"At 9.51 p.m. on Tuesday 13 February 1945, Dresden's air-raid sirens sounded as they had done many times in the previous five years. For Desdeners, such warnings were almost always false alarms, but this one was different. Ten minutes later the first marker flares were dropped by Mosquitos of 627 squadron. 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. At least 25,000 inhabitants (possibly many more) had perished in the terrifying firestorm, and thirteen 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 book is the first serious reappraisal for more than twenty years of an event that lives in the popular memory with Guernica and Hiroshima as a by-word for the horror of twentieth-century air warfare. Frederick Taylor has drawn on archives and primary sources only accessible since the fall of the East German regime, together with British and American records, and has also talked to Allied aircrew (now mostly in their eighties) and the city's survivors, whether Jews working as slave labourers in the munitions and radar factories, members of the German armed services, refugees fleeing the Russian advance from the East, or ordinary citizens of Dresden. In doing so he has created the most complete portrait ever attempted of the city, its people, and those involved in its fate."--BOOK JACKET.