Post by Dan Dare on Feb 7, 2024 11:47:15 GMT
And so on to what may be the final piece in the series on the Allied strategic bombing campaign against Germany in World War II – the destruction of Dresden by a combined Anglo-American force in February 1945. Rather than starting from scratch I thought I would start the discussion based a book review I wrote for a campus journal some years, slightly expanded and updated. The book in question deals with most of the major bones of contention surrounding the episode and those it doesn’t, such as the controversy over Churchill attempting to distance himself from Bomber Command in general and Dresden in particular, as well as the still hotly-debated Soviet role in the affair, can be discussed separately.
As its 79th anniversary approaches, the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945, one of the seminal events of World War II, retains an uncommon ability to incite controversy and inflame passions. Dresden, in particular, has long been a matter which raises not just moral, legal and historical questions, but political questions too. It has become a cause célèbre for the extreme right, which is on the rise again across Europe and especially in what is now eastern Germany, and which seeks to establish a moral equivalence between the Allied ‘terror bombing’ of German cities, and the atrocities which were perpetrated by the Third Reich [1]. As we speak the city fathers are busy organising the 'human chain' which will prevent access to the city centre by any 'unapproved' groups on the night of the 13th.
It is to this broad spectrum of issues and questions arising from the events of February 1945 that Frederick Taylor addresses himself in Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February 1945.
His Preface positions the book as a corrective to what he terms the ‘legend of Dresden’ [2], as he sees it a legend perpetuated in the English-speaking world and elsewhere, by authors such as David Irving [3] and Alexander McKee [4], who originally published their ‘revisionist’ works on the subject in 1963 and 1982, respectively. Taylor takes particular issue with the notion that Dresden has since that time and largely through the efforts of those two authors, become synonymous with the term ‘senseless crime’. He asserts that the most objective work on the subject is available only in German, and refers in particular to a book by a Dresden-born eyewitness, Götz Bergander which, according to Taylor, is a ‘scrupulous, rich and fascinating’ account of the attacks on his native city [5].
For Taylor, the principal argument revolves around the question whether Dresden was or was not at the time of the event a ‘special case’ given its reputation as the ‘Florence on the Elbe’, as Herder termed it. Was it merely the glittering baroque Kulturstadt of the Saxon monarchy, and therefore deserving of exclusion from Allied attentions, or was it, as Taylor proposes, a normally functioning major city in the Third Reich, albeit culturally uniquely endowed, with an attendant industrial infrastructure and extensive communications facilities, and therefore a legitimate military target? That is the principal question to which Taylor applies himself in the work under review here.
It would be misleading, however, to give the impression that Taylor restricts himself to such a narrow focus. In fact, just the opposite is true; the book attempts to cover many bases (too many, as we shall see) and weighs in at over 500 pages compared to, for instance, Irving at under 350. And therein lies one of its weaker aspects: in attempting to cover as much territory as he does, Taylor runs the serious risk of diffusing the message that he originally set out to deliver.
But more of the book’s shortcomings later, for now let’s turn our attention to those parts of the narrative where Taylor has something genuinely new to offer, even for those who may have imagined they already knew pretty much all there was to know on the subject. In Chapter 13, ‘The City of No Military or Industrial Significance’, he marshals the key arguments in support of the contention that the bombings were a military necessity. He cites the 1944 Handbook of the German Army High Command’s Weapons Office, which includes over 120 manufacturers of weapons, munitions, and other military equipment which were located in or around the city. Famous names such as optical giant Zeiss and radio- and communications-equipment producer Radio-Mende employed tens of thousands in the city itself. By this stage of the war, all of the area’s light- and precision-engineering concerns had converted to war production, producing a vast array of military hardware including machine guns, searchlights, aircraft components, directional guidance systems (for V2s) and torpedoes. Although Dresden may not have been in the business of producing instantly-recognizable end-products like the neighbouring cities of Chemnitz (tanks) or Leipzig (aircraft), Taylor leaves us in little doubt that the city’s extensive precision-engineering sector formed a vital cog in the German war machine, in much the same sense as did Schweinfurt with its ball-bearing industry.
Along with its manufacturing base, Dresden was equally notable as a communications hub. It lay at the junction of vital rail links, north-south from Berlin to Prague and Vienna, and the east-west route linking western Germany with the industrial regions of Silesia. By late 1943 the Dresden-based regional directorate of the German State Railways (Deutsche Reichsbahn) employed a total of 128,000 people. At the time of the bombing, Dresden had taken on an additional significance as the logistical supply center (and potential evacuation route) for Army Group Centre, then facing the Red Army a hundred miles or so to the east. The importance of Dresden as a military transport node is underlined by the scale of rail traffic passing through it; in late 1944 no fewer than 28 military trains, with a total complement of over 20,000 troops and their equipment, were passing east through Dresden every day . Taylor also recounts an Allied analysis of German plans for the reinforcement the Eastern front, based on Enigma intercepts, which entailed moving 26 divisions from Norway, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere in the south and west, the majority of which would have had to be routed via Dresden during February 1945 en route for the Eastern Front .
In addition to its military significance as a hub for the transportation of troops and materiel to the East, Dresden also served as a major channel for the evacuation of German civilians from the areas to the east which had been overrun by the Red Army. The question of the size of the population of the city at the time of the attacks, inevitably swelled as it must have been to some extent by an influx of refugees, is intimately connected with the politically-charged issue of the death toll, to which we return later. Irving makes the (unsourced) claim that “…At the time of the attacks, in addition to its full peace-time population of 650,000 citizens, Dresden was housing perhaps three or four hundred thousand refugees from the east, and probably even more” . Taylor, on the other hand, goes into considerably greater detail on the mechanics of the refugee management protocols then in effect, and basing his case on the fact that there is no evidence of any large scale compulsory billeting of refugees in the city, nor were any transit camps set up to house them, as well as on the work of local historians such as Bergander, and thus claims that most refugees had already been ‘moved on’ further to the west. According to Taylor, Bergander states that the total number of displaced persons and refugees in the city at the time of the attacks was “maximally of the order of several tens of thousands”.
Taylor addresses the overall death toll in Appendix B ‘Counting the Dead’. He surveys the range of estimates that have been proposed over the years, ranging from the 35,000 or so cited by the East German politician Max Seydewitz in 1955, David Irving’s original 1963 figure of ‘at least 135,000’ (long accepted as the standard, at least in the English-speaking world), up to the 202,400 referenced in the notorious Tagesbefehl (Daily Order) Nr. 47, a document which is now known to have been ‘doctored’ in Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. Taylor cites new documentation that has emerged from the city archives since reunification, indicating an overall death toll of around 25,000. He acknowledges, however, that other credible sources continue to insist on figures as high as 40,000 .
Another area of contention on which Taylor casts his spotlight is the alleged strafing of civilians by the USAAF escort fighters which had accompanied the US bombing forces during the daytime raid following the RAF night bombing. Irving continues to make much of this, and Taylor reviews the available evidence in Appendix A ‘The “Massacre on the Elbe meadows”’. Citing documents in the US National Archives, he concludes that the strafing did not occur as claimed, and that the few US fighters that did appear at low altitude over the city were involved in dog-fights with Fw 190 interceptors that had been dispatched to harry the bomber stream. He concedes that there could well have been civilian ‘collateral damage’ as a result, but plausibly maintains that there was no orchestrated effort to strafe civilians sheltering along the Elbe meadows in the aftermath of the bombing.
In a final bout of ‘myth-busting’, Taylor debunks the story, which is apparently still enthusiastically recounted by locals, that German-American agents resident in Dresden had provided the Allies with key intelligence and even guided the bombers onto the target by means of light signals from their rooftop (see Appendix C ‘Legend of the Fall’).
Well, so far, so good. Taylor has indeed rendered a useful service by refuting and demolishing a number of the more important myths and legends that have clouded the issue more or less since it occurred. If he had left it that, he would have done enough, but unfortunately he felt compelled for whatever reason (maybe his publisher insisted) to flesh out his thesis with all kinds of extraneous bumf, resulting in a strange combination of history book and vademecum, together embracing almost everything you had ever wanted to know about Dresden and Saxony, but were afraid to ask. That is where the principal difference between Irving and Taylor lies; the former restricts himself to a full description of the actual operations and the relevant background, while the latter embellishes his narrative with all manner of irrelevancies ranging from the original Slavic settlement around AD 350, the Holy Roman Empire, the Seven Years War, the Saxon monarchy and the Twin Kingdom, the story of Meissen porcelain, a potted history of aerial warfare, the (rather slight) history of Jewish settlement in the city, and on and on into the communist era and beyond. It’s almost as though the author wanted to impress us with how much he had learnt himself in the course of his research.
Another irritating aspect is the overuse of anecdotal evidence. Taylor resorts to the pop historian’s ruse of taking a few real-life characters who were present at the scene and weaves the entire story around their personal experiences and anecdotal evidence. That is not the approach of a serious historian and reads awfully like ‘filler’ included to ensure that the all-important ‘human interest’ angle gets covered for a mass market audience. Finally, the book is sloppily edited, being replete with annoying typos and modish phraseology and even worse, liberally larded with minor but telling errors of fact. The P-51 Mustang, for example was built by North American Aviation, not Lockheed, and the Handley-Page Halifax was faster than the Lancaster, not slower. There are many more in similar vein.
As a bottom-line assessment, if someone new to the topic were to ask for a recommendation as a first reading on the subject, this reviewer would direct them first to Irving, whose account of the attack itself, and the aftermath, are both more detailed and more vividly told, and then to Taylor, but focusing therein only on the parts of the book highlighted in this review, viz.: Chapters 6, 13, and 18, and Appendices A and B. That way the reader would enjoy the best of both worlds, Irving’s masterfully-written and tightly-constructed account, and Taylor’s effective rebuttal to the former’s polemics.
1 See for example Dresden: The German city that declared a Nazi emergency, BBC News, 2 November 2019
2 Taylor, p, xi
3 Irving, David, The Destruction of Dresden, London, 1963,)
4 McKee, Alexander, The Devil’s Tinderbox: Dresden 1945, London, 1982,
5 Bergander, Götz, Dresden im Luftkrieg: Vorgeschichte, Zerstörung, Folgen, Würzburg, 19982 Taylor, p, xi
3 Irving, David, The Destruction of Dresden, London, 1963,)
4 McKee, Alexander, The Devil’s Tinderbox: Dresden 1945, London, 1982,
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