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Several thousand air pilots and secretly but thoroughly prepared parachute troops were awakened soon after midnight. About 1,000,000 ground troops packed on their fighting equipment. Though a few observers had foretold it, until this moment none but the very highest German staff officers had known for certain what commanders now told their units: "It's to begin." Presently in the reddening skies over France, over Belgium, over Holland, over Great Britain, more than 1,000 Nazi bombing planes—more than the world had ever seen in simultaneous action—sought their appointed objectives. Bombardiers focused down through sights which the Germans boast (but U. S. airmen doubt) are equal to the world's best. From watchful gunners below came salvos of antiaircraft shrapnel, like loads from wild fowlers firing on a duck pass at the morning flight. But this pass was a crossroad of civilization. And this dawn lit the beginning of a human event darker than any night.
First Objectives. Airports, radio masts, railroad stations, key highways and bridges were the gigantic bombardment's first objectives. Alarm sirens screamed from Lyon in central France to towns on the North Sea coast of England. Western Europe stumbled out of bed to its air shelters.
Scores of women and children were too late to escape this first total war's wild shots. After the first bombing wave had passed, some people went back to bed—among them, bellicose U. S. Columnist Dorothy Thompson in Paris. Others sat up to hear the radios of Europe chatter the shocking news to the rest of the world.
Many ventured into the streets to see the first war fires burning. A load of bombs in a shot-down Nazi plane in Douai, exploding tardily, destroyed a knot of the curious.