a possible all out air raid, and shows how Dresden was truly undefended that night. When the author, who in no way seeks to minimize the horrors, is finished recounting the devastation inflicted on the inhabitants (told mainly through survivor first hand accounts), and you realize that there is still more come by way of the USAAF,... you are in disbelief.
Taylor is less successful at dispelling the "myth" of strafing. His method is to give credence to anyone who did not witness strafing, and to dismiss accounts of those who did as being "confused and traumatized" people. Yet there is documentation of an order to strafe and Taylor even prints it in his book. There are far too numerous recollections of this happening ( in many cities ) to dismiss out of hand. The official RAF Bomber Command web site page for Dresden 1945... still reads:
"Part of the American Mustang fighter-escort was ordered to strafe traffic on the roads around Dresden to increase the chaos and disruption to the important transportation network in the region."
Anyway, what Taylor spends most of his time on is counting the dead .. and since no one ever went to jail for reducing the number of Dresden victims, his final number is far lower than the 100 to 200 thousand often claimed.Taylor's final number of 30,000 seems low considering the number of refugees in the city, but it appears he has covered every angle on this based on documents that are known to exist.
The dense writing style of the book comes across as impenetrable but it is not without it flaws or manipulations.There are several carefully crafted statements throughout the book which while true on their face, are given in a near vacuum without addressing coherently the history of the economic and political turmoil of not only Germany but all of Europe in the years prior to Hitler. Statements such as "Dresden was a Nazi stronghold even before Hitler" are simply torn from their essential historical and political context, insinuating that in Dresden the early Nazi party rose to power on a wave of anti-Semitism rather than being the counter-revolutionary byproduct to massive destabilizing movements by communist/socialist forces.
While most people regard WWII as a `just war' it is also a war filled with mutual slaughter and atrocities with each nation bearing the weight of its own moral transgressions. To call it `strategic bombing' is merely a label and if a nation were to commit such an atrocity against a civilian population today that nation's leaders would surely be branded as war criminals.
Taylor may have been successful at some things, but he is by no means that last word on the subject. His greatest contribution is showing us how military minds run amok. Dresden was neither the first nor the last German city to be firebombed with devastating civilian casualties - but the Saxony city still manages to arouse both controversy and curiosity and Dresden still holds its place in history as a symbol of wars devastation and ruthlessness.
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45 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A respectable job at an impossible task, August 6, 2004
Writing a perfect book on the massive bombing raids against Dresden on February 13-14, 1945, is an impossible task. First of all, the two people in my mind most responsible for it--Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Air Marshal Arthur Harris--are long dead and while alive were far from forthcoming about their motives for the attack. So that avenue is closed forever.
Next, there is the eternal question of 'Was this raid militarily justified?' Here, I give Frederick Taylor a passing grade, but not much more. In my judgment, he is not interested in looking panoramically and in detail at the arc of the war in early February 1945. Admittedly, this is an immensely complicated issue. But for this book, I think a closer assessment of the dynamics of the European war as of dawn on February 13, 1945, would have been desirable.
Then, there is the second eternal question of 'Was this raid morally defensible?' Here, I think Taylor does a journeyman's job, but doesn't go as deep as would be expected in a book that seeks to re-assess the import and legitimacy of the raid. I think the book would have benefited from greater scrutiny of this question.
Three areas of the study, however, are revelatory and worth a careful read. The first is a roughly 50-page-long, very rich description of the founding and development of the city of Dresden. While some other reviewers were less enthused about it, I think this part of the book is fascinating. Second, the actual nuts-and-bolts description of the aerial raid is as fascinating as it is chilling. Finally, the personal, eyewitness face that Taylor puts on the bombing is remarkable, as it gives a horrifying 'you are there' drama to the event.
I'm disappointed in a few things. First, at times I detect an inappropriately breezy, know-it-all tone in Taylor's narrative style. Also, at times he goes heavy on the footnoting and documentation (which I commend), and at times, at least in my assessment, he does the opposite, as major points are made with few accompanying references.
In the end, this is a very powerful read, and one that will make readers examine a time in world history that both is and isn't far away from us today.
As another reviewer has mentioned, this book would best be read in the company of other works on the subject of the Allied bombing of Germany during the Second World War. The best is 'Wings of Judgment' by Ronald Shaffer, sadly out of print. Surprisingly, I did not find it in Taylor's bibliography. Also worth a look are Kurt Vonnagut's 'Slaughterhouse-Five,' Hermann Knell's 'To Destroy a City,' and, if you read German, Joerg Friedrich's 'Der Brand' ('The Fire').
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57 of 79 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dante's Inferno in Saxony, February 17, 2004
By A Customer
Except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I think what happened to Dresden on February 13 and 14, 1945 comes as about as close as possible to a vision of hell on earth. My opinion is that this book is a deeply moving piece of scholarship that clears away the myths surrounding the doom that came to the "Florence on the Elbe" at the end of World War II. Yet it does so without diminishing one bit the horror of it all. The book's best parts are the chapters dealing with the firestorm that swept through the city. However, the sections that address the history of "area bombing" and the "science" of burning a city are also highly informative. My only criticism is that on page 171, the author makes no less than three factual errors about the 1944-45 Ardennes Campaign: 1. Sepp Dietrich did not command the "SS Panzer Division." He commanded the "Sixth SS Panzer Army" (consisting of a mix of SS units and Volksgrenadier divisions). 2. Hasso Von Manteuffel did not command the "Fifth Panzer Division." He was the commander of the "Fifth Panzer Army." 3. General Patton did not rescue the "First Airborne Division at Bastogne." He relieved the "101st Airborne Division." This error is particularly surprising since the author makes a correct reference to that fact on the same page. Now, I want to close with a few words about revisionist reviews like the one that I've seen here which gave the book one star. The Germans and Japanese (with Italy in a supporting role) started a war of unprecedented viciousness which killed tens of millions of people. As the author points out, it is laughable for revisionists to condemn the Allies for fighting back with everything at their disposal. Some of the things that were done to Germany and Japan were wrong or excessive and caused considerable loss of innocent life. Yet they shrink into relative insignificance compared to the deliberate, "stare in your victims' faces when you kill them" genocide that the Germans and Japanese perpetrated. This being said, I weep for the people incinerated in Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and many other places. However, I feel much more pity for the entirely innocent victims of Auschwitz, Belsen, Treblinka, Nanking, and scores of other places where Germans and Japanese dishonored their nations by stooping into previously uncharted depths of evil. No one deserves the terrible fates that many German and Japanese cities endured. The deaths of individual Germans and Japanese are tragedies. But on a grand scale, what happened to those two countries is a classic example of sowing the seeds and reaping a whirlwind of destruction. After what those two nations did to the rest of the world, they had it coming. So I don't regard Dresden as a sin or mistake. It was one of terrible necessities of war, which advances in technology have made obsolete.
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