Armageddon - Max Hastings [248]
Even in war, the ends must relate to the means. Here, the means seemed wildly out of proportion to the ends. I will not say that Dresden should not have been bombed—it was a rail centre, and thus an important target. I will not say Dresden was an exceptional case as compared to other German cities. But I do not understand why it had to be done on such a huge scale. The only answer, I suppose, is that the Allied policy of bombing had developed a dynamic of its own.
Enormous scholarly effort has been expended since 1945 upon exploring the Allies’ motives for destroying Dresden. Many researchers, especially Germans, find it hard to comprehend that, in the minds of the Allied planners, the city possessed no special significance. It was merely one among a dozen undamaged urban areas which had been listed for months on Sir Arthur Harris’s target board at High Wycombe—his notorious schedule of unfinished business in Germany. The demolition of itemized cities was essential to the fulfilment of his vision for the triumph of air power. Harris was specifically encouraged to address targets in eastern Germany by Churchill, on the eve of the Yalta conference. The prime minister was eager to demonstrate to the Russians the power of the Allied air forces. Freak meteorological conditions created in Dresden a firestorm—a wall of flame driven by fierce wind—of a kind which Bomber Command aspired to create every night of its offensive, but only three times accomplished: at Hamburg in 1943, Darmstadt in 1944 and Dresden in 1945.
When researching the bomber offensive a quarter of a century ago, the author chanced upon, and revealed for the first time, the RAF’s briefing notes to its squadrons which attacked Dresden. “In the midst of winter,” these read in part,
with refugees pouring westwards and troops to be rested, roofs are at a premium . . . Dresden has developed into an industrial city of first-class importance . . . its multiplicity of telephones and rail facilities is of major value for controlling the defence of that part of the front now threatened by Marshal Konev’s offensive . . . The intentions of the attack are to hit the enemy where he will feel it most, behind an already partially collapsed front . . . and incidentally to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do.
The banality of this document accurately reflects the almost casual spirit in which the assault on Dresden was mounted. Great horrors in war are not always, or even often, the product of commensurate reflection by those who unleash them. Churchill himself regretted the destruction of Dresden after it had taken place, when the cultural implications were drawn to his attention. But amid the relentless pressures of prosecuting a war, to the prime minister as much as to Harris, Dresden seemed merely a placename on a map until the attack took place. Afterwards, of course, it was scarcely even that.
“This misery has got to stop,” Luftwaffe Unteroffizier Erich Schudak wrote in anguish in his diary after an air raid on 5 March. “What has become of our beautiful Germany?” Yet Schudak could not bring himself to accept that there was only one fashion in which “this misery” would end. On 18 March, he wrote: “Most of the squadron is convinced we have lost the war. To that, I can only say: ‘What weaklings!’ I know things don’t look bright and are getting desperate, but I’m sure we could turn the situation around.” Sir Arthur Harris might have said that, as long as such a spirit persisted among Germany’s defenders, his assault upon Germany’s people had to continue. And so indeed it did.
Henry Kissinger, perhaps surprisingly given his own Jewish background and subsequent political history, is among those who believes today that the area bombing of Germany was wrong: “Yet when a nation had tolerated the murder of so many people, they did not seem to deserve much sympathy.” This point