The Blood of Dresden
By Kurt Vonnegut
It was a routine speech we got during our first day of basic
training, delivered by a wiry little lieutenant: “Men, up to now you’ve been
good, clean, American boys with an American’s love for sportsmanship and
fair play. We’re here to change that.
“Our job is to make you the meanest, dirtiest bunch of scrappers in the
history of the world. From now on, you can forget the Marquess of
Queensberry rules and every other set of rules. Anything and everything
goes.
“Never hit a man above the belt when you can kick him below it. Make the
bastard scream. Kill him any way you can. Kill, kill, kill – do you
understand?”
His talk was greeted with nervous laughter and general agreement that he was
right. “Didn’t Hitler and Tojo say the Americans were a bunch of softies?
Ha! They’ll find out.”
And of course, Germany and Japan did find out: a toughened-up democracy
poured forth a scalding fury that could not be stopped. It was a war of
reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a
high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were
fighting – other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards. A new kind of
war, with all destruction, all killing approved.
A lot of people relished the idea of total war: it had a modern ring to it,
in keeping with our spectacular technology. To them it was like a football
game.
[Back home in America], three small-town merchants’ wives, middle-aged and
plump, gave me a ride when I was hitchhiking home from Camp Atterbury. “Did
you kill a lot of them Germans?” asked the driver, making cheerful
small-talk. I told her I didn’t know.
This was taken for modesty. As I was getting out of the car, one of the
ladies patted me on the shoulder in motherly fashion: “I’ll bet you’d like
to get over and kill some of them dirty Japs now, wouldn’t you?”
We exchanged knowing winks. I didn’t tell those simple souls that I had been
captured after a week at the front; and more to the point, what I knew and
thought about killing dirty Germans, about total war. The reason for my
being sick at heart then and now has to do with an incident that received
cursory treatment in the American newspapers. In February 1945, Dresden,
Germany, was destroyed, and with it over 100,000 human beings. I was there.
Not many know how tough America got.
I was among a group of 150 infantry privates, captured in the Bulge
breakthrough and put to work in Dresden. Dresden, we were told, was the only
major German city to have escaped bombing so far. That was in January 1945.
She owed her good fortune to her unwarlike countenance: hospitals,
breweries, food-processing plants, surgical supply houses, ceramics, musical
instrument factories and the like.
Since the war [had started], hospitals had become her prime concern. Every
day hundreds of wounded came into the tranquil sanctuary from the east and
west. At night, we would hear the dull rumble of distant air raids.
“Chemnitz is getting it tonight,” we used to say, and speculated what it
might be like to be the bright young men with their dials and cross-hairs.
“Thank heaven we’re in an ‘open city’,” we thought, and so thought the
thousands of refugees – women, children and old men who came in a forlorn
stream from the smouldering wreckage of Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Munich.
They flooded the city to twice its normal population.
There was no war in Dresden. True, planes came over nearly every day and the
sirens wailed, but the planes were always en route elsewhere. The alarms
furnished a relief period in a tedious work day, a social event, a chance to
gossip in the shelters. The shelters, in fact, were not much more than a
gesture, casual recognition of the national emergency: wine cellars and
basements with benches in them and sandbags blocking the windows, for the
most part. There were a few more adequate bunkers in the centre of the city,
close to the government offices, but nothing like the staunch subterranean
fortress that rendered Berlin impervious to her daily pounding. Dresden had
no reason to prepare for attack – and thereby hangs a beastly tale.
Dresden was surely among the world’s most lovely cities. Her streets were
broad, lined with shade-trees. She was sprinkled with countless little parks
and statuary. She had marvelous old churches, libraries, museums, theatres,
art galleries, beer gardens, a zoo and a renowned university.
It was at one time a tourist’s paradise. They would be far better informed
on the city’s delights than am I. But the impression I have is that in
Dresden – in the physical city – were the symbols of the good life;
pleasant, honest, intelligent. In the swastika’s shadow, those symbols of
the dignity and hope of mankind stood waiting, monuments to truth. The
accumulated treasure of hundreds of years, Dresden spoke eloquently of those
things excellent in European civilisa-tion wherein our debt lies deep.
I was a prisoner, hungry, dirty and full of hate for our captors, but I
loved that city and saw the blessed wonder of her past and the rich promise
of her future.
In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone
and embers; disembowelled her with high explosives and cremated her with
incendiaries.
The atom bomb may represent a fabulous advance, but it is interesting to
note that primitive TNT and thermite managed to exterminate in one bloody
night more people than died in the whole London blitz. Fortress Dresden
fired a dozen shots at our airmen. Once back at their bases and sipping hot
coffee, they probably remarked: “Flak unusually light tonight. Well, guess
it’s time to turn in.” Captured British pilots from tactical fighter units
(covering frontline troops) used to chide those who had flown heavy bombers
on city raids with: “How on earth did you stand the stink of boiling urine
and burning perambulators?”
A perfectly routine piece of news: “Last night our planes
attacked Dresden. All planes returned safely.” The only good German is a
dead one: over 100,000 evil men, women, and children (the able-bodied were
at the fronts) forever purged of their sins against humanity. By chance, I
met a bombardier who had taken part in the attack. “We hated to do it,” he
told me.
The night they came over, we spent in an underground meat locker in a
slaughterhouse. We were lucky, for it was the best shelter in town. Giants
stalked the earth above us. First came the soft murmur of their dancing on
the outskirts, then the grumbling of their plodding towards us, and finally
the ear-splitting crashes of their heels upon us – and thence to the
outskirts again. Back and forth they swept: saturation bombing.
“I screamed and I wept and I clawed the walls of our shelter,” an old lady
told me. “I prayed to God to ‘please, please, please, dear God, stop them’.
But he didn’t hear me. No power could stop them. On they came, wave after
wave. There was no way we could surrender; no way to tell them we couldn’t
stand it any more. There was nothing anyone could do but sit and wait for
morning.” Her daughter and grandson were killed.
Our little prison was burnt to the ground. We were to be evacuated to an
outlying camp occupied by South African prisoners. Our guards were a
melancholy lot, aged Volkssturmers and disabled veterans. Most of them were
Dresden residents and had friends and families somewhere in the holocaust. A
corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front,
ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children and both of
his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.
Our march to new quarters took us to the city’s edge. It was impossible to
believe that anyone had survived in its heart. Ordinarily, the day would
have been cold, but occasional gusts from the colossal inferno made us
sweat. And ordinarily, the day would have been clear and bright, but an
opaque and towering cloud turned noon to twilight.
A grim procession clogged the outbound highways; people with blackened faces
streaked with tears, some bearing wounded, some bearing dead. They gathered
in the fields. No one spoke. A few with Red Cross armbands did what they
could for the casualties.
Settled with the South Africans, we enjoyed a week without work. At the end
of it, communications were reestablished with higher headquarters and we
were ordered to hike seven miles to the area hardest hit.
Nothing in the district had escaped the fury. A city of
jagged building shells, of splintered statuary and shattered trees; every
vehicle stopped, gnarled and burnt, left to rust or rot in the path of the
frenzied might. The only sounds other than our own were those of falling
plaster and their echoes.
I cannot describe the desolation properly, but I can give an idea of how it
made us feel, in the words of a delirious British soldier in a makeshift POW
hospital: “It’s frightenin’, I tell you. I would walk down one of them
bloody streets and feel a thousand eyes on the back of me ’ead. I would ’ear
’em whis-perin’ behind me. I would turn around to look at ’em and there
wouldn’t be a bloomin’ soul in sight. You can feel ’em and you can ’ear ’em
but there’s never anybody there.” We knew what he said was so.
For “salvage” work, we were divided into small crews, each under a guard.
Our ghoulish mission was to search for bodies. It was rich hunting that day
and the many thereafter. We started on a small scale – here a leg, there an
arm, and an occasional baby – but struck a mother lode before noon.
We cut our way through a basement wall to discover a reeking hash of over
100 human beings. Flame must have swept through before the building’s
collapse sealed the exits, because the flesh of those within resembled the
texture of prunes. Our job, it was explained, was to wade into the shambles
and bring forth the remains. Encouraged by cuffing and guttural abuse, wade
in we did. We did exactly that, for the floor was covered with an unsavoury
broth from burst water mains and viscera.
A number of victims, not killed outright, had attempted to escape through a
narrow emergency exit. At any rate, there were several bodies packed tightly
into the passageway. Their leader had made it halfway up the steps before he
was buried up to his neck in falling brick and plaster. He was about 15, I
think
.
It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but,
boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I have
described and innumerable others like it were filled with them. We had to
exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks, so I
know.
The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great
was the toll. There was not enough labour to do it nicely, so a man with a
flamethrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay.
Burnt alive, suffocated, crushed – men, women, and children indiscriminately
killed.
For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a
Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally
cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.
When we had become used to the darkness, the odour and the carnage, we began
musing as to what each of the corpses had been in life. It was a sordid
game: “Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief . . .” Some had fat purses and
jewellery, others had precious foodstuffs. A boy had his dog still leashed
to him.
Renegade Ukrainians in German uniform were in charge of our operations in
the shelters proper. They were roaring drunk from adjacent wine cellars and
seemed to enjoy their job hugely. It was a profitable one, for they stripped
each body of valuables before we carried it to the street. Death became so
commonplace that we could joke about our dismal burdens and cast them about
like so much garbage.
Not so with the first of them, especially the young: we had lifted them on
to the stretchers with care, laying them out with some semblance of funeral
dignity in their last resting place before the pyre. But our awed and
sorrowful propriety gave way, as I said, to rank callousness. At the end of
a grisly day, we would smoke and survey the impressive heap of dead
accumulated. One of us flipped his cigarette butt into the pile: “Hell’s
bells,” he said, “I’m ready for Death any time he wants to come after me.”
A few days after the raid, the sirens screamed again. The listless and
heartsick survivors were showered this time with leaflets. I lost my copy of
the epic, but remember that it ran something like this: “To the people of
Dresden: we were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military
traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying. We realise that we
haven’t always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other than
military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.”
That explained the slaughter to everyone’s satisfaction, I am sure, but it
aroused no little contempt. It is a fact that 48 hours after the last B-17
had droned west for a well-earned rest, labour battalions had swarmed over
the damaged rail yards and restored them to nearly normal service. None of
the rail bridges over the Elbe was knocked out of commission. Bomb-sight
manufacturers should blush to know that their marvellous devices laid bombs
down as much as three miles wide of what the military claimed to be aiming
for.
The leaflet should have said: “We hit every blessed church, hospital,
school, museum, theatre, your university, the zoo, and every apartment
building in town, but we honestly weren’t trying hard to do it. C’est la
guerre. So sorry. Besides, saturation bombing is all the rage these days,
you know.”
There was tactical significance: stop the railroads. An excellent manoeuvre,
no doubt, but the technique was horrible. The planes started kicking high
explosives and incendiaries through their bomb-bays at the city limits, and
for all the pattern their hits presented, they must have been briefed by a
Ouija board.
Tabulate the loss against the gain. Over 100,000 noncombatants and a
magnificent city destroyed by bombs dropped wide of the stated objectives:
the railroads were knocked out for roughly two days. The Germans counted it
the greatest loss of life suffered in any single raid. The death of Dresden
was a bitter tragedy, needlessly and wilfully executed. The killing of
children – “Jerry” children or “Jap” children, or whatever enemies the
future may hold for us – can never be justified.
The facile reply to great groans such as mine is the most hateful of all
clichés, “fortunes of war”, and another: “They asked for it. All they
understand is force.”
Who asked for it? The only thing who understands is force? Believe me, it is
not easy to rationalise the stamping out of vineyards where the grapes of
wrath are stored when gathering up babies in bushel baskets or helping a man
dig where he thinks his wife may be buried.
Certainly, enemy military and industrial installations should have been
blown flat, and woe unto those foolish enough to seek shelter near them. But
the “Get Tough America” policy, the spirit of revenge, the approbation of
all destruction and killing, have earned us a name for obscene brutality.
Our leaders had a carte blanche as to what they might or might not destroy.
Their mission was to win the war as quickly as possible; and while they were
admirably trained to do just that, their decisions on the fate of certain
priceless world heirlooms – in one case, Dresden – were not always
judicious. When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht breaking up on all
fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the
question was asked: “How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that
benefit compare with the ill-effects in the long run?”
Dresden, a beautiful city, built in the art spirit, symbol of an admirable
heritage, so antiNazi that Hitler visited it but twice during his whole
reign, food and hospital centre so bitterly needed now – ploughed under and
salt strewn in the furrows.
There can be no doubt that the allies fought on the side of right and the
Germans and Japanese on the side of wrong. World war two was fought for
near-holy motives. But I stand convinced that the brand of justice in which
we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations, was blasphemous. That
the enemy did it first has nothing to do with the moral problem. What I saw
of our air war, as the European conflict neared an end, had the earmarks of
being an irrational war for war’s sake. Soft citizens of the American
democracy had learnt to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard
scream.
The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans,
embraced us and congratulated us on the complete desolation our planes had
wrought. We accepted their congratulations with good grace and proper
modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my life to
save Dresden for the world’s generations to come. That is how everyone
should feel about every city on earth.
© Kurt Vonnegut Jr Trust 2008
Extracted from Armageddon in Retrospect by Kurt Vonnegut, with an
introduction by Mark Vonnegut, is published by Jonathan Cape at £16.99.
Copies can
be ordered for £15.29, including postage,
from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Margaret
Freyer was living in Dresden during the firestorm created on 13th February,
1945.
The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and
screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno.
To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never
forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she
falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire.
Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and
gesticulate with their hands, and then - to my utter horror and amazement -
I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the
ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack
of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders.
Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself
continuously: "I don't want to burn to death". I do not know how many people
I fell over. I know only one thing: that I must not burn.
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