Dresden (14 page)

Nevertheless, at that time Bomber Command was definitely the junior partner to Fighter Command. Political pressures in the late thirties had led to a switch in purchasing policy. The government had invested massively in new fighters, leading the bomber arm to suffer relative neglect. The unfortunate results had shown themselves clearly in the early days of the battle for France. However, during the subsequent battle for Britain the government's decision seems to have paid off. The defending Hurricanes and Spitfires of Sir Hugh Dowding's Fighter Command—newer models, closer in quality to the opposing German aircraft than their bomber equivalents—fought off the Luftwaffe's attempts to establish air superiority and thus prevented a German cross-channel invasion.

During the high summer of 1940 the Germans concentrated on
attacking British airfields, an effective tactic that came close—though the enemy did not know this at the time—to inflicting a fatal blow on the island's fighter defenses. Then, smarting from the humiliation of a tiny RAF raid on Berlin and, it is said, hoping to lure the stubbornly resisting Spitfires and Hurricanes into the air in defense of their own capital, the Nazi leadership ordered its forces to attack targets in the heart of London. This decision is generally agreed to have been a great strategic blunder on Hitler's and Göring's part, far-reaching in its consequences. The spectacular results of the air raids on British cities, in terms of damage and casualties, may have bolstered morale in Germany, temporarily alarmed the Reich's enemies, and impressed neutral onlookers, but in direct military terms they achieved little except to infuriate the British people and provoke calls for revenge attacks by the RAF. Arguably the continued bombing campaign was actually an admission of defeat, a desperate alternative to the direct, annihilating contest with Fighter Command that, had the Luftwaffe emerged victorious, would have enabled it to rule the skies over England. Fighter Command survived. Its losses in the Battle of Britain were quickly replaced by the British aircraft industry, which was surprisingly little affected by the German raids that persisted through the autumn and winter.

 

FOR THE GERMAN PEOPLE,
the war it had embarked on rather reluctantly—if we are to believe other witnesses, including Klemperer—had apparently ended in triumph. Hitler's aggression seemed to have been vindicated. He was unquestionably hugely popular, even with Germans who had hitherto counted themselves skeptics.

The Third Reich held victorious sway from the Spanish border to the western Ukraine. If the British could not be conquered, they could be confined to their island and eventually made to sue for peace. Germany had defeated the traditional enemy, France, and driven the British back to their tight little island. This was 1918 in reverse, with the Germans on the winning side.

The war was over. This was the widely held belief in Germany. After all, what else could Churchill and his commanders do now except make peace? The Reich's civilian population would one day find out, but not yet.

Dresden and other Wehrmacht command centers in central and eastern Germany had been important jumping-off points for the absorption of the Czech lands and the invasion of Poland, but they had not had to suffer air raids, unlike the western German industrial cities. To the happy citizens of the German Florence, basking in the summer sun, for the moment all that mattered was that the war had been won—so it seemed—and won at minimal expense.

By the end of July 1940 units of the all-conquering Wehrmacht were coming home to heroes' welcomes in towns and cities that were as if at peace. On August 9, 1940, Dresden turned out in blazing summer weather to watch the returning Fourth Saxony-Dresden Infantry Regiment march through the streets and form ranks in the great cobbled square of the Altmarkt. The parade was, as a historian records, “an absolute high point in the life of the city…. Hundreds of thousands of onlookers—young and old—stood cheering on the pavements. They, like the soldiers, hoped that the war was now as good as over.”

Two weeks later, on the night of August 25, 1940, the RAF bombed Berlin. Despite minimal damage, Goebbels claimed that there was “colossal anger against the English.” To the Reich's propaganda chief this was healthy, since “now Berlin is also right in the middle of the war, and that is a good thing.”

More British raids on Berlin were to follow during the tail end of summer and into the autumn, though they were in truth largely symbolic. On September 11 Goebbels wrote in his diary mainly to gloat over German air raids against London:

By contrast, the same morning's entry deals with an RAF raid on Berlin the previous night, the latest of several since August 25. It is a masterpiece of cynical opportunism.

So feeble were the British efforts against German soil in the autumn of 1940 that Goebbels had to resort to faking British “atrocities” to rouse the German public. It was a time his fellow countrymen would look back on with nostalgia as months turned into years and it became clear that the war was not over.

THE GERMAN LAND FORCES
might parade through the homeland, giving their civilian compatriots the illusion of peace, but the Luftwaffe's air campaign against Britain continued with little respite through the winter of 1940–41.

On the evening of November 14, 1940, some 515 German bombers crossed the English coast, heading inland toward the country's industrial Midlands. Two-thirds of the attackers belonged to the Luftwaffe's Third Air Fleet, the rest to the elite pathfinder group, Kampfgruppe 100. It was a clear night with a full moon. Codename of the raid: Operation Moonlight Sonata.

The aircraft of KG 100, whose Heinkel 111s had been designated to lead the assault, were following the beam of a newly developed German direction-finding device known as the X-Gerät. This worked by a system of staged, intersecting beams sent out from two coastal transmission stations on the French side of the channel, one in Cherbourg and the other in Calais. The device not only enabled the aircraft to pinpoint their target to within a few score yards' accuracy over hundreds of miles, but also, by linking the operations of a special clock in each aircraft to a series of automatically triggered signals, provided a basic system of automated bomb aiming.

The X-Gerät was a very clever invention, though like all inventions in the air war, the enemy had quickly begun to find ways of countering it. That night the British (perhaps helped by their ability to read the enemy's coded signals traffic, or perhaps just benefiting from a lucky interception) had gotten a fix on the beams and were preparing to jam them, thus throwing the Germans off course. Unfortunately, owing to
human error, they were not close enough to the X-Gerät's frequency to fully realize that ambition. There was still a sufficiently clear distinguishing signal for the German navigators to follow it, so dooming their target to a fate that, like those of Rotterdam, Warsaw, and Guernica, would brand itself on the collective memory of the world.

The city of Coventry, just south of Birmingham, had been an important town for more than a thousand years. Lady Godiva, wife of the Anglo-Saxon Earl Leofric of Mercia, had in legend ridden naked on a white horse through its streets in protest against his imposition of crippling taxes on the common folk. In response, Leofric is said to have lifted all taxes except the one on horses. He also founded a Benedictine monastery on the site of a convent sacked by the Danes, whose church, dedicated to St. Mary, became a cathedral in the Middle Ages as the town became seat of the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield. The town itself became prosperous from the wool trade that the Benedictines had established, and later from the silk-weaving trade, though the old cathedral fell into decay after the Reformation, when the monastery was dissolved and the bishop's seat transferred to Lichfield. Only in 1918 was the bishopric revived, and the historic Gothic church of St. Michael—a building recognized as one of the finest examples of such architecture in Europe—designated as its cathedral, making Coventry by British rules once more able to call itself a city. By this time the silk trade was dead, as was the watch-making industry that had grown up in the eighteenth century. In common with most of the British Midlands, Coventry had become a center for light manufacturing and engineering, including bicycles, cars, airplane engines, and—fatally—after 1900, munitions.

Coventry, a city of more than 320,000 inhabitants, was therefore, in terms of what little law existed on the subject, a legitimate target for aerial bombing. It was also true that, in contrast to many industrial towns, but typical enough of the English Midlands, a lot of Coventry's factories and workshops were of a small to middling size and located in the ancient heart of the city, tucked in among and behind the half-timbered houses and winding lanes. In July and August the city had been subjected to fleeting air raids, which had killed a few dozen of its citizens, most memorably destroying a splendid new cinema, which had been finished just before the war. The next day it had been due to start showing
Gone With the Wind.

Like other wartime air raids that seemed to show extraordinary results, and thereby stick in the common memory, Coventry illustrated the use of a novel method—the X-Gerät. However, in this case there appeared not just one novelty but three. The second new procedure came when, at 7:20
P.M
., thirteen Heinkel 111 aircraft dropped a combination of special incendiary canisters and parachute flares onto the designated target area. As the canisters, which were filled with a phosphorus mix, fell to earth, they emitted a shower of sparks, almost like fairy lights on a tree. This method of delineating the target was to be copied and used by all sides throughout the rest of the war—notably by the RAF in February 1945. The final, lethal innovation was the use, along with conventional high-explosive bombs and a few so-called air mines, of masses of incendiary bombs. There was no mistaking the intention of the Luftwaffe on this moonlit November night: Its plan was to set Coventry ablaze.

At 7:30
P.M
., once the phosphorus canisters had been dropped, marking the target, the first wave of the main bombing fleet arrived. Soon it was time to add the high-explosive bombs to the mix. These were calculated to knock out the water supply, the electrical network, and the telephones. Then the railway. The great craters in the roads and streets would also make it hard for fire trucks and engines to reach the city center when the next stage came. For an hour streams of bombers droned overhead, relentlessly pouring incendiary bombs (regular magnesium and petroleum ones) onto the vast conflagration that was consuming Coventry.

At around 8 o'clock the first bomb had penetrated the roof of the cathedral, where Provost Howard of the cathedral; Jock Forbes, the master mason of the church; and two young men were keeping watch. Then came a second and a third bomb. The fire brigade was summoned, but they seemed to take their time. Two of the incendiary bombs were extinguished before they could catch, but the other had lodged above the great organ, in the space between the roof and the high ceiling, where all kinds of detritus, including dried-out birds' nests, provided excellent fuel. It was the first really serious blaze in the cathedral. Astonishingly, the little group of firefighters managed to bring it under control, using hand pumps and buckets.

Other bombs were falling all the time, however, and other fires starting. Provost Howard described their despair:

Almost every street in central Coventry was now on fire. The fire brigade headquarters itself had been badly damaged by a direct hit and was ablaze, which accounted for the delay. As were landmarks such as the Warwickshire Hospital, which had been hurriedly evacuated, all except for fifteen women in the gynecological ward who were not judged fit to be moved, and in another wing a dozen fracture cases who lay helpless in bed with legs in plaster, suspended from the ceiling. Through a great hole in the roof (a bomb had hit the head nurse's office), the patients gazed up at the sinister crimson glow of the burning city, and above it the German planes still circling overhead.

Without help from the fire brigade, the tiny band of amateurs trying to save the cathedral were bound to fail. When finally the professionals arrived, because of shattered water mains, they found themselves unable to access adequate water for its hoses—just as the Luftwaffe planners had hoped. Eerily, after the main body of the church had collapsed, for a few hours the spire stayed upright, its bells striking each remaining hour. Then, after midnight, the bells' supports disintegrated and they too tumbled to the ground and fell silent. The greater fire that was consuming the city could also not be controlled. Almost sixty thousand buildings were destroyed or damaged that night, a hundred acres of Coventry's built-up area. In all, the Germans had dropped five hundred tons of high explosives, thirty thousand incendiary bombs, fifty parachute landmines (a large metal box that would drift slowly and silently to earth and explode above ground level) and twenty incendiary petroleum mines. This was a new level of annihilation. The Germans invented a proud, jokey expression for what had been done; thereafter, any town that suffered a similar degree of destruction was said to have been
coventriert
—“Coventrated.”

There were, nevertheless, limitations to what the Luftwaffe could achieve. The German aircraft, two-or three-engined and designed to
be used in a ground support role as well as for strategic bombing, carried relatively light loads. The Coventry raid, like most major German raids in England, was, in essence, shuttle bombing. The enemy planes had to fly two hundred miles back from Coventry to their French bases to be reloaded with bombs. This led to lulls during which, despite the chaos, much could be achieved by those on the ground; fires fought, civilians evacuated. The raid did not actually reach its climax until almost midnight—four and a half hours after the Pathfinders of KG 100 had first marked the target. The bombers kept coming until the small hours, with the final all clear at 6:15
A.M
., more than eleven hours after the first warning.

So, despite the massive destruction of buildings and manufacturing capacity, a total of 568 civilians died in Coventry that night—blown apart, asphyxiated, above all incinerated, so that many of the bodies were unidentifiable.

Appalling as the effects of the fire had been, these casualty figures were relatively modest compared with Warsaw or (depending whose figures one believes) even Rotterdam, and as nothing compared with what would be achieved much later in the war. Cold comfort for the victims' relatives and the outraged British public, but the message about the feasibility of terrible mass killing by fire was chillingly clear, as was the identity of the message's sender: the German Luftwaffe.

Not that the Germans had done a “perfect” job in this raid or other attacks on British cities. As a cool and supremely professional observer would write after the war:

The writer was Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Travers Harris, also known as “Bomber” and “Butcher.” By then he knew exactly what he was talking about. Until earlier that autumn he had been commander of 5 Group, Bomber Command, based in Lincolnshire. At the time of the Coventry raid Harris was deputy chief of the Air Staff, a desk job, based at the Air Ministry. Just over a month later, he was to witness another major German fire raid, this time on London.

At about seven o'clock on the moonless evening of Sunday, December 29, 1940, Luftwaffe bombers arrived over the “City” of London—the historic heart, where much of its finest architecture and most venerable buildings were to be found. This was marked on the aircrew's maps as target area “Otto.” Guidance beams previously locked onto the docks, farther east along the river, had been redirected to cross exactly there. The Pathfinders of KG 100 started dropping their special incendiaries—more than ten thousand even in that first, marking phase—and by the time the main force arrived the area was already well on fire. A total of 136 aircraft were involved, and because they were operating on short hops from their French bases—much shorter than in the case of Coventry—they could save fuel and devote yet more cargo space to bombs, the vast majority of which were incendiaries.

The authorities had so far failed to set up a systematic network of firewatchers. The waters of the Thames were at their lowest point. Firefighters had to wallow through a chill, deep quagmire of mud as they attempted to connect the water for their hoses. Above all, it being a Sunday, the City was almost empty of the worker bees who filled its office buildings during the week. There were also few local residents to help with the struggle against the hundreds and even thousands of small fires that began to break out as soon as the first incendiary bombs fell. Individual incendiaries were generally fairly easy to douse, with the aid of a bucket of sand, and fires could be tackled with a water pump; it was the quantity of them, in big raids, that made it impossible to reach all of them before it was too late and larger fires formed. In the City there was also the added problem that many empty buildings were locked.

That night, London lost eight churches built by Sir Christopher Wren, as well as its exquisite fifteenth-century Guildhall. Fires also raged through the narrow streets and alleys in and around London's ancient center of printing and the book trade, Paternoster Row, hard by St. Paul's Cathedral. There the works of Shakespeare and many other famous British authors had first been set in type. All the area's fine old buildings were destroyed, along with thousands and thousands of precious books and other printed matter. Because of the confined, warrenlike layout of this part of the City, it was especially difficult to maneuver engines and fire-fighting equipment within it. The
result was that the smaller fires combined to form a single fire covering half a square mile, which was officially named a “conflagration.” It was the nearest London came to what later would be called a firestorm.

A published wartime account described that night, considered by many to be the worst of the entire London Blitz: