DER BRAND. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945. By Jorg Friedrich. 591pp.
Berlin: Propylaen. 25euros. - 3 5490 7165 5
THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION. By W. G. Sebald. Translated by Anthea Bell.
224pp. Hamish Hamilton. Pounds 16.99. - 0 2411 4126 5
US: Random House. $28.95. 0 3755 0464 2 Klaus Rainer Rohl VERBOTENE TRAUER Ende der deutschen Tabus 238pp. Munich: Universitas. 19euros.
0 2411 4126 5 Shock and awe: the phrase which summed up the intended effect of the air war over Iraq could just as well have been used sixty years ago to describe the Allied bombing of Germany. There is no major campaign of the Second World War that today evokes such unease among the victors. The spectres of Hamburg and Dresden still haunt the corridors of the Pentagon and Whitehall.
The purpose of what was then called "moral bombing" was to turn the population against the regime. Today's strategists have the same end in mind, but the means to evoke shock and awe could hardly be more different. Overwhelming force is now projected, not by maximum, but by minimum destruction of cities and people. At least since Vietnam, the overriding aim of American strategic doctrine, and hence of the armaments that are determined by it, has been to avoid enemy civilian casualties -for pragmatic as much as for humanitarian reasons.
Compare the Anglo-American bombing of the Iraqi capital with that of its German counterpart sixty years ago. Baghdad, like Berlin, was seen as the battleground on which the war would be won, but the two bombardments could hardly have been more different. The bombing of Baghdad was intended to destroy the regime's ability to control its forces, to overawe the population, and so to render a costly siege unnecessary. This enabled the Allies to preserve the city virtually intact. Such unprecedented solicitude for the enemy was not possible against Hitler. In bombing Berlin nineteen times between August 1943 and March
1944, killing nearly 10,000 civilians at a cost of almost 3,000 airmen, the RAF intended to achieve "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened". The very thought of destruction and casualties on this scale would cause even a Rumsfeld to shudder today.
