Kurt Vonnegut / The bombing of Dresden Germany during World War II

shance

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sat Sep-27-08 10:38 AM
Original message

Kurt Vonnegut / The bombing of Dresden Germany during World War II

The author Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the allied bombing raids and was later forced to dig out bodies from the ruined city.

In papers discovered by his son after his death last year, he provides a searing eyewitness account of the �obscene brutality� that inspired his novel Slaughterhouse-Five

The blood of Dresden Germany

It was a routine speech we got during our first day of basic training, delivered by a wiry little lieutenant:

�Men, up to now you�ve been good, clean, American boys with an American�s love for sportsmanship and fair play. We�re here to change that.

�Our job is to make you the meanest, dirtiest bunch of scrappers in the history of the world. From now on, you can forget the Marquess of Queensberry rules and every other set of rules. Anything and everything goes.

�Never hit a man above the belt when you can kick him below it. Make the bastard scream. Kill him any way you can. Kill, kill, kill � do you understand?�

His talk was greeted with nervous laughter and general agreement that he was right. �Didn�t Hitler and Tojo say the Americans were a bunch of softies? Ha! They�ll find out.�

And of course, Germany and Japan did find out: a toughened-up democracy poured forth a scalding fury that could not be stopped.

It was a war of reason against barbarism, supposedly, with the issues at stake on such a high plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting � other than that the enemy was a bunch of bastards. A new kind of war, with all destruction, all killing approved.

, three small-town merchants� wives, middle-aged and plump, gave me a ride when I was hitchhiking home from Camp Atterbury. �Did you kill a lot of them Germans?� asked the driver, making cheerful small-talk. I told her I didn�t know.

This was taken for modesty. As I was getting out of the car, one of the ladies patted me on the shoulder in motherly fashion: �I�ll bet you�d like to get over and kill some of them dirty Japs now, wouldn�t you?�

(snip)

There was no war in Dresden.

True, planes came over nearly every day and the sirens wailed, but the planes were always en route elsewhere. The alarms furnished a relief period in a tedious work day, a social event, a chance to gossip in the shelters.

The shelters, in fact, were not much more than a gesture, casual recognition of the national emergency: wine cellars and basements with benches in them and sandbags blocking the windows, for the most part.

There were a few more adequate bunkers in the centre of the city, close to the government offices, but nothing like the staunch subterranean fortress that rendered Berlin impervious to her daily pounding. Dresden had no reason to prepare for attack � and thereby hangs a beastly tale.

Dresden was surely among the world�s most lovely cities.

Her streets were broad, lined with shade-trees.

She was sprinkled with countless little parks and statuary.

She had marvellous old churches, libraries, museums, theatres, art galleries, beer gardens, a zoo and a renowned university.

It was at one time a tourist�s paradise. They would be far better informed on the city�s delights than am I. But the impression I have is that in Dresden � in the physical city � were the symbols of the good life; pleasant, honest, intelligent. In the swastika�s shadow, those symbols of the dignity and hope of mankind stood waiting, monuments to truth. The accumulated treasure of hundreds of years, Dresden spoke eloquently of those things excellent in European civilisa-tion wherein our debt lies deep.

I was a prisoner, hungry, dirty and full of hate for our captors, but I loved that city and saw the blessed wonder of her past and the rich promise of her future.

In February 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disembowelled her with high explosives and cremated her with incendiaries.

(snip)

The night they came over, we spent in an underground meat locker in a slaughterhouse. We were lucky, for it was the best shelter in town. Giants stalked the earth above us. First came the soft murmur of their dancing on the outskirts, then the grumbling of their plodding towards us, and finally the ear-splitting crashes of their heels upon us � and thence to the outskirts again. Back and forth they swept: saturation bombing.

�I screamed and I wept and I clawed the walls of our shelter,� an old lady told me. �I prayed to God to �please, please, please, dear God, stop them�.

But he didn�t hear me. No power could stop them. On they came, wave after wave.

There was no way we could surrender; no way to tell them we couldn�t stand it any more. There was nothing anyone could do but sit and wait for morning.� Her daughter and grandson were killed.

Our little prison was burnt to the ground. We were to be evacuated to an outlying camp occupied by South African prisoners.

Our guards were a melancholy lot, aged Volkssturmers and disabled veterans. Most of them were Dresden residents and had friends and families somewhere in the holocaust. A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front, ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children and both of his parents had been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.

Our march to new quarters took us to the city�s edge. It was impossible to believe that anyone had survived in its heart. Ordinarily, the day would have been cold, but occasional gusts from the colossal inferno made us sweat. And ordinarily, the day would have been clear and bright, but an opaque and towering cloud turned noon to twilight.

A grim procession clogged the outbound highways; people with blackened faces streaked with tears, some bearing wounded, some bearing dead. They gathered in the fields. No one spoke. A few with Red Cross armbands did what they could for the casualties.

Settled with the South Africans, we enjoyed a week without work. At the end of it, communications were reestablished with higher headquarters and we were ordered to hike seven miles to the area hardest hit.

Nothing in the district had escaped the fury. A city of jagged building shells, of splintered statuary and shattered trees; every vehicle stopped, gnarled and burnt, left to rust or rot in the path of the frenzied might. The only sounds other than our own were those of falling plaster and their echoes.

(snip)

We cut our way through a basement wall to discover a reeking hash of over 100 human beings. Flame must have swept through before the building�s collapse sealed the exits, because the flesh of those within resembled the texture of prunes.

Our job, it was explained, was to wade into the shambles and bring forth the remains. Encouraged by cuffing and guttural abuse, wade in we did.

We did exactly that, for the floor was covered with an unsavoury broth from burst water mains and viscera.

A number of victims, not killed outright, had attempted to escape through a narrow emergency exit. At any rate, there were several bodies packed tightly into the passageway. Their leader had made it halfway up the steps before he was buried up to his neck in falling brick and plaster.

He was about 15, I think.

It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but, boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I have described and innumerable others like it were filled with them. We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks, so I know.

The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll. There was not enough labour to do it nicely, so a man with a flamethrower was sent down instead, and he cremated them where they lay. Burnt alive, suffocated, crushed � men, women, and children indiscriminately killed.

For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.

When we had become used to the darkness, the odour and the carnage, we began musing as to what each of the corpses had been in life. It was a sordid game: �Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief . . .� Some had fat purses and jewellery, others had precious foodstuffs. A boy had his dog still leashed to him.

Renegade Ukrainians in German uniform were in charge of our operations in the shelters proper. They were roaring drunk from adjacent wine cellars and seemed to enjoy their job hugely.

It was a profitable one, for they stripped each body of valuables before we carried it to the street. Death became so commonplace that we could joke about our dismal burdens and cast them about like so much garbage.

Not so with the first of them, especially the young: we had lifted them on to the stretchers with care, laying them out with some semblance of funeral dignity in their last resting place before the pyre. But our awed and sorrowful propriety gave way, as I said, to rank callousness. At the end of a grisly day, we would smoke and survey the impressive heap of dead accumulated. One of us flipped his cigarette butt into the pile: �Hell�s bells,� he said, �I�m ready for Death any time he wants to come after me.�

A few days after the raid, the sirens screamed again. The listless and heartsick survivors were showered this time with leaflets. I lost my copy of the epic, but remember that it ran something like this: �To the people of Dresden: we were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying. We realise that we haven�t always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.�

That explained the slaughter to everyone�s satisfaction, I am sure, but it aroused no little contempt. It is a fact that 48 hours after the last B-17 had droned west for a well-earned rest, labour battalions had swarmed over the damaged rail yards and restored them to nearly normal service. None of the rail bridges over the Elbe was knocked out of commission. Bomb-sight manufacturers should blush to know that their marvellous devices laid bombs down as much as three miles wide of what the military claimed to be aiming for.

The leaflet should have said: �We hit every blessed church, hospital, school, museum, theatre, your university, the zoo, and every apartment building in town, but we honestly weren�t trying hard to do it. C�est la guerre. So sorry. Besides, saturation bombing is all the rage these days, you know.�

(snip)

More at:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_an...