Can Jean Calder check historical facts before making outrageous claims that fit in with her own, left-wing principles (The Argus, August 7).

She claims:

1. Dresden was already on its knees - Dresden had hardly been bombed.

2. Dresden was bombed to ensure its destruction before it fell into the hands of the Soviet Union - The Russians themselves asked (at the Yalta conference) for Dresden to be bombed as it was being used as a communications centre to transfer German army divisions from the Western to the Eastern Front. If the British and Americans had not bombed Dresden, Russia would have. The Russians shelled Berlin to oblivion so I hardly think they would have been concerned about damage to Dresden.

3. Hundreds of thousands of people died - the official German death toll was 29,000.

4. The British government refused to order the RAF to bomb the railways to Auschwitz - the British government gave very serious consideration to this request but the task would have required precision daylight bombing by heavy bombers, a capability the RAF did not possess.

In any case, does she seriously believe bombing railway lines would have saved anyone? The Germans would simply have diverted the trains to any of a number of other concentration camps.

However, I cannot see what this has to do with restoring the West Pier, apart from continuing the general anti-British tone she adopts in a lot of her articles.

It may further surprise Ms Calder to learn that, in the time the East Germans rebuilt the Dresden opera house, those nasty, capitalist West Germans rebuilt Munich from its original plans and many other German cities that had been heavily bombed, including West Berlin.

So successfully was West Berlin rebuilt, in fact, that the East Germans had to build a wall and shoot their own people to prevent them from visiting it.

-Brian Meredith, Hove