There was a teenage boy boarding at Winchester, the venerable English public school, in the 1930s, who had been marked out as a little eccentric, chiefly because of his habit of smuggling complex mathematical texts under his cricket jumper when he was forced to play. The amused teachers would send the boy out onto the grass to field in positions where it was unlikely the ball would ever roll, and where he could comfortably stand and study the most extraordinarily abstruse theorems as the game was played all around him.
Here was a prodigy who delighted in the ‘absolute elsewhere’,1 a popular slang phrase of the time denoting abstracted souls but deriving from the work of physicists who were beginning to explore new quantum realms. This teenager, a few years later, would find himself being drafted into one of the most sensitive of the war’s nerve centres: and his wild mathematical skill would come to be coupled with a maturing moral sense; a deepening understanding of the desires and vulnerabilities of war. Dresden was destined to become a large part of that boy’s moral and philosophical growth.
There is a map produced by Bomber Command in 1942, showing the city of Dresden and its public landmarks.2 A note at the top warns that the hospitals on it were not to be hit. It is striking that the map-makers felt the need even to say such a thing: who would ever consider a hospital a target? But there is an unconscious cruelty there too, against weary bomber crews who had already seen more death than most: for even though they could make strenuous efforts to obey the injunction, the truth was that the available technology did not make it possible for them to achieve such delicate accuracy.
The teenage mathematician was to see all of this and more: Freeman Dyson won a place at Cambridge University just after the war broke out. He knew that he would not have long there, that he would of course be drawn into some branch of the military effort. In fact, he was granted two years of intense study, of rather more esoteric matters such as Alpha/Beta theorems.3 By this stage, Dyson – an angular young man with large, penetrating eyes – was reading Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means, published in 1937, a series of philosophical essays concerning nationalism, religion, war and cycles of aggression. ‘We insist that ends which we believe to be good can justify means which we know quite certainly to be abominable,’ wrote Huxley. ‘We go on believing, against all the evidence, that these bad means can achieve the good ends we desire.’ He also noted the ‘extent to which even highly intelligent people can deceive themselves in this matter’.4
Freeman Dyson was called up for duty in 1943; recognizing his brilliant intellect, the authorities sent him to Bomber Command HQ, a ‘redbrick’ structure on the Chiltern Hills just outside the Buckinghamshire town of High Wycombe.5 Dyson was billeted near to the town, and every morning would get on his bicycle and ride five miles uphill to Bomber Command HQ. Sometimes he would be passed on his way there by a large government limousine, in the back of which would be sitting Sir Arthur Harris.
Dyson was selected to work with Bomber Command’s Operational Research Section; he arrived at the point when the raids over Hamburg – spread over eight nights in July 1943 – had succeeded in raising an extraordinary firestorm over the city, almost a mile high. Dyson’s section dealt with statistical analysis of all the bombing missions, in terms not of the buildings hit or the infernos started, but of the mortality rate of the aircrews and of what might be done to ease the horrifying rate of attrition that hung over every pilot and crew member’s head as they took off into the darkening night skies.
Could there be a factor linking the bombers that were either shot down or blown up in mid-air? At the time, Dyson recalled, pilots and crews were assured that practical flying experience brought greater safety; that the more sorties a bomber accomplished, the more adept the crew would be in avoiding all the hazards that the brilliant German defence forces could muster. Dyson analysed the statistics of the planes that had not returned. He and his colleagues faced the bitter truth of the matter: experience made absolutely no difference to chances of staying alive.6 A crew that had flown twenty-nine sorties deep into the heart of enemy territory was every bit as likely to become a flashing orange fireball as the crew that was just starting out. By the time they reached thirty sorties, this crew would have only a 25 per cent expectation of survival. On any raid it appeared that an average of 5 per cent of planes were lost, so after many hundreds of raids overall, the number of fatalities rose ineluctably.
Geometric propositions, once confined to blackboards in Dyson’s world, were now matters of life and death. It took Bomber Command a long time to fully comprehend all the hazards that their crews faced in the air. It was assumed for some time throughout 1943 and 1944 that crews in exploding planes that had not been hit by enemy fire had fallen victim to mid-air collisions. The tightness of the bombing formations, the requirement to sweep in en masse surely meant that such contact was sometimes inevitable.
But there was another element of mortal danger about which Bomber Command was as yet unaware. Pilots sometimes returned from missions with the sinister impression that the German fighters were somehow invisible. Dyson speculated that the Germans might have achieved what had once been a theoretical dream: not invisibility, but on-board weaponry for their night fighters that could be fired upwards at an angle – optimally between sixty and seventy-five degrees – as the enemy planes flew beneath bombers unseen. He was correct. The Germans had perfected the technique, which they dubbed Schräge Musik (crooked music).7
Dyson was not confined to his stark office; there were times when he took to the air himself, flying high in the summer skies, conducting aeronautical experiments. There was no sense that he was unhappy about his personal position, or that his support for those young bomber crews was anything other than resolute. But in 1943 and 1944, as Arthur Harris selected larger numbers of German cities to be targeted for high-explosive and incendiary drops, Dyson found himself questioning the ethics of the bombing war.
He was later to confess that, as he had entered the conflict, his intellectual position had been very broadly pacifist. Yet he could also see very clearly that the Nazis were a regime that no one could allow to survive. The questions then began to come back to Aldous Huxley’s ends and means. Many decades later, Dyson summarized his moral difficulties:
Since the beginning of the war I had been retreating step by step from one moral position to another, until at the end I had no moral position at all. At the beginning of the war I … was morally opposed to all violence. After a year of war I retreated and said, ‘Unfortunately nonviolent resistance against Hitler is impracticable, but I am still morally opposed to bombing.’ A few years later I said, ‘Unfortunately it seems that bombing is necessary in order to win the war, and so I am willing to go to work for Bomber Command, but I am still morally opposed to bombing cities indiscriminately.’ After I arrived at Bomber Command I said, ‘Unfortunately it turns out that we are after all bombing cities indiscriminately, but this is morally justified as it is helping to win the war.’ A year later I said, ‘Unfortunately it seems that our bombing is not really helping to win the war, but at least I am morally justified in working to save the lives of the bomber crews.’
But, he concluded: ‘In the last spring of the war I could no longer find any excuses.’8
Bomber Command had from the start been following a particular line of logic in its campaign: the belief that the conflict could be won decisively from the air. It was very persuasive: enemy tanks and ships targeted from high above and yielding; sprawling industrial plants and factories naked before the pathfinding pilots, defenceless against agile raids; vast dams, ghostly grey in the moonlight and towering over German valleys, marked out for destruction by the brilliant ‘bouncing bomb’ invention of Barnes Wallis. The enemy’s defences grew ever sharper, swift night fighters pursuing larger bombers through the clouds, the tight organization of the anti-aircraft lights and guns. But there would always eventually be a technological response.
The literary critic and novelist David Lodge, whose father had been in the RAF during the war and who himself was obsessed with planes as a boy, was later alive to another element that somehow lightened the dark nature of the bomber crews’ missions: the image of them (portrayed in films) as knights embarking upon a Grail quest,9 travelling far into an unknown and dangerous new world in pursuit of their noble aims, many of them meeting death along the way, and those who did eventually return being imbued with a melancholic sense of having seen the darkness.
This was not how Freeman Dyson saw it; what Bomber Command was doing was laying down a clear road that led to Hiroshima and the deployment of nuclear weaponry. Dyson had arrived in his new role as the aerial photographs of the Hamburg bombings were demonstrating what destruction might be wrought upon a civilian population. The raids had been labelled Operation Gomorrah. The effects rather transcended the Old Testament inspiration. It would have been too soon for the eyewitness accounts of that 1943 raid to have filtered back, but the technicians of Bomber Command already knew what they had done.
In part, they knew because of the newly adjusted nature of the bombs: as well as high explosives and sticks of incendiaries, here were weapons that deployed burning corrosion: bombs with jellied petroleum and magnesium. Unleashed on bricks and mortar, these would create fires that could not be extinguished; this was also true of human flesh. Anyone touched by these searing substances would find no escape, not even by jumping in rivers or canals.
That volcanic firestorm, started on the night of 27 July, had increased Hamburg’s fatalities to ten times the expected number for a bombing raid. Later, the figure was estimated at around 37,000 people, a death toll simply too large to comprehend. It was known the Germans had been very organized about protecting civilians, either in specially constructed shelters or, as in Dresden, in adapted basements and cellars, but although these shielded their occupants from blast, the wild firestorm still penetrated the depths. For those in the cellars, death resulted either through asphyxiation when the oxygen was sucked out or by roasting in the unendurably superheated air.
The Hamburg raids succeeded in swallowing large numbers of industrial concerns into that inferno; factories converted to wartime production. They also consumed transport arteries and made so many people homeless that the infrastructure of the city creaked on the edge of complete collapse. From the point of view of the Air Chief Marshal, further similar missions would play a vital role in securing victory in Europe: with morale battered into blankness, and familiar, much-loved cityscapes erased as though they had never been there, surely the enemy would soon be forced to admit that the conflict was unwinnable.
Yet it was Winston Churchill himself who advised Bomber Command never to guess or assume how an enemy would respond to a vast and terrible attack; their reaction could never be predicted.10 And he was proved right. The Hamburg raids had not resulted in anything resembling surrender or indeed despair. The immediate response from the devastated city’s authorities was to attempt to organize the many thousands who had been left homeless and who had, in a kind of fugue state, wandered out past the city perimeter into the woodlands beyond. Police and medical authorities followed the trails of zombie-like people out into the forests and the fields; the survivors seemed to have become completely disassociated from time.
The farming communities who saw these wandering citizens – some in pyjamas, others barely dressed – were bewildered by their abstraction. With some gentleness, the authorities started to corral the survivors, having arranged for them to be transported to towns across the country. Some were sent by train to Bayreuth, which was in the middle of its annual Wagner festival. There were grandees in full opera dress who found themselves mingling in the streets with catatonic walkers, clothes still torn.11 There may have been a few among the sophisticated opera-lovers who allowed themselves to think that this was indeed Götterdämmerung – the twilight of the gods.
Despite the horror, many survivors soon gathered their senses and were overwhelmed by a desire to return. Back in their obliterated neighbourhoods some could hardly orientate themselves; not only their apartments but their entire streets had vanished. Others were to be found desperately picking through rubble, turning over mummified corpses in their effort to find the bodies of their loved ones. According to one contemporary report, ‘rats and flies were the lords of the city’.12 The devastation also demonstrated the cold pragmatism of the municipal authorities: the inmates of a nearby concentration camp, Neuengamme, were forced to sift through the ash and melted flesh to recover the thousands of corpses for burial. But the almost surreal spectacle of Hamburg’s working-class residential district reduced to pale ash elicited not the slightest hesitation from the regime in Berlin; nothing seemed to deflect the Nazis. Here, instead, was a propaganda opportunity to be spread around the world: the revelation of terror bombing.
Air Chief Marshal Harris never entertained any doubts about the strategy, even as the Royal Air Force was being pushed by others in the Air Ministry in the later months of 1943 and throughout 1944 to aim for more specific targets: synthetic-oil plants and refineries and ball-bearing factories. The idea was optimistic: by consistently striking at fuel sources and armaments manufacture, it would be possible to bring the German war machine to a halt, its tanks and planes emptied and starved of petrol. One objection to this was the question of efficacy: reaching and pinpointing such targets was one thing, but to damage them so severely that they would be permanently out of commission was another. So many other factors – cloud cover, flak, defensive fighters – meant that such highly specific missions would carry the double risk of a low success rate and high mortality among British airmen.
For Harris, these were what he had long termed ‘panacea targets’. But in addition to this, the USAAF’s targeting of infrastructure such as railways and refineries still created numbers of civilian casualties: the difficulty over precision aiming, combined with the fact that such industrial features were frequently sited well within the built-up areas of cities, meant that houses and flats were bombarded, and the civilians who had not been able to reach shelters were subjected to blast waves, fire and white-hot shrapnel.
With D-Day and the invasion of Europe underway in the summer of 1944, there were senior figures in Whitehall who were once more starting to think like Harris, and it was Sir Charles Portal who in August 1944 drew up a confidential document setting out the case for a dramatic, if not apocalyptic, bombing raid upon the city of Berlin. There had been attacks in the autumn of the previous year – termed the Battle of Berlin – that had met with only very limited success: the long distance combined with strong German defences and poor weather meant that, even though buildings and parks burned, the practical effect of the raids was negligible. The administrative machinery that held the Nazi empire together continued to function, but now – with the Allies and the Soviets pushing from opposite directions through towns, across heaths and through forests – here was a chance to launch a different sort of mission. The bombers, this time, would not be looking for specific buildings. The target would quite simply be the city of Berlin and all of its people. The code name for this proposed mission was Operation Thunderclap.13
The term ‘thunderclap’ implies a moment of pure shock or fright, as opposed to damage; a reflexive start as the heavens boom. But there is also the distant resonance of divine intervention: the angered gods sending forth punishing storms. ‘This paper,’ wrote Charles Portal in the introduction to the confidential memo circulated within the War Cabinet, ‘proposes the renewal of area attacks on Berlin as the most effective attack on German civilian morale that can be suggested.’ The idea was to await the golden hour, the moment when ‘a sudden catastrophic area attack on Berlin offers prospects of inducing the immediate and organized surrender of the Nazi regime, or alternatively of precipitating the collapse of its authority’.14
The paper posited that, although American attacks on specific factories and plants had been a success, there had been little impact in terms of undermining the confidence of the German civilian population in the Nazi regime. Thunderclap was, conversely, aimed directly at the bodies and souls of the ordinary people to achieve ‘maximum moral effect’ – a hefty euphemism for fear and insecurity. ‘The attack must be delivered in such density that it imposes as nearly as possible a 100% risk of death to the individual in the area in which it is applied,’ the paper continued. The attack should ‘produce an effect amounting to a national disaster’. And more: the bombs had to hit places and landmarks that were absolutely central to the identity of Berlin. Such notable targets – governmental, cultural – would involve ‘the maximum associations, both traditional and personal, for the population as a whole’. This was not just about the destruction of civic symbolism; it was also very much about the deliberate targeting of human life. The aim was to ‘embrace the highest density of population’, and to hit it repeatedly to give citizens the impression that there was nothing that their government could do to protect them. This was about much more than morale; it was about regarding those civilians – the mothers, the elderly, the infants – as being as legitimate a focus for the incendiaries as the Nazis who governed them.
‘To the German High Command, defeat must seem inevitable as disasters grow day by day,’ wrote Portal.15 The trick was to strike with shocking ruthlessness when the confidence of the authorities was already sufficiently shaken; that way there could be a speedier collapse of the regime and a swifter end to the war. The carefully blank language and imagery of Thunderclap give the impression of smooth rationality, and the theory that a sudden burst of pure terror and destruction would induce Nazi inertia and surrender made superficial psychological sense. But under the technocratic terminology – the repeated use of the word ‘maximum’ – lay something that went rather beyond scientific strategy. Defeating a regime was one thing; but what sort of long-term future lay ahead for a nation whose old people and children had been specifically targeted at the moment when the nation was at its most vulnerable? In Thunderclap, there was an underlying assumption that the virus of Nazism lay deep within the flesh of German society as a whole; this was no longer simply a military force to be vanquished but an entire people.
In the event, Operation Thunderclap was set to one side in the long, gruelling autumn and winter of 1944, when the German army fought back with a terrible intensity. However, as the year drew to a close, the principles of the operation began to look extremely tempting once more, even as Air Chief Marshal Harris was being pressured to make more effort with his ‘panacea targets’. There was a great deal of friction between him and Portal; the author of Thunderclap was by now conflicted and had swung back in favour of Bomber Command targeting the mechanical rather than organic heart of the Nazi regime.
Just weeks before the attack on Dresden, the two men engaged in a fiercely forthright exchange of letters about the goals of the bombers. The view of the War Cabinet, and of Portal, was that the focus of raids should once more be very much on Germany’s oil plants, and on the railways transporting their products across Europe. But Harris was angrily sceptical and wholly convinced that the way forward was quite simply to raze more cities. His superior noted his reluctance coolly and wrote detailed letters explaining why he thought he was wrong.
In one of these, Portal tried to impress upon Harris the effectiveness of oil-plant targeting: he had ‘a dossier of “Ultra” information’ (decrypts from the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park) gleaned from the aftermath of attacks. ‘My dear Harris,’ Portal wrote, using his habitual salutation, ‘If cities, once attacked, were entirely destroyed, the chances would be better; but as you yourself admit, cities recover their industrial output … in four or five months.’ After all those months of hitting cities, ‘there is no evidence she [Germany] was [sic] near collapse’.16
Harris was hurt, especially as he was convinced that decisions were being taken in the Air Ministry that he was not party to. What especially rankled with him was the idea that some of those figures in the ministry were junior to him; this, he argued, was about experience. And underlying his irritation was the prickling and irrational sense that he was the outsider: despite his Devonian upbringing, Harris self-identified as what he termed a ‘colonial’, by implication outside of the inner rings of the establishment.
He wrote back to Portal on 18 January 1945, complaining that there was no precedent for policies laid down ‘without prior reference to the Commander in Chief’. He was, he said, being handed target lists and bemoaned the fact that ‘little I do now appears to meet with approval’.17 Harris’s view was that even some of the most spectacular targeted bombing coups had had scant effect, be it on oil plants or even vaster structures. ‘The destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams was to achieve wonders,’ he wrote, adding sharply, ‘It achieved nothing compared with the effort and the loss. Nothing that is but a supreme display of skill, gallantry, devotion and technical ingenuity.’ ‘The material damage,’ he went on, ‘was negligible compared with one small “area” attack.’
And so, he argued, it would be equally ineffective to simply hit ‘replaceable’ oil targets ad infinitum. Moreover, Harris was anxious that the order signified an entire change of strategy. ‘The main factor which I fear is the abandonment of priority for area attack,’ he wrote. There were other difficulties: the year had turned and the nights were beginning to shorten – extra hazard for bomber crews in twilit skies. ‘The enemy,’ he continued, ‘is neither a fool nor an incompetent.’ And it was at this point that he made his direct plea that cities such as Dresden should now be targeted.
‘The next three months will be our last opportunity to knock out the central and eastern industrial areas in Germany,’ Harris wrote, going on to list them: ‘Magdeburg, Leipzig, Chemnitz, Dresden, Breslau, Posen, Halle, Erfurt, Gotha, Weimar, Eisenach and the rest of Berlin. These places are now the mainspring of German war production and the consummation of three years’ work depends upon achieving their destruction.’ The next passage in the letter was underlined: ‘It is our last chance; it would have more effect on the war than anything else.’18
As a parting shot, Harris expanded upon his sense of hurt: that Portal had suggested that in terms of orders about targets, Harris had not been wholly loyal. ‘I will not willingly lay myself open to the charge … of not having really tried,’ he wrote. In his anger, he flourished the threat of resignation: ‘I therefore ask you to consider whether it is best for the prosecution of the war and the success of our armies, which alone matters, that I should remain in this situation.’19
Portal replied to ‘My dear Harris’ a day later, his letter a symphony of soothing notes. Yet underneath it was the clear message that he and the Air Ministry were not going to be gainsaid. On 20 January, Portal was still insisting on the importance of tackling the oil plants, adding that the Soviets had indicated how impressed they had been thus far with the effects of such missions. Portal was keen to share his own praise: ‘I would like to say how pleased I was with the success of your recent attacks on oil targets.’20
He also tried to persuade Harris that – successful though he had been – Harris alone could not be expected to know exactly which targets would be most effectively destroyed, that some decisions had to be taken at the Air Ministry with full access to all intelligence. This meant from the codebreakers of Bletchley Park onwards. ‘No commander of a large strategic bomber force can possibly have time to study and appreciate the enormous number of military and economic factors involved in the selection of the best policy,’ wrote Portal. ‘He has more than a full-time job running his Command.’21
And at this point, Portal’s emollience was aimed at forestalling Harris’s furious exit. ‘I yield to no one in my admiration for the work of your Command,’ he wrote. Yet Harris was going to have to fall into line; he could not be allowed to form his own strategies. ‘You apparently believe in putting all your effort into area attacks,’ Portal continued. ‘We recognize that area attacks have been extremely valuable but we are convinced that in order to be decisive in themselves … they would require a very much larger force than we possess … I willingly accept your assurance that you will continue to do your utmost to ensure the successful execution of the policy laid down,’ Portal added, with a trace of steel. ‘I am very sorry that you do not believe in it but it is no use craving for what is evidently unattainable.’22
By 24 January Harris had stepped away from the brink of resignation, but he felt impelled to write to Portal once more. This time there was almost a note of yearning. ‘I am still, I must confess, of the opinion that, in this hard winter – beset as they are on all fronts – a determined effort could not fail to destroy most of the major towns I mentioned and that that … would be the end of Germany,’ he stated. Harris conceded that there remained one problem: ‘There is of course the difficulty of getting the Yanks to come in on the area bombing. But I am certain we could achieve it ourselves. It is for that reason I am personally so upset at this sudden change of horses [by which he meant the oil targets]. The bomber is the prime offensive weapon.’23
Yet even as Harris wrote, different cogs in the innermost war machine were beginning to turn; the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Air Ministry had been studying with interest the vast numbers of German refugees pouring out of the east, fleeing the terror of the oncoming Red Army. Here was a chance to cause both severe disruption and confusion. The fact that it would involve the most desperate and vulnerable of human collateral seemed not to resonate in any way; Arthur Harris was by no means the only senior Allied figure who had apparently passed beyond regarding German civilian life as having any intrinsic value. Nor were decisions concerning targets entirely in his hands.
Winston Churchill was impatient to hear more of the possibilities. Was a vast raid on Berlin possible? And what of these other cities in the east of the country? Thus it was that Dresden – as well as Chemnitz and Leipzig – were added to the potential hit list. In Paris, at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), the HQ of the US and British in Europe, RAF Air Marshal Arthur Tedder – Eisenhower’s deputy – also drew up a memo concerning joint American and British air attacks on east-German cities. Although ostensibly more about concentrating on hitting transport links, power plants and telephone exchanges, in cold reality this meant essentially the same as Sir Arthur Harris’s approach: that is, the annihilation of the entire target city. Harris received these orders, with the list of potential objectives, very shortly after writing to Portal. When the wintry atmospheric conditions were right, then the bombers would fly out deeper into the east than they had ever been before.
And in airbases around the country, British pilots – and American pilots too, along with others from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Poland – who had adjusted to a life in which the likelihood of imminent violent, terrible death was ever present were now being asked to push themselves further yet. They would have to find a form of disassociation, for how otherwise would they find it possible to fly deep into the darkness of Germany again and again?