A Few Words About Slaughterhouse-Five

By common consent the two great English language anti-war novels of the past 50 years are Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). A third war novel, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), seems to have lost it former appeal as a big, important book about war and morality, and it’s not a title you are likely to come across in British bookshops, unlike the other two. Strange (but comforting) to find that realism has a shorter shelf life than exuberant non-conformist fiction.

Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five were both written by men who were young servicemen in the Second World War. Heller, born in 1923, enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was trained as a bombardier (i.e. the man who aims and drops bombs from a bomber). In 1944 he was sent in combat, flying out of Corsica with B-25 crews of 488 squadron. He flew 60 missions. His nerve cracked after what one obituary writer called “an awful experience on a bombing raid near Avignon” and for his last 25 missions he was “terrified”. In later years, as a successful writer, Heller played down the darker side of those missions, saying that for the most part he had “a very good time in the war”. But his sister Sylvia claimed he had a wartime diary which contained details of appalling events. (Heller died in 1999. A biography has yet to appear.)

Heller experienced war from a bomber, his compatriot Kurt Vonnegut from that of one of the bombed. Vonnegut (born in 1922) served in the U.S. infantry, was captured in December 1944, and as a prisoner of war was present in the German city of Dresden on 13 February 1945 when an Allied bombing raid laid waste the centre of the city, killing vast numbers of civilians in a firestorm. It was one of the defining moments of Vonnegut’s life and the experience which he later converted into fiction in what is arguably his greatest novel: Slaughterhouse-Five.

There are big differences between the two novels. Heller’s book is a lengthy comedy about the absurdity of war. It moves at a terrific pace and pays little attention to the conventions of standard realist fiction. There is no mannered fine writing and no in-depth description of characters or landscapes. The characters sometimes have absurd names, and a slightly cartoon quality. The novel is not a psychological drama and the plot is not suspenseful, setting up mysteries and then resolving them. It satirises the business of war from the perspective of the disgruntled, humane, ordinary fighting man of World War Two. General Peckem, for example, invents the term “bomb pattern”, cheerfully explaining that “It means nothing, but you’d be surprised how rapidly it’s caught on.” It results in bomber pilots not worrying whether or not they hit the target as long they can get their bombs to explode together “and make a neat aerial photograph”. This leads on to plans for “bombing a tiny undefended village, reducing the whole community to rubble” – a mission which is, in military terms, “entirely unnecessary”. It’s probably no coincidence that Heller started writing the book while working for an advertising agency. Catch-22 is an anti-army and anti-organisation book as much as an anti-war book, and a major theme is the jarring friction between image and reality, and language and reality. But underlying all this is the central theme of war’s stupidity and cruelty, and its irrational logic:

“Look, fellows, we’ve got to have some confidence in the people above us who issue our orders. They know what they’re doing.”
“The hell they do,” said Dunbar.

As a specific satire on the US army it has lost none of its punch:

“Now, men,” he exhorted. “We have with us today a very distinguished guest, General Peckem from Special Services, the man who gives us all our softball bats, comic books and the U.S.O. shows. I want to dedicate this mission to him. Go out there and bomb – for me, for your country, for God, and for that great American, General P.P. Peckem. And let’s see you put all those bombs on a dime!”

*

Slaughterhouse-Five is a much shorter novel and much more radical in its narrative form. The title refers to that part of a Dresden abattoir where Vonnegut and other prisoners of war were held captive, and where they had the good fortune to survive the massive bombing raid on Dresden and the firestorm that followed. Like Catch-22, Vonnegut’s novel is an absurdist satire on war, but its defining temper is whimsical – whimsical in its strictest sense: changeful, multi-formed, capricious, unconventional, crazy, unexpected, imaginative, witty, ridiculous. Its whimsicality is signalled by the eccentric title page:

“Slaughterhouse-Five OR THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE, A Duty Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod [and smoking too much] who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden, Germany, “the Florence of the Elbe,” a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamdore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.”

The first sentence of the novel begins: “All this happened, more or less.” Vonnegut stands in the doorway of his story asserting that the wartime experiences described in the novel are all true, but that “I’ve changed all the names”. He also describes how he went back to Dresden in 1967. He goes on to say how he has struggled over many years to write a book about the destruction of Dresden. He complains that in the post-war years “There hadn’t been much publicity” about what happened at Dresden and when he attempted to find out more from the Air Force he was told the information was classified. He goes on to explain why the narrative that follows is a fragmentary one: “It is so short and jumbled and jangled…because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”. Everything is quiet after a massacre, asserts Vonnegut, except for the birds, and all they say is: “Poo-tee-weet”. This meaningless bird cry turns out to be the closing sentence of the novel. After a rambling first chapter of autobiographical explanation, Vonnegut then gets on with his story.

His fictional alter ego turns out to be a man named Billy Pilgrim, who turns out to have been born the same year as Vonnegut. Pilgrim is a kind of holy fool – innocent, easygoing, placid. He is also “unstuck in time”. The novel has a complicated chronological structure, jumping backwards and forwards in time, but gradually leading up to (and back to) that moment in 1945 when Dresden is bombed. Billy believes he has been kidnapped by a flying saucer in 1967, which takes him to the faraway planet of Tralfamadore, where he starts a relationship with an abducted movie actress named Montana Wildhack.

There are at least two possible ways of reading the story. We can accept Billy’s version of reality literally, in which he really did visit the planet Tralfamadore and lead a surreal life, or we can interpret the narrative as the tale of a man broken by the wartime horrors he has witnessed, and who drifts in and out of consciousness, sometimes lapsing into fantasy as he reviews his life and reinvents it. All kinds of stories overlap in this novel, including Billy’s wartime experiences, his career as an optometrist, his marriage to Valencia Merble, his experience of an air crash and his abduction by extra-terrestials. The narrative structure of Slaughterhouse-Five breaks all the usual conventions of fiction. Apart from the autobiographical material which begins and ends it, the book includes discussion of a trashy sixties bestseller (Valley of the Dolls), newspaper reports and events which occurred while Vonnegut was writing it (“Robert Kennedy…was shot two nights ago”). It comments on the novels of the fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout (who sounds at times a bit like PK Dick), who pops up as a character. It also refers scathingly to current US foreign policy: “every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam.”

That other great American master of 1960s whimsy, Richard Brautigan, saw his critical reputation, commercial success, and readership evaporate in the 1970s (Brautigan committed suicide in 1984), but Slaughterhouse-Five has kept its readers and earned its place as a modern classic, despite being quite unlike the average novel. This may be because it is a very, very funny book and, in spite of its complicated narrative structure, it has a chatty, laconic, whimsical narrative voice and is not a difficult book to read. As a satire on modern American life it has lost none of its edge. The writing is often startlingly fresh and inventive in a wholly original way. What other writer has described orgasm and ejaculation like this? – “Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia”. That the whole edifice spins on a very dark axis – the Dresden firestorm – also gives it a moral seriousness and a satirical bite which is frequently lacking in American comic writing, and which is noticeably missing in Brautigan’s fiction, which all too often tips over into a kind of self-satisfied high-sugar-content cute sentimentality.

*

There is a problem with Slaughterhouse-Five, however. Vonnegut not only used his own personal experience and memories in writing the book but also drew on David Irving’s The Destruction of Dresden (London, 1963). The 1964 American edition published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston is even brought into the hospital in Vermont where Billy Pilgrim is a patient and handed to the Harvard history professor who he shares the room with.

Irving is now notorious as a right-wing extremist, Holocaust denier and a shoddy, unreliable historian, but that was far from obvious in the 1960s, when he appeared to be a reputable scholar. His book was an international bestseller, and popularised a number of central beliefs about the bombing raid on Dresden. One was that Dresden was a wholly innocent target of no significance, maliciously and scandalously flattened by the Allies; in a short, the air raid and the ensuing firestorm amounted to a war crime. In Slaughterhouse-Five Billy Pilgrim is told by an English prisoner of war that Dresden is supposed to be a beautiful city: “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.” Secondly, Irving claimed that at least 135,000 German civilians died in the Dresden firestorm. This is recycled by Vonnegut, who recounts how “Nothing happened that night. It was the next night that about one hundred and thirty thousand people in Dresden would die.”

At the beginning of the novel Vonnegut mentions how, when he first started working on it, hardly anybody had ever heard of the raid on Dresden: “Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance. I didn’t know that, either. There hadn’t been much publicity.”

Slaughterhouse-Five also briefly recycles an atrocity story publicised by Irving in which American fighter planes machine-gunned survivors of the firestorm. Vonnegut’s novel, like Irving’s history book, became a bestseller, and enormously influential in promoting the idea that the bombing of Dresden was a war crime.

It now turns out that David Irving’s historiography was utterly unreliable. A massive new history of the raid published last year by Bloomsbury – Frederick Taylor’s Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945 – asserts that Dresden was a normally functioning Nazi city containing many vital sites of manufacturing, communications and services of great importance to Germany’s war effort.

Taylor remarks in his Preface that “As a student in the 1960s…like so many others of my age, I had learned of the city’s destruction principally through a work of fiction: Kurt Vonnegut’s acidly surreal masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Taylor estimates that between 25,000 and 40,000 died in the raid – a lot less than the figure promoted by Irving and vastly less than the number of those who died at Hiroshima (100,000 out of a population of 400,000, rising to 140,000 from radiation sickness by the end of 1945, rising to 200,000 five years later.) Taylor also rubbishes the idea that American fighter planes deliberately strafed and massacred survivors.

*

The question then arises: what are the implications of this new historical knowledge for Slaughterhouse-Five? Perhaps not as great as those of us who admire the novel might have feared. Clearly it’s very unfortunate that Vonnegut inserts statistics into the narrative which now turn out to be utterly unreliable and wildly exaggerated. However, this only occurs on three or four occasions. They could be changed and I think should be changed.

The strafing episode is less contentious as it’s relatively perfunctory, consisting of just seven sentences. Taylor makes it clear that some survivors may indeed have been hit by bullets fired by fighter planes but insists that this would have been the consequence of a low-level dogfight involving the 356th Fighter Group and not a deliberate machine-gunning of civilians. (In the context of the crimes of the modern US army Taylor’s conclusion might provoke incredulity but he appears to be right.)

There are other historical errors. Vonnegut describes soap and candles “made from the fat of rendered Jews and Gypsies and fairies and communists, and other enemies of the State”. However, according to Anton La Guardia, this is legend, not fact (see his book Holy Land, Unholy War [John Murray, London, 2002], pp. 163-4).

Slaughterhouse-Five has dated in other ways, apart from those historical aspects highlighted by Taylor’s book. No novelist would nowadays use the word “fairies” for gay people. Vonnegut uses “schizophrenic” as an adjective, something now regarded as offensive by mental health groups. He also uses the terms “spastic” and “Mongolian idiot” for sufferers from Down’s syndrome – vocabularly now widely regarded as unacceptable. However, it would be foolish to insist that Vonnegut now altered that vocabulary. His novel is a snapshot of the language and attitudes of its time, just as every novel or piece of creative writing is.

The central core of the novel – Vonnegut’s own experience of the aftermath of rhe raid and his account of Billy Pilgrim among the ruins – survives with its integrity intact. The much bigger question raised by Taylor’s book is how justified is it to see the bombing of Dresden as a war crime.

The two most interesting discussions I’ve come across are by David Cesarini (in the Independent, 13 February 2004) and Michael Bradley (in Socialist Review, March 2004).

Cesarini remarks, “Like Frederick Taylor, I grew up with a sense that the RAF's bombing of Dresden on 13-14 February 1945 was a stain on the Allies' war record. My unease owed much to Kurt Vonnegut's novelised memoir of his experience in Dresden as an American PoW, forced to disinter the corpses of German civilians who had been suffocated or baked to death in cellars beneath the ruins of their once-beautiful city. I read Slaughterhouse-Five in one sitting, and it has haunted me since.”

Cesarini complains that the Dresden raid became a propaganda tool for the German right, and was:

“used to relativise and so diminish the scale and singularity of atrocities perpetrated by the German army, the Luftwaffe and the SS between 1939 and 1945. At best, Dresden distorted the moral balance sheet of the Second World War. At worst, it was a tool for polemicists blurring victims and perpetrators. This disturbing trend has gained force in Germany over the past few years.

“In 2002, Jörg Friedrich published Der Brand, an account of how ordinary Germans experienced the air war. Friedrich argued that the suffering of German civilians had always been unjustly overshadowed by the fate of the Jews. It sold 200,000 copies within months. Friedrich followed it with an illustrated history, using images previously considered too horrific to bear publication. This time, he accused the Allies of committing a war crime by continuing the intensive bombing of German cities between January and May 1945.

“Last year, the late WG Sebald's controversial lectures On the Natural History of Destruction appeared in English, arguing that Germans had repressed memories of the air raids. He maintained: "In spite of strenuous efforts to come to terms with the past, as people like to put it, it seems to me that we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition." The formula "coming to terms with the past", or Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, is more usually employed to describe Germany's reckoning with the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews. By using it, Sebald juxtaposed memory of the bombing with memory of the "Final Solution" and turned history on its head.

“Although his lectures concentrated on the alleged failure of post-war writers to describe the destruction and carnage caused by bombing, Sebald deployed terms such as "annihilation" and "extermination" to evoke Allied policy - terms that are customarily Nazi euphemisms for genocide. The lectures triggered a huge correspondence from Germans who lived through the raids, some of which - he acknowledged - showed the persistence of an unapologetic Nazi outlook.

…In setting out to create "a more complex moral and ambivalent framework", Taylor gives us the voice of civilians and bomber crews, teenage flak gunners and Jews facing deportation. For such Jews, so often omitted from the moral equation, the incendiaries and high explosive bombs were less a deadly rain than manna from heaven.”

*
For Cesarini, Dresden was not an innocent city.

For Michael Bradley it was. (Bradley’s was a lone voice; most reviewers seem to have adopted a position which paralleled Cesarini’s.)

He argues that in spite of the evidence put forward by Taylor, the raid was still a war crime:

“At the heart of Frederick Taylor’s new book on the attack on Dresden lies a very simple argument: the bombing of Dresden was justified. For all the pages of new research a very old message lies beneath. It’s the same message that was put across by Winston Churchill and ‘Bomber’ Harris, the man held chiefly responsible for the attack.

“Taylor’s book is part of a wave of revisionist histories of the Second World War. The war is seen as a moral certainty, a fight between good and evil. But the truth is that the Dresden raid, along with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is clear evidence that the Allies were capable of war crimes too.

“…The Dresden raid was by no means exceptional. It went according to the usual Allied plan. By this stage in the war the RAF had turned ‘area bombing’ into an art form. An exact mix of high explosive and incendiary bombs was used to start the kind of fires that burned Dresden. Such bombing was as much about cracking ‘morale’ by killing civilians and destroying a city’s infrastructure as it was about destroying German factories. This was terror bombing - no matter what spin you try to put on it. Even the US’s so called ‘precision’ attacks would cost thousands of lives through what they described as ‘spillage’.

“Taylor rubbishes the argument that the bombing was carried out in the knowledge that the end of the war was in sight. Many Allied leaders believed the war with Germany could drag on for months. Therefore they saw a ‘military logic’ to the bombing. But Taylor does admit that by this stage of the war the sheer amount of money invested in the bomber force had created its own logic. Millions had been spent on building the bomber fleets and training the crews. So why not carry on bombing?

“…The raid was part of a bombing campaign that all but destroyed cities across Germany. Ordinary workers were just a part of the war machine that the Allies were out to destroy. As such they were not even seen as ‘collateral damage’ but as ‘legitimate targets’.

“The Second World War wasn’t just a war about destroying German fascism. The Allies were out to destroy the German regime in order to control the postwar world. They were prepared to divert huge military resources into shaping that postwar world even if it meant weakening the fight against Germany. Britain sent thousands of troops into Greece to prevent the left wing resistance movement seizing power, and with the US rushed to disarm the left wing movements that had fought the Nazis in France and Italy. But notoriously the Allies, for all their huge air power, were not prepared to divert resources to bomb the railway lines that led to Auschwitz. They could stop Greek Communists but not the death trains.

“Taylor’s book is well worth reading. Many of the survivors of the bombing speak out in its pages. The interviews with Allied aircrew are fascinating - many of the young men had real doubts about what they were doing. But at the heart of the book is the moral ambiguity of a bombing campaign designed to destroy German fascism that targeted the innocent. For this was not a ‘good war’ against Hitler. It was a conflict between major powers who were out to dominate the globe.

“The bombing of major cities did not contribute the ‘knockout blow’ that bombing planners like Harris promised. The bombing campaign began as revenge for attacks on cities like London and Coventry. The British military wanted to show it could hit back. But area bombing raids targeted civilians. And the raids came no closer to destroying the German ‘will to fight’ than did German raids on British cities.

“In such a war of revenge attacks ordinary people in enemy countries were not seen as potential allies. They were not seen as an important force that could potentially undermine totalitarian regimes from within. They were legitimate targets. And at the end of that line of logic came Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

*

I’m not totally persuaded persuaded by Bradley’s arguments. I’m sceptical that if Dresden and other cities hadn’t been bombed the civilian population would have risen up against the Nazis. I also don’t find the point about the train line to Auschwitz convincing. Bomber Harris believed it was a waste of time bombing railway lines, as the Germans had special teams who replaced damaged track almost at once. Two days after the centre of Dresden was firebombed the trains were running again.

Part of the subtlety and complexity of Slaughterhouse-Five is that it in fact incorporates the counter-argument that the bombing was justified. Billy Pilgrim shares his hospital bed with a professional historian named Rumfoord. This allows Vonnegut to quote the words of Ira C. Eaker, Lieutenant General U.S.A.F., retired, who argues that those people who agonise about the victims of the Dresden bombing raid, should remember “that V-1’s and V-2’s were at that very time falling on England, killing civilian men, women, and children indiscriminately, as they were designed and launched to do. It might be well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry, too.”

Taylor puts it more subtly: “This is perhaps the great, still-unanswered question about Germany and the German people between 1933 and 1945. With the vast material and spiritual riches of places like Dresden at your disposal, why place all that at risk by launching a ruthless, in large part genocidal attack on the rest of Europe? … Did anyone really expect the world to fight back while wearing kid gloves, in order not to damage Germany’s artistic treasures or kill German civilians?”

A powerful advanced industrial nation with an impressive culture which believed it had a right to invade other nations, bringing misery and suffering to millions, and which never anticipated that one day this might have adverse consequences for its own civilian population… Now what modern country does that make you think of?

And who would have thought back in 1969 that such heavy issues would continue to be fought over at the start of the 21st century partly as the consequence of the influence of a slim whimsical metafiction “somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamdore, where the flying saucers come from”?