Recent bounty from the Library of America was a fine set of Kurt Vonnegut, and I am fresh off a much enjoyed reading of Slaughterhouse Five (1969). By the late winter of 1944 the Wehrmacht, doomed yet still dangerous, was in retreat on both its eastern and its western fronts. In the Ardennes the Germans had stunned the advancing Americans in the Battle of the Bulge and demonstrated quite clearly that the fight was not yet over. This was the context in which from its bases in England Allied Bomber Command ordered and executed a massive air attack on Dresden, an ancient “city of culture” that until then had been barely touched by the war’s violence. The raid began on Shrove Tuesday, almost exactly seventy-six years ago. Much of the ordnance was incendiary, igniting a firestorm that resulted in vast material destruction and appalling human carnage among the city’s civilian population, swollen by hordes of refugees from the advancing Red Army.
For many historical commentators this event lives in infamy, to coin a phrase. Military justification for the raid was at best highly questionable. Any country on a “total war” footing, as Germany certainly was, could perhaps be regarded as having military targets everywhere. There were indeed strategic light industries in Dresden, especially various lens-grinding ateliers producing high quality optical instruments, and British propagandists made as much of this as they could. The claim that the city was a major transportation hub with a complex ganglia of rail routes linked to all parts of Germany was undeniable. But everyone also knew that it was a residential, not an industrial city; and anyone with access to military intelligence reports knew as well that it was practically bursting with a huge influx of non-combatant refugees —especially women and children-- fleeing before the Russian advance. That Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda czar, presented it as a Massacre of the Innocents was to be expected; but his “take” was in essence adopted by the few journalists from neutral countries (Switzerland and Sweden) posted in Germany. Churchill, who had been a prime mover of the increasingly ferocious tactics of Allied Bomber Command, did his best now to protect his historical reputation, seldom entirely distant in his mind.. RAF Air Marshal “Bomber” Harris thought no special scruples were required when targeting an enemy whose V-2 rocket bombs were being fired randomly in the direction of the English capital, and Carl Spaatz, Harris’s counterpart in the US Army Air Corps, seemed nonplussed by criticisms of the raid.
Slaughterhouse Five is a terrific novel, enriched by Vonnegut’s unique dark humor and relentless but measured irony. It has a complex narration. It begins as autobiography, with Vonnegut explaining how he came to write “my famous Dresden book,” implicitly presented as having been completed some considerable time in the past. But the book’s first two sentences do not encourage a lot of biographical confidence. “All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.” The book is truly famous indeed, and among the critical commonplaces concerning it, two are prominent. The first is that it is about the Dresden raid. The second is that it is “an anti-war classic”. The claims are not exactly wrong, but in my opinion they hardly do justice to the book. The extent to which it is an anti-war classic has little to do with didactic intention or the book’s narrative posture. What I shall call the empirical Kurt Vonnegut was at the beginning of 1945 an American infantryman captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge, shipped all the way across Germany to Dresden in Saxony, and confined with other POWs in a makeshift prison in an old commercial abattoir. There, with a morbid irony, the prisoners safely waited out the devastation that had turned a great city into a slaughterhouse for so many of its own inhabitants. Though skating across a surface of obviously autobiographical experience, Vonnegut the novelist is steady in his effort to generalize, mythologize, and indeed fantasize the narrative. A good deal of the book, perhaps too much in my view, is given over to its hero’s sci-fi persecution by space aliens from the Planet Tralfamadore. Once past the first chapter, which ends by declaring the failure of the book still ahead for the reader, the narration switches to the third person and the “Vonnegut figure” is a very ordinary joe named Billy Pilgrim. With this name Vonnegut invokes a classic literary tradition of peregrine commentators on worldly folly that includes Pilgrim’s Progress and Candide. That war is hell is not the point of the book, but its premise.
The statistical comparison of hecatombs is a sordid business at best, but even atrocities can be characterized by degree. Vonnegut actually cites The Destruction of Dresden (1963) by David Irving, who had not yet been branded as a “Holocaust denier” or accused of racist neo-Nazism. The lowest plausible estimate of civilian deaths in the Dresden raid is enormous, about 25,000. At various times Irving multiplied that number tenfold, and his own rock bottom was 135,000, one of the lower figures originating from the Goebbels propaganda machine and backed by fraudulent documents. By fictionalizing it, Vonnegut also spread the canard that American fighter planes had strafed civilians in the streets. One may wonder whether the subtitle of his book (“The Children’s Crusade”) is more comforting than “Massacre of the Innocents.” Only when stimulated by this extraordinary work of fiction did I realize, with a start, that it was the probable source of what little I thought I had known and certainly believed about the Dresden raid for most of my life. Novelists have equal license to use history, or abuse it. Their obligation is to their art. One serious military historian characterized my view of the matter, which is to say Billy Pilgrim’s, as one “absorbed by countless undergraduates for whom the book has been received wisdom since its publication in 1969”.* Those are sobering words for an English professor.
For me the absorption had not even been conscious, but a kind of accidental and unpleasant cultural transfer, like stepping on a gob of chewing gum. The bombing of Dresden was simply criminal. Why, then, do I continue to demur in face of the nearly universal opinion concerning Hiroshima and its yet more flagrant slaughter? For the comparison seems obvious to all, as it certainly did to Vonnegut, who raises it with heavy irony in Slaughterhouse Five in a baroque episode of the post-War life of Billy Pilgrim, the same episode in which he endorses the work of David Irving.
The condemnation of Truman’s decision to use the Bomb has now become nearly universal, but it is actually the fruit of generational change. Few veterans of Guadalcanal or Tarawa found the bombing of Hiroshima obscene, but such men are now very thin on the ground. Scarcely a person living today was a mature adult in summer of 1945, when the decision was implemented. Japanese military policy was controlled by a fanatic medieval warrior code in which bloodless capitulation was unthinkable. In the invasion of Okinawa, the Americans had suffered 50,000 casualties. About 100,000 impressed Japanese civilians, some of whom had been armed only with pointed bamboo sticks, many of them compelled by their brutal army overlords to commit suicide, were dead. Okinawa was a fairly remote place in the Ryukyus. One could but imagine what would happen in invading the home islands, where the warlords declared there was no such thing as a civilian, and that every Japanese man, woman, and child must fight to the death for every yard of their native soil. Truman’s decision might be justified on classical utilitarian grounds. He made a bet that the Bomb could end the war, and he won.
I was quite young during the War and unable to appreciate either the arduousness or the brilliance of the American naval war in the Pacific. Certainly I was innocent of moral subtlety. What I knew was that my Dad was there, in the thick of frightful things that made my Mother anxious, silent, and teary-eyed; and strange place names like Midway, “the Marshalls,” “the Solomons,” “the Marianas,” Iwo Jima, the Leyte Gulf, though lacking all geographical specificity, troubled my imagination. I knew I wanted “us” to bomb the hell out of the Japs, and right away. I suppose that had to be the way little British boys thought about Dresden.
The past can be lamented, regretted, or even deplored. Or it can be imaginatively remade in serious make-believe by a fine writer. But it cannot be cancelled, as so many well-intentioned but misguided souls now pretend. For what does not exist loses all pedagogic potential. What does not live in memory can too easily revive by recurrence. Obligatory oblivion likewise wars against human nature as expressed in a famous saying of the Roman writer Terence: “I am human, and I reckon that nothing human can be alien to me.” So it goes, as Billy Pilgrim might say.
*Marshall De Bruhl, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 278.
