Chapter 8-Dresden or Hiroshima?

When Vonnegut described Dresden after it was bombed I was reminded of the bombing of Hiroshima and the book Hiroshima. Vonnegut says that "The sky was black with smoke. The sun was an angry little pinhead. Dresden was like the moon now, nothing but minerals . . . Everybody ele in the neighborhood was dead." When Hiroshima was bombed with the atom bomb almost everything was destroyed. Buildings were crushed, trees and grass were burned, and 66,000 people tragically lost their lives. Vonnegut's description of Dresden after it was bombed sounds very similar to this because of the amount of destruction that occured and by the large number of lives lost. This makes me wonder why the United States would take the lives of these two cities within months of eachother. In his description, Vonnegut makes the two bombings sound very similar relative to the destruction they caused.