Brightness Falls From the Air

The weather was finally fine enough to give Germany a look at the fiery face of the future. From British fields the mightiest air armada man had ever seen thundered across the channel, swept through German anti-aircraft defenses. Over Cologne (pop. 768,000), fifth largest city of the Reich, they dropped a trainload of bombs.

What airmen saw as the flames leaped up from the bosom of the city, what shaken Germans felt on the ground, was a new epoch in warfare. The awful power of independent air might had failed for the German because he tried it with too little on a nation whose soul was too stout.

Now the might had been multiplied and the nation's soul had not yet been tried.

Over London one night in September 1940, Germany had sent 500 planes. Over Cologne Britain sent more than 1,200 planes; they dropped 3,000 tons of bombs.

The damage to Cologne's industries (air and submarine engines, chemicals, explosives and synthetic rubber) was huge.

Britain used her big fellows--Stirlings, Halifaxes, Manchester. They pulled over Cologne with split-second precision, while lighter bombers--Beauforts, Bostons, Hampdens--engaged German fighters or whirled low over the targets, sowing incendiaries. When the big bombs began to land, the heart of Cologne burst into flame. Shattered buildings tumbled, great craters were torn in the ground. All this airmen saw from aloft, where the light of Cologne's fires was soon bright enough to illuminate the blacked-out attackers.

This was so big a show that a Vice Marshal of the R.A.F., John Eustace Arthur Baldwin, commanded it. Germany, busy at last on too many fronts, did not have the tools to head it off. When the British planes roared home and crawled down with nice precision on the flare paths of their island airdromes, only 44 were missing. For such a show, those losses were low (4%). After such a show, naturally, the returned air warriors all had a good hot cup of tea.

The British crews knew that that night was only a curtain-raiser. Tough Air Marshal Arthur Travers Harris, chief of the bomber command, had said what they all believed:

"Give me a thousand bombers over Germany every night and I will end the war by October. Give me 20,000 and I will stop it in a single night."

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