POINTS to bear in mind in reading Evans's waffling. My first book The Destruction of Dresden was written when I was penniless, and published in 1963 (I was aged 25). It became a best seller ut made me little money. The notion that the RAF had burned huge numbers of civilians alive was only just dawning on the British public. The official history of the strategic bombing offensive against Germany had just appeared two years previously, revealing this awful secret. Whether the figure burned alive in two hours in Dresden was 135,000, the estimate given me by the head of the bureau of missing persons in Dresden, or "only" 30,000 as preferred by Evans, was immaterial. I state that figure, and gave the crude margins of error. No new editions of the book appeared for thirty three years, until Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden in 1996. Apart from adding appendices to pocketbook editions, which I did, there was nothing I could do with fresh evidence that came to light meanwhile, like the police chief's March 1945 report which the communist archives in the Soviet Zone produced to me in July 1996; I at once reported its figures in a letter to The Times, and paid for its special printing as a pamphlet. I reported the existence of the fake Tagesbefehl in an appendix to a 1970s edition. Examining the latter document closely when I came to revise the book as Apocalypse 1945: the Destruction of Dresden, it became evident to me that it was a crude extrapolation and exaggeration of the police chief's genuine March 1945 report, and I said so.