Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
It was a routine speech we got during our first day of ba- sic training, delivered by a wiry little
lieutenant: "Men, up to now you've been good, clean, American boys with an American's love
for sportsmanship and fair play. We're here to change that. Our job is to make you the meanest,
dirtiest bunch of scrappers in the history of the World. From now on you can forget the Marquess of
Queensberry Rules and every other set of rules. Anything and everything goes. Never hit a man
above the belt when you can kick him be- low it. Make the bastard scream. Kill him any way you
can. Kill, kill, kill, do you
understand?"
His talk was greeted with nervous laughter and general agreement that he was right. "Didn't
Hitler and Tojo say the Americans were a bunch of softies? Ha! They'll find out." And of course,
Germany and Japan did find out: a toughened-up democracy poured forth a scalding fury
that could not be stopped. It was a war of reason against bar- barism, supposedly, with the
issues at stake on such a high
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Kurt Vonnegut
plane that most of our feverish fighters had no idea why they were fighting-other than that the
enemy was a bunch of bastards. A new kind of war, with all destruction, all killing approved.
Germans would ask, "Why are you Amer- icans fighting us?" "I don't know, but we're sure
beating the hell out of you," was a stock answer.
.
A lot of people relished the idea of total war: it had modern ring to it, in keeping with our
spectacular technol- ogy. To them it was like a football game: "Give 'em the axe, the axe, the
axe.... "Three small-town merchants' wives, middle-aged and plump, gave me a ride when I
was hitch- hiking home from Camp Atterbury. "Did you kill a lot of them Germans?" asked the
driver, making cheerful small- talk. I told her I didn't know. This was taken for modesty. As I was
getting out of the car, one of the ladies patted me on the shoulder in motherly fashion: "I'll bet
you'd like to get over and kill some of them dirty Japs now, wouldn't you?" We exchanged
knowing winks. I didn't tell those sim- ple souls that I had been captured after a week at
the front; and more to the point, what I knew and thought about killing dirty Germans, about
total war. The reason for my being sick at heart then and now has to do with an incident that
received cursory treatment in the American news- papers. In February, 1945, Dresden, Germany,
was destroyed, and with it over one hundred thousand human beings. I was there. Not many
know how tough America got.
Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
I was among a group of one hundred and fifty infantry privates, captured in the Bulge
breakthrough and put to work in Dresden. Dresden, we were told, was the only major German city
to have escaped bombing so far. That was in January, 1945. She owed her good fortune to
her unwarlike countenance: hospitals, breweries, food-processing plants, surgical supply houses,
ceramics, musical instrument facto- ries, and the like. Since the war, hospitals had become her prime
concern. Every day hundreds of wounded came into the tranquil sanctuary from the east and west.
At night we would hear the dull rumble of distant air raids. "Chemnitz is getting it tonight," we used to say, and
speculated what it might be like to be under the yawning bomb-bays and the bright young
men with their dials and cross-hairs. "Thank heaven we're in an 'open city," we thought, and
so thought the thousands of refugees-women, children, and old men- who came in a forlorn
stream from the smouldering wreck- age of Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Munich.... They flooded the
city to twice its normal population.
There was no war in Dresden. True, planes came over nearly every day and the sirens wailed, but
the planes were always en route elsewhere. The alarms furnished a relief pe- riod in a
tedious work day, a social event, a chance to gossip in the shelters. The shelters, in fact, were not
much more than a gesture, casual recognition of the national emergency: wine cellars and basements with
benches in them and sand
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bags blocking the windows, for the most part. There were a few more adequate bunkers in
the center of the city, close to the government offices, but nothing like the staunch sub-
terranean fortress that rendered Berlin impervious to her daily pounding. Dresden had no
reason to prepare for attack-and thereby hangs a beastly tale,
Dresden was surely among the World's most lovely cities. Her streets were broad, lined with shade-trees.
with countless little parks and statuary. She had marvelous old churches, libraries,
She was sprinkled
museums, theaters, art galleries, beer gardens, a zoo, and a renowned university. It was at one
time a tourist's paradise. They would be far better informed on the city's delights than am I. But
the im- pression I have is that in Dresden-in the physical city- were the symbols of the good
life; pleasant, honest, intelligent. In the Swastika's shadow those symbols of the dignity and
hope of mankind stood waiting, monuments to truth. The accumulated treasure of hundreds of
years, Dres- den spoke eloquently of those things excellent in European civilization wherein our
debt lies deep. I was a prisoner, hungry, dirty, and full of hate for our captors, but I loved that
city and saw the blessed wonder of her past and the rich promise of her future.
In February, 1945, American bombers reduced this treasure to crushed stone and embers; disemboweled
her with high-explosives and cremated her with incendiaries.
Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
The atom bomb may represent a fabulous advance, but it is interesting to note that
primitive TNT and thermite man- aged to exterminate in one bloody night more people than
died in the whole London blitz. Fortress Dresden fired a dozen shots at our airmen. Once back at their bases and
sip- ping hot coffee, they probably remarked, "Flak unusually light tonight. Well, guess it's time
to turn in." Captured British pilots from tactical fighter units (covering front-line troops) used
to chide those who had flown heavy bombers on city raids with, "How on Earth did you
stand the stink of boiling urine and burning perambulators?"
A perfectly routine piece of news: "Last night our planes attacked Dresden. All planes
returned safely." The only good German is a dead one: over one hundred thousand evil men,
women, and children (the able-bodied were at the fronts) forever purged of their sins against humanity.
By chance I met a bombardier who had taken part in the at- tack. "We hated to do it," he told me.
The night they came over we spent in an underground meat locker in a slaughterhouse. We
were lucky, for it was the best shelter in town. Giants stalked the Earth above us, First came the soft murmur
of their dancing on the out- skirts, then the grumbling of their plodding toward us, and finally the
ear-splitting crashes of their heels
upon us--and thence to the outskirts again. Back and forth they swept: saturation bombing.
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"I screamed and I wept and I clawed the walls of our shelter," an old lady told me. "I prayed
to God to please, please, please, dear God, stop them.' But he didn't hear me. No
power could stop them. On they came, wave after wave. There was no way we could
surrender; no way to tell them we couldn't stand it anymore. There was nothing anyone could do
but sit and wait for morning." Her daughter and grandson were killed.
Our little prison was burned to the ground. We were to be evacuated to an outlying camp
occupied by the South African prisoners. Our guards were a melancholy lot, aged
Volkssturmers and disabled veterans. Most of them were Dresden residents and had friends and families somewhere
in the holocaust. A corporal, who had lost an eye after two years on the Russian front,
ascertained before we marched that his wife, his two children, and both of his parents had
been killed. He had one cigarette. He shared it with me.
Our march to new quarters took us on the city's edge. It was impossible to believe that anyone
survived in its heart. Ordinarily the day would have been cold, but occasional gusts from the colossal
inferno made us sweat. And ordinar- ily the day would have been clear and bright, but
an opaque and towering cloud turned noon to twilight. A grim proces- sion clogged the
outbound highways; people with black- ened faces streaked with tears, some bearing wounded,
some bearing dead. They gathered in the fields. None spoke. A
Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
few with Red Cross arm-bands did what they could for the casualties.
Settled with the South Africans, we enjoyed a week with- out work. At the end of it communications were
reestab- lished with higher headquarters and we were ordered to hike seven miles to the area
hardest hit. Nothing in the dis- trict had escaped the fury. A city of jagged building shells, of
splintered statuary and shattered trees; every vehicle stopped, gnarled and burned, left to rust
or rot in the path of the frenzied might. The only sounds other than our own were those of
falling plaster and their echoes. I cannot de- scribe the desolation properly, but I can give an
idea of how it made us feel, in the words of a delirious British soldier in a makeshift P.W. hospital: "It's
frightenin', I tell you. I would walk down one of them bloody streets and feel
a thousand eyes on the back of me 'ead. I would 'ear 'em whisperin' behind me. I would turn
around to look at 'em and there wouldn't be a bloomin' soul in sight. You can feel 'em and you
can 'ear 'em but there's never anybody there." We knew what he said was so.
For "salvage" work we were divided into small crews, each under a guard. Our ghoulish
mission was to search for bodies. It was rich hunting that day and the many there- after. We started
on a small scale-here a leg, there an arm, and an occasional baby-but struck a mother lode before
noon. We cut our way through a basement wall to discover
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a reeking hash of over one hundred human beings. Flame must have swept through before the
building's collapse sealed the exits, because the flesh of those within resembled the texture of prunes.
Our job, it was explained, was to wade into the shambles and bring forth the remains. En-
couraged by cuffing and guttural abuse, wade in we did. We did exactly that, for the floor was
covered with an un- savory broth from burst water mains and viscera. A number of victims, not
killed outright, had attempted to escape through a narrow emergency exit. At any rate, there
were several bodies packed tightly into the
passageway. Their leader had made it halfway up the steps before he was buried up to his neck in
falling brick and plaster. He was about fif- teen, I think.
It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an
appalling lot of women and children. The shelter I have described and innumerable others like it were filled with them.
We had to exhume their bodies and carry them to mass funeral pyres in the parks- so I know.
The funeral pyre technique was abandoned when it became apparent how great was the toll.
There was not enough labor to do it nicely, so a man with a flame- thrower was sent down instead, and he
cremated them where they lay. Burned alive, suffocated, crushed-men, women, and children
indiscriminately killed. For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely cre- ated a
Belsen of our own. The method was impersonal, but
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Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
the result was equally cruel and heartless. That, I am afraid, is a sickening truth.
When we had become used to the darkness, the odor, and the
carnage, we began musing as to what
each of the corpses had been in life. It was a sordid game: "Rich man, poor man, beggar
man, thief..." Some had fat purses and jewelry, others had precious foodstuffs. A boy had his
dog still leashed to him. Renegade Ukrainians in German uni- form were in charge of our
operations in the shelters proper. They were roaring drunk from adjacent wine cellars and
seemed to enjoy their job hugely. It was a profitable one, for they stripped each body of valuables
before we carried it to the street. Death became so commonplace that we could joke about our
dismal burdens and cast them about like so much garbage. Not so with the first of them,
especially the young: we had lifted them onto the stretchers with care, laying them out with some
semblance of funeral dignity in their last resting place before the pyre. But our awed and sorrowful
propriety gave way, as I said, to rank callousness. At the end of a grisly day we would smoke and
survey impressive heap of dead accumulated. One of us flipped his cigarette butt into the
pile: "Hell's bells," he said, "I'm ready for Death anytime he wants to come after me.
the
A few days after the raid the sirens screamed again. The
listless and heartsick survivors were showered this time with
leaflets. I lost my copy of the epic, but remember that it ran something like this: "To the
people of Dresden: We were
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forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traf- fic your railroad facilities have
been carrying. We realize that we haven't always hit our objectives. Destruction of anything other
than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war." That explained the slaughter
to everyone's satisfaction, I am sure, but it aroused no little contempt for the American bomb-sight.
It is a fact that forty-eight hours after the last B-17 had droned west for a well-earned rest, labor
battalions had swarmed over the damaged rail yards and restored them to nearly normal service. None
of the rail bridges over the Elbe was knocked out of commission. Bomb-sight manufacturers
should blush to know that their marvelous devices laid bombs down as much as three miles wide of what the
military claimed to be aiming for. The leaflet should have said, “We hit every blessed church,
hospital, school, museum, theater, your university, the zoo, and every apartment building in
town, but we honestly weren't trying hard to do it. C'est la guerre. So sorry. Besides,
saturation bombing is all the these days, you know."
rage
There was tactical significance: stop the railroads. An excellent maneuver, no doubt, but the
technique was horri- ble. The planes started kicking high-explosives and incendi- aries through
their bomb-bays at the city limits, and for all the pattern their hits presented, they must have
been briefed by a Ouija board. Tabulate the loss against the
Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
gain. Over one hundred thousand non-combatants and a magnificent city destroyed by bombs
dropped wide of the stated objectives: the railroads were knocked out for roughly two days. The
Germans counted it the greatest loss of life suffered in any single raid. The death of Dresden
was a bitter tragedy, needlessly and willfully executed. The killing of children--"Jerry" children or
"Jap" children, or whatever enemies the future may hold for us- -can never be justified.
The facile reply to great groans such as mine is the most hateful of all clichés, "fortunes of war,"
and another, "They asked for it. All they understand is force." Who asked for it? The only thing who
understands is force? Believe me, it is not easy to rationalize the stamping out of vineyards where the
grapes of wrath are stored when gathering up babies in bushel baskets or helping a man dig
where he thinks his wife may be buried. Certainly enemy military and industrial installations
should have been blown flat, and woe unto those foolish enough to seek shelter near them. But the "Get
Tough America" policy, the spirit of re- penge, the approbation of all destruction and killing,
has earned us a name for obscene brutality, and cost the World the possibility of Germany's
becoming a peaceful and intel- lectually fruitful nation in anything but the most remote future.
Our leaders had a carte blanche as to what they might or
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might not destroy. Their mission was to win the war as quickly as possible, and, while they were
admirably trained to do just that, their decisions as to the fate of certain price- less World
heirlooms-in one case Dresden-were not al- ways judicious. When, late in the war, with the Wehrmacht
breaking up on all fronts, our planes were sent to destroy this last major city, I doubt if the
question was asked, "How will this tragedy benefit us, and how will that benefit com- pare
with the ill-effects in the long run?" Dresden, a beau- tiful city, built in the art spirit, symbol of an
admirable heritage, so anti-Nazi that Hitler visited it but twice during his whole reign, food and
hospital center so bitterly needed now--plowed under and salt strewn in the furrows.
There can be no doubt that the Allies fought on the side of right and the Germans and
Japanese on the side of wrong. World War II was fought for near-Holy motives. But I stand
convinced that the brand of justice in which we dealt, wholesale bombings of civilian populations,
was blas- phemous. That the enemy did it first has nothing to do with the moral problem. What I
saw of our air war, as the European conflict neared an end, had the earmarks of being an
irrational war for war's sake. Soft citizens of the Ameri-
can democracy learned to kick a man below the belt and make the bastard scream.
The occupying Russians, when they discovered that we were Americans, embraced us and
congratulated us on the
Wailing Shall Be in All Streets
complete desolation our planes had wrought. We accepted their congratulations with
good grace and proper modesty, but I felt then as I feel now, that I would have given my
life to save Dresden for the World's generations to come. That is how everyone should feel about
every city on Earth.
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