The Insurgent History Calendar: February 13

The next day, 1,350 American planes returned but the cloud and smoke cover forced them to drop their bombs over a broader area. They encountered no flak. Just six planes were lost in the two days. The bombing was ordered by Winston Churchill, who once, without irony, because he had no sense of it, referred to “the moral rot of war.” Dresden was undefended. It had until then been spared. It had no military value. It was a trove of art and architecture, and of course of unsuspecting human beings, thousands of them refugees fleeing the Russian assault to the east.

The bombing ignited a firestorm and killing some 25,000 people. Kurt Vonnegut was one of 26,000 Allied prisoners in and around Dresden. He was bunkered in a basement. He turned the experience into Slaughterhouse Five. The triple-decker headline in The New York Times the next day was not about Dresden, but about the Soviet capture of Budapest “at a cost of 159,000 to foe,” about Patton’s continuing push and the approaching end of the Manila campaign. Dresden was mentioned on the front page–but again, not the bombing. It was mentioned only in connection with an offensive push “within 70 miles of Dresden.” Dresden stood 110 mile south of Berlin. Even the daily war summary on the front page did not mention the bombing, though an article noted that troops would be getting more cigarettes, reducing supplies for civilians. American journalism has always known its priorities.

To find any approximation of reporting on the bombing, you have to read deep–well, to the very last paragraph of the more than half-page report of “The Day’s Communiques on the Fighting in Various War Zones.” The paragraph reads, with surprising candor and unsurprising vagueness: “Last night British terror planes dropped bombs on Stuttgart and at random on several rural communities in southern and southwestern Germany as well as in northwestern Germany.”




Vonnegut in an interview with Richard Rhodes had compared the city to Paris, “full of statues and zoos.” The prisoners were held in a slaughterhouse, “a nice new cement-block hog barn.” They were made to produce malt syrup. They’d hear other cities get bombed. “We never expected to get it. They were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories. Then a siren went off–it was February 13, 1945–and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone….The attack didn’t sound like a hell of a lot either. Whump. They went over with high explosives first to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries… They burn the whole damn town down.” Vonnegut and other prisoners then spend days bringing out the dead and burning them in pyres set up by the Germans, and after that, as Jens Bjorneboe wrote in his little-known “Moment of Freedom” (1966), “people could be poured right into the sewers, where there were any sewers left.”

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