Rereading dark chapter in Allies' tale of victory

DRESDEN, Germany -- From an altitude of 10,000 feet, Sergeant Navigator Harold Nash looked down from the cockpit of the British fighter plane as it dropped incendiary bombs on German cities and towns during World War II.

Sixty years later, he remembers what he saw: "From the sky, the fires burning looked like a sparkling necklace on black velvet. To me they weren't people. It was a target."

Nash, now an 81-year-old retired teacher and pacifist living in Birmingham, England, added, "If we had heard the screaming and the wailing of mothers holding dead children, we never could have done it. It was the distance that removed us enough to accomplish it. I think Dresden was unforgivable, frankly."

As Europe and the United States somberly reflect on the 60th anniversaries of the heroic turning points of World War II -- the D-Day landings at Normandy, the Battle of the Bulge, and the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz -- today's commemoration of the firebombing of Dresden forces a more complex reflection on the barbarity of total warfare, and the morality of the strategies it employed.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Britain later expressed regret for the bombing of Dresden and other civilian targets.The Royal Air Force dropped 1 million tons of ordnance on 131 German towns and cities, including Dresden, many of which were far from the front lines. Dresden's barracks and other military targets were not hit in the bombing raids, which began Feb. 13, 1945. The civilian death toll at Dresden has been debated, with 25,000 a long accepted figure but more recent historical research raising the number to 40,000.

However, Max Hastings, the British war correspondent and World War II historian, argued that "area targeting," as the bombing was euphemistically called, was less a strategy than a series of accidents.

The British started bombing seriously in 1941, Hastings wrote, not out of faith in air attack, but because they possessed no other means of carrying the war to Germany.

The British military-industrial complex was retooled to carry out these bombardments and by 1944-45, it was essentially unstoppable, Hastings wrote in his 1979 book "Bomber Command," even as it was becoming evident to British and US military strategists that the bombing of cities and towns was doing little to break the will of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

Hastings wrote that Sir Arthur Harris, the head of the Bomber Command, was beyond the control of his superiors in the British military and that he disregarded the American commanders' pleas to direct the bombers to hit specific military and economic targets, in particular oil supplies.

Last week, at the opening of the new Churchill Museum in London, Wendy Maxwell, 85, who was one of the secretaries in the Cabinet War Rooms, remembered the tension and the anguished debates over military strategies such as the bombing of Dresden.

Then, from 1946 to 1950, she served as a secretary in the office of the British Military Governor's Office in Berlin and saw first-hand the devastation.

Asked whether seeing that made her view the Allied bombing strategy at the end of the war as immoral, she replied: "No. Anything was worth it to win the war. Where would we have been today if we had lost?"