Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden

by Marshall De Bruhl

Book Overview

On February 13 and 14, 1945, three successive waves of British and U.S. aircraft rained down thousands of tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs on the largely undefended German city of Dresden.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679435344
• ISBN13: 9780679435341
• Release Date: November 2006
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 346 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Interesting and informative

I hardly ever bother to write book reviews but this book I cannot put down. I admit I am only half way through the book but I know I will enjoy it to the last page. This is more than just Dresden, it has a lot of good insights of the thinking that led the allies to drop all of those bombs. It talks about how easy it was to expect that the victims of all of this bombing would just surrender. Lots of good aircraft info as well. I did not know how Hitler and his boys screwed up the Me-262 Jet program so badly. Lucky for the world Hitler did not know much about the potential of jet airplanes.

A fine work of non-fiction

Although the title suggests the book focuses on Dresden, this is a more complete story of air power in the European Theater of Operations. The work focuses on the strategy behind the bombing and treats the criticism of area bombing on Dresden and other cities in a fairly balanced way. Perhaps I've been ignorant or the issue has escaped full treatment, but the political firestorm arising in 1945, even within the United States, from the area bombing of cities and, in particular, the American follow-up attack on Dresden, was previously unknown to me. Unlike Ambrose's book about George McGovern and other air war books, Firestorm does not focus on the day to day lives of the pilots but is more focused with larger geopolitical issues. My sole criticism of the work is that it is written from topic to topic rather than chronologically. As a result, it is difficult to keep in mind the timetable of which country, the Americans or British, are bombing who when and this detracts somewhat from an understanding of the course of the air war. With this one reservation, a good work about a controversial topic.