"So, It Is the Factory Again"

Each time he ran his elevator up or down the four-story building, Ernst Heuszler, a wounded Wehrmacht veteran, got a little relief from the afternoon heat. He looked at his watch--3:42. Heuszler decided he would have a beer on his way home. Two minutes later, as he recalled afterward, "I felt as if I suddenly had wings."

The blast that lifted Heuszler and threw him against a wall last week destroyed 18 buildings in the 8-sq. mile factory of Germany's biggest chemical works, the I.G. Farben plant at Ludwigshafen in the French Zone, producers of nitrogen fertilizer, varnishes and dyes. At least 180 were killed, 2,500 injured, and 70 were still missing this week.

After 120 Bombings. Within minutes of the blast, fire crackled around highly volatile chemicals. Survivors staggered out of buildings from which black smoke billowed. They could hear the moans of those trapped inside. But there was no panic, no screaming. To the workers this was an old, familiar story. In 1921, more than 80% of the northern third of the vast plant at Oppau, three miles northwest of Ludwigshafen, had gone up in one terrible roar that took 565 lives. Just five years--minus one day--before this week's explosion, a similar blast had taken 73 lives. During the war 120 Allied bombing raids had smashed more than half the plant. "We all knew," said one worker last week, "that this would happen again."

The townspeople of Ludwigshafen, half of whom rely at least indirectly on the plant for their living, also showed a noticeable lack of panic. When the blast disintegrated windows in houses as far as five miles away, the people poked their heads through the empty frames, looked up at the monster column of billowing black smoke, and yelled across to one another: "So, it is the factory again."

Then, as they had been accustomed to doing after Allied bombings, they went down into the streets and swept the broken glass and fallen tiles into the gutter. Not more than a few dozen of the 108,000 residents of Ludwigshafen bothered to go down to the factory--they had long since ceased to be curious about scenes of destruction. Most of those who did go were mothers or wives of workers who had not called or come right home. These women waited patiently across the street from the plant, every now & then crossing over to see whether any new names had been added to the casualty list posted on the wall.

The Reckoning. Within a couple of hours of the blast, hundreds of U.S. soldiers sped over the rickety Rhine bridge from Mannheim in the U.S. zone to bring help. They came with bulldozers to cut a path through the debris, with giant cranes to lift twisted girders off the dead and dying, with gas masks which proved invaluable when chemical fumes threw back rescue workers. As the fires raged on into the night, these G.I.s, led by quiet little Lieut. Colonel Walter F. Partin of Nashville, Tenn., worked without pause, performing a thousand acts of heroism in the smoke & flames. Bulldozing a path through one rubble-strewn street, Bill McKee, a big, tough technician, fourth grade, spotted six loaded gasoline tank cars on a siding next to one of the biggest fires. Wheeling his bulldozer around, he plunged into the smoke, came out pulling the cars away from danger.

Rumors circulated that Germans -had deliberately sabotaged the plant to keep the French from getting its products. Not even the French believed this.

Whatever had caused the blast, its effects, were calculable--and immense. Laurence Wilkinson, U.S. Military Government Economics Director, said: "The. loss of the plant will require an entire recalculation of the industrial program for Western Germany."

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