Kleve - or Cleves, in the older English spelling - sits where a low promontory rises above the Rhine plain near the Dutch border. The name itself probably comes from the Middle Dutch word for cliff, after the bluff on which the Schwanenburg Castle was built. From the eleventh century it was the capital of a county, then a duchy, and the dukes lived on that bluff with a tower called the Schwanenturm rising 180 feet above the town. Wagner spun the place into legend with Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan. The duchy's most famous export, though, was a young woman named Anne of Cleves. In 1540 she became the fourth wife of Henry VIII of England. The marriage lasted six months. Henry called her unattractive and had it annulled. She kept her head, accepted a generous settlement, and outlived him by a decade - which, by the standards of his other wives, counts as winning.

The Dutch ran Kleve for a stretch in the seventeenth century, and a remarkable governor named Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen left his mark on it. He rebuilt the Schwanenburg in baroque style, threw up a new palace called the Prinzenhof, and laid out gardens whose geometry rippled outward to influence European landscape design for the next two hundred years. The Forstgarten still survives. French Huguenots arrived in 1685, fleeing persecution at home, and held their services inside the castle itself. In the nineteenth century the town's mineral springs turned Kleve into a fashionable spa called Bad Cleve, and elegant villas in their Belle Epoque eccentricity went up along the B9 toward the Tiergarten. A few of those villas survived what came later. Most of the town did not.

Long before Horrocks's bombers, Kleve had been a point on the aerial map. During the early years of World War II, the Luftwaffe used two radio transmitters - one at Kleve, one at Stolberg - to guide bombers toward British targets. The system was called Knickebein, German for crooked leg, after the way the two beams crossed over the intended target. British scientists worked out how Knickebein functioned and began bending the beams away with their own jamming, a chapter of the war fought entirely in the radio spectrum. The Germans answered with the higher-frequency X-Gerat system, and then with another, and the war of beams ran on quietly above the rooftops of towns whose names never made the news.

By early 1945, the Siegfried Line had to be broken before Allied armies could push into the German heartland, and the high ground at Nutterden was the key to that break. The German reserves would have to come up through Kleve. Horrocks calculated, with the cold arithmetic of command, that bombing the town would save his soldiers. He gave the order. Over ninety percent of Kleve's buildings were severely damaged in the raid that followed. A Halifax bomber had already crashed into the Schwanenburg back in October 1944, and the February 1945 strike finished what the Halifax had started. Among the things destroyed were homes that had stood since the Middle Ages, churches that had crowned the high town for centuries, and the bodies of the men, women, and children Horrocks had known were still inside. The 43rd Wessex Division entered the town a few days later, partly in error, and finished clearing it. After the war Horrocks said it was the most terrible decision of his life and that he had felt physically sick when he saw the bombers overhead.

The Schwanenburg was reconstructed, brick by careful brick, and so was the Stiftskirche, the old Catholic parish church. Built on high ground, they can still be seen from the surrounding villages, as if the medieval town were trying to remember its own outline. The spa villas along the B9 survived because the bombs fell elsewhere. Joseph Beuys, born in 1921, grew up in Kleve and went on to become one of the defining artists of postwar Germany - the place that bred him is also the place he watched burn. After the war, biscuit factories, margarine works, and the Elefanten children's shoe factory anchored the Wirtschaftswunder economy. Dutch shoppers cross the open border in numbers, drawn by lower prices, and a wave of Dutch homebuyers has moved in. The town that Horrocks ordered erased rebuilt itself into something quieter, less famous, still standing - and the dukes' bluff above the Rhine still rises, more or less, where it always did.