NIGHT OF THE ``CHRIST BOMBS''

By JAMES O. JACKSON, IN DRESDEN

What Sigrid Dathe remembers most clearly is how brilliant the light was. ``It was incredibly bright, stronger than the sun,'' says Dathe, 65. ``The bombers roared overhead, very loud, and they dropped unbelievably bright lights. We called them Christ bombs. They were like the lights of Christmas.''

What Dathe was seeing was the very opposite of Christmas. The Christ bombs that so awed the 15-year-old schoolgirl on that night of Feb. 13, 1945, were lights of war and apocalypse. They were marker flares to guide U.S. and British bombers to one of the most controversial and troubling Allied actions of World War II: the fire bombing of Dresden. ``The planes roared over, and the bombs crashed down,'' recalls Dathe, who with her family watched from their house just west of the target zone. ``It was so awful that we had no concept of what was happening. We had no idea if we would survive.'' Like most other Dresdeners, Dathe had seen little of the war and believed her city was somehow immune.

There was no such immunity. Although Dresden was of little military importance, Allied strategists targeted the city to disrupt German supply lines by jamming the roads with refugees. Heavy bombing worked only too well in Dresden. The mix of explosives and incendiaries ignited a fire storm that melted iron and sucked up the oxygen. In much of Altstadt, the old center, the devastation was total. Residents caught outdoors burned to ashes. Those in cellars suffocated, then roasted. An estimated 100,000 died.

The next morning, Dathe saw scores of zombie-like survivors staggering away from the Altstadt. ``They were silent. Some were burned. Some were blinded by the fire. It was bitter cold, and they wore nightgowns and pajamas.'' Later, when the ruins cooled, ``corpses were piled a meter deep in every open space. There were too many to bury, so they burned them,'' she says. ``The smell of dead bodies, of burning bodies, was overwhelming.'' For more than five years afterward, Altstadt remained a ghost town. ``There was no life. Altstadt was dead, dark, empty.''

Yet Dresden recovered. Slowly, under Soviet occupation and then communist rule and now as a part of united Germany, Dresdeners rebuilt their homes, their palaces and their lives. Sigrid Dathe married and became a high school math teacher, never quite reconciling herself to the bombing, not even after the fall of communism and its anti-American dogma. ``The Americans and the British didn't have to do it,'' she says. ``The war was nearly over.'' But, she adds, ``we also have to remember who started it all. The same things happened in London and Coventry. The Germans put others through the same experience.''

At ceremonies this week, Dathe and her fellow Dresdeners mourn lost loved ones and remember the night of the Christ bombs 50 years ago. They pray it will never happen again. Not in Dresden. Not in Coventry. Not in Hiroshima.

Not anywhere.