• Dresden

  • Tuesday 13 February 1945
  • By: Frederick Taylor
  • Narrated by: Sean Barrett
  • Length: 18 hrs and 4 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (5 ratings)

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Dresden  By  cover art

Dresden

By: Frederick Taylor
Narrated by: Sean Barrett
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Publisher's summary

At 9.51pm on Tuesday, 13 February 1945, Dresden's air-raid sirens sounded as they had done many times in the previous five years - until then most always a false alarm. No searchlights probed the skies above the unprotected target city; the guns had mostly been moved East to counter the Russian advance.

By the next morning, 796 RAF Lancasters and 311 USAAF Flying Fortresses had dropped more than 4,500 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices. More than 25,000 inhabitants perished in the terrifying firestorm, and 13 square miles of the city's historic centre, including incalculable quantities of treasure and works of art, lay in ruins. It was Ash Wednesday, 1945.

This is the first serious re-appraisal of an event that lives in the popular memory with Guernica and Hiroshima as a by-word for the horror of 20th-century air warfare. In addition to drawing on archives and primary sources only accessible since the fall of the East German regime, together with British and American records, Frederick Taylor has talked to Allied aircrew and the city's survivors, whether Jews working as slave labourers, members of the German armed services, refugees, or ordinary citizens of Dresden.

©2005 Frederick Taylor (P)2011 Audible Ltd
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic reviews

'Taylor weaves a chilling narrative from eyewitness accounts and...documentary research...His account of the air operation... is quite superb.' (The Times)
'Taylor's magnificent... study... surely as close as the English language will get to a definitive, balanced examination of the subject.' (Scotsman)

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Gripping and balanced account of Dresden raids

This book was a balanced and thought-provoking, as well as an emotional, account of the Dresden raids and the impact of those raids on the people of Dresden. Taylor does a good job in providing a realistic assessment of the reasons why Dresden was fire-bombed and the ways in which the firebombing became a moral issue at the time and in the postwar period. He also tells an emotive account of the raids as they were experienced by ordinary Germans, including German Jewish people. As an audio book, this is generally gripping stuff. Sean Barrett is a good narrator, although I find some of the accents irritating (at times). I would recommend this to anyone interested in the story of the Dresden raids/ history of the Second World War.

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Brilliantly Written And Steadfastly Factual

Few historical events have been so stubbornly misremembered as the bombing of Dresden. The only parallel I can think of is the "Versailles was too harsh" myth, which has similarly been misrepresented for decades (if you want to see truly "harsh" treaty, read the terms of the Brest-Litovsk agreement, which Germany forced down Russian throats not long before Versailles).

Taylor attempts to set right this misconception, cleverly and clearly laying out the facts, and weaving in historical context with the personal stories of both those who dropped the bombs and survived the bombing.

Dresden was, in fact, a major center for war production, and acted as a massive transport hub. Indeed, it was the main route through which supplies and troops reached the Eastern Front at this time. The bombing was also not unusually large or ferocious, as is often claimed. It was a pretty standard bombing run. The difference was simply that everything went right on that night, causing the kind of destruction that was not often seen.

It was terrible, of course, and the last third of the book makes for some seriously grisly reading. That Dresden was a tragedy is indisputable, but Taylor's argument is that it was not sadistic or even really very special. It was simply the victim of poor preparation, particularly good bombing conditions and, ultimately, bad luck.


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