Monday, June 28, 1943. The bombing of Cologne.
Today in World War II History—June 28, 1943: Royal Air Force bombs Cologne, Germany, heavily damaging the cathedral and ending the Battle of the Ruhr—total of 872 British bombers have been lost.
From Sarah Sundin's blog. Other sources would regard the battle as going on through July 31, which is how I would place it.
On this raid, 608 aircraft, including participated of various types, of which 50 were lost. 4,377 Germans, which of course would have been mostly civilians, were killed, about 10,000 injured. 230,000 people were made homeless. Forty-three industrial, six German Army and about 15,000 other buildings were destroyed.
The Germans, on the same day, began construction of rocket launching complexes along the English Channel. At the Peenemünde Army Research Center, it successfully launched a V2 rocket as Adolf Hitler watched and unsuccessfully launched one which crashed nearby.
The United States Army Air Force changed its aircraft insignia. It had been:
This insignia had been adopted on May 15, 1942, in order to omit the red ball in the center of the star, which was a feature of the insignia thath predated it. There were fears the red ball could have been mistaken for the Japanese insignia. A special variant of this insignia had been modified for Operation Torch, which was:
By NiD.29 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19785085
Research had since shown that shapes, rather than colors, were more important for aircraft identification, so on this date, the following insignia was adopted:
In the Pacific, the red border was omitted by some units.
