Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (review)

This work, perhaps the most rewarding of the many books written about the Dresden bombing, is based on papers given at a colloquium held at Edinburgh University. The different contributions offer a variety of perspectives, but common to all is new and meticulous research. Some chapters are of general interest, while others will be of particular interest to military historians.

The general interest chapters include Jeremy Crang on famous philologist Victor Klemperer's Dresden with its horrific detail of Nazi antisemitism as well as his experience in the raid; Nicola Lambourne's argument (with which not all will agree) that the GDR's reconstruction of the city demonstrated a consciousness of Dresden's cultural history; and Alan Russell's account of how Dresden's destruction stands as a defining moment in the history of urban terror bombing and, later, the importance of the Dresden Trust as a symbol of this significance and of reconciliation. The absence of a chapter on the impact of the raids on the city's Christian communities is to be regretted, particularly in the light of the events of 1989 in which churches in Saxony played so important a part.

Chapters by Tami Davis Biddle on wartime reactions to the bombing and by Richard Overy on the postwar debates on the subject, will be of interest to military historians, especially Biddle's account of how many American consciences troubled over city bombing were soothed by the claim that the attacks were directed at communication targets and served a double purpose by subtracting resources from the other areas of the German war effort, a self-delusion that lasted even after the terrifying B-29 Tokyo firestorm raids of March 1945. The two chapters provide useful summaries of the arguments, mostly now well known, of the two periods but also offer some interesting new perspectives, some protagonist and some more scholarly, from the former GDR, whose leading historian Olaf Groehler finally disposed of the myth that the Soviets had specifically asked that Dresden be bombed and also confirmed the very limited military value of the raids.

But most important for military historians are the chapters by Hew Strachan on strategic bombing and civilian casualties, Sebastian Cox on the rationale of the raids, Sönke Neitzel on the city under attack and David Bloxham on Dresden as a war crime. Strachan's stimulating chapter suggests three main reasons leading to Britain's urban mass destruction bombing. First was technology, a preference for the advanced technology of the four-engined bomber rather than the bloodshed of mass mobilisation ground warfare. Second was the British colonial "pacification" experience, from the machine-gun to the DH9A bomber and onwards, of ferocious action upon colonial peoples seen as uncivilised and with no need for any consideration of proportionality, all leading to increasing breaches of international conventions concerning noncombatant immunity. Third was Britain's past use of a not dissimilar strategy striking at civilians and civilian morale, the naval blockades of Germany in the First World War. These factors, set against the general war-weariness and the particular frustrations of early 1945, led British and American air officers to see firestorms as a war-winning military strategy without regard to laws of war or morality.

Sebastian Cox enters further into the early 1945 arguments and preparations for the raid, noting Churchill's personal involvement. He provides a chilling account of the "command and control" of the raid—we learn of the "Master Bomber," "Blind Illuminators and Markers," and "Visual Centres" aircraft dropping "Skymarker" flares. He further records the damage inflicted on Dresden's industry and (short-lived) on the railway system. But, the firestorm centred on the baroque city centre.

Sönke Neitzel's chapter recounts how the German antiaircraft defences had been run down and how inadequate the fire service was, offers caution against inflated casualty estimates, and concludes that one major cause of the devastation...