dresden #1

I re-read Slaughterhouse-Five earlier this year. It’s an unnerving and funny read that centers on an American POW named Billy Pilgrim who was captured by the Germans and kept in a slaughterhouse in Dresden. Although he becomes “unstuck in time,” Billy was there when the allied forces carpet-bombed Dresden in February 1945, several months before the end of WW2.

Kurt Vonnegut, the book’s author, was also an American POW captured by the Germans and kept in a slaughterhouse in Dresden when it was carpet-bombed by allied forces. So, it’s a semi-autobiographical novel that draws on the personal experience of its author and describes events that actually happened in the real world: The British Royal Air Force and United States Air Force bombed Dresden, Germany into dust, destroying 85-90% of the city center; a place that had been a cultural seat in pre-war Europe referred to as “Florence on the Elbe [River].”

Outside of Slaughterhouse-Five, I can’t recall learning much about Dresden in middle- or high school history classes. When I looked for books about it (about the bombings specifically) I came up shorter than expected.

I was in the market for something that would analyze Dresden through a prism. I wanted to understand it from the perspectives of the allied forces, American prisoners of war, the local residents. But I was also interested in the objective historical record. How we frame history and what we do with it matters, but as I searched for a book, I learned that there had been tension in the record and that Slaughterhouse-Five was a contributing factor.

In describing the fallout of the Dresden bombings, Vonnegut cites a death toll of 135,000 people; a number he gets from disgraced historian David Irving’s book The Destruction of Dresden. Irving’s book, in turn, attributes the number to a retired USAF Lieutenant and a retired British Royal Air Marshal.

Vonnegut’s quote is what intrigued me about Dresden in the first place, since it frames the bombings as near equal in deadly force to the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

“…The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons.”

– Forward to The Destruction of Dresden quoted in Slaughterhouse Five

Through that lens, the scale of it, how come there weren’t more studies of Dresden? More books and papers? It turns out that the 135,000 statistic is wrong, but that hasn’t stopped people from reading Slaughterhouse-Five and walking away from it thinking that 135,000 people died in the bombings. Per Wikipedia, “the figure popularized by [Slaughterhouse Five] remains in general circulation.”

US Government reports citing analyses by the German government along with their own calculations, describe a death toll closer to 25,000, which, to be clear, is not nothing, and should not in any way cause anyone to change their mind about the brutality of the event.

On the other hand, 25,000 is not 135,000. The numbers are different enough that it matters, and so what started as an interest in understanding the historical event has evolved into a question of where people get their knowledge, what they do with it, and how their knowledge practices evolve.

When my kiddo was younger, we read lots of illustrated children’s books. Fiction and nonfiction. Sometimes, a fiction book contained information that sounded a lot like nonfiction. And so whenever we’d read something that sounded a lot like nonfiction in a fiction book we’d pause and talk about whether we should take that information as truth and incorporate it into our mental model of how the world works.

We talked about the value of doing additional detective work to figure out if there’s truth to the nonfiction-sounding thing we read in a fiction book and then, after learning the truth, baking what we learned into our mental model of the world.

Slaughterhouse-Five illustrates the first part of that example on a massive scale: People read the death toll cited in Vonnegut’s novel (fiction) and incorporate it into their mental model of the world without doing additional detective work, and the result is that 135,000 becomes a widely repeated statistic associated with the Dresden bombings.

Vonnegut’s postmodern writing style contributes to this phenomenon. He cites real people and sources throughout the text and, notwithstanding problematic doofuses like David Irving, an infamous Holocaust denier, the sources seem credible.

Ira C. Eaker was a general in the USAF during WW2. He formed and organized its bomber command, and he wrote part of the forward to Irving’s book about Dresden (granted that’s not a particularly strong endorsement of his character or credibility…). The other source was Sir Robert Saundby: a British Air Marshal (and real person), written into Slaughterhouse-Five as the friend of the fictional character Bertram Rumfoord, who shares a hospital room with Billy Pilgrim.

The writing blurs reality with fiction. On the one hand, that could motivate readers to question everything they read in the text. Is this real or is this fictional? Did that actually happen? Or is it just part of the story? These questions bounced around my head when I re-read the book.

But that same writing could also result in readers taking for granted that the “real” details in the book are actually real, that the descriptive statistics are accurate accounts of a historical event. And that seems to be what happens: a broad readership incorporated “135,000 killed in the allied firebombing of Dresden” into their mental model of world-historical events in spite of the existence of counter evidence, pre-dating the book’s publication.

Two US Government reports de-classified in 1953 and 1954 cite the 25,000 statistic and would have been accessible when Vonnegut was writing Slaughterhouse-Five. David Irving, doofus, even published a correction to the statistics given in his book in 1966, three years before Delacorte published Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

I don’t know if Vonnegut knew of either source. If he didn’t, why not? They seem relevant to any background research he may have done on Dresden. He read Irving’s book after all. If he did know about them, what did he make of them? And why not take them into account in Slaughterhouse-Five?

One goal of postmodernist literature is to challenge authority. On that ground, Vonnegut would be justified in refusing to cite one half of the force behind the bombing campaign (the US Government) as an authoritative source of its death toll.

Moreover, the de-classified reports themselves don’t exactly come across as unbiased accounts. Here, for example, is the verbatim first paragraph of Historical Analysis of The 14-15 February 1945 Bombings of Dresden:

The reasons for and the nature and consequences of the bombing of Dresden, Germany, by Allied forces on 14-15 February 1945 have repeatedly been the subject of official and semi-official inquiries and of rumor and exaggeration by uninformed or inadequately informed persons.

Moreover, the Communists have with increasing frequency have by means of distortion and falsification used the February 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden as the basis for disseminating anti-Western and anti-American propaganda.

From time to time, there appears in letters of inquiry to the United States Air Force evidence that American nationals are themselves being taken in by the Communist propaganda line concerning the February 1945 bombings of Dresden.

That’s not the unbiased interest in establishing an accurate historical record that one would hope for in a report like this. Rather, it sets up a political project designed to counter the “anti-Western” and “anti-American” narratives put forth by “the Communists.” One understands what this report will find without reading any further: The allies were justified in their role in the Dresden bombings, and any descriptive statistics that do not align with what this report finds are distorted falsifications designed to further anti-American sentiment in the West.

Introducing a report by poisoning the well and lobbing ad hominem attacks against straw man critics does not make a strong case for the credibility of what follows. These tactics suggest that the politics of the report take precedent over the science, but where questions of accurate historical records are concerned, science is the answer. It aims for intersubjective truth and is subject to the review and acceptance of a community of experts.

A quiet-part-out-loud-from-the-beginning political project is about image construction (or reconstruction) and not reality, but reality is where the accurate records live.

Accurate records matter. Someone reading this post as an attempt to downplay the enormity of the Dresden bombings (which it most certainly is not) understands intuitively that when you change the record you change the narrative, and when you change the narrative you change its impact. Anyone with internet access and the ability to get around censors/blockers has seen this play out in real-time on a global stage since 2023.

It’s worth noting that the historical inaccuracy of the statistics make up half of the criticisms summarized on the Slaughterhouse-Five Wikipedia page, which is not a comprehensive record of the criticism, but which I find interesting nonetheless because there is so much more to the novel than the numbers. And, also, it’s a novel not a history book.

Criticizing Slaughterhouse-Five for its historical inaccuracies is like criticizing Picasso’s Guernica for its inaccurate portrayal of the suffering and death that resulted from an aerial bombing campaign of Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Don’t get me wrong: the numbers matter. But arguing over which number is correct misses the forest for the trees. 135,000 dead is more than 25,000 dead. If more death is a worse outcome, then 135,000 dead is worse.

But both outcomes are objectively horrible tragedies for the dead, for the survivors, and for humanity. In cobbling together a set of sources that give a richer picture of the Dresden bombings, I came across a meaningful quote in Der Spiegel that I think is worth reflection:

“Mourning is not dependent on statistics….”

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the enormity of the bombings is accessible to readers through the story itself, its aesthetics, the author’s experience of being a POW, living through the nighttime air raids, and then emerging from the slaughterhouse into Dresden, and putting that experience into the text.

Billy thought hard about the effect the quartet had had on him, and then he found an association with an experience he had had long ago. He did not travel in time to the experience. He remembered it shimmeringly—as follows:

He was down in a meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families.

So it goes.

The girls that Billy Pilgrim had seen naked were all being killed, too, in a much shallower shelter in another part of the stockyards.

So it goes.

A guard would go to the head of the stairs every so often to see what it was like outside, then he would come down and whisper to the other guards. There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.

It wasn’t safe to come out of the shelter until noon the next day. When the Americans and their guards did come out, the sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals. The stones were hot. Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.

So it goes.

– The Bombing of Dresden as described in Slaughterhouse-Five