The Fire and the Darkness

The Bombing of Dresden, 1945

By: Sinclair McKay

Narrated by: Leighton Pugh

Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

“Beautifully-crafted, elegiac, compelling - The Fire and the Darkness delivers with a dark intensity and incisive compassion rarely equalled. Authentic and authoritative, a masterpiece of its genre.” (Damien Lewis, author of Zero Six Bravo)

A gripping work of narrative nonfiction recounting the history of the Dresden Bombing, one of the most devastating attacks of World War II.

On February 13, 1945 at 10:03 p.m., British bombers began one of the most devastating attacks of WWII: the bombing of Dresden. The first contingent killed people and destroyed buildings, roads, and other structures. The second rained down fire, turning the streets into a blast furnace, the shelters into ovens, and whipping up a molten hurricane in which the citizens of Dresden were burned, baked, or suffocated to death.

Early the next day, American bombers finished off what was left. Sinclair McKay’s The Fire and the Darkness is a pulse-pounding work of history that looks at the life of the city in the days before the attack, tracks each moment of the bombing, and considers the long period of reconstruction and recovery. The Fire and the Darkness is powered by McKay’s reconstruction of this unthinkable terror from the points of view of the ordinary civilians: Margot Hille, an apprentice brewery worker; Gisela Reichelt, a 10-year-old schoolgirl; boys conscripted into the Hitler Youth; choristers of the Kreuzkirche choir; artists, shop assistants, and classical musicians, as well as the Nazi officials stationed there.

What happened that night in Dresden was calculated annihilation in a war that was almost over. Sinclair McKay’s brilliant work takes a complex, human view of this terrible night and its aftermath in a gripping audiobook.

A Macmillan Audio production fron St. Martin's Press

"McKay’s rich narrative and descriptive gifts provide us with an elegant yet unflinching account of that terrible night...to be recommended as a very readable and finely crafted addition to the literature on one of modern history’s most morally fraught military operations.” (Wall Street Journal)

©2020 Sinclair McKay (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Hauntingly Prescient

Although this is a historical piece about a particular night in 1945, this book should be read as a warning to all the warmongering in the 21st-century. Having just finished listening to it now in the fall and end of 2023, the abuse of the word Dresden in the wake of October 7 should now be called out as either an ignorant abuse, or a thinly veiled excuse in a failed attempt to defend genocide

Comprehensive account of terror bombing

The story has a lot of preamble, setting the history and environment of Dresden, and quite a bit of aftermath, political posturing and debate over the legitimacy of the action. But the actual account of the bombings, though rather concise, is chilling in its gruesomeness. The author does a detailed job of conveying the horrors, beyond the common metrics of area destroyed and lives lost (though a fair amount of time is devoted to that). It put me in mind of the book "Symphony for the City of the Dead", about Dmitri Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad, with its grisly detail of the true destruction. It gives a fair hearing to whether it deserves to be a considered a war crime. But like with the firebombing of Tokyo, and dozens of other cities in Japan and Germany, the conclusion is inescapable. They certainly were, only hidden beneath a veneer of being on the side of justice, and history being written by the victors.

The author does rely a bit on familiar sources regarding Dresden, referencing Kurt Vonnegut and his creation, Billy Pilgrim, extensively. Though why the narrator felt the need to do a Stanley Tucci impersonation in quoting Vonnegut is beyond me. It's his go-to American accent, I suppose. Otherwise, it was quite a captivating story. Slow at times, but merely setting the stage for the fiercely grim specifics of the bombings. As with in Tokyo and other cities, these may be considered even more ghastly than the atomic bombings later, in the terror created with wave after wave, creating firestorms sustained over several hours. A good book for everyone to learn that war crimes aren't only committed by "the bad guys".

Excellent narration

This book is super, Bravo to Mr. McKay and Mr Pugh ! A complete concise history or this horrible event, leaves the reader as myself much to think about.