"And they invaded us."

I finished reading Dresden by Frederick Taylor a while ago, and there's on passage in particular that's stuck in my head. It's near the end of the book, where Taylor is discussing what happened as the Soviets moved in on Dresden.

When the first Soviet troops pushed across the German border into East Prussia toward the end of 1944, looting and raping and burning as they advanced, they were, as Anthony Beevor records, "disgusted by the plenty" they found everywhere, in town and country alike. The neat houses, the evidence of comfort and material well-being at every turn, served only to enrage them further. A Red Army sapper said to his superior:

"How should one treat them, Comrade Captain? Just think of it. They were well off, well fed, and had livestock, vegetable gardens, and apple trees. And the invaded us. They went as far as my oblast of Voronezh. For this, Comrade Captain, we should strangle them."

It's not that I agree with what the Russians did - I don't. It was cruel, horrible, and unnecessary. It was also understandable - in the driest possible sense of that word. I mean I understand why, but I don't agree and I don't empathize.

That said, I can imagine two Iraqis getting off a plane in New York tomorrow, and being "disgusted by the plenty", too.

The rest of Dresden is excellent, and it nicely challenges a lot of assumptions that the West has about Dresden in particular, and strategic bombing in particular. Dresden, Taylor argues, was not nearly as innocent a target as historians have previously suggested. Rather, it was a thoroughly militarized city, as all major German cities were by 1945. If there are moral problems with Dresden - and this is Taylor's explicit argument - then there are moral problems with aerial bombardment in general, not with Dresden in particular.

That said, Taylor tries to refute the absolutist anti-airpower argument, that says the aerial bombing of Germany was totally ineffective at ending the war sooner. (This is an argument I've made here, and has a long pedigree so you can't blame me too much.) While Taylor doesn't buy the 8th Air Force's spin about how crucial bombing was to ending the war in Europe, he does nonetheless point to a great deal of testimony from average Germans who say that, after Dresden, the nature of the war changed for them. After Stalingrad, and until Dresden, they say, most Germans believed that the Nazis would be defeated but that the German state would continue and there would be a negotiated peace.

Dresden ended those illusions. With the calamity of Dresden - and the bombings that followed - the German people lost any illusions that the war could be won, or even ended with dignity. The Nazis - and with them, the German state - were going to be destroyed thoroughly. Taylor even says that the Wehrmacht's fighting weakened after Dresden, but he doesn't explicitly say Dresden was the cause.

Call it the Weak Airpower Argument - Dresden wasn't crucial to ending the war, but it did hasten the end. Color me unconvinced, but Taylor's book is excellent in any case.