Comment on the Dresden bombing

I wanted to quote this excerpt from a book review by Tami Davis Biddle, an authority on air power at the US Army War College, in Parameters Winter 2007-8; scroll down to the review of the book Firestorm: Allied Air Power and the Destruction of Dresden 92006) by Marshall De Bruhl.

Biddle writes:

Many observers, both at the time and later, wondered why the city should have come into the Anglo-American crosshairs at such a late hour in the war. And the sense of lament was heightened by the knowledge that the city had been full of refugees fleeing the fighting on the Eastern Front. In addition, David Irving’s influential book The Destruction of Dresden (which was originally published in 1963 but went through many English and German-language reprints) raised the public profile of the raid, especially since Irving asserted, erroneously, that the attack killed up to 250,000 persons. (Irving later backed away from that claim, but he was unwilling to give up a six-figure number: He continued to assert that the death toll was 100,000 or more.) His figures greatly influenced both the scholarly and public discussions of the Dresden raid.

A recent careful accounting revealed that the death toll at Dresden was probably between 25,000 and 35,000. While this is a terrifying number, it is far lower than Irving’s claim and lower than the death toll for many other bombing raids waged during the Second World War.

One particular reason for getting the history of the Dresden bombing correct is that Holocaust deniers, following Irving's lead, use a false, ideological version of the event to promote their pseudohistory.

She also writes:

Few people, including professional historians, seem to understand that Dresden was part of an air campaign carried out as an emergency response to the setbacks of the fall and winter of 1944-45 (including Hitler’s December counteroffensive) and the gnawing fear that if the Soviets did not make rapid progress westward, the war in Europe might drag on into 1946—a concern that neither the British (who had been under V-2 attack) nor the Americans (who still had a war to finish in the Far East) wanted to contemplate.

Tags: dresden, dresden bombing, second world war, tami davis biddle