History: Visiting Dresden two years ago, it was hard to imagine how the narrow streets of the old town, then awash with flood water, were once awash with flames.
The unimaginable firebomb attack of February 13th, 1945, has given Dresden a special status in the history of the second World War: a city that still serves as shorthand for Allied barbarism and revenge lust.
Dresden, so the argument goes, was not a vital part of the war machine but a city of culture, teeming with refugees just weeks before the Nazi capitulation. The British knew all this and bombed the city anyway despite its limited military importance.
This generally accepted view of Dresden was one of the last masterstrokes of Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Rather than hush up the attack to maintain morale, as had happened after raids on other cities, he dispatched camera crews to document the destruction.
Only with evidence of the demonic rage of the enemy could he sell his version of events, of Dresden as an innocent victim of allied aggression.
It's a story that continues to be peddled today, primarily by David Irving, who began his career as a historian in the 1960s with a book on the city's destruction.
In recent years, however, Irving has been exposed as one who manipulates facts to suit his view of history. Still, Irving's work remained the standard work on Dresden in the English language, making Frederick Taylor's Dresden a timely arrival.
With the light but sure touch of an engaging history professor, Taylor puts Dresden in its historical and cultural context. Once into the Nazi years, however, he hits his stride, countering one unchallenged assertion after another that have created the legend of Dresden.
First, Taylor paints a picture of Dresden as it was: a Nazi hive. Support for the fascists was higher here than nearly all other German cities. He provides ample evidence to rubbish the notion held to this day that Dresden was simply a collection of pretty buildings or one big porcelain factory.
Hitler described Nazi Dresden as a "pearl in a new setting": the new setting was a war setting and Dresden was central to the war effort.
True, the city lacked the industrial smokestacks of the Ruhr, but Taylor presents evidence showing how its precision engineering works were put to good use manufacturing torpedo shells and aircraft parts. Radio factories became fuse wire factories. Cigarette factories became bullet factories.
Taylor then presents a history of the air war and the bombings of cities from Warsaw and Coventry to Hamburg and Cologne, not to compile a ghoulish top 10, but to show the increase in sophistication and destruction as air-war technology improved.
He also makes the case that bombing Dresden's railway infrastructure knocked out the vital gateway to Sudetenland and Bohemia: 20,000 officers passed through one of Dresden's two main train stations each day. Eye witnesses described Dresden, not as a city of culture, but an "armed camp: thousands of German troops, tanks and artillery".
Weeks before the attack, the Nazis reclassified Dresden a Verteigiungsbereich, a defence area of strategic military importance.
Despite this, the only proper air-raid shelters in the city were reserved for Nazi officials. Ordinary Dresdners lived in the naïve hope that the British would never attack Dresden because of their love of culture, or because the city had so far escaped the bombs.
The numbers game around the final death toll began with Goebbels and the communists and is continued today by Irving and neo-Nazi groups, inflating the total number of dead to over 250,000. Taylor presents ample convincing sources to conclude that the death toll was probably no more than 40,000, still a shocking number.
The book's high point is its most harrowing, Taylor's masterly, shocking description of the firebomb attack.
He presents one of the great horrors of the second World War by cross- cutting between eye-witnesses as they stumbled across each others' path, searching for shelter and breathable air in the howling inferno.
His harrowing description of the firebombing makes clear that, whatever about setting the record straight, this book is not an attempt to play down the tragedy, dishonour the dead or whitewash the bombing's moral questions.
Taylor is an excellent writer who tells a satisfyingly complex story with a coherent, confident voice. He also spares us the exhaustive military detail of Anthony Beevor's works on Stalingrad and Berlin, detail that thrills armchair generals but, for many ordinary readers, stops his books cold.
For six decades, the one-sided verdict on Dresden has served as "Goebbels's final dark masterpiece".
With this outstanding volume, Frederick Taylor reweights the moral scales of a firebomb attack that went "horribly right" and retells the story in a way the dead of Dresden deserve.
• Derek Scally writes for The Irish Times from Berlin
