The still burning problem of Dresden: Sinclair McKay’s masterful Dresden and David Price’s sobering The Crew show both sides of the story
Dresden
Sinclair McKay Viking £20
The Crew
David Price Head of Zeus £25
Rating: 
On the night of February 13, 1945, the east German city of Dresden was virtually obliterated by the RAF in one of the most brutally effective bombing raids of the Second World War. The following day, with the firestorm still raging out of control, another mass assault by American heavy bombers piled yet more misery and suffering on to a scene of devastation that survivors could describe only as ‘biblical’. But was the destruction of Dresden necessary?
At the time, the war in Europe was in its final phase, and German forces everywhere were in retreat. Dresden was crammed with refugees fleeing the Soviet advance, and it was widely regarded as a safe haven. But as Sinclair McKay explains in this masterful and measured account, there was another side to the story.
Dresden might have been famous for its beautiful china and its splendid buildings, but under Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, a personal friend of Hitler, it was a functioning cog in the Nazi war machine. The Zeiss factory, famous before the war for its cameras, was turning out precision optical instruments and, like other peacetime businesses in this and other cities, was reliant on a workforce of horribly maltreated slave labourers.
Sinclair McKay’s masterful and measured account of the allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945 shows there was more than one side to the story
McKay’s analysis of the sometimes flawed thinking of Allied strategists makes for troubling reading, but equating the toll of German civilians with the institutionalised genocide of the Jews, as some have done, seems to me unsupportable. There is only one Holocaust and the word should not be appropriated for anything else, however ghastly.
The men who dropped the bombs certainly didn’t think of themselves as murderers of civilians – they were too busy simply trying to stay alive.
The story of one Lancaster bomber crew, and of its last surviving member, former bomb-aimer Ken Cook, provides the focus for David Price’s sobering and poignant book. Attrition rates in Bomber Command were higher than at the battle of the Somme, and during the course of the war a staggering 55,573 British and Commonwealth aircrew were killed.
David Price’s sobering and poignant book, The Crew, tells the story of one Lancaster bomber crew, and of its last surviving member, former bomb-aimer Ken Cook (above)
The war fought up in the clouds by these mostly very young men was gruelling and remorseless as well as dangerous. Cook says he was embarrassed by the depictions of RAF crewmen in post-war British films. He remembers ‘a far tougher and coarser life of hard drinking and bad language’ than the anodyne celluloid version.
There were seven men in a Lancaster bomber, but according to one of the veterans quoted in McKay’s book there was always an eighth crew member present – fear.
The controversy over wartime saturation bombing shows no sign of fading away, but there should be no question mark at all over the bravery of the men who carried it out.