The Devils Tinderbox Dresden 1945 Mckee Alexander by Mckee, Alexander 9780285640962, 0285640968 instant download after payment.

DRESDEN was a famous massacre from the start. At that time I was a soldier with the 1st Canadian Army; I entered Germany in March 1945, about a month afterwards. In the spring and summer, when I was with the British 2nd Army in the Rhineland and Ruhr, I heard the first whispers. Something very terrible had happened over there in the East near the war’s end, I was told, but no one could explain why it had been so much more cruel than the fate which had engulfed most of Europe, burnt with fire from heaven or tornadoed into rubble by the passage of the armies.

The Blitzkrieg, theirs and ours, had spared some tracts of countryside and all the Western capitals. Paris, Brussels and Rome were almost untouched; even London was only lightly damaged. But seen from the air, most of the great cities of Europe were jagged scars on the landscape, with the survivors gone to ground, huddled in cellars under the wreckage, coughing. The bones of dead cattle lay in the meadows by the Channel coast and the towns of Normandy were fields of debris. The Dutch dykes had been bombed and broken, and the sea had conquered Holland. The cities of the North German plain were husks. Warsaw was a pile of bricks and bodies. From the Channel coast and on into Russia, to Kiev, to the Don and the Volga; from the Bay of Naples through Cassino to the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland – the ‘red hot rake’ of total war had passed over them all. Not with fire and sword as in the old tales of the Thirty Years War, but with thermite bombs, blockbusters, multi-barrel mortars, massed artillery and the stabbing rash of small-arms fire.