Coastalsurvey

There were 796 of these Lancaster bombers in the first wave

Last week’s New Yorker had an excellent article by George Packer about Dresden and how history is revised. For those of you who haven’t read Slaughterhouse-Five, Dresden is a Medieval city in eastern Germany’s Elbe River valley, that was burned to the ground on the night of February 13, 1945 by 2600 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices dropped from Allied bombers.

Days later, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of information, denounced the “Anglo-American air gangsters” and the raid that he said killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The press picked up on the claim and even Vonnegut wrote that the bombing of Dresden was worse than Hiroshima.

Then in 2004, Frederick Taylor wrote what Packer called the definitive history of the bombing: Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945. Taylor put the number of people killed at about 30,000 and pointed out that Dresden was a manufacturing center for Luftwaffe equipment and a major rail hub. Yet, to this day, the streets of Dresden are thronged with protesters every February 13th.

The rest of Packer’s article went on to describe the rebuilding of Dresden and the ways in which a city comes to grips with its past.

All this reminded us of  Australian Surfing Life’s now classic video, Hitler’s Surf Trip Ruined, which is a bit of truly inspired revisionism.

It’s funny how memory works.