Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
INTERVIEWER:
The ultimate terror weapon.
VONNEGUT:
Of the Franco-Prussian War.
INTERVIEWER:
But you were ultimately sent overseas not with this instrument but with the 106th Infantry Division?
VONNEGUT:
“The Bag Lunch Division.” They used to feed us a lot of bag lunches. Salami sandwiches. An orange.
INTERVIEWER:
In combat?
VONNEGUT:
When we were still in the States.
INTERVIEWER:
While they trained you for the infantry?
VONNEGUT:
I was never trained for the infantry. Battalion scouts were elite troops, see. There were only six in each battalion, and nobody was very sure about what they were supposed to do. So we would march over to the rec room every morning, and play Ping-Pong and fill out applications for Officer Candidate School.
INTERVIEWER:
During your basic training, though, you must
have been familiarized with weapons other than the howitzer.
VONNEGUT:
If you study the 240-millimeter howitzer, you don’t have time for other weapons. You don’t even have time left over for a venereal disease film.
INTERVIEWER:
What happened when you reached the front?
VONNEGUT:
I imitated various war movies I’d seen.
INTERVIEWER:
Did you shoot anybody in the war?
VONNEGUT:
I thought about it. I did fix my bayonet once, fully expecting to charge.
INTERVIEWER:
Did you charge?
VONNEGUT:
No. If everybody else had charged, I would have charged, too. But we decided not to charge. We couldn’t see anybody.
INTERVIEWER:
This was during the Battle of the Bulge, wasn’t it? It was the largest defeat of American arms in history.
VONNEGUT:
Probably. My last mission as a scout was to find our own artillery. Usually, scouts go out and look for enemy stuff. Things got so bad that we were finally looking for our own stuff. If I’d found our own battalion commander, everybody would have thought that was pretty swell.
INTERVIEWER:
Do you mind describing your capture by the Germans?
VONNEGUT:
Gladly. We were in this gully about as deep as a World War I trench. There was snow all around. Somebody said we were probably in Luxembourg. We were out of food.
INTERVIEWER:
Who was “we”?
VONNEGUT:
Our battalion scouting unit. All six of us. And about fifty people we’d never met before. The Germans could see us, because they were talking to us through a loudspeaker. They told us our situation was hopeless,
and so on. That was when we fixed bayonets. It was nice there for a few minutes.
INTERVIEWER:
How so?
VONNEGUT:
Being a porcupine with all those steel quills. I pitied anybody who had to come in after us.
INTERVIEWER:
But they came in anyway?
VONNEGUT:
No. They sent in eighty-eight-millimeter shells instead. The shells burst in the treetops right over us. Those were very loud bangs right over our heads. We were showered with splintered steel. Some people got hit. Then the Germans told us again to come out. We didn’t yell “nuts” or anything like that. We said, “Okay,” and “Take it easy,” and so on. When the Germans finally showed themselves, we saw they were wearing white camouflage suits. We didn’t have anything like that. We were olive drab. No matter what season it was, we were olive drab.
INTERVIEWER:
What did the Germans say?
VONNEGUT:
They said the war was all over for us, that we were lucky, that we could now be sure we would live through the war, which Was more than they could be sure of. As a matter of fact, they were probably killed or captured by Patton’s Third Army within the next few days. Wheels within wheels.
INTERVIEWER:
Did you speak any German?
VONNEGUT:
I had heard my parents speak it a lot. They hadn’t taught me how to do it, since there had been such bitterness in America against all things German during the First World War. I tried a few words I knew on our captors, and they asked me if I was of German ancestry, and I said, “Yes.” They wanted to know why I was making war against my brothers.
INTERVIEWER:
And you said—?
VONNEGUT:
I honestly found the question ignorant and comical. My parents had separated me so thoroughly from
my Germanic past that my captors might as well have been Bolivians or Tibetans, for all they meant to me.
INTERVIEWER:
After you were captured, you were shipped to Dresden?
VONNEGUT:
In the same boxcars that had brought up the troops that captured us—probably in the same boxcars that had delivered Jews and Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses and so on to the extermination camps. Rolling stock is rolling stock. British mosquito bombers attacked us at night a few times. I guess they thought we were strategic materials of some kind. They hit a car containing most of the officers from our battalion. Every time I say I hate officers, which I still do fairly frequently, I have to remind myself that practically none of the officers I served under survived. Christmas was in there somewhere.
INTERVIEWER:
And you finally arrived in Dresden.
VONNEGUT:
In a huge prison camp south of Dresden first. The privates were separated from the noncoms and officers. Under the articles of the Geneva Convention, which is a very Edwardian document, privates were required to work for their keep. Everybody else got to languish in prison. As a private, I was shipped to Dresden.
INTERVIEWER:
What were your impressions of the city itself before the bombing?
VONNEGUT:
The first fancy city I’d ever seen. A city full of statues and zoos, like Paris. We were living in a slaughterhouse, in a nice new cement-block hog barn. They put bunks and straw mattresses in the barn, and we went to work every morning as contract labor in a malt syrup factory. The syrup was for pregnant women. The damned sirens would go off and we’d hear some other city getting it—
whump a whump a whumpa whump
. We never expected to get it. There were very few air raid
shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories. Then a siren went off—it was February 13, 1945—and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.
INTERVIEWER:
You didn’t suffocate in the meat locker?
VONNEGUT:
No. It was quite large, and there weren’t very many of us. The attack didn’t sound like a hell of a lot either.
Whump
. They went over with high explosives first to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries. When the war started, incendiaries were fairly sizeable, about as long as a shoebox. By the time Dresden got it, they were tiny little things. They burnt the whole damn town down.
INTERVIEWER:
What happened when you came up?
VONNEGUT:
Our guards were noncoms—a sergeant, a corporal, and four privates—and leaderless. Cityless, too, because they were Dresdeners who’d been shot up on the front and sent home for easy duty. They kept us at attention for a couple of hours. They didn’t know what else to do. They’d go over and talk to each other. Finally we trekked across the rubble and they quartered us with some South Africans in a suburb. Every day we walked into the city and dug into basements and shelters to get the corpses out, as a sanitary measure. When we went into them, a typical shelter, an ordinary basement usually, looked like a streetcar full of people who’d simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting there in their chairs, all dead. A fire storm is an amazing thing. It doesn’t occur in nature. It’s fed by the tornadoes that occur in the midst of it and there isn’t a damned thing to breathe. We brought the dead out. They were loaded on wagons and taken to parks, large open areas in the city which weren’t filled with rubble.
The Germans got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. 130,000 corpses were hidden underground. It was a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt. We went to work through cordons of German soldiers. Civilians didn’t get to see what we were up to. After a few days the city began to smell, and a new technique was invented. Necessity is the mother of invention. We would bust into the shelter, gather up valuables from people’s laps without attempting identification, and turn the valuables over to guards. Then soldiers would come with a flame thrower and stand in the door and cremate the people inside. Get the gold and jewelry out and then burn everybody inside.
INTERVIEWER:
What an impression on someone thinking of becoming a writer!
VONNEGUT:
It was a fancy thing to see, a startling thing. It was a moment of truth, too, because American civilians and ground troops didn’t know American bombers were engaged in saturation bombing. It was kept a secret until very close to the end of the war. One reason they burned down Dresden is that they’d already burned down everything else. You know: “What’re we going to do tonight?” Here was everybody all set to go, and Germany still fighting, and this machinery for burning down cities was being used. It was a secret, burning down cities—boiling pisspots and flaming prams. There was all this hokum about the Norden bombsight. You’d see a newsreel showing a bombardier with an MP on either side of him holding a drawn .45. That sort of nonsense, and hell, all they were doing was just flying over cities, hundreds of airplanes, and dropping everything. When I went to the University of Chicago after the war the guy who interviewed me for admission had bombed Dresden. He got to that part of
my life story and he said, “Well, we hated to do it.” The comment sticks in my mind.
INTERVIEWER:
Another reaction would be, “We were ordered to do it.”
VONNEGUT:
His was more humane. I think he felt the bombing was necessary, and it may have been. One thing everybody learned is how fast you can rebuild a city. The engineers said it would take 500 years to rebuild Germany. Actually it took about 18 weeks.
INTERVIEWER:
Did you intend to write about it as soon as you went through the experience?
VONNEGUT:
When the city was demolished I had no idea of the scale of the thing…. Whether this was what Bremen looked like or Hamburg, Coventry … I’d never seen Coventry, so I had no scale except for what I’d seen in movies. When I got home (I was a writer since I had been on the
Cornell Sun
except that was the extent of my writing) I thought of writing my war story, too. All my friends were home; they’d had wonderful adventures, too. I went down to the newspaper office,
The Indianapolis News
, and looked to find out what they had about Dresden. There was an item about half an inch long, which said our planes had been over Dresden and two had been lost. And so I figured, well, this really was the most minor sort of detail in World War II. Others had so much more to write about. I remember envying Andy Rooney who jumped into print at that time; I didn’t know him, but I think he was the first guy to publish his war story after the war; it was called
Tail Gunner
. Hell, I never had any classy adventure like that. But every so often I would meet a European and we would be talking about the war and I would say I was in Dresden; he’d be astonished that I’d been there, and he’d always want to know more. Then a book by David Irving was published about Dresden,
saying it was the largest massacre in European history. I said, By God, I saw something after all! I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of
Slaughterhouse-Five;
I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra and it’s not fair to future generations because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.
INTERVIEWER:
That sort of shifted the whole focus …
VONNEGUT:
She freed me to write about what infants we really were: 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. We were baby-faced, and as a prisoner of war I don’t think I had to shave very often. I don’t recall that that was a problem.
INTERVIEWER:
One more question; do you still think about the fire-bombing of Dresden at all?
VONNEGUT:
I wrote a book about it, called
Slaughterhouse-Five
. The book is still in print, and I have to do something about it as a businessman now and then. Marcel Ophuls asked me to be in his film,
A Memory of Justice
. He wanted me to talk about Dresden as an atrocity. I told him to talk to my friend Bernard V. O’Hare, Mary’s husband, instead, which he did. O’Hare was a fellow battalion scout, and then a fellow prisoner of war. He’s a lawyer in Pennsylvania now.
INTERVIEWER:
Why didn’t you wish to testify?
VONNEGUT:
I had a German name. I didn’t want to argue with people who thought Dresden should have been bombed to hell. All I ever said in my book was that Dresden, willy-nilly,
was
bombed to hell.
INTERVIEWER:
It was the largest massacre in European history?
VONNEGUT:
It was the fastest killing of large numbers of people—one hundred and thirty-five thousand people in a matter of hours. There were slower schemes for killing, of course.
INTERVIEWER:
The death camps.
VONNEGUT:
Yes—in which millions were eventually killed. Many people see the Dresden massacre as correct and quite minimal revenge for what had been done by the camps. Maybe so. As I say, I never argue that point. I do note in passing that the death penalty was applied to absolutely anybody who happened to be in the undefended city—babies, old people, the zoo animals, and thousands upon thousands of rabid Nazis, of course, and, among others, my best friend Bernard V. O’Hare and me. By all rights, O’Hare and I should have been part of the body count. The more bodies, the more correct the revenge.