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By Root 1247 0

first, on the night of the 24—25 July. Their coordinates rigged against creep-back, and protected by a new technology known as ‘Window’—aluminum shreds that, dumped from British bomb bays, distracted German radar operators—nearly 800 planes dropped high explosives and incendiaries, killing some 1,500 people, ‘dehousing’ thousands more, and, as intended, stretching beyond capacity Hamburg’s firefighters. The result was not decisive enough for Harris, so three nights later the RAF struck again. This time, conditions were perfect; as Michael Sherry has written, ‘the second Hamburg raid ignited the war’s first great firestorm’. Thousands burned to death, or simply melted into lumps of flesh in the 1,400° heat. Some who tried to run were caught in the melting asphalt of the streets. Others, seeking shelter underground as those suffering attack by explosives were advised to do, were asphyxiated as the firestorm intensified and sucked the city center dry of oxygen. Firefighters who survived the onslaught were helpless; small ‘children lay like fried eels on the pavement’. Perhaps 45,000 people died in Hamburg that night, mostly women, children, and old men. ‘Hamburg’, Jorg Friedrich has written, ‘found itself in a room for three hours not where life dies—that always happens—but rather, where life is not possible, where it cannot exist.’ It was a horror ‘transcending all human experience and imagination’.10

On the mornings after the nighttime raids, the Eighth Air Force attempted to fulfill its part of the mission, which was to attack Hamburg’s shipyards (including a submarine base) and an aircraft engine factory. Smoke from the preceding night’s attacks on both mornings hid the Americans’ targets, and the Eighth did little damage. When the results of the Hamburg attacks were assessed, the Americans began to rethink their strategy. If efficiency was the goal of bombing, and if there was no compelling moral impediment to bombing the centers of cities, Hamburg seemed to prove that the British had been right all along. Eaker’s subordinate Frederick Anderson now waxed enthusiastic about the possibility of a daylight attack on Berlin, which would, if successful, have a ‘terrific impact’ on the German population. In October the Eighth carried out its first daytime attack, on the city of Munster. The use of Window made such raids safer for the attackers, and over time the degradation of German defenses helped too. Similar assaults were made, with satisfyingly bloody results, in Axis Bulgaria and Romania the following year. And Hamburg was instructive on another front: in its aftermath, Roosevelt called it ‘an impressive demonstration’ of what might be done by American bombers in Japan.11

The best known and most notorious of Allied bombing raids on Germany came at Dresden, the capital of Saxony and a cultural center, though not altogether devoid of military and industrial targets. It was a city of refugees, many of them running from the advancing Red Army, and in its suburbs were some 25,000 Allied prisoners of war (including the future American novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr.). It was early 1945, and, despite the rapid crumbling of German resistance, Churchill wanted to continue bombing undefended German cities. The British struck first, on the fatally clear night of 13 February, unleashing high explosives and incendiaries. The Americans followed up the next morning, Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday, and, as in Hamburg, unable to see much of the target for the smoke and flame left by the British the previous night, bombed the area without discrimination. Neither attack encountered much opposition; indeed, the Luftwaffe was altogether absent from the sky over Dresden. The death toll came to some 35,000. The bombing was, recalled Arthur Harris’s deputy, ‘one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances’. And it was, as Frederick Taylor has written, ‘a terrible illustration of what apparently civilized human beings are capable of under extreme circumstances, when all