Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden

Air & Space Power Journal, Summer, 2008 by Peter W. Huggins

Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang. Ivan R. Dee (http://www.ivanrdee.com), 1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago, Illinois 60622-2694, 2006, 272 pages, $16.95 (softcover).

Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan by A. C. Grayling. Walker and Company (http://www.walkerbooks.com), 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011, 2005, 320 pages, $25.95 (hardcover).

Moral questions regarding the use of force are often the toughest issues for practitioners and thinkers of warfare to face. Most military people recognize, at least on an instrumental level, the need for restraint in warfare; morality plays an important role if for no other reason than to provide a vision for how we ought to fight. Yet morality can be a tough taskmaster, leading to stinging critiques of our performance on the battlefield and forcing us to confront episodes of history that one might prefer to leave undisturbed.

Two recent works provoke that level of discomfort. Both Firestorm, edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, and A. C. Grayling's Among the Dead Cities take fresh looks at "area bombing" during the Second World War. In doing so, they force the reader to face up to the very real moral issues surrounding the use of airpower in this period.

Firestorm is an edited volume based on a colloquium held at the University at Edinburgh in May 2003 "to discuss the causes, the conduct, and the consequences of the bombing" (p. ix) of Dresden in February 1945. The contributors do not share one particular viewpoint regarding the event; in fact, the authors disagree at times on certain conclusions. But collectively they provide an important reexamination of the bombing of Dresden and the ways it "has come to symbolize the military and ethical questions involved in the waging of total war" (p. x).

The work offers a number of important contributions to the scholarship on Dresden. Richard Overy makes a compelling case, based on recently discovered primary sources, that the number of civilian casualties resulting from the raid was significantly less (approximately 25,000) than previously unsupported assertions by authors such as David Irving. Both Tami Davis Biddle and Sebastian Cox agree that the raids represented "business as usual" for both the Royal Air Force's (RAF) Bomber Command and the United States Army Air Force's (USAAF) Eighth Air Force. However, while Cox argues that Dresden was a militarily significant target, as a center of administration and communication as well as war industry, Sonke Nietzel maintains that the raid, in the end, produced no military advantage for the allies.

The contributors assert other, more disturbing, conclusions. Biddle makes the case that one of the Allied objectives for the Dresden raids was to create an obstacle, through the use of refugees, to hinder the German Wehrmacht's attempts to reinforce the Eastern Front against the approaching Soviet offensive. She also notes that, unlike what one might have expected to happen at the beginning of the war, no debate occurred amongst Allied war leaders about the use of civilian refugees for this purpose. Biddle attributes this lack of debate to "hardened attitudes" among the war leaders at this stage of a long and exhausting war, as well as their anxiety about the conflict's future direction in the immediate aftermath of the Ardennes offensive. Donald Bloxham contends that the bombing of Dresden was, in fact, a war crime: "Had an independent war crimes tribunal with full international jurisdiction been established in 1945, there would have been a strong prima facie case for it to consider the bombing [of Dresden] as a war crime" (p. 180). In doing so, Bloxham provides a thoughtful discussion on the principle of proportionality and airpower--that is, what is the balance between the hoped-for military advantage gained from area bombing on the one hand and the resulting civilian deaths and destruction of property on the other? All in all, this volume is an important addition to the literature on the use of airpower and morality in the Second World War.

In Among the Dead Cities, British philosopher A. C. Grayling takes a similar yet broader tack than Donald Bloxham's contribution in Firestorm by seeking to answer the question "Did the Allies commit a moral crime in their area bombing of German and Japanese cities?" (pp. 2-3). Unlike Firestorm, which focuses exclusively on the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, Among the Dead Cities casts a critical eye at area bombing throughout the war, including the USAAF's XXI Bomber Command's firebombing of Japanese cities starting in March 1945. In doing so, the book provides a passable synthesis of the history of the intellectual development of the RAF's bombing doctrine, as well as the history of Bomber Command in the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO), but does not make any new contributions to the current understanding of the field. Grayling also scrutinizes British public dissent of the RAF's area-bombing campaign and makes a compelling case that the government was aware of the humanitarian impact of this policy. He also analyzes the arguments used in defense of area bombing. Grayling is to be credited for at least presenting these defenses; in some cases, however, he discounts generally effective arguments, such as Richard Overy's compelling line of reasoning about the CBO's overall impact on the German war effort.