"The bombardier, whether or not he aimed for a target, caused damage. He fired a shot basically like a cannon’s, but vertically. It was all the same whether he fired blindly or aimed. The site where the cannonball hit was a target of some kind. Sometimes it was hit intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. The rules changed, however, when the pathfinders and bombers began to divide up the work. The grammar of shot and target became insignificant. The pathfinder no longer indicated a point but rather outlined and area. It then was not a matter of “hitting” discreet objects within an area—instead, the demarcated area comprised all that was simply was not supposed to be and was to be removed from the world. Annihilation is the special extension of death. The victim does not die his death, because he does not have one. He finds himself in a sphere in which life has ceased."
This paragraph occurs a mere 69 pages into Jorg Friedrich’s study of the allied air war in Germany, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945. I cite this not as an example of reportage or analyses, but as exceptional writing. This is dense yet distilled thought: crystalline, clinical, and dispassionate. This passage captures Friedrich’s tone for the rest of the book. It is not judgmental because it need not be. The subject matter alone is the judgment and the justice, if that is what it can be called. Friedrich relates a six-word commentary of Der Brand (the original German): “It is an encyclopedia of pain.” I contend that this book is actually a dictionary. It is a dictionary of loss.
Friedrich makes no attempt to justify the German position in the war - he knows he can’t. He does not make a case for the firebombing as an Allied war crime. All war is crime and Augustine’s concept of a “just war” is just so much theologic masturbatory fluff. Friedrich carefully documents the history of air warfare (from The Great War to 1945), the weapons of such (planes, ordinances, radar), people (pilots, navigators, bombardiers), and the intercourse between them. He addresses the strategy of the bombing campaign exhaustively leading to Dresden, but highlighting Hamburg and Berlin in the wake.
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