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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.

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Editorial Reviews

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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 Socialismexcept 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)

About the Author

Jörg Friedrich was born in Tyrolia in 1944 and grew up in the Ruhr District (Essen). A broadcaster in Berlin, Friedrich became a historian after he reported on the Majdanek Trial during the 1970s. His first comprehensive history of the prosecution of Nazi criminals in Germany, The Cold Amnesty (1984), was a bestseller in the Federal Republic. In 1993 he published a monograph on the forgotten Nuremberg Trial of the German High Command titled The Law of War: The German Army in Russia, which earned him a honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. The idea for The Fire came to Friedrich accidentally one night in February 2002, and since its publication, the book has been translated into ten languages, sparking debate worldwide.
Jörg Friedrich was born in Essen, Germany, in 1944 and spent most of his career writing about Nazi atrocities before orienting his research toward an analysis of Allied military tactics. He lives in Berlin.

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: #919,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2121 in Books > History > Military > Aviation
- #3423 in Books > History > Europe > Germany
- #8607 in Books > History > Military > World War II

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Tim Johnson

A brilliant German book superbly translated.

January 21, 2016

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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 a work that is worth every bit of reading fortitude. I began this literary journey some months ago, well before Christmas, and was at turns horrified and very impressed me with the tremendous amount of research used to produce such a book.
Further, as opposed to other commentators, I found that Fire was very well organized in that I could look at the Table of Contents and find exactly what each chapter contained. Now that content was organised by themes rather that chronology but it covered all the history of the bombing for instance: Strategy p.49, moral bombing, the way to the Rhine; Land p.153, north, west, south & east (the bombing of specific cities); Protection . p. 325, refuge in the vault, care, evacuees, etc. Therefore if you wish the reader can easily pick and choose the topics that most interest you (this method is not recommended).
As opposed to one commentator I read this afternoon I did not question (perhaps stupidly) the author's mammoth use of statistics to stun the reader's consciousness concerning the horror done to Germany by the 8th Air Force and the British Bomber Command. For instance on page 136 the author writes that 1,108 planes carrying 4,148 tonnes of bombs destroyed Dortmund. As a non-military person and as a non-military historian I was flabbergasted by reading these statistics on page 165, that Hamburg was bombed 213 times before it was no longer thought to be of use to anyone although one of the commentators reported that some of the industries came back into production.
Of course at some point in discussing this awful story one must deal with the American decision to begin to use a mix of high explosives and incendiaries; in seven raids on Munich the 8th Air Force dropped a million incendiaries. The question must be asked, why? However this is not the place to second guess the war-time decisions of the air generals but why should they escape the same damnation that has generally fallen on Bomber Harris of Bomber Command.
It is a hard read on many levels but if you stay with it you will not be disappointed.

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Magda Denes

A terrible tale to tell ...

December 18, 2012

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This is the story of fire raining down from the sky upon ordinary citizens during WWII -- events as individuals experienced it at the time. Told in searing and painful detail.

Says Tami Biddle in her historical overview online, "...warfare is the most dangerous and the most corrosive activity in all of human endeavour, and we must treat it very carefully because this is where it can take you."

What happened to the German (and Japanese) civilians in war was horrible, but all the killing and suffering in every form of battle was terrible. Could any part of this war be considered as moral? This writer thinks not.

The greatest immorality was, if Hitler had not decided to wage total war, fought down to the last gasp of 13-year old German soldiers, then all of the dead Germans would have remained alive.

Quoting Arthur "Bomber" Harris "The GERMANS started this war under the naive assumption that they would be able to bomb everyone and no one would bomb them, Well they have sowed the wind and NOW THEY WILL REAP THE WHIRLWIND" Britain and the U.S.A. have nothing to apologize for."

Still. This author had a horrific true story to tell and he tells it well.

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Richard W.

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

January 3, 2015

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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.

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