Operation Overload
Friedrich, Jörg & Bruhl, Marshall De
BOOKS IN REVIEW ion ad IXTY YEABS AFTER THE EVENT, the mass bombing of Germany still raises anxious thoughts, and reading these two impressive books is a sad experience. JSrg Friedrich's...
...NOVEMBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...Leaders of comparable seniority in all three services received peerages but Harris was denied one...
...It has also been frequently cited as proof that bombing is not a war-winning strategy in general...
...I was an English schoolboy, 11-16, while the bombing campaign was taking place, and listened daily to the BBC bulletin which gave all the German cities bombed the previous night...
...He, and the survivors of Bomber Command, bitterly resented this cowardly snub...
...But De Bruhl concludes that Dresden, "with its pre-war light industries retooled and revamped to provide vital military goods and services, and with its vast network of railroads, highways and river traffic, was clearly a viable military target...
...So we used it for all it was worth, with the backing of the entire nation...
...One exception was Roland Friesler, the vicious and hysterical judge who presided over the trials of those involved in the July 1944 anti-Hitler plot...
...Yet the numbers killed were, bearing in mind the huge bomb weights and the firestorms raised, surprisingly few...
...But by then the war was practically over, and the crime, if it was a crime, had been committed...
...On March 28,1945, he minuted his chief of staff General "Pug" Ismay, "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed...
...JSrg Friedrich's volume is the first comprehensive and deeply researched book on the subject written from a German point of view, while Marshall De Bruhl's study of what is widely regarded as the worst atrocity, the on Dresden in February 1945, is the best book subject I have read, obliterating the effect of The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945 by J6rg Friedrich, translated by Allison Brown (COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 552 PAGES, $34.95) Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden by Marshall De Bruhl (RANDOM HOUSE, 368 PAGES, $25.95) Reviewed by Paul Johnson the earlier and sensational work by David Irving, which we now know to be grossly exaggerated...
...Nobody I knew, or heard of at the time, had a word to say against the bombing or did anything but Paul Johnson's many books include Modern Times, Intellectuals, A History of the English People, and A History of the American People...
...The city was an important component of the Nazi war machine...
...But high-altitude night bombing by Bomber Command was inaccurate at this stage, and "area bombing," as it was sometimes called, was indiscriminate but justified on the grounds that it 66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW demolished the housing of the workers in the war factories, when it did not actually kill them...
...I T HAS ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME that the bombing of Germany, though justified in the years 1940 to 1944, became progressively less so as Soviet advances in the East, and the success of Operation Overlord in the West made Nazi defeat on the ground increasingly certain...
...And certainly Harris himself to his dying day believed he and his men had made a decisive contribution to victory...
...After the war, when Churchill was replaced by Clem Attlee and his Labour government, uneasiness about the bombing grew, and was expressed in a characteristically English way...
...The one powerful weapon we possessed was Bomber Command, under its redoubtable and ruthless commander, Air Marshall Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, and the use of this weapon was the only way in which we could damage Germany's warwaging capacity, and "make the Germans pay" for starting the war in the first place...
...Moreover, he adds, the raid, plus American follow-up attacks, successfully knocked the city out of the war...
...No responsible military planner could ignore it...
...rejoice at what we believed to be its triumphant effectiveness...
...Dresden was Germany's seventh largest city and perhaps its finest art and architectural center, so the huge raid on February 13, 1945, was more controversial...
...bombing policy, after America joined the war and became an enthusiastic partner in the effort...
...He drove to his headquarters at High Wycombe every day in a huge Packard (then a very uncommon car in the UK), often at high speed...
...Our wartime experience suggests bombing is not a successful way of eliminating individual enemy leaders...
...Friedrich says over a hundred Allied pilots were lynched in the last years of the war, sometimes with the connivance of the Nazi authorities...
...But the evidence of both these books is more nuancde...
...And many of Germany's smaller war-industry towns were completely destroyed...
...Only a tiny number of top Nazis were killed by bombing...
...He was buried in the rubble of his own courtroom...
...Some of the photos are horrifying, particularly one of the massed corpses of the Dresden raid piled on iron gratings for incineration...
...But Harris was left out of the victory honors list...
...Churchill sensed this...
...There were some incidents in which angry mobs of civilians attacked Allied prisoners of war believed to be bomber-crews...
...On the other hand, it forced Germany to divert air defense and fighter resources from the eastern front and thus made it easier for the Russians to win the ground war there...
...Young man," said the "Bomber," "every night I kill thousands...
...The policy of giving mass-bombing of German industrial areas high priority was throughout decided by the War Cabinet, and Harris merely carried out orders...
...JSrg Friedrich tells the story from the viewpoint of the bombed with, it seems to me, great skill and objectivity, and with many gruesome details...
...The policy was costly in aircraft and crews...
...At Pforzheim, for instance, a precision-engineering center with hundreds of small workshops, 80 percent of the buildings were wrecked and 25 percent of the workforce killed...
...He wanted some German industry preserved to help rebuild Britain, and he was uneasy about German civilian casualties...
...It has to be remembered that in the first half of the war, right up to the victory of Alamein in November 1942, Britain experienced an unrelieved succession of defeats, and for most of the time was fighting Nazi Germany alone, without the smallest prospect of winning the war...
...On one occasion he was stopped by a country policeman, who gave him a rustic lecture on the risks of speeding...
...German morale held up well, despite the failure of Hitler's rockets offensive, which Goebbels's Propaganda Ministry hailed as "retribution...
...Why, Sir, one day if you're not careful, you might even kill someone...
...He was a curious and rasping figure about whom many tales were told...
...Attlee and Labour had been in the wartime coalition and endorsed the bombing policy, so they could not repudiate it openly...
...Wherever possible specific targets were selected, whose destruction had a direct impact on the Nazi war-making capacity, and this was the avowed object of U.S...
...Only once was the moral issue raised publicly, by the Bishop of Chichester, and he found few supporters...
Vol. 39 • November 2006 • No. 9
