Devastated on the night of May 30, 1942, by the first of the Royal Air Force's 1,000-bomber raids on Germany, Cologne today stands as tall and proud as its awe-inspiring Gothic cathedral, in refutation of the military dictum then prevailing that wars could be won merely by destroying the enemy's main cities and thereby shattering civilian morale.
Bathed in pale moonlight filtering through a curtain of fleecy cirrus clouds, the sleeping Rhine-side city was awakened just after midnight that half-century ago by the wailing of air-raid sirens. An armada of no less than 1,046 RAF bombers was approaching. They passed over the city at the rate of one every six seconds, dropping a total of 1,500 metric tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs, one bomb every other second, for what seemed, at least to the victims, an interminable hour and a half.
When at length the all-clear sounded, about 600 acres (240 hectares) of Cologne had been flattened, including 90 percent of the central city, 5,000 fires had been ignited (the glare of the flames was visible to returning RAF aircrews up to 150 miles away), 3,300 homes had been destroyed and 45,000 people left homeless.
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