Dresden: the fire last time.

A stand-up comedian has compared Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's views on the war in Iraq to those of a recovering alcoholic--as though he were fearful that the mere scent of combat would tempt the Germans to relapse into the unfortunate habits exhibited in World War II. The wit cut too close to the bone to elicit hilarity, but was not entirely off the mark when one considers the zig-zag course during the past half century of German public opinion about the Nazi era. After the largely ineffectual trials of Nazi war criminals and a passing phase of collective shame, the aptly named economic "miracle" became the surrogate symbol of nation-wide metanoia. The subsequent feigned obliviousness to the Reich's evil-doings--presumably the work of a small number of reprehensible fanatics--was shattered by European and American student agitation, crystallizing in the movement of '68, with such radical but irrelevant slogans as "Marx, Mao, and Marcuse," which precipitated in Germany a radical rejection of postwar values, even to the widespread acknowledgment (at least among the pundits and in the media) of guilt for the extermination of the Six Million.

But in reaction to that leftward swing, and as many formerly militant radicals aged over the following twenty years, there emerged an aggressive return in the late eighties to a sense of nationalist righteousness (think Neocon) with an attendant shift from ostensible pity for Nazi victims to self-pity at having been victimized by "others." Those others being mainly the Anglo-American world as represented by Nuremberg, and most recently by the invasion of Iraq. The path into that victimization phase was eased by the Historikerstreit, or conflict of historians, about the Holocaust as intentionally planned event of which the nation was guilty (associated with the liberal philosopher, Jurgen Habermas) vis-a-vis. the Holocaust as accidental contingency shaped by the blind forces of fate for which Germans should not be demonized (associated with the historian, Ernst Nolte.) This "revisionism"--originally a Marxist pejorative--was advocated in the name of an open-mindedness which ultimately reached the point of tolerating the possibility that Nazi atrocities, if not justifiable, were at least "understandable" (think Reagan at Bitburg).

A recent validation of the above shorthand history is the appearance or republication of several works relating to the second World War in which the pros and cons of German victimization and Allied criminality are analyzed, assessed, and sometimes exploited. The central issue concerns the death of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants, and the destruction by bombing of a fifth of all the dwellings in Germany "rendering homeless seven and a half million German civilians." The quoted phrase is from the U. S. Strategic Bombing Survey, published after the war and conducted by George W. Ball, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Paul Nitze, among others.

The massive firebombing campaign of the Allies against German cities had been discussed with more or less specificity in such earlier books as Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Gert Ledig's Payback, as well as in an abridged translation of The [Victor] Klemperer Diaries by a Jewish survivor of Dresden. The subject has more recently been taken up by Jorg Friedrich, a leftist writer whose previously acid criticism of the Third Reich was now focused on the Allied bombing campaign in Der Brand (the fire) subtitled "Germany Under Bombardment," to appear next year in English translation. Similar criticism, this time from the right, is Verbotene Trauer (Forbidden Grief), subtitled "The End of German Taboos" by Klaus Rainer Rohl, a protege of Ernst Nolte. The "taboos" being broken are silence about the evils of firebombing as well as the equation of the latter with current Al Qaeda terrorism.

An effort to comprehend these shifting currents is the late W. G. Sebald's lectures titled "Luftkrieg und Literatur" which were published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction, a pretentious title--derived from the primatologist turned bombing assessor, Solly Zuckerman--for a bland and brief essay which has gotten much attention by reason of the author's innovative and intriguing memoir/novels. Hermann Knell, a survivor of the bombing of Wurzberg, and now a Canadian citizen, transcends parti-pris in his compassionate and factual study, To Destroy A City: Bombing and Its Human Consequences in World War II. All of these books in one important way or another relate to the destruction of Dresden (February 13-14, 1945), which ever since has been regarded as the arch-emblem--along with Nagasaki--of the ruthless amorality of Allied political and military leadership.

Because incendiary bombs were by definition indiscriminate regarding specific targets, they became the weapon of choice for wreaking widespread destruction--a lesson the British learned from the German bombing of the industrial city of Coventry in November 1940, as well as of London and provincial cities like Bath and Canterbury intermittently throughout the following year. One month after Coventry the British retaliated by striking not at factories or military objectives but at the city center of Mannheim, destroying hundreds of buildings and taking scores of lives. A year later while the Germans were fighting a violently offensive war in the East and strengthening their air defenses around industrial areas in the West, the British undertook what was for them a new tactic that came to be called "city busting" and which had as its primary purpose to demoralize the enemy population--though also crippling some manufacturing plants. In May 1942 the first of the "thousand plane" raids was launched against Cologne where 45,000 people were rendered homeless. This was followed in July 1943 by the incendiary raid on Hamburg which caused the first major urban firestorm and killed upwards of 50,000 civilians. It says something about motive that this assault was code named "Operation Gomorrah." Such raids were continued with increasing intensity after the Americans joined the war, and up to its last year, 1945, when occurred the allegedly ruthless and pointless bombing of Dresden.

That almost universally embraced allegation is challenged by Frederick Taylor in his impressively researched and cautiously argued, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. The official and publicized rationale for the saturation bombing of cities was that, given the intrinsic inaccuracy of necessary nighttime raids, it was the only way of striking military and industrial targets. Even the massive firebombing of Hamburg was justified because of that city's importance as a port and manufacturing center. But such a rationale could not be made for Dresden which--according to the conventional view--was primarily a refuge for children and the elderly as well as for hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing the Russian advance. Moreover, according to established historical opinion, the firebombing was undertaken against a city of no strategic or industrial importance, and was unnecessary since it occurred less than three months before the Allied victory.

Taylor struggles conscientiously with the ethical dilemma, and seeks to resolve it on the factual level by effectively showing that the city was an important producer of war materiel, a major communications center for the entire area, and an essential transportation hub for the Wehrmacht. As to the imminence of victory, it was indeterminable. In the West, the German breakthrough at the Battle of the Bulge late in 1944 had shaken confidence in Allied power; in the east, the Russians dallied outside of Warsaw and only occupied the city in mid-January, 1945, on their way to what must have appeared to Allied leaders as a very slow and body-strewn march to Berlin.

But on the political level, it is hard to deny that saturation bombing was driven by less justifiable motives, one of which is indicated by the designation, "morale bombing"--bad for the enemy, good for civilians at home who were also crying out for retaliation and punishment. The spiral of destruction from Coventry to Mannheim to London to Lubeck and upward to Cologne and Hamburg, was for both sides a way of placating their respective publics for a war that seemed agonizingly endless. An additional indication of the real motive came from the Allied press briefing three days after the attack on Dresden and its purlieus: "first of all they are the centres to which evacuees are being moved." Then were mentioned "centres of communication," and finally support for the Russian advance. In a subsequent effort at spin, the priorities were reversed, though with an unfortunate concluding slipup: "The fact that the city was crowded with refugees [well-known to the Allies] at the time of the attack was coincidental and took the form of a bonus"--a term to be later incorporated into nuclear newspeak as "bonus kill," now euphemised as "collateral damage." Another obvious hint of British intent--and subsequently a propaganda defeat--was disclosed when it became known that the RAF had concentrated on the city center rather than the industrialized suburbs.

Churchill himself--who had from the beginning supported the firebombing of urban areas--six weeks after Dresden on March 28 also let slip a mortifying disclosure: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing Germans cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed." Mentioning specifically Dresden, he referred to "mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive." Taylor's explanation is one of the few times in a book of over five hundred pages when his sense of objectivity is unfortunately blurred: "As he went over the air war in his mind, it would not have been unnatural for Churchill to have questioned the current bombing policy. With the Allies' situation dramatically improved in the past month, and the defeat of Germany now only weeks away [five week to be precise] what was the point of continuing to bomb cities." But left without explanatory justification for city busting are the references to wanton destruction and to increasing civilian terror under the guise of military necessity.

"Wanton destruction" has to be the explanation three weeks after the bombing of Dresden for the almost total annihilation of Wurzburg, a city of over a hundred thousand people and of no strategic or industrial importance which was leveled by the RAF. Ironically, it was the shattered hulks of buildings and other ruins that made it more difficult for the Americans to dislodge German soldiers when the former fought to capture the city three weeks after the bombing. It was Hermann Knell's experience as a nineteen-year old survivor of Wurzburg that led him to write his important study, To Destroy A City, about strategic bombing and "its human consequences"--a work much less censorious than Jorg Friedrich's Der Brand.

However, even more damaging to the exoneration of Churchill is Taylor's own description of the last raid on Dresden which occurred on April 17, two months after the original devastating attacks: "Clearly aimed at transport targets used by the German military, this was, perhaps, the most straightforwardly justifiable of all the Allied raids." But it defies comprehension that the kind of long-planned and intentional bombing operation, such as that of February which killed upwards of forty thousand civilians, could be transformed in only two months into a technological achievement of such accuracy that, "aiming specifically at railway targets," it left only four to five hundred casualties. The latter is said of the April raid which Taylor describes as "the largest single assault" on the city. Certainly, even an observer sympathetic to the overall Allied cause, must wonder--if there had not been the political intent to destroy and punish--whether this "straightforwardly justifiable" precision assault couldn't have taken place two months earlier (perhaps not so massively and repeatedly) and with the intention of destroying only military targets, thus resulting in far, far fewer civilian casualties. Even more significant is the question, what happened to Churchill's putative second thoughts--three weeks before this assault"--about stopping the bombing because he believed victory was so imminent? As indeed it was. In less than a fortnight of this last raid on Dresden, Hitler would commit suicide, and a week later the war was officially ended.

In wrestling with the motivation for the bombings, Taylor notes, "The fact that Germany insisted on prolonging the battle long after defeat was inevitable (and therefore continued to bring retribution upon itself) if anything, hardened the hearts of a war-weary, embittered Allied public." This can be read as a factual assessment, but soon--in another lapse by a basically fair-minded author--it devolves into some unfortunately rigged questions: "Did anyone really expect the world to fight back while wearing kid gloves, in order not to damage Germany's artistic treasures or kill German civilians?" "Artistic treasures" and too many references to Dresden as "Florence on the Elbe" are an unfortunate red-herring refrain. As to killing civilians, the answer is, yes, the world should have expected that they not be targeted. In another invocation of an-eye-for-eye ethic, Taylor then asks "Why are there no shelves of books emotively recalling the fate of the forty thousand human beings--many of them women and children and refugees--who died in the Luftwaffe's systematic bombing of Stalingrad....? There probably are at Volgograd State University Library such shelves of books--and one can only hope that some of them will soon appear in English.

Of course, on strict just-war principles one can make an argument that even the bombing of a city like Hamburg--if it was indeed a major industrial center and a port essential to the German prosecution of the war--could be morally sanctioned, provided every effort were made to target only those manufacturing and shipping facilities. And one could make that case even though fifty thousand civilian casualties were the totally unintended consequence of the assault--but all that assumes that firebombing is capable of being discriminatory. British area bombing in general was, by reason of its goal of breaking civilian morale, intentionally indiscriminate in its scope. Moreover, the slaughter of civilians was not accidental, even when conceivably not directly intended, since the uncontrollable nature of the force unleashed by incendiary devices could--depending on arbitrary and unpredictable climatic factors--destroy everything in an area of a thousand acres, or a hundred thousand acres, or even more.

Setting aside for the moment the fact that a major motive of the massive firebombings was to demoralize the civilian population, one must weigh Taylor's pragmatic "structural" explanation of why the raids continued and accelerated beyond the limits of any just-war norms. "Aircrew had been trained, at enormous expense, to carry out the big 'city-busting' raids." He then quotes the late W. G. Sebald's lectures, "The Air War and Literature," referred to earlier. "An enterprise of the material and organisational dimensions of the bombing offensive ... had such a momentum of its own that short-term corrections of course and restrictions were more or less ruled out.... Once the material was manufactured, simply letting the aircraft and their valuable freight stand idle on the airfields of eastern England ran counter to any healthy economic instinct."

Unfortunately, this doctors what Sebald actually said, which was that one of the reasons "largely ignored in the official histories" as to why "the strategic aims of the offensive were not modified" was "that an enterprise of the material and organisational dimension ... etc.," as quoted above from Taylor. But the more important reason, which he omits, follows immediately in Sebald: "And a conclusive factor in deciding to continue the offensive was probably the propaganda value, essential for bolstering British morale, of the daily reports of systematic destruction in British newspapers at a time when all other contact with the enemy on the continent of Europe had been cut off." So what the common reader would have assumed from several remarks by Churchill, of which only one was quoted above, ends up the most important reason for the devastation of Dresden and other firebombed cities: to enervate German and to galvanize British morale, while also within the constraints of that goal to destroy legitimate targets. The momentum of successive investment in weaponry was at best a tertiary reason.

However, there may have been another less immediate though related reason which Taylor discusses in detail, and then dismisses, i.e., that the raids on Dresden and other eastern cities in 1945, though ostensibly to support the advance of the Russian army, were also intended to impress the Kremlin with the might and the accuracy of American-British air power at a time when the tensions were building that would culminate in the Cold War. On grounds that seem not very convincing, Taylor inclines to dismiss this argument, though it had already been determined among the Allied leaders at Yalta that Dresden would be in the Soviet occupied zone, and he concludes his treatment of that April 17th "largest single assault on the city" on an ominous note: "From that day until the end of the war and beyond, Dresden remained completely out of action as a major railway junction."

The argument that such raids were connected to increasingly strained Soviet relations becomes even more credible when one looks at the closing days of the other war, that in the Far East. Eisenhower and other military leaders had strongly opposed using the atom bomb to defeat Japan, but it is not unlikely that even the bombing of Hiroshima, coming in the wake of massive firebombing of major Japanese cities, had at least as secondary motive the desire to intimidate the Soviets. Both Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, and Truman, once he was informed of the new weapon, referred to it as their "ace in the hole" for the predictable confrontation with Stalin. Even apart from that secondary motive, the bombing of Hiroshima raises acute ethical issues. It has been said, perhaps rightly, that the determination of the Japanese military to defend its home islands would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of American casualties. The implication of this statement seems to be that any military power representing what it deems to be the party of justice is allowed to destroy a comparable or greater number of civilians to insure victory. It used to be argued by cold warriors that since the Soviet Union was literally a totalitarian society, all its citizens were engaged in war efforts, and thus the category of non-combatant was non-existent. But Hiroshima can be justified only if it was known, per impossibile, that all dwellers in the city were going to collectively commit seppuko in defense of their country. The definition of "terrorism," whether individual, state-sponsored, or military, remains the targeting of civilian populations. That the first utilization of the bomb was at least partially determined by political not military reasons is reinforced by the utterly redundant destruction of Nagasaki, after the enormous power of the atom had already been demonstrated to the Japanese and to the world. There is reason to believe that this superfluous exercise of power was not lost on the strategists in the Kremlin who accelerated their own "Manhattan Project," while emulating their wartime enemies and allies in another spiral of destructiveness.

At the beginning of this discussion I referred to several books that relate to the firebombing of Dresden. This is but a sampling of what is a growing literature composed of autobiographical witness, fictional critique, post-war exoneration, and scholarly analysis. One title omitted is David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden, a work of considerable influence that greatly exaggerates on ideological grounds the murder and devastation wrought by the Allied attacks, and which represents an effort at rendering less culpable German society and more particularly its leaders for being complicit in the exterminationist program of the Third Reich. This is hardly surprising in an author who also minimizes to the point of negation the role of Hitler in the systematic annihilation of European Jewry. But it is surprising that Jorg Friedrich, a severe critic of the Nazi regime and a man of the left should refer to bombing crews in terms of Nazi mobile killing squads and to fire-bombed cellars and shelters in terms of crematoria. While agreeing with his overall indictment of the massive raids, the seeming equation of the systematic murder of six million Jews with the generally intentional but often incidental bombing deaths of a tenth of that number of Germans represents the kind of abuse of the term "holocaust" and its synonyms that Americans have become familiar with in the abortion controversy. "Are we all Nazis now?" asked a celebrated midwestern Catholic professor of philosophy.

Nevertheless, the repeated firebombing of civilian centers must be recognized--entirely apart from the Holocaust--as a monstrous crime, and there was so much concern before the Nuremberg trials that the German defendants would raise the issue (as Eichmann attempted in Jerusalem), that by fiat it was decreed inadmissible. Certainly such a crime is not obviated by the fact that its commission would bolster the morale of the home population-which Sebald suggested as the military leaders' motive for continuing the firebombing. Nor can it be rationalized by invoking some kind of strategic lex talionis whereby the bombing of London justified the bombing of Berlin--much less that the bombing of Pearl Harbor justified the bombing of Nagasaki. Nor is it even remotely possible to invoke some kind of mathematical ratio: the number of deaths in the bombing of one city, Hamburg, exceeded the deaths by the Luftwaffe of all its raids on England; similarly Pearl Harbor is numerically light years away from Nagasaki in terms of casualties suffered in the latter. The direct intention of killing disproportionately large numbers of non-combatants remains a clear violation of just-war principles and of the Geneva Conventions.

Obviously, any attempt at defending the numerical ratios above entirely misses the point, as does also the current preoccupation with so-called WMD's, or the cold-war acronymic bogey, ABC, for atomic, biological, chemical weaponry. The essential issue does not relate per se to the size of the attack (its mass or massiveness), or to its composition (whether biological or chemical or whatever), but to the targets and the controllability of the weapons. In place of concern with "weapons of mass destruction" the focus must be on weapons of indiscriminate destruction, which would then include planned use of much ABC weaponry as well as much planned use of cluster bombs, anti-personnel land mines, high-powered microwaves, and the so-called "neutron bomb." Though, obviously, to the degree any of these weapons systems can be deployed on legitimate targets with a direct intention of inflicting no disproportionate damage on non-combatants and with a predictably controllable consequence, to that degree they may meet just-war standards. To affirm this is not to be more intent on concluding rightly than on right conclusions, nor is it to stretch ethical standards to their extreme limits; it is simply to be precise about why the uncontrollable destruction of urban areas was (and is) immoral.

Finally, by way of bringing this discussion to bear on some pressing contemporary matters, I will mention two relevant events--in the domain of "deeds" and "words"--that offer slivers of hope that might augur further resolution and clarification of problems in the future, and one additional possible event where the prospects are very bleak, at best.

First, it should be noted that regardless of how much anger or rage people may feel toward the present American administration for launching its "preemptive" war against Iraq, it has to be acknowledged that the invading forces according to all reliable reports made an unprecedented and apparently successful effort to avoid civilian casualties. Whether the motive was lofty ethical principles, fear of public opinion, or simple expediency--and of course contingent on independently confirmed figures as to exact numbers--this stands in striking contrast to the carpet bombing during the Vietnam War, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, or the firebombing of such civilian centers as Wurzburg during World War II.

The second of these issues does make a connection between the bombing raids and the Holocaust, and relates to that gnawed and clawed bone of contention regarding the role of Pius XII during World War II. Several writers, and most emphatically Michael Phayer in The Catholic Church and the Holocaust have maintained that "the problem facing Pius XII was that he had failed to condemn the German bombing of England during 1940 and 1941, but then spoke out against the bombing of civilians when the Allies gained aerial superiority." But the facts are that there were several condemnations during that period which could relate only to the Luftwaffe, including statements shortly after the bombings of Warsaw and of Rotterdam, as well as statements broadcast in several other addresses. (Dates and texts are supplied in Popes and Politics.) Typical of the tone and scope of these condemnations is the message of March 24, 1940: "More than once to our great distress, the laws which bind civilized peoples together have been violated, most lamentably; undefended cities, country towns and villages have been terrorized by bombing, destroyed by fire, and thrown down in ruins. Unarmed citizens even the sick, helpless old people and innocent children have been visited with death."

Once the knowledge of what the deportation of Jews meant, the issue of the bombing of cities and of the continent-wide refugee problem was joined to that of the Nazi death factories, as in the peroration to Pius's 1942 Christmas message with its drumbeat repetitions--reminiscent of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech:

  Mankind owes that vow [to bring society back to its center of gravity
  in God's law] to those numberless exiles whom the hurricane of war
  has torn away from their native soil and dispersed in a foreign
  land.... Mankind owes that vow to those hundreds of thousands who,
  without any fault of their own, sometimes only by reason of their
  nationality or race, are marked down for death or gradual extinction.
  Mankind owes that vow to the many thousands of noncombatants, women,
  children, sick and aged, from whom aerial warfare--whose horrors we
  have from the beginning frequently denounced--has, without
  discrimination or through inadequate precautions, taken life, goods,
  health, home, charitable refuge, or house of prayer.

Anyone with a "feel" for rhetorical effect will sense in this repetition, which is the emphatic climax to the whole address, the Pope's response to the three tragedies concerning the suffering of the innocent in the second World War. Lastly, in light of the unfortunate controversies subsequently engulfing this pontiff and the events of the war, one can speculate on the likelihood of a touch of irony, if not of frustration, signaled by the parenthetic insertion in the third expression of votive indebtedness: "whose horrors we have from the beginning frequently denounced." But there is no sense of either irony or frustration in the overall tone of the three statements. They are not intended to change events or to halt the march toward annihilation or to persuade nations to open their borders to the homeless, all efforts to those ends having proved fruitless, but merely to bear witness to the monstrosity of human fury by lancing the infected wound--not healing it.

And that dismal note inevitably raises the third, and bleakest, unresolved issue relating to the indiscriminate destruction of civilian centers. No religious or moral-much less political--leader spoke out more frequently and vigorously after World War II against "total war" than Pius XII. These remonstrances went on through the nuclear-weaponry threats of "massive retaliation" and "mutually assured destruction," and culminated

after Pius's death in the condemnation of nuclear war by the second Vatican Council. That condemnation was publicly opposed by Cardinal Spellman and Archbishop Hannan, speaking as defenders of American policy, who publicly denied "that 'recent popes' have condemned total war as categorically as it is condemned in this section [# 80 of Gaudium et Spes]." The prelates speaking for the redactors of the section, citing Pius XII, replied curtly: "As to indiscriminate destruction, as here understood, no Catholic theologian admits or is able to admit that it is morally licit."

Yet the threat of indiscriminate destruction remains, even after the cold war, the strategy of all nuclear powers, most notably and dangerously, the United States and Russia. The most awesome hazard is not posed by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, however threatening that may be. The greater danger comes, as it did in World War II, from what W. G. Sebald discerned behind the firebombing of Dresden and other German cities: an uncontrollable momentum based on the mere fact of national investment of men, effort, and materiel in a given military program. That same momentum, as former Senator Sam Nunn and those attached to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (not to be confused with the Bush administration Proliferation Security Initiative) have been insisting, is responsible for the "crackpot realism" that impels both major nuclear powers, even in this post-cold war era, to have hundreds of nuclear armed missiles equipped with what is called "prompt-launch capability"--in less euphemistic language, "hair-triggers." For that reason, a strong and commonsense case can be made that in terms of state- or nation-wide destruction, there is more to fear, by way of accident of miscommunication, from the American and Russian defense establishments, than there is from so-called "rogue states" or from terrorists infiltrating the country.

But it is not just the momentum of novel weapons that needs to be halted. There are also those compelling and combustible factors, such as fear, revenge, lust for victory, and other base instincts that often arise in any prolonged conflict. Since the latter have to do with flawed human nature, or what for want of a better tem may be called "original sin," there is a very real need for some mutually agreed upon mechanism (and the political will to achieve its universal implementation) to frustrate existing hair-trigger devices. This will require moral and political efforts to re-awaken public opinion to the horrors of planetary war and possible annihilation. The occasion should not be allowed to arise again when people will applaud "patriotic" advocates of indiscriminate destruction. It should be remembered that it was a Roman Catholic prelate, the Archbishop of Seattle, who twenty-five years after the end of World War II called for the bombing of Hanoi, and cited specifically the "precedent" of Dresden and Nagasaki. "Never again," said Paul VI in a memorable address to the United Nations. But, as with Pius XII, the question remains, who is listening?