I couldn't get on my comuter for a couple of days and I am pleased to see so many responses. I am not surprised that the name Dresden is not widely known, it all happened sixty odd years ago. It is as if , when I was a youngster, someone had mentioned "Andersonville", a notorious Civil war prison. About twenty years ago I happened to say about a young woman who had lost a lot of weight, "You look like you came out of Belsen!". This was met by blank stares and , "What is Belssen?" Immediately after the end of the war, everybody knew the names of the worst concentration camps, all of the newsreels in the movie houses ran them regularly, much as shortly after 9/11 the TV news was filled withy images of the towers crashing down. Belsen was particularly notable for starving, (to death), women.
I answer to a query, yes I did take part in big city raids. In another thread I described our daylight bombing of Hamburg and being attacked by ME 262s. I should say it was likely that we bombed Hamburg, it was covered in heavy cloud and we bombed red smoke puffs over the clouds that had been released by the Pathfinders. Prior to that we had bombed Hamburg at night, just a huge area of flame, much like flying over a huge, city size, campfire. The pathfinders who flew almost ten or fifteen thousand feet below us, called out instructions like, "Bomb the column of smoke, or "bomb the red fire!" These bombings were at the end of the war and it was surprising that there was anything left. As the Germans found out when they bombed British cities, it takes an unbelievable amount of explosive to cripple a large city. Hamburg had had a couple of major attacks much earlier in the war and I understand that most of the damage was caused by firestorms.
