Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 | Frederick Taylor | Thorough, Readable and Illuminating

Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 | Frederick Taylor | The Raid That Went Horribly Right

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Dresden: Tuesday, ...

	Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 Frederick Taylor HarperCollins, 2004 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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The bombing began shortly after 10:00 P.M. on February 13, 1945. In the fifteen hours that followed, 1,100 American and British heavy bombers dropped more than 4,500 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices, leaving the ancient city of Dresden -- "the Florence of the Elbe" -- in flaming ruins and claiming the lives of thousands of its citizens. Twelve weeks later the German surrender was in hand, signaling the end of World War II.

Yet today the bombing of Dresden is embedded in our collective consciousness not as the toppling blow to Nazi Germany but as one of history's cruelest wartime atrocities, a vicious and militarily unjustifiable act of vengeful retribution against a peaceful, beautiful, defenseless city somehow removed from the war-making machinery that had otherwise consumed all of Germany.

What really happened at Dresden -- both the facts of the events themselves and the reasons behind the remarkable legacy of propaganda that has left us in the dark about those events for nearly sixty years -- is the subject of Frederick Taylor's ground breaking study. After careful research into British, American, and German archives (including recently discovered documents, now available after decades of communist censorship) and interviews with both bombers and survivors, Taylor -- a bilingual scholar, translator, and writer -- has created the most complete portrait ever assembled of the city, its people, and those involved in its fate. Many of his findings require a revelatory shift in how we understand these events. For instance, he demonstrates that

the numbers of dead -- frequently cited in excess of 100,000 -- were greatly exaggerated, for propaganda purposes, by Josef Goebbels (Taylor estimates the actual death toll at between 25,000 and 40,000)

charges that Allied pilots overhead shot down German civilians as they fled toward safety were patently false

contrary to popular belief, Dresden was a city of considerable military importance, both as a transportation hub and a major producer of armaments and military provisions.

Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 is the first truly informed and fair-minded history of the bombing that lives in infamy. Frederick Taylor's book, a responsible and long-overdue corrective to a sixty-year-long legacy of misinformation masquerading as fact, will be remembered for generations both as a work of enduring scholarship and as a moving, compassionate narrative of a human tragedy of historic significance.

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Thorough, Readable and Illuminating

This is how I like my history: intensely readable, balanced and thoughtful. Taylor excels himself in writing about this controversial subject. His thorough grasp both of the historical context in which Dresden existed and of the events that led to its destruction never falters.

Frederick Taylor is a writer who is passionately engaged in his subject and it shines through on every page. I cannot recommend this absorbing and complex book highly enough.

The Raid That Went Horribly Right

" .... much of what has been thought and said about Dresden since its destruction (February 13, 1945) owes a great deal to the efforts first of the Nazi and then Communist propagandists." In this book, author Frederick Taylor attempts to present the known facts of the Dresden raid in the context of the date of the raid. He notes that while Dresden didn't deserved to be destroyed, by the standards of the time it was "....a legitimate military target."

The first four chapters outline Dresden's history from the thirteenth century to the twentieth century. A historic and magnificent city, Dresden was known as "Florence on the Elbe." The Nazi regime took power in 1933. The text gives an excellent, brief outline of life under the Nazi. British Bomber Command was ill prepared to begin offensive operations following the 1939 German invasion of Poland and suffered heavy losses. The Luftwaffe's November 14, 1940 raid on Coventry resulted in 568 civilian deaths. Amazingly, this raid showed that area incendiary bombing destroying infrastructure had lasted far longer and caused long-term difficulties for war production than the actual bombing of the industrial plants."..."From September 1940 to March 1941 the Luftwaffe launched raids on Britain killing more than forty thousand civilians. These Luftwaffe raids became the model for British strategy. Commander of Bomber Command Arthur Harris noted "It would have taken Bomber command much longer to learn how to attack Germany if it had not been for the lessons of the German attack on Britain."

Taylor covers the history of aerial bombardment and outlines the allied WWII strategic bombing campaign against Germany. Most interesting is the text's explanation of the strategic value of Dresden. Dresden had the big Zeuss-Ikon complex employing over ten-thousand workers on war contracts, the city also contained 127 critical factories and it was a strategic rail center. At the beginning of the war, Dresden was considered beyond the RAF's range and was thought immune to air raids. The text devotes five chapters to describe the actual February 13, 1945 bombing of the city by the British and American forces. Mixing with the text narratives, first-person accounts of the air crews and those of the German soldiers and civilians, the book paints a gruesome picture of the hell in Dresden during and after the raid. Except for minor variances, the raid went horribly right operationally! German propaganda proclaimed a distorted casualty figure of 250,000 for Dresden as opposed to the actual number killed of approximately 25,000. When the communist overran Dresden they continued to proclaim the erroneous casualty figures.

The closing text is devoted to the post war discussions and moral questions of the city's fate. The author notes that "The macabre argument over the death toll at Dresden still continues." Taylor continues that "The fact that one of Europe's finest cities was almost entirely destroyed--while much, though by no means all, of what made it a legitimate target for bombing survived--can be criticized and condemned."

While countless works have been published on the bombing of Dresden, Taylor uses several German and Allied sources to write an account in English that both the historian and history buff will find informative and interesting.

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Decent Review Of History

Makes an interesting read because there is so much controversy about the bombing, i.e. was it necessary etc.

Regardless where your opinion falls, it is necessary to confront one undeniable fact - at the end of the Second World War the German people were so badly beaten that they had utterly no will to resist at all, despite German efforts to set up roaming bands of insurgents (the "werewolves," etc.). Alfons Heck's memoir is instructive in this regard, how small acts of resistance on the part of individual German units were met with overwhelming and vastly lopsided force, and how demoralizing this was to the average German. I believe this is what William F. Buckley meant when he said regarding the current war in Iraq, that the only means available to defeat the insurgency involves measures that we will not consent to use.

Think about that. Was the bombing of Dresden horrible? Sure it was. Were civilians the target? You bet they were, in part.

But was that a war worth winning by any means necessary? I defy you to watch Shoah and then try answering "no."

The bottom line is that the Germans picked a fight, acted like a nation of serial killers and then were treated in kind. That sums it up pretty well I think.

But yeah, the book is a good read.

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Military logic - or military minds run amok?

`Dresden' - the book - is Taylor's contribution to the revived controversy surrounding the 1945 firestorm bombing of the city of Dresden. While extremely interesting and recounted in great detail, I still had mixed feelings about some of his conclusions. Taylor who is out to dispel the "myths" surrounding the notorious saturation bombing totes a questionable fine line as to whether he is arguing a case for military target legitimacy... or for complete annihilation.

He spends much time building a case for why Dresden was a legitimate military target. Nearly every German city had by this time been conscripted to the war effort, and yes, Dresden may have had legitimate targets, but the destruction inflicted upon the civilians was so ferociously excessive contrasted with the relatively minor damage done to military infrastructure, that it makes the argument almost moot.

The first RAF bombing raid excluded the Marshalling yards, Hauptbanhof, Marienbrücke railway bridge and troop barracks... obvious military targets if you are bombing to disable troop movement. It was -only- during the 2nd bombing raid, seeing that the Altstadt was completely engulfed in flames, that the RAF bomber leader made a snap decision - on his own - to target the fringes, otherwise the second target drop would have been exactly as the first.. the Altstadt itself. This is as much of an admission as you are ever going to get that the 1st and 2nd RAF raids were sent not so much for its military targets but for sheer chaos or "dehousing" as it was called.

The author however, does an excellent job revealing the lack of preparedness for a possible all out air raid, and shows how Dresden was truly undefended that night. When the author, who in no way seeks to minimize the horrors, is finished recounting the devastation inflicted on the inhabitants (told mainly through survivor first hand accounts), and you realize that there is still more come by way of the USAAF,... you are in disbelief.

Taylor is less successful at dispelling the "myth" of strafing. His method is to give credence to anyone who did not witness strafing, and to dismiss accounts of those who did as being "confused and traumatized" people. Yet there is documentation of an order to strafe and Taylor even prints it in his book. There are far too numerous recollections of this happening ( in many cities ) to dismiss out of hand. The official RAF Bomber Command web site page for Dresden 1945... still reads:

"Part of the American Mustang fighter-escort was ordered to strafe traffic on the roads around Dresden to increase the chaos and disruption to the important transportation network in the region."

Anyway, what Taylor spends most of his time on is counting the dead .. and since no one ever went to jail for reducing the number of Dresden victims, his final number is far lower than the 100 to 200 thousand often claimed.Taylor's final number of 30,000 seems low considering the number of refugees in the city, but it appears he has covered every angle on this based on documents that are known to exist.

The dense writing style of the book comes across as impenetrable but it is not without it flaws or manipulations.There are several carefully crafted statements throughout the book which while true on their face, are given in a near vacuum without addressing coherently the history of the economic and political turmoil of not only Germany but all of Europe in the years prior to Hitler. Statements such as "Dresden was a Nazi stronghold even before Hitler" are simply torn from their essential historical and political context, insinuating that in Dresden the early Nazi party rose to power on a wave of anti-Semitism rather than being the counter-revolutionary byproduct to massive destabilizing movements by communist/socialist forces.

While most people regard WWII as a `just war' it is also a war filled with mutual slaughter and atrocities with each nation bearing the weight of its own moral transgressions. To call it `strategic bombing' is merely a label and if a nation were to commit such an atrocity against a civilian population today that nation's leaders would surely be branded as war criminals.

Taylor may have been successful at some things, but he is by no means that last word on the subject. His greatest contribution is showing us how military minds run amok. Dresden was neither the first nor the last German city to be firebombed with devastating civilian casualties - but the Saxony city still manages to arouse both controversy and curiosity and Dresden still holds its place in history as a symbol of wars devastation and ruthlessness.

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