In World War II approximately 410,000 German civilians were killed by Allied air raids. From July 1944 to January 1945, an average of 13,536 people was killed every month. In Hamburg alone, about 49,000 civilians were killed by the Allied bombing, and in Berlin about 35,000. During a single attack carried out at night from February 1st to 14th 1945, more than 20,000 civilians were killed in Dresden. But not only cities had fallen victim to the Allies' strategic bombing.
The medium-sized town of Nordhausen lost about 20% of its population in one night attack in May 1945, Pfortzheim lost 22%. Numerous cities, medium-sized towns and small towns had been the target of the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the US-Air Force (USAAF), amongst them Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Essen, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Emden, Duisburg, Hamburg, Saarbrucken, Düsseldorf, Osnabrück, Mainz, Lübeck, Münster, Kassel, Cologne, Schweinfurt, Jena, Darmstadt, Krefeld, Leipzig, Dresden, Brunswick, Munich, Magdeburg, Aschersleben, Halberstadt, Chemnitz, Halle, Plauen, Dessau, Potsdam, Erfurt, but also towns like Cailsheim, Freudenstadt and Hildesheim.
Historical events are depicted through the narrative of a veteran in the air war and his pilot life and career is described in the book.
