I have visited Dresden three times; I read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five many years ago, and began to explore the history and consequences of the firebombing of the city. But Sinclair McKay's book was the first account I've ever read of the raid from beginning to end, with both some detailed scene-setting and an account of the city's fortunes in the post-war era, first as part of the DDR and then latterly after reunification. This bracketing of the account of the bombing is important, setting the story in context both before and after the war.

The book uses eye-witness accounts from both sides of the conflict to describe the events of the bombing raid in horrible detail. At the same time, the account is very even-handed. Although the question as to whether the bombing of Dresden was a war crime or not is examined, McKay does not come down on either side; for him, the story of the post-war reconciliation is more important. He devotes some time to the account of the restoration of the Frauenkirche and the role of British charities and craftsmen in that work. He also explores the use of Dresden in propaganda both during and after the war. In particular, he goes into some level of detail over the varying accounts of the death toll; many have found it convenient to inflate the death toll in Dresden, partially to attempt to paint the Allies in a poor light. Some accounts have inflated the death toll by as many as ten times; the persistence of this number might make you wonder who really won the propaganda war.

McKay devotes space to examining the personality and reactions of Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, in charge of RAF Bomber Command. Many have tried to depict him as a war criminal precisely because of the bombing of Dresden as well as other German cities such as Cologne and Hamburg; McKay's analysis suggests that he was firmly in the mainstream of military thinking at the time on both sides. Ultimately, McKay says, if the bombing of Dresden was a war crime, so was the bombing of Coventry, London, Guernica, Rotterdam or Warsaw.

For someone who has done so much research, McKay has some odd omissions, though. The German author Karl May, often erroneously described as a writer of 'Westerns', is referenced but his connections with Dresden are not; the Pragerstrasse, the main street leading from the central railway station to the centre of the Altstadt, is described a lot but its post-war reconstruction is only referenced for its blocks of apartments and not for the three monolithic buildings built as hotels that for a long time were its most notable architectural feature. Also, Dresden Mitte railway station is not mentioned. This was a considerable structure, having a large steel-framed overall roof; in the bombing, all the glass in the roof was shattered, but the structure itself remained. It was demolished in the immediate post-war years, not because it was unsafe but because of the costs involved in restoring the roof.

(On the other hand, I had a real "I never knew that!" moment when McKay casually comments that Oliver Dowding, in charge of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, regularly attended séances after the war to try to contact the souls of the young airmen who fell during the war. McKay includes this in part to emphasise the adulation given to fighter pilots in post-war Britain and contrast it with the rather more muted official attitude towards Bomber Command crew, especially when it comes to the political significance of statues and monuments.)

McKay also mentions Freeman Dyson, the physicist, who as a young conscript was put to work by the RAF doing statistical analysis of the outcomes of bombing raids. He provides an interesting pen-portrait of the young Dyson, and then later goes on to talk about some of his doubts and concerns over the bombing of Dresden. Nowhere does he mention that in later life, Dyson went to work on the USA's Project Orion, the ultimate swords-into-ploughshares project that proposed building a spaceship powered by exploding atomic bombs behind it. Orion attracted a number of scientists, including Edward Teller, precisely because of its potential as a pacifist icon (odd though that may seem to us now). As an expression of Dyson's own unease at the bombing of Dresden, this would have made an interesting counterpoint.

But none of these omissions really change the impression this book will leave on the reader. Given that I know some of the parts of Dresden, I could easily visualise the places being talked about, even though my most recent visit was ten years in the past. I first visited in the decade immediately following reunification, and at that time the city still presented a very East German appearance. In contrast, on my last visit (itself more than ten years ago), I was surprised by the amount of new building that had gone on since my previous one, and the casual traveller now might not imagine any of the horrors of the bombing if they were merely passing through. And such has been the amount of time and effort expended in restoring parts of the Altstadt, there are few obvious memorials to the victims of the bombing unless you know the history of the city. And then, the very city itself becomes that memorial; and its story needs retelling to future generations to show who the victims of war really are, and how reprehensible are those who cause war to be waged, no matter what their justification. ( )

Absorbing. Compelling. Riveting. Those are just some of the words that spring to mind over this well-written, well-researched book about the Feb 13, 1945 firebombing of Dresden, Germany.

I learned so much about pre-bombing Dresden and, of course, about how the bombing itself played out, and what has happened there since then.

A masterful work of narrative nonfiction which really brought the horror of that night to life. Highly recommended!!

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via Net Galley, in exchange for a fair and honest review.) ( )

Excellent. Very readable history. McKay interspersed context with oral histories to paint an accurate and horrific picture of the events of February 1945. Provoked a number of questions about the morality of war. ( )

This is an extremely well written and balanced account of one of the most controversial actions of the Allies in the Second World War: the firebombing of the German city of Dresden by British and US bomber planes on 13-14 February 1945. Its detractors, especially in later decades far distant from the preoccupations and reality of the time, have described it as a war crime and its architect Sir Arthur ("Bomber") Harris as a war criminal, as an attack on a cultural metropolis of limited military strategic significance, where many refugees had gathered. Harris and others saw it as eliminating a major centre where many peacetime industries had been converted to military use, a vital step in ensuring that the Nazi regime, already dying though it didn't admit it, was finished off properly and forced to recognise the reality of its own demise, in order to save the lives of thousands of Allied pilots and civilians. Others have seen it in more simple terms of revenge as just reprisal for similar Nazi destruction of numerous other cities earlier in the war, notably Coventry, but also Rotterdam and many others. Churchill's views changed over time; while ultimately politically responsible for ordering the firebombing, he seemed to regret it afterwards, and wanted to revert back to a strict focus on purely military targets - though the distinction between military and civilian targets was less clear-cut than many might imagine.

The first third of this book covers the history of Dresden as an artistic and cultural centre and the way in which the Nazis changed, or in some cases failed to change, the character of the city and its people from 1933. Thereafter it follows the experiences of a range of ordinary people, both Dresden residents sheltering from the bombardment and trying to locate family and friends afterwards in a city centre incomprehensibly smashed beyond recognition and where 25,000 people had been killed in one night, and the bomber pilots who had seen large numbers of their fellow pilots shot down and many towns and cities in Britain ravaged and their citizens killed by air raids.

These groups' perceptions on these events may seem utterly irreconcilable. And yet the twinning of Dresden with Coventry in 1959 was surely a very significant event, a joining of two cities both of which had their hearts torn out through war, but which had been rebuilt. More specifically, the destroyed Frauenkirche cathedral in central Dresden, left in ruins through the duration of the communist East German state partly as an attempted reminder to the population of the actions of "imperialist" Americans and British, was rebuilt after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and one of the British craftsmen working on the golden orb and cross at its apex was the son of one of the bomber pilots who took part in the raid.

Ultimately, the raid can only be seen against the context of its time, after five years of total war and an existential struggle for existence that left all its participants desperate and exhausted. This was an engrossing read, and the author lets the reader make his or her own mind up about these cataclysmic events. ( )

The bombing of Dresden (one of my favorite cities) has been told many times. This book focuses on background and experiences of a variety of individuals, some quite well-known such as Kurt Vonnegut of Slaughterhouse-Five fame. The publisher's blurb makes it sound as if the fire-bombing of Dresden was unique. It wasn't. Firebombing was a deliberate campaign to destroy the citizenry and their morale. The Germans tried it, the Americans under LeMay utilized it extensively in Japan before the A-bomb, and the British bomber command under Harris made no bones about it (see Bomber Command by Max Hastings.)

The ethical debate over this practice was not new. It had been discussed during the 1920's and it was known as "terror bombing." The idea was to overwhelm the fire-fighting capabilities of the city demoralize the population, and thus force capitulation. Civilian casualties were considered perfectly justifiable as the girls in the factory manufacturing shells were just as much combatants as soldiers in the field. Killing them in their homes prevented them going to work.

The physics of these infernos was only beginning to be understood, especially following the horrible fire in Wisconsin in 1871 near Peshtigo. Dry conditions and wind and multiple fires combined to create what was called a "fire whirl." The air became so super-heated (the wall of flames was a mile high, some 2,000 degrees Celsius) that it was hot enough to melt sand into glass. It created its own weather system included tornadoes of flame. It became known as the Peshtigo Paradigm, and that's what the war planners wanted.

Following an earthquake and tsunami near Tokyo in 1923 a similar fire happened spreading over many miles. Flames reached skyscraper heights, boiling water in the river.

A western trader called Otis Poole observed: ‘Over everything had settled a thick white dust. And through the yellow fog of dust, still in the air, a copper coloured sun shone upon this silent havoc in sickly reality.’ 18 The death toll was prodigious, in the region of 156,000 lives, though once again it was difficult to be exact when so often, all that remained were fragments of jewelry and headless naked husks.

The goal of military strategists had always been to find the super weapon that would make winning "easy," and force rapid surrender. Dresden was just the latest in a series of terror bombings. It had become a war fought by physicists as well as soldiers. Not to mention meteorologists. The atmospheric conditions for fire-bombing had to be correct.

Freeman Dyson was a statistician for Bomber Command. His first job was to analyze the statistics of the planes that had not returned. He and his colleagues faced the bitter truth of the matter: experience made absolutely no difference to chances of staying alive. A crew that had flown 29 sorties deep into the heart of enemy territory was every bit as likely to become a flashing orange fireball as the crew that was just starting out. By the time they reached thirty sorties, this crew would have only a 25 per cent expectation of survival. McKay provides eyewitness accounts of not just the victims but the airmen as well

"In part, they knew because of the newly adjusted nature of the bombs: as well as high explosives and sticks of incendiaries, here were weapons that deployed burning corrosion: bombs with jellied petroleum and magnesium Unleashed on bricks and mortar, these would create fires that could not be extinguished, but this was also true of human flesh. Anyone touched by these searing substances would find no escape, not even by jumping in rivers or canals.

In Operation Thunderclap , the attack on Berlin, there was an underlying assumption that the virus of Nazism lay deep within the flesh of German society as a whole; this was no longer simply a military force to be vanquished but an entire people. "

"The gesture was human (and possibly widespread – there were accusations of explosives being deliberately offloaded in the North Sea), but the fact remained that few bombs that night were going to land harmlessly. This second wave was to bring with it many more 4,000lb ‘Cookies’ and other varieties of explosives and incendiaries: in total, an additional 1,800 tons of bombs were to be dropped by the second wave, and many in areas that were not yet glowing with that lethal light."

We see not just the horror of the raids but also the resilience of the people. It's a tragic story, well told, scary and emblematic of how the nature of war has changed technologically.

My thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the review copy. It affected my opinion not one whit. ( )