In 1969 American science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut wrote a war novel based on his own experiences as a prisoner of war during the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II. Historical background: In February 1945 when the war was close to its end and the outcome was apparent, American and British bombers dropped almost four thousand bombs on the city. Dresden was an open city. It was undefended and contained no war industries or troop concentrations of any importance.
In 1967 Kurt Vonnegut with his old war buddy went back to Dresden to write a book he had been unsuccessfully trying to finish since 1945. Over the years, the writer told that the main thing he was working on was a book about Dresden. At first he thought it would be easy to write about this but he wrote five thousand pages and threw all away. Harrison Starr, the movie-maker heard that Vonnegut was writing an anti-war novel and asked him: "Why don't you write an anti-glacier book instead?". What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.
The outline of this book was on the back of a roll of wallpaper, the writer used his daughter's crayons to draw lines on it, different color for each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the beginning of the story, the lines of characters met, stopped, intercrossed then they passed through cross-hatching of the destruction of Dresden and not many of them came out the other side.
He decided to call his novel "The Children's Crusade" because they had been the youth, just babies, who fought in the war, he remembered (the real Children's Crusade started in 1213 when two monks got the idea of raising armies of children and selling them in North Africa as slaves; so they did, though half of them drowned in shipwrecks).
"Slaughterhouse-five" is often considered as Kurt Vonnegut's best book, though the author himself called it a failure. All this happened, more or less, he says.
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