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Book Review: View from under the bombs
German historian questions need for Allied air attack

THE FIRE: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945
By Jörg Friedrich.
Columbia University Press, 552 pp. $34.95.

Between 1940 and 1945 more than half a million German civilians perished as the Allies mounted an increasingly coordinated and
deadly air offensive designed to break not only Germany's ability to fight but also the will of her people to do so.

In 2002 the historian Jörg Friedrich published an enormously popular but highly controversial history of the bombing campaign in his
native Germany. Thankfully, it has now been translated into English. Readers interested in the history of World War II, or those who want to understand the very different ways in which Germans understand what Americans tend to think of as the defining moment of their "greatest generation," owe it to themselves to read this book.

It has been difficult for Germans to publicly commemorate, or even discuss, the suffering of Germans during the war without seeming to trivialize or relativize the crimes of their countrymen. Issues like the postwar expulsion of millions of Eastern European Germans, the violence of the Soviet invasion or the air war against German cities were hopelessly politicized and bitterly contested. The public memory of the air war seemed to belong to those at the ideological extremes. The radical right accused the Allies of "crimes" equal to anything the Nazis might have done, while those on the left memorialized the 1945 destruction of Dresden as proof of Western belligerence.

The past decade has seen a cautious reappraisal as German writers like W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass and Guido Knopp have begun to consider the wartime role of Germans as both victims and perpetrators of wartime violence. Friedrich's contribution to this debate asks readers to consider the air war not in terms of the other human horrors of World War II but as a tragedy of its own. Many readers will take exception to this distinction, but it deserves to be considered.

The path of a bomb

The Fire is not just a well-documented piece of historical writing. It is also a poignant, lyrical and terrible account of human
suffering. Friedrich ingeniously structures the book to follow the path of a bomb, beginning in the cabin of a Lancaster bomber manned by a crew in mortal terror of fighters and anti-aircraft fire. The narrative follows the munitions as they fall through the roofs of densely packed half-timbered houses and into the cellars and bomb shelters where Germans crouched, prayed and died.

Many of Friedrich's conclusions challenge widely held assumptions about the air war over Germany. Bombing, he argues, was largely
ineffective, failed to significantly weaken civilian morale and succeeded primarily in killing civilians and flattening Germany's urban landscape.

With little faith in the ability of bombers to destroy militarily important targets, Allied planners experimented with techniques
designed to literally burn Germany's cities and towns to the ground. Many of the deadliest raids occurred as the German army fell back in the final months of the war and, Friedrich suggests, served little tactical or strategic purpose.

The historic centers of German urban areas, packed with winding streets and wooden buildings, made ideal targets, and
Friedrich is unsparing in his account of the burning of Germany's cultural patrimony. He repeatedly reminds readers that cities like Lübeck, Münster and Hamburg had burned before in peace and in war but that the air campaign brought a new type of destructive energy.

In his account of the bombing of medieval Hildesheim, Friedrich grimly suggests that, while locals saw their community as a
cultural treasure, the Americans thought of it as "a train station that happened to have a city surrounding it." The result was a devastated city and more than 1,700 dead.

Because the war ended with the destruction of Nazism, generations of Germans have been asked to view the bomber
campaign as a necessary component of their liberation. Provocatively, Friedrich asks, "If Allied history does not depict this as a tragedy, then does German history also have to view it as a total success?"

It is here that Friedrich's book is most controversial and most likely to anger readers. There is some unfortunate language,
carefully parsed in Allison Brown's generally excellent translation, in which Friedrich uses terms like "extermination" that resonate with the very real genocide Germans carried out in Eastern Europe.

Friedrich's account does not, as some of his harshest critics have suggested, ask us to draw moral equivalencies between the
air war and the crimes of the Nazis. The Fire reminds us of the terrible inadequacy of the official language of war. Those who planned and carried out the bombing campaign targeted "military production" and "civilian morale." Those who lived and died in the path of falling bombs were human beings, a lesson that should not be forgotten in any year or any war.