Rains of Ruin

[Ya Sam]

Rains of Ruin
Arguing over the World War II bombings of Dresden and London.

Reviewed by Mark Lewis
Sunday, January 28, 2007; Page BW11

On the evening of Dec. 29, 1940, Arthur Harris looked on from the Air 
Ministry roof in London as German bombers set the city ablaze. "Well, they 
have sown the wind," he said. Four years and 46 days later, Dresden reaped 
the whirlwind.

London survived the Luftwaffe's onslaught, and the city's fortitude during 
the Blitz passed into legend. Dresden's legacy is more problematic. Largely 
incinerated by British and American bombers in mid-February 1945, it has 
been rebuilt and to a great extent restored to its former glory. But its 
destruction often is cited as proof that the Allies, too, committed war 
crimes, and that Germans, too, were victims.


"Bomber" Harris, who ran the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command from 1942 
through 1945, was untroubled by second thoughts. As Marshall de Bruhl makes 
clear in Firestorm, Harris never regretted the decision to target the Saxon 
capital. Had he not done worse to Hamburg? Besides, the Germans started the 
war; they had fire-bombed British cities; and in the war's final months, 
they still were terrorizing London with V-1 buzz-bombs and V-2 ballistic 
missiles. Why the fuss about Dresden?

The answer is that Dresden was beautiful; it still was mostly undamaged in 
February 1945; and in hindsight, its destruction served no purpose since the 
war was almost over. This was "the Florence of the Elbe," a jewel box of 
Baroque architecture that had played host to Goethe and Schiller, Bach and 
Schumann, Wagner and Richard Strauss. Inevitably, Germans seeking to shrug 
off the historical burden of Nazism have seized upon Dresden as an 
exculpatory event. Here was a cherished symbol of everything the world still 
reveres about German culture, cruelly and uselessly obliterated by Harris's 
bombers. In this view, Dresden was not merely a crime; it was a mistake.

There are, as De Bruhl notes, some rather large holes in this theory. 
Dresden was a loyal city of the Reich, as supportive of the Nazis as any 
other burg. It was also a transportation and manufacturing center and 
therefore qualified as a legitimate military target, insofar as any city can 
be considered one. The war in Europe appeared far from over when the Dresden 
raid was mounted; and the number of its victims, while considerable, has 
been grossly exaggerated by the Nazi apologist David Irving. (Current 
estimates place Dresden's death toll at somewhere between 25,000 and 40,000, 
far below Irving's estimate of 135,000.)

De Bruhl, whose previous book was a biography of Sam Houston, devotes much 
space to the overall air war in Europe from 1939 to 1945. In this context, 
he views the bombing of German cities as a necessary evil. He compares the 
Dresden firestorm to "the purifying fire that brings to a close Wagner's 
epic Ring of the Nibelung." To De Bruhl, "the fires of World War II were 
necessary in order to destroy an evil society and portend a new beginning 
for Germany."

FIRESTORM The Bombing of Dresden 1945Edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. 
Crang Ivan R. Dee; paperback, $16.95


Dresden gets a bit more sympathy from the contributors to another book 
entitled Firestorm, this one a collection of essays from such noted 
historians as Hew Strachan, edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang. Like 
De Bruhl, these essayists reject the Irving-style myths and exaggerations, 
most of which were exposed by the historian Frederick Taylor in his 2004 
book Dresden: Tuesday, Feb. 13, 1945. But one can reject the myths and still 
be appalled by the tragedy that gave rise to them. Donald Bloxham, a history 
lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, asserts in his essay that the 
bombing should be considered a war crime, albeit not one on the same scale 
as Auschwitz. Bloxham sees Dresden as "a black spot on the British 
conscience," and therefore a useful corrective to "the central role that a 
rather mythologized war effort plays in British national identity."

BLITZ The Story of December 29, 1940By Margaret Gaskin Harcourt, $27

Bloxham no doubt would gag at a book like Blitz, in which Margaret Gaskin 
valorizes the desperate struggle to save St. Paul's Cathedral and other 
architectural treasures from Nazi incendiary bombs. St. Paul's survived, but 
several Christopher Wren churches were gutted that night, along with 
London's medieval Guildhall and the attic in which Samuel Johnson composed 
his Dictionary. To create her narrative, Gaskin skillfully draws upon the 
accounts of eyewitnesses, including the American journalist Ernie Pyle -- 
and also the 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys, whose description of the 
Great Fire of London is artfully interpolated. (That 1666 fire and this 1940 
fire covered much of the same territory.) The result is an absorbing book, 
although it's a bit thick with admiring references to Londoners' stiff upper 
lips. "Yes," Gaskin assures us, "a cup of tea really was viewed as the 
universal panacea for all ills."

As wartime targets, London and Dresden each has inspired a classic 
postmodernist American novel. London has Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow 
("A screaming comes across the sky"); Dresden has Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s 
Slaughterhouse-Five. What London has that Dresden lacks is a library full of 
books like Gaskin's Blitz: uplifting accounts of ordinary citizens 
heroically enduring the horrors of war. "London can take it," the British 
liked to boast in 1940. Well, so could Berlin, but no postwar filmmaker ever 
produced a German version of "Mrs. Miniver." Hence the strategic focus on 
Dresden as a crime against art. The Germans who died in the conflagration 
may in some sense have brought it on themselves by supporting Hitler, but 
the beautiful Frauenkirche and the Semper Opera House clearly were blameless 
victims of war's madness.

Even back in 1945, this argument had an impact. Dresden's destruction 
sufficiently disturbed Secretary of War Henry Stimson that he removed Kyoto 
from the Army Air Force's list of target cities in Japan. Stimson, who had 
visited Kyoto as a tourist years earlier, wanted to spare its temples and 
palaces a visit from Gen. Curtis LeMay's B-29s. So the first mushroom cloud 
rose over Hiroshima instead. Ars longa, vita brevis. ·

Mark Lewis is writing a book about the American experience in the 
Philippines.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/25/AR2007012502272.html

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