This would be his home for the next – what? – year, at least. Until his research had been peer-reviewed and published in a respected journal. It would make waves, of course it would. It was a controversial thesis, especially from a British academic, even though he didn’t want to prejudge its outcome. But the documents he’d been provided, the documents that proved that psychological studies – studies he himself had been a part of as a young boy – had been traduced and perverted by leaders with particular aims, they were the proof. Yes, he had a personal interest in all this. His city, like Dresden, had suffered horrifically. His brother, who’d never had the chance to flourish into adulthood, never even properly enjoyed a childhood, he had been a victim. He owed it to little Fred that the truth should come out. Fred’s death could, he supposed, be seen as a sacrifice, although it was one none of his family had wanted to make. But for that sacrifice to be perverted in the way it had been? Well, that was beyond the pale. And this was the city that had suffered the horrific, almost unimaginably diabolic consequences. Consequences that to its citizens must have felt like hell on earth.

As his head lighthoused from side to side, he tried to imagine what this view must have been like on 13 February 1945. Would anyone have been up here watching? He doubted it – but the nearby villas, reputed to have been owned by leading Nazis, would have also had a perfect view. First, the Lancaster pathfinder planes, dropping their magnesium parachute flares to light up the target – nicknamed ‘Christmas Trees’ by the Germans. Then the Mosquito marker planes whose job was to drop specific target indicators, whose red glow would guide the bombers. Finally, the main group of Lancasters – more than 250 strong – with their deadly load of nearly a quarter of a million incendiary bombs, and 500 tons of high explosives.

And that was just the first raid.

The city – seen from here – would have become a giant, lethal fireworks display. An awful spectacle. But surely even here you wouldn’t have seen the actual firestorm, the deadly superheated winds cutting through the streets, sucking the air from Dresdeners’ lungs, killing them as they ran.

It would have been an indescribable sight. And yet, the British had suffered the same thing on a smaller scale at the hands of German bombers earlier in the war. His home city of Hull reputedly the most heavily bombed outside of London – yet rarely mentioned in the news for fear of giving the Nazis succour. Only ever described – anonymously – as a ‘north-east coastal town’. Britain had suffered that, Arnold and his family had suffered that, Fred had been killed, the psychologists had come and studied the effects.

And yet still they launched the attack on Dresden, when the war was already all but won.

*