Justifying the Means; A new book makes a case for the Dresden bombing.(Dresden, by Frederick Taylor)(Book Review)

Byline: William Underhill

On a clear February night in 1945, a first wave of Allied bombers struck at Dresden in eastern Germany. By the following evening, British and American warplanes had dropped 4,500 tons of incendiaries and high explosives on Saxony's ancient capital. Some 20 square kilometers of the city center, previously untouched by the bombers, was leveled, and some of Europe's finest baroque architecture collapsed into rubble. Up to 40,000 civilians lay dead, many of them asphyxiated in cellars or inadequate shelters. To cremate the bodies, the authorities needed the skilled services of an SS team who'd learned their business at the Treblinka death camp.

It's an episode that has nagged at the victors' conscience ever since. Dresden's destruction has come to stand for all that is morally questionable about the wartime car-pet bombing of German cities: an escalating attack that cost about 600,000 civilian lives and left 7.5 million homeless. A clutch of recent books--from British as well as German authors--testifies to the passions still raised by such events. Put simply, was the strategy a cruel but necessary price for hastening the end of a barbarous regime? Or a moral outrage that amounts to a war crime?

The Dresden raid makes a powerful case study--and not just because of its scale. By the winter of 1945, many other German cities had already been pounded to near oblivion, as the British historian Frederick Taylor makes plain in his new study, "Dresden" (518 pages. Bloomsbury ). But the city had good reason to hope it might escape devastation. At the time of the attack, the war's outcome was in little doubt. Dresden was a city of exceptional beauty--"Florence on the Elbe"--far richer in culture than in industry. Unlike the much-bombed industrial centers of the Ruhr, the city made little contribution to the German war effort. Indeed, it was packed with refugees who believed in its safety. As the orthodox view of history holds, Dresden's annihilation was more than disproportionate; it was senseless.

Taylor remains unconvinced. His account, based on research into the once closed archives of East Germany, makes clear that the city's manufacturers had retooled to produce military equipment. Factories that once turned out sewing machines and cameras were making gun sights and bullets. For the Ger-man Army, Dresden was also an important road and rail center. Besides, writes Taylor, Allied commanders had little reason to believe that the German Army was on its knees. Only two months earlier a ...