Vanishing Points

For three days & nights Allied planes had worked over 53 target areas in the Ruhr-Westphalia sector, north and east of Field Marshal Montgomery's points of attack. Crossroads villages became the rims of great craters. Towns burned like torches for a night, smoldered for a day, then lay blackened and dead. The rain of bombs knocked out cities' antiaircraft defenses, and the flak vanished. Then the cities themselves vanished under clouds of flame-streaked smoke.

For the Allied air masters each day was a "record": 7,000 planes went out, then 8,000 planes. But all this was only a prelude to air power's awesome climax day of coordinated attack.

From dawn to dusk a vast procession of aircraft streamed across the Channel. Nearly 2,000 were engaged directly in the airborne drops (see above). But there were at least 8,000 more--from England, The Netherlands. France, Belgium, from new-won fields inside Germany itself. At some points over Westphalia there were five layers of aircraft, crisscrossing at set altitudes, building a wall of fire inside a 1,000-sq.mi. box.

British and American pilots wondered how any German could live in the inferno below. Said fine flyer: "The Ruhr is lit up, messed up and ruined. The hearts of the cities are dead." Perhaps the main targets -- Muenster, Osnabrueck, Rheine, Coesfeld, Siegen, among many others--were now only names for history, the relics of air power's biggest day in its biggest week of 1945.

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