[David
burned with anger against the man and said to Nathan, “As surely as the LORD
lives, the man who did this deserves to die! He must pay for that lamb four
times over, because he did such a thing and had no pity.” Then Nathan said to
David, “You are the man!” – The
Bible]
They said it would hasten making the world
safe for democracy. It was novel and bold. British Joint Chiefs of Staff first
floated it, and the Americans soon enough were convinced. The project, code
named Operation Aztec, was launched by
the Allies late in 1944. After all, the Germans started it by firebombing
London… My dad said it had real potential to bring the War to an early end, if
only outraged German citizens would rise up en
masse against the Nazi Command.
The surprise raids by Allied soldiers on
the troop trains initially proved easy, since by then Germany’s defences
southeast of Dresden were virtually non-existent. The fools readily
surrendered. Lots of small nearby towns and rural areas were also attacked. The
Elbe River rolled right through the spectacularly cultured city of Dresden on
its way to the North Sea. The juxtaposition of thousands of floating corpses couldn’t
have been starker. The massive Allied leafleting and radio propaganda announced
there would be a minimum of one thousand victims a day until Germany
surrendered. It eventually was upped to two thousand, then three… It was worth
trying; anything was by then… To
quickly bring this brutal War to an end, to bring our troops and values home.
The “older German soldiers were easy.,” dad
reported. He continued, “Who knows what horrors they had committed, possibly
against the Jews, certainly other Allied targets?” Still their faces close up all
looked the same – such fear! – including just kids who by War’s end were
joining the Nazis by the thousands. My dad also claimed “the kid soldiers were
harder. Civilians the hardest. But we kept remembering, they were all Nazis,
the whole damn lot! Initially, women and children were to be spared. But they
were Nazis too! Or would produce and become them.” Besides, the propaganda
impact would be ruthlessly shocking. “It was for our troops we heard over and
over again, for civilization, for democracy.” My dad initially I guess believed
it.
Twenty-five at a time were lined up, no
hoods (they would be messy to remove afterwards) and twenty-five in the squad,
each needing only forty bullets to bag the thousand; later eighty bullets;
eventually one hundred and twenty? and more?… He never specified the
ballistics, but they were the mushroom kind that entered neatly on one side, then
blew off half the head on the other. At least none of the victims would drown… .
My dad remembered clearly “the birds brightly chirping on the mornings it was
our turn. Until the first volley rang out.” He explained, “I always looked away
immediately. The birds dispersed even faster!” He never knew what kind of
songsters they were. He never knew one of his targets… what lives they had lived,
might have still lived.
One different squad a day, seven in all, weekly
rotation. You never knew which day was yours, until the orders were given that
very morning.
They then loaded them daily onto trucks and
dumped all one, eventually two, three and more thousand at once over the
precipice edge into the roiling river below, sharp at 8:00 a.m. It must have
been a sight: several trucks lined up over the gorge, awaiting the order, then
lifting the immolated high in the dumpsters like the Aztec priest’s knife and
palpitating hearts, and plunging them like a baptism into the dark river far
below. My dad said chaplains were in fact on hand throughout. Consigning to
hell? To heaven?
It was hoped the German populace would be outraged
at the daily floating horror show and overthrow the Führer…
Ambrose Bierce wrote that “war is the means
by which Americans learn geography.” And Westerners. Chris Hedges wrote that
“war is a force that gives us meaning.” And Western values. Bruce *censored*burn
sang, “And they call it democracy.” And Western civilization. I wish I had
gotten to know my dad. I would have asked so many questions about war and values
and civilization. I vaguely remember a few visits to the asylum. More that they
stopped suddenly when I was five. My mom only years later admitted to the War-induced
suicide.
They say the Aztecs at the height of their
civilization sacrificed twenty thousand victims a year. They say the Allies at
the height of “our finest hour” slaughtered or wounded through “moral bombing”
about two million civilians. They say the
most destructive single terrorist attack in human history happened sixty years
ago this August 6 on a beautiful summer day in Hiroshima. Thousands of kids
that morning too for a time listened to the birds chirping, their incinerated
hearts in a split second en masse lifted
high by a mushroom cloud…
They say it was to make the world safe…
[My dad in
fact died peacefully in his sleep in his
eighty-first year. He had served only on the Italian Front, never in Germany or
elsewhere; never on a firing squad to my knowledge. He refused to talk about any
of the War. There was no “Operation Aztec.” There was however in fact a bomb dropped August 6, 1945 codenamed
“Little Boy” that killed 70,000 people instantaneously and stopped time and
civilization precisely at 8:17 a.m. Another bomb, “Fat Man,” released over
Nagasaki three days later, obliterated 40,000 outright. And on February 13 and
14, 1945, refugee and medical centre Dresden was reduced to rubble by the worst
firebombing in European history.]