Dresden Read Free Page B

approached me and said “You Tommy ya? To which I replied ‘Ya, ich bin Englander’. He gave me a grin, ‘Gut Englander Tommy, Sie Komm mit eins’. This meant I was to go with him which I didn’t mind as it meant food, possible shelter, but most of all he represented order amongst chaos, which I didn’t mind, even if he was the hated enemy. If he was brave and stupid enough to fight what I thought was the impossible then I, an Englishman, would match him.
    And so that morning of the Fourteenth of February, Nineteen Forty Five our work party of about forty men trudged across the short open field and into the smouldering embers at the edge of the vast bonfire that was still raging less than five or six hundred yards away from us. Other small groups were already digging and shoveling at the piles of fallen masonry, trying to clear a pathway through the rubble so that the rescue gangs could make a start on uncovering the cellars, in the hope that there may be some chance of finding survivors. It must be said that, even though these gangs were made up of different nationalities, everyone set to it with a will.
    We had been at it for about half an hour when our leader came over to me. He had noticed that I was struggling and was in pain. He gently lifted my coat and the dried out, brittle shirt from my shoulders to reveal a mass of blisters across my back. He called one of his mates over and must have instructed him to take me to one of the many aid centres that had sprung up just outside the city limits. It was while I was being attended to by a German doctor that the air raid sirens started up again.
    This started a minor panic as the little aid centre was right out in the open, with no cover whatever. But the doctor carried on smoothing cream over the blisters on my sore back. Then the third raid started. Now it was the Americans who were flying over us and we reckoned they been told about the lack of air defences which, after the bombers had completed their satanic mission, enabled the escorting fighters to come down almost to street level. This time it was the the railway yards that were the target. Only a few bombs landed in the burning city centre. It meant that the population who had survived and escaped the night before were now getting the same treatment from the Americans. Luckily the American bombs were much less destructive than the ones the British had used. But, even so, five hundred and one thousand pound bombs kill in the same way that their big brothers, the five and ten thousand pounders, do. In this last raid the tally of the dead continued to rise.
    When the raid ended everyone lifted themselves from the ground and by some quirk of fate or luck there were no dead bodies within the dressing station. The doctor arranged for me to have some food and a drink of the awful ‘coffee’ and then I had to find my way back to the group that I now felt was my family.
    I found them and duly reported to our leader who I had named General with the emphasis on the guttural ‘G’. I thought he was going to give me a big slap on the back but he didn’t, he just said “Gut Tommy”, and I joined the rest of the gang in to the heart-rending job of opening up the cellars. We had to try and drag what was left of people into the open where they were examined for identifying marks and then piled up in huge squares. The final destination for these bodies would be one of the big water containers that had been built in various parts of the city. There they were burnt using gallons of petrol and oil. This was the only method of dealing with the huge numbers of bodies strewn across the rubble of what had been one of the most beautiful cities of Western Europe.
    We were split into teams of four who would burrow into the mountains of bricks and mortar, find a cellar door and prise it with pickaxes and crowbars. Inside we found the victims, in most cases the bodies were shriveled up to