Dresden Bombing: Competing Narratives

The Dresden firebombing is one of the more controversial aspects of World War II history. There are two competing narratives in the case of the bombing. The Allied justification is that with the Soviets advancing quickly on the eastern front, bombing Dresden would severely hamper German troop mobility and arms production and hasten the end of the war. At this stage in the conflict, it is clear that Germany will eventually lose the war, as the Soviets had already advanced past pre-war German borders, but according to Allied leaders, area bombing of Dresden would help the Soviets break through the final German defenses and bring the end of the war. The other side believes that the bombing of Dresden was a useless destruction of a cultural city that had very few military targets and was housing over one hundred thousand refugees at the time of the bombing.

One thing that we have discussed some in class is the idea of the death toll being conflicted. German propaganda had the death toll at nearly 200,000, while recent estimates from studies done by historians claim as few as 25,000 deaths. With that huge of a difference in the death count, it is of little surprise that this is a controversial event. Vonnegut claims that about 130,000 people died in his novel, which is a fair estimate based on the time it was written. When people are criticizing Vonnegut for the number, I think it is important to note that at the time Slaughterhouse-Five, this was considered a fair estimate. Another claim that Vonnegut makes is far more interesting: “And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the firebombing of Dresden. So it goes” (Vonnegut). Here, Vonnegut claims that the firebombing of Dresden was the greatest massacre in European history. This claim is a little more controversial, especially since we are talking about World War II. It can be argued that the Holocaust is an assortment of many massacres, and doesn’t quite fit under the massacre situation, but in any case, this is an interesting claim to make due to Europe’s long history of warfare and massacres. While Vonnegut is clearly not claiming the bombing of Dresden was worse than the Holocaust, he is giving people that do and opportunity to use his work.

Even if Vonnegut’s claim that Dresden was the greatest massacre in history isn’t quite indisputable, and even if the 130,000 number is disputed, I still think that the main point of Slaughterhouse-Five holds. The fact that when people quote the 25,000 figure, it is usually written as “only 25,000” shows just how devastating the bombing was. The war was basically won, and at that point the only question was whether the war ended in May or November. The tension between Allied forces was probably a driving factor in the hasty decision making. In 1945, the seeds of the Cold War are already planted, and an extra layer of tension is added when Poles find out that the post-war agreement between the Soviets and the Western Allies concedes parts of Poland to the Soviet union. Many Poles who were fighting with the British were angered by this, especially considering Britain entered the war to guarantee Poland’s independence in the first place. With all this tension among leaders of the various Allied powers, rash decisions were made in an attempt to win the war. Dresden was an avoidable massacre, and thousands of lives were taken for no good reason.