The Night 1,000 Bombers Hit Cologne in 90 Minutes

WW2, from the records. https://warshelf.com/ May 30, 1942. Bomber Command is close to being broken up. Only one bomber in three is getting within five miles of its target, and the Admiralty wants Harris's aircraft for the Atlantic. Harris answers with a single night: a thousand bombers on one city. He doesn't have a thousand, so he scrapes them together from reserves and training schools, and more than a third of the crews are instructors and pupils. Three nights of cloud cancel the raid. On the last morning of the moon, his forecaster gives Cologne a fifty-fifty chance, and Harris takes it. The stream crosses the Rhine under a nearly full moon, and in ninety minutes 868 aircraft drop fourteen hundred tons on the old town. A twenty-year-old pilot, Leslie Manser, holds a burning Manchester steady so his crew can jump, and waves away the parachute they bring him. Forty-five thousand people wake up homeless. The cathedral is still standing. Göring refuses to believe the numbers. Bomber Command will never send a thousand aircraft at one target again.