Cologne, March 1945

Cologne was the first German city to receive a thousand-bomber raid, on the night of May 30, 1942, and the bombing did not stop for three years. By the time the U.S. First Army reached the Rhine the city was rubble. The cathedral, struck by bombs more than a dozen times, was still standing.

The 3rd Armored Division and the 104th Infantry Division fought into Cologne on March 5, 1945. On March 6 a tank duel was fought in the shadow of the cathedral — a Pershing of the 3rd Armored knocked out a Panther, and an Army cameraman filmed it.

The city fell on March 7. The Germans had already blown the Hohenzollern Bridge behind them, and the twin spires looked down on an empty river.

The cathedral fills the picture from the rubble to the top edge, its two spires lit gold where the sun breaks through the smoke. Everything around it has been reduced to shells of walls and heaps of brick. At the bottom a single tank rolls up the cleared street, four infantrymen walking beside it and two more in the foreground with their backs to the viewer. The scale is the point: the men are tiny, the tank is small, and the church is enormous.