Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden (review)

Strategic bombardment remains a controversial subject, apparently increasingly so as the years lengthen between its major use in World War II and the present. Probably the most written about strategic bombing attack of that war was the February 1945 bombing that destroyed Dresden and killed some 35,000 civilians. Although the scale of death and destruction was no greater than that of Hamburg and less than that of a number of Japanese cities, Dresden has become the icon representing the horror of modern warfare and strategic bombing. It achieved this special place as a result of a number of factors such as racism and the fact that Japan and the Pacific War are seen much differently than the European War, but also due to questions regarding Dresden's value as a military target, its destruction so late in the war, and allegations of U.S. fighters strafing civilians. This prominence is also built on the efforts by wartime German and postwar Communist propagandists, Nazi apologists, antiwar activists, and present day right-wing Germans to use Dresden's fate for their own purposes.

Marshall DeBruhl employs both primary and secondary sources, along with some interviews, to present the story from both the airmen's and Dresdeners' perspective. There are citations, but by page number, not in a form expected by either scholars or (hopefully) students. (However, some documentation is better than none.) He contends that the city was a bona fide military target because of its industries and function as a communications hub. Concerning the issue of American fighter pilots strafing civilians, the author concludes it was a myth concocted by the Nazis (p. 272), although earlier he writes that these charges have been "neither substantiated nor refuted in the sixty years since the raid" (p. 227), and then relates a survivor's claim that his brother's ambulance was destroyed by machine gun fire from an American fighter (p. 249). The author does not come directly to grips with the criticism of the timing of the attack, but implies that the disruption of communications aided the Soviet advance.

Firestorm can be criticized from a number of angles. First, while it is passable on the major points, DeBruhl makes errors and questionable statements that in the aggregate erode his credibility. For example, he gets details on U.S. aircrew rotation policy, the B-17, and B-24 wrong. He baldly states that bombing increased civilian morale, despite findings to the contrary by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey (not mentioned by De Bruhl), and that lessons on the bombing of Germany were useful in the air campaign against Japan, an assertion unsupported by either the author's documentation or my own archival research. Second, the focus of this book is unclear. DeBruhl devotes too much space to the formation of U.S. and British bombing doctrine, and goes off on tangents such as the treatment of Jews in Germany, devoting about half the book to such subjects. This serviceable, although bloated and flawed, overview comes at the expense of much more germane topics that would better explain the bombing of Dresden and put it into historical context, such as the morality of strategic bombing, the effectiveness of bombing cities, the overall treatment of civilians in World War II, and the specifics of other cities bombed during the war in Europe and Japan. Regrettably, the author does not attempt to explain why this attack was so much more destructive than the hundreds of other allied raids, although the airmen employed neither new tactics nor new technologies. (This attack was atypical, a "perfect storm" resulting from the lack of German air and civil defenses, little prior bomb damage, and the weather.) The bibliography demonstrates a good overview of the general literature, but omits at least two key works, Alexander McKee's critical Dresden, 1945 (1984) and the more recent (2004) Dresden, by Frederick Taylor. This omission is...