Rains of Ruin

[rich]

thx for this

i was in dresden last year--at one of the museums (transport I think) they
showed a documentary film on the city, footage mostly from the 30s
a class of kids was in attendance. the film strongly suggested the bombing
as a war crime

rich


On 1/27/07, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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