If the destruction of Dresden was a crime, then who precisely was guilty? To begin with, the shock seemed too profound to allow for finely reasoned inquests. The famous Dresden-born author Erich Kästner – whose bestselling 1929 novel Emil and the Detectives had bewitched millions of children – was among those in the months after the cataclysm who returned to the city and walked down long canyons of haphazardly piled bricks and boulders, open to a wide and wholly unfamiliar sky, filled with horror as he tried and failed to locate sentimentally remembered spots in this weird wilderness. Later, he bitterly reflected on the futility at that point of trying to assign guilt for this atrocity.
Kästner was born in 1899: his saddler father and hairdresser mother (occupations old and modern, interestingly spanning the turn of the century) had made their home on the other side of the river, near the Neustadt station. Kästner’s early childhood, before a move to Berlin, had been filled with expeditions to the grand streets near the Kreuzkirche, the dome of the Arts Academy and the bright colours of the flower stalls lining the Altmarkt. That day when Kästner returned to Dresden, he tried to find his old school but it had vanished. He walked across the grey prairie of grit that had been the Neumarkt and looked up at the remaining fragments of wall that had been the Frauenkirche, where he had once sung as a schoolboy.
For him, the years of Nazi rule had been personally fraught with hazard; in the early 1930s he had been implacably opposed to the rising National Socialists and described Goebbels as a ‘limping little devil’,1 yet had chosen not to emigrate to safety. In 1933 Kästner’s adult novels – one of which, Fabian, recounted louche sexual scenes in Weimar Berlin – were among the first to be publicly burned. The Nazi regime had ostracized him and he had to write screenplays under a pseudonym. Kästner was familiar with bombing, having seen the attack on Munich, where he lived, but the incineration of his beloved home city shocked him deeply. Some years later, he wrote:
Dresden was a wonderful city … history, art and nature intermingled in town and valley in an incomparable accord … And you have to take my word for it, because none of you, no matter how rich your father may be, can go there to see if I am right. For the city of Dresden is no more … In one single night, and with a single movement of its hand, the Second World War wiped it off the map.2
Kästner observed that among the Great Powers, there was mutual blame; in his view, there was a terrible purposelessness about this ‘quarrelling’. That it would not bring Dresden or its beauty back to life.
And among those citizens who had lived through that infernal night, there similarly seemed no desire for either vengeance or even accusations; at least not initially. For Marielein Erler, reunited with her husband and daughter in Lüneburg and dictating her account of the bombing, while sitting on a bed, her eyesight perhaps permanently damaged by her ordeal in the fire, the responsibility arguably lay with ‘that crazy man’ Hitler.3 Though she also thought that the will of ‘a higher power’ had to be considered as well. Conversely, for Gisela Reichelt, thinking back years later, there was something purely nihilistic about the attack; it was essentially ‘senseless’.4 She was looking at it from the point of view of her ten-year-old self, and all the other children of the city, so many of whom among the survivors were horribly injured.
This was a psychic wound inflicted upon the city that its people would never be entirely free of, but nor was there time in that immediate post-war period for inquests. The Soviets, who were tightening their grip on the Dresden civic infrastructure in offices where damaged roofs left rainwater in puddles on the floors, were paranoid about the intentions of the Americans, the French and the British ensconced in the west of Germany. There were no certainties anywhere in a nation that was split ideologically but not yet politically, and in the weeks and months after surrender Dresdeners were facing the most terrible food shortages and ever more frequent power cuts. Even bread was becoming scarce. All this left neither time nor energy either for public mourning or to address the moral dimensions of the bombing.
In certain circles in Britain, though, the subject of the bombing campaign was provoking wider unease, not so much from passionately outspoken figures such as the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, who had pleaded consistently for the distinction to be drawn between ‘Nazi assassins’ and the ‘German people’, but more, in the wake of VE Day, among senior figures in Whitehall. Having proudly trumpeted British success in the Battle of Britain, the war in the desert, the campaigns in Italy, D-Day and the push through Europe, firestorms were not going to be woven into this national tapestry of gallantry and courage. Air Chief Marshal Harris was acutely sensitive to this, to the fact that Churchill had not explicitly mentioned the efforts of the Bomber Command members in his victory address and to the fact that the ground crews were not going to be awarded a special Bomber Command campaign medal. Harris himself had written proudly to his entire personnel, praising the efforts of all from the ground crews to the airmen who ‘fought alone through black nights, rent only, mile after continuing mile, by the fiercest barrages ever raised … In each dark minute of those long miles lurked menace … In that loneliness in action lay the final test, the ultimate stretch of human staunchness and determination.’5
It seemed intolerable to Harris that such monumental courage should be so casually dismissed by Whitehall. The personnel of Bomber Command were to be awarded only the standard ‘Defence’ medal, which, Harris later wrote in his memoirs, was the subject of much ‘bitter’ comment among those ground crew and engineers. As Harris added acidly (and snobbishly), ‘Every clerk, butcher or baker in the rear of the armies overseas had a “campaign” medal.’6 As to the ethics of the bombing: ‘I was called upon to attack Dresden,’ wrote Harris. ‘This was considered a target of the first importance for the offensive on the eastern front.’ However, he went on, ‘I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war.’ Harris understood himself to be the plain speaker, up against a hypocritical and squeamish establishment. Yet with all that said, he too seemed eager to place the responsibility elsewhere. ‘Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself.’7
Harris was made Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, an honour that came from the Palace, but he saltily declined any honours that would have been offered from Whitehall. If his aircrews could not have special recognition, then neither would he. He also expressed his desire to return swiftly to his colonial heartland as governor of Rhodesia. The position was not vacant. The silence of his superiors in the coming months and years became more marked; Churchill’s history of the war failed to mention the Dresden bombing. There was an element of shame in that 28 March memo that the prime minister had sent concerning area bombing; a sense that he feared that the British had become, as he once warned, ‘beasts’. Mixed in with this was some anxiety about the future of Germany itself; to be seen celebrating and honouring such destruction through specially struck medals would not have gone down well with the defeated population.
The Americans too seemed at best ambivalent on the subject, even though they held Harris in some regard and had awarded him their own Distinguished Service Medal. Harris, too, maintained a very friendly correspondence with figures such as General Ira Eaker.8 (He later noted in his memoirs that the Americans ‘used against Japan exactly the same method of devastating large industrial cities by incendiary bombs as was used in Europe by Bomber Command’. And this was before the even more terrifying weaponry that they were soon to deploy.) But there were some very distinguished Americans who seemed keen to separate the Japanese fires from that one specific inferno on the Elbe. One such figure was Telford Taylor. Taylor had spent part of his war deep in the most secret heart of the Allied operation: as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. After the war, as a lieutenant colonel, Taylor, who originally trained as a lawyer, was a prosecutor at Nuremberg. In February 1945 he ‘was privy to some of the discussion about the proposed attack against Dresden’. The morality of the issue had preyed on him ever since:
What Sir Arthur Harris’s purpose was, I do not know, but the British told the doubters that there was a German armoured division in or near Dresden blocking the Soviet advance from the east, and that the Russians wanted an aerial attack to clear their way.
However, the British decoders had produced information that the German armoured division was not at Dresden but in Bohemia many miles to the south. A senior air officer of the British intelligence group, based on this and other information, concluded that there was no military purpose to be gained by attacking Dresden. He so informed Sir Arthur’s headquarters staff, without result.
The British air officer then gave his information to the staff of General Carl Spaatz, Commander of the US Army Air Force in Britain. General Spaatz concluded that the Dresden raid should be called off but Sir Arthur was adamant and General Spaatz was unwilling to stand aside if the British were insistent on going ahead.
And so both air forces joined in the attack with the much denounced consequences.9
There was, in this account from Taylor, a suggestion of something dark and cold in Harris, launching an attack which he knew to have no military basis. Yet Taylor ignored both the transport targets and indeed the element of Soviet involvement.
And there were those who had been at the heart of the USAAF who were brisk on the subject of ethics. Major General Robert Landry, who had been Director of Operations at SHAEF, was asked many years later about the Dresden raids and about the American bombers attacking a target that had already been essentially levelled. It was put to him that it was a ‘terror raid’; he dismissed the suggestion instantly. ‘I don’t think there was ever any question of whether or not some civilians were going to get killed … because the Germans put a lot of factories right in the cities, and who was to determine whether there was a factory there or not?’ he said. ‘Nobody was going to take a load of these goddamn bombs back and drop them in the North Sea when they were fighting somebody like the Germans.’10
Elsewhere, the burgeoning debate was precisely coloured by the question of German temperament; many in Britain believed that, as a nation, Germany was especially prone to militarism, and to brutality in pursuit of conquest – that there was a specifically Teutonic impulse that had recently pulled the world into two devastating conflicts. And some worried that there was every chance Germany would do so again. The young scientist Freeman Dyson, who had worked in Bomber Command and who had come to feel a revulsion especially for the raids carried out towards the end of the war, found himself discussing the Dresden bombing raids with a ‘well-educated and intelligent’ wife of a senior air force officer. Dyson asked her if it was right that the Allies should be killing large numbers of German women and babies. She told him: ‘Oh yes. It is good to kill the babies especially. I am not thinking of this war but of the next one, twenty years from now. The next time the Germans start a war and we have to fight them, those babies will be the soldiers.’11 There was something quite extraordinarily primitive about this exterminating impulse that stayed with Dyson for decades. The sentiment would also have confirmed the worst suspicions of the Bombing Restriction Committee, which issued a pamphlet a few months after VE Day claiming that 200,000–300,000 people – some ten times the real figure, echoing the Goebbels propaganda – had been killed in Dresden.
It would be several years before the new president of Saxony, Max Seydewitz, decreed – with the blessing of Moscow – that the raid had been an act of ‘Anglo-American terror bombing’; that the British and Americans had been ‘brutal warmongers’; that the ruins of Dresden stood as a spur to ‘fight against the imperialistic gangster war’ and to combat ‘the stranglehold of fascism’; and that this terrorist outrage should be marked with an annual commemorative silence, with all traffic halted.12 With Germany divided, and the Americans and Soviets seeking to divine one another’s intentions across the Iron Curtain invoked by Churchill, the bombing of Dresden would now be the subject not of reasoned inquiry, but of ever more shrill and venomous propaganda serving a variety of ugly political causes.
In England, not long after the war, Sir Arthur Harris was invited to give a talk in the Devon market town of Honiton, near where he had gone to school. The speech he gave, the notes of which are now among his papers, had a tone of defiance, and indeed compassion, for his airmen and the station crews. He placed special emphasis upon the vast sacrifice made by those flying through the relentless flak who had to fight ‘with their heads’ rather than their bodies.13 They had shortened the war, he said, and by so doing saved uncountable lives. Out of 125,000 aircrew, some 55,573 had died: Harris made sure these statistics were known.
Elsewhere, there was, in transatlantic popular culture, one bittersweet moment for surviving flight veterans. The Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death (1946) was a metaphysical drama about a bomber pilot – a poet called Peter Carter – who bails out of his burning plane without a parachute, having in those last few minutes fallen in love over the airwaves with June, an American wireless operator guiding him back to England. Carter survives thanks to a bureaucratic mix-up in Heaven, washes up on an English beach and ecstatically meets June. Then a heavenly emissary descends to earth to try to persuade him his time is up, even as he protests that he is now too deeply in love to leave life. This was the first ever film to receive a Royal Command Performance, attended by the king and queen. The film’s spoken prologue – beginning in outer space, closing in on the earth and finally, from very far above, on Germany – talked of ‘a thousand-bomber raid’, but this was a drama that began with the return from that raid, over the foggy English Channel. And because it was a fantasy, it could safely suffuse the bomber pilot, played by David Niven, with an almost absurd romanticism without troubling the audience with ugly moral questions. The film was also about redemption and the importance of forgetting: with the war over, and the dead happy in Heaven, those on earth had now to steep themselves in all that was beautiful: from summer-evening trysts to poetry and Shakespeare. The bomber pilot who had been destined to die was instead permitted to live because he stood for a certain sort of English civilization.
The moral questions that haunted the Dresden raid were not in any way diminished by the sudden blinding flashes of light and the instantaneous atomization that made shadows stand permanently on walls when the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end the war. These were the weapons that transformed the world order and pointed to a future of warfare that Arthur Harris had been predicting, a future that he did not even see himself surviving. The atomic bomb and all its descendants (the technology passed to Stalin by spies enabling the Soviets to test their own first device in Kazakhstan in 1949) promised death on a scale never before imagined; David Niven’s Peter Carter was already antiquated.
In the years that followed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed to catalyse more debate in the West about the impact of Dresden, not least because there were many in Britain who believed that the numbers who were incinerated in the German firestorm – an echo of the inflated claims of both the Nazis and the Bombing Restriction Committee – outweighed the total of deaths from the Hiroshima atomic blast. Despite the 1961 publication of the four-volume official history The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939–1945, by Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, which came to a balanced judgement on the effectiveness and weaknesses of Harris’s strategies, a view was hardening in some quarters that Bomber Command had done a uniquely terrible thing. In 1963 historian David Irving – later to become a figure of the most intense controversy – wrote The Destruction of Dresden, which suggested that the death toll may have been 135,000 and perhaps even as high as 200,000.14 Reviewing this work for the Observer, former politician and diplomat Harold Nicolson agreed with its broad thesis and came very close to alleging that the bombing was a war crime.
‘The British public like to persuade themselves that, whereas other nations indulge in atrocities, we ourselves never commit unholy acts,’ wrote Nicolson. ‘Yet there can be few operations of war as causeless, as purposeless, and as brutal as the attack on Dresden.’ Nicolson was not interested in laying responsibility at the feet of Sir Arthur Harris; this, for him, went higher. He continued: ‘It is difficult to dismiss the impression that we undertook this vast operation in order to impress the Russians with the power of the RAF.’ Moreover, Nicolson – in the ecstasy of his anger – entered the territory that was later to give such succour to neo-Nazis: he wrote that, even compared to Hiroshima, the Dresden raid ‘was the single greatest holocaust caused by war’.15 Even if he had used the term lazily, it was a wildly tasteless and stupidly provocative thing to write.
In response to Nicolson’s piece, a letter to the newspaper the following week was sent by E. Birkin of London SW6. Birkin was a Holocaust survivor:
I with many other inmates of concentration camps was trudging across Europe before the advancing Russians when we saw the flames of Dresden and the ruins of the city. It made us realize that the end was near. The morale of our guards, and of the German people whom we met, visibly deteriorated and their attitude to us, once at last they realized that Hitler’s promises were false, improved remarkably. Also, it gave us renewed hope and strength to survive the last months of the war. In fact, that very night, we toasted our allies with soup.16
It was also in the 1960s that former bomb aimer Miles Tripp set about reuniting with his former crewmates. After the war, and demobilization, Tripp had married his girlfriend Audrey, with whom he had shared so many nights in Bury St Edmunds. He became a solicitor and wrote thrillers in his spare time which achieved their own success.17 Tripp was alert to the way that the bombing of Dresden had become shorthand for unthinking destruction, but that was not quite how he and his former crewmates saw it; broadly, their view was that a war of that kind could never have been simply waged against hermetically sealed armies with no civilian casualties; that Nazism had been a tumour, and such a growth could not be cut out without damage to the surrounding flesh. In truth, the airmen did not remember a great deal about that one specific raid out of so very many, save its unusually long flight duration. Added to this, their chief thoughts on any mission concerned survival; so many thousands of feet up in the sky, it was difficult for them to imagine individuals on the ground as their bombs fell.
There was a curious paradox: all of them remembered the dread, the bad dreams, and many had developed conditions after the war – ulcers, stomach problems, fused vertebrae, trembling hands – which they attributed directly to the fierce stress of bombing missions. Yet at the same time, everyone in Tripp’s crew unhesitatingly declared that it was an extraordinary period of their lives, and they would never have had it any other way. To a man they acknowledged how the world saw Dresden; all they could say in response was that the enemy had committed so many atrocities that the all-consuming aim of any mission was to wipe the Nazis out, for any of that Nazi tumour that remained might have regrown, leading to illimitable future atrocities. Tripp’s comrades had scattered into a variety of lives, from local council employee to antique dealer. All were proud of the service that they had given.
None the less, throughout the late 1960s in Britain the view gained ground, especially in artistic circles, that the bombing of Dresden had been a sinisterly shameful episode; Soldiers: An Obituary for Geneva, a drama about Churchill, bombing and Dresden by the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, opened in the West End in 1967.18 Strikingly, one journalist writing a background feature described the Dresden subject matter as being about ‘the biggest and quickest single massacre in history’, adding that the atom bomb over Hiroshima ‘killed only 71,000’.19 The other element fuelling anti-bombing feeling at that time was perhaps the deepening moral mire of the American war in Vietnam; increasingly among the younger generation, this was an era in which bombing signified ruthless imperialism.
Sir Arthur Harris – who had finally been nudged by Churchill into accepting a baronetcy in 1953 – was interviewed in 1977 by Tony Mason for an internal RAF project. By then, Sir Arthur was eighty-four years old, but his memory was crisp. Again, he made it clear that he was not responsible for the selection of targets; that his entire time at the helm of Bomber Command had been spent ‘under a shower of directives’. When it came to Dresden, and other cities, he insisted that the relentless pressure from his bomber raids depleted the strength of the German army because men were needed for anti-aircraft defence, and the manufacture of new weaponry and repairs. Sir Arthur, who had returned to Britain from South Africa with his family in the 1950s, was living in the willow-trailed town of Goring-on-Thames. There were no regrets, save for his gruff view expressed in 1977 that war ultimately ‘never did anyone any good’.20 He died in 1984, aged ninety-one.
In Dresden itself, in the post-war years, as citizens adjusted to the heavy pressures of a new world, new politics, new philosophy and new oppressions, there was a growing sense of the importance of memory; indeed, the struggles over remembrance would become bitter. At the same time, though, the city began regenerating, and restoring, and was eventually to find a new aesthetic that, unlike other areas of public life, was not entirely dominated by the crushing weight of Soviet ideology.