Cheyenne Maldonado Professor Robert Furstoss

"Fierce Consciousness" English 151-03 2/07/15

The Blood of Dresden

In Kurt Vonnegut's Essay "The Blood of Dresden" there are multiple times where, even though he was a prisoner of war, he could see the beauty of the city he was captured in. He was able to come to love the city of Dresden and "saw the blessed wonder of her past and the rich promise of her future." He goes of to tell us how it was bombed, how this beautiful city was reduced to crushed stone and embers by bombs dropped wide of stated objectives. That we lost generations of German children whether they were future enemies or not, cannot be justified. That he saw this war as "obscene brutality." He saw this first hand because Vonnegut was one of the many men who pulled out the dead of Dresden out of the shambles of rubble. He was the one who brought them to a funeral pyre, a technique that was long abandoned. The Americans did indeed learnt how to "kick a man below the belt and make him scream"

Vonnegut saw that the bombing of Dresden was an awful event, even him being a POW. He said that it was once a tourists paradise because it was one of the world's most lovely city. He goes on to paint this image of Dresden as pleasant, honest, and intelligent civilisa-tion. In the shadow of the Hitler regime it flourished with countless unwarlike countenance. Being a POW you'd expect him to have some resentment towards the city, but he knew this city and people did not deserve the destruction it succumbed to by the saturation bombings. The implications of this war were the 100,000 noncombats of which were innocent women and children. His insight to this was the fact that he had to dig these innocent people out of the rubble. It was with regret that

he felt resentment towards the airmen because "they killed an appalling amount of women and children.

The day of the bombing his little prison was burnt to the ground, they were evacuated. On the walk to the new quarters he saw the cost of war first hand from the faces of the survivors, whom carried the injured and their dead. He saw the desolations in their blackened tear streaked faces and in the bombed city. One thing he heard from one British soldiers was that you could walk through the streets and feel thousands of eyes on your back and hear the whispers. When you looked back you would not see a soul in sight. From these observations of all the little things like, the masses of dead bodies, to the buildings destroyed, and the vehicles that were gnarled and burnt, he knew that "the fortunes of war" was a cliché. And his knowledge now to that, was that it was an overused phrase to justify the obscene brutality of war.

One of the worst part of this bombing and being a prisoner of was that he had to do "salvage work." Their ghoulish mission was to search for the dead. At first they just found limbs and an occasional baby. They soon struck the most bodies one day (around 100 of them) who's remain looked like textured prunes. You could see that a number of them had not died right away, that one of their leaders around the age of 15 had attempted to escape through the emergency exit along with countless others but had been buried in the bricks of the shelter. There were numerous other building that held the same grim fate. The toll was so great from what he seen. They had become to used to seeing the carnage but at the end of the day they wished for death from doing the work of finding the dead and using the funeral pyre. They would say "I'm ready for Death anytime he wants to come after me."

From this experience the idea that "they asked for it. All they understood is force." Was what made Vonnegut the most upset because he seen first hand that these people did not deserve this bombing of their beautiful city and all the killings of these innocent people . It was uncalled for. The leaflet that was that showered upon the heartsick survivors should have said that we ruined the city but it was unintentional. His fierce consciousness was that he would have given his life to save Dresden for the worlds generations to come. And that he thinks that everyone should feel this was about every city on earth. His reasoning of this was because he seen what the city had succumbed to and how many countless innocent people died.