Angry Planet - When the Allies Burned a German City to Cinders

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

In the closing days of World War II, the British Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force dropped more than 3,900 tons of high explosives and fire bombs on the city of Dresden. It was not, strictly, only a military target and the story of the bombing has captured the imagination of everyone who survived it and those who study the war.One of those people is Sinclair McKay. McKay is a literary critic for the Telegraph and The Spectator in the UK. His latest book is The Fire and Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden 1945.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. You remember the tornado at the Wizard of Oz? Well, imagine that, but composed of pure searing flame, but still dragging trees out by the roots. Trees being dragged up into its kind of more lampposts being dragged up in the sky, and people too. People being, literally being picked up off the ground and burned as they can whirl around in the sky above.

I mean, it's just terrifying. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello and welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. In the closing days of World War II, the British Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosives. and fire bombs on the city of Dresden. It was not strictly only a military target,

and the story of the bombing has captured the imagination of everyone who survived and those who studied the war afterwards. It had long-ranging consequences that we're still talking about today. One of the people who has studied this is Sinclair McKay. Beké is a literary critic for the Telegraph and the Spectator in the UK, and his latest book is The Fire and Darkness, The Bombing of Dresden, 1945. Sir, thank you so much for joining.

us. No, thank you very much for asking me. All right, so we'd like to get some basic stuff out of the way at the top of the show, usually. So can you give me the broad outline of the firebombing of Dresden? And in my mind, I always call it the firebombing, although it's not always called that. But it's an interesting point, actually. Yes, I mean, it has haunted the imagination since February 13th, 1945, which was the night upon which 796 Lancaster bombers from the RAF flew over the city of Dresden

and dropped not only high-explosive bombs on the city, but also thousands upon thousands of incendiaries too, because for the Air Chief Marshal, Sir Arthur Harris, it wasn't enough simply to blow buildings up. He wanted an entire city in flames. They had done this before in Lubeck. They had done it in Hamburg throughout the course of the war. Now, Dresden, because the atmospheric conditions were perfect that night, became this kind of terrifying crucible in which flame started joining with flame.

So the reason we refer to it as a firebombing is because Dresden is remembered for the firestorm that rose over the city throughout the course of that night. And then the American Air Force came in the following day to go for their specific targets, the railway marshing yards, various factories. and they were, in essence, bombing a city which was already a wilderness of molten ash and flesh. Why was Dresden a target? Well, it's interesting to point out where Dresden is geographically, to put it in context. Dresden is in the very, very far east of Germany. It's quite close to the Polish border. It's quite close to the Czech border.

And it's only about 100 miles or so away from Prague. So in a sense, the cities always have that kind of, Not a specifically Germanic feel, but a kind of middle European feel. There's always been something slightly kind of fairy tale about it from that point of view. It's a city that's deep in the valley of the River Elba. It's surrounded by these kind of rich, haunted Saxon forests and these beautiful, kind of rocky plains. And since the 18th century onwards, it has been part of almost as a grand tour for both Europeans and Americans alike, actually, from the 19th century onwards.

Washington Irving went to live there for a long time. You know, the author of The Settent of Sleepy Hollow, He adored Dresden. And so what is this has happened is a city that is known for its amazing Baroque architecture, its fantastic art, it's extraordinary kind of music from Wagner to Kempstras. And in 1945, when the city was targeted, there was an instant moral recall because a lot of people thought, this can have no possible military significance at all. This is a beautiful city that's simply being bombed for the sake of it.

It's almost as if it's some form of atavistic. vengeance that's being poured out of the sky. That wasn't quite the case, however. The Red Army on February 13th, 1945 was about 60 miles or so away from Dresden, and Dresden itself was an incredibly busy transport hub for the German military at that stage in the war, so important, in fact, that at the Yalta Conference, a few days beforehand, when Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill were meeting, Stalin requested specifically that Dresden be added to their target list. Because of these intense German troop movements, sending equipment all the way to the Eastern Front and hampering the Red Army, but also because

Dresden factories, of which there were a great many, were all totally engaged in war work, everything from ammunition to ordnance to optical instrumentation and factories, incidentally staffed by slave labor. So there is a kind of duality in the story of Dresden. It wasn't just this extraordinary fairy tale city. It also had intense use to the Nazis who at that stage of the war, remember, you know, because with hindsight, we can say, yes, this was the closing stage of the war, but no one knew that the war was going to end in May 1945 at that stage. Even though it was clear the Nazi regime was pretty much over, they were still fighting with extraordinary viciousness and vigor. And there was genuine fear, actually, among the American command and British command, too,

that there would be thousands more thousands more casualties before the war would end. So partly, Jerusalem was also a target because it was simply a desperate, almost irrational move, I think, simply to make the Nazis stop. There is this sense, again, with hindsight, looking back in those final months of the war, that the allies are trying to use overwhelming force just to finish things off, right? Because no one had ever quite seen a war like this. no one really knew what it was going to take to make an enemy stand down. Yeah, yeah. And this is a global conflict which has claimed so many countless millions of lives up to that point in 1945. And you can imagine just the exhaustion of total war.

And on top of that, the older figures in the command who had seen that previous terrifying conflict, the First World War, who had lived through that, this to them must have just seemed a world. of blood and horror. And as I say, I argue in the book actually, there was a point in 1944 when certainly in terms of the bombing campaign, the Allies, I think, passed beyond strict rationality. The decisions they're making are no longer completely rational.

They become much more kind of haphazard and instinctive. And yes, as you say, there was an American soldier, actually, who went on to become a very distinguished American literary critic, Paul Fussell, who was fighting. He was there, I think, at the Battle of the Balsh. He was one of those people fighting their way through the horrible freezing Arden in those closing stages of the war. And he remembered thinking, he wrote some time later, it must have been clear to the Nazis that they were finished. So why would they, why were they not acknowledging it?

Why were they not surrendering? Why was there no sign of surrender? So, yeah, I mean, part of the tragedy of the story is trying to read the motivation. of this because, I mean, I don't know about America. This wouldn't be the case, I don't think, in America, but in Britain, ever since the bombing of Dresden, ever since February 1945, there have been substantial numbers of people who have demanded that it should be labeled a war crime.

No, talk about that, because I do think it's interesting to kind of put that in the European context for people in America, who may not quite understand, like, how important this was. But, like, this bombing has, has, since it occurred, become, you know, a football and a political game a little bit, right? Yes, and continues to be so to this day, actually, in a terrible sense. It's understandable because ever since it happened, actually, Dresden, rather like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has become a totem, a symbol of the horrors of total war.

You know, this is what happens with the shadow of total war. The civilians just wiped out mostly, because in the case of Dresden, I mean, the numbers are kind of almost unfabbable. 25,000 people incinerated or baked or mummified or simply crushed to death in the space of one night. 25,000 people. It's a figure could have almost beyond comprehension,

really. And so almost as soon as it happened, in Britain, and in America, too, there was a tremendous moral recoil. The American authorities were the first to recall, because it was American reporter, who was the first to say that this was terror bombing. he didn't actually use the phrase in a pejorative sense, curious enough. Finally, the Allies are using the technique of terror bombing

in order to smash the enemy into the mission. And the American authorities saw that absolutely recoiled because the Americans would be most insistent that what they did was precision bombing. The Air Force, the American Air Force, always flew by day, incredibly, horribly hazardous, as you can imagine, and they picked out very specific targets in the case of Dresden, railway marshingards and factories. The British always bombed by night,

which meant that accuracy was all but impossible, even with Markslaus. So there you have the start of the moral debate. The reason it's echoed, type of years, is because in the immediate aftermath, Goebbels looked at the horrific destruction in Dresden and decided that that still wasn't quite enough, so he decided that the figure of fatalities was $250,000, a quarter of a million.

And he ensured that that figure was the one that went around the world, that the Allies had murdered 250,000 people among them, many, many rural refugees. And the idea from the Nazi side was that at last the world would see that the Allies were every bit of steeped in innocent blood as the Nazi regime. And this continues to echo to this day. There are those who continue to wildly inflate the number of fatalities, as if you have to infect. I mean, 25,000, I would have thought, sufficiently horrific. But there are those in the far east, on the far right in Germany today, and elsewhere in Europe too, actually, where there's still a huge political football,

because there are now those who were saying, yes, this was for German civilians, their holocaust. That kind of language is being used. It is genuinely chilling once you start to look at the people who are going down that road and seeking to hijack history in that way. So yes, to the people of Dresden, the history is incredibly sensitive. Memory itself is a battlefield. And the way that it's commemorated every year is done with immense dignity.

And actually, it's just some beauty, too. But they form a human chain around the old town on the day of commemoration, February 13th, right the way around the historic city centre, which was destroyed in this firestorm. And the reason for the human chain, partly, is to keep the extremist lunatics out. The ones who want to say that, the ones who are basically saying, yes, sure, we agree the Nazis were bad, but the allies were every bit as bad to everyone's a criminal. And once you start drawing those kind of moral equivalences, you then start to find yourself in some very dark company. Well, there is this, you light it on a couple different things. I think it's very interesting about strategic bombing in World War II in particular.

They were still kind of figuring it out and figuring out what it was for and trying to justify its use. at the time. So the distinctions between the British method of bombing and the American method of bombing, I think is very interesting. Another thing that you touched on that I kind of want to highlight for the audience is there was this sense in some portions of the Allied leadership, especially in the closing days of the war, that to defeat Germany was not only about defeating them militarily, right? but there were portions of German culture that had to be eliminated to stop them from being warlike. And I think that Dresden kind of highlights that, and it's not something that we talk about a whole lot

for obvious reasons. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating point, and it continues again to be a fault line today, actually. I've been speaking to, you know, not only friends in Dresden, but also a number of difference of German people who assume, actually, that one of the main reasons for the bombing was that Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris in particular genuinely just literally wanted to stamp

on the centre of German civilization because he saw German culture itself as the root of Nazism and only by stamping on German culture could you eradicate the threat of Nazism forever? Now, it's certainly true that Arthur Harris was unyieldingly hostile to the Germans, not just the Nazis,

but the Germans. He did genuinely. really loathe the German people and and possibilities of German culture too. By any slight hesitation about that argument in the case of Dresden particularly is that it was actually a much more kind of pan-European city than that. There was nothing that the wonder of the Dresden actually wasn't kind of a peak of German civilization and German culture. It was the peak of a very kind of middle European culture too.

As I say, the Baroque architect that we see so miraculously rebuilt today, perfect in every kind of particular, draws influences from all corners of the continent, actually. And on top of that, Sir Arthur Harris, although he was very articulate and very intelligent, I don't think it would have known a Baroque church if one actually collapsed on his head. And I don't think there's any particular evidence

that he was fixated by Dresden in that way. He always said afterwards, actually, in his own defence, he always rather gruffly said, I never went in for terror boning. That wasn't what I was trying to do. He genuinely believed that simply pouring fire upon a city would stop the Nazi regime in its tracks. He genuinely could have thought that was the case, even though time and time again it proved not to be the case. Hamburg, most famously, in 1943, when again a firestorm that rose a mile into the sky and some 43,000 people killed,

many of whom were simply liquefied or drawn up into the air into the terrifying fire tornado. in the same freak of physics that you see in Jerezden, actually, where the very elements are kind of bent, and the air is turned inside out, and lungs are scorched, the terror beyond kind of imagination, you would have thought that an attack by that on Hamburg in 1943, which was so, so, so extraordinary,

that the rats in the city with the sole survivors, and the rats grew fat, dining on all the corpses. You would have thought maybe that would have made the Nazi regime. It didn't. It didn't cause a blink in the Nazi. regime. But somehow, Bomber Command didn't quite register that. So, yes, there is something slightly atavistic about this pouring fire upon a city. It's so ancient and so dark that

impulse. It goes right back to the very dawn of history itself, actually. This kind of instinct to set fire to set fire to one's enemy. The Americans were always different. And technology, you're right, technology developed throughout the war. It was developing fast towards the end of the war, too, as it was with the Germans, with a V1 and the V2 rockets, for instance. And the American technology with the bomber crews was getting better. And, you know, there was a semblance of precision bombing. Obviously, it couldn't be anything like what we had today. But, you know, certainly the intention was there. And I might also quickly point out the courage of those American air crews and British air crews, too, those British bomber

Cruz and American bomber Cruz. I don't know how they did this. I really did. I've read so many memoirs and diaries of those young men who fought so incredibly. Psychologically, I still can't work out how they did it.

That kind of courage seems to be almost unearthly scale. It just reminds me of catch-22. You know, I think the fiction I've read about these kinds of things helps me process what was going into the headspace of those men. And Catch 22 really highlights the bomber's life and struggles for me.

And speaking of, how's this for a transition, how does Kurt Vonnegut factor into all of this? Well, I'm a Kurt Vonnegut. Again, Dresden then led to one of the most extraordinary works of 20th century. Literature Slaughterhouse 5. Young Kurt Vonnegut, I think he was about 22 when he was taken prisoner of war in Germany. He was serving with the Allies

in Germany. He was taken prisoner of war in the winter of 1944, 1945, and was basically attached to what became a slave Labour Party that was taken to Dresden. And he knew that Dresden was one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, if not

in the world. There was very little that he was obviously able to see of it as a prisoner of war. He was held along with his, along with his comrades, in an abattoir just on the edge of the city, a concrete structure of underground, amidst horse carcass and pig carcasses. Basically, he was held in a slaughterhouse, slaughterhouse number five. And on the night of the bombing, ironically enough, because he was being held prisoner in the structure, he may well have been a great deal safer than many of his Nazi captors. But there is the enduring horror.

of what he saw afterwards. I mean, his account of Dresden in the days after that bombing, when it was his job as one of the slave laborers, to go into the wholly inadequate brick shelters that were there for the people of Dresden. They had no proper bomb shelters. They were just these brick cellars, basically, which people have been sitting at which people have been killed in.

And Vonnegut, among others, had to go down the steps into these, just appalling sort of mausoleums. He said the smell was like mustard gas and roses. The heat that came out of these brick cellars was incredibly intense. And he looked upon figures that were basically mummified, or just in the most atrocious kind of states. There was a decapitated head still wearing a hat. And he described himself as a corpse miner.

His job is now corpse mining. It's just unbelievable, obscene. spectacle that he had to gaze upon. And yes, I mean, how do you begin to process that, actually, in the years afterwards? He didn't write Slaughterhouse 5 until

1968, 1969, I think. But he went back to Dresden in 1967 to go and look around what was it now a city within the realm of the Soviet Union. It was in the Eastern Bloc. It was the German Democratic Republic. It was a communist city,

along with all others in East Germany, Vonnegut went there to have a look to have a look at the way that it had been kind of rebuilt by the Soviets in this kind of modernist style with all the housing and the shops and all that Slaughterhouse Five then came out of that and it's an extraordinary story

time travels kind of back and forth the hero Billy Pilgrim seems to exist in all these difference of time streams but it leads all roads lead inextrably to the horror of Dresden and you know the novel received the immortality that deserves

as a result. I think, remember, when I first read that, I had to read it in high school. The part of it that's always stuck with me is his introduction, where he talks about how it took him, as you said, until the late 60s to finally write this book. It took that long to process the horror that he had seen. And you do an incredible job in this book of kind of giving a street-eye view of what's happening. you concentrate on the people who live in Dresden. There's a lot that, you know, that's a large focus of the book.

Can you tell me about some of the, you know, aside from Vonnegut, it's some of the other people that really struck you? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of this book was, this book, it is military history, but it's kind of not military history in the sense I wanted to see this horrific event through the eyes of those who were on the ground and also those who were in the air, too. You know, the incredible bomb crews who were carrying. these raids out and yet still

somehow retained that kind of humanity. But also yeah, in the Dresden City archives now, they've done the most amazing job in collecting and collating because of hundreds upon hundreds of eyewitness accounts, which obviously I spent a very great deal of time going through. It's a fantastically welcoming city now, by the way, actually. It has to be

said, really good, really good wonderful to visit and to work in, too. But yes, to read all these hundreds of accounts, immeasurably haunting, but in so doing, trying to build up a mosaic a kind of a mosaic picture of the city as it was in the days before and on that night of horror and in the days after too

it's what it did to the order of people because again this isn't so much a story about soldiers the story about women and children and grandparents and also about rural refugees those all those who are fleeing the red army all those people who happened to be in dresden on that one night and there are accounts from people who were children at the time which are of course immeasurably haunting. Now these were children born into the darkness of Nazism. A world of Hitler was the only world that they had ever known

if they were under the age of 10 or so. But nonetheless, on the day before the bombers came, it was a day of carnival for the children. Shrove Tuesday, which by tradition, in that part of the country, the children dress up in all sorts of fancy dress costumes. And even though this was so deep in the depth of the war, even though all their fathers were away

fighting on the eastern front or wounded or dead the children still dressed up on that day and their clowns outfits and their little devil outfits and there was that kind of semblance of normality for their mothers and their grandparents too and yet it was trying to see it

through all those eyes so by the time the air raid siren started that night you know the children were tucked up in bed the mothers and the grandparents were listening to their radios and life in the kind of city was going on There were workers drinking in the cavern. There were artists. And as I say, there were a rural refugees going through.

And it's just trying to build up a composite picture through so many different eyes. And what is like to live through that level of bombardment, what it's like to witness a firestorm rising in mild of the sky and only just escape it by the skin of your teeth. All right, we're going to pause right there for a break. You are listening to War College. We are talking to Sinclair McKay about his new book about the firebombing of Dresden. Welcome back. You were listening to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt.

We are talking about the firebombing of Dresden. This is something we've teased, and I would like to go into a little bit more. Can you, you kind of said that there were unique weather conditions that evening, and it created a firestorm. So what is exactly? a firestorm, and why is it in particular so devastating over these cities? Well, it's interesting question, actually, because it's still being, because firestorms are still being investigated by scientists. You remember recently, Australia had those terrible

bushfires, which, again, produced firestorms, and scientists were kind of fascinated by some of the extraordinary kind of quirks of physics that you find in these events. Now, it's quite difficult to create a firestorm artificially, and this is one of our Chief Marshall Harris' constant of obsessive. But on Dresden, they just happened to have that night what were termed the correct atmospheric conditions. The air was still and cold. There was very little cloud cover for whatever, that very particular set of meteorological conditions. But when those fires took a hold and started, you know, as I say, flames started joining the flame,

and then a whole timber framed old historic city started to go up. What then happens is that the force of the fire starts sucking all the oxygen. and in from all around, and that has the effect of creating near hurricane force winds. But these are hurricane force winds, which by now are carrying millions of molten embers. So basically, if you're anywhere near those, those molten embers land on dry clothes. You go up in flames instantly. If they touch your eyes, don't even think about it. And if you're closer than that to this extraordinary, a roaring force,

It produces a fire tornado. You remember the tornado at the Wizard of Oz. Well, imagine that, but composed of pure searing flame, but still dragging trees out by the roots, trees being dragged up into its kind of more, landposts being dragged up in the sky, and people, too. People being literally being picked up off the ground

and burnt as they can whirl around the sky above. I mean, it's just terrifying, absolutely terrifying. And for those who are close to it, and witnessing it, and for those who are in those brick cellars underneath, who basically found,

either they were being baked to death or they were being poisoned by the terrible chemicals that are being produced by this firestorm. And then got to a stage there was a young physicist working in the city called Mishkadanos and he was watching from a hill in the south.

And he said the most terrible spectacle as he watched this kind of a tower of flame just reaching into the sky. There's nothing anyone could have done about that. In the inner suburbs of the city, all the windows of all the houses had obviously been

shattered. Roves had been shattered to, you know, doors slamming back and forth. And the houses were starting to go to place, even those that weren't close to flames, found that their curtains were going up, their surface was going up. There was fire, kind of everywhere. Fire was kind of inescapable, and the heat

was just extraordinary for the widest of direction. all around. So, and as I said, there were eye witness accounts, too,

of the people walking on the streets which just appeared to spontaneously combust out of nowhere. And in fact, they didn't. It was kind of

molten embers. But that, which also had the power to melt the tar in the street. The tar was melted so that people could have lost their shoes

and then they couldn't walk in the boiling tar, obviously, and then they collapsed, and then they could die where they were to have been burnt to death. As I say,

these are just too terrible to dwell upon, actually. But at the same time, you know, when you're writing about a particular moment of horror in history, you have to look at it because of fairly full on. No, I agree. You can't look away. I think that's one of the wonderful things that your book does. And you also – you – such a nice, complete history of the event. And there's so much context on both before and after. and can you talk a little bit about what happens in the immediate aftermath of the bombing

and then what happens to the city over the next few years? Yes, absolutely. One of the most extraordinary things I've found about the story, actually, is that the instinct towards civic orderliness and rebuilding seem to be completely innate. That having endured this data forward, whereas I say the entire history, historic city centre was, by the end of it, just a seething, cracking mass of boiling boulders and ash, and body parts, the body parts everywhere, if not as the whole bodies. And yet those who lived

in the areas around the old city that had been reasonably untouched, apart from, as I say, the windows being smashed in and the doors being smashed in, found that they couldn't, could have resisted. They had to find out what had to happen to the, to the large. to loved ones, to families, to friends. And so people started to, as far as they could, to explore this, this kind of nightmare wilderness.

The parts of it weren't too hot to walk on. And there were, the vast boulders where streets had once been, people got lost because they couldn't navigate or orient. But the Nazi authorities, there was a chap from Berlin,

was sent along called Theodore Elgering. He came down from Berlin to try and coordinate some kind of civic response, but in fact, it kind of didn't need these Nazi overlords to it, because the city was doing it for itself. The city's senior doctors, for instance, had been working all the way through.

The hospitals had stayed open. They opened up military hospitals in order to take in more casualties. On the medical side of it, they were extraordinarily organized. On the side of getting people out of the city, you know, as of 78,000 apartments had been completely

wiped out in the space of one night. And those who survived, obviously, had no homes. Where were they to go? So the local people organised billets in nearby villages, and so people took to the roads and were guided out of the roads. Food was brought in, tea was brought in. People were kind of extraordinarily looked after. They were volunteer medics coming from around the nearby part,

the volunteer firefighters who came in to try and do something about the seeding rubble that were made. Within a few days, they had the railways back up and running, which I just find extraordinary. makes a mockery of any idea that bombing railways is somehow an effective strategy it just can never is. There was a postal system within two days. And so, as I say, and also just small outbreaks of kindness and generosity, one of the most famous systems, we haven't touched on this at all actually, but out of the population of 6,000 Jewish people in Dresden before the Nazis came to power,

by February the 13th, 1945, there were 198 Jewish people left in Dresden. and among those 198 people they knew what had happened to all the friends and family who'd been deported to the death camps there was no secret about it but one of the most famous

of the Jersey Jewish citizens was Professor Victor Klempera who kept the most amazing diary of his war years absolutely forbidden Jews were not allowed to keep diaries but he kept it hidden

and his account was somebody he and his wife managed to get through the inferno having seen illimitable horror his wife tried to light a cigarette on what she thought was a bit of burning rubble

it actually turned out to be a corpse but as that morning dawned before the American Red came over somebody came up to Professor Clemperer and pointed at the yellow star and said now take that yellow star off now that no one will know this is your chance

no one will know save yourself and Clemperer thought oh right okay and he did and partly it was this kind of saving There was, as I said, there were so many small points of genobotty elsewhere throughout the story of judgment as people could have behaving like of human beings, it measurably could have moving. Then three months later, the Soviets move into the city.

It's May 1945, the Red Army come in, and they are very, very quick to establish total control. They put up street signs in Russian. They take over the schools. Russian is instantly taught as a second language. They take over every single aspect of political life, every single civic structure. They take over the shops. They take over the factories. They steal all the equipment for the factories, spirit it back to Moscow.

And then by the end of the 1940s, it becomes part of the German Democratic Republic, part of East Germany, and Jordan slides basically from one form of totalitarianism to another and doesn't shake that off until 1989. but in the course of that it has to be said and if you go to Dresden now actually interestingly

while at the the for instance the Soviets put great emphasis on rebuilding housing naturally there wasn't there wasn't a huge amount of money

because they turned down martial aid money in the late 1940s they wouldn't take it from the American gangsters who had bombed Dresden that's how they could put it

but they set to work on rebuilding housing and actually if you go to Dresden now you see a lot of the Soviet era housing projects and they're actually quite quite well built better than a lot of the equivalents in Britain.

And they rebuilt the main shopping streets in the 1960s. They put in a 1960s palace of culture. So the communist idea of rebuilding was this kind of utopian vision of we're going to restore Dresden as an artistic city, but in Soviet terms. But now, if you go back to Dresden, what you see is a city that's been rebuilt, recapturing its old soul. This Zwinga Palace, this Baroque, Fantasia has been perfectly restored, full of old masters' amazing paintings.

The Frow and Kierke, the Church of Our Lady, this amazing Baroque church with a fantastic dome that have been built in the 18th century, which collapsed in the days after the bombing, but which now have been rebuilt in every perfect detail, including the exact colours on the interior of the dome when you go inside. It's a Lucerne church, and you would think when you go outside, oh, but this is a reconstruction, This is a fake because I know that the original was destroyed in 1945. But you step inside and actually you don't feel that at all. You feel something quite definitely feel genuine life and vitality of soul.

And you realize that it's in this building radiating outwards that the old soul of Dresden, this old artistic, cosmopolitan, light, blithe, colorful soul that had been thriving before the Nazis came, has now finally been restored. Why were you drawn to this story? Because it has haunted the even. English imagination, certainly since 1945. It's certainly true. If you bring up Dresden anywhere now, if you bring it up in the

pub, even, you know, over drinks with friends, there's instant anger. There are a lot of people who will say Arthur Harris should have been tried as a war criminal or he should have been hanged for what he did. It touches some kind of nerve

simply because I think not just because it was an exquisitely ornamental to a beautiful city, but just the horror of 25,000 people being burnt to death in the space for a single night is a kind of lasting moral stain on what had otherwise been

the great British narrative of the war the British stood alone in 1940 with the Battle of Britain we had the Blitz, we had the blitz, we have an end of the war in the desert, the particular British narrative of the war with all the war films that came in the 1950 celebrating all of this

no one would ever make a war film about Dresden's. There was a statue to Arthur Harris put up in 1992 in central London, and the very idea of putting a statue up to him caused huge protests, an enormous amount of anger. But at the same time, what you meet in the story was, even though it's become a byword for all this in total horror,

it was wanted to find out about why the city was regarded as this amazing cultural jewel, and it's been fantastic to be able to research all the brilliance in terms of art, from music and literature. The city is produced over the centuries. It was a real, real pleasure to discover all of that, but also to discover the people who lived in the city. And also, on top of that, as I say, to read the accounts of those young men who knew that it was a beautiful city,

but were simply fighting this war in the way that they thought it would stop the war as quickly as possible. And the nature of their missions, flying deep into enemy darkness night after night, knowing that there was every chance they wouldn't come back. because they'd seen so many of their friends being blasted out of the skies. It's just an measurably kind of haunting moment in history on all sides, I think. And on this, the 75th anniversary, it's just now passing from living memory. And that, I think, because there's something from random about anniversaries.

They've always daft. But actually, 75th isn't daft. Because when something passes from living memory, you have to kind of acknowledge that it's important to keep the history of it is life as much as you can. And to do tribute to the people of Dresden, who themselves are the guardians of that history and making sure, as I say, that it's not hijacked by those who seek to use it for their own sinister political purposes. I think that's a great place to end. Sinclair McKay, the book is The Fire in the Darkness, The bombing of Dresden, 1945. Thank you so much for joining us on War College.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I thought this was wonderful. Thank you so very much. Sorry, I'm burbled on a bit. Well, one day I want to do an episode that's just all about how in a militarily ineffective strategic bombings are, and this made me think of it. Like, Dresden highlights all of the reasons why. Does bombing civilians ever work and has it ever worked in the course of history?

Now, people would say instantly, I suppose, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yeah, but I think there's... But I think that exists in a different realm. It exists in a different realm. And there's also, there's a lot of arguments in current research that says that the Japanese were also about, they were already done. And we were already firebombing their cities too, right? You know, those beauty. Indeed so.

Yes, Tokyo in March, 1945. Exactly. So all of those beautiful wooden buildings also gone up in firestorms. But yeah, and nuclear bombs are like a whole other, a whole other argument, right? Like you said. because that's simply vaporizing a city. That's going beyond even. And the fact is that they haven't been used since,

whereas bombing civilians has continued. You know, we look at Syria now, and I can't think of a single point in history where that has worked, because all you do is you make the survivors so furious. And you'd think the RAF, in particular, they've got all this great information from the Blitzkrieg, you know, all these stories about

how it brought everybody together and it made everybody you know like consistently when they study the effects on the civilian population that's the truth over and over again it makes people harden up

and it does the opposite of whatever its intended effect is you can't win you can't win a war just with bombs and there was you know in America in particular there was you know that was a really a I mean look at Vietnam for so long

how much of it was just a bombing campaign because we thought we could win the war that way. And like you said, it just doesn't, it doesn't work. History doesn't bear that out at all. It doesn't, but they'll carry on doing it. And the way that, because it becomes an article of faith. I mean, yeah, I mean, Arthur Harris, I thought it was quite interesting that point. Because within British command, you know,

his superiors were telling him, look, drop this bombing of cities stuff, just go for the factories. Do what the Americans are doing. Go for the factories. That works when you go for synthetic oil plants because it hampers the enemy. That has a direct effect on supply lines. We can see what the effect of that is,

bombing cities together. But Arthur Harris would not be swayed. And in the end, neither would Churchill. Churchill, you know, in the end, said, no, go for the city. And then recoiled after. Yeah, and I think that that's, again, one of those things where there was,

because they had fought these wars with the Germans for the last, you know, not just World War I, but even going back before then, I think there was a sense that the the German people had to be brought to heal in some way. Yeah. No, well, I quote, I quote in the book, Freeman Dyson, who actually is a brilliant contributor for New York Review of Books these days.

I hadn't realized he was still, I didn't realize if I'd realize he was still alive, I would have gone to interview him because he must be about 98 by now. But he was a young physicist at the time, and he remember going to a cocktail party, and he'd been a bomb a command, and he was talking to some woman after the war, and they were talking about the ethics of bombing, and she said, well, it was perfectly right that we bombed the babies. And he said, what? He said, yes, of course we had to bomb the German babies, because otherwise they'd be growing up to be Nazis.

And we'd be doing the whole thing, again, 21 years later. Right, okay. And again, it's beyond, it's not rational. No, no. I mean, at that point, those kinds of wars, what they do to a culture are, we don't, I mean, we're still figuring it out, right? It is still in the grand scheme of things so new. Well, like the shadow of Vietnam over America still. I mean, at what point is America going to stop examining Vietnam?

Probably not for a very, very long time. See, what worries me now is that we've got literally a generation engaged in wars overseas in the Middle East now. Half of it, more than half of it conducted in secret, and what are the ramifications of that going to be on our culture? But that's a whole other conversation. Well, thank you very much for your time. No, absolutely. conversation. It is genuinely a wonderful book. This is a subject I'm interested in. Strategic Bombing and its follies specifically, I think, is something we need to talk about more.

And I think your book does a great job of doing that while also being like a good piece of history that really focuses on, you know, it's military history, like you said, but also really focuses on the people that are caught up in that military history. So it was good. It was unlike anything, unlike other things I'm reading right now. Right. No, well, good old Jasmine City Archives. Well, thank you very much again. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to War College. War College is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin Nodell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, you can follow us on Twitter at MJG, AULT, and at KJK Nodell, and at War underscore College.

We will be back next week with more stories of conflict from behind the first. front lines. Stay safe until then.