The Fire and the Darkness - Sinclair McKay

I have spent the entire past weekend submerged in reading this book about the Allied bombing of Dresden in February 1945. Luckily for my kids we have all been under the weather so no one complained about me spending the entire weekend with my face in a book).

I was born in Britain, and spent the first 10 years of my life there, living not too far from Coventry (one of the cities that was crushed by the Germans during the Blitz). I heard stories of German bombings and devastation from family members who had lived through it, it’s part of our history. But the Allied bombing of German towns and cities is also part of our history, and I think it’s important that we talk about, and understand what happened there.

The Fire and the Darkness is a deeply researched and superbly well written account of the city of Dresden, before, during, and after it was annihilated by the Allies. This is a book of nonfiction, but it reads like fiction, beautifully blending fact into the stories of people who were there on the ground and in the sky. I was able to imagine the beauty of pre-1945 Dresden in my mind, and live through the terror and the horrors of the bombing campaign with the citizens of Dresden as I read. 

I really appreciated how the author does not shy away from posing ethical questions about the bombings, looks deeply into the reasons for the bombings through different sources, without providing excuses and/or blame. I personally don’t think there is any justification for mass murder in any shape or form, and I think it’s easy to overlook the tragedies that the German population endured in the last year or so of WW2 because of the amount of atrocities that were committed in the name of Nazism. I think Sinclair McKay takes the perfect approach in this book by providing the reader with an overall view of where, why, and how; and he does not shy away from stating hard truths.

It was interesting to delve deep into the workings of the city, especially as I wasn’t very clued into how Dresden situated itself inside Nazi Germany. The detailed background of the city and the residents was very helpful in creating insight into Dresden at the time of the bombings. I also learnt so much about the ins and outs of bombings, the decisions that were made, the actual destruction that they caused, and how they were engineered to cause mass destruction (the idea of being stuck behind a fire tornado gave me nightmares, I can only imagine how terrifying it must be to be stuck there with nowhere to go).

The narrative is structured in a way that the build-up to the bombing is terrifying: there are cold, hard facts mixed with personal background stories of people who were on the ground and in the air, and the first half of the book contains this build-up. It creates a canvas on which the reader only has to imagine the scene that is to unfold as the masses of Lancasters arrive on the horizon along the Elbe. I felt on edge most of the first part of the book, just waiting for the inevitable to happen. The descriptions of the bombing are also terrifying - definitely not for the faint of heart, but still a must read in terms of understanding the utter devastation and loss of life caused.

What we do know now though, is that the real evil in Germany often managed to survive, and some participants even prospered after the war, sometimes hiding in plain sight. The “collateral damage”, or “spillage” as they used to call it, in places like Dresden, was mainly civilians who may or may not have toed the party line out of conviction and/or fear. In my opinion this amplifies the horrors of the bombings even more. In the end what did it really accomplish? (I think the same questions are completely viable for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and any more recent drone attacks and/or bombing campaigns that leave death and destruction in their wake.)

I think the only issue that I may have had with this book, and it’s really a non-issue: the length. There were parts that I had to plough through a bit because I knew that if I put the book down then I may not be in a rush to pick it up again (some of the burrowing down into the history of the city, while relevant, lost my interest a little). I’m glad I continued though, this book is a deep mine of important information that I think we should all be aware of. Cities in different countries around the world are still being bombed to oblivion today (Syria comes immediately to mind but there are others), and warfare from the air is still something that I think brings up many of the ethical questions that we should still be posing ourselves today.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.