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DAVID IRVING'S ACCOUNT
David Irving’s book, The Destruction of Dresden, was published about 50 years ago. It appeared at a time when it was not generally known in England what Britain had done to Dresden in February 1945, when the war was being wound up. It caused quite a stir in England and made many react with revulsion.
There had only been a few critics of Churchill’s conduct of the war (mostly from British military backgrounds, like Captain Grenfell) who wondered whether the World War which Britain had declared, supposedly to free Poland from totalitarian government and which had resulted in totalitarian government installed across half of Europe, had really been worth it. But there was little actual knowledge of the things that the Allies had visited on Germany in punishment for its success against the Anglo-French armies.
Irving had written his book on Dresden after finding out the facts for himself when he had being working in Germany as a welder. It has a Foreword by an Air Marshall of the RAF, Sir Robert Saundby. And it is too fair by half on Britain, if anything.
In the last decade or so – 25 years after his book on Dresden – Irving has been accused of denying the Jewish Holocaust and has been ostracized as a result from respectable academic circles. About fifteen years ago he was prevented from speaking in a number of Irish universities on this basis, although at the time no evidence from his books was produced to justify the assertion (Irving’s books published into the 1980s reveal no denial – rather the argument that the Nazi regime got on with the killing of the Jews rather independently of the Fuhrer.)
What this has to do with his work on Dresden – which should be allowed to stand on its own merits – is neither here nor there. But, of course, if slogans to do with “fascism” or “anti-Semitism” are thrown thought is not necessary.
Irving did not, as some have suggested, in any edition of The Destruction of Dresden from 1963 to 1985, state that 250,000 had died in Dresden. He said in a prominently displayed author’s note that the accepted minimum estimate was 35,000, the post-war German estimate was 135,000, and American sources had put it at 200,000.
It is quite obvious why accurate figures for casualties in Dresden were hard to come by – the British bomber crews incinerated tens of thousands of refugees seeking shelter from the advancing Soviet armies in Dresden, as well as foreign labourers and prisoners of war. Its 600,000 population was swollen by an estimated further 500,000 refugees fleeing from the Red Army. It was both hard to count the bodies, or what was left of them, and to know who had been there before the incineration and account for them afterwards.
Nobody knows for sure just how many innocent civilians were bombed and burned to death in Dresden. Most accounts now put the total between 40,000 and 50,000. What was beyond dispute was that its destruction was of no military significance whatsoever. It did not shorten the war by a minute, it was entirely unnecessary and neither was it really intended to be of any military consequence.
The war to all intents and purposes was won in February 1945 and the city itself had no military, political or industrial significance. And the British Government was well aware that it was defenceless against air attack.
A DEFENCE AND A BELATED EXPRESSION OF REGRET
A few years ago a British writer, Frederick Taylor wrote a book that sought to justify the massacre at Dresden. A reviewer in The Irish Times noted:
“He makes the case that bombing Dresden’s railway Infrastructure knocked out the vital gateway to Sudetenland and Bohemia: 20,000 officers passed through one of Dresden’s two main train stations each day. Eye witnesses described Dresden, not as a city of culture, but an armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery. Weeks before the attack the Nazis reclassified Dresden a Verteigiungsbereich, a defence area of strategic military importance.”
Surely the fact that the Red Army was bearing down upon it would make Dresden “a defence area of strategic military importance.” If “20,000 officers passed through one of Dresden’s two main train stations each day” the whole officer corps of the German army would have gone through it in just over a week!
But was the railway junction the target of the bombers, as Taylor asserts? We have first hand evidence to suggest it wasn’t – or at least to verify it became the “target” only after the event, for reasons of propaganda.
This letter by a member of bomber-crew, Mr.A. Williams of Nottingham; published in The Observer, August 8th 1984 suggests that the real target for the bombers was not the military facilities of Dresden but the people of the city and refugees from the Soviet advance:
“On 13th, February, 1945, I was a navigator on one of the Lancaster bombers which devastated Dresden. I well remember the briefing by our Group Captain. We were told that the Red Army was thrusting towards Dresden and that the town would be crowded with refugees and that the centre of the town would be full of women and children. Our aiming point would be the market place.
“I recall that we were somewhat uneasy, but we did as we were told. We accordingly bombed the target and on our way back our wireless operator picked up a German broadcast accusing the RAF of terror tactics, and that 65,000 civilians had died. We dismissed this as German propaganda.
“The penny didn’t drop until a few weeks later when my squadron received a visit from the Crown Film Unit who were making the wartime propaganda films. There was a mock briefing, with one notable difference. The same Group Captain now said, ‘as the market place would be filled with women and children on no account would we bomb the centre of the town. Instead, our aiming point would be a vital railway junction to the east.’
“I can categorically confirm that the Dresden raid was a black mark on Britain’s war record. The aircrews on my squadron were convinced that this wicked act was not instigated by our much-respected guvnor ‘Butch’ Harris but by Churchill. I have waited 29 years to say this, and it still worries me.”
A week or so later the RAF destroyed the small jewellery and clock producing town of Pforzheim, reducing it to ashes on the night of 23 February. It was still flammable because it had been ignored up until then as militarily insignificant. It had dense working-class housing, narrow streets, sandstone buildings and no firewalls. It was undefended and had minimal fire-protection. It was a laboratory waiting for the fire-storm experiment.
There was a fire zone of nearly two miles whipped up and a third of the inhabitants, 20,000 were incinerated. Metal became molten and Pforsheim turned into lava. Master Bomber Edwin Swales was awarded the Victoria Cross for his work in the RAF’s most successful raid ever, in terms of proportion of inhabitants killed to total population (1:3). British physicists had worked out the mechanics of the firestorm in an area-wide conflagration, with vertically flaring hot air, producing a storm that sucked in horizontally to fill the vacuum that further fanned the area blaze.
At the very end of the war Churchill attempted to distance himself from the bombing campaign he had himself ordered:
“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing. … I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives, such as oil and communications behind the immediate battle-zone, rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.” (Memo to the Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Chief of Air Staff, March 28, 1945, in Max Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 344.)