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The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 Hardcover – November 7, 2006

by Jörg Friedrich (Author), Allison Brown (Translator)

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For five years during the Second World War, the Allies launched a trial and error bombing campaign against Germany's historical city landscape. Peaking in the war's final three months, it was the first air attack of its kind. Civilian dwellings were struck by-in today's terms-"weapons of mass destruction," with a total of 600,000 casualties, including 70,000 children.

In The Fire, historian Jörg Friedrich explores this crucial chapter in military and world history. Combining meticulous research with striking illustrations, Friedrich presents a vivid account of the saturation bombing, rendering in acute detail the annihilation of cities such as Dresden, the jewel of Germany's rich art and architectural heritage. He incorporates the personal stories and firsthand testimony of German civilians into his narrative, creating a macabre portrait of unimaginable suffering, horror, and grief, and he draws on official military documents to unravel the reasoning behind the strikes.

Evolving military technologies made the extermination of whole cities possible, but owing, perhaps, to the Allied victory and what W. G. Sebald noted as "a pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms," the wisdom of this strategy has never been questioned. The Fire is a rare account of the air raids as they were experienced by the civilians who were their targets.

The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Exhaustive and harrowing … Friedrich's aim seems to be not only to wrest the history of German suffering from the clutch of the far right but to rescue the glories of German history from the twelve years of Hitler's thousand-year Reich. (Ian Buruma New York Review of Books)

The Fire represents the continuation of Friedrich's generation's indictment of National Socialism—except now the finger is pointed at the Allies, and sympathy is extended to the civilian Germans who were their victims. (The Nation)

What W. G. Sebald lamented about the lack of open discourse on the air war appears to have been blown apart with the publication of The Fire. (Noah Isenberg Bookforum)

Jörg Friedrich's achievement in The Fire has been to tell this tale of death and destruction with a rare plasticity and vividness. (German Historical Institute London Bulletin)

[Jörg Friedrich] describes in stark, unrelenting and very literary detail what happened in city after city as the Allies dropped 80 million incendiary bombs on Germany.... There is … an edginess to Friedrich's writing and commentary, an emotional power. (New York Times)

Jörg Friedrich tells the story from the viewpoint of the bombed with... great skill and objectivity. (Paul Johnson The American Spectator)

Thorough and methodical... Friedrich's book underscores that precision bombing is anything but a scientific enterprise. (Stanley Hoffman Foreign Affairs)

Mr. Friedrich deserves credit for both his diligence and his descriptive powers. (Economist)

An indictment both of Hitler's appropriation of German history and of the Allies' destruction of a nation's culture... Thoughtful and detailed. (Library Journal)

This is a book that demands to be read, no matter how uncomfortable the experience. (David Cesarani The Independent)

[A] haunting book… forceful, incendiary. (Atlantic Monthly)

A well-documented piece of historical writing... [that] is also a poignant, lyrical and terrible account of human suffering. (Adam R. Seipp Houston Chronicle)

A vivid and powerful critique of war... [The Fire is] fascinating, ground-breaking, and thought-provoking. (Roger Moorhouse BBC History Magazine)

Recommended. (Choice)

A contribution to the German literature of remembrance; it is also a passionate denunciation of the excesses of the air war. (Harold Dorn Technology and Culture)

Riveting. (TIME Europe)

Book Description

Combining meticulous research with striking descriptions, Jörg Friedrich renders in acute detail the Allies' air campaign of systematic destruction of civilian life, cultural treasures, and industrial capacities in Germany's city landscape. He includes personal stories and firsthand testimony of German civilians, creating a portrait of unimaginable suffering, horror, and grief. He also draws on official military documents to unravel the reasoning behind the Allies' strikes.

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Product details

Hardcover: 552 pages
Publisher: Columbia University Press; First Edition edition (November 7, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0231133804
ISBN-13: 978-0231133807
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 50 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,772 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #308 in Books > History > Military > Aviation
- #455 in Books > History > Europe > Germany
- #1411 in Books > History > Military > World War II

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Top customer reviews

Sheds light on a very dark episode of World War Two.

ByAmazon Customeron January 3, 2015

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

I have read a lot about WWII but this book was news to me. I had no idea quite how devastating the US/UK bombing campaign was for German cities and civilians. Kind of makes you ashamed to have been on the winning side, when such genocidal and cruel methods were used, not to military purpose, but as terror weapons meant to kill civilians, in revenge for the bombing of England. After a while the book becomes a catalog of destruction, and all the historic buildings destroyed are listed, as if every single one was a unique treasure of architectural history. Shows just how morally ambiguous and treacherous a war can be. If you are interested in WWII aviation history, it is worth learning something about the bombs dropped by all those B-17s and B-24s. Despite its many flaws, this should be on your reading list.

0Comment 4 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

A tough go

ByScotton August 25, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I have just finished this and feel almost as numb as the bombing victims. I read slowly to begin with but I kept putting this down because it was often too hard to take.

My father was a radioman and waist-gunner in B-17s in the 8th Army Air Force and, when I asked, he said that they were only interested in dropping their payloads and getting the hell out. After V-E day they got to fly over many of the destroyed cities, he offered no opinion other than to say they deserved it. The Nazis surely did.

The Fire (Der Brand) shows the other side of the story.

I'm certain Friedrich was sorely tempted at times to equate the firebombing with the Holocaust (which of course numbered in the millions not the hundreds of thousands). He does not.

If architecture is the objectification of history, Friedrich does equate the obliteration of the cities and towns with the loss of Germany's history, heritage and people and asks whether it was necessary.

11 comment 8 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Probably the best book ever written on the bombing of Germany.

ByNachtjageron July 28, 2011

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

To keep this simple, this is probably the single best book ever written on the fire bombing of Germany during WWII. Intensely personal with first-hand accounts instead of textbook-boring lists of statistics and reports, this is a troubling read that shows what it was like to live under the constant threat of allied bombing. I had to read this book ten or twenty pages at a time because it's troubling and intense; it will pull you into visual nightmares that are difficult to get away from. This is a very intense book, and as my grandparents lived through this and I've heard their stories most of my life, it is an especially important book to me. If you want to look at the allied bombing of Germany in an entirely new perspective, read this book - it's powerful and should be on every WWII history buff's shelf. HIGHLY RECOMENDED!

0Comment 5 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Powerful and thought-provoking

ByTraveleron October 25, 2007

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

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.

0Comment 12 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Finally found it.

ByEvelyn Lopezon January 11, 2014

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I've search for this book in the library to no avail. The hardcover is so expensive. Getting information on this topic from the people who suffered it was important to me. I like to know all sides. Why was such terrible devastation necessary? Who was truly responsible? Was this our only recourse? So much lost.

0Comment 3 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Most recent customer reviews

Useful

Books that describe the suffering and destruction of war should be valued and welcomed. Anything that helps people understand what war is like may contribute to the ability to...Read more

Published 15 days ago by doug korty

Consider all the lives of those living in Germany in the war before you decide whether Germans were the victims.

I hold life to be sacred. The Nazis were still deporting Jews and killing slave laborers daily at the time of the fire bombings of the German cities by the Allies. Bloomberg.Read more

Published 11 months ago by Bob & Pat

Too bad

If you don't want to die, don't start wars. The only ones not complicit in the Nazis' war were those under ten years old.

Published 1 year ago by SK

Excellent! The subject of the book

Excellent!

The subject of the book, "The Bombing of Germany, 1940-45 was deftly analyzed by the author.Read more

Published 1 year ago by TommyB

This book is comprehensive. That's a strength, but also a weakness.

I tend toward books about the Second World War because I have a fascination with human resilience, which often arises in the face of human stupidity.Read more

Published 1 year ago by Thomas K. Krug III

A brilliant German book superbly translated.

All references are to the paperback version
I finished The Fire last night and I am, admittedly, a slow reader but any person that has attempted Jorg's work will attest it is...Read more

Published 1 year ago by Tim Johnson

Five Stars

Great book!!!

Published on November 14, 2014 by William G. Prewitt

aaa

aaa there needs to be more books like this before we can find middle ground with the world, and the truth about our history

Published on June 13, 2014 by Hank D Baum

Total madness

Jörg Friedrich has written what is perhaps the definitive indictment of total war and the lies of its ethical justification.Read more

Published on January 8, 2014 by Gustavo E. Romero

HORROR ON THE GROUND

No country save Vietnam has ever been bombed as much as Germany in the Second World War. In this five hundred page book Jorg Friedrich presents a heartbreaking look at the damage...Read more

Published on December 19, 2013 by Severin Olson

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