Dresden Bombing Quotes

I could buy that she would murder me in a fit of rage, poison me out of flaming jealousy, or bomb my car out of sheer, stubborn pique. But she would never do it and feel nothing.

There was a ticking time bomb inside my head and the one person I trusted to go in and get it out hadn’t shown up or spoken to me for more than a year.

While we were being bombed in Dresden sitting in a cellar with our arms over our heads in case the ceiling fell, one soldier said as though he were a duchess in a mansion on a cold and rainy night, 'I wonder what the poor people are doing tonight.' Nobody laughed, but we were still all glad he said it. At least we were still alive! He proved it.

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.

He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land … who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books …

Billy switched on a floor lamp. The light from the single source threw the baroque detailing of Montana’s body into sharp relief. Billy was reminded of fantastic architecture in Dresden, before it was bombed.

I’m reading a book about bombs being dropped on Dresden. Twenty-five thousand people are dying. There’s a plane banking over Manhattan right now. I can read the jumble of numbers and letters on the tail of that plane. I am screaming in my head for the pilot to pull up.

For some reason I just want to mention another German artist I like a lot. Imi Knoebel. He once described hiding in an attic during the bombing of Dresden and how the flashes of bombs filled a triangular shaped window in the room he was in and the experience contributed to his love of simple shapes. Is that love or merely imprinting. It was simple and strong and one is forced in a way to see the world the way it IS shaped. Art becomes a momory more than anything else. A kind of chooser. It shows how we were touched.

The Strategic Bombing Survey estimates that “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a 6-hour period than at any [equivalent period of] time in the history of man.” The fire storm at Dresden may have killed more people but not in so short a space of time. More than 100,000 men, women and children died in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945; a million were injured, at least 41,000 seriously; a million in all lost their homes. Two thousand tons of incendiaries delivered that punishment—in the modern notation, two kilotons. But the wind, not the weight of bombs alone, created the conflagration, and therefore the efficiency of the slaughter was in some sense still in part an act of God.

In my dream, all of the collapsed ceilings reformed above us. The fire went back into the bombs, which rose up and into the bellies of planes whose propellers turned backward, like the second hands of the clocks across Dresden, only faster.

Industrial production actually rose in Germany during the war. And the cities with the highest morale were the ones—like Dresden—that were bombed the hardest. According to German psychologists who compared notes with their American counterparts after the war, it was the untouched cities where civilian morale suffered the most.

most Americans have never recognized as “terrorist” in precisely the same sense the firestorms caused deliberately by U.S. firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden or Hamburg or the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. These deliberate massacres of civilians, though not prosecuted after World War II like the Japanese slaughter in China at Nanking, were by any prior or reasonable criteria war crimes, wartime terrorism, crimes against humanity.

Wells recognized that these crude novels correctly foresaw modern warfare as aiming at the massive destruction of the physical structures of an enemy civilization and the terrorizing if not annihilating of its noncombatant population. His Martians anticipate with uncomfortable accuracy, for example, American bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and boastful proclamations of “shock and awe” tactics against Iraq.

The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people.

The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes.

For some reason I just want to mention another German artist I like a lot. Imi Knoebel. He once described hiding in an attic during the bombing of Dresden and how the flashes of bombs filled a triangular shaped window in the room he was in and the experience contributed to his love of simple shapes. Is that love or merely imprinting. It was simple and strong and one is forced in a way to see the world the way it IS shaped. Art becomes a memory more than anything else. A kind of chooser. It shows how we were touched.

He was down in the meat locker on the night that Dresden was destroyed. There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked. The meat locker was a very safe shelter. All that happened down there was an occasional shower of calcimine. The Americans and four of their guards and a few dressed carcasses were down there, and nobody else. The rest of the guards had, before the raid began, gone to the comforts of their own homes in Dresden. They were all being killed with their families.

Götz Bergander, son of Dresden, eyewitness to its suffering, and the first objective historian of its destruction, summed up succinctly but tellingly: What began as routine led to an inferno and left behind a signal. What seemed capable of achievement only on paper—the coming together of favorable circumstances for the attacks—was suddenly an accomplished fact. But wasn’t that what the supporters of area bombing had always wanted? Too late came the question of whether they had really wanted it.Or, as the painter Goya—also no stranger to horror—expressed it with even more economy: “The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

I was halfway across when the planes came roaring, demolishing the sky over the Severn Valley. Tornados fly over our school several times a day, so I was ready to cover my ears with my hands. But I wasn’t ready for three Hawker Harrier Jump Jets, close enough to the ground to hit with a cricket ball. The slam of noise was incredible! I bent into a tight ball and peeped out. The Harriers curved before they smashed into the Malverns, just, and flew off toward Birmingham, screaming under Soviet radar height. When World War III comes, it’ll be MiGs stationed in Warsaw or East Germany screaming under NATO radar. Dropping bombs on people like us. On English cities, towns, and villages like Worcester, Malvern, and Black Swan Green. Dresden, the Blitz, and Nagasaki.

Joseph Andreas Epp. Epp told us that German scientists had secret UFOs’ facilities in Germany and Poland. He particularly mentioned the UFOs’ hangars located in Letow, Breslau and Dresden, which was reduced to ashes by Allied aerial carpet bombings. He stated that 15 UFOs prototypes were built and flew successfully. He added that the early German UFOs were based upon blueprints and instructions given by Maria Ostric’s Vril Society. Epp in his own words, describing the UFO mode of operation: The circular wing blades rotated independently and smoothly around the external body (Chassis) of the machine as the craft moved forward in a centrifugical manner (Auto-gyrocopter), and the craft took off vertically in a spiral mode. It reached a high altitude at an incredible speed…close to a supersonic speed.

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat’s Cradle, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity’s Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode. This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors listed above, only four besides Tolkien would find their works regularly placed on the ‘fantasy’ shelves of bookshops, and ‘the fantastic’ includes many genres besides fantasy: allegory and parable, fairy-tale, horror and science fiction, modern ghost-story and medieval romance. Nevertheless, the point remains. Those authors of the twentieth century who have spoken most powerfully to and for their contemporaries have for some reason found it necessary to use the metaphoric mode of fantasy, to write about worlds and creatures which we know do not exist, whether Tolkien’s ‘Middle-earth’, Orwell’s ‘Ingsoc’, the remote islands of Golding and Wells, or the Martians and Tralfa-madorians who burst into peaceful English or American suburbia in Wells and Vonnegut. A ready explanation for this phenomenon is of course that it represents a kind of literary disease, whose sufferers – the millions of readers of fantasy – should be scorned, pitied, or rehabilitated back to correct and proper taste. Commonly the disease is said to be ‘escapism’: readers and writers of fantasy are fleeing from reality. The problem with this is that so many of the originators of the later twentieth-century fantastic mode, including all four of those first mentioned above (Tolkien, Orwell, Golding, Vonnegut) are combat veterans, present at or at least deeply involved in the most traumatically significant events of the century, such as the Battle of the Somme (Tolkien), the bombing of Dresden (Vonnegut), the rise and early victory of fascism (Orwell). Nor can anyone say that they turned their backs on these events. Rather, they had to find some way of communicating and commenting on them. It is strange that this had, for some reason, in so many cases to involve fantasy as well as realism, but that is what has happened.

You needn’t worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance.

Rosewater was twice as smart as Billy, but he and Billy were dealing with similar crises in similar ways. They had both found life meaningless, partly because of what they had seen in war. Rosewater, for instance, had shot a fourteen-year-old fireman, mistaking him for a German soldier. So it goes. And Billy had seen the greatest massacre in European history, which was the fire-bombing of Dresden. So it goes. So they were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science fiction was a big help.

Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window was among the paintings rescued from destruction during the bombing of Dresden in World War II, The painting was stored, with other works of art, in a tunnel in Saxon, Switzerland; when the Red Army encountered them, they took them. The Soviets portrayed this as an act of rescue; some others as an act of plunder. Either way, after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviets decided in 1955 to return the art to Germany, “for the purpose of strengthening and furthering the progress of friendship between the Soviet and German peoples.” Aggrieved at the thought of losing hundreds of paintings, art historians and museum curators in the Soviet Union suggested that “in acknowledgment for saving and returning the world-famous treasures of the Dresden Gallery” the Germans should perhaps donate to them Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window and Sleeping Venus by Giorgione. The Germans did not take to the idea, and the painting was returned. Well-preserved, it is on display at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden.

Harris himself was not the villain of Dresden. The decision to mount the raids, and those on Berlin, Leipzig and Chemnitz, was taken by the combined US, Russian and British Chiefs of Staff, fully supported by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. It was Harris’s duty to execute their orders. Nor was Harris the architect of area bombing, a policy already in place when, in 1942, he became C-in-C of Bomber Command.

This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don't think it's a marvelous moral, I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. My personal experience with Nazi monkey business was limited. There were some vile and lively native American Fascists in my home town of Indianapolis during the thirties, and somebody slipped me a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I remember, which was supposed to be the Jews' secret plan for taking over the world. And I remember some laughs about my aunt, too, who married a German German, and who had to write to Indianapolis for proofs that she had no Jewish blood. The Indianapolis mayor knew her from high school and dancing school, so he had fun putting ribbons and official seals all over the documents the Germans required, which made them look like eighteenth-century peace treaties. After a while the war came, and I was in it, and I was captured, so I got to see a little of Germany from the inside while the war was still going on. I was a private, a battalion scout, and, under the terms of the Geneva Convention, I had to work for my keep, which was good, not bad. I didn't have to stay in prison all the time, somewhere out in the countryside. I got to go to a city, which was Dresden, and to see the people and the things they did. There were about a hundred of us in our particular work group, and we were put out as contract labor to a factory that was making a vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. It tasted like thin honey laced with hickory smoke. It was good. I wish I had some right now. And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an 'open' city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then hundreds of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one another, and became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. And so what? We didn't get to see the fire storm. We were in a cool meat-locker under a slaughterhouse with our six guards and ranks and ranks of dressed cadavers of cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep. We heard the bombs walking around up there. Now and then there would be a gentle shower of calcimine. If we had gone above to take a look, we would have been turned into artefacts characteristic of fire storms: seeming pieces of charred firewood two or three feet long - ridiculously small human beings, or jumbo fried grasshoppers, if you will. The malt syrup factory was gone. Everything was gone but the cellars where 135,000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men. So we were put to work as corpse miners, breaking into shelters, bringing bodies out. And I got to see many German types of all ages as death had found them, usually with valuables in their laps. Sometimes relatives would come to watch us dig. They were interesting, too. So much for Nazis and me. If I'd been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides. So it goes. There's another clear moral to this tale, now that I think about it: When you're dead you're dead. And yet another moral occurs to me now: Make love when you can. It's good for you.

What Air Marshal Saundby said, among other things, was this: That the bombing of Dresden was a great tragedy none can deny. That it was really a military necessity few, after reading this book, will believe. It was one of those terrible things that sometimes happen in wartime, brought about by an unfortunate combination of circumstances. Those who approved it were neither wicked nor cruel, though it may well be that they were too remote from the harsh realities of war to understand fully the appalling destructive power of air bombardment in the spring of 1945. The advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to believe that, if they could achieve their aim, war would become tolerable and decent. They would do well to read this book and ponder the fate of Dresden, where 135,000 people died as the result of an air attack with conventional weapons. On the night of March 9th, 1945, an air attack on Tokyo by American heavy bombers, using incendiary and high explosive bombs, caused the death of 83,793 people. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 71,379 people. So it goes.

You needn't worry about bombs, by the way. Dresden is an open city. It is undefended, and contains no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance.

How can the United States, supposedly a world leader in human rights, justify firebombing Tokyo and the saturation bombing of Dresden near the conclusion of World War II? Why does the slogan an eye for an eye always trump the mantra of turn the other cheek? Why does the cry for revenge always ring louder than the plea for peace? How can the League of Nations idly standby for decades why merchants of greed cleared the rainforest, polluted the skies and streams, and decimated species after species of plants, animals, and sea life? If human beings are inherently kind and God serves as a symbol of human being’s charitable impulse, there would be no warfare.

Britain and Germany thought they were winning World War II by trying to bomb the other into submission. In reality, they were destroying themselves as global powers, and (ironically, similar to one of the firestorms their city bombings caused), creating a vacuum on the world stage that the United States and the Soviet Union rushed to fill as superpowers in the post-war years.

In her somberly measured reflections, Reading the Holocaust, Inga Glendinnen ventures this opinion about the slaughter of innocents: "If we grant that 'Holocaust,' the total consumption of offerings by fire, is sinisterly appropriate for the murder of those millions who found their only graves in the air, it is equally appropriate for the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden." Without using her capitalization (which implies too complete an equation between the Shoah and other carnages), it is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations, not illustrations.

We bombed children in Dresden. We napalmed little kids in Vietnam, burning their clothes off and leaving them running naked through rice paddies, screaming for mercy. We bombed weddings in Afghanistan. We watched as Israel bombed children in hospitals. On and on it goes.

Israel is estimated to have dropped over 83,000 tons of explosives—more than all the bombs dropped on Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II combined—on Gaza between October 7, 2023, and September 22, 2024.