Firebombing

DRESDEN

Tuesday, February 13, 1945.

By Frederick Taylor.

Illustrated. 518 pp. New York:

HarperCollins Publishers. $26.95.

World War II was a war of unparalleled atrocities. The worst is also the best known: the Nazi murder of millions of Jews in death factories. But in this total war, no one could emerge with totally clean hands. In the bitter struggle for survival, the Allies, it is said, all too frequently descended into barbarity of their own.

The bombardment of the German city of Dresden, brought home to Americans most famously in Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel, ''Slaughterhouse-Five,'' is a frequently cited case in point. The political theorist Michael Walzer is not alone in condemning the raid as ''terror bombing,'' a gratuitous and ''savage attack'' in which ''something like 100,000 German civilians were killed,'' all ''without moral (and probably also without military) reason.'' In today's Germany, this view has gained salience in a society increasingly intent on redefining itself less as a perpetrator of evil deeds than as their victim. ''Der Brand'' (''The Fire''), a best seller in Germany by the historian Jörg Friedrich, calls the destruction of Dresden and other German cities ''unjust and unimaginable,'' if not ''technically'' an Allied war crime.

On its face, Walzer's position, if not Friedrich's, seems unassailable. Dresden, after all, was one of the great architectural pearls of Europe. Its strategic importance was evidently trifling enough that the Allies left it unscathed for most of the war. No less a figure than Winston Churchill had regrets about Dresden's fate, writing to aides that it constituted ''a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.'' The entire air war against German cities is now widely believed to have had little effect other than to stiffen German resolve.

''Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945,'' by the British historian Frederick Taylor, offers grounds for considering this orthodoxy afresh. Taylor begins by tracing Dresden's rise as a center of German culture. He then goes into the period of Nazi rule, describing life in the city during wartime and, finally, the chain of decisions -- both Allied and Nazi -- leading to the single day that destroyed so much treasure and human life.

What emerges is a picture markedly different from conventional accounts. To begin with, though a great many innocent civilians perished in the firestorm, the city itself had hardly been a model of innocence. Rather, it was a Nazified redoubt; the bulk of its citizens passionately supported Hitler's war of aggression. Those who did not actively persecute the small Jewish community within their midst quietly stood by while it was physically eliminated.

Nor did Dresden, as some have suggested, produce nothing more harmful than cuckoo clocks and marzipan. Taylor carefully debunks what he calls the ''pervasive postwar myth'' that the city contributed little to the war. Dresden, as one Nazi document quoted here boasted, was ''one of the foremost industrial locations of the Reich,'' manufacturing a range of crucial goods from optical gun sights to munitions.

Dresden was also, it turns out, important strategically, and became more so as the war progressed. Of particular significance were the city's railyards, a crucial way station for the shipment of men and matériel to the east, as well as for thousands of ''passengers'' on ''special trains'' bound for Auschwitz. Every single day in October 1944, Taylor writes, a ''total of 28 military trains, altogether carrying almost 20,000 officers and men, were in transit through Dresden.'' Indeed, it was the frenetic pace of German military transport through the city, Taylor points out, that partly prompted the decision of the Allies to place Dresden in their sights.

Coming so late in the war, was the bombing of Dresden gratuitous? Only with hindsight. It now seems obvious that by mid-February 1945 German capitulation was just months away. Things looked very different at the time. The Dresden attack took place in the immediate aftermath of Hitler's shock offensive in the Ardennes -- the Battle of the Bulge -- that in a few short weeks took the lives of some 19,000 American soldiers. Allied planners also feared that in addition to the V-1 and V-2 rockets still raining down on England, Hitler might surprise them with even more powerful wonder-weapons.

Finally, Taylor places the bombing of Dresden in the larger context of Allied strategy. The targeting of urban centers may have been morally repugnant, but given the inherent inaccuracy of nighttime bombing it was also unavoidable. According to Taylor, whatever effects the campaign against cities did or did not have on German morale, it played ''a major role in the defeat of Germany.'' Among other things, the German need to protect the homeland with flak guns and fighter aircraft meant diverting a substantial quantity of industrial and military resources from offensive to defensive operations. When forcefully challenged by the General Staff for his harsh appraisal of the Dresden raid, Churchill withdrew his ill-considered comment.

Taylor does not slight the terrible human toll of Dresden. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, he vividly recreates the inferno unleashed by the British incendiary bombs. But his close analysis of the death toll puts the total at between 25,000 and 40,000; fearsome numbers, to be sure, but far below the 100,000 commonly cited. (Walzer, like many others who have written about Dresden, drew on figures put forward by the British Holocaust denier David Irving and shown to be lacking, as a British judge found, ''any evidential basis.'')

If thousands of innocent men, women and children perished in the fires of Dresden, the bombing of the city, as Taylor emphasizes, also saved innocent lives, and not merely by shortening the war. Here we come to one of the most spellbinding twists of the story. Just days before the raid, the minuscule remainder of Dresden's Jews -- spared by virtue of their marriages to ''Aryans'' -- received their final deportation notice. On Feb. 16, they were to be shipped to Auschwitz. Among those Jews saved by Allied firebombs was the diarist of wartime Germany, Victor Klemperer, who survived along with his manuscript.

Watching the local synagogues burn seven years earlier in the orgy of anti-Semitic violence known as Kristallnacht, one wary non-Jewish Dresdener was recorded as saying: ''This fire will return! It will make a long curve and then come back to us.'' He was right. The fire did return.