The World Gone Mad

Searching for Humanity in Dresden

On July 1, 1982, Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church presided over a mass wedding ceremony at New York’s Madison Square Garden in which 2,075 couples were married in one of history’s largest mass weddings. When Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. read about the couples being paired off, his mind was brought back to his time in the U.S. Army and the buddy system. As a member of the 106th Division during World War II, Vonnegut, along with other Privates and Privates First Class, had been asked to pair up. The point was for each soldier to have someone who knew and cared about them, “since nobody else was going to do that,” Vonnegut recalled. While waiting at Camp Atterbury in Indiana to be shipped out in 1944 to the European theater, he struck up a conversation with a short, thin, chain-smoking 20-year-old named Bernard V. O’Hare. Vonnegut was a year older than O’Hare and both enjoyed smoking, drinking, and having a laugh. The two were now buddies; “O’Hare and I got hitched, so to speak,” Vonnegut later wrote.

Vonnegut watched as busloads of college kids arrived to replace the soldiers who had already been shipped overseas. The U.S. war effort “needed…more bodies of the lowest grade.” Vonnegut and O’Hare fit the bill and were assigned to be battalion intelligence scouts. The role involved sneaking ahead their fellow soldiers to scope out enemy positions. Vonnegut did not understand why he, at 6’3”, was selected for a job in which he needed to be stealthy, but he acquiesced to avoid having to take Infantry training, which he assumed would be “unpleasant.” In addition, he “didn’t want to leave O’Hare.”

With Camp Atterbury being close to his family home in Indianapolis, Vonnegut was able to sleep in his childhood bed and use the family car on weekends. On one of those weekends, on Mother’s Day, May 14, 1944, Vonnegut’s mother took her own life, overdosing on sleeping pills. Vonnegut found her in bed after being awakened early that morning, his sister Alice expressing that something was wrong with their mother. “My mother…surrendered and vanished…an air of defeat has always been a companion of mine,” he later wrote.

The “fucked-up division,” in Vonnegut’s words, was sent overseas to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, the last major German attack of the war. That October, from England Vonnegut wrote home to his family with a positive spin on the mission ahead: “There’s no sense worrying about me. I’m a damned capable scout—well armed. You may be sure that I’ll not trifle with those who try to kill me. Remember this: we operate behind enemy lines. If I am reported missing chances are the Army will have no idea as to my fate. If such a thing should happen (and unlikely it is in the face of our demonstrated performance) I shall probably be a prisoner—not dead. Know full well that I’m in excellent spirits, confident and unafraid.” In retrospect, Vonnegut viewed it as an impossible task to defend their position in Belgium across 75 miles of terrain. The Germans were better equipped and wore white, less visible in the snowstorms in contrast to the U.S. Army, “since our uniforms were the color of dogshit.” Promised combat boots never arrived and Vonnegut “never saw one of our own tanks or planes.” On December 19, six reconnaissance scouts, including Vonnegut and O’Hare, were sent out to scope out the enemy: “our whole purpose was to either step on mines or to draw fire,” Vonnegut recalled.

While on their mission, their fellow scout Bill Sieber stepped out front of the tree line for a few yards, with the sound of smalls arm fire echoing in the distance. Sieber glanced in both directions and was hit by rifle fire, collapsing onto the ground. He positioned himself up on one of his elbows, saying: “I need a medic, I’m hit.” Before the team could grab him out of harm’s way, a mortar round exploded and they fled back into the woods. Back at headquarters, they were denied a request for a medic, their Colonel explaining that the regiment was moments away from surrendering; Sieber was to be abandoned. Vonnegut considered surrendering in this fashion “an illegal order” and set out with around 10-12 others: “We had a doctor, a couple of anti-tank guys, whoever wanted to take off.” While they were in a creek bed, the Germans called out over a loudspeaker, in “good enough” English, that they knew where they were and commanded them to bring their weapons. The U.S. soldiers refused and the Germans began firing on them. They quickly decided to surrender; Vonnegut and others began taking apart their M1 rifles and scattered the pieces on the ground. Vonnegut months afterward assessed their place in the Battle: “The other American Divisions on our flanks managed to pull out. We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren’t much good against tanks: Our ammunition, food and medical supplies gave out and our casualties out-numbered those who could still fight—so we gave up.” The Nazis had expected to emerge victorious in the Battle within one day; it took three.

Thousands of U.S. prisoners of war were marched for miles without food or water and loaded into the boxcars of a train. Since there was not enough room for the soldiers to all sleep at the same time, Vonnegut and his companions took turns laying on the fresh coating of cow dung on the floor of their unheated boxcar. The unmarked train was attacked by the U.K. Royal Air Force on the morning of December 23, killing around 63 men in a single boxcar that was hit directly. Some of the prisoners who had tried to run lay dead on the ground, some still holding on to a piece of bread dispensed earlier that day. One man who was still alive could be heard outside of the train, pleading to be shot.

The prisoners received some water on Christmas Day and were transferred to a POW camp in Mühlburg, 420 miles southwest of Berlin. On New Year’s Day, the prisoners were released from the train into delousing showers. “Many men died from shock int he showers after ten days of starvation, thirst and exposure. But I didn’t,” Vonnegut later wrote.

Forced Labor

“It’s been one helluva holiday season for all of us. The worst of all my somewhat sensational experiences just undergone in the course of battle and capture is not being able to tell you wonderfully affectionate people not to worry—to tell you that I came through the whole god-awful slaughter without a scratch.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, January 3, 1945 letter

The Geneva Convention of 1929 on the treatment of prisoners of war stipulated that “belligerents may employ as workmen prisoners of war who are physically fit, other than officers and persons of equivalent status, according to their rank and their ability.” Vonnegut and O’Hare, being Privates First Class, were not of sufficiently high rank under this provision to avoid being forced to work. They, along with nearly 150 other U.S. POWs, were shipped to a Dresden work camp on January 12. The compound was announced by a SS captain to the POWs as: “Schlachthof Fünf”—Slaughterhouse-Five. The converted building was outfitted with tables and chairs, bunks, stoves, and two basement levels where hanging meat continued to be stored. Those who attempted to either escape from the camp or steal anything would be shot, they were told. The German guards did not speak much English and a translator was required from the POW group. Vonnegut was selected as the most proficient, having taken two years of German in high school. Unfortunately, as he was soon to learn, his guards were “sadistic.”

The next morning, exhausted and many suffering from dysentery, the POWs were awakened by a Hitler Youth banging on a pan. “Get up, you lousy Chicago gangsters! Work, work, you lazy gangsters!” The blond young Nazi, around seventeen years of age, was politically connected and could speak some English. “We will show you how to work,” he warned, pacing back and forth with a rifle hanging over his shoulder. The men decided to name him “Junior.” Their first assignment involved clearing debris from a street following a recent bombing raid. Among the pieces of brick and dirt were gritty old pieces of food; although the punishment for taking them was death, the men thought stealing the occasional bite was worth it. The most well-liked of the guards was an older sergeant with a black eye patch, nicknamed “One-Eye” or “One-Lamp Louie” by the men. This guard would occasionally fraternize with the men in broken English if no other guards were watching.

Food became an obsession of the POWs, with promised Red Cross packages almost never arriving in complete form. Instead, the men had to subsist daily on a small slice of black pumpernickel bread, some watery soup, and ersatz coffee, made from wheat, sugar beets, and chicory. The U.S. prisoners used different tactics to cope with their situation. “In the evenings there was very little to do,” Ervin Szpek recalled. “Somehow I had pencils and scrap paper. A lot of the guys would make up menus—an odd way to keep your mind off of hunger.” Vonnegut fantasized about eating every kind of chocolate bar when he returned home and talked about what eating them would be like. This upset another POW who told him to shut up and the two argued. Vonnegut’s job as translator was made difficult by the constant hunger, weakening his ability to think. White patches began to appear on his skin from the lack of vitamins in his diet.

Edward “Joe” Crone from Rochester, New York, took to trading his food away for cigarettes. He was going to be an Episcopalian minister when he returned home, he told the other POWs. Earlier in basic training, he had frustrated his buddy in the 423rd regiment by constantly having his utensils fall out of his backpack. “He could never do it right,” his buddy remembered. “Joe didn’t understand the war,” Vonnegut surmised, “and of course there was nothing to understand. The world had gone completely mad.”

Vonnegut and 12 other POWs were assigned to a malt factory, given the job of filling and hauling bags of grain to storage. The women in the building’s kitchen, taking pity on the men, allowed them to take a spoonful of the syrup they were making that was intended for pregnant women. The men made excuses to pass through the kitchen every opportunity they had.

The men took the guards’ lack of English proficiency to undertake minor acts of rebellion. One athletic-looking guard would strut by each morning with a salutation of “Guten Morgen.” The men would respond in a pleasant tone with “Fuck you.” This continued for four or five days until the guard learned the expression’s true meaning. Walking by, he yelled at the men: “Schwein!” Gordon Zicker remembered the men got off with a verbal warning: “He cursed us out but didn’t try to hit us or anything.” Vonnegut would typically translate the guards’ instructions by beginning with, “What these cocksuckers want us to do…” Vonnegut eventually lost his job for another incident involving Herbert Boone, who “never got enough to eat.” Gifford Doxsee witnessed the events that unfolded: “One day as Vonnegut remained in the barracks with a detail of five prisoners to scrub down the refectory tables and chairs and our living quarters, one of the German guards began to press on a prisoner to work harder. The soldier said he was sick, that he could not work any harder. The guard continued to press for more work, finally striking the prisoner.” Vonnegut lost his patience and muttered, “You frickin’ swine.” Vonnegut recalled telling “the guards just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came.” Floyd Harding described what he saw in response: “The German smashed him right in the face and knocked Kurt out.”

Duane Fox recalled Vonnegut’s condition after the beating: “Boy, when they brought him back to the compound he was in bad shape. They worked Vonnegut over. Oh bad, real bad!” Vonnegut believed the beating was “very small time” compared to how some of the other POWs fared. He lost his position as translator and was replaced by Lloyd Schulte, who in Vonnegut’s retelling “became pals with the guards and grew fat.” In contrast, Vonnegut was persistently harassed by Junior, who would follow him around, waiting for a pause or slow down in work to poke him with his bayonet: “Vonnegut!” he would exclaim. “You are lazy. You Americans are all lazy. You do not know the meaning of work. We Germans are strong!” Another POW remembered “Junior telling Vonnegut everyday: ‘Vonnegut, you must clean das shitters.’ Every day he would make Vonnegut, even barefooted, go out in the snow and roll these barrels out to the honey wagon and load them up. He really had it in for him.” Without complaint, Vonnegut now carried out his tasks, not giving the guards another excuse to beat him. O’Hare discovered what could happen when he once refused an order from a guard. “You ever hear of Eisenhower?” O’Hare said, refusing to pick up a shovel. The guard smashed him in his shoulder with a rifle butt. His shoulder never fully recovered after that.

Overground

On Shrove Tuesday, February 13, 1945, Dresden enjoyed mild weather and residents prepared for Carnival celebrations for the city’s children. Victor Gregg was a British POW in an overcrowded prison in the center of the city that day. He had signed up for the British Army in 1937 and experienced brutal battles during World War II across North Africa and Italy. Surrounded by death, he grew desensitized to killing and came to believe that he was indestructible. He later fought at Arnhem in 1944, where countless young men died in what felt like futile sacrifice. As a POW, Gregg and fellow survivors were sent to a labor camp near Dresden, working in fields, streets, and coal yards. His buddy was named Harry, with whom he had sabotaged a soap factory. For this act, they were told to await their execution. For the first time, Gregg felt real fear, although Harry remained calm, insisting that “something will turn up.”

The pair arrived at a grim and overcrowded prison in the center of Dresden on February 13. Gregg still had wooden clogs with him that had been given to him by the Germans to walk through the snow to the soap factory. He and Harry were forced up stone steps and into a long hall with a high glass-domed roof, crowded with prisoners who appeared utterly defeated. The room reeked of excrement from two large drums at its center. Despite the oppressive conditions, Gregg and Harry refused to succumb to despair and began to crack jokes about the other inmates; the pair thought that “at least we weren’t dead yet. We were doing our best to kid each other that perhaps we might get away with it, knowing, in the pit of our stomachs, that we’d had it.” They ran into two Americans who had been imprisoned for looting and revealed that each morning thirty prisoners were taken away by the Germans, never to be seen again.

As evening fell, a small portion of the floor was claimed for sleep, and the prisoners tried to rest, unaware of the devastation about to unfold. Air-raid sirens wailed at 10:30 p.m., but most dismissed them, confident Dresden would not be bombed. Suddenly, flares from the pathfinder bombers illuminated the night sky like burning Christmas trees, signaling the imminent attack. Inside the prison, panic spread as inmates realized they were trapped, with the guards having fled and locked the doors. Gregg, Harry, and the Americans positioned themselves against a wall, trying to survive the impending onslaught.

The U.K. Royal Air Force bombing began with waves of incendiary devices and bombs, transforming the night sky into a fiery red glow. Chaos erupted in the hall as bombs shattered the glass cupola above, killing and setting alight prisoners beneath. Many were trapped and burned alive, their screams adding to the terror. Thanks to their quick thinking, Gregg and his companions remained near the wall, escaping immediate injury. However, the bombing intensified, and a massive “blockbuster” bomb struck outside the building, collapsing a wall and hurling Gregg across the room, burying him under rubble. “I had the sensation of being picked up bodily as if by some giant, invisible hand,” he remembered.

After being briefly knocked unconscious by the blast, he awakened and found himself pinned beneath the rubble, fearing he had been blinded. As he cleared the dust from his eyes, he realized his vision was intact and began the painstaking process of freeing himself. Once he got himself free, he searched for Harry, who had been hit full-on by the explosion and lay motionless against a wall. His buddy was gone: “I knew death when I saw it. I managed to close Harry’s eyes and pull some sort of cover over his twisted body.” He then stumbled out of the crumbling building into a city transformed into a burning inferno.

Outside, Gregg confronted a nightmarish landscape of fire and destruction. Blocks of debris fell from collapsing buildings while flames engulf timber-framed houses, and many of the city’s inhabitants, trapped in cellars or concrete water containers, were slowly being roasted alive. Amid the smoke, heat, and flying rubble, Gregg joined a small group of survivors, none of whom knew each other, but who clung together for mutual safety. They navigated the streets with caution, dodging sudden outbursts of flames and the remaining incendiary bombs that fell from the sky.

Gregg’s wooden-soled clogs, given to him earlier by his camp commandant, ended up being useful as they protected his feet as he walked over burning cinders and rubble. The group eventually reached open fields and a railway line, providing a brief respite and a vantage point from which to see the devastation of the city’s main railway station. Their path was soon crossed by a group of men in uniform led by a German officer, armed with picks, shovels, ropes, and water. The officer, whom Gregg decided to nickname the General, enforced strict authority. He commanded the able-bodied survivors to assist in fire-fighting efforts. When three men refused to participate, the General pulled out a gun and shot two of them; the third man changed his mind and ran to join the effort. “Chaos reigned everywhere,” he later reflected, “and authority above all else was needed, even if it had to be exerted through the muzzle of a gun. I had been a front line soldier for six years and that is how I had been trained to think.” The group improvised stretchers using picks and shovels to rescue and carry the injured, moving through the heat and flames as they attempted to save those caught out in the open. By midnight, after hours of grueling work, they retreated to their original point along the railway line, where reinforcements and a food wagon were brought in. As they regrouped, the “terrible wailing” of the air raid sirens warned that further attacks were moments away.

As the RAF proceeded with a second wave of bombing, survivors of the first attack were left exposed on a low embankment with no shelter or protection. The city was a roaring inferno, visible for miles, and the distant thrum of hundreds of heavy bombers grew steadily louder. The survivors huddled together, instinctively trying to shield one another, and realized that the new attack was unlike the first. The bombs were enormous—the incendiaries erupted in massive balls of fire and “blockbusters” obliterated entire city blocks in a single explosion. The ground itself seemed to convulse with each blast, sending up clouds of smoke, flame, and debris, while violent gusts of air, drawn to feed the raging firestorm, threatened to sweep people into the conflagration.

Despite being only a few hundred yards from the heart of the previous raid, none of the bombs fell directly on their position. The survivors lay on the ground, powerless, feeling the heat and trembling as if the earth itself were shaking. Buildings and railway stations nearby collapsed under the bombardment, but the sheer scale of the sky filled with aircraft and falling bombs left them utterly helpless.

Amid the chaos, the General emerged to rally the survivors, ordering them to move further down the line for safety. Yet half of the group—about two hundred people—were paralyzed with terror, unable to follow. Gregg believed that there was nothing that could be done for these petrified individuals. After the second, stronger wave of bombing passed, less than a hundred survivors struggled to find safety amid an inferno that consumed everything combustible, including roads that melted into rivers of tar. Flying debris was drawn into hurricane-like winds, and people were lifted and consumed by the flames. Gregg witnessed “people of all shapes, sizes and ages…slowly sucked into the vortex by the force of the winds and then, with a final whisk, they were lifted up into the sky and into the pillars of smoke and fire that carried on up until they disappeared in the clouds above, with their hair and clothing alight.” Efforts to help the dying were impossible; those who tried to cross the streets were trapped and perished in molten tar and smoke.

The group realized their ability to escape was cut off, with the city reduced to a towering mass of fire and collapsed steel. The intense heat and unbreathable air made survival tenuous. The General guided the survivors to a safer area; any chance of life required movement away from the inferno. It was the screams of men, women, and children being roasted alive that led to Gregg having “fiendish visions that brutalised my mind in later years.”

Basement

The U.S. POWs of Slaughterhouse-Five were in a deep basement storage room as they listened to the ground-shaking bombardment above, with hanging sides of beef shaking around them. Amid the chaos, the director of the city’s Historical Museum tried unsuccessfully to save precious artworks as the building burned. In shelters, terrified civilians panicked, screamed, and prayed while walls threatened to cave in around them.

At dawn on February 14, eight hours after Dresden’s first bombing raid, Vonnegut and the other POWs emerged from their underground shelter to find a city in ruins. The prisoners scavenged food from a flash-cooked side of beef until their guard, One-Lamp Louie, intervened. With no clear plan for what to do with the 150 emaciated and disoriented prisoners, the guards eventually ordered them to relocate to Gorbitz, four miles west, where they would join British and South African POWs.

The march through Dresden revealed surreal and horrifying scenes: children’s bodies in party clothes, burned civilians in cars and fountains, and zoo animals roaming the devastated streets. Navigating rubble and melted asphalt, the U.S. prisoners were attacked by the U.S. Air Force: “A couple of American fighter planes came after us, just seeing somebody still alive down there, and just a couple of young kids, I guess, having fun and raising hell and opened fire on us and they missed,” Vonnegut recalled. The prisoners struggled to push their wagons uphill until finally reaching Gorbitz. There they were assigned bunks, Vonnegut landing near two intimidating New Yorkers. Their guard, One-Lamp Louie—later reported to have lost his parents in the bombing—returned home as the POWs settled into their new quarters.

On February 15, the prisoners were marched back into Dresden to begin clearing rubble and recovering bodies. Along the way, they were jeered at by angry residents who threw rocks at them. At the slaughterhouse, an SS officer divided them into work crews, warning that looting would be punished by execution. Junior continued his harassment of the prisoners while they attempted to bring bodies out of homes. In one cellar, they struggled to move corpses through a small hole and up a staircase under the watch of Junior who prodded them with his bayonet. A woman’s leg came off when they pulled her body through the hole and Junior yelled at one of the prisoners at the bottom of the stairs, who lost his patience with the guard: “I picked up the leg and threw it up the stairs at him,” Norwood Frye recounted. “We never saw Junior again. Where he went to we don’t know.”

The grim task involved dragging the bodies out, stacking them in the streets, dousing them with lime, and burning them on wooden pyres. As weeks passed, the stench revealed that countless corpses still lay beneath the rubble. Eventually, the prisoners were ordered only to retrieve identification and valuables, after which German troops—some with concentration camp experience—used flamethrowers to incinerate the remaining dead.

Gregg

Gregg’s forced labor campaign had begun earlier than the U.S. prisoners of Slaughterhouse-Five. At dawn on February 14, Gregg and his fellow prisoners watched German workers repairing railway tracks while food was provided in a makeshift kitchen wagon. Gregg was selected by the General to accompany him into the dangerous ruins, which offered some protection, food, and a sense of order amid chaos. Their task was also to dig through rubble and uncover cellars in search of survivors, a job made more difficult by the intense heat and destruction. Gregg suffered severe blisters on his back from the fires and was taken to a nearby aid station where a German doctor treated him even as new air raids began, this time by the U.S. Army Air Forces: “Now it was the Americans who were flying over us,” Gregg explained, “and we reckoned they’d 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…It meant that the population who had survived and escaped the night before were now getting the same treatment from the Americans.” Despite the danger from the U.S. bombings, he returned to his group to continue clearing cellars. The work involved removing bodies of victims, many of whom were burned beyond recognition or shriveled by the heat, and piling them for disposal in large water containers, where they were cremated with petrol and oil.

Over the next two days, the work continued under increasingly dangerous conditions near the firestorm’s center. More gangs arrived, and although Gregg’s group faced the most horrific tasks, they were left largely to operate independently under the General’s guidance. Progress was painstakingly slow, and the physical and psychological toll was immense. Amidst the horror, small gestures of care—such as food, blankets, and eventually a shower wagon for washing—provided rare relief.

As dawn broke through the dust and debris of the ruined city on February 15, Gregg and his fellow prisoners rose to another day of grim work. That morning, the routine at the field kitchen held a small surprise: instead of the usual male attendants, women were serving the meager breakfast. The change brought a moment of levity, with prisoners cheering and calling out in good humor. They queued for what passed as stew, though no one could find any meat in it, and thick slices of black bread were handed out to fill them up—a staple much favored by the German forces.

The day held a second surprise: Gregg and the others were assigned new leaders, including a young boy in an SS uniform carrying a Schmeisser submachine gun. Their mission was to clear a new sector of the city in search of any survivors, a prospect that sparked renewed energy among the men. The area they reached was a small square where grass had been reduced to four inches of ash, surrounded by houses less damaged than those they had seen before. As usual, streets were clogged with rubble, and finding shelter entrances required careful effort.

At the end of the day and after the evening meal, Gregg was approached by the General and a German soldier fluent in English. He was informed that the following day he was to rejoin a batch of British POWs, though he could remain with the group for another day if he chose. At first, Gregg thought, Good, can’t wait to get back to my own mob. Torn between returning to familiar company and the peril of being discovered for past offenses, Gregg decided to stay another day. The General looked at Gregg but said nothing. Gregg resolved to secretly pocket as much black bread as he could at the next meal, preparing for a chance to slip away, though he had no detailed plan beyond that.

On the fifth day, Gregg and the group were back under the command of the General. Their task was to try to access a main communal shelter on the edge of Dresden’s Altstadt or old town, despite extreme heat and the intense fires still raging around the city. The General led the team through streets filled with flames, accompanied by a water truck carrying wet rags and towels. The men worked in shifts to clear a path to the shelter’s entrance. Later, a larger group of about fifty men joined to help locate the entrance. Gregg was singled out as a “specialist” and handed a heavy crowbar to help pry open the massive, bolted door. The task took the entire afternoon in the oppressive heat, with workers rotated frequently.

When the door finally opened, the scene inside was horrifying: the shelter contained no intact bodies—only a grotesque mix of bones, clothing, and solidified fat, the result of people trapped during the bombing. The General ordered the door closed, leaving Gregg and the others deeply shaken. That evening, the group returned to the railway line for a subdued meal. The General informed Gregg that he would return to the prison camp the next morning. Gregg, in broken German, replied that he understood and they parted with a handshake. Now Gregg faced the challenge of escaping the group and leaving under the cover of night, avoiding German forces and the danger of being caught as a condemned saboteur.

After fleeing the ruins of Dresden, Gregg began moving eastward at dawn, going against the tide of refugees who were desperately trying to escape the advancing Soviet Red Army. These civilians pushed handcarts and prams filled with whatever belongings they could salvage, creating a mass exodus that seemed to stretch endlessly across the city. Despite the chaos, Gregg made his way largely unchallenged, finding temporary refuge in an abandoned building where he slept fitfully and survived on a few crusts of black bread.

Over the next two days, he continued traveling, moving away from the main roads and refugee columns. Hunger and exhaustion pressed heavily upon him. On the third day, while crossing frost-hardened fields, he unexpectedly encountered a group of Russian soldiers. “They didn’t shoot me,” he recalled. “That night I was put in a sort of cage with some Germans and a mixture of displaced persons.” Demonstrating his mechanical skills, he quickly proved invaluable by repairing American Chevrolet trucks that others had abandoned, earning their trust and protection. Gregg’s ingenuity and utility made him indispensable, and he was taken under care, his blisters treated, and given warm clothing. He remained with the Russian unit for several weeks, participating sporadically in minor engagements against scattered German forces, until the Russians reached an area already occupied by Allied forces. With much handshaking and farewells, Gregg was finally transferred across a river to a massive transit camp.

The camp was crowded with displaced persons from across Europe, with people huddling under marquees for warmth and seeking nourishment wherever possible. Gregg recalled vividly the sight of people dipping their hands into casks of condensed milk, desperate for a taste. Though the conditions were harsh and freezing, the camp offered relief from the constant threat of bombing and gunfire. He described to one Russian officer how he and Harry “had escaped by the skin of our teeth but that, alas, Harry wasn’t as lucky as me.” After two days, he was unexpectedly summoned for an interview by a British officer, which frustrated him to the point that he walked out. “I got asked the usual crap: Who was I? Where had I come from? How had I managed to get there?” Soon after, he was informed he would be returning to Britain, his ordeal at an end. His perspective had now profoundly changed: “Dresden had made me feel like a murderer; it had altered my whole idea of war. Never again was I to view it as a glorious adventure. On the train going home there were a load of the lads, living it up. I don’t remember saying a word to any of them.”

Palaia

O’Hare recalled that during the clean-up effort with the U.S. POWs, clearing cellars of casualties and streets of debris, their food allocation was still dangerously low. In order to survive, in his words, it was “necessary to pilfer food from cellars in which it was found from time to time.”

While looking through one particular cella, Private First Class Michael Palaia took a jar of preserved beans, but his coat—marked with Soviet initials—drew SS attention. Caught with the contraband, he was court-martialed and forced to sign a confession he did not understand. On April 1, 1945, guards ordered Vonnegut and three other prisoners to dig his grave. Days later, the POWs watched as Palaia and a Polish soldier were executed by firing squad as punishment for looting. The prisoners buried them, with one placing a rosary in Palaia’s hands. O’Hare remembered learning from these men that “they had constructed a cross for his grave to which they attached his dog tags.” Vonnegut could not hold back his tears telling the story later: “The sons of bitches! The sons of bitches!”

Crone

“In cold and in starvation, you don’t know where the breaking point is…It is a matter of how much you can stand and where is the breaking point.”

-Robert Allen, 442nd Infantry, U.S. Army

Joe Crone did not believe in the buddy system, preferring to be on his own. His colleagues viewed him as ill-suited for the army: “In basic, he couldn’t keep up,” Tom Jones remembered. “We’d help him out all the time. On hikes he was always losing things from his backpack. He was inept. He was a good old guy. You had to like him…a sweet person.” Crone continued to trade his small allocations of bread for other items. “The guys would have little tiny piece of candy and swap it for his bread ration or something,” Jones added. “And he was always nice enough to trade but always got the worse end of the deal. They knew they could bamboozle him.”

As Crone wasted away from malnutrition, his fellow POWs could not reach him: “I tried to talk to Crone to get his spirits up but he just melted away,” James Donnini remembered. Crone was having difficulty walking and his fellow soldiers had to help him urinate by holding him upright. One night Crone gave away his possessions to his closest friends. The next day he was taken to a hospital. “One morning he woke up and his head was swollen like a watermelon and I talked him into going on sick call,” Jones later wrote. Clifford Stumpf recounted: “My last vision was him lying in a bathtub.” Crone died from malnutrition and heart failure on April 11, 1945. Vonnegut later recalled of his character: “Joe was deeply religious and kind and childlike. The war was utterly incomprehensible to him, as it should have been.”

Remembrance

“This letter started as a huge joke. There’s no sense in going through with it. There’s nothing funny in watching friends starve to death or in carrying body after body out of inadequate air-raid shelters to mass kerosene funeral pyres—and that is what I’ve done these past six months.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, May 21, 1945 letter

In April, the U.S. prisoners learned of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death and were marched southeast to Hellendorf, near the German-Czechoslovak border, where they endured hunger while awaiting the German surrender. As Russian planes strafed the area, the German guards abandoned them. Vonnegut marveled at his luck: “I’ve been attacked by the British Air Force, the American Air Force, and the Russian Air Force.”

Once the guards had disappeared, Vonnegut and his several companions came upon an abandoned German Army wagon with a horse still attached to it. They painted their newly adopted mode of transport with white American stars and “USA” to discourage Russian planes from attacking them. It took days until, as Vonnegut recalled, “Russian ground troops finally arrived and locked us up again.” The process for being released from custody was frustratingly slow, with O’Hare writing in his diary on May 20: “I’m becoming a firm believer in the Vonnegut statement that ‘getting out of Germany is like walking in sand.’” While waiting to be flown to France, O’Hare recorded that the “Red Cross Clubmobile presented itself and I basked in about six doughnuts and a cup of real coffee. Prima.”

At Camp Lucky Strike in Le Havre, France, Vonnegut and O’Hare were processed for repatriation. Vonnegut wrote another letter home on May 29, realizing that none of his previous letters had reached his family: “I’ve been told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than ‘missing in action.’ Chances are that you also failed to receive any of the letters I wrote from Germany. That leaves me a lot of explaining to do…” From France, a U.S. cargo ship named the Lucretia Mott, took Vonnegut and O’Hare back to the United States. Before they separated, Vonnegut asked his buddy: “Well, what did you learn?” O’Hare solemnly replied: “I will never believe my government again.” Vonnegut later explained his sentiment: “It had been so important to him to think ours wasn’t the sort of government that would bomb civilians; men, women, and children. Because that’s what the bad guys were and we could have won the war without doing that.”

For Gregg, reflecting back on his experience at the age of ninety-three, while some details in his memory remained fragmented, the sheer horror of the bombing, the terror, and the struggle for survival were etched indelibly in his mind and were impossible to erase. Although he respected the RAF aircrews who were following orders, Gregg argued that in destroying the Third Reich, the Allies committed further atrocities. He called for recognition of these acts and hoped for legal enforcement to ensure civilians were never deliberately targeted in future wars. Gregg clarified that he was not a pacifist, acknowledging the necessity of fighting evil like Hitler, but insisted that terrorizing civilians was indefensible. “I will never forgive those who organised this raid, never,” he wrote. “It made me ashamed to be British.”

Head of the Bomber Command for the RAF was Arthur Harris, known publicly by the nickname Bomber Harris. In private correspondence after the war, he attributed the ill will around the bombing of Dresden due to people liking the porcelain figures that the city produced, as summarized by author Denis Richards: “the fuss about the destruction of Dresden arose from sentimental associations of the city with china shepherdesses.” This text appeared in the 1990 edition of Harris’ 1948 book, Bomber Offensive. Harris in the memoir called the bombing of Dresden “a comparatively humane method.” In retrospect, Vonnegut referred to Harris as “the marshal who was in charge of the RAF who believed in attacks on civilian populations to make them give up, although quite the opposite had happened in Britain…But a whole lot of RAF guys objected to a monument being put up to Bomber Harris. I think it probably finally did get up, but a hell of a lot of RAF guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do.”

Connections

“A perpetually tight belly has pretty well obliterated recollections of what happened to me in Germany—every time my memory speaks up I call it a goddamn liar.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, letter received by his family on June 9, 1945

Following the war, O’Hare worked as a district attorney and a defense attorney in Pennsylvania. He and Vonnegut returned to Dresden in 1967 as Vonnegut tried to rekindle memories for the novel he worked on for decades, Slaughterhouse-Five. The two rarely discussed Dresden since when they were together they “laugh[ed] too much,” in O’Hare’s words. Similarly, on the return trip to Dresden, they “laughed excessively…hysterical laughter, I believe.” Once there, they tried to phone their former guards, but none of those they reached on the phone wanted to meet. For the novel, Vonnegut transformed Palaia into the character Edgar Derby, executed in the story for having stolen a teapot, and selected Joe Crone as the model for the protagonist Billy Pilgrim, imagining him to have survived the war.

Vonnegut sent the finished manuscript to O’Hare, who gave his approval. Reflecting on Vonnegut’s celebrated work for the writer’s 60th birthday, O’Hare wrote the following letter: “In some reviews Kurt has been characterized as a black humorist. Those reviewers wouldn’t know black humor from Good Friday. They don’t know that what they read is only his reaction to the sight of the world gone mad and rushing headlong toward Dresden to the hundredth power…There is certainly nothing wrong with a man like that. And if such thinking constitutes black humor, it’s too bad there is not an epidemic of it. I am glad Kurt and I did not die. And I would go back to Dresden with him again.”

As Vonnegut observed, O’Hare never stopped chain-smoking. He developed lung cancer and June 9, 1990 for Vonnegut was “a date which for me will live forever in infamy. That is when my buddy died.” In 1995, Vonnegut was shown the headstone for the grave of Joe Crone in Mount Hope Cemetery, located in Rochester, New York. “But he’s in Dresden,” Vonnegut insisted. “I saw him buried myself—in a paper suit—because there wasn’t enough fabric to bury him in a suit of clothes.” It turned out that Crone’s family had searched for their son for years and had his remains returned to the United States. Left alone at the grave, Vonnegut privately paid his respects. “I was deeply moved,” he described of the experience, “and it finally closed out the Second World War for me completely.” He later sent money to place flowers on Crone’s grave every Memorial Day until his own death. Vonnegut last visited Dresden in 1998 on a book tour. He pointed to where warning signs had once hung, which explained that infractions were “punishable by death.” He repeated the phrase several times in German, “visibly shaken,” according to the press. Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, at the age of 84. The death of Joe Crone had occurred exactly 62 years earlier to the day. In 2010, a study commissioned by the city of Dresden concluded “that the air raids on Dresden between 13th and 15th February 1945 caused up to 25,000 deaths.”

In the search for bodies in the aftermath of the Dresden bombing, Gregg’s team had managed to achieve one success that none of the participants would ever forget. Initial searches had yielded empty shelters, but one collapsed tunnel leading to another underground shelter looked promising. Gregg observed the hesitation of the German officer ordered to inspect it, recognizing the officer’s concern for his uniform over the danger below. Ultimately, the group shored up the tunnel with timber and cleared the way. Their efforts were rewarded later that afternoon when three of the men broke through to find four women and two small girls huddled together and still alive. The rescue took an hour, and the group was filled with a profound sense of accomplishment. Gregg wrote of that moment: “we all felt like heroes, there were no enemies, no hatred, just this sense of utter fulfillment that the rescue of these people had been down to us.” Despite their arduous labor, it would be the only occasion these prisoners of war encountered living survivors in the ruins of Dresden.