Mission Accomplished

Allied ground troops had watched the great bomber fleets roar out from England night & day, had exulted over 1,000-plane assaults and 3,500-ton bomb loads.

But infantrymen had sometimes wondered what strategic air power really was accomplishing. Now they knew.

For Cologne, where the R.A.F. first tried saturation bombing, was at last in American hands and available for expert Allied study. During the war Allied flyers had sent some 42,000 tons of bombs smashing down upon Cologne. And the city, once more populous than Pittsburgh, once a great industrial center, once a hub of communication lines, had died violently.

As the 3rd Armored Division and 104th Infantry ("Timberwolves") moved in, a church bell rang crazily, not in joy but high and loose-lipped like the laughter of a hysterical woman. A mud-stained veteran stared with dazed eyes at the desolation about him murmuring over and over, "Ain't it awful! Ain't it awful!" Silent Rubble. In most districts not one street was untouched, not a single house undamaged. The outer areas of the city were 85% destroyed, the center 95% rubble. TIME Correspondent Sidney Olson, who went in with the first troops, cabled: "The first impression was that of silence and emptiness. When we stopped the jeep you heard nothing, you saw no movement down the great deserted avenues lined with empty stone boxes. We looked vainly for people. In a city of 700,000 no one now seemed alive. But there were people, perhaps some 120,000 of them. They had gone underground. They live and work in a long series of cellars, 'mouseholes,' cut from one house to the next." The fear of air power was branded deep on the people. They stammered out stories of the 25 major attacks driven home to their town, groped in their memories for the dates when this or that old landmark disappeared in a blockbuster's blast. Now even the put-put engine of a light plane sent shuddering children racing to their mothers. Cautiously, jerkily, the troops moved down the radial boulevards.

Baedeker Updated. Officers who had been in Cologne before ticked off the list of things gone. The Opera House, the rows of medieval gabled houses, the Dom and Excelsior hotels, the great Rhine bridges, the little cafes and haunts, all destroyed.

But Cologne Cathedral's delicately balanced spires, soaring 515 feet into the air, still stood. Mainly, the bombers had succeeded in sparing it. But at a corner of the central window over the main door there was a jagged hole; there were others in the roof. Thousands of small chips, knocked from the carved stonework, were scattered about. The Germans had removed the windows and main altar, bricked up the statues. The choir loft was in ruins, the confessionals smashed and heaps of rubble covered the floors.

This, said a correspondent, was one of the most famous buildings in the world. Said a soldier: "Yeah? Whaddaya know! Ain't much of a place right now though, is it?"

Outside, an R.A.F. officer asked: "What do you think of the railroad station?" Blankly the correspondent asked, "What railroad station?" The officer waved at a nearby pile of twisted steel. "The perfect answer," he said.

Work in Progress. Overhead the bombers still roared. Scores of other cities, the nerve centers of industrial Germany, were being attacked as Cologne was. Day & night for almost a straight month the fleets have been out. Last week, in air columns 200 miles long, they hammered at the Ruhr and the rail centers of western Germany.

The doughs who were careful--and lucky--would yet see many another Cologne.

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