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<pre>In devoting a book to this one violent moment of the war, with its antecedents and something of its aftermath, Mr. David Irving has rendered the British people a great service. They have to know. The Dresden event is a part of British (as well as of German, and European, and human) history. It is a piece of a mosaic that makes up the British character and a brushstroke, out of many, in the image that Britain presents to foreign peoples - an image the British are at best imperfectly aware of, and that has consequences which they often find it difficult to understand. Dresden also has lessons necessary to an understanding of the nature of war. What is necessary is to know what happened and to understand how it came to happen. And the only way is to read Mr. Irving's excellent and terrible book. --The Economist
"There can be few operations of war as causeless, as purposeless, and as brutal as the attack on Dresden on the attack of February 13, 1945. In "The Destruction of Dresden," Mr. David Irving has analyzed, in an objective manner, the causes and result of this gratuitous act. As Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby comments in his foreword, the bombing of Dresden was "a great tragedy," the purposes of which are "difficult to determine." He agrees that Mr. Irving "tells dispassionately and honestly" the story of a deeply tragic example, in time of war, of man's inhumanity to man." We should be grateful to the author for having devoted long study to this question and for having provided us with as accurate an account of what acttually happened as we are likely to obtain. It was, in fact, an operation unworthy of our history. Nobody could contend that Dresden was a legitimate strategic target; nobody could contend that this terror raid shortened the war or satisfied our Russian allies. I am not surprised that most Englishmen should strive to forget about Dresden." --Sir Harold Nicholson, The Observer
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AT 10.10 P.M. ON THE NIGHT of February 13-14, 1945 the R.A.F. Master Bomber broadcast the cryptic order: 'Controller to Plate-Rack Force: Come in and bomb glow of red T.I.s as planned.' The ill-famed attack on Dresden had begun. The target city was among Germany's largest, but it alone had developed no single major war industry. The German authorities had made it a centre for the evacuation of wounded servicemen, and by February 1945 most schools, restaurants, and public buildings had been converted into military hospitals. In selecting Dresden for this purpose, the German government probably hoped that this, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, often compared with Florence for its graceful Baroque architectural style, would be spared the attentions of the allied bombers. By 1945, the legend was deeply entrenched in the population's mind that Dresden was a city that would never be bombed. It was not to be. In February 1945, with the Soviet armies making striking advances in their invasion of Silesia and East Prussia, and when the war's political and military directors were meeting at Yalta, Mr Winston Churchill was urgently in need of some display both of his offensive strength and of his willingness to assist the Russians in their drive westwards. Dresden, the 'virgin target' just seven miles behind the eastern Front, became the victim of Mr Churchill's desire for a spectacular blow. By a combination of delays and poor weather, the raid, the climax of the strategic air offensive against Germany, and the most crushing air-raid of the war, was not delivered until the day that Mr Churchill was departing from Yalta. The city was undefended -- it had no guns, and even the German night-fighter force was grounded by Bomber Command's brilliant tactics of deception and trickery. It had no proper air-raid shelters. On the night of the attack, Dresden was housing hundreds of thousands of refugees from Silesia, East Prussia, and from western Germany in addition to its own population of 630,000. Up to 100,000 people, perhaps more, were killed in two to three hours, burned alive, that night. Yet until the author's first book on it appeared in 1963 the raid on Dresden scarcely figured in any official indices of the war. A veil had been drawn across this tragedy. Why was there this official silence about the Dresden tragedy? Certainly little discredit reflected on the officers and men of the bomber forces; equally the two commanders, Sir Arthur Harris and General Carl Spaatz, were not acting out of hand. The directives and orders confronting them were painfully clear. Stung by foreign revulsion at this new St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the British Prime Minister - who had ordered it - penned an angry minute to his Chief of Staff, even before the war ended, rasping that, "The Destruction of Dresden remains a query against the conduct of Allied Bombing." It is from this remarkably forgetful minute that the subtitle of this documentary account is taken. For the first time, the full story, ommitting nothing, of the historical background to this cruel blow and of its unexpected political consequences, is told. First three, and now forty years' research in England, Germany, and the U.S.A., and the active cooperation of the military authorities in London, Washington, and Moscow, produce a detailed account of this tragedy.
Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Focal Point Publications; 2nd edition (July 20, 2007)
Language: English
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