Funeral Pyres

Abstract

For the men and women of the Western Allies, soldiers and civilians alike, the devastation wrought in the cities of Germany was stupefying. Even for those who were to some extent inured to destruction by the battlefields of North Africa and Europe, the shattered ruins of Germany were shocking, not least because of the realization that such conditions were due, in large part, to the aerial bombing campaign. Especially in the United States, there had been an enduring belief in the unearthly accuracy of Allied bombing, especially in the daylight raids of the USAAF in Europe. This belief had its enduring and enigmatic symbol in the famous Norden bombsight that could, its advertising fatuously reiterated, put a ‘bomb into a pickle barrel’.¹ The pervasiveness of this rhetoric meant that even an experienced reporter such as Percy Knauth from Time magazine was genuinely awed by the evidence that ‘in the Battle for Berlin a lot of our American bombardiers … did not even aim’.² Berlin, in particular, quickly became home to a phalanx of international reporters, most of whom made at least passing comment on the ghostly burned-out shells of the buildings at the centre of town. A much-quoted article in the London Times called the city a wilderness of shattered stone. The visitor to the city, the report continued, ‘can walk for hours and see no small thing, not a stick of furniture, a rag or scrap of paper to suggest that there was even any life here. Fire has consumed all.’³

There is nothing for it but to pulp them all.

Thomas Mann