20 AUGUST 2005, Page 20

Death in Dresden

From Professor Colin Leach

Sir: Andrew Kenny (Letters, 13 August) repeats the long-held belief that the bombing of Dresden caused more deaths than the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was not so: terrible as the raid on Dresden was, it now seems certain that it caused the deaths of between 25,000 and, at most, 40,000 people, rather than the figure of 100,000 or more which was for so long the received belief; the ‘official’ figure has been 35,000 since 1955. The full evidence is authoritatively set out in Appendix B of Frederick Taylor’s Dresden, published in 2004.

Colin Leach

London N6