Dresden destruction 'jusfified'

The order to RAF Bomber Command's Five Group for its operations for Tuesday 13 February 1945 could hardly have been more stark: "To burn and destroy an enemy industrial centre." The target chosen was Dresden, Germany's seventh largest city, only a little smaller than Manchester. It was, as one report put it, "by far the largest unbombed built-up area in Germany".

Dresden was not merely a city, but a work of art in itself, an architectural jewel whose aesthetic attractions had made it Saxony's pride for nearly half a millennium. That long chapter of its history closed when a 1,000-bomber raid created a firestorm that burned for 48 hours, consuming virtually the entire city centre and incinerating between 25,000 and 40,000 people. The before-andafter photographs featured in this scholarly, objective, sane and well-written book emphasise the astonishing scale of the destruction.

Yet, for all that the bombing of Dresden - called by some "the German Hiroshima" - has been regularly denounced as a war crime, Frederick Taylor disagrees. The extensive work he has done in archives in Germany and Britain has led him to the conclusion that Dresden was a legitimate military target, and that its bombing was, in fact, justified in the context of total war. It is a tremendously powerful work, profoundly moving in the accounts of ordinary German families who met their deaths that dreadful night.

Overall, however, Taylor explains the high death toll - which was, of course, nothing like the six-figure one claimed by Joseph Goebbels and David Irving - not in terms of deliberate Allied policy so much as a number of "accidental factors".

"In practical terms," Taylor argues convincingly, "Dresden was one heavy raid among a whole, deadly sequence of massive raids, but for various unpredictable reasons - wind, weather, lack of defences and, above all, shocking deficiencies in air-raid protection for the general population - it suffered the worst." When the Nazi gauleiter of Dresden, Martin Mutschmann, fell into Allied hands, he quickly confessed that "a shelter-building programme for the entire city was not carried out", since, "I kept hoping that nothing would happen to Dresden." (He had a shelter built for himself, his family and his senior officials, however.)

Quite why Mutschmann thought that, alone of large German cities, Dresden should have been immune to Allied bombing is a mystery, for Taylor establishes what a nodal point its railway marshalling yards were, and what a conglomeration of war industries - particularly in the vital optics, electronics and communications-fields - the city had acquired in the previous eight months since the Allies had landed on D-day. (In case anyone was to doubt the Nazi enthusiasms of its population, Taylor reproduces a photograph of the vast pro-Hitler demonstration held the day after the attempt on the F¸hrer's life in July 1944.)

Yet, once the Lancaster bombers had wrought their terrible destruction, the political outlook of many Dresdeners and other Germans changed. Taylor quotes the respected German historian Gotz Bergander's opinion that whereas before Dresden the concept of accepting unconditional surrender was considered unthinkable by ordinary Germans, "the shock of Dresden contributed in a fundamental way to a change of heart".

In the hard and ill-tempered debate over the precise numbers who died that awful night and morning, Taylor argues, in an authoritative appendix, that the generally-accepted figure of between 25,000 and a maximum of 40,000 is correct. This actually makes the raid less lethal than those on Hamburg, and proportionately less deadly than those on places like Pforzheim and W¸rzberg. Taylor goes so far as to say - and he backs it up with incontrovertible historical evidence - that "the attack on Dresden was routine".

No one has ever denied the horror of what happened to the beautiful city of Dresden on the night of 13 February 1945; the 1,000-degree heat from the firestorm could be felt by the RAF aircrew at more than 10,000 feet above the city. But Taylor rightly pays tribute to the bravery of Bomber Command - of men like Mike Tripp and Bruce Wyllie of the RAF and Alden "Al" Rigby of the USAF - who night after night heroically undertook missions from which several tens of thousands of their comrades never returned.

They attacked what Taylor describes as "a functioning enemy administrative, industrial and communications centre that by February 1945 lay close to the front line". They did what they had to do.

Andrew Roberts's Hitler and Churchill is published in paperback by Phoenix later this month.