The Devil's Tinderbox: Dresden 1945
Alexander McKee Souvenir Press, 334pp, £12.99
ISBN 0285635476
My father was born in Dresden during the Second World War, when Germany's most beautiful city could still call itself the Florence of the Elbe. My grandmother had fled there to escape the British bombs that flattened her home town, Hamburg, killing 55,000 people - almost as many as were killed throughout Britain during the entire war. Why swap Hamburg for Dresden? Why swap frying pan for fire? Well, because until the last few months of the war, Dresden wasn't just the most beautiful city in Germany; it was also the safest.
When my grandmother returned to Hamburg, ahead of the advancing Red Army, my father's birthplace resembled, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote, the surface of the moon. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut created great literature out of that carnage. And in The Devil's Tinderbox, Alexander McKee wrote a gripping oral history to go with it. While Vonnegut hid from the firestorm in a Dresden slaughterhouse, McKee fought for the Canadian army on Germany's western front. Yet, even in ruined Hamburg, he heard rumours that eclipsed what he saw. At the other end of the Elbe, an entire city had been incinerated. In the 1950s, McKee visited Dresden, now stranded deep behind the Iron Curtain, in the so-called Democratic Republic. He wanted to write a book about its obliteration, but nobody was interested. At last, in the 1980s, he found a publisher. This is a timely reprint of the result.
McKee is no bleeding heart. He comes from a military family. The Luftwaffe bombed his home, blew him off his feet and injured his father. As a soldier, he witnessed the unprecedented evil of the Third Reich - such as a doodlebug that destroyed a hospital, and a doctor in a concentration camp who killed 17,000 people and ordered the deaths of 80,000 more. Yet, like my English grandfather, who lost his brother at El Alamein, tabloid rabble-rousing is furthest from his mind. In Dresden, something dreadful happened. It cannot be measured against Hitler's horror, but it deserves a record, and remembrance. This sombre book does both.
McKee tells a harrowing tale, but his spare prose gives these grim events a compulsive pull. He writes well about warfare and sketches its historical hinterland with brevity and wit. But it is his eyewitness testaments that make this book live and breathe. He collects personal accounts from every part of this apocalypse and, although this is an epitaph for its victims, he also cares about those who dropped the bombs and lived to regret it. Even those veterans who can find scant sympathy for the thousands who perished are allowed their say.
No one knows how many died. Estimates range from five to six figures. The residential centre was packed with refugees fleeing from Stalin. This was where the bombs fell. The strategic targets in the industrial outskirts were neglected. As well as these ruthless means, McKee lays bare the political and diplomatic ends of this terrible bombardment. Was this horrific inferno meant to help the Soviets, or to intimidate them? Either way, during the cold war, Dresden became a useful communist propaganda tool. But anyone who still believes that this palatial refuge was fair game can't fail to be moved by McKee's human details, if not the logic of his argument.
Today, the historic old town is a modernist desert, but the skyline that Canaletto painted has been wonderfully restored. At a few points along the waterfront, you could almost be back in the enchanted capital that Vonnegut first saw as an American POW.
My family salvaged something from Dresden's destruction. My grandmother lodged with her brother-in-law, who worked at the local airfield. You might imagine that an airfield would have brought bombs raining down on their dormitory town. But the British and the Americans ignored this military satellite. They saved their awful firepower for that Florentine beauty on the Elbe. And so my grandmother and my infant father both survived.
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