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The aircrew in both forces shared a host of similar views and scares, but – as McKay evocatively shows – had widely different opinions on what we would now call ‘collateral damage’. The USAAF in Europe, under the command of General Carl Spaatz, adopted a different bombing philosophy – that of precision daylight attacks on specific, single targets, such as oil refineries, ball-bearing works, and railway marshalling yards – which Harris dismissed, quite incorrectly, for many of these exacting raids, when successful, caused great damage to the Nazi war-effort. There was often friction between Portal and Harris, and Harris sailed so ‘close to the wind’, especially during the build up to D-Day, that he might have been relieved of his command. Bomber Command followed a particular line of logic in its campaign: the belief that the conflict could be won from the air. Harris’s superior was Marshal of the Air Force Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, who as early as 1941 acknowledged that the RAF’s bombing tactics needed to change from precision bombing to area bombing, and was thus broadly in agreement with the tactics employed on the Dresden raids. In his memoirs, he points out that the Luftwaffe had sought fire typhoons in Coventry and London, although in the latter this had never been achieved. Harris’s role as AOCinC has, particularly in post-war years, become almost as controversial as the bombing of Dresden itself, for he was an unflinching advocate of area bombing rather than precision bombing, and equally of large blast bombs as a natural progression from the 250lb general-purpose bomb that had been the main weapon of Bomber Command when he became AOCinC. McKay next introduces Air Chief Marshal (‘Bomber’ or ‘Butcher’) Arthur Harris, Air-Officer-Commanding-in-Chief (AOCinC) of RAF Bomber Command, who was ultimately responsible for the British and Commonwealth air forces’ element in the bombing of Dresden. Neither was Dresden a bastion of anti-Nazi sentiment: its burgomaster was but one of the high-ranking party officials who had aggressively persecuted the local Jewish population, including by his active participation in Kristallnacht. It is also revealed that the massive raids that lay ahead were not, as is often stated, the first air raids on Dresden, for the USAAF had carried out attacks in October 1944 and January 1945, with significant casualties on both occasions. It then moves on to the days immediately prior to the bombardments and tells of the air of normality prevailing, but it also tells the reader of the secret production of war material that the city – often using slave labour (from the Flossenbürg, Auschwitz, and Ravensbrück camps) – was involved in at sites adjacent to its centre.ĭresden had since the 1920s been famous for its optical goods, with its precision-produced lenses and the like now being used by all three branches of the Nazi armed forces. The book’s main narrative begins by reviewing buildings and life in the city from just after the Great War and waxes lyrical on the beauty of Dresden, with its world-famous cathedrals, opera houses, and public buildings.
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Sinclair McKay’s well-researched, detailed, and all-embracing book is the first major study of the bombing of Dresden to be published for 15 years, and covers equally the pre-war history of the city – ‘The Florence of Germany’ – the horrors of the RAF and USAAF attacks, and the mainly Stalinist-style rebuilding prior to German reunification. In fact, Pforzheim, attacked even later in the war than Dresden, suffered a greater number of casualties per head of population – an often-overlooked fact. The Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden over the period 13-15 February 1945 was almost certainly the most controversial conventional bombing attack of the Second World War, although it did not bring about the greatest number of casualties, either in absolute terms or as a percentage of population.