Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Have to read that book by Vonnegut.He obviously was there and reffered to his old unit as the "hungry and sick".I had to watch this very intersting YT segment with Stephen Ambrose,Kurt Vonnegut & Joseph Heller the 50th Anniversary of V-E Day in 1995 worth it


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWXXpMWqG9Q

Kurt Vonnegut was indeed there.
But he got his statistics about how many died in the Dresden bombing wrong.  That's often the case with eyewitnesses.  They only know what they saw, not the bigger picture.
Vonnegut got his figures from British historian David Irving (in The Destruction of Dresden, 1963), who got them from the East Germans, who used them as propaganda against the West.  Irving later emerged as a Holocaust-denier, and an advocate of the idea that there was no moral difference between the USA and Britain on the one hand and Nazi Germany on the other, so his fidelity to evidence and truth can reasonably be questioned.
Vonnegut even exaggerated Irving's exaggerated figures of "up to 100,000" Germans killed at Dresden, claiming the death of "135,000 Hansels and Gretels" in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Irving's figures didn't just get into Vonnegut's work.  They made it into Air War Against Hitler's Germany, an American Heritage Junior Library selection from 1964 written by serious historian Stephen W. Sears.  I guess it serves as an example of the persistence of bad information.


I only got clued into this about five years ago.  Mike Pearlman, a civilian Ph.D. colleague of mine at the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, was working on a book about the final Soviet offensive, and Dresden was to occupy a chapter of the book.  I made up the maps and cropped and otherwise edited the photos he was going to use in the book.  Unfortunately, he died before finishing it, so there is one needed rebuttal to the Irving-Vonnegut story that will never get out to the general public.

So you preferred Battleship?

What makes you ask that?

Irving's figures didn't just get into Vonnegut's work.  They made it into Air War Against Hitler's Germany, an American Heritage Junior Library selection from 1964 written by serious historian Stephen W. Sears.  I guess it serves as an example of the persistence of bad information.

So are you saying Vonneguts numbers are hi/lo?Watch that Video if you get the chance.Thought I read in the 40-60 K which is still staggering

battle of the Bulge was a bit of an example of what the Germans might have put up w/o the Allies knowing their every move 

Condo = Unit.  My official address says "Unit 914".  It's a Big Unit, encompassing three of the top floors next to said tree.  Those blooms are all over the place on the ground.

I'm disappointed in Stephen Ambrose in that video, MrNubbz.  He's saying things that he should know better about.  Heller and Vonnegut aren't historians.  They can only talk about what they saw, and for the most part that's what they're doing, although Vonnegut overstates what he knows about Dresden.  I think his service in the sorry-ass 106th Infantry Division colored the whole war in his eyes.  And I don't get Heller saying that he never encountered any officers whom he did not respect and yet in Catch-22 the entire chain of command is portrayed as knaves and fools.

But Ambrose should know better than to assert that any bombing of targets other than frontline troops is somehow illegitimate.

Also, Ambrose claims that the Dresden bombing was mostly done by the Brits.  Per the USAF official history, Dresden is one of the few German cities that the Americans bombed more heavily than the Brits did.

These are the bomb tonnages of the seven largest German cities.

                 Population                 Tonnage
City           (1939)        American British    Total
Berlin       4,339,000      22,090     45,517     67,607
Hamburg  1,129,000      17,104     22,583     39,687
Munich        841,000      11,471       7,858     19,329
Cologne      772,000      10,211      34,712     44,923
Leipzig        707,000       5,410        6,206      11,616
Essen          667,000       1,518      36,420      37,938
Dresden      642,000       4,441        2,659        7,100

I'm disappointed in Stephen Ambrose in that video, MrNubbz. 

The banter and insight was still engaging.But he they were there(not Ambrose) even if they didn't count the bodies.I'm sure they coud have numbers to counter yours.But with the mess that was the war how many people disappeared from anything?I know ambrose made a few mistakes in BoB like on Dike and Blythe and saying Hitler was dead when the screen said april 11th.Of course that could have been on Speiberg/Hanks.Still the descriptions rivaled anything from Dante's Inferno.Hamburg and Tokyo got the same - horrorific