It was precisely because Sebald had spent most of his adult life wrestling with this issue of silence in the face of the Holocaust, and because he understood the corrosive effect of such denial, that in autumn 1997, in a series of lectures in Zurich (‘Air War and Literature’ – later published with other material in the collection On the Natural History of Destruction), he tackled another silence. This time his focus was on the silence of his compatriots regarding the firebombing of Germany by the Allies in the last years of the war – a subject which was then regarded as a taboo for the vast majority of Germans. Only the extreme right didn’t share this silence, so nearly all writers and intellectuals (with the notable exceptions of Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass) ceded the territory to the far right, and avoided discussing these Allied war crimes. On the Natural History of Destruction is a relentless examination of both the atrocities committed by some of the Allied bombing and the deliberate ‘amnesia’ of post-war Germany regarding these acts of targeted civilian killing. At the beginning of the work he describes the bombing of Hamburg by the RAF, supported by the US 8th Army Air Force on 27 July 1943. It was code-named ‘Operation Gomorrah’ and its aim was to destroy the city completely. From the Allied perspective the operation was a success. More than 30,000 men, women and children died on that single evening:
At 1.20 a.m. a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire now rising 2,000 metres into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out at once … the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of over 150 kilometres per hour … The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in the tramcar windows melted … When day broke … horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorus flames still flickered around many of them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size. They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat … Other victims had been so badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to 1,000 degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket.
Sebald is most disturbed by the fact that such events, had never really been spoken of. He observes that post-war German society had ‘developed an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression’. He wonders whether this lack of verbal expression links to wider questions, whether there is ‘some connection between the German catastrophe ushered in under Hitler’s regime and the regulation of intimate feelings within the German family’.
I can still remember where I was when I first read the above description of the Hamburg firebombing; I remember putting the book down on the park bench and feeling physically sick. And then waves of anger. Part of this is an entirely understandable human response, but I reflected later that much of this anger was connected to reading this as a British man – not exactly a sense of shame or responsibility, but more the fact that I had lived for many years with only the vaguest knowledge of such events. That I, who had made myself consciously aware of so much in terms of war and modern history, had not felt the need to look at this. It shocked me that such knowledge was simply not part of our British consciousness, and that it had taken a German writer to bring this to the surface. It also troubles me deeply that in the heart of London, a city I love greatly, there stands a statue to the pioneer of this devastating policy of area bombing, the man who ordered this mass killing of civilians, as well as the firebombing of several other cities. There, on the Strand, outside St Clement Dane’s Church, you can read this inscription, which is supposed to represent the views of our society:
MARSHAL OF THE ROYAL AIR FORCE
SIR ARTHUR HARRIS BT GCB OBE AFC
IN MEMORY OF A GREAT COMMANDER AND
OF THE BRAVE CREWS OF BOMBER COMMAND
MORE THAN 55,000 OF WHOM LOST THEIR
LIVES IN THE CAUSE OF FREEDOM
THE NATION OWES THEM ALL AN
IMMENSE DEBT
I am not a pacifist. The Second World War was one of the – very few – justifiable wars of the last hundred years, but area bombing of civilians is indefensible, whether it happens in London or Hamburg or Hiroshima or Aleppo. Our ongoing silence about the atrocities of Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne is deafening. It weakened the war against fascism because the method was fascist, making the destruction of Guernica pale in comparison. In fact, three years before the area bombing of Hamburg took place, Albert Speer recalls Hitler planning a very similar kind of firebombing for London:
Have you ever seen a map of London? It is so densely built that one fire alone would be enough to destroy the whole city, just as it did two hundred years ago.3fn1 Goering will start fires all over London, fires everywhere, with countless incendiary bombs of an entirely new type. Thousands of fires. They will unite in one huge blaze over the whole area. Goering has the right idea: high explosives don’t work, but we can do it with incendiaries; we can destroy London completely.
Today many consider Harris a war criminal for his indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of civilians. And it is highly likely, had Britain lost the war, that he would have been executed by the Germans. But I feel more conflicted about the men who served in Bomber Command, those 55,000 who died, representing the highest proportion of deaths of any branch of the armed services during the war. Almost half of those who flew never returned. If it’s possible to set aside for a moment the question of the moral legitimacy of these bombing raids, it must have taken a great degree of courage to have flown on those missions, knowing that half of your comrades would never return. The majority of the targets in the first part of the war were military and industrial installations. For those in the bomber crews these missions would have created few moral dilemmas. However, when the policy changed and the area bombings of whole cities began in 1943, those airmen would have known that tens of thousands of civilians would be killed. And to have been able to release bombs with such knowledge must then have demanded an extreme, and morally dubious, form of moral compartmentalisation.fn2 What then is the responsibility of the individual airman in such a situation? Consider the enormous amount of attention given, rightly, to Hitler’s notorious Kommissarbefehl – issued in March 1941, sanctioning the killing of non-military, political personnel in the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union. Why have British airmen who were ‘only obeying orders’ not been subject to the same degree of scrutiny as the Wehrmacht who obeyed the Kommissarbefehl?
Yes, 55,000 men from Bomber Command lost their lives in the war; but 42,500 civilians were killed in the firebombing of Hamburg in the week of ‘Operation Gomorrah’. Fifty-five thousand air crew in the 2,193 days of the war; 42,500 children, women and men in a single week. And then how many of us have any knowledge at all of what happened in Toyko on 9–10 March 1945? An event even more invisible to us than the firebombings of Hamburg and Dresden, yet, in a single evening’s raid, 105,000 men, women and children in that city were incinerated. At least the officer responsible for ordering this raid, General Curtis LeMay, had the honesty to admit afterwards that if the Allies had lost the war, he would have been tried for war crimes.