Dad with flare pistols, ca. 1946. This was fairly late in the period when visual, rather than radio, communications were still widely used for air traffic signaling.
Recently I read an old copy of the Destruction of Dresden by David Irving, which details with mesmeric and elegiac detail the march to doom of the city. He also explains with great precision some of the targeting, radio, and early radar systems used by the RAF and U.S. Army Air Force. The Wikipedia entry on Irving's work doesn't do it justice, making it seem as if the book is nothing but an inaccurate rendering of the death count after the triple blow attack in February 1945. While in later years Irving has (with justification) become a widely reviled and controversial individual, Dresden is a well-researched and informative popular history, not necessarily favoring one side or the other.
The system of writing in general is not exterior to the system of language in general, unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently alien to its system. For the same reason, writing in general is not “image” or “figuration” of language in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning of the image within the system from which one wishes to exclude it be reconsidered. Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true. If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign” signifies writing, certain conclusions — which I shall consider at the appropriate moment will become inevitable. -- Derrida
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