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Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden

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Although the title suggests the book focuses on Dresden, this is a more complete story of air power in the European Theater of Operations. The work focuses on the strategy behind the bombing and treats the criticism of area bombing on Dresden and other cities in a fairly balanced way. Perhaps I've been ignorant or the issue has escaped full treatment, but the political firestorm arising in 1945, even within the United States, from the area bombing of cities and, in particular, the American follow-up attack on Dresden, was previously unknown to me. Unlike Ambrose's book about George McGovern and other air war books, Firestorm does not focus on the day to day lives of the pilots but is more focused with larger geopolitical issues.

My sole criticism of the work is that it is written from topic to topic rather than chronologically. As a result, it is difficult to keep in mind the timetable of which country, the Americans or British, are bombing who when and this detracts somewhat from an understanding of the course of the air war. With this one reservation, a good work about a controversial topic.

Book Review
By STEPHEN FRATER, author of HELL ABOVE EARTH



In a pitiless twist of Dresden's fate, Ash Wednesday and St. Valentine's fell on the same day in 1945.



"An inharmonious combination," observed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's private secretary in his diary.

As the sun rose over a still-flaming Dresden, Germany, on Feb. 14, it revealed a city laid waste from the previous evening's two high-explosive and incendiary night attacks by British Royal Air Force's Bomber Command, spaced three hours apart.

The resulting firestorm ignited the ancient city into a tornadic inferno that incinerated thousands of civilians and their homes and destroyed Baroque churches, ancient palaces, historic museums and art galleries.

Strong winds whipped flames into pyres of biblical proportions; towers of fire were hundreds of feet high and as wide as city blocks.

The massive columns of flame, visible for miles, served as homing beacons for hundreds of bombers in the subsequent attack waves.

Automobiles and streetcars melted in temperatures reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Ancient trees exploded.

People who sought safety in water towers, ponds and fountains were trapped and boiled alive.

Asphalt ignited and flowed like flaming lava.

"People who were blocks from the flames and thought themselves safe were suddenly picked up by hurricane-force winds and pulled into the inferno ... their corpses were reduced to ash," writes author Marshall De Bruhl in his new book "Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden."

Yet the raid was not over.

At midday, a third wave of heavy bombers, this time from the U.S. Eighth Air Force, appeared over the stricken city and unleashed fresh hell on the heads of emergency workers and rescuers who'd been struggling to put out the fires and extricate victims.

The rescuers were caught in the open, as predicted by the strike's Allied planners.

The first responders to the city once known as "Florence on the Elbe" were killed in droves by the latest assault. It struck some as being morally akin to targeting medics on a battlefield.

The third U.S. attack was regarded as the "most cruel element of the triple blow against Dresden," writes De Bruhl. "In less than 14 hours, the work of centuries was undone."

Less than a month later, on March 9, Tokyo was also attacked with incendiary bombs. About 90,000 people died.

In preparing to write the book, De Bruhl says he "had subscribed to the conventional view, that the firebombing of Dresden was unnecessary."

"The Dresden attack and firestorm immediately became a symbol to many of the horror of a war waged on civilian populations," he writes.

After the Dresden raid, Hitler's chief of propaganda, the odious Dr. Joseph Goebbels, swung into action.

Goebbels and his Nazi-controlled press began to circulate a "clearly erroneous casualty figure," of up to 200,000 dead in Dresden.

De Bruhl maintains the propaganda worked and the "neutral press," in countries including Switzerland and Sweden, largely accepted the Nazi reports and published them to a worldwide "great outcry."

Calling the numbers of dead "inaccurate," De Bruhl has set about -- much to his surprise -- to justify the raids as an attack "on a legitimate target." The scales fell from his eyes as he did the research.

In both justifying the attack and minimizing the death statistics, De Bruhl knows he may be opening a hornet's nest and fully expects criticism.

The irony is that De Bruhl, who calls himself "something of a pacifist," started the book convinced that the bombing was a war crime.

"I had an epiphany," he said in a telephone interview. "Don't get me wrong; it was horrifying and the most awful thing to do, but it was legitimate."

De Bruhl maintains that Dresden, the Third Reich's seventh-largest urban center, had 110 known armament manufacturing sites and 50,000 people, including many slave laborers, working in critical war industries.

He also points out that Dresden's administrative infrastructure and key rail hubs were valid and vital war targets.

The book puts into perspective the political and visceral pressures to avenge concurrent V1 and V2 missile attacks on London.

British revenge played a deadly but silent role in Dresden's fate.

History records that in Europe, it was Germany that first unleashed incendiary bombing of civilian targets during the London Blitz in 1940.

De Bruhl says that the actual numbers of dead in Dresden were between 35,000 and 50,000, a fraction of what was commonly reported during and after the war.

Renowned war historian John Keegan supports De Bruhl's casualty estimate, writing in 2005 that "by the time the raids finished ... 35,000 people, mostly civilians, had been killed ... the casualty figure was inflated ... while the name of Dresden was used to brand Air Marshall (Sir Arthur "Bomber") Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, a war criminal."

De Bruhl blames Goebbels' propaganda, as well as certain authors, for the widely accepted higher death tolls.

Later-discredited author and now-jailed Nazi apologist David Irving published "The Destruction of Dresden" in 1963, in which he claimed 135,000 died.

De Bruhl also says author Kurt Vonnegut, who as a prisoner of war witnessed and survived the firebombing, quoted Irving's book in his classic "Slaughterhouse-Five," in which the firebombing is the defining event.

Calling Vonnegut's book "science fiction," not history, De Bruhl blames Vonnegut "for sharing with David Irving the distinction of being one of the two best known sources of information about the destruction of Dresden."

During the war and after, U.S. military leaders insisted that civilians were never purposely targeted.

De Bruhl, however, makes it clear that "terror bombing of civilians was an official, albeit unannounced, policy of both the RAF and the Eighth Air Force."

Given the technology of the era, "all bombing was area bombing," and everyone, including Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, knew it, maintains De Bruhl.

Once, while viewing photographs of the aftermath, Churchill reportedly asked his military advisers, "Are we beasts?"

In the end, De Bruhl is conflicted about the immolation of tens of thousands of women, children, pensioners and slave laborers.

In a phone interview, when asked directly if Dresden was a war crime, De Bruhl says flatly, "It was not," given its strategic importance.

But later, he opined that generically, "bombing of civilians is certainly a war crime."

An estimated total of 600,000 civilians died in about 70 German cities and towns during the war. The U.K. death toll from German bombers was about 60,000.

Tellingly, the book relates that Churchill's multivolume history of World War II "addressed the terror of Dresden in one sentence."

Air Marshall Harris, the head of the RAF's Bomber Command, "disposed of the issue of Dresden" in less than a page of his 1947 memoir.

On Feb. 26, 1945, Newsweek magazine ran an article referring to Dresden, titled "Now Terror, Truly."

It was clear, even before the atomic era, that a new age of maddeningly amoral -- yet arguably essential and effective -- civilian targeting had dawned.

Industrial war engages industrial populations.

Civilian attacks have not faded from history.

Today, despite advances in smart-bomb technology in modern armies, civilian targeting remains with us -- moral equivalency aside -- as the preferred weapon of terrorists worldwide.

That terrorists learned the concept of targeting civilians and the various justifications for it from the "civilized" industrial powers is one legacy of World War II that's beyond question.

Copyright Herald-Tribune Media Group

This book is often discussed in argument as if it were a deeply researched major contribution to the discussion about Allied terror bombing in WWII. It isn't. It is a very popular book that uses the subject of Dresden to draw the reader through discussions about bombing strategy among American and British military leaders in the leadup to WWII and during the war itself and Germans responses to them.

Nothing new is added compared to more serious discussions of bombing and Dresden such as Frederick Taylor's _Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945_ or the great study of the impact of the boming politically, culturally, and in human terms _The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945_ by Jörg Friedrich. These two books are where anyone seeking a serious study of the meaning of the bombing and the history should start, with Friedrich's book being a literary masterpiece as well.

Yet, this book is well written as an easy quick read. I finished it in a day. His interest seems to be on the cynicism and hypocrisy of Churchill and leaders of the USAAF in their later denial of terror bombing. He spends very little time discussing the impact of the bombing on Dresden and the world, although he does include a few good eye witness memories from German sources. His coverage of the post-war controversy is completely abbreviated except insofar as he documents how Irving's extravagent claim have been exposed as fraud.

Probably the most interesting and repeated contribution this book makes to the discussion that it argues that the bombing was a part of the normal political-military strategy of the USSR, Britain, and the US and justified by military strategy rather than some special act aimed at the USSR. As he and Taylor both point out, the bombing was part of a series of heavy bombings of cities in eastern Germany requested by the Soviet military to support their offensive into Germany. He discounts claims that the bombing was useless because the war was near an end by citing the Allied belief at the time that the war in Germany might last until the fall of 1945 and that the highest casualty rates of the war for the US and Britain had been suffered in the previous two months. He does not mention that hundreds of thousands of Soviet and German soldiers were yet to die.

Yet, De Bruhl seems dangerously complacent about the very horror of the bombing, the way it showed how the rulers of the capitalist goverments and the Stalin-led gang running the USSR are completely distainful and alienated from the ordinary people of Germany who were the real victims of Hitler. He says very little about how this and the terror bombing of Japan climaxed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of a vain attempt by the US government to intimidate the world into accepting US dominance.

This book summarizes the history of Dresden and recounts its role during WWII. Besides describing the February 1945 bombing, it includes survivors' accounts. The reader may be surprised to learn that Dresden was much more than a cultural city. There were no less than 110 military targets in Dresden. (p. 281). Finally, unlike most other books on this subject, this one provides details on the decades-long rebuilding of this city, including the reconstruction of historic buildings that had taken place only since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

De Bruhl seems to be a little inconsistent in his citing of casualty figures. Thus, he cites 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied bombing in total (p. 47), which is an upper limit. On the other hand, he endorses the 35,000 figure--a minimum estimate--for the number of Dresden civilians killed in the February 1945 raids. (p. 273).

There has been a long debate on the efficacy of strategic bombing versus that of area bombing. (p. 151). The author makes it clear just how ineffective strategic bombing really was. British Bomber command estimated that 50-75% of bombs were not even hitting the intended city! American strategic bombers, in 1943, dropped their bombs within 1,000 feet of the intended target only 14% of the time. At war's end, this improved to about 44%, while 73% fell within 2,000 feet of the desired aiming point. (p. 143).

Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris was essentially copying German methods of bombing when he chose to use area bombing as his main strategy. (p. 40). [The author could have mentioned the fact that the Germans were already using massive high-explosive and incendiary bombing of civilian areas in their 1939 conquest of Poland. As for the accusations of Allied bombers strafing German civilians (p. 227), de Bruhl should have mentioned the fact that the Luftwaffe was systematically strafing columns of fleeing Polish civilian refugees back in 1939.]

The author confirms the fact that the dislocations caused by area bombing often proved more significant than the actual destruction caused by the bombs themselves. For instance, in describing the July 1943 Hamburg firestorm, he comments: "The Reich, however, had to divert staggering amounts of supplies, thousands of men, and great effort to protect, house, and feed the beleaguered civilian populace. The effort was a tremendous drain on the German war effort...But no nation could constantly rebuild itself from within...The bombing campaign would ensure the ultimate collapse of the Third Reich." (p. 107).

Although this book is not about the Jews or the Holocaust, de Bruhl writes a significant amount on this topic. He realizes that, owing to the fact that bombing was insufficiently accurate (as specified above), destroying the death camps was not a feasible proposition for the Allied bombers. What's more, destroyed rail lines could be easily repaired, often within a matter of hours. (p. 140, 143). The author mentions the thousands of Jewish inmates of Stutthof concentration camp who were shot by the Germans after a forced march to the Baltic Sea (p. 198), but not the many Polish inmates who met the same fate.

However, de Bruhl does mention the stunning achievement of Polish intelligence in hiding a fallen V-2 rocket, disassembling it, and smuggling parts of it to England. (p. 116). He also informs the reader that 3 million non-Jewish Poles perished at the hands of the Germans during WWII. (p. 142). As for the 1939 war, it was not as lopsided as commonly supposed. The Luftwaffe lost 285 planes and 734 men in the 4-week campaign. (p. 52).

I hardly ever bother to write book reviews but this book I cannot put down. I admit I am only half way through the book but I know I will enjoy it to the last page. This is more than just Dresden, it has a lot of good insights of the thinking that led the allies to drop all of those bombs. It talks about how easy it was to expect that the victims of all of this bombing would just surrender. Lots of good aircraft info as well. I did not know how Hitler and his boys screwed up the Me-262 Jet program so badly. Lucky for the world Hitler did not know much about the potential of jet airplanes.