LAURENCE REES: I’ve heard it argued that Churchill’s anxieties about morale in Britain, during this period after D Day but before the Battle for Berlin, contributed to the thinking behind Dresden, and was partly behind this ratcheting up of the bombing of Germany.

JULIET GARDINER: That’s a difficult one, I don’t know. I tend to think that the bombing of Dresden had more to do with showing the Russians that the Allies meant business, as it were, and this was what they could do. I think it’s an interesting story, and an interesting investigation as to what the British thought about saturation bombing. I mean, obviously if you’re being blitzed you want your troops to blitz Germany, there’s no question about that. I have never been convinced that, apart from some of the press, that most people were very avid for saturation bombing. I don’t think that many objected to it, they just thought it was a ‘fair does’ sort of thing. But I don’t really believe there was a great pressure to do that. There certainly was pressure to knock out the sites of the V1s and the V2s but that’s very different, and Dresden is seen as much more retributive and I’m sure that would be the sort of argument that Churchill would make, how true it was I don’t know. Again it’s difficult because the only reports were afterwards so you don’t really know.

LAURENCE REES: And you’d think actually that perhaps more people would have been demanding retribution on Germany, but it doesn’t seem to have quite been that way does it?

JULIET GARDINER: I think it’s very much 'I want you to stop the war, I want Britain out of the war and if that’s what it takes then okay'. But also don’t forget that Churchill disowned Dresden in a sense. Churchill sort of said we’ve gone too far, and basically he said we’ve got to have a Germany at the end of the war that can contribute to the economy of Europe. So there’s a great deal of ambivalence I think and saturation bombing is one of the great areas of dispute and debate even today.