We derive Berry-Esseen approximation bounds for general functionals of independent random variables, based on chaos expansions methods. Our results apply to $U$-statistics satisfying the weak assumption of decomposability in the Hoeffding sense, and yield Kolmogorov distance bounds instead of the Wasserstein bounds previously derived in the special case of degenerate $U$-statistics. Linear and quadratic functionals of arbitrary sequences of independent random variables are included as particular cases, with new fourth moment bounds, and applications are given to Hoeffding decompositions, weighted $U$-statistics, quadratic forms, and random subgraph weighing. In the case of quadratic forms, our results recover and improve the bounds available in the literature, and apply to matrices with non-empty diagonals.