75 years on, the British are still haunted by the aerial bombing raids
On the 75th anniversary of Britain’s most divisive wartime act, Sinclair Mckay insists the bombing was far from a criminal act
The darkest, most primitive impulses of war are ancient and unchanging – no matter how much we tell ourselves that our age is different. Just recently, Donald Trump appeared to make a direct threat to destroy Iran’s cultural monuments: architectural treasures that not only represent an extraordinarily rich history, such as the city of Persepolis, but also possess great religious significance.
The shudder of disquiet from around the world at this challenge to the very notion of civilisation showed that some sensitive line of morality was being breached.
Yet today sees the 75th anniversary commemoration of an act of terrifying wartime cultural destruction in Europe that was not quite so morally clear-cut. On the night of February 13 1945, 796 RAF Lancaster bombers flew deep into the eastern darkness of Nazi Germany, and in two successive waves poured fire upon the baroque historic centre of Dresden.
Thousands of high explosives destroyed entire terraces of houses, apartment blocks, department stores and more: beautiful 18th-century churches, exquisite cathedrals filled with Saxon relics. But it was the innumerable incendiaries that sparked the all-consuming inferno.
The human toll was incalculably shocking: Dresden civilians, sitting in wholly inadequate brick cellars beneath timber-framed buildings, were either crushed, or asphyxiated, or baked and then mummified. In the space of one night, 25,000 women, children, grandparents, soldiers and refugees were killed in a firestorm that rose high into the sky, sucking people off the ground into a tornado of pure flame.
The following day, the US air force flew over to drop yet more fire into open wounds. By then, the historic city centre was a molten, seething mass of ash, flesh and fused organs.
Dresden now stands – like Hiroshima and Nagasaki – as a totem to the horrors of total war.
And many demand, to this day, that the Dresden bombing should be labelled a war crime, that Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris should have stood trial. But they are wrong. There are layers of terrible complexity here, which is why the subject has haunted the English imagination.
In the city, which sits in a fairytale valley somehow a step apart from time, dignitaries and citizens alike will be gathering today to form a vast human chain around the old town, which has been beautifully reconstructed. Among them will be the Duke of Kent, who has worked with the Dresden Trust on many fine restoration projects.
The miracle of Dresden is that its regeneration – after so many decades – is so perfect in so many details. There will be services and concerts of remembrance. Just a few minutes before 10pm tonight, in the rebuilt market squares, church bells will ring out, signifying the time the air raid sirens wailed. Then there will be the profoundest silence.
The events of that night were unquestionably an atrocity. But why does the targeting of Dresden continue to arouse such passion when other bombed German cities – such as Hamburg, Cologne, Mannheim and Lübeck – receive less attention? Partly, it is also because in terms of architecture and art, music and literature, Dresden had once been renowned as one of the most civilised places in Europe. For research into my new book about the city, I threw myself into its archives.
Here are to be found some of the most powerful, lucid, harrowing and heartbreaking eyewitness accounts from those who survived: children who watched in the dark as the first of the RAF’S dazzling white, green and red incendiary marker flares – macabrely termed “Christmas trees” by bewitched onlookers – came down.
Then there were memoirs left behind by older people – from the city’s brewery workers to air raid wardens, describing the nightmare visions as the flames engulfed the streets of the historic old city. They watched as the tar melted; as the burning wind rose and the air was filled with molten embers that set light to dry clothing.
There was the reluctant Hitler Youth conscript, Winfried Bielss, a 15-year-old boy more concerned with stamp collecting than ideology, who guided refugees through the darkened city as the air raid sirens wailed.
There was Marielein Erler, an elegant middle-aged lady crouching in a dusty cellar trying to comfort a neighbour’s child as, above them, the house was stamped upon as though by the foot of a giant. Not far from that, 10-year-old Gisela Reichelt reached, as if by instinct, for her dolls, as her pregnant mother lay down on their cellar floor, immobile with horror.
The first wave of Lancasters came just after 10pm; the second just after 1am, by which time the superheated air was uprooting trees. All the firefighters in the world could not have vanquished the demonic inferno.
In those cellars below – knocked through by the authorities to allow people to move under the streets – the poisoned air whispered unimpeded. People short of breath might have thought it was their own fear. Their shrunken bodies were found simply sitting, as though they had fallen asleep. Others were burned and their organs liquefied. And above, a once-familiar landscape of baroque churches and cathedrals, of grand art galleries such as the Zwinger Palace and the Japanese Palace, and a world-famous opera house, were soon nothing but bloody rubble, the scattered masonry co-mingled with body parts and decapitated heads.
Part of the dreadful fascination of the story of Dresden now is that gothic intensity: the juxtaposition of an old city’s fairy-tale beauty, and the forces of unrestrained fiery violence poured upon it. So how, then, might there be any question concerning morality and ethics? Because there is another side, not merely about the desperate need to defeat Adolf Hitler. There is an even
Shrunken bodies were found simply sitting, as though they had fallen asleep
more piercing element yet.
I spent a great deal of time reading the diaries and memoirs of the RAF bomber crews: they were intelligent and often sensitive and reflective young men facing the most terrifying danger with every mission. Those who returned home from bombing raids – and over the course of the war, some 55,500 did not, their planes consumed in flames – had to live with the darkest trauma. All they had wanted was to see the conflict brought to the swiftest end and the darkness of Nazism eradicated. They were wholly prepared to sacrifice themselves. They were not monsters. Would anyone accuse those young men of being war criminals?
The city was also a military target in its own right; Stalin had asked for it to be bombed to hamper Nazi supply lines and war production. Harris carried out instructions.
None of this makes the irrational scale of destruction any more palatable; the stories of those who lived through that night and saw others so hideously killed are unforgettable. But in Dresden today – the city, incidentally, was twinned with bombed Coventry in the Fifties – the accent is on reconciliation, friendship, and ensuring that such horror cannot happen again.
Here – and in Coventry, too – there is an understanding of the terrible fragility of historic beauty; but an even greater understanding of the strength of the human spirit in restoring that soul.