The stereotypical representation of what went on in Europe during World War II paints the picture of the noble, righteous Allies standing up for Truth, Justice, and Decency in the face of the consistently evil Nazis.
The following excerpt from W. G. Sebald's book, On
the Natural History of Destruction, tells a mostly-hidden tale of quite a different reality.
In the summer of 1943, during a long heatwave, the RAF,
supported by the US Eighth Army Air Force, flew a series of raids on Hamburg.
The aim of Operation Gomorrah, as it was called, was to destroy the city and
reduce it as completely as possible to ashes. In a raid early in the morning of
27 July, beginning at 1 a.m., 10,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary
bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe.
... A now-familiar sequence of events occurred: first all the doors and windows
were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive bombs weighing 4,000
pounds, then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight
incendiary mixtures, and at the same time fire-bombs weighing up to 15 kilograms
fell into the lower storeys. Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning all
over the target area, which covered some 20 square kilometres, and they merged
so rapidly that only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the
whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five
minutes later, at 1.20 a.m., a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever
before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising 2,000 metres into the
sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached
hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out
at once.
Residential districts with a street length of 200
kilometres in all were utterly destroyed. Horribly disfigured corpses lay
everywhere. Bluish little phosphorus flames still flickered around many of
them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their
normal size. They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat, which had
sometimes already congealed. In the next few days, the central death zone was
declared a no-go area. When punishment labour gangs and camp inmates could
begin clearing it in August, after the rubble had cooled down, they found people
still sitting at tables or up against walls where they had been overcome by
monoxide gas. Elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had
cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers. Other victims had been so
badly charred and reduced to ashes by the heat, which had risen to 1,000
degrees or more, that the remains of families consisting of several people
could be carried away in a single laundry basket.
The exodus of survivors from Hamburg had begun on the night
of the air raid itself. … The refugees, numbering one and a quarter million,
dispersed all over the Reich as far as its outer borders. Under his diary entry
for 20 August 1943, ... Friedrich Reck describes a group of forty to fifty such
refugees trying to force their way into a train at a station in Upper Bavaria.
As they do so, a cardboard suitcase 'falls on the platform, bursts open and
spills its contents. Toys, a manicure case, singed underwear. And last of all,
the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy, which its half-deranged
mother has been carrying about with her, the relic of a past that was still
intact a few days ago.'
Truth is...no matter the conflict, "the enemy" never has a corner on the market for being evil.
