The Dresden Legend

摘要

When US airpower struck targets in Baghdad during the first days ot'Gulf War II, the media brought up the name of a historic European city almost as often as they mentioned the Iraqi capital itself. That city was Dresden. It was a potent symbolic reference, intended to suggest cruelty, horror, and unjustifiable overkill. On Feb. 13-14, 1945, two waves of Royal Air Force firebomb attacks and a follow-up US Army Air Forces raid all but obliterated Dresden, an old and graceful German city on the Elbe River. Huge incendiary assaults created a firestorm that consumed everything in its path.