Interviewer: Do you mind describing your capture by the Germans?

Vonnegut: Gladly. We were in this gully about as deep as a first World War trench. There was snow all around. Somebody said we were probably in Luxembourg. We were out of food. The Germans could see us - because they were talking to us through a loudspeaker. They told us our situation was hopeless and so on. That was when we fixed bayonets. It was nice there for a few minutes.

Interviewer: What did the Germans say?

Vonnegut: They said the war was all over for us, that we were lucky, that we could now be sure we would live through the war, which was more than they could be sure of. As a matter of fact, they were probably killed or captured by Patton's Third Army within the next few days. Wheels within wheels? Interviewer: And you finally arrived in Dresden.

Vonnegut: In a huge prison camp south of Dresden, first. The privates were separated from the non-coms and officers. Under the articles of the Geneva Convention, which is a very Edwardian document, privates were required to work for their keep. Everybody else got to languish in prison. As a private, I was shipped to Dresden? Interviewer: What were your impressions of the city itself before the bombing?

Vonnegut: The first fancy city I'd ever seen. A city full of statues and zoos, like Paris. We were living in a slaughterhouse, in a nice new cement-block hog barn. They put bunks and straw mattresses in the barn and we went to work every morning as contract labour in a malt syrup factory. The syrup was for pregnant women. The damned sirens would go off and we'd hear some other city getting it - whump a whump a whump a whump. We never expected to get it. There were very few air-raid shelters in town and no war industries, just cigarette factories, hospitals, clarinet factories.

Then a siren went off - it was February 13, 1945 - and we went down two stories under the pavement into a big meat locker. It was cool there, with cadavers hanging all around. When we came up the city was gone.

Interviewer: You didn't suffocate in the meat locker?

Vonnegut: No. It was quite large and there weren't very many of us. The attack didn't sound like a hell of a lot either. Whump. They went over with high explosives first, to loosen things up, and then scattered incendiaries. When the war started incendiaries were fairly sizeable, about as long as a shoebox. By the time Dresden got it, they were tiny little things. They burnt the whole damn town down.

Interviewer: What an impression on someone thinking of becoming a writer!

Vonnegut: It was a fancy thing to see, a startling thing.

It was a moment of truth, too, because American civilians and ground troops didn't know American bombers were engaged in saturation bombing. It was kept a secret until very close to the end of the war? Interviewer: One more war question: do you still think about the firebombing of Dresden at all?

Vonnegut: I wrote a book about it, called Slaughterhouse-Five. The book is still in print and I have to do something about it as a businessman now and then.