I still get the same reaction
when I see a B-17.
But isn't that a beautiful aircraft?
It's like a piece of sculpture.
And it's lovely in the air
when your wheels are up.
When you flew in formation...
sometimes with a thousand aircraft...
it was a very beautiful
and dramatic sight.
[Hanks]
In the cold, blue skies over Europe,
a new kind of combat was fought
in an environment
that had never been experienced before.
It was a singular event
in the history of warfare.
Unprecedented and never to be repeated.
Airmen from 40 American bomber groups
bled and d*ed in staggering numbers
in air combat.
One of these groups,
hyperaggressive and undisciplined,
suffered so many casualties
in such a short period of time
it became known as the Bloody Hundredth.
[crowd cheering, whistling]
[h*tler speaking German]
[crowd cheering]
[reporter 1] Germany has invaded Poland.
In a big att*ck, about nine o'clock,
Warsaw itself was bombed.
[reporter 2] The German army invaded
Holland and Belgium early this morning
by land and from parachutes
[Churchill] You ask, what is our policy?
It is to wage w*r by sea, land and air.
To wage w*r against
a monstrous tyranny never surpassed
in the dark
and lamentable catalog of human crime.
[Roosevelt] If Great Britain goes down,
the Axis powers will control
the continents of Europe and Asia
and Africa, and they will be in a position
to bring enormous m*llitary and naval
resources against this hemisphere.
[reporter 3]
We have witnessed this morning
severe bombing of Pearl Harbor
by enemy planes.
It is no joke.
It is a real w*r.
[Roosevelt]
I ask that the Congress declare
that since the unprovoked
and dastardly att*ck by Japan,
a state of w*r.
- [troops marching]
- [crowd cheering, whistling]
[Hanks] At this point in the w*r,
h*tler's Germany
controlled continental Europe.
Great Britain stood alone and vulnerable,
the last surviving European democracy
at w*r with the Nazis.
And the question became
how to hit back at the enemy.
Britain's bomber command
had been striking Germany incessantly
but ineffectively since 1940,
taking huge losses in night raids
that often missed their targets by miles.
[Spielberg] There was a clear
and present danger to global democracy
because of the Nazis.
So, patriotism was something
that the Greatest Generation,
my father's generation,
took very, very seriously.
Now, it isn't as if it was
a chore for me to talk to you
because I wanna speak on my
favorite subject, the Army Air Forces.
I-I can't speak from long experience.
I've only been in the service a year,
but I've learned a lot about
what the air forces have to offer.
That's what I wanna talk to you about.
The Army Air Forces need 15,000 captains,
40,000 lieutenants,
35,000 flying sergeants.
Young men of America,
your future's in the sky.
Your wings are waiting.
[Luckadoo] I was in the middle
of my sophomore year in college
and didn't have a lot on my mind but
chasing girls and-- and drinking whiskey.
[chuckles]
Meantime, Pearl Harbor happens, and then,
along with my other fraternity brothers,
were recruited as aviation cadets.
[officer] Attention!
[crowd cheering]
[Rosenthal] At that time,
there was a great deal of anti-Semitism.
And h*tler, with his talk of superiority
of the Aryan nation,
I had a sense of frustration
that I couldn't do anything about it.
Suddenly, that frustration disappeared.
I'd felt now that I could do something.
I thought the most effective
way to serve would be as a pilot.
I went down the next day
and volunteered to be an air force cadet.
[Hanks] Before enlisting, thousands
of American flyers had never set foot
in an airplane or fired a sh*t at
anything more threatening than a squirrel.
The crews were made up of men
from every part of America
and nearly every station in life.
There were Harvard history majors
and West Virginia coal miners.
Wall Street lawyers
and Oklahoma cowpunchers.
Hollywood idols and football heroes.
[reporter 4]
The cadets have passed their test.
And now, they'll get their flying lessons.
[Rosenthal]
Each instructor had four students.
The other three students
had previous flight training, I had none.
I had never been inside of an airplane.
[Clark]
After about ten hours, we'd have solo.
When those wheels leave the ground,
there's no one to help you.
You're on your own.
[Crosby] I became a navigator
because I was a flop as a pilot.
[Armanini] I got washed out.
I'll never forget the guy that
washed me out was Lieutenant Maytag,
proper name for a-- washing out
a prospective flying student.
[Luckadoo] I had a m*llitary instructor,
and he was about to wash me out,
and he said,
"You're gonna k*ll yourself anyway,
but I'll tell you what,
I'm gonna go over and sit under that tree.
If you can take this up three times and
around the pattern and land it, you're in.
If not, you're out."
[Rosenthal] We flew from eight o'clock
in the morning to eight o'clock at night.
I did various maneuvers
of chandelles and lazy S's.
And on a rare day off, we would dogfight.
I never enjoyed anything
more than I did at that time.
[speaking indistinctly]
[Luckadoo] Forty of my classmates,
just graduated from flying school,
along with me,
were all assigned to fly the B-17.
We'd never been in a B-17 before.
[reporter 5] The Boeing Flying Fortress,
manned by ten men,
this new bomber has a speed
of nearly 300 miles an hour.
The bulges on its fuselage
are turrets for machine g*ns.
With 4,000 horsepower engines,
it can cruise for 3,000 miles
without landing to refuel.
B-17 was the first both offensive
and defensive aircraft ever designed.
Offensively, it dropped
very heavy payloads for its day.
And it was called the Flying Fortress
because it had so many 50-caliber g*ns.
[Rosenthal]
The feel of the B-17 was wonderful.
The plane responded so beautifully that I,
uh, immediately related to it.
I was very happy to be on B-17s.
[Murphy] We had about
five or six months of practice training
and getting ready
for an overseas assignment.
In May of 1943 we were sent to England
to become a part
of the Eighth Air Force.
[Luckadoo]
We were told before we went overseas,
"You look on your left and your right,
and only one of you is gonna come back."
We were going overseas to die.
[Hanks] Just as the crews of the 100th
began arriving at their new base
in rural eastern England,
the European w*r entered a new phase.
It was the official beginning
of Pointblank,
an around-the-clock bombing campaign,
with the Americans bombing by day
and the British by night.
Its purpose, to achieve air supremacy
over northern Europe
by the D-Day invasion
the following spring.
Without air supremacy, the Allies
could not inv*de the European continent.
[airmen chanting]
[Roane] We'd just got there
and getting to know one another,
and King, the pilot, asked me,
"What had you done before?"
I said, "Well,
recently I did the work of a cowboy."
And he said, "Well, fine,
you'll be Cowboy from now on."
[Miller] The 100th is a young outfit,
and it had some
pretty reckless young commanders.
A guy named Gale Cleven,
who was a squadron commander
and an air executive named John Egan.
Egan and Cleven didn't have to fly
as squadron leaders, but always did.
And that's one of the reasons
the men admired them.
[Luckadoo] Buck Cleven,
along with Bucky Egan, they wore scarves
and their hats cocked
on one side of their heads,
and they were pretty cocky.
They'd be at the officers' club,
and they would say,
"Lieutenant, taxi over here,
I wanna talk to you."
[Paridon] John Egan, Gale Cleven,
their life's ambition
was to fly an airplane.
And here they are, flying an airplane.
Doing something that they love
for a country that they love
on a mission that they believe in.
[Hanks] Cleven and Egan
would help lead the 100th
against the most formidable air force
in the world, the German Luftwaffe,
whose veteran pilots had seen action
over Spain, Norway, Poland,
France, Russia, Greece,
North Africa and England.
They will understand the enormity
of their miscalculation
that the Nazis would always have
the advantage of superior air power.
That superiority has gone forever.
We believe that the Nazis
and the fascists have asked for it,
and they're going to get it.
[officer] Captain Kirk, Captain Thompson,
Lieutenant Bushka,
Iverson, Holloway and Hawkers
scheduled to fly.
Snap it up.
[Alshouse] The commanding officer,
he'd come in, he'd come up the front,
he'd pull back a, uh, curtain,
and there'd be a red ribbon from
Thorpe Abbotts all the way to the target.
[officer] This group of buildings here
is your target.
This building will be the aiming point.
If your b*mb pattern
is concentrated in this area,
it should very effectively
knock out the factory.
[Wolff] After getting off the jeep
and getting some of the stuff stowed,
then climbed aboard, got settled in,
and fired up.
[Hanks]
Flying in a self-defending formation
they called a combat box,
with accumulative firepower
of as many as 13 g*ns on each plane,
they could muscle their way to
the target through waves of enemy planes.
[reporter 6] At the fighter fields,
Thunderbolts are ready.
They set out to meet the bombers.
The two groups make
rendezvous over the English Channel,
and with the fighters patrolling
the skies around the bomber formation,
the air armada moves into enemy territory.
[Hanks] The bombers received
limited protection from the smaller,
more nimble fighter planes,
like the P-47 Thunderbolt,
whose limited fuel capacity
forced it to leave the bombers
once they crossed deep into Germany.
[Paridon]
The crewmen were in an alien world
to where they physically could not survive
without specialized clothing,
without specialized equipment,
without breathing oxygen
that was being pumped to them.
[Luckadoo] As soon as we got to altitude,
we had to go on oxygen,
so we had an oxygen mask
clasped on our face.
And the-- the stark cold.
The frigid temperatures.
We were operating
in 50 or 60 degrees below zero.
[Paridon]
The fighter escort did not have the range
to escort the B-17s all the way
to the targets inside of Germany,
so the Allied fighters turned around
and went back to England.
[Murphy] I remember that when
we first crossed over the English Channel,
I remember looking down and realizing
that we were over enemy territory,
and I had a lump in my throat.
I was-- [stammers] I was nervous.
[shells exploding]
[reporter 7]
There are the black smudges of the flak
that come up from
the antiaircraft g*ns below.
[Miller] A flak g*n is a German 88 g*n,
and it could fire a shell
up to 40,000 feet.
The shell would explode in the air,
and it would throw shards of shrapnel.
The skin of the plane is not steel,
it's aluminum.
So, that meant
flak just blew holes in the plane.
[flak hitting metal]
[Murphy] That was my first time to be
exposed to very heavy antiaircraft fire,
and, uh, it was-- [stammers]
it was frightening.
[g*nf*re]
[Luckadoo] We were being confronted
by very experienced
and very well equipped
and very well trained opposition.
They were pros, and we were rank amateurs.
[Hanks]
When the formation neared its target,
the bombardiers entered variables
such as airspeed and wind drift
into their Norden bombsights,
top-secret aiming devices
designed to guide the planes
to the optimal release point
for dropping their payloads.
[Miller] The Norden bombsight,
it's supposed to be so accurate
that you can b*mb from 20,000 feet
and drop your bombs into a pickle barrel.
[Bankston] When we dropped our bombs,
I could see bombs from the planes
ahead of us dropping
but also I could lean out
in the plexiglass nose
and see the bombs
falling directly down from us.
And then, when they exploded,
we could actually see the explosions.
[reporter 8]
The first bombers have been over,
and the target's already partially
obscured by the fires they've started.
Hits were scored on a power plant,
submarines under construction,
and at least one U-boat in the water.
[Wolff] We dropped our bombs,
a couple of fighter att*cks,
nobody got hurt.
And I thought, "Well, this isn't so bad."
[chuckles]
[Hanks] The early missions for the 100th
were mostly coastal targets,
like submarine pens
and industrial sites in France and Norway.
[Spielberg]
The air force was trying to destroy
the w*r machine of n*zi Germany.
The factories that made planes,
that made tanks.
The factories that produced ball bearings.
[reporter 9]
At the British landing fields,
word on the sky battle was out.
Many of the fortresses themselves
were crippled.
A few came in with feathered props
or with knocked-out landing gear.
[Crosby] The B-17 had the reputation
of being trustworthy and safe
and getting people back.
You could lose three engines and get home.
You could lose half
of your vertical stabilizer on the tail
and get home.
[Jeffrey]
It would bring you home on two engines,
and I've seen 'em come in with only one.
[Hanks] Everything was
about to change for the Eighth
with the largest raid
they would undertake up to now.
A double strike against
ball bearing plants in Schweinfurt
and Messerschmitt factories in Regensburg,
massively defended targets
deep inside Germany.
The 100th was assigned
to the Regensburg Force.
[Wolff] When they pulled the curtain
away from the map,
and you saw that red line
going all across Germany,
you know, we thought, "Holy cow."
[Crane] The plan as designed
is really brilliant when you look at it.
So, you've got
Curtis LeMay's Third
Bombardment Division is going to fly
and att*ck the Messerschmitt factories
at Regensburg and then head for Africa.
And ten minutes behind them is gonna be
the First Bombardment Division,
and they're gonna att*ck
the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt
and then go back to England.
So, the Germans are gonna have to
decide which of these groups to hit.
The problem is-- surprise, it's August,
and there's fog in Great Britain.
[LeMay] We went out that morning.
I had took lanterns and flashlights
and lead the airplanes out.
I got assembled about ten minutes late,
but we got off.
[Crane] Curtis LeMay has trained
his bombardment division
to take off in-- in English fog.
The other bombardment division hadn't.
So, all of a sudden, LeMay gets
his guys up and gets them all formed,
and the other bombardment division
hasn't even taken off yet.
So, it ends up, instead of
a ten-minute gap, a two-hour gap.
[siren wailing]
[reporter 10] This captured German film
shows how quickly their 109s
and Focke-Wulf 190s
got into action after a warning.
They had plenty of time to amass
their fighters at a chosen point of att*ck
and to outnumber our escort
at anything from 2-to-1 to 10-to-1.
[Wolff] Flew across the channel.
It was a beautiful day out there.
They hit the Dutch coast,
and all of a sudden
the whole world exploded.
Kept up for the next two hours.
[Roane] The training we'd had previously
gave us the idea
that we could outrun German fighters.
Of course,
we learned that that was not true.
[Wolff] There was flak, there were
fighters, more flak, more fighters.
And I could hear the top turret
chattering away with machine-g*n fire.
[Miller] Cleven's plane took six hits.
They knocked out the hydraulic system.
They knocked out one of the engines.
The cockpit is on fire.
Cleven turns around, and he...
[stammers] ...looks at the radio gunner,
and the radio gunner
doesn't have any legs.
They'd been sheared off.
[Wolff] And I still remember one plane,
fire was coming out
of every opening in that hull.
I dreamed about that one for a long time.
[Spielberg]
Every single member of that flight crew
was fighting so democracy
and freedom could reign.
But when you're in combat,
you know who you're fighting for?
The guy to your left
and the guy to your right.
The guy just ahead of you
and the guy just behind you.
That's the pod you're fighting for.
[g*nf*re]
[Miller] Cleven is sitting in the cockpit,
and his copilot said, in so many words,
"We gotta get out of here.
Let's hit the bail out bell."
Cleven said,
"We-- We gotta get to the target.
We're gonna complete the b*mb run."
[Wolff] Five minutes before we got to
the target, everything stopped.
No fighters, no flak, no nothing.
We succeeded in dropping our bombs.
[Hanks] Perilously low on fuel,
the Regensburg group fought its way
over the Alps down to North Africa,
while the Schweinfurt group flew straight
into the full brunt of the Luftwaffe.
So that means for the Germans,
they get up and ravage LeMay's guys,
then they get to land and have
a schnapps and rearm and refuel too.
And then they get to hit
the Schweinfurt guys.
The whole Luftwaffe jumped on the
Schweinfurt group and just shattered them.
[Hanks] Having made it to North Africa
by day's end,
the crews of the 100th b*mb Group were
battle-worn and weary,
but feeling lucky to be alive.
[Eaker] Any commander
that had to commit forces to combat
when they were outnumbered
and with equipment which was not suitable
and with a minimum of training,
faced very tough decisions.
Uh-- [stammers]
It's like, uh, sentencing men to death.
[Rosenthal] I had landed in England
in the summer of 1943,
and I was sent to the 100th b*mb Group.
[Luckadoo]
Rosie Rosenthal, uh, arrived at the group
as a replacement crew
for crews that were lost.
[Miller] Egan had gotten word that
this kid, Rosie, was a pretty good flyer.
And so, Egan took him out
and ran him through the-- the struts
and said, "I want you in my squadron."
[Luckadoo] I happened to be in the bar.
And I was having my usual Scotch
and felt this tap on my shoulder
and turned around,
and here was the squadron commander.
He said, "Lucky, you better go home
and get some sleep.
You're flying tomorrow."
[Hanks] When the weather over Germany
cleared on October 8th,
the Americans launched a succession
of maximum-effort missions
to take out aircraft manufacturing plants.
The airmen would
eventually call it Black Week.
[reporter 11] On October 8th,
855 planes left Great Britain
for a raid on Bremen and Vegesack.
They were loaded with
two and a half million pounds of bombs.
Two and three-quarter million
rounds of amm*nit*on.
[Luckadoo] As we came off the target,
out of the corner of my eye,
I saw this flight of two Fw 190s
aiming directly for us.
He sh*t down the ship
directly in front of me,
and it blew them out of the formation,
and they exploded.
[Crosby] The group was decimated.
We were sh*t clear out of the formation.
Our number three engine was on fire.
[Luckadoo] Cleven tried to move up
and take over the group
when he was sh*t down.
[Miller] Cleven, he got hit.
There's a lot of chaos in the plane.
The cockpit caught fire. They gotta bail.
[Paridon] Gale Cleven is sh*t down.
This is a huge hole
left in the 100th b*mb Group at this time.
And for all intents and purposes,
everybody thinks he's dead.
That was the first time that I doubted
that I really was gonna get back.
[Rosenthal] My plane, Rosie's Riveters,
was badly damaged,
and a couple of engines were out.
[Luckadoo] After we dropped our bombs,
I brought what was left
of the formation home,
which was only six airplanes.
[Crane] I mean, imagine the morale,
to lose all those crews in one day.
What they would try to do
is clean out the barracks.
As soon as a plane went down,
they'd clean it out.
So, you'd walk in--
you'd walk into an empty barracks.
[Luckadoo] Egan was in London on leave,
and he got word
that Cleven had been sh*t down.
Egan was so incensed that
he immediately canceled his leave
and returned to the base,
and said, "I'm leading the next mission."
[Hanks] The Mnster raid
was a city-busting operation,
a new thing for the Eighth Air Force.
The target was a strategically essential
rail yard in the city center
and also a neighborhood
of workers' housing that abutted it.
In the fight against n*zi tyranny,
human flesh and bone became a target,
an essential part
of the Reich's w*r machine.
[Miller] There was tension in the room.
A lot of the airmen,
for the first time ever,
questioned the mission.
Egan makes a speech.
They were gonna fly this one for Cleven,
and this is a revenge raid.
[Rosenthal] Because we had high losses,
our group was pretty well banged up,
and we could only
put 13 planes in the air.
[Paridon]
When it came to German fighter att*cks,
if your formations were loose,
if you had 13 aircraft as opposed to 18,
the Germans are gonna
att*ck the lesser target.
[Murphy] We were immediately att*cked
by over 200 German fighter aircraft.
Two, uh, Me 109s came in behind us
and k*lled our tail gunner.
I was sprayed with shrapnel flak
from an exploding cannon shell
and knocked to the floor.
It was clear
that the airplane was out of control,
and we were going to go down.
I remember we were about 21-- 22,000 feet.
The ground looked a million miles away,
but I had no choice.
I had to go out, and so I did.
[g*nf*re]
We went down the flight line,
and we kept waiting around.
Finally, one of ours came in.
[Jeffrey] Only one airplane
of the 100th had returned.
Uh, Rosenthal was the man
that was flying that airplane.
So, he had seen, uh, his share of, uh--
of rough times.
[Rosenthal]
We returned to the officers' club.
There was an eerie silence there.
There were a few people
who hadn't flown the mission,
and nobody seemed to approach us.
We were sort of left by ourselves.
It was a very strange feeling.
[Roane] We certainly felt the loss
of the people that had been sh*t down.
I especially l-lost my very best friend
on the Mnster mission.
[Luckadoo] When Bucky Egan and Cleven
were sh*t down,
it was really a tremendous morale factor
because everybody just assumed
they were invincible.
[Hanks] The Mnster mission was
the greatest air battle up to that time.
Not just a raid, but a titanic struggle
between two large
and murderous air armies.
The 100th had arrived in England
four months before Mnster
with 140 flying officers.
After Mnster, only three of them
were still able to fly and fight.
[Rosenthal]
This kind of record got around,
and people became worried about us.
They called us the Bloody Hundredth.
[Crane]
When you're an airman, and you go out,
you have four hours of pure terror.
All of a sudden, you get on your bicycle,
go to the local pub,
drink a beer, go out with a local girl,
go back to base,
sit nice and peaceful.
Then, the next day, you're up,
and you're back into the terror again.
This had the ultimate result,
in some cases, of causing people to cr*ck.
[Hanks] After Black Week,
morale in the Eighth
plummeted to a new low,
and commanders worried about crew revolts.
There were distressing reports
from flight surgeons
and air force psychiatrists
of abnormal behavior among crewmen
as combat insidiously shook the moorings
of airmen's self-control.
[Luckadoo] I have seen instances
where they weren't in control enough
to just walk out of the airplane.
Those were individuals
that were on the verge
of what we called
victims of combat fatigue.
[reporter 12] We have learned that
many of these men with neurotic reactions
can recover quickly
when the battle situation
has been left behind temporarily.
Fundamentally, we must depend
for this recovery
on the patient's own recuperative powers.
But these powers can best be
exercised away from a hospital atmosphere.
[Luckadoo] We would try to get them
out of the wartime environment
for a few days and sent to the rest home.
We called it the Flak House.
Oftentimes, it was effective.
Sometimes it was not.
[Jeffrey] This was a problem
that all commanders had to deal with
because there are some people
whose chemical and mental makeup,
uh, is such that, uh,
they just can't stand this sort of thing.
[Luckadoo] We had to
immediately remove those people
from the crew and from the base
because that sort of attitude
was contagious,
and we couldn't afford to have it affect
the morale of the rest of the people
that were going out every day
and continuing to perform their duties.
[Crane] You can argue not only
has the Allied air forces
don't have any sense of air superiority
over Germany and Europe,
you could argue
they're losing the air w*r.
[Clark] You know, we did not drop into
a pickle barrel all the time.
We would scatter bombs
even on good, clear days,
several miles from the intended target.
[Hansen] They couldn't hit their targets,
and they were much more,
themselves, a target
for German fighter defense.
So the force was being slaughtered.
[reporter 13] Every few cubic feet
of this pile contains a plane,
22,000 hours of American labor.
Every yard of it means
ten American boys dead or captured.
[Murphy] Probably the most dreadful thing
that one could expect was to be sh*t down.
We always knew it was possible.
Being young
and thinking that we were immortal,
we always figured that
they might get everybody else,
but they wouldn't get us.
I-I knew how much
my mother worried about me,
and I knew that she would be getting
a missing-in-action telegram
from the w*r Department,
and she would not know
what happened to me.
[Hanks] Airmen were given parachutes
but not trained how to use them,
and they were given only scant training
in escape and evasion tactics.
Nor were they properly warned
when civilians in bombed-out towns
began to att*ck downed airmen
in increasing numbers.
[Miller] Cleven, he goes down,
and he can see
that farmers are gathering all around.
The next thing he remembers,
a farmer has a pitchfork
a ninth of an inch in his chest
and wants to press down on it.
Some local Luftwaffe police show up.
[Murphy]
I was taken to a German Air Force airfield
that was a collection point
for all of the American flyers
who had been captured that day.
[Wolff] I got interviewed by this guy,
and, uh, he congratulated me...
[chuckles] ...on my promotion.
I had just gotten first lieutenant
about three days before.
That sort of took me by surprise.
And he hands me a 3-by-5 card,
and there's my name and birth date,
my parents' name, and my address.
[Miller] The Germans had spies
in the United States
send them their hometown newspaper.
So, they relax you
to get this sense that
you're having a conversation,
and they know everything about you.
[Hanks] This cagey interrogation technique
was sometimes effective
in persuading unsuspecting airmen
to give up information
they considered inconsequential,
but which master interrogators prized.
[Wolff]
The next morning, they put us in a boxcar.
There were 30 or 40 of us in the boxcar.
None of us knew what was gonna happen.
[Wolff]
I can remember walking through the gate,
and there were big, wooden stakes there,
and there was barbed wire
all over the place,
and there were guard towers
at all the corners.
And there was about a 10- or 12-foot space
between the big fence,
and then there was a smaller fence.
We were told not to
go over the small fence, or we'd be sh*t.
[Murphy] The American POWs who were there,
many of whom, uh,
were members of the 100th b*mb Group
who had been sh*t down
before I was sh*t down.
The minute they saw us come in,
well, they--
Some of them laughed and said,
"Well, we've been expecting you.
You're finally here."
[Hanks] Cleven and Egan arrived at
Stalag Luft III within days of each other.
Cleven was immediately wisecracking
with the injured Egan,
and soon, the two were roommates again
and quickly assumed leadership roles
inside the camp.
[Wolff]
We lived together, cooked together,
washed our clothes together,
showered together.
Showers were once a week,
maybe... [chuckles] ...if you were lucky.
[Paridon]
Life inside the Stalag Luft camps
was very, very regimented.
Everything was done in a m*llitary way
to keep their minds busy,
to keep discipline,
and basically to keep everybody alive.
[Hanks] At a secret meeting
at the Tehran Conference
in late November 1943,
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed to
a second front against n*zi Germany
to be planned and ex*cuted principally by
the Americans and the British.
There was to be
a massive amphibious as*ault,
the greatest in history,
across five beaches in Normandy, France,
code-named "Overlord."
It was scheduled for May 1944,
just six months away.
[Miller] General Eisenhower
has been brought to London.
He said that we can't launch the fleet
until you knock out the Luftwaffe.
That is our mission now.
[Jeffrey] We were aware
that no land invasion can occur
unless air superiority has been achieved.
[Hansen] The ultimate goal
was to sh**t down so many fighters
that the Germans could no longer
put up a fighter defense.
[Doolittle] We had been having
very high losses due to fighter action.
And so, a rush program at home
began to get us more and more fighters.
[Paridon] Late 1943,
a fighter aircraft arrived in England,
and it was the fighter plane that
the Eighth Air Force had been waiting for.
It was the P-51 Mustang.
[reporter 14] The Mustang. The P-51.
The longest-range fighter in the world.
Speed, fast climb, quick dive, tight turn.
[Rosenthal] When P-51s came over,
they had the range to accompany us
to the target and back.
And they also fixed up the 47s
and put wing tanks on them
so that they could accompany us.
[Crosby] When we went to Emden,
and I saw all those gorgeous P-51s,
I thought, maybe for the first time,
"I'm gonna get through."
[Miller] The primary mission
is not to protect the bombers
and get 'em home safely.
It'll be to go after the Luftwaffe
in the air and on the ground.
[g*nf*re]
[reporter 15] Sunday morning 20 February,
we prepared for the heaviest as*ault
in the history of the American
Strategic Air Forces up to that time.
This was the prelude to invasion.
[Miller] They planned a succession of
continuous raids one day after the other.
This is gonna decide the whole w*r.
[reporter 16]
Day after day, month after month,
Mustang, Thunderbolt against
the Me 109s and the Fw 190s.
Our fighters att*ck, att*ck, att*ck.
Our victory column soared
at the rate of 4-to-1.
[Crane] The casualty rate for
German pilots on the western front
between January and May 1944 was 99%.
I mean, they just get butchered.
[Spielberg] It wasn't until
the Mustang really got involved in the w*r
that America and England
gained air superiority over Germany.
[Biddle] If you want to go
to the heart of the enemy
and be sure the Luftwaffe will be
pulled into the sky, you go to Berlin.
[Crosby] When they had the briefing,
and they pulled the curtain back,
and the tape went all the way to Berlin,
first it was just stunned silence
and then just a shout.
[reporter 17]
You can't hear what's going on down there
five miles below you,
but marshaling yards
and chemical tanks, ships and warehouses,
spare engines, and ball bearing factories
are disintegrating in molten chaos.
[Hanks] This would be the American's
first foray into bombing Berlin.
It would be the toughest target
the Eighth ever att*cked,
but it had to be done.
[Bankston]
I can say that if I had been in Germany
and witnessed, everyday, hordes of bombers
coming over and dropping bombs,
it would have had
a very adverse effect on my morale.
It must have had an adverse effect morale
on the civilians and m*llitary alike.
[Murphy] One of the worst things
about being a prisoner of w*r
is that you don't know how long
you're gonna be held c*ptive.
It's not as if you've been given
a fixed sentence.
You're going to be there
until you either escape or it's all over.
[Wolff] I did start a tunnel.
They had an old toilet
that had a tile floor
and I figured, well,
let's see if we can do something here.
And my object was
to have these removable tiles
and we could start digging.
The guards caught that almost immediately.
[Murphy] Some 76 British prisoners
tunneled out of the compound
immediately adjacent to us
through a tunnel that they dug.
It was known as the Great Escape.
All but two were recaptured,
and 50 were ex*cuted by the Germans.
What little decent relations
we had with the Germans
evaporated completely after that.
[Jeffrey] One day I received
a telephone call and they said,
"General LeMay would like
to speak to you."
He said,
"Jeffrey, I need a group commander
at the 95th b*mb Group
and the 100th b*mb Group.
You can take your choice."
The 95th could essentially do no wrong.
They lost the minimum number of airplanes.
Their bombing record was good,
and I figured that I could do more
for the 100th than I could for the 95th.
So, I called him back
and I told him with his-- his permission,
uh, I would accept the 100th b*mb Group.
And I asked him,
"When do you want me to report?"
And he said, "This afternoon."
My first action was to ask General LeMay
if he would take the 100th
off of operations
for two days and he granted that.
And so, over the next two days,
four hours in the morning
and four hours in the afternoon,
we flew every airplane
in the 100th b*mb Group in formation.
[Rosenthal] Tom Jeffrey, he was dynamic,
charismatic and knowledgeable,
not only about the aircraft,
but about combat flying.
[Jeffrey]
I had people in the lead airplane
photographing the formation
so that we could identify
who was flying good and who wasn't.
And then I took an old airplane
and circled around the formation,
back and forth,
and tried to herd 'em into position.
[Clark] The commanding officers
were just blue in the face
about us keeping our formations tight.
You think you're tight
and they say tighten 'em up more.
[Jeffrey] At the end of two days,
the 100th was flying the best formation,
uh, that I have ever seen.
[Rosenthal] It was not until Jeffrey came
did we become a superb group.
I think the best group in the air force.
[Paridon] An Eighth Air Force bomber crew
had a tour of duty of 25 missions.
Once you completed your 25 missions,
you were rotated back home
to the United States.
[Luckadoo] Upon completion,
I was told that I could either remain
and accept command of a squadron
or rotate back to the States.
I concluded that
I had been extremely fortunate
and lucky to have survived
and that I shouldn't push it any further.
So, uh, I elected to return.
[Paridon]
Rosie Rosenthal completes his 25 missions
on March 8th, 1944, on a raid over Berlin.
[Rosenthal] The crew urged me
to buzz the field when we returned.
I was a very conservative pilot
and I said, "I don't think so."
But on the way back,
I said, "What the heck."
And headed right for the tower
and everybody hit the deck there
and I buzzed the field
three or four times and then came in.
And then somebody approached me and said,
"Rosie, did you know
that General Huglin was there?
And he hit the deck and he--
his clothes are all messed up."
And there coming into the debriefing room
was General Huglin.
He came over and grabbed my hand
and he said,
"One hell of a buzz job, Rosie."
[Miller] Everyone knew
that D-Day was on the horizon
and finishing off the Reich
was a big objective for Rosie.
To leave here is to
leave the center of the universe.
[Rosenthal] And that's when
I decided to continue flying,
and ultimately,
I was assigned to be a squadron commander.
[reporter 18] On this day,
650 American flying fortresses
inflicted severe damage
on German defenses along the coast.
[Jeffrey] I had flown over to France
to drop some bombs on some target.
And when I returned,
I was met at the airplane
and told that I was t-- to report to
General LeMay's headquarters that evening.
General LeMay marched in
and announced to us that the Allied Forces
would land on the beaches of Normandy
the next morning.
But he said in order for you
to thoroughly understand
the, uh, importance of this occasion,
that the Eighth Air Force will expend
every airplane that it has
in its inventory to be sure
that these people got ashore.
[Rosenthal]
I remember coming to the briefing
and when they moved the curtain
from the map and there were cheers.
I had never heard
this kind of thing from the crews.
Finally, D-Day had arrived.
[Eisenhower] Soldiers, sailors and airmen
of the Allied Expeditionary Force,
you are about to embark upon
the Great Crusade
toward which we have
striven these many months.
The eyes of the world are upon you.
Your task will not be an easy one.
Your enemy is well trained,
well equipped and battle-hardened.
He will fight savagely.
I have full confidence in your courage,
devotion to duty and skill in battle.
We will accept
nothing less than full victory.
[Rosenthal] As we flew over the channel,
we looked down and saw thousands of ships
in an armada down there.
It was so thrilling one of the crew
started to pray, and we all joined in.
[radio beeping]
[St. John] This is Robert St. John
in the NBC newsroom in New York.
This is a momentous hour in world history.
The men of General Dwight Eisenhower
are leaving their landing barges,
fighting their way up the beaches
into the fortress of n*zi Europe.
They are moving in from the sea
to att*ck the enemy
under a mammoth cloud of fighter planes.
[reporter 18]
The fury from the air went on and on.
Our airmen in tactical support of
the ground forces took no rest that day.
Back from one sortie, they gassed up,
loaded their bombs and amm*nit*on belts
and grimly went out again and again.
[Biddle] There was hardly any
air intervention by the Luftwaffe
when we invaded Normandy.
[Spielberg]
The Air Force really paved the way
for the invasion
across the English Channel.
[Hanks]
Germany now had to fight on two fronts,
against the Anglo-American allies
in the west and the Russians in the east.
In August 1944,
the Red Army discovered Majdanek,
an abandoned n*zi concentration and
extermination camp near Lublin, Poland,
indisputable evidence of h*tler's program
to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
[reporter 19]
Our invasion forces are on the offensive
against n*zi troops who have been
ordered to die rather than retreat.
However, die or retreat they must,
for this att*ck is being made
with all the strength
the Allied Command can throw into battle.
[Couch] The army camp had
these clandestine radios
and we knew just about
everything the BBC knew.
[Wolff]
When the invasion started in June of '44,
we knew that we weren't
gonna be there forever.
[Hanks] Downed airmen
were still streaming into Stalag Luft III.
Among them, a number of Black pilots
including Second Lieutenants,
Alexander Jefferson and Richard Macon,
who were with the renowned
332nd fighter group, the Red Tails.
[Delmont] The Tuskegee pilots painted
a deep red on the tails of their planes.
Even when people didn't know that these
were Black pilots flying the planes
they recognized that they were Red Tails.
[Macon] We didn't have any concern
about running into the enemy
because we knew that
we were better flyers than they were,
and I would "Ready, aim, fire."
[Spielberg] These courageous
Black flyers had been waiting
to contribute to the w*r effort, and
they distinguished themselves brilliantly.
[Moye] Within the Air Force,
and especially among the bomber crews
that are making those long dangerous runs,
say that they appreciated the Red Tails
more than any of the other squadrons
that they flew with in the w*r.
[Hanks] Macon and Jefferson
had been racially segregated
on Air Force bases in America and Italy,
and were shocked to discover
that the barracks
at Stalag Luft III were integrated.
[Jefferson]
There were approximately 150 men
who had come in to this camp,
and we were lined up.
Finally, down the line
came a long, tall Kentucky hillbilly
and he walked back and says,
"By cracky, I think I'll take this boy."
Colonel walked across and said,
"Lieutenant, you go with him."
"Yes, sir."
[Macon] The Germans took me into the room
and showed me where I was going to be,
on the third bed up.
I didn't realize
how badly I had been injured.
I was paralyzed from my waist down.
So, once they saw that I couldn't move,
the Germans tried to tell them
who will give up his bottom bunk
for this man.
Nobody moved.
And finally, the guy from Texas said,
"He can have my bunk, I'll go up there."
He and I became the best of friends.
[Delmont] These men had to come together
to survive the prisoner camp.
They let whatever racial attitudes,
racial animosities go or at least lessen
because they had to work together
to keep up each other's spirits
to survive that experience.
[Hanks] One of the last Air Force
operations was to starve the Reich of fuel
by bombing German synthetic oil plants.
The Allies also would need to hit
transportation and storage facilities
for the coal
that powered jet production plants.
This air blockade
would cr*pple the Reich's w*r machine
and leave the German army
without adequate air cover
in the culminating battles of the w*r.
[Clark] We were in the officers' club
until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.
Suddenly we heard the announcement:
"Be prepared
for a mission in the morning."
We put up 2,000 heavy bombers.
All you could see was
four-engined bombers to the horizon.
[Miller]
To knock out one plant in World w*r II,
a place called Leuna near Merseburg,
it took 6,000 bombers flying
about 40 missions to knock that plant out.
[Rosenthal] Our group
led one of the biggest raids on Berlin.
It was a very beautiful day.
The sun was shining, not a cloud in sight.
As we approached the target,
the plane was hit,
but we continued and bombed the target,
knowing that we couldn't
return to our base.
There was smoke and fire in the plane,
and I knew I had to get out.
And when I got out,
I thought I was in heaven.
And suddenly,
I hit the ground and I looked up,
and I saw three soldiers
coming at me with g*ns.
One of the soldiers raised his g*n
and was about to strike me,
and I noticed that he had,
on his hat, the Red Army symbol.
And I yelled, Amerikanski, Roosevelt,
Stalin, Churchill, Pepsi-Cola,
Coca-Cola, uh, Lucky Strike.
[Hanks] The Berlin raid
was Rosie's 52nd and final mission.
The most raids
flown by a pilot in the 100th.
After recuperating in a Russian hospital,
Rosie made his way back to Thorpe Abbotts,
where he had flown his first mission
a year and a half earlier.
[Couch]
The Russians were knocking on the door.
We could hear a*tillery
and other sounds of combat
in the distance.
[Walton] h*tler debated back and forth:
should we march the prisoners
out of the camp or k*ll them?
That was a real possibility.
[Murphy] And suddenly, one night,
our American senior officer
was told by the Germans
that we were going to be
evacuated immediately,
and we would be leaving the camp
within an hour to march out on foot.
They just said,
we're moving you for your safety.
That was what they said,
but we all knew better.
[Miller] The airmen had no idea
where they're going.
They feared h*tler
was going to take American airmen
and use them as human shields.
And it's the worst European winter
in 100 years.
[Murphy] It was bitterly cold.
The snow was about knee-deep,
and they walked us all that night
until late the next afternoon
with just brief stops.
[Jefferson]
At Spremberg, they put us on a train.
We were locked inside of these boxcars.
They jammed in 60 to 70 men.
Didn't have room enough to sit down.
It was hell.
[Wolff] That one,
we were packed in tighter than heck.
Anybody falling down would get stomped on.
[Walton] When the train pulled in,
men were banging on the door
to get out of the cars.
The guards finally opened the doors.
It's as bad as-as you can imagine.
[Wolff] It was a camp
that apparently had been designed
to hold 8,000 or 10,000 people max.
There was over 100,000 there.
Camp Hell would be a good word for it.
[Miller] There were no barracks,
people camped outside.
The conditions were horrible.
No one knew what was gonna happen to them.
[Macon] One day,
we were walking around in the camp.
Somebody says,
"There's a t*nk. There's a Sherman t*nk."
And then we looked and, surely enough,
there was a Sherman t*nk on the horizon.
[Jefferson]
Patton's Third Army came through.
I saw Patton on-- on a t*nk when he came
through the main gate of--of Stalag VII-A.
We'd been liberated.
[chuckles]
The men went to the flagpole
and rung down the swastika
while they opened up Old Glory
and raised it, and we came to attention.
We weren't in uniforms.
Tattered clothes and all that stuff.
And I guess that was the greatest salute
I ever gave. [chuckles]
[Murphy] It was very emotional.
We were finally going to be freed
after all those months and years
of having been held as POWs.
In many ways, it was hard to believe that
we were finally gonna be able to go home.
[reporter 20] This is London Calling.
Here is a news flash.
The German radio has just announced
that h*tler is dead.
[Hanks] On May 1st, 1945, the day
the world learned of h*tler's su1c1de,
the 100th flew one final mission,
part of what was called
Operation Chowhound.
The crews would be dropping,
by parachute, food, not bombs.
Relief for nearly five million
starving people in the Netherlands,
still occupied by die-hard Nazis.
As the bombers reached
the outskirts of Amsterdam,
they passed over fields
of brilliantly colored tulips.
In one of them, the heads of the flowers
had been clipped to say,
"Many thanks, Yanks."
[cheering, whistling]
[Hanks] The w*r in Europe was over.
The crews of the 100th
packed up their duffels,
and the local folk
from the villages around Thorpe Abbotts,
dressed in their Sunday finest,
gathered to see them off
for their long journey home.
[cheering]
[Murphy] When I got to Atlanta,
I went to the public telephone
and called my mother
and told 'em I was home.
Course, she immediately broke down,
and they-they ca-- they came out--
They drove out to Fort McPherson,
and they picked me up and I got home.
[sniffles]
[Wolff] We got back to California.
My dad and mother were there.
There was a big reunion, of course,
and I was halfway to the moon.
And then I saw my wife-to-be, Barbara.
And three weeks later, we were married.
[Hanks] The men of the Bloody Hundredth
were finally home,
reunited with their families
and their wives
and their sweethearts.
Some for the first time
since leaving for w*r.
[Rosenthal] When I l-left the service,
I was exhausted.
I'd been through these trying experiences,
and I wanted to put that behind me
and I wanted to resume civilian life.
I went back to work
at the same firm that I had been with,
and I was not ready, really,
to go back to work.
And finally,
after being there for six months,
I heard about an opportunity
to go to Nuremberg as a prosecutor.
On the ship over there,
I met this beautiful woman
who was also a lawyer
and was going over as a prosecutor.
And within 10 days,
we were engaged to marry,
and we were married over in Nuremberg.
I saw these defendants there
who were powerless now,
sitting abjectly
and being tried and being convicted.
And when I saw that,
that, in fact, ended the w*r for me.
[Hanks] World w*r II was the most
devastating event in human history.
More costly in lives
than any w*r ever fought.
In it, the Eighth Air Force
suffered the highest casualty rate
of any of the American Armed Forces.
[Luckadoo] Now that I've survived it
and can look back on it
for all these intervening years,
it was a life changer for me.
[Crosby] If, in this time,
there's a feeling of excitement
and romance and mythology, it's there.
My friends that I made then
saved my life any number of times.
They were the friends of all friends.
[Rosenthal] The people we served with,
they were dedicated,
they sacrificed, they had great courage.
We shared heartbreak and hilarity.
We saw our comrades go down
and being k*lled,
being wounded, become prisoners of w*r.
And we developed a tremendous respect
for each other and we shared a victory.
And I think this was
the experience of all of our people.
Miraculously, people came together.
You have to give all the credit
to the men and the women
that sacrificed their lives and basically
saved the world from fascism.
[Murphy] The freedoms that we enjoy
did not come about by accident.
They were bought and paid for
by my generation
and the generations that preceded us.
And for that reason,
I think the World w*r II generation
deserves to be remembered.
Bloody Hundredth, The (2024)
Moderator: Maskath3