Over A Thousand Bomber Planes Conduct Single Raid

On May 30, 1942, over 1, 000 bombers were sent into Cologne, Germany by the British. Their goal was to demolish the chemical and machine tool facilities in one fell swoop.

Bombing Prep

It was set to happen before there were many American troops in Europe, and the British did not have a whole lot of bombers. In total, there were 416 bombers that were mission-ready. It was Air Marshal A.T. Harris' job to figure out how best to use the planes that they had.

It was imperative that the British kept running missions, even though they kept losing planes. If missions were not flown, the Germans were able to make more bombers and fighters of their own.

Harris hatched a plan. He could take a grouping of bombers, over multiple missions all focused on a single target. That way he would have to drop fewer bombs and have fewer planes for the Germans to focus on.

Or he could send a large force of bombers all at once and flood the enemy. The Germans would have many, many planes to defend themselves from.

All At Once

He decided the best course of action was to send them all at once. All 416 first-line bombers along with the second-line and the training bombers set course for Cologne.

Operation Millennium was in motion. The 1,000 plus planes dropped 1,500 tons of bombs on the city, causing 600 acres of damage. On average, a bomb went off every two seconds.

Britain lost 40 bombers in the raid. Targeting was not at its best in the early years of World War II, drawing criticism for the execution of the raid.

However, 45,000 German were without homes after the raid was over, and 469 were killed, many of them civilians. Britain had seen similar losses in 1941.

The Royal Air Force bombing resulted in about a 5 percent loss each time the fighters went out. So a 4 percent loss in this mission was actually pretty good stats.

This was not the only high number of raids of the war, but it did have the most. The attack on Dresden only had about 700 bombers.

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3 comments on “Over A Thousand Bomber Planes Conduct Single Raid”

  1. We all know about WW11 and it’s sad and it was devastating to so many . But your headlines are misleading and I for one don’t like it when someone try’s to get you to visit their site for what ever reason . If I wanted a history lesson , I would have googled it

  2. Keep up the good work ! I don’t have the time to sit still and lookup topic to read ! So I like these short emails of interesting stories that I otherwise would ever read ! I will read most of them on my lunch break or bus back home . So far everyone had my interest , every thing on history from civil wars to now. Building giant buildings, railroads across America, the great tea trade of sailing ships from China back to England! It was a race for the best price. Thanks

  3. I enjoy these quick factual reminders of many topics to choose from and often go off on a search to learn more. Much quicker than the zillions of books behind me! thank you! And we should NEVER forget what the war was like in WWII and what the world did to destroy Nazis. I grew up knowing three of four uncles who fought that war (one is buried somewhere in France and three came home) , and hearing "what it was like" during the war and all the sacrifices Americans made to help win it.

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