The tragedy of Dresden

No need to go and see the latest horror film. You can get ail the horror you want if you sit back and read The Destruction of Dresden, by David Irving (Kimber, 36s.). It has taken Mr. Irving three years of patient research to produce these two hundred and fifty pages of cold, blood-curdling facts. It is a ghastly story of scientifically planned and ruthlessly executed death and destruction, rained on a historic German city in February, 1945.

Dresden was not, of course, the first town in the Nazi Reich to feel the weight of the R.A.F. bomber offensive. Such had been the extent of the fires started at Hamburg, for example, that a vast area had become a raging inferno in which nearly fifty thousand people perished. This was the first experiment of the “fire storm”—a phenomenon which was to be repeated at Dresden with devilish refinement and which was, to cause no less than one hundred and thirty-five thousand deaths in that ill-fated Saxon capital.

The decision to inflict a crushing blow of unprecedented size on a selected target was the brain child of Prime Minister Churchill. He had been concerned for some time to impress the Russian government with the terrible might of Allied air power in Europe, although it is doubtful whether this was to assist the rapidly advancing Soviet armies, or as warning and a possible bargaining weapon in case they went too far. There is, after all, some evidence that the Western Allies were already falling out with the Russians.

So the triple blow was mounted by well over two thousand British and American bombers. The choice of Dresden was quite deliberate, although it meant more than nine hours flying for the air crew and its fall to the Russians was imminent. For all practical purposes also, Dresden was undefended, most of the ack-ack guns and fighter planes having been rushed to the front some time before. But crammed with over half a million refugees and with its population swollen to about three times pre-war, here was a juicy and obvious target indeed. Practically the whole weight of the attack was laid on the residential area, and the resulting fires raged for seven days and eight nights.

David Irving’s book is a timely reminder of the essential inhumanity of war, of how it degrades and brutalises all who participate—of whom the bomber crews are only a few. Intimately linked with Allied bombing policy were the macabre experiments conducted by British scientists earlier on. What was the lethal explosive power for humans? How many Germans might we hope to kill per ton of bombs dropped? How many more can we render homeless? Professors Blackett, Lindemann, Zucker-man and others supplied their answers to these grizzly questions. Just listen to Professor Lindemann at the end of March, 1942: —

“Each bomber will in its lifetime drop about forty tons of bombs. If these are dropped on built-up areas, they will make about 4,000 to 8,000 people homeless.”

Nor was Sir Archibald Sinclair the only liar to emerge in a period when deception was raised to a virtue. Many of the bomber crews who pounded Dresden and other places were not aware of the precise nature of their targets until they were actually commencing their bombing runs. In the Dresden affair their briefing officers told a variety of lies to conceal the true nature of the attack. Few of the crews knew of the refugees and prisoners of war there, even though the Allied governments had this information.

The story of the Dresden massacre is a terrible indictment of war. But more than this, it is an indictment of capitalism. For what defence can there be of a society which pits man against himself and turns whole cities into vast crematoria?
E. T. C.