Dispatches from Home – Horror and Death on the Day before Valentine’s Day.
“As a student in the 1960s, I knew only the legend of Dresden because it was just about all that was ever printed. 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.”
Frederick Taylor, author of “Dresden–Tuesday, February 13, 1945,” did well to reference Vonnegut’s book for the opening of his book about the famous–some would say infamous–bombing of the ancient city of Dresden, the Florence of the Elbe. I read this book a few years ago and could not put it down.
I remembered my dear father–the Marine–talking about the destruction of the city by the Allies during the last days of World War II. “Son (he always called me son); some say Churchill ordered the bombing of Dresden as revenge for the Nazi bombing of Coventry (England). Some say he was wrong to bomb a defenseless city.”
Mr. Taylor’s book addresses those thoughts on the bombing and others, such as Josef Goebbels exaggerating the number of dead for propaganda purposes. There were also charges that Allied pilots shot down German civilians fleeing the burning city. And contrary to popular belief, Dresden was indeed a major producer of armaments and military provisions for the Nazi war effort.
Using British, American, and German archives (including heretofore unseen documents long hidden by Communist censorship), as well as interviews with Allied bomber pilots and survivors of the bombings, the book helps piece together a complete portrait of that hellish night. Tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices left the fairytale-like baroque city of Dresden a flaming, crumbling ruin. February 13, 1945, like December 7, 1941, is truly “a day that will live in infamy.”
The book’s last paragraph reveals a fascinating historical tidbit. If the Soviet Army’s own blitzkrieg had not been so rapid, which helped end the war in Europe, there was talk among the Allies that Dresden might have been the site of the first Atomic bomb.
