I've just spent two harrowing weeks with one of the best non-fiction books I've ever encountered. I didn't expect this. In fact, I had asked the sales rep for a reading copy, not planning to purchase one for the bookstore.

Who else would want to read about the destruction of a German city in 1945, I wondered? It's mythological by now, and we've all moved on.

I was wrong. Frederick Taylor's new book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 is a path breaking work of scholarship and feeling.

It reads like a dark thriller. It IS a dark thriller. Taylor has interviewed survivors, examined war records, pondered the subsequent propaganda. He is fluent in German and has made good use of newly opened East German secret files.

The facts are straightforward: Near the end of World War II, when the Luftwaffe could raise only a dozen fighters to the Allies thousands of bombers, the British and American air forces finally got around to Dresden. Unexpectedly, everything went horribly right -- horribly wrong for the people on the ground.

There's a natural tension built into such a book: each chapter is leading to the inevitable explosion. We know it's coming; the citizens do not.

Perfect weather conditions, a perfect mix of high explosives and incendiary bomblets, undefended air space, a total lack of meaningful shelter, a city full of refugees fleeting the invading Russians, and a widespread belief that somehow this ancient and beautiful city would be spared the fate of other German cities -- all this conspired on the night of February 13 and the morning of February 14 to create a firestorm that ended up leveling many square miles and killing, as Taylor writes, "...between 25,000 and 40,000 human beings, an architectural heritage created over centuries, and a treasured, enviable way of life."

"A woman sent a postcard to her absent daughter. It read simply: 'All three of us still alive, city gone.'"

Dresden was a mythical place before Hitler came to power, and as a symbol it still has the power to move politics and undermine moral authority. Dresdeners, today constitute one of the most passionately anti-war groups in the world. At the same time, the widely believed myths that surround Dresden's destruction fuel neo-Nazis in their drive toward renewed political power.

Taylor covers all of it, beginning with the history of Saxony and the gradual rise of a town that came to be called "Florence on the Elbe." He never glosses. He is thorough but never boring. His own feelings and those of the survivors are plain on almost every page.

You may remember Kurt Vonnegut's apocalyptic novel Slaughterhouse 5. How close did Vonnegut come to portraying what really happened in Dresden? Fairly close -- Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when the bombers arrived. Then he was part of the forced labor crews doing "corpse mining" (his term) in the ruins of the old city. His book, too, has fueled myths.

In the end Taylor's Dresden is subversive. Here are facts, here are lies and propaganda. Did British bomber command set out to incinerate innocent people, or were they after the high tech armament factories in Dresden? Both? Did master politician Winston Churchill foresee the postwar questions, and want to cease the bombing?

Can Coventry, Dresden, Berlin, Stalingrad, Leningrad and eventually Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Ho Chi Minh city and all the rest ever be fully justified?

These questions are raised and at least partially answered in this outstanding work of modern history.

From the book:

"Dresden contained plenty of things worth bombing, but it also contained even more things that in a better world would have been somehow preserved, even if that meant sparing the entire city, armaments factories, marshaling yards and all.

"Think of the German commander who ignored Hitler's order to burn Paris, or the American artillery colonel who refused to shell the ancient university town of Heidelberg...

"...By 1945, in the air war, individual choice... was all but irrelevant. All that mattered was the things worth bombing, and everything other was hardly considered."

"Then the war ended, the fighting ceased, and the world awoke from its terrible dream. The defeated had only survival to think of, but among the victorious nations this was when people started to turn to one another in shamed amazement and ask: 'Did we really do that?'"

Aired Sunday January 25, 2004 at 10:55 am and Monday January 26, 2004 at 8:40 am

We received this email from Frederick Taylor's agent in response to this article:

To: tony@gallerybookshop.com
Subject: dresden
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004
Dear tony,

I am the agent for Fred Taylor's book on Dresden and his publisher forwarded to me the text of your radio review. I just wanted you to know what delight such a thoughtful and positive piece has brought to all involved. You understood perfectly what Fred was doing and I think you put it across beautifully. It has been a very long haul for him and to have this reception makes it all worthwhile. I hope you've got thousands of listeners!

With many thanks,
Yours
Jane Turnbull

Orders/Information:

Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 by Frederick Taylor. HarperCollins hardcover $26.95. ISBN 0060006765. Publication date February 3, 2004. The author is an English novelist, translator and editor.

I was born on March 23, 1945, a month and ten days after the firebombing of Dresden, and shortly before the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. As these events are commemorated each year I can't help but feel a spiritual connection to the questions they raise for humanity. My father, Joe Miksak, who took part in the invasions of Africa, Sicily and Italy, was safely home and out of the war by the time these events took place.

In 1938 the Nazis burned the Dresden synagogue on Kristallnacht, November 9. Taylor retells how a "grizzled Dresden street character named Franz Hackel muttered to a horrified Jewish onlooker, 'This fire will return! It will make a long curve and then come back to us!"

There is so much depth and detail to Taylor's book, and so little can be conveyed in the short on-air segment above. The bombing actually was a kind of liberation for some Jews in hiding in the city (some of the few remaining Jews were in mixed "Aryan" marriages, a fact that had delayed their destruction). A few tore off their yellow stars, stood in line for food ration coupons, and left in search of liberating troops. Many political prisoners escaped the Gestapo's guillotine only to be recaptured and put to forced labor in the rubble. After the war, the communist government leveled areas that could well have been preserved, installing endless blocks of concrete communal housing. Careless dynamiting of dangerous structures weakened those nearby, leading to the kind of urban renewal last seen in our inner cities in the US in the 1960s.

Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, the Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut. Bantam Doubleday Dell, $7.50. ISBN 0440180295.