World War II, Dresden was called “the Florence of the Elbe” and was viewed as one the world’s most beautiful cities for its architecture and museums. Although no German city remained isolated from “Hitler’s war machine”, Dresden’s impact to the war effort was nominal compared with other German cities CITATION His09 \l 1033 (History Staff). This is a major reason as to why many people did not understand the reason that Dresden was bombed out of all the German countries. The bombing began February
The extreme destruction and burning that came of the bombing of Dresden in 1945, rendered in both Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse IV, violently terrified the population of Dresden and the world as they grieved over the estimated civilian casualties of somewhere between 24,000 and 40,000 people. Information about the firebombing remained classified until 1978, when the U.S. Air Force divulged many of the documents revealing the Allies’
Operation Gomorrah – Bombing of Hamburg in 1943 For a week in late July and early August in 1943, the British Royal Air Force committed to a week-long bombardment of Germany’s second city called Hamburg. Due to the weather on the first night of Operation Gomorrah which was hot and humid, civilians were tossed indiscriminately into an inferno which incinerated them immediately. Another aftermath of the raid was its political effect on the population of Hamburg. For example, citizens of Hamburg performed
to ignore the bombing of Dresden and treat it with no obvious signs of empathy. These actions show a similarity to the passage taken from On the Natural History of Destruction by Sebald which discusses how people deal with destructive events. The characters in both Slaughterhouse Five and the given passage from On the Natural History of Destruction act as if the bombings in Germany had no effect. The passage from Sebald’s book refers to how people in Germany react to the bombings and how their way
The Military Experience The Normandy D-Day objectives were designed to allow for a successful landing operation from sea and air, in which we would hope to catch Hitler’s German forces off guard. Known as Operation Overlord, the objectives noted by Buckley, “The planners hoped to limit the rate and weight of the enemy reinforcement of Normandy prior to the assault and to persuade the Germans to concentrate on fortifying areas outside the invasion site and to focus their
As a prisoner of war Billy has to leave the prison, to work in Dresden as a cleaner. He and the other POV's find shelter in the Slaughterhouse-Five. One night there is a warning of a bombing in Dresden, all the POV's go into the meat locker of the slaughterhouse and survive the firestorm of Dresden. Not only Billy survived the bombing in that meat locker, Vonnegut also survived in the same meat locker. After the firestorm in Dresden, Billy has to dig for dead bodies. Vonnegut ensures that he and
the first few years of the war the bombing gave little impact on Germany. However, as the war went on the impact of strategic bombing became much more significant. Therefore, on the whole, the bombing had a significant impact on Germany. One way Germany was impacted by Allied bombing was morale. Before the war, it was predicted, by the British, that German morale would be practically non-existent by the end of the war. As the war went on, allied strategic bombing on Germany’s impact on morale only
Characters (Protagonist/Antagonist), Title, & Traits: Billy Pilgrim: protagonist; WWII soldier and prisoner-of-war survivor, and optometrist after the war; weak, strange, passive Bernard O’Hare: former soldier and POW at Dresden who helps Vonnegut write his story about Dresden; helpful Mary O’Hare: wife of Bernard; convinces Vonnegut to tell how bad war really is; honest, realist Gerhard Müller: taxi driver who helps Vonnegut write his story; helpful, peaceful, kind Roland Weary: antagonist;
In the passage Vonnegut alludes to the “fire-bombing of dresden” calling it “the greatest massacre in European history” (pg. 101). This use of both a hyperbole and allusion, represents the great traumatic effect that the bombing had on both the character Billy Pilgrim and the narrator, Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut uses a hyperbole here, because the bombing of dresden was not the the most deadly event in Europe, to show the extreme effect the war has on people
the straight forward, text of non-fiction. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut is a testament to this fact. While often regarded as science fiction or metafiction, it nevertheless incorporates the real experiences of Vonnegut in the bombing of Dresden into the fictional story of the novel’s main character, Billy Pilgrim. With this fictional model