The paper tried to put a heroic spin on the tragic news, calling a one-sided catastrophe “the Battle of Hamburg.” They refused to mention that the bombs had produced a thousand-foot-high tornado of fire that had swirled and swallowed eight square miles of the city. They neglected to describe that the tornado had melted the city’s streets and sucked the air from bomb shelters, killing, in one week, forty-two thousand men, women, and children.* Franz and Willi looked up from their papers and at each other with dismay. In Africa and Sicily they had fought for nothing, for meaningless sand and
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