Dresden, 60 years on

“What was done there was wrong, even though I, for one, would hesitate in blaming those who did it.”

This is a cop-out. (Of course I hesitate to blame you.)

This is a cop-out.

Not at all. There’s a fundamental moral distinction at work, and one that people use all the time.

Chris,

It is true that people frequently say such things as: it was wrong to do it, but I don’t blame you. Cases where this formula comes in handy include blind rage (for example a soldier shoots a prisoner who has himself committed some heinous crime) and pressure of circumstances (the ticking-bomb scenario).

The idea as I understand it is simply that although the action itself was wrong, there were extenuating circumstances. Are you seriously saying that that kind of reasoning can be applied to a decision to reduce a city to rubble? In the Qaradawi thread you denied that states are entitled to the supreme emergency exception. Now it seems that if they do invoke it, you file their actions under Wrong but Not Blameworthy.

If I understand you correctly, the difference between you and Brad DeLong now comes down to this: he defends the supreme emergency exception but admits to being uncomfortable about it. You reject the supreme emergency exception but you don’t blame Bomber Harris for invoking it. Is that it?

Kevin,

I was thinking mainly of the aircrew. Would you want to blame them?

As for Harris, yes, I agree with you that we should blame him for what was an immoral policy. But that’s still a stone I cast with some reluctance, sitting as I am in an English city in peacetime, knowing what I know now, etc.

Sorry, you would *hesitate* to blame the aircrew(s)? On the contrary, I would think you should get down on your knees and thank the British and American aircrews, every one of them. They did not, of course, have a choice of what they would bomb, and they faced terrible odds of survival.

Andrew, my purpose in posting was to mention a terrible event that ought to be commemorated rather than to spark off a discussion about blame and responsibility. If you want it clearer I’m happy to say that I don’t blame the aircrew.

Chris, ok no harm done. Blogging’s tough work isn’t it?

Yes, when your side does it, it’s always between ‘wrong but understandable’ and ‘we should’ve killed more of ’em bastards’.

Luckily, though, when the other side does it there is no ambiguity whatsoever – they are plain monsters.

As Vonnegut would say: and so it goes…

In Austria, today’s “Die Presse” has a very good OpEd on Dresden and our approach to the question’s thrown up by its remembrance. Unfortunately the English webstite has not provided a translation. The article was so good I decided to translate the important sections myself: this is important!

You can always apply the “knowing then what we know now” logic to it. And then it becomes quite apparent that Dresden was a mistake from the military’s point of view. The concept of dropping massive amounts of bombs on indiscriminate targets was the wet dream of the US military. But looking back, we can see that the military effort would have been much better used in building fighter bombers rather than strategic bombers. The ability to nullify German air power and provide US ground forces with overwhelming air support should have been the only driving goal of the US Air Corps. Strategic bombing was useless except for revenge, keeping navies away from shores, and setting back Axis production a few days.

So Dresden was wrong in military logic. But politically could the Allies let Hitler bomb cities uncontested? It was paramount that Hitler understand that Axis bombing of civilians would be met in kind. That was the only meaningful way to send a message to that crazy bastard. Who will argue that Hitler’s change to bombing cities should have been met with cries of “unfair” instead of doing in kind to Axis cities? There is a strong argument to be made that Dresden was a sound logical decision.

Jet:

The reason why people argue about the Dresden bombing and not about the bombing of other German cities (almost all of which were targeted and many of which were destroyed) is timing: by the time of the Dresden bombing, the war was almost over, Dresden was bursting with refugees from the East, and there was nothing of military value in Dresden (except rail lines which were explicitly not targeted during the bombing night in question). Said differently, the message you are talking about had long been sent and can not justify what happened in Dresden.

Jet wrote: “But politically could the Allies let Hitler bomb cities uncontested? It was paramount that Hitler understand that Axis bombing of civilians would be met in kind.” The Brittish were the ones who started the indiscriminate bombing war, one of Churchill’s first decisions as PM, because long range bombers was all they were better at than the Germans. It was very cynical, but may have won the war.

What makes the bombing of Dresden stand out is that it served little military purpose. The railway station that might have been a reasonable target was outside the city and wasn’t even targetted the first day. I suspect it was largely based on the idea that they had all those bombers and the generals in charge felt they should be used even if there were no decent targets left. It’s the same principle that makes managers spend all of their budget at the end of the year just to seem important.

Even worse were the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were designed as bomb tests more than strategic bombing. The americans deliberately choose cities that were of such small importance that they hadn’t been bombed before just because they wanted to see the effect on a “virgin” city. Nagasaki wasn’t even the primary target for the second bomb, but Kikura was covered in smoke from a nearby burning city so they couldn’t drop the bomb there. Well, they could drop the bomb, but the accompanying plane wouldn’t get good pictures of the damage which would ruin the whole idea.

Your server is weird! Sorry about the double post.

Stan,
Good point, I’m convinced. There is no excuse for Dresden.

Thomas Paine, I don’t want to deflect the thread, but the way I see it, the Japanese had long lost any right to complain about the method in which their enemies fought them. 2.5 times as many died in the random Japanese slaughter of Chinese civilians after the Doolittle raid than died in the nuclear bombing. The Americans were in no more awe of their new toys than the Japanese were in awe of their old toys (samuri swords). It’s just the Japanese toys killed more innocents, while doing nothing to end the war.

For brian c.b

This from a review of Taylor’s book in Salon:

Most Western misperceptions about the bombing of Dresden — especially the casualty count of 135,000 — come from one source, the 1963 bestseller “The Destruction of Dresden” by David Irving. Irving’s book is the source of much of the misinformation Vonnegut reproduced in “Slaughterhouse-Five,” and Vonnegut goes so far as to mention Irving’s book in his novel. This added the authority of an eyewitness to Irving’s account, but as Taylor demonstrates in “Dresden,” the terror and confusion of enduring a bombing raid often drastically distort the memory. One Dresden survivor recalls finding refuge on an ice floe in the midst of the Elbe River, while another describes the same river aflame with phosphor. It was a mild evening and phosphor didn’t figure significantly in any of the ordnance. To a POW like Vonnegut, forced to excavate corpses from the bomb shelters under the rubble, 45,000 dead could easily look like over 100,000.

Seems clear to me about how Irving is very influential to Vonnegut’s view of Dresden. Is there dispute about this?

Thomas Paine,
But those bombings ended the war. There is a case, very weak in my opinion, that the coming Russians were part of the reason that Japan surrendered, but it is a laughable argument that those two bombings didn’t deeply effect the Japanese decision to give up. Yes it sucks those civilians died. But it would have sucked even more if US soldiers, or Russian soldiers would have had to die in the Human Blender that would have been a Japanese homeland invasion. And far FAR more Japanese civilians would have died in that invasion.

Every day that the war continued, Chinese civilians were killed for no reason or died from their treatment. US POW’s were killed for no reason or died from their treatment. So what if the US looked for any city where they could drop the bomb. Japanese atrocities continued at a horrifying pace until the end of the war.

There is an argument to be made that the US should have waited a day (at what cost?) for a better target. There isn’t an argument to be made that they shouldn’t have used the bomb. When you start talking about 10’s of millions of massacred civilians, nuclear weapons lose their taboo status.

The claim that phosphor wasn’t used in the bombing is wrong. The markers dropped by specialist navigation planes to mark the targets and approaches were phosphorus, and there were hundreds or thousands of them.

Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima may well have shortened the war, but if, as I believe I’ve read, negotiations were already underway for a cessation of hostilities, with the status of the emperor being a sticking point, there might have been other routes to the same end.

The bombing of Nagasaki doesn’t seem at all defensible.

I’ve read nothing that dealt with the utility of the systematic bombing of Japanese cities, whether that shortened the war or not. As McNamara makes clear in The Fog of War, though, the people involved were aware that their acts could be considered war crimes.

holy crap, someone fix that trackback spam!

Anyways, Hiroshima & Nagasaki is a very clear moral choice if you frame it as between atomic bombing and ground invasion, which would inevitably have been far more horrible if you look at, say, Okinawa.

The A-Bomb’s terror value- as something new and horrible and with the capacity to utterly destroy a nation- was considerable. Cities have burned down; cities have been destroyed in fighting; yet the prospect of this is not nearly as daunting as Hiroshima. I think its role in bringing Imperial Japan’s surrender without an invasion should never be underestimated.

Think of it this way; imagine that England lost the Battle of London and that a sea invasion seemed imminent, and America remained neutral. Would England have surrendered? It doesn’t seem likely, not going by the stirring rhetoric of the time. But then think if Germany proceeded to drop a pair of atomic weapons on England, when the vast majority of English had no inkling that such a thing was possible. I should think that surrender would come quickly, because A-Bombs cannot be fought.

As to Dresden- I recall that the military rationale was to block German troop movements to the Eastern Front, and that there were quite a few valid military (industrial) targets. It’s really a lie to say it was pure revenge targeted at killing German civilians for revenge.

Jet writes:

“But politically could the Allies let Hitler bomb cities uncontested? It was paramount that Hitler understand that Axis bombing of civilians would be met in kind. That was the only meaningful way to send a message to that crazy bastard. Who will argue that Hitler’s change to bombing cities should have been met with cries of “unfair” instead of doing in kind to Axis cities?”

In grade school, we called this the “he hit me first” defense. it didn’t work then, either.

If X may not be done, it doesn’t really matter if you want to argue that X might have some positive side effects. Consider a more general version of jet’s statement:

“But politically could the Allies let Hitler [conduct war crimes] uncontested? It was paramount that Hitler understand that his [war crimes] would be met in kind. That was the only meaningful way to send a message to that crazy bastard. Who will argue that Hitler’s [war crimes] should have been met with cries of “unfair” instead of doing in kind?”

Look, I love Connery’s “they put one a yours in the hospital …” speech from The Untouchables, but if you adopt it as policy you end up with, for example, the idea that Abu Ghraib is an acceptable response to terrorism.

From reading the comments, especially Lionel´s and Sandals´, there were three (supposed) good reasons to bomb Dresden.

I used today to google around a bit to get some information.
So…

1) Destroying the transportation hub (especially railways) to hinder the eastwards deployment of German troops.

http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/dresden.htm
(No publication date mentioned but certainly after WW2.)

“By air action on communications hinder the enemy from carrying out the shifting of his troops to the East from the Western Front, from Norway, and from Italy (In particular, to paralyze the junctions of Berlin and Leipzig).

I´m not a military and history expert but:
– How were the Nazis going to transfer a meaningful number of troops with their equipment from Norway to Berlin or Dresden?
Despite total Allied air and sea superiority?
There is some water between Norway and Germany. :)
– And transfering troops from Italy or the Western Front?
Were the American and British forces supposed to sit still in such an event?
It would have made attacks even more easier against a weakened enemy?
Not to mention the fact that these troop movements would have been restricted to the night and really good hiding during the day because of Allied fighter-bombers and bombers.

And I really, really doubt that there was enough railway stock left and/or available to transport 500.000 soldiers and their equipment across Germany or from Italy/Norway to Germany.

And do I need to remind you of the acute and big fuel shortage in Nazi Germany?

http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm#taoo
(This report is from September 30 1945.)

“When the Germans launched their counter-offensive on December 16, 1944, their reserves of fuel were insufficient to support the operation. They counted on capturing Allied stocks. Failing in this, many panzer units were lost when they ran out of gasoline.”

Did the Americans and British fail to detect that fact after the “Battle of the Bulge” ended?
Panzer units not attacking, retreating or moving at all after they ran out of gasoline?

Taken together I have to say that yes, this could be a reason for bombing the rail yards.
If so though, the Allied intelligence officers in early 1945 had to have been amazingly stupid.
Which I doubt. :)

Difficult to believe that Nazi Germany in February 1945 could shift 500.000 soldiers and their equipment (not to mention their supplies including the non-existent gasoline) hundreds of kilometers across Germany and Europe.

(An issurance policy could have been to just destroy the railway and road bridges across the river Elbe.)

2) Industry producing war material and gas for the Concentration Camps

I don´t know about the gas-producing plant.
So I´ll accept it as true.
I notice though that the Allies never bombed the railway lines leading to Auschwitz nor the camps itself.
So I´m not sure if that was a main factor in the bombings?

Anyway…

http://www.anesi.com/ussbs02.htm#taoo

“As a rule the industrial plants were located around the perimeter of German cities and characteristically these were relatively undamaged.”
[Relatively undamaged by city area bombings especially at night.]

(I visited Dresden a few years ago and the tour guide then mentioned – unrelated to any bombing attacks – that Dresden had a “city law” since the 19th century forbiding the building of any factories with “large” chimneys in the “inner” city.)

And:

http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/dresden.htm

Target area in Dresden from January 1945 to March 1945:
American 8th AF: 4 attacks against “Marshalling Yards” with an average of around 300 arcraft.
RAF Bomber Command: 1 attack against the “City Area” with 772 aircraft.

Oh, and one single attack against the “Industrial Area” on April 17 1945 by the American 8th AF
with 8 aircraft.

So I have to assume that the “Industrial Area” wasn´t a main target?

3) Military installations.

That would be a very good and legitimate reason.
Unfortunately in 1871 the then Saxon King founded the “Albertstadt” suburb.
That was kind of a “garrison town” close to the capital of Saxony.
Since then almost all military installations were concentrated there (barracks, supply depots, administrative buildings etc.)

Surprisingly this part of the town wasn´t targeted. It only got hit by a few accidentially dropped bombs as far as I can see.
It existed since 1871 so it is a bit hard to believe that the Allies didn´t know that.

This website (in German)

http://www.geschichtsthemen.de/bombenterror.htm

claims to have a copy of the March 1945 Dresden police report.
The report says that only around 100 military personal were killed during the attacks.
(It doesn´t say if those 100 might have been staying home with their families perhaps.)

So, military installations don´t seem to have been a major target too?

Now, I am a German and I admit that I´m biased here. :)

(Notice that the bombings of Hamburg for example are treated entirely different?
Hamburg with roughly the same number of civilian victims happened in 1943. Around 40.000 killed.
As Stan said, “timing”.
Not to mention the Hamburg shipyards building submarines in 1943.)

If the sources I cited were right, industrial and military areas weren´t the main target at all.

One could make a (in my opinion weak) case that destroying the “Dresden transportation hub” was important to protect the Russian advance against Berlin against a German counterattack from the South.

Still, that´s something hard to believe as I tried to explain in point 1).
Where was the (still intact transport) infrastructure, the gasoline and all other supplies to support a transfer of 500.000 troops with their equipment across hundreds or thousands of kilometers (Italy/Norway) in February 1945?
Not to mention the coordination and planning problems needed in such an effort.

Sorry, it´s just not plausible in my opinion.

Detlef

P.S. Note that I don´t even mention alledgedly
RAF quotes trying to “hamper the evacuation” [of German civilians from the East] or alleged RAF quotes trying to show “Stalin what heavy bombers could do”.
I´m wary of these quotes so I didn´t include them.

Sorry about that garbled first sentence — it should have read “in his book Disturbing the Universe, physicist Freeman Dyson put . . .

if one is to draw any precedent from the Nuremburg trials, the aircrews certainly could be considered culpable.

In addition, it was dubious even then that area bombing of concentrations of civilians – later to become a defined offence under the Geneva conventions — constituted legal prosecution of war. Obeying an illegal order is no defence.

The difference between Dresden and the camps is the matter of genocide, of course.
But that should not weaken the principle of legality.

Both Jet and Jean Lepley seems to think that Brittish bombing of Germany started as a response to the Blitz, but it didn’t. Churchill ordered the first bombing attacks on German railway stations and similar targets May 11th 1940, which given the inaccurace of bombs meant civilians were killed too. June 20th the targets were extended to any industrial target, including the housing for the workers. This was still several months before the Blitz started.

The ruthlessness of the Brittish bombing campaign wasn’t surprising. They had learned everything about terror bombing in India, Iraq and other colonies where it was routine to destroy villages of rebelling natives from the air. It was in India Harris developed the perfect mix of explosive and incendiary bombs to maximize damage.

Alfred Coppel wrote an alternate history of the end of the war with Japan about 20 years ago called, I think, “The Burning Mountain”. In this book, the original bomb test in New Mexico fails, so the U.S. has to begin invading the Japanese Home Islands. Nine months and over a million more dead Americans and Japanese later, a new a-bomb test succeeds. Truman decides to use the bomb on Japan, since obviously the Japs aren’t giving up, and final victory would be infinitely more bloody. In the final scene, a Japanese fighter pilot just fails to shoot down the Superfortress carrying the bomb to Hiroshima, because his fuel runs out. He plunges to his death thinking “How beautiful is the land of Yamato, and how tragic.”

Dresden was the ultimate “shock and awe” raid, and it’s easy 60 years later to condemn it and much of the whole anti-civilian RAF Bomber Offensive as immoral or a violation of just war principles. I have read horrendous, heart-rending testimonies from the summer 43 Hamburg raids; they, and many others, were as bad as Dresden. The RAF dropped over 20 times as much explosive on Germany as the Luftwaffe (which never acquired 4-engine bombers) did on Britain.

Still, there was a war on. It is not easy to sit today and say, I would never have approved that raid, or, Churchill and Harris shouldn’t have ordered it. They wanted to destroy Germany (and not, of course, to save victims of Nazi rule, that is another ex post rationalization), and they did. They were not squeamish about the means. It’s anachronistic and ahistorical to apply simple blanket judgments so many years later. “Should” and “shouldn’t” are moral, not historical, categories. Best just to understand what happened, which was a tragedy.

sorry about the double post; I got an “error – page not found” message on the first try.

Even in the last year or so of the war, there were debates, at least among the upper echelons of the war establishment in Britain, about not just the morality of wide area bombing of Germany but about whether the priority accorded to it made good strategic and economic sense in the context of other alternatives. Churchill expressed his reservations in writing but the strategic commitment continued nonetheless. Harris’s fixation with area bombing prevailed. That it did despite the widely expressed reservations is hugely significant. The triumph of the will? Vested interests in making heavy bombers? Surely not implacable clamour from heavy bomber crews who had to withstand the high casualty rate?

BadJim writes: “Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima may well have shortened the war, but if, as I believe I’ve read, negotiations were already underway for a cessation of hostilities, with the status of the emperor being a sticking point, there might have been other routes to the same end.”

It has been a few years since I last read “Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire” (by Richard B. Frank), but my recollection is that Frank examines records of the discussions at the highest levels of Japan’s wartime government, as well as the Japanese diplomatic communications that the US had intercepted and decrypted. From these he concludes that the handful of (mostly) military officers running Japan had no interest in negotiating peace from a position of Japanese weakness. Instead, Japan’s strategy was to let the US invade and then inflict as much carnage as possible upon the invading armies to force the US to negotiate a peace that left the warmongers in charge in Japan.

In other words, the sticking point was not the status of the emperor, but the desire of Japanese leaders to retain at least the status quo ante bellum.

The US military made several estimates of the expected casualties from an invasion. The low was of order 50,000 (K/W/M) the high was of order 200,000 (K/W/M). Historically, Japanese casualties were several times those of the US in the PTO, with a larger fraction of Japanese KIA.

In addition, in Aug. ’45 the US was set to start targeted bombing of the Japanese transportation infrastructure. The Japanese were projecting very low harvests that year (of order 1400 calories per person per day). As it was, only US food stocks and US transport stave of widespread hunger in the winter of ’45-’46. Had the war continued, the added disruption of Japan’s rail / road / sea routes would have made famine in the cites quite likely.

Finally, it is estimated that of order 100,000 to 200,000 civilians were dying each month in Japanese occupied territories because of the occupation. These deaths would continue at least as long as the hostilities with Japan.

These factors, in aggregate, to me, are sufficient to justify the atomic attacks.