DRESDEN

THE FIRE AND THE DARKNESS

SINCLAIR MCKAY

Viking, 400pp, £20

‘The first 70 pages of Sinclair Mckay’s narrative offer a lyrical vision of Dresden, both light and shade, on the morning of 13th February 1945, before more than 1,000 British and American aircraft opened their bomb doors over the city,’ wrote Max Hastings in the Sunday Times. ‘The author, who achieved bestsellerdom with his earlier account of Bletchley Park’s codebreakers, has here written a much more troubled and troubling book, about one of the most controversial events of the Second World War... There is rage in his ink, as he describes the destruction of the 18th-century Catholic cathedral, whose crypts contained the remains of Saxon kings and princes: “This was not a factory producing optical equipment, or spare parts for planes or tanks. This was a holy place that had held onto its own unique life even through the coming of Hitler. The effect of its destruction – upon those left to see it – would be that of simple despair and fury as opposed to crushed morale.”’ In his review for the Financial

Times, Richard Overy declared that the book ‘has little to add to the standard account by Frederick Taylor, published 16 years ago and strangely absent from Mckay’s endnotes’. But he acknowledged that ‘if the central narrative of the raid is already well known, the recollections mobilised by Mckay give the experience of the bombing a vividness and poignancy that other accounts have lacked’. The Dresden atrocity is ‘a difficult subject to sell to a British readership, but a necessary one’, wrote Saul David in the Daily

Telegraph. ‘Mckay’s canny approach is to concentrate on the human story of the civilians and servicemen involved on both sides.’ Nonetheless

David thought Mckay ‘too generous’ in his speculative judgement that Bomber Command’s ‘city bombings were not vengeful or consciously merciless, but ever more desperate reflexive attacks launched to make the other side simply stop’. For David, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris was ‘convinced that area bombing helped to shorten the war – ignoring all evidence to the contrary – and, unlike Churchill, he never regretted Dresden’.