Customer Reviews

The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945

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This is a different kind of history than one I am used to. I found no discernable structure. Nor did I find an explicit thesis. The narrative runs at random across time and space, from pre-Roman history to 1945, from one city to another and back. The only common thread is death, destruction and the bombers themselves. Even the chapters seem to be arbitrary breaks in one long stream of consciousness.

This stream is unremitting dispassionate fury, quiet but relentless through all 480 plus pages of narrative. Like the bomber streams themselves, you begin to feel its pounding bombardment page after page after page. Then suddenly, like the war, the stream stops and all that is left is the wreckage as you consider what you have endured.

Never actually stated, the theme is nonetheless clear enough. The allied bombing of Germany - in particular that of Bomber Command - brought massive death and destruction to Germans, destroyed priceless artifacts built and preserved for centuries, yet made little contribution to actually winning the war.

The author makes no excuses for Germany and, from time to time in passing, acknowledges both the evil done by Germans and that the Germans themselves were the pioneers in bombing defenseless cities. The author fully admits that the Germans would have eagerly done worse with bombers - if they had had the power.

The author's point is that the Germans did not have the power. By late 1944, when the war's outcome was no longer in doubt and the destruction began in earnest, they were so totally overmatched by the allies so as to be at the mercy of the bombers. And the bombers showed no mercy, just as readily destroying libraries and the medieval churches of anti-Nazis as factories and the homes of war workers. Showing no discrimination, the bombers killed soldiers and Nazis as readily as they killed children, slave workers and little old ladies.

The author appears grateful that the allies won the war, but in so doing wishes that the bombers' indiscriminate killing and destruction had been tempered. How, he does not say. If nothing else, he wishes to make the reader feel, in a deep visceral way, the destruction sown by the bombers and recognize the tragedy.

I am retired history professor and always had problems to get my students to deal with books about WWII that would not in one way or another condemn Germany and praise the U.S. I have taught and lectured in many countries and have never seen such as strong a need, not just among students, to protect a received, generally positive view of history. Even the traditional "left" and "right", often bitterly devided over other issues, find much common ground here. Many of my studens knew before I started lecturing what their assigned WWII paper would say, and what they heard in class or read in assigned material was of help only to the degree that it would confirm what they already knew. Books such as Alfons Heck's "A Child of Hitler", for example, generally aroused distrust and even anger because very little in them seemed of any help. Although Heck's book talks about WWII, it primarily offers descriptions and explanations and not condemnations. The reviews I have read here of Friedrich's book express, on the whole, a similar sentiment.

From personal experience, I know that Friedrich's book is as accurate a desription of what happend to the inhabitants of German cities during allied bombings as you may find anywhere. As a scholar, I can see flaws in its style of representation that a good book review (which this is not) should address. As a German immigrant, I can only note that it will take much longer than I had hoped for cooler heads to prevail when it comes to discussing and representing WWII and its epoch. As a human being, I have problems realizing that some people will base their judgment of the suffering of innocent people (children) on the views they hold of those who inflict the suffering. I seems that many of the lessons contained in the narrative of WWII, including of course the Holocaust, are lost, perhaps forever. It is mainly for that reason that Friedrich's book should be read, particularly by people who find the thought that it is possible to be German AND to be a victim very uncomfortable.

As a veteran of WW II and a member of the Fifteenth Air Force, based in Italy, I always saw the bombing campaign from the bombers' point of view. But, there was always a gnawing question about what was happening to the cities and people on the receiving end of our efforts. Friedrich's wonderful book provides the answer and it's not a pretty one.

Friedrich's book has made me question the ethics of armed conflict, whether we're speaking of "The Good War" or not.

The harrowing aspect of this book is the quoted attitudes of the Allied (primarily British) leaders. Bomber Command, as I understand it, was the only branch that was not commended for its service after the war. Arthur "Bomber" Harris was the only one not to receive a peerage. During the war, the political leaders were eager to tell Harris "Go to, go to!" like spectators at a rape. But afterwards, they didn't want it booted about that they were intentionally targeting civilians against our own traditions and public statements ("We are only bombing military targets" Bomber Command repeatedly said) and the vast majority of the civilian leadership, including Churchill, was cheering them on. Even Churchill was keen on ordering anthrax bombs for use against the Germans.

After the war, the Allied Bombing Survey found that the bombing was relatively disappointing, especially in its avowed goal of destroying German industry. German war production peaked in the last quarter of 1944 and it wasn't until the ground forces arrived that production was effectively stopped. According to J. F. C. Fuller, in his "The Second World War," there was only one plant in German producing the necessary lead additive to raise fuel octane but it was never bombed. He also opined that the vast fortune in money and materiel expended on the bombing offensive would have been better used in the production of landing craft, the shortage of which, time and again, delayed the decisive ground attacks that defeated Germany.

There was no point in destroying the German cities turned to dust and ashes in the last few months of the war. At that time what made a city a target was that it hadn't been bombed before.

"The quality of mercy is not strained, but falleth like the rain from heaven," and mercy and humanity was supposed to be the Allies strong suit. When American ground units bypassed a German town and drew fire, they fired back into the town until it stopped. The bombing was not such a justified act of reprisal - according to our own standards. After a point, we were just killing more civilians and "making the rubble bounce."

Germany deserved to lose this war and I am heartily glad they did, but we owe more to the GI's and their suffering in accomplishing that goal than we do to "strategic bombing," which was like a giant ineptly swinging a gigantic sledge hammer, a giant intentionally set free by the politicians to do his worst.

At the very least, this book gives one much (very much) to think about. The savage and brutal atrocities of the German forces were their responsibility and history should witness to such evil. Allied excesses were our sides responsibility, and we have done a poor job of owning up to them.

The author's weakest argument is when he describes things like the attacks on transportation links just before the D-Day landings. Thousands of occupied civilians were killed because bombing was just not that accurate in those days, but those targets had to be taken out for the landings to succeed. I'm sure that the occupied populations, had a poll been possible, would have stoutly backed the effort to get the Nazi beast off their backs, even if some of their own would die in the effort. In this case we are dealing with valid military targets and the limits of technology at that time.

In any event, there is much here that does not do credit to the Allied side and the interests of history and posterity deserve to have it made known. I, for one, have a difficult time describing to my sons what our side did in this fashion.

You should read also, "Wings of Judgment" by Schaefer (sp?), a somewhat more clinical analysis of the policy decisions and history of the bombing.

Written in a calm, low-key style that at first seems inappropiate, Friedrich inexorably builds up the tension and the horror of the bombing war. At the end the reader is left devastated at the futility and seemimg inevitability of it all. A fine work.

I just returned from two weeks in Germany, my first time. I stood in the bustling city of Frankfurt and asked friends how much of the city was destroyed and why was everything so new. I found 75 percent of the city including almost all of the housing except a row of millionaire's mansions we passed entering the city had been destroyed. Last night I looked at a friend's video of a trip to Zurich and so many more old buildings dating before the war, so different than any of the cities I saw in Germany and realized that is because US and British Bombers never tried to burn this city down with their bombs, although US bombers did raid ball-bearing factories in Switzerland. This lifted all of this out of the book and into reality.

On these pages we live with the ordinary people of Germany: unable to sleep as they await the firebombs, rushing to the shelters,living in the shelters, rescuing their sisters, husbands, children, parents, struck dead as the blast shatters their brains and lungs, struck dead by fear, fright, and the awfullness of it all, suffocated, the air sucked out of their lungs by the flames, exploded, torn apart by the hurricanes of fire, burned and charred down to cinders and then carried in these buckets of ashes and stray bones to the overflowing cemetaries or stacked like cord wood in huge piles and consumed by bonfires that blazed for days.

Not only adults, the aged, or women but we see children growing up used to seeing friends and neighbors blown to bits, burned to cinders, used to fleeing the strafers, seeing their parents, their teachers, and themselves fall into the flames.

Nearly a million people, including about 100,000 Allied Air Crew, were murdered in the Allied terror bombing of Europe's cities, most in the fire bombing of Germany.

In the first years of WWII, the British and then the US, learned that it was simply impossible with the aircraft and technology of the 1940s to hit designated targets of economic and military importance without sustaining losses that would have eliminated the air crews. A British study of attempts to hit only such targets at the end of 1941, found that as many British aircrew were being killed as Germans on the ground. However, learning from German fire bombing of Coventry, the British discovered while hitting targets was hard, burning down an entire European city, or at least its central core, filled with wooden and wood-beamed buildings holding the legacy of culture, history, and religion from the times of the Romans on, was possible. To this task they set themselves, working with urban fire fighters, experts from insurance companies, pouring over insurance maps of Germany, studying not how to hit Germany armories, military barracks, tanks or army stockpiles, but how to burn furniture, home roof top, bedding, clothing, books, and children's toys, how to burn the people and their lives.

From then on, the British designed their bombing campaigns to produce firestorms. The most famous were the razing of Hamburg and Dresden which were not unique, but the achievement of what the British, later joined by the US, sought to do every time a large bombing raid was planned. Many smaller cities and towns in Germany suffered far worst damage in percentage of devastation and casualties than these two famous cities. Some cities were bombed HUNDREDS OF TIMES between 1942 and 1945. Especially, in 1944 and 1945 many cities, towns, and even villages were bombed for the simple reason that they had not been bombed before. Jörg Friedrich discloses that beyond the fire-bombing, Churchill kept the alternative of combined gas and Anthrax bombing of Germany available with a million bombs until he realized such chemical and biological warfare would also harm invading Allied troops.

Arthur Harris, commander of British Bomber Command, and Churchill behind him simply mean to murder people in Germany. Harris considered all other military efforts even the invasion of Western Europe to be a waste of time. He thought that all resources should be directed to murdering Germans in their homes from the air. In fact, in 1944 when ordered to carry out a campaign against oil facilities in Germany, Harris disregarded the order kept burning German cities. Often military facilties, such as the air base and Army barrcks in Dresden, were not impacted at all while thousands of elderly, women, and children were murdered by the British and American bombers. While post-war critics have attempted to demonize Harris, it was Churchill and the rest of the Allied leaders who put Harris in this position and sustained his plans with thousands of bombers, billions of tons of bombs, and hundreds of thousands of air crew.

After the war, studies especially by US intelligence and military found the bombing had little impact on German industrial production and increased the anger of the average German against the Allies. After all, if they could do such horror against Germans from the air, what horrors were ahead if the British and Americans occupied Germany.

Jörg Friedrich is very clear about the evil the Nazi government represented, about the heartless way Hitler and other Nazi leaders actually thought the terror bombing helped them by making millions of Germans "soldiers" in their homes. He relentlessly shows Nazi persecution of Jews, the labor movement, and other victims of Hitler's fascism. However, hee also documents the extraordinary work Germans did the minimize the human casualties. Allied air commanders assumed they had killed millions of Germans, but "only" five or six hundred thousand were murdered.

The greatness of this work is how he explains the human and cultural cost of the bombing. British bombers aimed for the old sections of the city made of wood. Most often their target points were the Cathedrals and high churches that the old towns and cities were built around. Hospitals, often linked with these religious institutions or mistaken for factories were also a frequent target. Walls of flames burnt away some of the most priceless religous and historical monuments in Europe. Friedrich explains the firebombing was the greatest book burning in human history, far outweighing the books Hitler burnt in 1933. He gives a great history of what was lost culturally and historically in the flames that swept across Germany in the war.

But what is the human cost! Jörg Friedrich gives us the stories of the thousands and thousands who were burned to death, torn apart by explosions, sucked into the super hurricane gales of the firestorms, smothered as the fire storms sucked all the oxygen out of shelters, and gassed as the heat of the fire storms turned the piles of coal and coke that were in every basement and cellar into carbon monoxide produers.

The allied bombs were specifically designed not only the launch fires but were planned to hinder fire fighting and rescue attempts. Waterworks were usually key targets in these raides. Delayed-detonation bombs that would go off even days after the fire storms made it dangerous for firefighters and often fatal for rescue teams. In 1944 and 1945, American and British fighters strafed refugees, rescuers, and fire fighters. Everything possible was done to multiply the death toll and stop the rescue and physical recovery.

This book is more understandable if one consults the map of Germany on inside back cover. It will force the reader unfamiliar with German and European history to learn more.

The claim that the bombing was a result of military measures was a lie. Harris considered any military operation other than murdering and "dehousing" Germans to be a diversion. Even in a place as hard hit as Dresden, the actual military targets--the town's airbase and army barracks for example--were hardly touched, but tens of thousands lost their lives in their homes, their schools, their churches, their libraries. Even though Jews fighting against the death camps urged the bombing of death factories like Aushclitz, neither US nor Britain, allowed such a task to interfere with their campaign to murder ordinary Germans.

Joerg Friedrich's book is an invaluable contribution to the history of the Second World War that was long overdue. Until very recently it was taboo for Germans like him to write about the devastation of their country for fear of antagonizing their Anglo-American occupiers and newfound allies. The British press and public especially vented outrage whenever a native of Germany dared broach the subject. The Germans, it was held, were responsible for the Holocaust and other wartime atrocities and their bringing up the Allied firebombing of their cities was no more than a brazen attempt to to turn victimizers into victims. With the critics of these wartime atrocities effectively silenced, an important part of the whole truth about this war remained buried for over half a century. Historian Friedrich is to be commended for his audacity and courage in bringing the results of his researches before the public and so is Columbia University (this writer's alma mater) for deciding to publish the English language version of this work which was first published in Germany as "Der Brand" in 2002.

What this author's work shows is that World War II was not simply a struggle between good and evil but one between forces of evil that were present to varying degrees in all three principals to the conflict in Europe - The Third Reich under Hitler, the Soviet Union under Stalin and the Anglo-American Empire under Roosevelt and Churchill. It is a historical fact that Winston Churchill and his Chief of Bomber Command, Arthur Harris, planned and executed the systematic destruction of German towns and cities and the mass killing of their inhabitants. By Churchill's own admission (after the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945), it was a campaign of terror specifically designed to demoralize the German people to the point where they would surrender unconditionally. Exact figures are unknown but, by conservative estimates, on the order of one-half million German civilians were slaughtered during Allied air raids of which 75,000 were children under the age of 14. Yet despite all the efforts of the western Allies to break the will of the people, the home front never wavered in its determination to resist a brutal enemy and stoically endured what seemed unendurable. Churchill's diabolical and murderous scheme did little to shorten the war and may have even prolonged it. In the end, it proved to have been a complete and costly failure.

The Anglo-American air forces razed every German city and most towns of any size to the ground. All the heavily populated city centers were systematically taken out while the factories and transportation hubs important to the war effort were inexplicably spared. To catch the populace off guard and thereby increase the horror and death toll, many of the Allied air raids were conducted on major Christian holidays including Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Palm Sunday, Easter and Christmas. Besides the human toll, this orgy of destruction resulted in the loss of innumerable cultural and historic sites. In one example, Frankfurt's Old town together with Goethe's birthplace were burned down on March 22, 1944 which was the aniversary of the great poet's death. Much of the cultural patrimony of the German people was wantonely destroyed as millions of books, ancient manuscripts, musical scores, and works of art were consigned to the flames. The western Allies engaged in cultural vandalism on a scale unprecedended in recorded histor.

Fortunately for his readers, Friedrich has a knack for story telling and is able to enliven his often grim narrative by sharing his vast knowledge of interesting historical facts and anecdotes throughout the book. Following the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command, he takes his readers on a Baedeker tour of much of Germany visiting such ancient and historic towns as Aachen, the capital of Charlemagne, and Trier, where Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to be baptized, had his palace. The human element too is given its due with many riveting eye witness accounts by people who lived through the nightly horrors as hundreds of Allied planes roared overhead discharging their deadly loads of thousands of explosive and incendiary bombs. Most of the population survived by spending their nights in the reinforced basements of their apartment buildings or in public air raid shelters all of which were never completely safe and rarely withstood direct hits by 500-pound bombs. The victims were blown apart, burned to death or suffocated when the raging fires consumed the oxygen in the shelters. The author touchingly mentions the name of one baby boy who was born during an air raid and was in the world for just one day.

Much to his credit, Friedrich manages to remain completely objective and avoid even a trace of rancor or vindictiveness. He lets the facts speak for themselves. He even goes so far as to defend some of the standard rationalizations that have been advanced to justify these murderous and inexcusable acts of state terrorism. The book makes a powerful impact but it is not without flaws. Thus, some readers may be disconcerted by a lack of organization and cohesion making the narrative difficult to follow. At times the author makes a series of non sequitur statements which leave the reader puzzled as to what he is trying to say. Not all writers on this subject have been as charitable in their judgments as Friedrich. John Peter Allemand, who as a child narrowly escaped becoming a statistic in a British air raid, offers a very different perspective. This author, whose prophetic and apocalyptical verses were published under the title "A Poetical Offering with Commentaries," considers the wartime destruction of Germany and Japan a prelude to Armageddon. By reinterpreting certain passages in the Book of Revelation and Nostradamus quatrains, he convincingly shows that the Apocalypse and Second Coming are near at hand. This awesome and terrifying event promises to spell the end of many nations and powers.

I am a WWII buff and have read an awful lot about the war generally and the firebombing campaigns in particular. But this book takes it to a new level, a riveting, highly depressing account of the intentional targeting and slaughtering of tens of thousands of civilians in an explicit effort to "weaken the will" of the German people and thus hasten the end of the war.

Churchill really comes across as the instigator of much of the detailed destruction of historic city centers, ancient churches and steeples, dams, water mains, you just about name it. Roosevelt is described by the author as "more humane" and mostly focused on the targeting of legitimate military and industrial targets.

But according to this book, the British worked for years with fire prevention specialists to devise the best method to destroy old and largely defenseless historic German cities. Careful attention was paid by the British to which buildings would burn fastest, how it would best be spread, which fire walls and water mains to destroy, and how to stop the fire from being put out in order to maximize civilian death and destruction. The author makes no real attempt to justify any of this, other than to say that the British were desperate and being bombed themselves.

Interesting facts - Churchill ordered from the US military a large quantity of anthrax, to be dropped on German cities, but the anthrax was set to arrive after the Allies landed on the continent, so the plan was disbanded.

New facts recounted of the horrific British destruction of the massive dams protecting the Ruhr river valley, leading to massive drowning, drought, and devastation of defenseless women and children living in villages downriver. The technology of firebombing, and the effects on the civilians who retreated to cellars, are all discussed in painful detail. Attention is paid to the great likelihood of dying that the British bombers knew went along with their dangerous missions, but the pilots are hardly described here as "heroes."

The book, however, lacks a narrative structure and could have been more crisply edited. It is simply a collection of death and destruction, intentional and targeted directly at civilians, with account after account of successful bombing raids and their effect on the historic treasures there were destroyed as a result -- along with the many many thousands of civilian dead.

This is a hard read, and I found myself reaching for someone or something to help me understand the moral equivalency of what I had been reading -- something to put it into perspective so you are not left with the sense that war is hell, and many war crimes were committed by the participants with no understanding of the whys or the moral justifications for same. For this book, it is the hows that are itemized in dark deadly detail.

This is one of the most powerful books that I have read in some years. The author provides perhaps the first truly exhaustive study of the effect of the air war on Germany. The book is broken down into chapters addressing the background and plans for the air war, the actual operations against virtually every city of significance, and the impact of the bombings on civilians, industry, architecture, cultural icons, etc. Narrative of operations is interspersed with eyewitness recollections so while this book is lengthy and academically thorough it is not dry. One should not become intimidated by the one very long chapter which covers the bombing war city by city from west to east. While this might tend to become monotonous after several hundred pages in the end you realise exactly why the author structured it that way. I could almost hear the metronome ticking as each city was systematically destroyed. A culture was very nearly erased in essentially two years (1943-45 when most of the significant bombing took place).
The thoughts this book provoked for me were twofold. First, this should cause all rational people to decide whether deliberate targeting of civilians is ever justified in war (legally as well as morally). This book does not excuse the German bombing of British, Dutch, Polish or Russian cities. On the contrary, it only serves to show that unfortunately US and British leaders were guilty of the same mindset, but had far greater capacity for destruction and continued to use it long after the necessity had vanished (by late 1944 it was clear that the bombing had little effect, if any, on war material production and the Germans were not going to surrender to the air war in any case). Second, while unmentioned this study might be applied to the bombing of Japan. Libraries of books and articles have addressed the moral and legal issues of the two atomic attacks but should these stand any differently from the great Tokyo fire raid that killed over 100,000 people in a single night (far more than Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg or Dresden)? If we decide that such bombing tactics are justified in "total war" we had better not distinguish to type of weapon used. Would you rather burn alive or suffocate in a collapsed cellar during a fire storm (as vividly described by many witnesses in this book) or become atomized in a split second or die a wasting death from radiation in Hiroshima. Not much of a choice. Both types of attacks were deliberately aimed at civilians with, as the book describes, only incidental concern to eliminate vital transportation and industrial targets. It is uncomfortable to read that the US and our Allies were successful in burning up centuries of humanity's culture and learning in monuments, buildings, libraries, artwork and other cultural artifacts, not to mention killing untold numbers of civilians (the author admits that there are no clear numbers for human losses) while leaving vital military and industrial targets intact. After thousands of books and articles condemning (justifiably) the atrocities of the Nazi regime it is high time the rest of the story of WWII is told. Read this and weep.

I was looking for some facts about these bombings. I could find some here, some there. This book gives you virtually everything on this account. This is a treasure chest of facts. It's not a well-structured story but a mammoth collection of recorded events, facts, numbers and witness accounts. The book is about how Germany took a deathly blow, how she was ruined, and how innocent people died.