When Pop History Bombs: A Response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Love Letter to American Air Power

[mariomike]

Finally, although there are now many books on the fire bombing of Dresden, not forget the Holocaust-denier David Irving’s sob story about the “war crime” of the Allied fire bombing of Dresden, which was among the first if not the very first on the topic.

At one RCAF Bomber Command station,

As far as Dresden goes, that was the first time the Station Commander came and gave us a political reason for the raid. It only happened just prior to take-off at the briefing for the Dresden raid.

He explained that the Nazis had convinced the German people that at the end of WW1 their armed forces had remained still on foreign soil and basically undefeated, and that they, the German forces of WW1, had been betrayed by politicians at home. "He then pointed to the cord running across the map to the city of Dresden, and said, 'There are going to be a lot of people in Dresden tonight who are going to find out that war can be a very nasty thing. Never again will any future German government be able to say that the country was fairly well intact but still defeated.' "

"Incidentally, it will show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do."

Battlefields in the Air: Canadians in Bomber Command page 152.