The History Channel, Original Podcast.
In 1942 and in 1943, hundreds of thousands of Americans descend on the east of England.
“To live fight and maybe die in the joint effort to defeat Nazi Germany from the air.”
Combat to 25,000 feet and 300 miles per hour has never been attempted before.
The physical, mental, and emotional challenges will be unique. Victory in World War II will be largely determined by who controls the skies. The German Luftwaffe, or the Allied Air Forces. This is World War II with Tom Hanks, episode 12, battle for the skies. 1942, the Third Reich, is building elaborate coast of the fences in Europe.
As they continue to battle the Soviets in the east, the Germans know that it's only a matter of time before Britain and America attack from the west.
“From the English Channel to the Plains of Russia, Germany controls most of Europe.”
Hitler has turned Europe into an apparently impregnable fortress. But as people said at the time, yes, but he forgot to put a roof over it. And the Allied bombers are going to take advantage of that.
In the First World War, both sides bombed each other to little effect.
But his aviation evolves. A new concept of warfare develops in the 1920s and 30s. Strategic bombing. Its proponents are a group of officers from the U.S. Air Corps Tactical School. They come to be known as the Bomber Barons. The theories will use this novel weapon in a novel way, not to attack the enemy's armies, to attack the enemy's homeland. His factories, his infrastructure, destroying his economy,
and thus making it impossible for the enemy to make war. These air power advocates say this is a better way to fight war. No need for a horrible trench deadlock, the World War I. That's the old way. The new way is strategic bombing. East India is the England of little churches, hedges, fields,
medieval buildings, and its turned into one gigantic aircraft carrier. In the spring of 1942, the U.S. 8th Air Force begins construction on dozens of air bases, transforming a quiet corner of East England into one of the most vital fronts of the entire second world war. It's flat, it's perfect for airfields. So you get this massive, massive influx of American bombers,
carrying the most destructive weapons ever produced, and just strikingly, young American Ammon. They all and grown up dreaming of flying above the clouds at over 300 miles per hour,
something their parents and grandparents could never imagine. And all the sudden,
here's this opportunity. The English used to complain, the over-sex, the overpaid, and the over here. The Royal Air Force has been striking the German homeland for two years.
“Prime Minister Winston Churchill understands how important such raids are for British morale.”
But the RAF pays a grievous cost. In these early months, the war, the war raids with hardly any aircraft coming back. And the most important lesson that took away from it is that daytime bombing was very hazardous thing to undertake. Arthur Harris is the man put in charge of Britain's bomber command. And it's his idea to switch to night bombing, to use night as a cloak, to protect these bomber forces, so they can drop their bombs,
and they have a better chance to make it home. So what they're doing is merely area bombing. They're flying over German cities at night
Letting loose their bomb loads.
There's a lot of retribution in this British torture. The blitz had smashed British cities
“and factories in the winter of 1941. And the blitz planned to smash German societies so badly”
that it knocks them out of the war. They said the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. Meeting in Casa Blanca. President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and their staffs strategize how to continue the Allied assault on the third Reich. One of the major outcomes of the Casa Blanca Conference is the Allies declared unconditional surrender as their war aim. But something else happens at Casa Blanca as well.
An argument on air strategy between the British and Americans. The US Army Air Force, particularly its commander, General Henry Hap Arnold, insists that daylight
precision bombing on critical wartime industries will be more effective.
And as so often in World War II, American expectations come up against British experience. Churchill is going to go to FDR and tell him that look, your daylight precision stuff. It's not going
“to work. We tried it, it didn't work. That's why we are doing bombing operations at night,”
and that is the way forward. We'll help Arnold get to win to this. Arnold's a pioneer in aviation taught by the Wright Brothers out of fly and he is a believer in strategic air power. And when the British say, "Hey, you've actually bombed at night just like we do," and he says, "No, no, air power could be used in a better way." The American plan rests on a cutting-edge device, the Norden bomb site.
The Norden bomb site is an analog computer. You punch in various data, wind speed, altitude, wind direction, air pressure, and it correlates all those things together and tells you exactly when to drop the bomb. According to the advertising slogans, it can drop a bomb in a pickle barrel at 18,000 feet. Americans claim the Norden bomb site, which requires daylight and clear weather, promises greater precision, and therefore fewer civilian casualties.
So Henry Arnold and his advisors come up with this plan, the combined bomber offensive, which means the British bombing at night in the American bombing precision targets during the day. The Americans are going to sell it as this round-ma-clock bombing, and this utterly appeals
to Churchill with the idea that his adversary will never catch a break.
The attacking and enemy from 25,000 feet presents unique challenges. Temperatures dip below minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit. If an airman supply of oxygen is cut off for more than 60 seconds, he will die. You look out the window as a crewman on a B-17 and you begin to see black puffs. And they might not look too dangerous until one actually makes contact.
The most infamous German weapon of them all was the Flaq 88 millimeter gun. It's a capable of sending 29-pound explosive projectiles to altitude approaching 30,000 feet. The dilemma with Flaq is you can't maneuver to avoid it. So the best you can do is sit tight and grit your teeth. Once the Flaq stops, there's silence. It's a deathly silence because they know what's coming.
German fighter pilots are seasoned combat veterans. Many of them have hundreds of kills because they've been gaging this horse in 1939.
“The best way to kill a German fighter is to send allied fighters to shoot them down.”
But when the United States starts to bomb Germany proper, their fighters don't have the range to be able to escort bombers all the way to a target. So the B-17 is bristling with machine guns around the fuselage of the aircraft. They really is a flying fortress.
Bomber crews were these interdependent societies in which every person was
dependent upon the person sitting next to them and the person sitting behind them.
A few miles from the actual target, the bomber will start what's called the bomb run.
“It's all done visually. You have to hold altitude, hold airspeed,”
and hold headings so the bomber air can dial in on the northern bombsite. Because if you don't hit the target, you've got to come back again. War sometimes breaks down to individual moments of terror.
You're watching other planes being literally blown out of the sky.
And you have to drop the bombs with precision, and then make it out again on the way home. In combat conditions, the accuracy of the northern bombsite is not as precise as the air force predicted. The casualties are greater than they feared. These missions would come back with 10-20% losses.
“Of course, the pilots are highly trained, highly technical people that are very difficult to replace.”
No one in history has ever tried strategic bombing on this scale before. As generals and strategists and air marshals are working out the future of air war, these managini picks. Mission by mission, the 8th Air Force slowly develops the methods needed to damage their intended targets. But it'll Hitler's attention remains fixed on his battle with the Soviets.
He had seen the German losses back in 1940 when the Luftwaffe was attacking England. And to him, it looked like strategic air power doesn't win wars, ground forces win wars. So Hitler's viewpoint about an air force is that it exists to support the ground troops. With the loss at Stolengrad, including the capture of his entire 6th Army, Hitler is focused on the eastern front. But the Allied raids do alarm Luftwaffe air marshal, Herman Gehring.
Gehring is hearing from his local and regional Luftwaffe commanders that they really need more fighter aircraft. But in a sense, Gehring strapped, if he detaches air power from the eastern front,
a situation that is already critical is soon going to turn mortal.
The Germans now are going to streamline procedures. And it thinks more efficient. They start producing more aircraft, more armaments. In the middle of the combined bomber offensive. So from 1943 on, there is an exponential increase in German industrial output. With German fighter production on the upswing, the Allied governments becoming increasingly concerned
and they're getting a little tired of hearing their airmen say we can bring Germany to its knees when they don't see any evidence that that's true. In May, Churchill and Roosevelt meet to finalize plans in the Mediterranean. They also commit to a cross-channel invasion of France. Since America came into the war, they've had a strategy to land a gigantic force somewhere in northwestern
France and then driving straight into the heart of Germany. Code-named Operation Overlord, the attack is scheduled for spring of the next year.
“Achieving air supremacy over occupied Europe is crucial to the success of the invasion.”
At this point, everybody recognizes amphibious operations can't happen unless you control the seas and have control of the air. So the top commander is all agree that the number one priority is destroying the Luftwaffe and that means the bomber force is given the job of smashing the infrastructure of the Luftwaffe on the ground. So when the Allies land on D-Day and in the ground fighting at follows, they'll be no German aircraft interfering.
The RAF at the 8th Air Force joined efforts for what they term "blitz week" attacks on various
Cities across Germany.
submarine pins, and manufacturing. It's also home to over a million people.
“Hamburg is a real center of aircraft production. So for the Americans, there's lots of”
specific military industrial targets they can attack. But the Brits look at the types of housing there, and they think they're very vulnerable to fire. So they're going to burn neighborhoods. They're going to de-house German people. And that means workers are going to be killed. Factories will grind to a halt, supply chains will break down. It's codenamed Operation Gamora, after the Old Testament city that was destroyed by fire from above.
This is going to be eight days and seven nights of pounding the city of Hamburg.
It's very carefully planned. First, they're high explosives to blow out windows, to blow out
roofs, to knock down buildings, and they'll drop in centuries smaller bombs that just burn
“like firecrackers. And with these roof tiles gone, the wooden structure of the roofs exposed,”
and these little incendiaries will land in those roofs and just set fires. The British Wapri Venge on Hamburg for the Blitz. The Americans have been seeing the strategic bombing song for years. And now they can show the destructive nature of the combined bomber offensive to wipe a city off the map. History that doesn't suck is a legit, hard-hitting American history podcast
told through entertaining stories. As we approach America's 250th anniversary, now might be the time to go back and learn how we got here. With more than 200 episodes, you can binge your way, decade by decade,
“defining event to define an event from the founding into the 20th century.”
Join me, Professor Greg Jackson, for History that doesn't suck, an Odyssey podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the summer of 1943, Allied Air Force's launch Blitz Week, the largest series of raids on Germany to date. The British and American Air Force's have supposedly been working together, the British bombing by night, the US by day, but they haven't been bombing the same target
cities. That changes in the summer of 1943. The Allies' first joint target is the city of Hamburg. On the 9th of July, 24th of the raids begin. They are AF drops in secondary bombs. But in the following days, American B-17s are unable to hit their targets. The Americans intended to bomb aircraft factors, but the use of incendiaries created so much smoke that the Norden bomb sites were essentially blinded.
They can't actually see their targets. So they're almost reduced to doing area bombing not unlike the British. On July 27th, a heat wave since temperatures are sore, as the RAF returns for a fourth night of strikes. It's very hot, it's very dry, and the meteorological conditions are ripe for firestorm. This time the fires were in so hot, the oxygen that these fires demand causes windstorm. Winds are over 150 miles an hour. The firestorm works, a little bit like a
blast furnace. It's a local-like weather system that will see that fire spread at the speed of a galloping horse. A gigantic updraft results that robes people cowering in their shelters of oxygen and leads to death by espiciation. Temperatures go up to a thousand degrees Celsius. It's the most devastating firestorm that's ever been created. The stories are of people trying to run out of shelters with children near them burning with their hands and feet stuck in
melting asphalt, with the buildings falling down on top of them. The city of Hamburg. It's devastating. Operation Gamora kills over 40,000 civilians. Almost two-thirds of the city's houses are burned
to the ground, leaving a million residents homeless.
Churchill is worried about the human cost of what they're doing.
history will look at it. There's a line from Churchill supposedly where he looks at some of the
“movies of Hamburg and goes, "Are we beasts?" The striking thing about air power is it”
makes all of us combatants. It's not just about the battlefield. The battlefield is actually civilian population. The destruction stuns Nazi high command. One of Hitler's ministers tells him that Hamburg put the fear of God in me. But Hitler refuses to visit the city, or receive a delegation of civilians who would save lives during the fire. Hamburg is a shock to the entire German war effort.
Carrying his told Hitler repeatedly that he had this bomber problem under control,
and now here lies the second largest city in Germany in ashes.
Accounts of the bombing of Hamburg spread throughout Germany. Hitler begins to transfer German fighter planes from the eastern front and the Mediterranean to the fatherland. In addition, the Germans ring their major cities with these gigantic monumental flag towers. 150 feet tall, 11 foot thick concrete walls, bristling with guns. Not only are they highly effective against incoming bombers. Their guns barking the sound and fury remind the people
that Hitler is looking out for them. Back in Britain, there was big disagreement at the time with how the raid on Hamburg goes. From Harris' point of view, this is a war-winning strategy. If you hit people hard enough, you can cause a breakdown of their will to fight. But for Arnold, Hamburg was not a success. It proved the inefficiency of area bombing. He wants to strike precise targets, the factories that are keeping the Luftwaffe in the air.
Henry Arnold thinks strategic bombing can work. We just need to do it harder. The combined American British raid on Hamburg levels a city. That is little to destroy the Luftwaffe before the invasion of Europe. By August of 1943, the 8th Air Force is receiving enough planes in personnel to launch the large formations required to decimate German aircraft production.
Bomber Baron Theory is about to be put into practice. What is keeping the Luftwaffe in the air
“are the factories behind it. That's what Arnold wants to strike. And he thinks the way to do that”
is to double down our daylight precision bombing. Or planes, more raids, more attacks on the same target until the Germans break. Arnold now demands maximum effort from the 8th Air Force. Normally, airplanes that are being worked on are repaired or air crew that are resting, so that every now and then they get a day off. But now when you go maximum effort, it means you put everything in the air every time.
Previously, around 90 B-17s would fly each mission. But that number will soon double. And triple. The Americans are obsessed with this view of the German economy as a series of interconnected pubs and spokes. So if they hit the right domino, they'll all come down. These are called bottleneck industries. Industries where just a few plants and locations control
all the production. bombing bottleneck targets seems to be a more efficient use of your Air Force.
“One big raid, one factory destroyed a crucial sector of the German Warri economy crippled.”
Probably the most consequential bottleneck industry with regards to the Luftwaffe. There's ball bearings. Anything that moves needs a ball bearing, anything that turns needs a ball bearing, including German aircraft engines, propellers turning, landing wheels, and also all the machines and machinery that build those products. So it's a two-fer.
On August 17th, one year to the day from their first attack on occupied Europe.
The 8th Air Force launches a dual ray. A first strike on Reagan's Burgers meant to draw
Off German fighters.
Germany's largest ball bearing factory, and fine-for. Three weeks later, the 8th strikes another
“plant and stood guard. In these raids alone, the 8th loses nearly a hundred planes,”
and a thousand crew killed or captured. Ball bearing production is interrupted, but only temporarily.
The allies are always surprised at how rapidly the Germans rebuild their cities and factories.
But they do so, with this almost inexhaustible supply of slave labor. Prisoners of War in the hundreds of thousands. They're barely fed. When one dies, they can be simply discarded and another one put in their place. Forced laborers from occupied countries are ordered by the Nazis to reconstruct German factories. They also disperse the German aircraft industry so that it can't be taken out in any one strike
“because it's not all in one place. And they put it underground.”
They use old salt mines. They use old quarries. Now you can't hit it. Now you can't bomb it. There is nothing you can do.
Because you can't bomb a facility when it's underground. This ultimately means
German aircraft production will continue to increase. By the fall of 1943, the 8th Air Force's bombing targets deep inside the Reich and returning to ones they've already hit. In early October, they fly a series of maximum effort raids, including a second strike on the planted fine-ford. All in a single week. There is a limit to how much the human psyche can take and on many occasions,
bomber crews reach that limit.
“You're five miles up and you're braving death every second.”
Fighters, black, fighters, black.
And a adrenaline rush overloading your nervous system. And then you land. And it's quiet. You're back at a base in East Anglia. You have a hot meal. You sleep in a comfortable bed. And then maybe you do it again tomorrow. More fighters. More flack. You'd think you were going to die. 10 times in the course of this bomb raid.
And that night, you'd be drinking Scotch with a couple of friends at the commissary. It was almost impossible to reconcile. The longer you did it, you would become more and more aware of how vulnerable you were. By the end of the month, the eighth Air Force has endured horrific losses. The men call it black October.
If you're an American airman, you have a 20% chance of being killed on any mission you undertake. One in five. That is for bidding math. Adding to that, they don't appear to be having an appreciable impact on the German war effort. Leading to an recipient collapse of Airman Morrell. They start to see the loss as a round of a go. We're just going to fly until we're dead.
The series of American raids in Black October shows the cost of daytime precision bombing. The lost raids, the limitations of the northern bomb site, the weather, all these things play in a factor and how ineffective the bombing campaign is in 1943. It could easily say that the Luftwaffe still owned the skies over Germany. In the late fall, bad weather forces the eighth Air Force to suspend missions,
giving ground crews the winter to patch battered planes. But the RAF launches is a largest campaign yet. A sustained assault on Berlin. These are going to be massive raids, 16 of them in the heart of Germany. The British goal over Berlin is to destroy German Morrell.
That's the way to be Germany, not to destroy individual factories.
Harris thinks these Berlin raids will cost 4 to 500 bombers, but they'll cost...
The RAF winter raids to Berlin push the limit and stamina of British air crews,
with modest results.
“Harris is pressently accurate, they lose 400 to 500 aircraft and almost 5,000 airmen.”
The Berlin bombing campaign is an epic effort, but unfortunately an epic failure. Both air forces are finding their plans are not corresponding with reality. They're having almost no impact on the Luftwaffe at all. They're simply getting more of their plane shot down and more of their crewmen killed or captured.
After months of heavy losses, the eighth Air Force is at a crossroads.
Arnold realizes the bombers can't do it alone. If he wants these bombers to make a difference in this war, he's got to send fighters to the target with them.
“The Allied Air Force has the P38 Lightning and the P47 Thunderbolt.”
To absolutely excellent fighter aircraft, capable of dogfighting just about as well as anything else in the sky. They only had one limitation and that was rage. At the time, air-notical engineers believe having an aircraft that could fly almost a thousand miles into Germany and back with enough firepower, enough maneuverability,
enough engine power, is an engineering impossibility. But a new fighter is already being produced by the United States for the British. The P51 must hang. And the Brits test fly it and they go, "Thanks, it's okay." Below 15,000 feet, it's fine. But we're looking for something higher altitude.
Then we get the idea of putting a Rolls Royce Merlin engine in this thing. So you have a British-made engine and American Airframe made it together and it's gangbusters. That's when it turns into this magical machine. It's fast, it flies high. It's so efficient that it can escort a bomber all the way to downtown Berlin and back. It's the equivalent or better than anything the German has.
The Americans and British are allies, but in many ways they've been working at cross purposes, especially in the Air Campaign. But now the US and British War efforts come together to produce an aircraft that is greater than the sum of its parts. It's the embodiment of the angle American Coalition in World War II. The P51 is a game changer, but it requires mind-une entire re-thing of American aerial doctrine.
“Allied planners realized that if they threaten targets through essential to the German War”
efforts and they force the Germans to send up fighters to protect those targets, the P51s compounds and shoot them down. The Allies have started out thinking, B17s will destroy the German Air Force on the ground. By early 1944, they realized that P51 is going to destroy the German Air Force in the air.
Knowing the command of the air is crucial to the upcoming cross-channel invasion,
Allied Air Force's launch operation argument, a five-day series of bombing raids over major German cities. This is the critical hour for the combined bomber offensive. Because the Allies now know that they're approaching the time for the D-day landings, they need to draw up the Luftwaffe so that the P51 can destroy it in the skies.
The plan is to send thousands of bombers knowing that the Luftwaffe will have no choice,
To send everything it has up in the skies to defend the homeland.
So in a way, the bombers are the bait.
“Fitted with extra fuel tanks, the P51 Mustangs are capable of penetrating deep into Germany.”
Their primary mission has been protecting the bombers. Now, they're ordered to actively pursue German fighters, even if it leaves the formations vulnerable. The mission of the American fighters is to be aggressive and go after the Luftwaffe in the air to kill them. In any way, shape or form.
Operation argument, known as Big Week, begins a battle of the Trisha between the Allied air forces and the Luftwaffe. The success of the upcoming invasion hangs in the balance.
“The United States is going to lose about a quarter of the eighth air force in that fight.”
The Germans are going to lose about a third of their fighter force.
In 18% of their fighter pilots, this is something the Allies can sustain, the Germans cannot. From the US perspective, this is a war economy that is turning out hundreds and hundreds of heavy bombers every day of the year. Young men are signing up in droves, and so the cold-blooded calculation is that no matter how heavy US losses are, America can replace its planes and pilots.
In the month after Big Week, American fighters down more German planes over Europe,
“than in the previous two years. The Luftwaffe is being destroyed in the air and on the ground.”
It's really this symbiosis. Mustangs are killing German fighters,
which means the bombers can now be more accurate, which means they're doing a better job of attacking the German aircraft industry. It's a cycle that's destroying the Luftwaffe. By June 1944, there are few experienced Luftwaffe pilots left alive. The Baton D Day comes to allies own there. It's why you see very few Luftwaffe fighters over the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Control of the air is decisively established. The Luftwaffe will be incapable of opposing the upcoming Allied invasion. But again, the cost is high. Fewer than a quarter of British and American bomber crews survive a campaign. The tragedy of the air warriors that the bomber crews were essentially testing out an unproven theory. Anytime you're talking about high technology and cutting-edge weaponry,
there is an element of experimentation involved, and some of the ways, unfortunately, that you learn in war is by dying. Sometimes in wartime, there's no other way to learn. When both the British and American air forces work together, bombers and fighters together, they prove to be the most effective aerial instrument of war in history. The battle in the air over Europe isn't won by B-17's or P-51's. It's won by the men who fight in those planes and the men and women who
support them on the ground. What they accomplish, the destruction of the German Luftwaffe, will make possible the greatest land and sea invasion in history. World War II with Tom Hanks has produced by A&E-Factual Studios, Nutopia Limited, Play-Tone Productions, and Backpocket Studios in association with motion entertainment for the history channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd,
additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the history channel, our executive producers are Eli Lera and Live Fidler. For Play-Tone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getsman. For Backpocket Studios, our executive producer is Ben Dixing.
