War is Hell

Union General and future President Ulysses S. Grant was absolutely correct when he described war as Hell, a literal place of fire and brimstone. I have already explored the reasons there have been very few years in history when the world was not engaged in warfare some place. I think this is a good time to revisit the topic by examining the worst of the fighting.

The one historical battle, not counting the land battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War, which stands out in my memory for its brutal violence, was the devastating air attacks on the German city of Dresden. According to Wikipedia, the city was bombed seven times during the period of 1944-1945. There were 772 heavy bombers of the RAF and 527 of the United States Air Forces (USAAF) that participated. Resistance was relatively minimal as the Allies lost only 13 aircrafts. 

The fires were so horrific that they demonstrated what Hell must be like in the human imagination. The resulting firestorms destroyed 1600 acres of the city’s center. Later attacks focused on the city’s railway marshalling yard and a smaller one in April that went after the city’s industrial center.

During February 13th and 15th, the Allies dropped an estimated 3900 tons of high explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the near helpless city of Dresden and its 600,000 inhabitants. This is not counting an estimated 300,000 refugees who had fled the violence, which was prevalent in most European cities. Most of Dresden’s inner city was virtually leveled to the ground.   

I believe the reason my vivid picturing of this horrific aerial assault was due to one of my frequent callers I had on my radio program on WGNU in St. Louis in the latter quarter of the 20th century. The caller was a German woman with a very sharp accent. I cannot remember her exact name, but I know I used to call her Schatzy.

She told my audience that she lived on the outskirts of Dresden during the war and had been spared the obliteration, though she had been close enough to feel the torrid heat which killed several thousand Germans. I remember distinctly her telling me one of her sons had been in the Panzerwaffe tank corps and had been forced to ride out the bombings in one of their primeval forests. Her stories were so real I could almost smell the carnage and feel the intense heat of the slaughter in my earphones.

Eyewitnesses and historians report that the Allied damage from their air raids was so extensive that a narrow-gauge light railway was constructed for the purpose of removing the debris. The seven-line railway system employed 5000 staff and 40 locomotives to accomplish their job. The major clearing did not end until 1958. However, it was not until 1977 that the last of the debris was finally removed.

Churchill and his military advisers reasoned that German non-combatants were part of the German Volk who gave moral and material support to their armies and therefore were legitimate targets for destruction. The German citizen was now viewed as the same kind of threat as Germany’s Panzers and their Wehrmacht soldiers. This was a serious strategic and moral departure from England’s traditional war-making machine.

Dresden, known as Germany’s Florence on the Elbe, was universally revered for its architecture and art. This change in British warfare tactics was quite a controversy and an extreme deviation from former Allied strategies. In effect this meant that the Allies planned to accomplish the total annihilation of many of Germany’s most important metropolises.

The raids became the symbol of Churchill’s terror bombing campaign, which wreaked havoc and destruction on many German cities. His purpose was to overwhelm German leaders and their infrastructure, especially transportation, in order to send waves of panic, create thousands of refugees so as to overpower their home defenses.  

Dresden was considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world. After it was pounded by 800 bombers carrying 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries, one had to strain to see any hints of its pristine beauty. While it had been virtually ignored throughout the war, Churchill was looking for a knock-out blow. 

He chose Dresden to implement his vicious strategy of carpet bombing, also known as obliteration bombing. The term was applied to a very large swath of German territory late in the war. The strategy had originated during the Spanish Civil War in 1938. In 1940, the Luftwaffe set the entire city of Rotterdam on fire with the Rotterdam Blitz. 

The Royal Air Force had targeted virtually every inch of Germany’s major cities. The Dresden Historian Commission estimated that the city lost nearly 25,000-35,000 people during these raids, mostly women and children. Many world leaders tried to outlaw carpet bombing, citing the Hague Rules of Air Warfare of 1922-23.

One of the bombings’ architects was Stanley Baldwin, one of England’s wartime leaders. The intention behind it was to serve to break down the morale of the German civilians and lessen their abilities to give aid and comfort to their armies. Their goal was that this destruction would eventually compel Germany’s government to surrender.

Many critics argued its limited military value did not justify its widespread destruction. It was largely indiscriminate bombing, which is without any specific target. Given its relative lack of strategic value and the high number of civilian wounded and killed, the bombing of Dresden caused many critics to call these attacks a war crime. Many in the American and British camps disagreed, calling the attacks necessary and proper to end the war.

In an essay written earlier this year for H Vault, author Volker Janssen raised the pivotal question: Why was Dresden so Heavily Bombed? The city was a vital railway and road center for the German Wehrmacht. The Allies hoped the bombings would create a massive logjam of traffic that would hamper Germany’s war efforts and paralyze its military response. The Allies originally hoped this three-day series of concentrated bombing would force a German surrender. 

Since the city’s air defenses and the Luftwaffe had already been silenced by British bombing, the results were extremely destructive, and some would say cruel. As shocking and brutal as it was Dresden did not stand out as several other German cities were flattened into piles of rubble. For instance, in July of 1943, Hamburg generated the first large firestorm and killed 30,000 Germans. 

Many American prisoners of war were on the ground when the bombs fell. They were frightened by the sirens that started to go off on the 13th. These sirens howled right above their heads, driving many mad. Others sought shelter in railway tunnels and two stories underground in a meat locker, which spared their lives. When the bombing stopped, they all went back to the surface. Many commentators noted early that the bombing of Dresden, not only meant the death of civilians but the destruction of European culture and Baroque splendor.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut was one of the survivors of the firebombing. Vonnegut commented the city was gone and with it virtually all of its population. Some years ago, I read his book Slaughterhouse Five which was based on his near-death experiences as a Prisoner of War in Dresden. He believed that the scale of death and destruction seemed beyond comparison. 

Vonnegut had been deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge by the Germans. A published novelist, his big break came when he published one based on his experiences in the War. His Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969. Its anti-war sentiments found a ready audience, given that the United States was in the midst of a long and unpopular war in Vietnam.

Vonnegut and others rode out the attacks in a meat slaughterhouse. After the bombings stopped, he was assigned to the cleanup crew. He wrote that the city looked like it were full of people who had suffered heart failure. There were people just sitting in their chairs, all dead, robbed of oxygen by the all-consuming firestorm. I think the German high command realized the end was near.  Fewer than three months later, Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis committed suicide, including most of the German high command. What was left of it signed the unconditional surrender of all German forces.

Slaughterhouse-Five follows the war experiences of his stand-in protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, a native of Illum, New York. The novel is a clever mixture of fact and fantasy. The narrator, who is actually the author, centers its attention on Billy’s capture by the Germans and his survival of the Allied bombing of Dresden while a prisoner of war. Critics called it one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time. It includes time travel and many subplots which add to its ultimate confusion. It was adapted into a film in 1972.

The novel seriously reflects the authors disgust with human warfare.  It critiques the destructive nature of war through the experiences of the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, who becomes unstuck in time and experiences moments from his life linearly. His narrative structure emphasizes the chaotic and often senseless nature of human existence, especially in the context of warfare. The author suffered in the rampant inhumanity during his capture and came to realize the horrors of war and its nefarious impact on humanity. Some of its universal themes include the illusion of free will, war’s devastation, the inevitability of death and the nature of time.

While the German Blitz over England gathered most of the headlines, as well as the subject of many books and movies, little coverage was given to Germany’s destruction. The main focus was on other major European cities, such as Belgrade with its 17,000 dead and Warsaw with up to 25,000 fatalities. This is not to forget the nuclear Holocaust in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed a combined total 150,000 of the Japanese people.

Shortly after the Dresden dust started to settle, many chose hindsight to berate the Allies for making a slaughterhouse of their once beautiful city. Dresden was a densely populated metropolis having thousands of war refuges among in population many of them fleeing the advancing Russian troops.

Fortunately, many of Dresden’s historic landmarks were saved or reconstructed, including the Augustus Bridge and the Zwinger, a palatial complex with gardens the city’s Cathedral, the Kreuzkirche in 1955. The ruins of the Frauenkirche were allowed to remain as a war memorial. By 2004 it was completely reconstructed.

It also helped that the German character was resilient and used to these kind of destructive events, which allowed Dresden to return as one of Germany’s leading cities. However, the Nazi movement did not completely disappear, since as late as 1999, Neo-Nazi groups organized demonstrations in Dresden, which were considered among the largest of their type in German post-war history. 

Personally, I believe that Vonnegut’s attempt to expose the horror of war just does not work for me. His introduction of the Tralfamadorians, small, one-eyed, one-handed beings, having a four-dimensional view of the world. They also have a peculiar philosophy of time, claiming to see all events past, present and future at the same time. Their view of the universe informs their feelings on life, death, and fate. It is very difficult to separate fact from the fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five. One thing is certain the author has been able to not only describe the horrors of Dresden but also underscore the mental disassociation of its terrors.

My final analysis is that the author’s bizarre plot with all its scientific fiction quirks may be candid proof of what his war experiences did to his mind. Battles such as Dresden have been effective in generating a war movie catalogues of motion pictures from Hollywood about this subject. Below is my list of 10 films that I believe are representative of the genre. In no certain order they are:

1. All Quiet on the Western Front– 2022*
2. Apocalypse Now– 1979
3. Born on the 4th of July– 1989
4. Catch-22– 1970
5. The Deer Hunter– 1978
6. Full Metal Jacket– 1987
7. Hamburger Hill– 1987
8. M*A* S*H– 1970
9. None but the Brave– 1965
10. The Thin Red Line– 1998

*There are more than one film with the same title. I have selected the most recent.