The women and men in towns and cities across Britain who sat down at kitchen tables with their morning newspapers on 15 February, eating their strictly rationed butter and bacon, now knew that this had been an unusually large bombing raid on Germany: following brief final-edition headlines the previous day, all the papers now had fuller reports – and expert analysis. It would take a few more days before the attack was seen by some in starker moral terms; for the Nazis to fully capitalize upon the horror, for questions to be asked in Parliament and for the prime minister himself apparently to recoil.
At first, the raid was presented in terms of the logical progress of war; although Britain’s press had to abide by subtle wartime censorship, there was no strong indication here that the reporters were being urged to hold back. On 15 February the working-class Daily Mirror declared that this was ‘Germany’s Worst Air Blitz’, adding that ‘1,350 US heavy bombers … showered hundreds of tons of bombs on Dresden, which was raided for the third time in little more than twelve hours … They stoked up the fires raging from the 650,000 incendiaries and hundreds of explosive bombs, dropped by 1,400 RAF planes the night before.’1 The numbers of planes had been puzzlingly inflated; but the attack was presented here squarely in the context of aiding General Konev and the advance of the Red Army; there was no emphasis on civilian casualties.
The more patrician Daily Telegraph the same morning betrayed more fascination with the effects of the bombing, and indeed with the responses from the Nazi regime. After the initial RAF raids, involving ‘many 8,000lb and hundreds of 400lb high explosive bombs … flames could be seen 200 miles away. When the Americans arrived, the fires were still burning.’ Strikingly, though, the newspaper tried to anticipate the propaganda battle that was just beginning internationally: ‘The German reaction to the bombing of Dresden by 800 Lancasters was to label it a “terror attack”, the Telegraph report continued, ‘in which famous buildings were destroyed. The Berlin military spokesman declared that the RAF “hit exclusively the centre of the city”.’2 Yet the Telegraph readers were to be reassured that the city was ‘an important railway junction’ with ‘large ammunition workshops and factories’. The railway was crucial: it was ‘a meeting place of main lines to eastern and southern Germany, Berlin, Prague and Vienna … Dresden is desperately needed as a concentration area for troops and to house administrative services evacuated from elsewhere in the Reich.’
The Telegraph also engaged its in-house RAF specialist – the Military Cross-holding retired Air Commodore Ernest Howard-Williams – to analyse the raids and their effects. He was not wholly numb to the fact of dreadful civilian casualties, but context was all. ‘The massive Allied raids on Dresden indicated that the plans made at the Yalta Conference are being implemented almost before the ink of the signatures is dry,’ he wrote, suggesting that the attack was inspired by the desires of the Soviets. ‘A heavy strain had already been thrown on routes to the eastern front, other than that through Dresden, by recent raids on Chemnitz and Magdeburg which were again attacked yesterday.’ But Howard-Williams was thinking of more than railway lines. ‘It is estimated that troops and civilians in Dresden may have numbered up to two million,’ he continued. ‘The normal population is 640,000. Many Berliners and evacuees from the east had fled to the city which had excellent rail communications with the capital and had developed into a huge arms centre … The confines of the city include over thirty miles of track and a huge marshalling yard on the left bank of the Elbe, which is crossed by six bridges.’
As an ‘Air-Staff Officer’ told him, ‘Give us a month of reasonable weather, and we will paralyse the railroad system of the German armies in the east and in the west.’3 The emphasis was very much on infrastructure; the term ‘refugees’ was avoided. But the retired expert also mused about other aspects of the city’s life. ‘Dresden is the seat of a technical academy and an academy of arts,’ he wrote. ‘I understand that the more valuable art treasures have long since been put underground elsewhere.’4 That indeed might have been the chief concern among many of those middle-class Telegraph readers, a substantial proportion of whom would have had a few pieces of Dresden porcelain in their display cabinets. The newspaper’s puckish gossip column ‘Peterborough’ that morning essayed a joke in very bad taste in the form of a mock headline: ‘Air Raid on Dresden – New Version of a Bull in a China Shop’.
This unseemly description is unlikely to have been appreciated by the bomber crews returning from further missions: the targeting of benzol industrial plants from Essen to Cologne. For the airmen of Bomber Command, Dresden was already in the past, and according to the bomb aimer Miles Tripp there was little sense of the future. They were, instead, living purely in the present; fear remained deep in the marrow, but there was something else too: what seemed like an addiction to flying, and to adrenaline. The almost total lack of defences around Dresden had been unusual; the silver of the moonlit night sky was – over other German cities – still lined and scored with the orange fire of flak. In mid February the Allied armies below were yet to make their decisive advance through the German forests; and the flight crews each night were still aiming to destroy infrastructure as well as fuel supplies. Tripp recalled that the night after the Dresden raid, the order came through that they were to set course for Chemnitz, a town that lay a little to the west.5 He, his crewmates and his superiors knew that there would be large numbers of refugees. The idea left Tripp momentarily reflecting on his own sudden absence of qualms. This bleakness was counterbalanced by the hypersensory awareness that he and his crewmates experienced while flying through those skies, an overwhelming sense of aliveness. For the pilot of their plane, ‘Dig’, the missions by themselves seemed no longer sufficient to keep his heart pounding at the rate to which he had become accustomed; after the bombs were dropped, and the craft was turned back towards England, ‘Dig’ would put the plane into a vertiginous dive, Tripp in the bomb aimer’s position staring down at the fast-approaching North Sea or gazing at cyclists on English lanes suddenly ducking and falling off their bikes as the plane dived at them.6
When Goebbels used the phrase ‘terror bombing’, it had no international traction; when, however, on 16 February it was deployed in what seemed to be ill-thought-out error by an American Associated Press reporter called Howard Cowan, it suddenly and unexpectedly acquired heft. Cowan, in Paris at SHAEF, had been at a press conference given by Air Commodore C. M. Grierson of the RAF. Grierson had spoken of how the purpose of targeting Dresden and other such cities was to create administrative chaos, and also to disrupt German transport links and communications. But that concept of targeting not specific factories or plants but the city itself, in such a way as to create insurmountable difficulties for the civic authorities, seemed to be a bland way of expressing the more ruthless truth. Grierson was asked about refugees; he sought to emphasize the railways and roads, and the proximity of the Soviet forces. But the indelible impression was left that refugees and civilians would form a part of this engineered chaos, blocking these roads in vast, panicked numbers. And the journalist Cowan, with enthusiasm, summarized the approach in his report’s introduction, by stating: ‘Allied air commanders have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror bombing of German population centres as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.’7
His report also noted that an earlier attack on Berlin was upon a ‘refugee-crowded’ city. This was not to signify moral disapproval; indeed, Cowan wrote that there would be ‘satisfaction’ in those parts of Europe where thousands of civilians had fallen victim to the German Air Force and the V-1 and V-2 rockets.8
Somehow, the report – even after objections were raised – made it past the censors, and a couple of days later it received coverage in the American press. In Britain, newspaper editors were of their own volition more circumspect. This was not to say that the fate of Dresden was ignored; quite the reverse. Both the left-leaning Manchester Guardian and the right-wing Daily Telegraph carried reports in the days afterwards that conveyed the extraordinary extent to which it had been incinerated. On 17 February, the Telegraph relayed a line from the German Overseas News Agency: ‘The Allies have turned Dresden … to ashes.’ The city, it stated, was ‘one great field of ruins’.9 Some days later came a further dispatch for British readers: ‘The Dresden catastrophe is without precedent … A great city has been wiped from the face of Europe.’10 On the same day, the Daily Mail proclaimed that Dresden was ‘a city of the past’.11 It was not the facts that were suppressed but the interpretation. National editors were in agreement with Bomber Command and the War Office: this was not a new tactic of ‘terror bombing’ but the result of aiming for the transportation network of an enemy army. None the less, neutral countries such as Switzerland and Sweden picked up on the overenthusiastic phrasing.
Even then, there was not a great deal that Goebbels could achieve by promulgating it, nor by his swift decision to magnify the numbers of the dead by ten times, claiming that 250,000 had perished that night. Perhaps there was the chance that this would inspire newly recruited boy soldiers into more determined fighting against the Soviets, the Americans and the British, but he also surely knew that by suggesting that the Allies could kill a quarter of a million defenceless German citizens in one night, he was conceding that they were the dominant power; any talk of the Germans being close to deploying top-secret miracle weapons to gain a surprise victory was now notably sparse. There are hints from the private correspondence of Goebbels that he understood very well the reality of the Nazi position by that stage, and equally suggestions from eyewitness accounts and diaries from the German populace that victory was extremely unlikely, aside from a few who believed that on Hitler’s birthday – 20 April – a new wonder plan or superweapon would be revealed.
The phrase ‘terror bombing’ did matter very much to the Americans, though. As soon as it was printed there was immediate disquiet, and great efforts were made to align future US news reports so that it would be made clear that the USAAF had been specifically targeting railway marshalling yards, not defenceless people. Colonel Rex Smith, a USAAF public relations officer, was anxious that the American public should understand that US crews were still engaged in ‘precision bombing’.12 It is possible that he and other senior figures still believed that such a thing was remotely achievable, given that their ‘precision’ targets were so close to residential housing and high population densities. But it was vital that the public appreciated that, no matter how barbarous the Nazi enemy, the Americans would never sink to that moral level. This was not merely for fastidious reasons of maintaining the morale of the aircrews, but also part of the preparations for the post-war power struggles to come: in order to carry authority throughout Europe, and indeed defeated Germany, the Americans had to be seen as the virtuous power, doing only what was necessary to remove the evil of Nazism with solemnity and regret and scientific calculation. In this, there was also a measure of distancing themselves from the British, though merely in terms of press presentation. The air war continued as before, and in the case of one particular town, with even more lethal intensity.
Pforzheim was known popularly as Goldstadt, the Golden City. This elegant town, a prospect of spires and turrets standing in a valley on the fringes of the Black Forest and close to the border with France, had long been a centre for both exquisite jewellery work and precision watchmaking. It was a town of some 80,000 people; here were craftsmen in long-roomed workshops with large windows so that their delicate tasks with coils and springs, with flashing diamonds and glowing gold, could be bathed in light. Naturally, as with Dresden, many of these workshops were turned to new purposes for the war, manufacturing fuses and small ordnance and arms components. This was one justification for its appearance on the bombers’ target list. Another was – again, like Dresden – that the town was a troop-movement hub. At this stage, the Allied armies had yet to cross the Rhine; that was still a month away. On the night of 23 February, Bomber Command raised another firestorm. The column of incandescent light rising from Pforzheim was said by some accounts to reach almost a mile into the sky.
As with Dresden, thousands sheltering in cellars were condemned, the superheated air becoming toxic, the oxygen vanishing. Proportionately, the casualty figures were very much worse than Dresden. In the space of a few hours, some 17,600 people were killed – almost a quarter of the population. In terms of fire and explosive damage, the impact was also seismic: an estimated 83 per cent of the town’s central buildings and housing were destroyed. The idea of one in four of a town’s population being killed in the space of a few hours is very difficult to comprehend; a massacre that ripped each and every family in Pforzheim to shreds, as well as tearing away homes and shelter, leaving a landscape looking like medieval ruins. This was the true gravity of war, the wild maelstrom that somehow had its own impetus, divorced from serious tactical thinking. Aside from the phrasing of newspaper reports, the shocking severity of the bombing of Dresden – like Hamburg, Cologne, Essen and Magdeburg – had clearly not prompted any pause, or hesitation, or doubt in the minds of the bomber commands.
And on the other side of the world, the American conflict with Japan brought a night of bombing that in terms of scale and suffering dwarfed Dresden: the 10 March attack on Tokyo. In the space of two and a half hours B-29 bombers poured fire on the city, with Japanese defensive fighters and the fire services down below powerless to beat back the fury. The Americans had taken careful note of the natural catastrophe of 1923: the earthquakes and tsunami that had summoned the whirling tornadoes of fire known as ‘dragon twists’; the bombers, which started flying over at around midnight, now created their own inferno. The sector of the city that lay in their sights was home to just over a million people. Families sought vain refuge anywhere: canals, rivers, temples. The roaring firestorm rose and fathers, mothers, children were burned alive where they stood as the seething sky turned bronze. It was said afterwards that American pilots had to pull oxygen masks on quickly as they flew over, not for lack of air, but because of the pervasive stench of roasting flesh. Curiously, though, this raid and others like it seemed not to spark the same introspection that the European campaign was inspiring; instead, it seemed to many that General Curtis LeMay’s bombers in that part of the world were simply seeking to bring an early end to hostilities in order to avoid more bloodshed – an argument that would be made more forcefully in the months to come with an even more terrible and history-changing raid.
But as all this unfolded, there were those back in England who were ever more profoundly troubled about the fate of Dresden specifically, and about everything that this one particular raid appeared to symbolize. Opponents of area bombing were now speaking ever louder. The Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, was among them, as was Vera Brittain and Alfred Salter, MP for Bermondsey West, a London district that had itself been heavily damaged by bombing. Passionate too was the Labour MP for Ipswich R. R. (Richard Rapier) Stokes, who, early in March 1945, stood up in the chamber of the House of Commons to attempt to challenge the apparent new orthodoxy of heavy firebombing. He was responding to a statement given by the saturnine Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, who had proudly told the House on 6 March: ‘The strategic bomber offensive … remains the principal role of the British and American Bomber Commands … The arm of Bomber Command reaches across Europe from time to time and bombs targets in direct support of the redoubtable Red Armies in their advance from the East.’ Sir Archibald also stated: ‘Allied air bombing is on such a colossal scale that Dr Goebbels has had to admit that it can now hardly be borne.’13
Stokes – who was not in any other sense a pacifist – had listened to other questions in the chamber to do with lifting the blackout in England. His own interjection was rather more piercing. As reported in the Manchester Guardian, he said:
… reference had been made to the accuracy of our bombing. He [Stokes] did not believe in that humbug. Where strategic bombing was necessary, it might have to be put up with, but the Russians did not seem to think it necessary. He had been reduced to despair about the moral issue of strategic bombing and viewed with alarm the disease and poverty that would arise and which would be almost impossible to overcome. Was terror bombing now part of our policy? he asked. If so, why were not the British people being told what was being done in their name?14
This evoked a sharp response from Commander Rupert Brabner, undersecretary of state for air, who was addressing the House and who denied ‘terror bombing’. ‘Our job,’ he said, ‘is to destroy the enemy and this we are doing in an ever more efficient and ever-increasing way. It does not do Mr Stokes justice to try and suggest that our air marshals or anyone else are sitting down thinking how many German women and children we can kill. It is not true.’ Stokes persisted: why then had one report referred to terror bombing? Sir Archibald rose with the answer to this. ‘The report,’ he said, ‘was not true.’15
The Commons reporting meant that the phrase ‘terror bombing’ received its first airing in the British press; the following week, Stokes was involved in a further parliamentary controversy when in a slip, he used ‘unparliamentary’ language to accuse the War Office of lying. The prime minister certainly paid close attention to Stokes’s earlier comments, and it was Churchill himself, addressing the House a week later, who rose to challenge Stokes not on the point of ‘terror bombing’ but upon the accusation of parliamentary deceit; Stokes, flanked by Aneurin Bevan, gamely spoke up for himself but was forced to concede that ‘misleading’ would have been the more appropriate word. It is difficult to imagine that Stokes had not sparked unease within Churchill, or at least catalysed it. For within a fortnight, the prime minister was secretly to express his own moral fears and difficulties to the air chief marshal of Bomber Command.
But before that happened, that same air chief marshal was on insistently bullish form: his own view at the beginning of March 1945 was that his bomber crews were not receiving the praise and admiration that were due to them. Sir Arthur Harris had clearly also been stung by the phrase ‘terror bombing’, chiefly because he detected in it a pattern of unfriendly and unhelpful journalism. He wrote a passionate letter on the subject addressed not to Churchill but to General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. ‘I ask for your personal assistance in a matter which is causing me and my Command great concern,’ he wrote. ‘As you are probably aware, we have virtually destroyed some 63 amongst [sic] the leading industrial towns in Germany, and vastly damaged a great many more, including Berlin, on a scale far beyond anything that we have suffered in this country.’ But the bomber forces, he complained, suffered an ‘almost entire lack of credit’ among the war correspondents. Most woundingly, Harris asserted, journalists were going so far as to ascribe such destruction to ‘the artillery’. As the armies advance, he wrote, would it be ‘pardonable’ if ‘credit is given to us for our efforts’ for the damage caused to those towns and cities beforehand? ‘The present state of affairs is already causing considerable bitterness amongst my crews, a body of men whom you are well aware carried on this fight virtually alone for two years, and without any aid from the ground forces for four years … I know I will not appeal in vain to your generous nature in making this request.’16
And indeed the appeal worked. ‘Dear Bert,’ wrote General Eisenhower on 7 March (a curious nickname apparently derived from an old naval custom of referring to anyone called Harris as ‘Bert’). ‘I read your letter with the most sympathetic understanding and have been cudgelling my brain as to the best way to meet the situation.’ Eisenhower’s plan – apart from briefing the army press relations officers – was ‘to write you and Tooey Spaatz each a personal letter which, if you so desire, may be published to your commands. If this action were taken the letter would naturally find its way into public print and would do something, I think, to accomplish the purpose.’17
General Eisenhower duly wrote the letter: he pointed out that ‘city after city has been systematically shattered’; that the advancing armies saw all around them ‘striking evidence of the effectiveness of the bombing campaigns’ and that ‘the sacrifices they [the bomber crews] have made are today facilitating success on all fronts … The effect on the war economy of Germany has obviously been tremendous; a fact that advancing troops are quick to appreciate and which unfailingly reminds them of the heroic work of their comrades in Bomber Command and in the United States Air Forces.’18
The contrast with the ‘top secret’ sentiments expressed by Winston Churchill at the end of March 1945, and conveyed in a letter from Deputy Chief of the Air Staff Norman Bottomley to Harris, could not have been starker. The moral questions that arose from the Dresden fires had been preying on the prime minister. There was no talk here of heroism or sacrifice in Bottomley’s letter:
Dear C-in-C
At the instigation of the Prime Minister we have been asked to consider whether the time has not come when the question of bombing of German cities ‘simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts’ should not be reviewed. One of the reasons given is that we shall not for instance be able to get housing material out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provision would ultimately have to be made for the Germans themselves …
Finally, the note [from the PM] states that there is need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction.19
This was extraordinary: the prime minister accusing the chief of Bomber Command of ‘mere acts of terror’. Bottomley included in his precis a further extraordinary thought from Churchill – that the morality of Bomber Command was in doubt: ‘The note comments on the destruction of Dresden as a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing and expresses the opinion that military objectives must henceforward be more strictly studied in our own interests rather than that of the enemy.’ But the Air Ministry was with Harris; Bottomley in that same letter suggested that the PM’s note ‘misinterprets the purpose of our attacks on industrial areas in the past’ and concluded that there ‘has never been any instruction issued which gives any foundation to an allegation that German cities have been attacked simply for the sake of increasing terror’.20 In other words: Churchill was mistaken. And the Air Ministry was anxious for Harris to see that.
In his flinty, contained reply to Bottomley the next day, Harris signalled his intention to bite his tongue, despite passages in the PM’s note being ‘abusive in effect, though doubtless not in intention’. But he was also adamant that his own philosophy be understood, for Harris did not conceive of himself as anything approaching a ‘terror bomber’. He wrote that to ‘suggest that we have bombed German cities “simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts” … is an insult both to the bombing policy of the Air Ministry and to the manner in which that policy has been executed by Bomber Command’. Harris argued that the policy was as much about aiming for the ‘dislocation of transportation’ as the destruction of buildings, and that ‘Dresden was recommended by the Targets Committee as a transportation target as well as on other grounds’.21
For Harris, it was almost too obvious to be stated that ‘the destruction of those cities has fatally weakened the German war effort and is now enabling Allied soldiers to advance into the heart of Germany’. ‘We have never gone in for terror bombing,’ he continued, ‘and the attacks which we have made in accordance with my Directive have in fact produced the strategic consequences for which they were designed and from which the Armies now profit.’ He was also piercingly bitter about the underlying suggestion from Churchill that even if in the past, bombing cities was justified, it was none the less always ‘repugnant’. Harris could not accept that. ‘Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of Allied soldiers.’ These lives were, he wrote, of paramount importance, adding with a caustic rhetorical flourish: ‘I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.’22
But he wanted it to be understood that he was not bloodthirsty; that if it was decided that the strategic bombing must now end, and the bomber crews be stood down, then this ‘last alternative would certainly be welcome. I take little delight in the work,’ wrote Harris, ‘and none whatever in risking my crews avoidably.’ On the face of it, Harris’s impassioned self-defence had an impact in the Air Ministry, and upon Churchill himself. For Norman Bottomley wrote Harris a very quick note a few days later to tell him that ‘you will wish to know that the allegations of acts of terror and wanton destruction in the conduct of our bombing in the past … has now been withdrawn’.23 But the ill feeling was still there on both sides; Churchill’s later apparent reluctance to offer proper acknowledgement of Bomber Command – together with Sir Arthur Harris’s later fury at the perceived establishment dismissal of the achievements of his crews – was venom that sank deep.
So even as the crumbling masonry of Dresden – the Altstadt eerily silent on those early spring days – continued to collapse without warning, and as its citizens tried to restore some form of familiarity to a blasted landscape, they were not to know that their city had already become a byword for the hideous, unthinking, reflexive excesses of war. Arthur Harris had argued that all raids were a lottery dependent upon weather conditions, and that it was near impossible to plan or calculate their exact outcomes. But there were in Dresden a number of people who did not understand it as a random blow, an accident that grew beyond the initial intent; instead they were beginning to understand it as the ferocious consequence of the scourge of Nazism.