David Spark

Between February 13th and 15th, 1945, British and American bombers dropped nearly 4,000 tonnes of bombs on the refugee-crammed city of Dresden, causing a firestorm which reached 1,500 degrees centigrade and killing tens of thousands of people. The raids destroyed six in every seven homes in Central Dresden along with seventy-two schools, twenty-two hospitals, nineteen churches, five theatres and thirty-one department stores. David Spark relates how an officer at the British Air Ministry tried to get the raids called off.