Updating the Mongols

THE BOMBING OF GERMANY by Hans Rumpf. 256 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.50.

The city of Dresden, teeming with war prisoners and refugees, was of little military importance. It was so unlikely a target that its antiaircraft had been dismantled. Yet on the night of Feb. 13, 1945, three months before the war was to end, Allied bombers raided the city, demolishing eleven square miles of magnificent buildings and killing some 150,000 people, far more than the total number who died in either atomic raid on Japan and almost three times the number killed in all the German attacks on Britain.

Dresden was only one of 70 German cities that were at least 50% destroyed by the so-called "strategic" bombing raids of the R.A.F. and U.S.A.A.F. These raids were intended to force Germany to surrender by destroying civilian morale. But Hans Rumpf, a brigadier general who headed German civil defense during the war, is the latest of a number of military analysts to conclude that the raids did nothing to shorten the war and unnecessarily took the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, largely women and children. Strategic bombing, British Military Historian Liddell Hart has written, was the "most uncivilized method of warfare the world has known since the Mongol devastations."

Angry Response. At the beginning of the war, writes Rumpf, bombing was carefully limited. Germany, it is true, stunned the world by bombing Warsaw and Rotterdam; but these raids were arguably part of a military attack. Hitler feared all-out air warfare because he lacked an effective long-range bomber. When Germany launched its great offensive through the Low Countries in 1940, Britain was the first to start bombing industrial targets. Not until five months after the first British raid, writes Rumpf, did Germany retaliate with the blitz of Britain.

Eventually, people became the target of the raids. In March 1942, the R.A.F. bombed the Hanseatic town of LLibeck, which had little industry but many people crammed into its old medieval quarters. The Luftwaffe replied with "Baedeker" raids on the English cathedral towns of Exeter and Canterbury. But ultimately, Goering's bomber force proved no match for the R.A.F. reinforced by U.S. planes. In 1942, 1,000 bombers devastated a great part of Cologne in 90 minutes (though the cathedral escaped serious damage). In 1943, 400 bombers were able to do comparable damage to other cities in 15 minutes, since radar allowed them to approach a target at the same time from different heights and directions.

Spirit of Solidarity. By destroying factories and workers, the Allies expected to bring German war production to a standstill. But in 1944, after nearly three years of punishing bombing, German production was never higher. The raids, it was discovered, had destroyed the cities but not the industries ringing them. Nor had the raids demoralized the German people--any more than the V-l and V-2 raids had demoralized the British people. "Under the terrible blows of that terror from the skies," writes Rumpf, who in his job traveled from one blazing city to another, "the bonds grew closer and the spirit of solidarity stronger." The people began to believe Goebbels' propaganda that the Allies meant to annihilate the German nation, and they steeled themselves against the Allied demand for "unconditional surrender."

By the time the war was over, an estimated 1,000,000 civilians had been killed in Allied raids on Germany, while 60,000 British civilians had died in German raids. In telling his story, Rumpf has a habit of minimizing German aggression; the official British report on strategic bombing, published in 1961, is a much more balanced appraisal. But in many ways, it confirms Rumpf's own judgment: strategic bombing was a tragic failure.

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