Historically High - World War 2: Allied Strategic Bombing

Episode Date: January 22, 2025

A major if not the most important key to victory in World War 2 Europe was the Allied Bombing Campaign against Nazi Germany. World War 2 wasn't just a collections of campaigns fought in different theaters but also campaigns specific to the land, sea, and air. After WW1 introduced the concept of air power, the end of the conflict saw every country invest into this new frontier of war to varying degrees. Pre-WW2 saw most major powers developing bomber aircraft to extend their projection of power and hit the enemy far behind their lines, and fighter aircraft to shoot down the bombers. WW2 in Europe saw the first occurrences of terror and strategic bombing. Hundreds of planes dropping thousands of tons of explosive on cities in a single day attempting to destroy enemy resources and moral. To be a bomber pilot or crew you had to have smarts, skills, and frankly balls because you had a 50% chance of being killed when this was said and done. These men (some in their teens) in their Boeing Flying Fortresses and Avro Lancasters kept the allies in the war until it could be won on the ground. Almost a full 5 years before the allies set foot in France, the bomber aircrews of the British Bomber Command and soon after the U.S. Air Force flew missions over France and Germany to keep the pressure on the Nazis and prevent them from solidifying their hold. Flying miles above occupied Europe without fighters to protect them, the bomber crews of the allies were constantly under attack by enemy explosive shells (Flak) from the ground or the deadly Germany fighters strafing them at double their speed. Okay I'm rambling, sorry I love this shit and I hope you will too, hit play already.Prof Chris.Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everybody. Welcome back. This week, we have a learning episode taught by yours truly. And surprise, surprise, you probably already saw by the title, but we're talking about the strategic bombing campaign of the Allies in World War II in Europe specifically. That was probably too much for the title, so I'll simplify it. But we're getting it's specific, but it's broad. With me, as always, I couldn't do this without him. the guy to my left, Professor Adam over there, intently looking into something to a wet his whistle, apparently.

Again, this is one of those things that I think there's a huge, a very dramatic juxtaposition between what most of the world learns in regards to this type of history and what we've learned in the United States. Because before looking into this, comparing that to what we kind of gloss over in history class, people, know the World War II, that bombings took place in World War II, but I don't know if they understand kind of the vastness and how much of an impact it had on not only the war, but on just the civilian population that was kind of the real victims of it. Well, it's hard to understand just how many bombs were dropped. We have never seen that level of destruction here. And mean, you go back and forth on this, and not back and forth in that we're arguing. We just try to point out facts to each other. But we, and I'm going to get into the details of it, but there were

cities that were, and when I say leveled, I literally mean leveled, left uninhabitable. We've never seen that type of destruction. I don't mean little villages or towns, like cities with hundreds of thousands of people that live in here. If during World War II, we had Chicago taken out or New York bombed like Berlin was, it would really, really change our outlook on how maybe as a country review war. We're always playing away games when it comes to war. And when you are over in Europe, and this stays with you because you see the rebuilding that has to take place over the next few

decades, that's going to really give you a different outlook on what actually occurred during the war period and these bombings happening. It's one thing to hear about the results of a bombing raid from 6,000 miles away. Yeah. It's another thing to look at your window and just see city blocks leveled. Or to hear the planes overhead and know what's going to happen. Well, without making you guys wait any longer, remember, rate, review, subscribe. Love the comments coming through Spotify.

Guys, listen to us wherever you find your podcast. And without any further delay, let's get it. Airborne. All right. So the concept of just bombing in general is kind of stems out of World War I when the advent of using airplanes and warfare first came about. And in World War I, it was something as simple as because the planes were very simple and they couldn't carry a lot of weight. It would literally be a guy in the back or the pilot sitting with a box of grenades and literally just dropping them out the side of his plane as he flew over a battlefield. After World War one ends, people see that there's going to be a third dimension added to warfare going forward,

and it's going to be essentially you already have land and sea that have been established. Now there's going to be an air war that's going to take place in any future conflicts. So a lot of countries kind of kick into gear developing these new weapons that they're going to be able to utilize when, because we're people, eventually someone fucks off and we have to go fighting. Was there a point in time in the development of the aircraft? when it became less about making it more efficient and faster in the skies and more capable of dropping bombs? Like where was the balance? Yeah, was there like a shift?

Like we've gotten these airplanes to their max efficiency in the air. Now we need to start being able to utilize them by loading them with bombs and dropping them. I think it was more the other way around is how do we get these bombs to that place in the most efficient way? And that answer was provided by the aircraft. And it was a constant development because things they couldn't foresee would come up, different distances they would have to be flying. And so already after World War I, you get this development of the military industrial complex where you have all of these companies like Boeing and Curtis and all these other ones vying for government contracts because this is the direction the government is going to be going. They're going to be developing this Air Force. So other countries are kind of viewing the same thing.

Over in Europe, you have Hitler looking into this. And the first instance of the actual bombings occurring during World War II was on September 1st in 1939, begun by the Nazis with the invasion of Poland. Did you know that Lockheed was founded in 1926? Yeah, a lot of these things have been around forever, man. So they've been building military planes for that long. Yep. Boeing was around before that because Boeing designed one of the most famous planes of the war. Boeing bomber?

The B-17 Flying Fortress. Wow. I didn't realize that it was that long. But yeah, I mean, I guess there's probably new companies that come on board, but you're always going to stick with the ones that have been doing it the longest, right? I looked at it this way, too. So if Boeing is essentially created to fulfill government contracts with the aircraft they're going to need, when the war is over and they're not building the war aircraft anymore, they still have all of that knowledge.

That's when you convert over into civilian air travel. And that's why you're successful because you've built up all of that trial and error for these engines and airframes and aerodynamics over the course of a war. Instead of carrying bonds, you're carrying luggage. Exactly. Huh. So this is something nobody had ever seen. seen before on this scale. So during the invasion of Poland, Hitler sends in the Luftwaffe, you know, this is kind of the buildup to the Blitz that's going to, or the Blitzkrieg that's going to

actually overrun France. This is, you know, beta testing for it. They're launching huge air strikes against these civilian population cities, and then they're sending that ahead of the soldiers with tanks and armor. And by the time they get to these places, they bomb them so much, the Poland is just like, well, fuck it. No, we surrender. No one has ever seen that kind of destruction done so quickly because outside of like the military planes weren't a thing like there was a point in time when you didn't look up in the sky and see the contrails from a jet and that was just like you didn't bat an eyelash there was some places where if you saw a plane overhead you would look up and be like the fuck is that i've only ever heard of this is happening

yeah exactly and so that kind of kicks off the confirmation that this is going to be a new aspect of warfare going forward so So at this point, you know, Britain, France, everyone's kind of thrown their hat into the ring. World War II kicks off. And in March of 1940, between the 19th and the 20th, and whenever I'm talking about British missions, I'm always going to say 19th and 20th or 20th and 21st because they bombed exclusively at night. So any of the British missions always take place technically over the course of two days because they only conducted night bombing. So a raid would start at like 10 and end at like two? Yeah, I mean, you would be in your plane ready to go. And as soon as it started, and you've got to imagine that you're also taking fly time into account.

So you'd probably want to be taking off while it's still a little bit of daylight so you could form up. I'm going to be jumping around between stuff here because stuff's going to lead me to one thing. But I'm going to try to keep it chronological at the same time. You would have to have situations where you didn't just launch planes. And they just, as soon as they were off, they turned in the head. to their target. The planes would have to form up into formations and flying together to where they wouldn't be getting lost. They would be more effective in their bombings because if you had a plane that just took off and started toward the target, and then there was just this big single file

line of planes, by the time the first plane got there and bombed, they would know that there were bombers coming in. And all of a sudden, all of the air defenses would be kicking in. They would have time to scramble all of the fighter planes that they needed to. And from plane number 50, all the way back to however many you had, those guys would be completely under attack by themselves getting picked off. So you had to form up into formations and send them kind of en masse to not only have a chance of hitting the target, but to also make sure that they were able to kind of like protect each other.

And they would make the raids take less time. Was there an inherent danger in night? raids as far as return, like landing? No, because they knew what they were going. Some of the technology that was created at the time, they had transponders. They could tell when they were getting, the navigators of these things were, everyone in these crews were, like, had a job and were like rock stars at these jobs. Getting into be a pilot was something that you had to test for.

Kind of like the same way the military has to know, you have to have certain aptitudes at things, to even be part of the crew that was like one of the gunners on it. And so most of the guys that were pilots were like college educated guys that came in and were officers, had to know the ends and outs of these aircraft that if something went wrong, what fuses to pull, how to redirect things. And the level of skill and training that these guys had when we get down to kind of like what they were doing and what they had to go through, you're not going to be shocked that they had to have all of this almost muscle memory instilled to them because the shit that started kicking off when they would go on these bombing missions, if it wasn't automatic for you, there would be

no way for you to process things while you were under attack. There's no time for recovery or to fix a mistake. So, kind of going back, so March 1940, night of the 19th and the 20th, the British Air Force bombs the seaplane base in Hornham. And Hornum was a place that the Germans had taken over. I'm sorry, I didn't look to see if it was in Germany or if they'd taken it over. It had to be kind of within range, and it probably wasn't Germany proper because they hadn't started launching missions into that. They were just kind of doing test runs and probing, things like that. Was this post Battle of Britain or the air raids in Britain? No, this is when it kind of kicks in. Okay. So in response, essentially, to the bombing in Poland, the Brits started actually bombing,

and it was a seaplane base. So it wasn't like a major military installation, but it was still military. This is actually when the Battle of Britain kind of gets its kickoff because that starts in June of 1940. May of 1940, and I think what even prompts it to happen the next month, is the British begin actually bombing Germany proper, and they're basically going after any industrial targets that are aiding in the war. And I mean, we're texting back and forth on this, like, how did they know where these places were? How did they choose their targets? So, there is surveillance at this point, but it is nowhere near as accurate or as good as surveillance that we have, even, you know, 10 years after the war. This is basically sending up just a plane that you currently have that's been fitted with a camera, not like a specialty stealth plane or like a quite, just one of the ones you had that could get that type of range.

You would be flying over, but you would have to know where to fly over. So all of these people that you have during the war that are flooding out of Germany, people that are being, you know, refugees that are fleeing all these other countries, you're getting information from all of these people. You're putting out, you know, announcements in Britain and England all over the country. Hey, if you've ever been to this place, come and talk to us. Hey, if you've ever done business in this place or you know this company, come talk to us. And they were gathering all of this intel of like, we know where this plant is. that's manufacturing this. We now wear this, you know, Measure Schmidt factory is that's manufacturing this. And so after they were able to kind of dial in the area that those were in, he'd send the surveillance planes over and hope to God, they weren't going to get shot down because they were having to do some of this stuff

during the daytime so you can actually take a picture. And if you're the lone airplane flying, they're going to fucking send the fighters after you and you're much slower than them. So after they kind of know the general location of these areas, Then they'll send in the surveillance, try to get a picture. So then when they come back and they're doing their briefings to these bomber pilots, they're like, here's your target, here's what surrounding area looks like, here's going to be your area of drop, here's going to be the approach that you're going to be doing.

So they gathered information from just all of these different sources to try to pick out these targets. And kind of from the get-go, there was a couple different ideological strategies about how, bombing should actually work. Not a lot of people were sold on it. It was kind of a smaller as far as compared to like the Army and the Navy. It was the smallest of those operations. They kind of had to prove themselves for why it would be effective, but you still had the old schools of thought of being like, no, this war is going to be won by sea power. No, this war is going to be won by the army. The Air Force was basically under the, you know, kind of made the argument of being like, guys can't hit them where they're making all of their stuff. You guys can only fight them on the

front lines and knock out the stuff that they're presenting you with. And they're just going to keep making more stuff. And if they make more stuff than we make, they're probably going to win. So we need to hurt them where they're making their shit that's providing them the ability to actually make war. And these bombers that we're building and that we're using can get deep behind enemy lines knocking out factory supplies, oil depots, marshalling yards where they try to gather, you know, train cars and transport hubs and everything, we can basically hit their infrastructure. While at the same time we're hitting their infrastructure, there was this thought of saying, well, who's actually making these things? How are they able to go ahead and, you know, man these factories? There has to be a workforce. It's not the military. It's not the soldiers that are this workforce. It's essentially the German public. And so, especially because they're bombing at night, it's not very precise. You know, they know the general area. There might be lights on. But once bombing started happening, cities started turning off lights at night to where you couldn't spot them. Certain factories or installations would actually produce like smoke screen to try to keep like a perpetual like smoke or fog kind of over these areas to obscure them. And so that's kind of why they had to almost sell it as we're going to aim for this target, but we're going to be aiming for the general target around it as well, because if people don't have places to live, they can't

live by these factories and they can't work at these factories. So even if we don't destroy the factory, we're still taking away their workforce and their ability to make these things. There's a level of damned if you do and damned if you don't trying to camouflage these areas, right? Because even if they have the general area and you're trying to put up that smoke screen to camouflage, Like you were just saying, if you try to bomb the factory and you miss the factory, but you knock out an entire block of housing that works at the factory, the factory is rendered and operable until you can get new people into it. Yeah, you're not going to drop production as if you destroyed the factory,

but you're going to be over there bombing anyway. So any delays or any type of holdup you can cause them is going to be something. So while the camouflage was effective, still, generally if you knew where the area was anywhere that you hit was going to affect the output of that factory yeah and i mean you're bombing from 20 to 20 to 35 000 or 20 to 30 000 feet that's insane because you have to stay above the flack and you have to try to stay high enough to where essentially like you're high enough to where it takes them longer to try to intercept you if they're sending up fighters as well is that what the flack is what is the flack so essentially the flack is fired from

canons that are pointing in an angle or straight up. And the most famous flak gun that the Germans would use, it's called the 88. And so the 88 could launch a flak shell from four to six and a half miles into the air. Were these like the big guns that they put along the Western front? You know, when you see a war movie and they're flying and you see the little puffs of black smoke? Yeah. That's flak. And basically it's launching a shell.

and these shells are different because they will explode at a predetermined height. And so you would fly in, I'm getting way ahead of myself, but you would fly in these formations where the planes in the British did it differently than the Americans, and I'll kind of touch base on the differences on that. But you would send in your squadrons or your bombers at also different heights. So if they dialed in on one height for one group of bombers, everyone wasn't fucked because of that flack. there would at least be some people above or maybe below it.

But the flack was shells that would be fired up in the air and then would just explode and launch shrapnel everywhere. Hundreds to, you know, however it would explode, hundreds of pieces of just fucking metal just flying through the air. When you're trying to fly a plane with your engines exposed and getting hit by that, it would tear holes through the, because these were just sheet aluminum that the fuselages were made of.

And so even more deadly than the fighters were, the flack because fighters could only, you know, they only had a certain amount of ammunition. It's not like in war movies where they're literally just holding the trigger and like just firing constantly. You would maybe build the lid off like a three second burst. That's not real? No. If you did that, I think they said if you did that, you would be out of ammo. I think they said within like maybe it would be a minute's worth, but you were up flying for a lot longer than that. Yeah. And so you would get them in your site and you would fire off little like two or three second bursts.

So the flack was even more dangerous because the areas that they had to fly over were the ones that were going to be the most fortified. But, okay, going back, going back. They were machine guns, right? The flack? No, no, no, that you would have on fighters? Yeah, usually he would either have them installed. The German fighters had a lot of them installed in the nose.

They had the timing down for the prop where the bolts would fire through that. The Americans usually, and the British usually went for like a, three on each wing formation to where with with the germans it was a little bit more sophisticated because you're aiming exactly looking down the nose that's where you know that's the trajectory that those bolts are going to go on with the allied planes because you have those spaced out probably i'm going to get the footage wrong maybe even like 20 or 30 feet apart you have to have an area in which those then actually meet and that has to be at a predetermined distance so it was probably a little bit harder. You were throwing more lead out there because you had more guns,

but the aiming probably was a little bit trickier. Were the casings, was the brass just falling to earth? Yep. Really? Yeah. Just constantly. So if you were underneath, like, I'll get to when I get to the bombers. Yeah. But compared even to the fighters, the bombers were even more heavily armed. And all of that casing would, yes, be ejected from the craft. So if you were under a huge bomber run or a huge fighter, dog fight and everything, technically it could be raining shell casings just all around you. And I'm sure that that actually happened. That's nuts.

Yeah. So it's just kind of an escalation at this point after the British begin bombing actually like Germany proper. At that point, I think Gering had said that no bombs would ever job on the German homeland. So his pride is fucking bruised. Hitler's fucking pissed because he's been basically slapped in the face. So this is when you were talking about this.

This is when the Battle of Britain and the Blitz actually starts. It starts in June, 1940 is when the Battle of Britain actually occurred. And this is where they're launching over fighters. And at this point, they kind of made a weird type of agreement that they understood that they weren't going to be doing terror bombing. This was on the site of both the Axis or the Germans and also the Allies. We're not going to hit your cities just to hit your cities. We have to try to justify it and go out. these military targets, things like that.

So London was pretty safe. Berlin was supposed to be pretty safe. Not on the outskirts, though, right? Not on the what? The outskirts? Because would that be word? It would be too dicey. I think if you, here's the thing about the bombing man, even if you're trying to hit the outskirts,

some of these bombs and these bombers would be off by miles. I mean, that's what was so crazy is that's why there were so many civilian casualties because had it been very, very precise, they could have just taken out military targets. Yeah. But they had to kind of just carpet bomb or kind of blanket bomb for the most part. So, R.A.F. starts bombing Germany proper as far as, like, the industrial targets and everything. And then in Battle of Britain starts, and what I was getting at is you have German aircraft, German bombers flying over, you know, England and Great Britain.

And they're bombing military targets. They're bombing airfields. They're trying to knock out the RAF, which is the Royal Air Force. Sorry. So you have the Battle of Britain where basically all of the Spitfires are going up and they're having these, you know, they're intercepting all of, you know, this is the doubting radar and the doubting system, the heyday of all that, intercepting the bombers, shooting them down. And at that point, kind of in retaliation for the Battle of Britain, in August, that's when the first British bomber raid on Berlin happened. So they were like, you've been coming over, you've been bombing the shit out of England, we're going to go ahead and fucking gloves are off at this point. they bomb Berlin September 7th that's when Hitler is like fuck this throw everything at him

and this is when the Blitz starts and the Blitz was basically a continuous bombing raid on England that took place over the course

for like eight months and five days it went from September 7th of 1940 to May 11th of 1941 and they were launching out of France

yes they had France at this point So they were able to go ahead and, you know, still not ideal because if you're getting shot down, you're getting shot down over England or over the channel. You're on an island. But that's why they were also able to facilitate that is because they weren't flying as far. The retaliatory ones that were headed towards Germany, though, they were traveling a much greater distance. They had to fly. There was no friendly area in mainland Europe.

They were flying out of Britain. And so, but like imagine, and I want to do an entire episode on the Blitz, so I'm not going to go into it too in depth on this. but just imagine like the first bombing raid happens. It's fucking terrifying. It might not hit your neighborhood or even the section of town that you live in, but you still know the holy shit we're vulnerable here. They're now bombing this city. And then literally for the next eight months.

And it might not have been every single day, but even if they sent over two or three bombers just to fucking get the air raid sirens going, just to get the guns firing just to the planes. You're pulling resources up. You're also keeping that constant. state of fear and terror up in the populace. And so that's going on while other operations are going, because again, it's eight months and we're now pretty thick into World War II at this point.

So on September 23rd, the RAF is basically like, okay, we're bombing at night because if we don't bomb at night, anytime we fly past the English Channel and get into either France or Germany, that's where their fighters are. And as soon as the fighters detected you coming in, they were twice as fast as these planes. These planes are carrying bombs. They're not fast. And here's one thing that I think that probably isn't like really like touched on, but you would think like, if you're having like a German fighter shoot at you, like, why isn't the pilot like going side to side and like taking a base of maneuvers? Boom. You had to, you were flying in formation. with your other planes, and if you were to take evasive maneuvers, you're going to crash into

another one of your guys, and they're also supposed to be following you to the target. They can't just keep flipping around and diving with you and everything. The other reason is, and I'll talk about a little bit more, is certain sets of bombers like the B-17s that the 8th Air Force flew. They determined that the best survivability for them was to be in this combat box formation where you would essentially have, I think it was between like four to six planes. And they would be almost in kind of like a V with someone in the middle type formation. And that was the optimal position because no matter where a German fighter was attacking from, you had the guns of three different planes able to fire at that.

So you had three times the chance of fending off that fighter or shooting it down. The Brits kind of had the same thing. But at the same time, they're like, we can't take bomber losses during the day. They know we're coming already. and if we go up there in the daytime, they have such an advantage already. We're not going to be able to bomb any targets and we're going to lose too many planes. So they had to bomb at night. And because of that, it wasn't able to be as precise.

So they pretty much had to come out and say, hey, we're going to be doing area bombing. And the lead science advisor proposed this. He was the lead science advisor for the RAF and for, like, Churchill's like war council. He said, the ultimate aim of an attack on a town area. is to break the morale of the population which occupies it. To ensure this, we must achieve two things. First, we must make the town physically uninhabitable. And secondly, we must make the people conscious of conscience, Jesus Christ, conscious of constant personal danger.

The immediate aim is therefore twofold, namely to produce one destruction and two, fear of death. So it's aggressive. pretty to the point. In hindsight, is very easy to look at these things. You're in a position where

all of Europe has fallen to this guy. You don't have France. They've taken Poland. I think they've taken Norway at this point. They have you fucking surrounded. The U-boats are

shooting or, you know, or fucking torpedoing your supply ships trying to come in here. And you're kind of looking for a way to stop this thing dead in its tracks and you're kind of throw in darts the board for the only options you have you can't establish a foothold because they have all of their forces there they're too strong they'll repel you the only thing you have is essentially bombing and you can't just turn around

and say hey because we can't hit these precise targets we just we can't bomb and so they had to kind of spin this thing into saying hey if people won't inhabit these. cities, like I was saying before, there's not going to be anybody to work these factories. So we need to essentially create such a condition of fear that both them not being able to go ahead and produce war materials, but at the same time, if we can turn the populace against the current regime, that's going to also go ahead and cause problems within the country and could possibly help in the war quicker. When this is mid-blitz, when he says this?

This is just like right after the blitz, like maybe two weeks after it starts. Oh, so even at that point, you probably don't have a lot of empathy for the Germans. Zero. You literally just endured like probably the first two weeks were probably the worst of it of all of these bombings coming in. So yeah, I definitely see why even the lead science advisors being like, okay, people have to work the factories. People need houses. Therefore, we get rid of the houses. There aren't people to work the factories and go.

If we get rid of the people, maybe there's nobody else to replace them. So now it's just going back and forth for kind of a. lugging match. And again, America's not in this yet. This is just basically going on between Britain and Nazi, in Nazi Germany at this point. Are we providing planes? We've started to provide materials because right now they're still flying all British planes. And I'll kind of get to a couple of the most well-known ones. They're flying a collection of a couple different types of bombers. They'll have like a long range of heavy bomber. They have a couple medium bombers, some light bombers. It's kind of this hodgepodge

mishmash of all of these plane manufacturers making these different planes that are used in these different roles. I'm sure you'll get to it, but as far as like a, what would a lineup look like in a bombing raid, like a bombing squadron? Like, would there be heavy bombers towards the center, light bombers outside of them, and then like a defense force on the outside of that? You would only use them for what you needed them for. So you're only sending out your medium bombers to bomb distances at a medium. You can only carry so many bombs, so much fuel. You're trying to maximize that by maybe using less fuel and adding more bombs in there. So your medium bombers are also kind of your medium range bombers.

You're not sending those. You're only sending your long range bombers and your heavy ones if you need to get to that range because they're so valuable, you're not going to waste those on targets that you can use planes that are two-thirds the cost. So it's all dependent on what the mission, on what these planes are going to be selected for. But everybody has, like, defense fighters around them. That comes into play as well. I'll get to that.

Okay. At the moment, no. The, depending on where the target was, if it were to just be closer to, like, the coast of France, like the northern coast of France or, like, close within maybe, like, Belgium or, like, Luxembourg, you might be able to take, like, spitfires or hurricanes, and those are, like, the two predominant British fighters. You might be able to take those with you for a certain period of time, but their fuel level and their fuel capacity is so much lower.

that even if they came over there with you, their job is to take on the other fighters and scare them off. They might only be able to do that for 15 minutes and have to turn around. All those other fighters that are launching 15 minutes later with fresh fuel tanks, it would be like poking the hornet's nest. And they're just constantly springing up to meet you the entire way that you're flying. So you could, you know, let's say you head over the English Channel, head into occupied France, you're heading to bomb a target.

as soon as they detect you, they're launching fighters to start harassing you. When those fighters run out of ammo and have to refuel, they're flying down. At the same time as you're traveling forward, all those other bases around the area that you're projected to fly to or the direction you are, are going on alert and they're launching their fighters essentially in groups. So when one fighter group has to drop out, another one is there to take its place and you're constantly being shot at and harassed and shot down. So as soon as you got, and you would not have fighter support.

during this entire time, which is why the long-range bombers, the heavy bombers had to be so heavily armed because they had to try to give them a chance. If they don't have a chance to defend themselves, the bombs don't get to the target, and it's completely pointless. Yeah, and you've displaced a shit

lot of money and resources. Not to mention, man, the B-17 had a crew of 10. The Lancaster, I think, had a crew of seven. So every time one of these planes go down, you just lost 10 guys that had trained for the last two years. The investment in not only the plane, but the crew itself was insane. That's why their

losses were so, like, so significant because, and I'm not saying anything like you could just plug someone else in from the army, but if it's someone that's just firing a rifle and someone goes down, the guy coming in might not be as good at firing that rifle, but he's a body in there and he can try to pick up some of the slack. You couldn't just plug anyone else in for these bombing rates or for these crews. 14th of 40, Germany kind of launches a terrorade on this town called Coventry. It was one, like an old standing, like British town and everything. They bombed it. It had like a famous cathedral there and like part of the cathedral was destroyed.

It was kind of around this time, kind of leading up to, I think it was in like, you know, again, it goes back and forth, back and forth. In December of 1941, the first usage of this thing called the Obo Navigants. starts. So they're constantly trying to develop things during the bombing campaign. And the oboe navigation from how I understand it is on the island of Great Britain you have a bunch of different

radar stations or transmitter stations. You would launch out and you would basically on that, it would launch out like a transponder ping and the closer you got to it, the stronger the signal and I think it went faster. So what they would do

is they would find out what the distance was between the, where they were taking off and the target. And they knew that distance. They knew how strong the ping would be at that distance. These planes that had transponders on them would fly out until that ping matched what it should be for that distance. They would know that they were out on that outer edge of that, like, convex, that circle, because they would just do it in like a circular pattern.

But then at that point, they didn't know where along that circle, where along that curve the city was. So a second radar station would launch out another ping and where those two pings intersected, they would know that was the city and to release the bombs. Oh, they would just kind of triangulated. Yes. Okay. But with radio signals. Huh. And just the pings of these transponders.

So they're developing all this crazy shit. There was a guy that came in right early in 42. And his name was Marshall, Arthur Harris. and he became known as bomber Harris. And this guy was fucking hardcore. He advocated he's like, bombing is what's going to win us this war. Like, I know it's never been done before

because we haven't had technology, but he was of the belief that they could win the war almost through bombing alone by devastating their ability to make war so much that they just simply couldn't produce the materials and they had to kind of capitulate because of that. So he takes over for the time and what was required.

he kind of had the right mindset. He's actually going to lead bomber command, which is what the British portion of the bombing campaign is known as Bomber Command, from February 1942 to 1945, so pretty much through the end of the war. In 1942, in February, this is when they had the area bombing directive. That's when this actually went into effect. So you know how I told you that and read you the little excerpt. That was proposed essentially back in 40 or 41,

and then in 42, that's when they were like, okay, we're going to actually put this into effect and start just area bombing. They had this thing called G navigation that they, or G navigation that they designed. And basically, I want to say it used some type of, like, what was it? It was some type of like navigation to where they could actually

pick up the area on the target. I don't know if they would send in these pathfinder planes to like mark the target form, but they were, it was a more advanced version essentially of the obo, so they kind of switched up to that. But this is where the term G unit, like G, G unit is actually a measurement of like 66.6 microseconds. That's what the, so I'm wondering if G unit actually, because it's supposed to be like gangster unit, right? Yeah. But the fact that I wonder if one guy just heard G you and he's like, that should be the name of our group.

I don't know if they were history buffs. I don't know if Lloyd Banks was studying. Probably not. So again, at this point, this is still just Britain and Germany trying to knock each other around. And I'm not going to go through every single bombing campaign because there are literally too many of them to discuss. But just kind of, I'm kind of building it up to see how it keeps escalating. So March, we get to March 42. So the night of the 28th and the 29th, 232.

planes, or sorry, 234 planes bomb this place called Lubeck. And the reason they chose this place, Lubek, was because the commander said the town was built like a firelighter. A lot of wooden structures, a lot of opportunities to go ahead and start fires. And that was kind of part of the bombing strategy is it wasn't just, hey, let's drop these bombs that explode and just like shockwaves, you know, turn these buildings to rubble. Yeah. Because the bombs were huge.

But at the same time, when they explode, you know, in an alley or in a building, it's kind of contained by that. You're not causing as much destruction as you'd like. So what they would do is they would drop these bombs and they would call them, I think, cookies. The cookies would hit the roofs of these buildings and blow the roofs off and expose the buildings. And they would drop incendiaries after that to start fires and to burn everything. So a little like the fire bombings in Japan or in Tokyo? Correct. But I think they strictly used incendiaries. because Tokyo was so made of wood.

There was so much of it. They had to essentially knock essentially some of the stone around to expose like all the flammable shit. And then would launch the incendiaries. When you're literally bombing places just because the construction of the city is conducive to lighting it on fire, you know you're fucking just like you're in a bad place. Your collateral damage is going to be high. Yes. You're throwing out kind of hellmeries to be like, what do we have to do to try to end this thing, to try to force these people to surrender, basically? Instead of a fourth quarter hill marry, this is more like a early second quarter hill mary.

So it keeps bumping up, man, because again, as time is going on, they're producing more bombers, they're training more pilots. They're in full war production mode. Like a month later, on May 30th of 42, there was a thing called Operator. Millennium, more than a thousand bombers hit Cologne. The fires, and they did it over the course, all these bombers dropped their payloads over the course of 90 minutes. 2,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries were dropped on Cologne. What was the average payload per plane? Do you know? On that mission, I don't know what it was. I know with the payload capacity for the two main bombers, one British and then one American. The main heavy British bomber was the

Afro Lancaster. And I want to say it had a 14,000 pound bomb load. God damn. 14,000 pounds flying? Yeah. And that was just the... That was its max. So they're having to lower that if they need to add more fuel. Yeah. But still. You're still getting probably closer to maybe eight to 10,000 pounds because again this is 2,000 tons of explosives and incendiaries were dropped on Cologne. The fires were so big and intense that you could see the fires from 600 miles away from a plane that was 20,000 feet in the air. Wow. You could see them from 600 miles away. Huh. So it's just, and again, the collateral damage on the is insane.

Just to kind of list off, and they break it down by what percentage of the city was destroyed during these bombing raids. So just kind of going down the list for some of the big ones. Colon, 61% of the city was destroyed in bombing raids. You're not manning a factory

if 61% of your city just was turned ash. Hamburg got 75%. I mean, some of these places got a couple, one place got 83% of the city was destroyed. One place got 80%. I'll kind of go through some of the bigger cities when I start talking about those actual like raids and missions. They turned Hamburg into hamburger. Pretty much.

In June, 42, on the 11th and 12th, this was the first American day raid over Europe. So the yinks have shown up. They're flying a couple different planes. They're flying either mostly either the B-Cast. 17 flying fortress or they're flying the B-24 Liberator. Both of them just kind of had different rules. Both of them were heavy bombers made by different companies. The Liberator, I think, was produced in higher numbers, but the B-17 is kind of the one

that was kind of the more famous one and just because of its survivability and how much damage it could take. I sent you some of those images. Insane. That those planes that flew back with. I'll probably go ahead when this episode comes out. some of the posts for the week leading up to it will actually be of some of the battle damage that some of these planes sustained and made it back to bring their air crews home it's it's nuts but i'll get to that here in just a few minutes do you think that that played any psychological role for the germans in seeing these new planes show up in the air but i mean seeing the americans show up and they're different style fighters and different style bombers and

Well, you got to imagine that they probably weren't really familiar with their capabilities because, of course, that stuff has kept as secret and confidential as possible. So the reports that you're probably getting back is fighters are landing on the ground and being like they got something new. This is what we notice about it because even after any of the bombing missions, when those planes landed, the first thing they did was the crews were pulled into a thing they called interrogation. It was basically debriefing. They were all brought in. The crews were sat around a table, and there would be one guy from like command or admin or whatever, and be interviewing the crews about anything and everything to do with the mission. Where did you see the bombs land?

How much flak did you guys see? How many fighters were there? Did you see this plane go down? How many shoots did you see them? They would be grilling them on everything about the mission. So I would imagine that on the other side, German fighters get down to the ground. They're being grilled about. tell us everything you can about this plane.

Where did it look like the guns were? Did you, you know, happen to notice any weak spots? How fast was it flying? And so that's kind of probably the way that they figure that out. You had some of them that tried to make crash landings, that tried to thought they could bring the planes down instead of just bailing out, that probably set them down a little bit too easy and they were able to recover some of these planes. Kind of reverse engineer.

I think they flew a B-17 with the iron cross on it at one point during the board. No way. Yeah. So that was the first day raid, the American day raid over Europe, and it was actually bombing the oil fields in Romania. And I think we might have talked about that during a previous episode that that cut off a lot of the fuel. Was it bulge? It was. Yep. Because the oil fields had been bombed, and that's why Hitler could only muster like 5 million gallons of gas for that operation, why they were so short on gas. So the 8th Air Force, that was in June. the 8th Air Force had arrived in May of 1942.

So these are the guys that are coming over before any, you know, we're not landing troops in Normandy until June 644, and these guys are there May two years earlier. So there was this entire involvement. I know we were also in North Africa earlier than when we were in, you know, occupied Europe. But these air crews were over there two years prior, more than two years prior, fighting this war. Just simply flying over everything you were flying over to bomb was enemy territory. The only friendly place that you could land was trying to get back to fucking Britain. Yeah. I think this is kind of where I get lost in the idea of these bombing raids.

And it just kind of came to me. But as we were talking about it and just talking about similarities between what happened with Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, those two were deemed necessary to save the lives of everybody that was going to have to invade Japan. And maybe this is where I got lost because these air raids in Europe were essentially doing the same thing because if you're knocking out, if you're knocking out these factories and you're slowing down the means of production, that's less bullets that could potentially potentially be fired at your ground troops.

Anything and everything, man, like petroleum, like they were making oil and gas for these, you know, tanks and all this armor and the trains and all that shit. You also had a huge thing was ball bearings. Everything used ball bearings. Planes used ball bearings. Tanks used ball bearings. And, like, that was a priority target was to try to knock out these ball bearing factories because it could impact so many different facets of, like, the Nazi war machine.

So while these bombing raids are happening, while they sound a bit excessive, the ultimate outcome is to slow the loss of life on the ground. It's trying to end it as quickly as possible. That's exactly where it is. And that's the goal and you're willing to overlook a lot of things to try to reach that goal is what's going on. So kind of going and I'm going to jump over to the planes for a little bit because it'll also explain some of the information that I'm going to be talking about during like some of the missions. So again, going back to the British, they had two. main bombers, the Avro Lancaster, and then I think the Wellington Vickers. I'm going to focus on the Lancaster because essentially it was the most successful British heavy bomber. Started out as this plane that had two engines on it, start causing some issues. And again, this is development prior to World War II. And then they were like, okay, this isn't getting where it needs to go. Let's expand the

wings and had two more engines. So basically, this plane, it's a sexy looking plane for a bomber. The reason it looks so cool to me is, and I didn't realize this until I dove deep into this, there's two types of different engines that these planes would be using during World War II. You have like your fighters that are basically using these inline like, you know, 12 cylinder engines with the big nose cones on the propellers and everything. If you look at the Avril Lancaster, it basically just looks like it has four noses of like spitfire fighters on each wing. they're using the same engines, those Merlin engines. Oh yeah, that's an attractive plane.

Yeah. And so the American planes... Tail's cool, too. Huh? The tail is cool, too. Yeah, the split tail, the booms. Yeah. So if you look at a B-17,

that's where you get more of the traditional engine that you think of with almost like the, where you can see the pistons in the circle that go around the crankshaft. Yep. The big circular ones. So the difference on that, you had radial engines that you would use and you would have in-line engines. And there was a method to why you would pick one or the other.

So with those engines like the Merlin engine, like the Lancaster was using more aerodynamic, they had a few different like advantages, but one of the disadvantages is it was a liquid-cooled engine. And one of the first things that fighters would go after, or if you got hit by flack, if it hit that engine and disable the cooling system or cut the hoses,

the engine would overheat and you would lose, that engine. A radial engine is air-cooled, and that's why it has that big opening in the front where you can see all of the pistons surrounding it in a circle. And I didn't even know this, but to get more power, they added rows of pistons behind it. It would just stack behind it. And because it was air-cooled, all of that air coming and being forced backwards by the propeller would be constantly cooling that. Because it was air-cooled, those could take a lot more damage. They could be shot up a lot more and they could actually operate

better because they were air cooled and they wouldn't overheat. So they were more essentially hardier. The survivability was better on the radial engines. You're also underselling a crazy feature of this Avro-Lancaster is that

the bomber that is sitting back in the second bubble in the back? Yeah. So they're... In the very back? Okay, so I'll go over the position. real quick. So like we said, had seven-man crew. You had the pilot. You had

the navigator. You had the bomber. You had the radio guy. You had two gunners. And I believe you had an air craft engineer. Who's the fellow sitting in the back? Okay. So looking at it this way, and I'll probably post a picture of this in the

B-17 on one of the posts as well. the dude sitting in the very back tail gunner the guy sitting in the bubble about two thirds of the way down he's the dorsal gunner he's the guy on top of it like you would think of a dorsal fin on a shark

that's where like the gun position would be it's like a bubble and that was hydraulically and electronically moved to where he could just rotate around it wasn't like he could literally just spin that thing all the way wait till I get to the B-17 man

it's even fucking crazier so the Lancaster had these seven positions one pilot flight engineer who would be in charge of managing and watching fuel levels, the engine performance, all that kind of stuff. Pilots just trying to get them to where they're trying to go. And another thing that is kind of undersold about this is these pilots really don't have an autopilot or anything like that.

And because these guys are flying in formation, some of these missions would be like eight to ten hours, man. These guys are sitting at the stick, especially these guys, the British dudes, because they're the only pilot. and they're just completely focused on staying information. The plane, again, it's fighting anymore. There's not as many of the electronical, like, hydraulic type stuff that modern planes have where it's all digital response. You're actually pulling back on the yoke. It's pulling cables and you're having to put some fucking muscle behind it. So many things that you go wrong, too.

Exactly. Was anybody cross-trained? Like, just in case something happened? So in those, the pilot would usually cross-train either the navigator or the bombardier. because if he was incapacity in any way and he's the only guy that can fly the plane, all those other six guys are fucked. Yeah. So he cross-trained and would cross-trained them enough just to be able to be like,

okay, if you need to take control, here's how you go up, downside, here's what you do in this situation, and would train them as much as he possibly could, but they're not going to be a substitute for him. Yeah. They're not going to finish the mission. It'll probably be to get back. And the big advantage about the Lancaster is the way it was set up. So like you were saying, you have the bomber who's in the nose, and the nose of the plane basically has a two-barreled turret on the front.

Below that is like a clear plexiglass bubble. That that's basically where the bomb site would be. He would lay down when the bomber was coming over the target, and he would be aiming in the site, and he would be telling the pilot, left, left, right? Nope, left, and be trying to get that crosshair on there before dropping the bombs. anytime he wasn't in that position, he was upmanning the machine gun watching for fighters.

Then back and above him would be where the pilot was sitting. Behind the pilot, I believe, would be the flight engineer. The flight engineer was then, I think, separated from him back further, would be the radio guy. Sitting in a desk nest to him would be the navigator. And he had a little window up above his desk. They called it an astrolab. And it was basically a clear portion where he could look up and get their bearings by the stars.

Wow. To do navigation. Huh. Back further down, you would then have the guy was telling you about the dorsal gunner who would be up in that turret rotating around watching the top of the plane. And then in the very back, you would have the tail gunner. And the tail gunner, at a certain point, they upgraded that tail section to four machine guns to where it almost looked like an, because it was like an anti-aircraft gun. And that thing was also electric where he could pivot almost one to eight. I think maybe in a little more, he could rotate that whole thing.

That's insane. And how they said it worked is he had a joystick and it would control the barrels of all the, all the guns for firing. But he would just move that left and right up and down and it would just kind of rotate that thing around. We're talking 1942? Yes. And they're building this stuff into planes that are, you know, again, flight was 1903. Yeah. Yep.

And we're already designing stuff like this. So it could go 280 miles an hour. It could go to 24,000. 500 feet. Like we said, the max bomb load would be 14,000 if it wasn't having to carry a ton of gas, but usually less than that. And it had a 1600 mile range. The reason that this was so popular is not only was it like the premier British bomber, but it could carry quite a bit bigger bomb load than the B-17. Because the B-17, or sorry, the Lancaster, the entire bottom of it was the Bomb Bay. Everyone just kind of sat on top of the Bomb Bay. So it was able to carry the almost the whole length of it, or at least a good portion down the length of it, just bombs stacked up. With the B-17, the bomb bay actually took up from bottom to top a certain portion and had a walkway through the middle that you could walk between them. But it was only a smaller section, so it could carry, I think maybe they said less than half of the capacity of bombs that the Lancaster could. Do you have the specs, like how long this thing was?

So it was a 102 foot wingspan. Wow. And it was 70 feet long. Wow. So it, they're big planes. I mean, not in comparison to a lot of like the normal jets that people are flying on today, 737s. But for the time, yeah, it was a big plane. Jeez.

7,300 of these things were built during the course of the war. They also took place and I'll get to it here in a second of this thing called Operation Chastise, which is fucking awesome. But these were also the types of planes that were supposed. responsible for sinking the turpets, the sister ship of the Bismarck with the one that was up in, like, they parked it in the fjords up in Norway. And the British kept launching missions against it and dropped these things they called Tallboys, which were basically just insanely huge, like, blockbuster bombs to try to sink this thing. And they ended up actually, like, damaging it. And then it rotated over and it capsized. So one of the deficiencies, though, about the Lancaster is it had no way of protecting underneath it.

and the Germans figured this out really quick. And again, they're flying at night, so the Germans have night fighters. And what they developed of these night fighters is they installed a gun that pointed straight up that was kind of behind the cockpit. And all they would do is they would try to fly up underneath and pass underneath the plane

and just pull the trigger on this thing and just fire rounds up into the bottom of the unprotected portion of the plane to shoot it down. And in the area of the bomb bay? I mean, they could probably hit that. The thing about the bombs, the bombs weren't armed at the time of takeoff. They didn't arm the bombs until they got very close to the target. And once the bombadier was like, okay, we're heading over the target area,

I think it was the flight engineer would go back and pull the pins off of all the bombs. Now, I'm not sure if that protects from getting hit by a fucking round. Yeah. But I would imagine that there were probably instances where those things exploded. And then at that point, the fucking Germans, just all he's wondering is if he's far enough down below it to get the fuck out of there yeah wow so on the other side of it on the american side the main bomber was the uh the one that i'm going to focus on is at the boeing b-17 flying fortress and it got that name for a reason as far as

performance in the war it dropped the highest amount of bombs so the most amount of bombs during the war like tonnage you know poundage it dropped the most 12,700 of these were built during the course of the war. Kind of had a rough start when they were first going through testing phases. In fact, their prototype actually during the trial to get the government contract crashed and killed like two of the test pilots and burned up and they didn't have another one. But through one of these, a couple of these generals that really believed in air power, they actually ordered during a special project like 18 of these things. And so they got to build and develop them and it became this, pretty much this relied upon bomber of the war. The B-17s had four of the radio engines that I talked about, the ones that were a little bit more resilient to damage, a little bit more reliable than the other ones.

And they had a 10-man crew. So it was the pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, radio guy, flight engineer, ball turret, two-side turrets, and the tail turret. The B-17 had 13 guns on it. it had in the nose directly ahead one machine gun off to the side one to the left one to the right in the nose as you went back

it had the same type of dorsal turret that could spin around and cover the entire top of the plane you went a little bit further back and this is where the spary ball turret was this was the one that hung out the bottom of the plane it was the dick of the plane no so it was just think of a golf ball you know up against like and of course bigger than that

but hanging about I don't know like four-fifths of the way out of the bottom of the plane and basically this thing could rotate up down left right in every direction I think it was electrically or hydraulically powered but the way the guy would have to sit well I'm talking about it look up Spary Balter and look at how the guy had to sit in it you only you usually be the shortest guy on the crew

that was on the gunner crew would have to sit in there he would have to sit and have his legs up and he would be firing like this like the triggers were up above his head fuck that dude he had plexiglass most of it was exposed below by plexiglass so he could see and he could aim at the fighters below it did you see it yeah no i i'm not in

you couldn't convince me to be in this position on the plane they said it was the safest position on the plane out of all the gunners because they weren't getting attacked really from the bottom too much you're just hanging in air I know. There's nothing below you. Okay, so that thing would be recessed up into the plane a little bit. And when basically the plane got up to altitude in formation and everyone was kind of getting to their positions and getting ready like right after they got off the ground, the guy would basically be like, I'm going in the ball. And it would recess up.

He would open the hatch, crawl in. The hatch would close behind him. And then it would move down into that position. So technically, if you're in a position, the hatch is behind you. there were situations where the hatch got blown off and he looked behind him. He didn't get sucked out, but he's like, I looked behind me. The hatch got blown off and it was nothing but open air behind me because the ball turret wasn't rotated pointing directly down to where he could get up. Yeah.

When planes got shot and were going down, can you imagine trying to get up and out of that while the plane is trying to like keel over and start stiving? I don't think it matters where you are. I would probably, if I knew we were going down, I would prefer to be. be in that situation just because I'd be the first one to go. Well, that's the thing. So the Lancaster crews, you know, when you were getting shot down, crews were trying to bail out. They didn't wear their parachutes.

They were the belly attached parachutes. So they were attached to their like flight suits and the harnesses. So when the pilot was like, hey, we're hit, we're going to try to keep it. But like the guys would start putting on parachutes in case they had to bail. And some planes, like the Lancaster had small emergency hatches to where it'd be really tricky to try to get out, especially when you're trying to do it at night. Yeah. So with the B-17, they had a little bit bigger hatches to where they could try to dive out of it.

They could even try to dive out because it was exposed. They would try to dive out the bomb bay. If the pilot was holding it steady, they would just tuck up and just jump down through the bomb bay. So we were prepping these B-17 flying fortresses way before the war then. Because I just looked it up. The start of production was the early. early 1930s. The first prototype flight was 1935.

Yeah. So they produced those 12,000 from 1936 to 1945. It took several months to build. So we were already, we knew that this was going to be like a peak in aviation bombing. Yeah. Okay. So this wasn't something that they threw together on the fly midwar. This was well researched.

Oh, yeah. There were multiple companies, like I said, like the B24 Liberator. there was a B-25 Mitchell. There were a bunch of bombers. These are just, and then you had the Boeing Super Fortress that they started developing to. That's the one that dropped the bomb

on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So you had the, yeah, so, and then coming back down past the ball turret, you would have two guys that were standing probably three quarters of the way down in kind of in the tail section, and those guys basically just had

open windows out the sides of the airplane and had two 50 caliber, one on each side, and those guys were just protecting the sides of the plane. Go back further and you would get to the tail gunner who was basically, if you look at a picture of it, jammed inside the tail with two, a dual-mounted, I think, 50 caliber,

and basically just this little glass screen in front of him and would be able to rotate the gun. These planes were flying, I think they said the height that they were flying was usually between like 25,000 and 30,000 feet. you're flying without a pressurized cabin. Yeah. And what about oxygen? You have oxygen masks.

Every guy had an oxygen canister that he was like hooked up to and they had a few spares that were in the plane. But it was the temperature that was getting these guys because they said that the temperature up there could be, I think, like, negative 20 to negative 30. I believe it. Yeah. And so it came a little bit later. But the initial suits that they gave them. were like the ones I was telling you were like sheepskin lined, full body suits with leather on the outside. It was leathered. And they would also have, you know, they had to have insulated gloves

because there were instances all the time. You never touched anything at that altitude with your hands because your hands would stick to and you'd rip the skin off your hands. So you had to wear gloves to touch every single thing up there. You were wearing an oxygen mask. You were trying to stay warm. There was no heat. And you're flying that consistently at that altitude. for the majority of your mission because that's the safest place that you can be. And you can just peer out the side of the plane out this window if you're these, you know,

two sidegunners and you're just looking down. And then you're looking out and you're seeing another plane that's like 100 or 150 feet from you. And the other guy out the other side has seen a plane that's 100 and 150 feet. And they're flying just in these type formations so they can all support each other with all of these guns when the fighters show up.

I've seen a couple of the RAF bomber jackets on repair shop that they brought in and they had like orange visibility

on the inside of the hood so if you went down in the water and you were wearing it you could flip your hood inside out and it would be easy for somebody to be able to spot you in the water

well like they had these huge collars on them so they could pull it up and like protect their the back keep the backs of their heads and everything like that warm they look badass too Eventually, they developed heated seats that were basically just like an electric blanket,

that they would be able to plug in in the plane and be able to keep themselves warm. Yeah, I guess you're not really going anywhere if you're in the seat. Okay, again, some of these missions eight to ten hours. No bathroom in the B-17. You're literally just turning around and pissing in a can. The Lancaster, I think, had like a small lavatory or bathroom in it. But for the most part, you don't want to hang anything at the side of the plane. No.

Nothing you're not willing to lose. So kind of going back to the B-17 with like the differences from the Lancaster. So you had a pilot and a co-pilots. He had two sitting right next to each other. One guy goes down, another guy is easily there to fly the plane. Had the flight engineer who again was in charge of checking on the engines, fuel consumption, all that stuff. And he was also the guy that would man the turret that was sitting above where the pilots were, the one that would be able to spin around. The navigator and the bombardier were both in the nose of the plane, which was that clear plexiglass nose,

where the bombardier would be in the very, very front with the site, and the navigator sat back at a desk kind of behind him. That way, the navigator, because in the Lancaster's, the navigator doesn't have a window to look out, and he's getting all his information from the bombardier. He's like, hey, I'm seeing this. I see a river. I'm seeing this.

I think this is this town. He's going up there checking with his charts, being like, we should be passing over this because this is the route I've navigated for us. The navigator sitting down there in the B-17 allowed him to basically just look out, be like, okay, I can see everything. Disadvantages to that is the German fighters would adopt tactics once they got used to kind of, you know, flying against these formations where they started just attacking these planes head on.

Because if they were coming in, they were coming in extremely fast because not only are the planes, fighters going 350 plus miles an hour where your fight or where your bombers maybe go in 200, you're flying almost twice as fast and you're flying in the opposite direction toward each other and they would aim to take out the pilots or the bomber or the navigator just in that single run. They were trying to find, you know, probe for the weak points of this. Was there a benefit to the plexiglass over just regular glass? Was it a weight thing or? Well, it was stronger.

Really? Yeah. I guess they didn't have like super laminated glass or anything like that yet. I'm not quite sure exactly what the. glass was. I just say plecal gas because it wasn't an actual glass. It was more of a like a fabricated, like plastic type. So these things had like a 4,000 pound bomb load for the average, but they had an 8,000 max. But because they were bombing so far into Germany, you really didn't take your max because, again, you had to go and use fuel. The Americans were bombing at daytime. The British were bomb at night,

and they thought we were insane for bombing the daytime. And it comes to the, the fact that, yeah, I think we probably were a little bit insane to do that based on the losses. And so that's kind of why the Lancaster didn't have to have as many guns because half of their thing is trying to hide in the darkness and just get out of there without the night fighters being able to find them. When you're flying in these huge formations of B-17s during the daytime, everyone can fucking see you. The flak gunners on the ground know exactly where, you know, to lead you and they're testing

altitudes to try to hit you. But the fighters know exactly where to find you as well. Yeah, I think it provides a good one-two punch, though. It is insane to fly during the day when you're kind of naked to everybody. But at the same time, if you're planning raids close together and you're hitting once at night and once in the day, the unpredictability of when you're going to be there is going to keep everybody, just like they had Britain, just like during the Blitz when they didn't know when these air raid sirens were going off, it's going to hit you either in the middle of the night or in the middle of the afternoon.

You have no idea what's coming. The strategy on it and the way that it was presented is the British were kind of doing this indiscriminate bombing of this area bombing, whereas the U.S. came in. I'm not saying that this ended up being the end result, but the justification for the daytime bombing was that we have this Norden bomb site. And this thing was behind the Manhattan Project and the B-29 super fortress. this was the costliest development of the entire war, as far as from a cost perspective. So the Norton bomb site, what it did was it was almost like kind of a mechanical computer. It would factor in things that the bomber would be looking down.

He would be twisting certain knobs to dial in airspeed and altitude, and the thing would make calculations on what he needed to drop the bomb. So it would go ahead and extend the crosshairs out if it needed more distance. It was kind of a predictor. correct but what it also did is it dialed into the plane and when they got close to the target and the bomber was like I can see the target we're not on it yet and the pilot would be like bombers taking control

and the bomb site and the bomber would take over control of the plane and be trying to and that's how because you know if you're trying to radio like the British were in it like left left right right you're not getting it super precise this bomb site they said it was supposed to be able to drop a bomb in a pickle pickle barrel. If the pickle barrel was like a mile wide, maybe, but still more precise than just bombing the night. So during that time frame, though, that the bomber had control of it, the pilots didn't have control. And so if they're under attack during that time or trying to

dodge flack or anything, they can't because the bomber's trying to keep it level and straight to be able to drop their load. Priorities, I guess. Yeah. And that was kind of the sacrifice to to try to be able to do this precise bombing, and that's why they did during the daytime, its justification was like, we're going to go for precise strikes on these military targets, and going during the daytime is what's going to allow us to do that. It also had the advantage of pretty much keeping everybody on their toes both day and night for these cities, trying, you know, that we're under the threat of being bombed. All right. Before we kick into 1943, which is when stuff starts getting popping off,

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All right, guys, back to the show. All right, we've come to 1943. So all throughout the war, nothing stays just flat. Germany's still not surrendering, so stuff's going to continue to escalate. And at this point, it's kind of hard for Germany because so much shit is also going on over in the Soviet Union over in Russia, that they're not able to really retaliate in regards to. bombing attacks against London. They're still able to do them every now and then, but it's not as heavy like it was during the Blitz. And definitely not as heavy as it is to what we're doing to their areas. They're having to focus attention elsewhere, but they're keeping, you know, they have all the fighters there. So essentially, we're doing damage, but they're also doing damage to us just through war of attrition. in 43, that's when they start the first United States mission to bomb the German homeland.

So as the war progresses, we're also getting further and further into Germany, but we still haven't got a foothold yet. So we're essentially taking more dangerous and dangerous missions because we've also hit targets that are further away from, you know, the center of Germany in that area. but also German industry because of this bombing directive is also starting, I think, to kind of pull itself in and condense a little bit and redirect some resources and manufacturing. And so in order for us to continue to have the impact, we not only have to go larger, but we have to go, we got to penetrate. We got to get deeper inside Germany is what we got to try to do. So March 5th and 6th, again, this is 43. the Brits have their 100,000 mission for Bomber Command. What?

Their 100,000 mission for Bomber Command. How? Okay, so Bomber Command did all of the bombing campaign. Now, yeah, they're bombing Germany. They're bombing places in France. They're bombing Yubopans. They're bombing refineries. But any time they're sending guys out to even bomb, you know,

search out and bomb. bomb a destroyer because they have bombers flying over the English channel that some of them are retrofitted to be able to try to bomb ships. So anytime they're even launching these little one or two plane missions, it still counts, but still to get to 43 and to have your 100,000th, why can I fucking say that? My mouth is really dry. Because that number is just ridiculous. Mission, no kidding.

April 13th, 115 B-17s destroy half of a fawken wolf, that. building in Bremen. So again, they're still going after military targets. They're actually hitting them once in a while, but statistically, I think they said less than 10% of the bombs they dropped got within like a damageable area. It's not good. You're dropping them from 25,000 feet up and you're hoping to be precise. I mean, you might be more precise with that bomb site, but there are so many variables that are going to change the direction or the trajectory of that bump. The plane could sway just a little bit when it's launching and it's throwing it off a few degrees. One at every 10 still. Well, kind of getting back to the formation part of it as well. So when the American planes would fly in,

they would have to be in a protective formation in order to protect against the bombers. That would require them to be in these box formations. So you would have these box formations that were like four to six planes. and then you would have them, you know, you had like smaller groups like a squadron and then four squadrons make something else and then a bunch of those make another thing. So you would have these big bomber raids that would take place, you know, 115 was kind of slow or low in comparison to some of these raids. And you would be flying one formation, like a formation within a formation. So it would just be extrapolated.

So you would have one bomber group that was out on. in front at the highest. You would have another bomber group that was, you know, in the rear at the lowest and then one medium. So being in the low was like the worst place that you could be because not only were you going to be closest to the, any aircraft gun and the flat guns, you were going to be the first ones that the fighters ran into. And if you were also last in the formation, you were the ones that were going to get the brunt of it because everyone had already kind of been notified to intercept you. Well, if anybody gets popped in front of you're avoiding a potential crash in front of you, right?

Well, and there were situations, man, where it got so crazy because they're flying so close to try. And that was the thing. You're staying so close because you need the mutual support of these other planes to try to survive. But you're also trying to fight the urge to try to take evasive maneuvers and steer out of the way instead of just being a straight flying target and just counting on your guys in the back. to be able to, you know, protect you. And I mean, they talked about, I listened to a few interviews of guys that served either as pilots or on the bomber crews. And they said, you know, the training that they gave them, and I never even kind of thought about this. They would take them up in the B-17s for the gunners and they would tow a target behind a plane that was flying out to the side of them

so they could work on leading the target. And of course that makes sense. How else are you going to know how to do that? Yeah. Are you going to be the first time you're trying to figure out how to shoot these planes is going to be in Germany or anything? No. Like you have to find ways to train them. But what that doesn't prepare you for is a plane maybe flying past you or flying next to you to teach you how to lead it. And then a plane coming in flying 200 miles an hour faster than you zipping by you trying to shoot you. Well, not to mention, yeah, you're not just dealing with one other airplane up there. You're dealing with a lot of other things going on. Well, and what would happen is the outer areas of the formations were the most dangerous because you were the furthest away from the highest concentration of strength.

So usually those guys would actually get, I think, I can't remember what they called that position. But those would be the guys that they would go after first. And if they hit you in the engine, I mean, the B-17s would get home on two engines. And they could fly for a little ways on one engine as well. But started out with four. Correct. But you lose one engine and compare. to the rest of your squadron

or the group that you're flying with, you're not able to fly as fast and you start to drop back and drop out of formation as soon as you're by yourself. The fighters, they wouldn't focus on the rest of the formation anymore because they knew that they could shoot you down.

And so even having a little bit of damage could be a death sentence. And not only, you know, you had the flack that you were flying through and if you managed to get through that because again, it's launching shrap there were holes. I sent you the damage of like entire sections of the plane and the wings getting completely ripped off or punched through holes in the fuselage, you know, engines, you know,

with freaking half of them torn away, but these things would still fly, but they're definitely not going to fly as fast. And then as soon as all of a sudden that flack stops, it's not like a reprieve. You know it's only stopping because they're not going to send up flack where their fighters are. So it's like as soon as you make it through that nightmare, which nothing can prepare you for, because you can't simulate a situation like that in training. Can you imagine what it was like for those pilots, maybe hearing back from other pilots and being like, this is what you got to prepare yourself for, the flack is crazy, it's explosions all around you. And in your head, you probably still can't imagine how bad it's going to be.

And then you get there. And it's jerking the plane around and you're seeing explosions next to you and the windshield next you cracks because fucking shrapnel hit it. And all of a sudden now fighters are coming in and all this shit is going on. And you're trying to do your job. And that's why you have that training that tries to hardwire you for that. But like, nothing prepares you for that. No amount of training can prepare you for that kind of stuff.

No, I don't even think the first few times that would happen would. No. Like, and imagine if you got a, up and you, your first couple missions were quiet. Yeah. And you were just like, this is going to be easy. Like, we're going to, this thing. And then all of a sudden, you run into this next mission and you're completely fucked. And you're, and you're literally looking out the sides of the plane and you're seeing a, we can get blown off the plane, flying in formation behind you. And then all of a sudden you see your buddy's plane get hit and all of a sudden one of the engines start smoking and

it starts to fall out of formation. You know that there's nothing you can do to help him. Or you start to see a plane going down and you're just you're just saying you know if you're I listened to like a lot of the radio chatter on it and you would just hear like Johnson's plane's been hit or they would call out the name of the plane like you know like Memphis bell like uh duces wild or something and they would be heading down and you'd just be like do you see any shoots do you see any shoots he's like one two I see three shoots and you know that seven guys were going down with it and then you fly back and as you're flying back, you know,

the way that it was kind of structured is not all these bombers were at one airfield. There would have been a huge military target if, you know, he found out where it was the country was.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. So you had these little airfield that would maybe have like 15 or 20 planes at this airfield. And so they would know

how many planes were flying out. You had your ground crew there. You had your, you know, command structure there. And when you were coming back, they would just be counting your planes. And,

They, you know, we sent out 20, 12 or only 12 came back, and they would just be, and you'd see him coming back smoking. Or if you saw a plane coming in and they had a, a hole, a little hole in the ceiling, kind of next to the flight engineer. And it would fit a flare gun. You could put a flare gun up in it and fire a flare up in the air. And they would use this for, like, forming up formation once they got up in the air. They'd be like, launch a green flare.

And the planes flying around would see the green flare and they'd converge on your formation so you could group up together. So if you're coming in and you see a red flare, it means that they have wounded on board. And as soon as they landed, they were able to pull up to the tower where the hospital trucks were in the doctors and everything to pull these fucking guys out of here with like fucking shrapnel wounds and fucking just bloodied or burnt if there was like a fire or something like that. Was there an episode that we did where we talked about somebody accidentally fired up the wrong colored flare? I feel like it was another war episode. I'm sure it's probably come up at some point, something like that. It's probably more common than you think it happening.

In these little airfields, if you launched, say, 20 from that airfield, another one down the way to launch 20, you only get 16 back. Are you radioing around to the others to say, hey, did one of my planes fall short on you? So your airfields are going to be a little bit deeper inside Great Britain. not presenting an opportunity along the coast, but they would have airfields that were literally set up right on the coast. Like, you fly over the close to Dover, there's an airfield literally right there for emergency landings. For relief. Just having all these. And so first thing you're thinking is, okay, how many planes are coming back? Where are the other pilots? You probably know in your head what the survivability of these guys are. But at the same time, you're then waiting for

communication because you don't know what airfield they could have landed at. Yeah. But when they landed, they were supposed to report back that they had landed. And so you knew that they were, you know, still alive. They would radio you before you had to radio out to try to find him. Yeah, I mean, there were instances when, depending on the flight back that they were going, because they didn't just hit the target and then fly the same path back, because then they were flying over the same fibers that were fueled up to go out again. So they had a different flight path or flight plan.

You would have guys that would have to land in freaking Scotland because they were damaged in everything. And they had to try to make emergency. landings. One thing that if you guys haven't watched Masters of the Air and this is something

that interests you watch it, it's a great show. It's by the same guys that did, Band of Brothers, Spilberg and Hanks. But it centers on the 8th Air Force

and they were a group of like B-17 air crews. And whenever an engine would get damaged, they would be like, I'm feathering it. I'm feathering it.

And I didn't know what that meant. So I looked it up. And what they would be doing is they had the wherewithal and the training and the knowledge of these planes, so what the pilots would do is if an engine started going down, well, those blades, if they're not spinning, are pretty wind resistant.

They're pretty flat and they're pretty big. So feathering it, he would rotate the prop to where it would almost be facing straight ahead, like a knife cutting through the wind so it would have less drag. So then that portion of the plane isn't pulling back as much and the plane isn't fighting him. So you would have them constantly working these engines, you would have situations where

engine caught fire and they would put the plane into a dive to try to create enough air. They would cut off the fuel and try to create enough air to where it would put out the fire and then try to pull back out of the dive. So is that how they controlled their movements was by the propellers moving back and forth?

It wasn't like flaps on the... No, no, they had flaps, but basically what that allows you to do is when you change the pitch of the prop. Yeah. It changes how much it's cutting into the wind and how much air it's pushing behind it for power. But I think to a degree, there was an optimal position that was the most fuel efficient, one that they would use. And maybe they would

have to rotate them when they were trying to climb and gain altitude quickly. Like rotate them up to propel them faster? What I mean rotate. Okay, so you have, let's say you have a prop and it has four blades on it. Yeah. The blades are usually sitting. Just imagine all the blades sitting at a 45 degree angle. So when they cut through the air, they're forcing that air back. they would be able to rotate the prop itself. Oh, so not the whole thing, the actual blades would twist. Yeah, not like one of those Osprey planes where they were able to kind of rotate the engines.

They were able to just rotate the blades of the props so they would be facing so they wouldn't be creating as much drag. That makes more sense. So you also had, you know, the guys, and I know I'm not covering 1943 yet because I'm getting stuck on this, but you not only did you have the aircrew, cruise. And these guys were guys that had trained together and were only really swapped out or replaced if one of them was killed or was injured or anything like that. You would get someone to plug them in.

But you also had all the guys on the ground. And I don't think really that's like a completely unsung group of people that almost more than anything deserve as much credit as the guys that were flying over there because their job was so important and they took it so seriously. Seriously. I think you had a ground crew of 11 per B-17. And these guys weren't just like a bunch of mechanics. You had a guy that was the crew chief that was in charge of everybody. You had specialists in engine mechanics. You had an electrician. You had people that specialized in the propellers, sheet metal workers, armament guys, to where everyone had a speciality. So you could be working on the plane all at the same time. And you were having to sometimes, sometimes, Sometimes you would have three days of three missions in a row. And your plane would come back rarely without damage. And these guys are having to go through these planes and inspect them for every bit of damage they have because they know if they missed something, it could cause an issue on the next flight and it could cost 10 guys their lives. So they knew that every time that they had to go in and fix an engine that maybe if that one didn't look hit, they still had to tear it apart to make sure that it didn't get hit to make sure that it wasn't damaged.

The electrician that had to go through where bullet holes and flack burst had punched holes in the fuselage and cut a whole bunch of electronics or busted circuits had to go through and rewire stuff to make sure that the freaking turret didn't lose power or anything like that or that the flaps, you know, hydraulic cables or, you know, just cable pullies that controlled flaps and everything weren't severed. They also had to go through and any time a chunk was blown on. or a flap had a huge hole taken out of it. They had to replace that whole flap and patch the thing up. Timeline on those repairs was probably ASAP too. So it wasn't like you just had an eight-hour shift that you went in and worked on them and then... No, so what would happen is as soon as the plane got back, the crew chief would talk to the pilot and ask him anything and everything about the plane. What did you notice?

Of course, he's going to point out anything that happened to the plane that he noticed. so they know what to focus on. But he's also saying, how did it perform? What happened? When did it lose power? To find out every detail about it and they went to work immediately fixing these planes. They would work all through the night. And then in the morning, if there was another mission, they were out there before anyone

else was awake, doing complete walk arounds, checks on the plane, making sure nothing had changed the night before. The crew chief and another guy would go into the cockpit. They would power up all of the engines. they would go around make sure there's no leaks. They would make sure everything was perfectly set up

for the crew when they came out. Then the armament guys would have to come out. The guys that are towing these huge 500-pound bombs on little tugs and pulleys and wagons that would have to get under the plane

and then wench them up individually crank by crank to get them up into these planes. And while all of this is going on, you have these crews who, you know, they may not have a mission the previous day. They may have gone out and had a few drinks, but all of a sudden, four o'clock in the

morning, someone comes in and tells the commanding officer of that plane, hey, you guys are flying today. Wake you up, wake up your crew. You would go in, they would make you a special breakfast. They do, like, bacon, eggs. You'd get, like, some, like, coffee and everything. They start calling it the last supper. Then you would go into your briefing for the bombing, and they would tell you, you know, this, they would uncover a board and say, this is our mission today. You wouldn't find out about it until the day of, because they couldn't, you know, risk any of that information linking out. Absolutely. The guys would explain what the weather patterns were looking like. They would talk about what type of resistances they expected, where they had concentrations

of planes that they were trying to avoid. And so you would get all of this information, and then start making your way with your crew out to your plane and go through all of your, the reason pre-flight check start happening is because when the B-17 was going through that testing phase, and I mentioned it crashing, because they had the flap lock on, and as soon as they lifted off, they couldn't control the plane and it nosedived. So they invented a checklist that had to be done after that, and that's where we get the advent of the pre-flight checklist. Do you, for everything? Like, for commercial, for, wow. What do you think the mood of these dudes is?

Like during the morning briefing and everything like that? Like, do you think they're just sitting there sipping coffee and reading over papers and looking at it? I mean, how do you put yourself in a position to just focus on that instead of the, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit? I think the morning you wake up, you have no downtime because everything you're doing that morning is prepping. Every second that you're taking before that plane takes off is a bit. getting prepared for the mission and making sure it's got the highest chance of success. They said a lot of guys only got through with, it was an interview with guy, and he's like, a lot of guys only got through the war because of pills, pills to put you to sleep, pills to keep you up. He's like, that was just kind of the way we had to operate in those situations.

Yeah, I don't blame him. I was talking to you that it was a really unique position rather than being a sailor or, you know, army troop on the ground or anything because you would wake up, in England. And you would find out you're flying. You would fly your mission. And if you made it back, you were back in England that day. And you could be at the Bart night. And most of the time, if you're there, all your friends aren't there with you because

chances are, you know, one or two or three or even more wouldn't be making it back. And then you don't know if you're going to have to fly the next day because you don't know when these missions are planned. Yeah. You got to always be on edge. even at the war. They said the expectancy, the average expectancy without getting shot down

was 11 missions. Caviot to that is that in order to be able to go home, you had to fly 25 missions. And then partway through the war, it got increased to 30 missions. Bad odds. It's real bad odds. Really bad odds.

And if you made it to 25, they would fly you and your crew got to go back to the States and basically do like war bond drives and everything. I think, the British also had the 30 mission rule. And they were also flying missions earlier on.

So I think a lot of those guys got to it a little bit faster. But that does you know good if you don't have the next gen ready to go. Because if you're releasing... No, no, you would. You would be consistently training people. You still, there has to be like a batch of recruits that you're looking at. And you're like, they're not as strong as these guys that are about to phase out. like so what they would do and this was another interview i watched is when guys would first come in

they wouldn't let them fly as part of their crew first they would have them not all together but one guy would go fly with this crew if he was the navigator one guy would go fly with this crew as a gunner this guy would go fly and they would be with an experienced crew that could make up for their deficiencies oh okay and they would get a couple missions under their belt and then they would come together and fly also at the same time they're constantly flying training missions in England, in Scotland, working on bombing accuracy, working on navigation, because navigation at this time for like the B-17s was literally a guy with a map that knew where they were going that was clocking the speed they were traveling at for how long

they were traveling in what direction. Then when the plans called for it, he would call to the pilot for another heading. They would turn that way and he would start the clock again to try to find out were, you know, to try to direct them to where they needed to go. So these guys had to be on the ball consistently practicing navigation. The bombardiers had to be consistently practicing to be more accurate. And the pilots had to consistently practice to essentially fly in all types of scenarios and weather and everything. So not only are you flying these missions, but you're also flying training missions in between as

well. Are they actually dropping bombs during training missions? They were usually dropping like dummy bombs. Yeah. Okay. So there's not just like one big stretch of Scotland that's just completely bombed out because I don't believe. I don't believe.

So I think they knew the ordinance worked. And so I don't think they had to really actually test if that was going to happen. But there was a time that, and I'm sure it happened to other bomber groups and everything, but the one that masters of the air and it took actual missions and kind of show the results of those, there was a time when they had to fly three missions in a row in three. days. So your plane is getting repaired. Sometimes you might not even be flying your plane because your plane was damaged too much, but they still needed a crew. So how do you come back from one day? You made it. You made it back. You're on the ground again. And then you know tomorrow you have to go back up and experience that same thing.

If you survived that one. Now you're 23 left, 23 missions. But I know that after 11, That's the average. I could be less. I could be a little bit more. But after 11, I feel like I'm going to be on borrowed time. So getting back to 43. So on May 5th of 43, the game kind of changes because during this entire time prior to this date, all these bombers have been flying without escort. So they've just been being picked off by both the flack and the fighters. They can defend themselves and they do have, you know, fighter kills. they're able to go ahead and make it harder for the fighters because they're half into bob and weave and dodge and everything. So had they not had this type of armament on the flying fortress, a lot more would have been lost, but they're still losing too many. So the P-47 Thunderbolt, which was a pretty decent fighter in the war, they start to develop and put drop tanks on these things. The tanks that would go up under the wings, they would take off with the bombers because of the extended fuel. They would burn all the fuel in the tanks first, drop the tanks, and then they would be,

able to fly with them further to engage the enemy fighters. Even if they couldn't fly the full way, even if you could only fly halfway with the bombers, you're still flying more than you could fly before. You're able to keep all of those fighters that would be harassing them all the way up to that point off of them or trying to prevent them from getting shot down. And so then they're only having to fly the last leg of the journey by themselves. So they're doing anything they can to try to increase the survivability because they are losing like a lot of air crews and again they're not landing over friendly territories territory so even the guys that bail out are getting taken as POWs they would get sent to this play place called stalag Luft or something and it was a

processing center for the pilots and for air crews because they were treated differently than like army POWs oh okay because I was going to say if you're a POW in your army you're probably ended up in a camp in a work camp or something but with pilots because the British had German POWs because when they would fly over there and get shot down, they would get taken. So there was this weird agreement that they would actually like treat them like humanely and everything. So the bomber crews and the air crews actually got it a lot better than I think a lot of the other POWs for like other services. But then again,

you're still there for the remainder of the war unless you try to escape. And you could have got shot down in 43 and you could be there until 45. So having those escorts and increasing the likelihood of those guys getting through and getting back was huge. May 17th, Operation Chastise, watch a YouTube video or listen to a podcast directly about it. Or if we do a Patreon, which we're trying to get off the air, I'll do that one because it's not a full episode, but it's still pretty fucking cool. They were trying to figure out a way to kind of interrupt the industrial capacity like they were trying to do the entire time. but they had an idea that in the Rur Valley, which was kind of the industrial heartland,

the bread and butter for Nazi Germany, some of these places ran off a hydroelectric power from dams, but they also, it was a low valley. And there were dams there. And so they got the idea to drop bombs on the dams. Yeah. To try to flood the area, kill the power. Pretty much just caused chaos.

Pretty smart. Well, the bombing wasn't accurate enough to actually drop a bomb straight down out of a plane and try to hit the dam. so they developed these bouncing bombs and they rigged a Lancaster to be able to pull you know bring these in

and basically they looked like a giant steel drum and they would hang under the belly of the plane and as they got closer it started to spin it and rotate it in the opposite direction so backspin and as it got down low what would happen is these dams the Germans knew that they were targets and so they had like anti-bomb netting around them

so like you couldn't drop a torpedo and it wouldn't make it to the dam if you tried to do something like that this bomb would hit the water and skip and it would skip over the nets, the torpedo nets. It would slam into the dam and then it would sink. And once it got to a certain depth, it would explode and it would crack the dam. There's no way that these worked, right?

Two out of the three of them hit the dams. They launched three and multiple planes against each target. They had three dams. Two of the dams that they hit. Wow. And you're thinking, okay, not only does that put kind of a kink in the, you know, that area in which it floods and which it, loses power to. It's also extremely humiliating for Hitler. Not only that, but now you have to

redirect concrete supplies that could go toward the Atlantic Wall, workforces that could go toward that. All of those guys have to be redirected to then go back and repair that dam. So even little operations like this that may not have had a huge impact are still pulling these little resources away. June 25th, the U.S. launch a rate on Bremen and end up losing 26 B-17s.

That is an insane number. 20, meaning 10 guys per crew. 260 guys. Yeah. Just in that one raid. They end up losing 26.

And so, again, they're having to launch into Germany, they don't have the long-range fighter support yet. They can get halfway there, maybe, but they're still the hardest areas they're getting hit are going to be the areas right above their target because they're the most heavily protected. I don't know if you know this. Did they hand out aces for these guys too? Was there ever an opportunity to shoot down that many planes? Oh yeah. Like if you were a tail gunner or you were the spary ball gunner, you were keeping track of how many planes. So you could be an individual ace.

And I think what a lot of them would do is they would, if you look at like some pictures of like them, they call them forts. They would put a bomb logo on the front, like how you're counting underneath like the window for how many bombing missions they'd been on. And then underneath they would put an iron cross for how many fighters they had shot down. So you had some that I mean, you have 13 guns that after you're leading up to the bomb run. You're getting attacked. Everyone is manning a gun. Your navigator is not having to track anymore because you, know where the target is.

Your bombardier isn't bombing yet, and everyone else has a gun in their hand, and they're firing just out in whatever direction. Not only is it your fighter or your bomber firing, it's all the other bombers around you trying to fend off these fighters. And they said there were instances when just in the heat of things you're following a target and all of a sudden you strafe down into another B-17. It's friendly fire. There's no way to stop that.

They said it was just kind of the nature of what ended up happening because there was so much shit going on up there. A bomber race would be pretty cool. That would be a... I think there had to have been a couple bomber races. I'm sure there was more than a couple. And it continues. So that was June 25th.

So July 29th, they start equipping the Nazi fighter planes with rockets. Yikes. So if they can... I mean, they're unguided. They're just, you know, they shoot and they're comparatic. But if you can hit something with a rocket, it's going to do so much more damage and you might only need to hit one of these bombers

once. So they start using... rockets from planes. So that's another thing that they got to worry about at this point. August 17th, there was a mission called the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission. And what the plan was, is they were going to launch a few different, like, bomber groups, and they were going to fly and one group was going to bomb one target. One group was going to bomb the other. But because one group was going in first, what was going to happen is they were going to kind of draw the attention. This other group would be able to come in, bomb this other city,

and by the time that they reacted, these planes were already going down, as far as like the fighters to refuel and everything, this other group that would be bombing this other target, they would get the attention last, but they were turning around and flying home so they could get harassed more. So they were going to take like the business end or like the shitty tail end of it, and this first group was going to take the shitty front end of it. One of the first groups was then going to fly, not back to,

England was going to fly all the way to Africa. What? It was closer to fly down to Africa? A group from the, so the 100th bomber group, which was called the bloody 100th because they lost so many guys. They flew this mission and then turned south and flew all the way to, I want to say like Alger or like Tunisia or something and had to make it all the way down. It got to the point too where I mean some of these guys are running low on fuel.

And so as soon as they get to. a place where kind of flying out over the Mediterranean, they're dumping stuff off the planes. They dropped the ball turret. They were able to detach it if they need to do like a belly landing. They're dumping machine guns out the side. Anything they can do to save weight, they're trying to pitch out just to make sure they can try to make it.

I mean, it was a huge journey just to do that. And then to return back to Great Britain. You have to have someone basically come get you and you have to take a roundabout way to get there because your planes are so damaged and you don't have your repair cruise down there. You're having to get back through other means. And you're the most important part.

You're the air crews. They can get more planes. They can't replace you that easily. But during that Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission, they lost 60 B-17s, and between 58 and 95 were severely damaged. And that's including the cruise, too? The 60 that were lost.

Yeah, and I'm sure the ones that had damage to probably a few of them had lost people within the plane itself. So you're losing at least 600 officers. Yeah, 600 crew. So, and again, that's just in one mission. And these things, it's not like they have, you know, total amount built throughout the time, 12,000. But you don't have that amount there.

You can't, you can't afford to be losing these, this, you know, this amount of manpower. On October 10th, there was a raid to Munster and 12 guys, there were 13, I'm sorry, I think there were 15. I'm sorry, I think there were 15 or 16 planes out of this 100th bomb group. They flew this mission. On the way there, three of the planes malfunctioned and had to turn around and fly back. And of the 13 that flew to continue to the target, only one made it back. And it was this guy named Robert Rosenthal, and they called him Rosie. So you would have times when these singular bomber groups would just be completely wiped out.

and then all of a sudden, a week later, new planes would show up, new air crews would show up, and looking at it from even like the ground crew perspective, those guys are still there and have to then take on a new plane and a new crew and now try to and now care about these guys in this plane as much as like, how fucking discouraged would you be like if you kept losing the crews that you got close with? and then a new group came in and you're like okay I'm you know I'm friendly with these guys and those guys get shot down at what point are you just like I'm not fucking talking to these people anymore getting close because I keep losing friends it's exactly what I was just thinking is you

almost have to put up a wall between you and them because you don't know if they're ever going to come back and I think that's also something you have to probably do as far as being guys flying these bomber planes knowing that you know they knew what they were doing and like listening to interviews with them and everything, they're like, we were doing what we needed to do to try to end the award, and that was our priority.

But anyone that thinks, that says they didn't have reservations about, you know, whether it was at the time or afterward, about what they were actually doing and how they would feel had that been put upon them

or their families, like there was some, some reconciliation that you had to fucking do, regardless of kind of probably what your job was within that plane, knowing kind of what you were contributing to. Yeah, that's heavy stuff. Four days later was called Black Thursday.

They did a second raid on Schweinfurt. So a little less than probably two months after that, they do another raid. 291B17s were sent. So a lot of fucking planes. Back to Schweinfert. Second raid on Schweinford to hit it again. They probably didn't knock out enough of the infrastructure or the factory or the factories that they were going after. It was still in production.

They were going to have to hit it again. You couldn't, ideally you would want to bomb a place once, because after you bombed it the first time, they were probably going to be a little bit more prepared the second time, knowing that you didn't cause as much damage as you needed to. And more mad. So out of the 291 of the B-17s that were sent, another 60 were lost,

17 were damaged beyond repair, 121 were damaged, and 650 men were lost on that mission as well. So just within that two-month period, you've lost over 1,200, 1,300 guys. So they're fucking losing so many people. They finally realize that we can't fly these like deep missions into Germany more or we're not going to have anyone left.

So they actually kind of put like a little bit of a hold for like, I think it might have been a few months until they were able to figure out the problem of like solving the escorts. And how I wrote it was deep penetration was put on hold and need escorts. It's a fact of life. So at this point, they're trying to look for a solution. They can't afford to be losing any more guys. The guys that they are bringing in as well, you know, as the replacements, they're trained in everything. But you've got to have some experience in order to get you back there.

Like, if you run into a worst case scenario when you're new, had you had three missions under your belt, you might have had some idea how to practice, you know, how to do. deal with that. But if you're new and this is the first time, and the first mission you're flying into is insane flack and fighters, you know, flying everywhere and your planes to your left and right are getting shot. Just like the, how could, you know, how could you not have fear during that kind of shit? This is the age old Mike Tyson. Everybody's got a game plan until they get punched in the face. Like, there's, you can't, there's no training mission that you can fly where you're actually going to have like a a grouping of bullet holes

into your fuselage or you're missing something that got blown off. You don't practice that. No. You can't practice having shards of fucking razor sharp metal being flung at you at fucking thousands of miles an hour. November 18th,

the British end up bombing Berlin. And this kind of kicks off what's known as the Battle of Berlin. on the night of the 22nd and 23rd, 764 bombers rated Berlin. Just getting that many together. And I think that was strictly a British operation. They weren't going for factories in Berlin at that point, were they? It's nighttime. So no.

Are we over Berlin? Yep, drop the fucking bombs. And, I mean, it got to the point, especially like during the missions, you know, after the precision bombing thing wasn't as effective. especially, you know, even for the Americans, what would happen is you would be flying in these type formations. The lead of your formation would be the guy that was aiming the bomb site. And then as everyone is watching,

you would have the bombardier from the other planes watching the lead plane. You'd see his Bombay doors open. They would open their Bombay doors. They would still be watching him. They wouldn't even be looking at their site. The pilot would just be holding it steady. And as soon as you saw the bombs start to fall out of the lead plane, you just hit your switch and your bombs fell out too.

It's just a waterfall. Yeah. Wow. And one of the guys was describing, and he's like, you would drop your bombs. He's like, and you couldn't see your bombs because of the distance that it had to fall. Your tail gunner might be able to look down and try to see the area, but you definitely wouldn't be able to see it up front. But what you could see is you would witness all of the bombs that were dropped by the bomber group in front of you, like some distance in front of you. And he's like, it just looked like the ground was just like shaking.

He's like all of just, it looked like the ground had come alive for a brief moment. hadn't just been shifting and moving around. This could possibly be a dumb question, just based upon how high in the air they are. But that amount of bombs hitting the ground, there wouldn't be any reverberations back up into the air that would affect the planes, right? No, no, no, they're so high,

and the bombs are just concussion. No. Okay. Yeah. Because I'm sure when the atomic bomb hit and the mushroom cloud went up, it had to have sent waves. Yeah, and that was one of the big things, is they had to determine how high the plane

and how far could get away from the blast to where it would be safe. And that was one of the factors on how high they needed to drop it from, I think. But even the clusters of these falling weren't. No. I mean, they were, and the thing is, too, is they were so far past it by the time

the bombs, their bombs even hit. Yeah, I don't think that was... 25,000 feet to the ground, yeah. Yeah, definitely quite a bit of time. So, around this time as well, kind of toward the end of 1943, a savior arrives in the, in the form of the P-51 Mustang.

Now, when it first gets to Europe, it's a fighter plane, single-seat fighter plane. And when it initially gets to Europe, it was a good plane, but it wasn't great. It wasn't able to go ahead and just simply outperform

any of the German fighters that they were flying at the time. But then they switched the engine out, and they're like, let's throw a Spitfire engine in there and see what it can do. And it was just the perfect marriage of just engine

and then also just like fuselage design. and how the fighter was designed. And it became the top fighter of the entire war. And so what these P-51s also had was the ability to use these drop tanks and increase fuel range. So they could literally...

And it was the same planes that the Tuskegee Airmen got later on, the Red Hills. It was the same type of plane. So they would be able to follow the bombers all the way to Berlin, fight around Berlin, and then fly back. And so you would have, if you get some time, just watch a few scenes like the actual bombing scenes from Masters of the Air, because you would see the planes flying.

You would see like the group like way out ahead of you and you would see their contrails from their planes. But then you'd be looking everywhere else to be looking for contrails and everything. And you would all of a sudden just see this swarm flying in. And it was fighters. The Ford Mustang is named after the fuck. Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I didn't know that.

That's a fun fact. to learn that the Ford Mustangs are named after those fighters? So you would see these planes that would be, and the bombers called them their little friends. So they're like, we got little friends with us. And so you would have these fighter escorts that would be flying with the bomber group, just kind of protecting them,

and all of a sudden you would see a group of Nazi planes coming in, the fighters would drop their tanks, and you would just see them fucking punch it and just haul ass out in front of the planes. They weren't going to let them try to get to the fighters before they engaged them, they were trying to go and disrupt them and punch a hole through to where the bombers could just keep flying straight on their course. I could see why they're little friends.

Yeah, I mean, there were so many, it increased. As soon as that occurred and that plane showed up on the scene, it was almost an instant reversal because the main advantage, of course, you can't fight the flack. That's always going to be an issue, and that was even more deadly to the planes than the fighters were. But if you're able to take that out of the equation and only just kind of worry about, about the flack, you're not losing those planes to other fighters. You're only losing it to the flack. So you're reducing your losses right there.

More of a fair fight. Yeah, exactly. So we come to 1944 and this was kind of the tide is turned as far as bombing goes. So there aren't going to be as many losses and it's when, again, shit gets cranked up. So March 6th was the first large-scale U.S. rate on Berlin. It involved 600 bombers, six. 1,600 tons of explosives and fighters out of 8 to 900 fighters that went with them. There were 600 bombers and 8 to 900 fighters.

They lost, I think, 60 or 160 to 170 fighters. This just drives home how bad East Berlin had to be when the wall was up. Yeah. After all of these bombs were dropped on Berlin. And not a lot of... And it wasn't a lot of infrastructure work to go into rebuilding everything. Yeah, dude. If you look at some of the footage, it just, it's the skeletons and just little bits of buildings that are poking up.

It kind of looks like Hiroshima, not as flat, but just the destruction is, I don't, I don't know how else to describe it. Like, I can't imagine being through something. Like, the death tolls that when you look at that stuff should have been higher. Yeah. And they were still pretty fucking high. So, big thing that, you know, D-Day gets so much shine in which it should for, you know, the invasion, Operation Neptune, overlord, all of that stuff.

But the role that the bombing campaign played in that was huge. So just the 8th Air Force alone, which was just the American arm, basically, that was operating in Europe there. 1,789 heavy bombers flew missions on D-Day, dropping 3,500-plus tons of bombs. So these were the guys that were. flying in destroying railways, destroying fortifications that were just back off the beaches a little bit, that were destroying marshalling yards where, you know, soldiers in armor and all that stuff would meet up, basically trying to cause as much damage and, you know, disruption as they could to make sure that the landings were actually successful.

The, just to put that number into perspective, 3,500 tons is. seven million pounds of explosives. Yeah. Just over the course of like three days in their lead up to overlord. Yeah, it's fucking insane. July 26th is actually when the first engagement with Measershowit 262, the jet fighter that the Germans developed, that was the first time that there was an engagement with that jet.

And when it actually, sorry, when it got its first kill, I think against either a fighter or a bomber. August 27th, things were going so well that the Brits were finally like, you know what, we haven't seen daytime during any of our bomber raids in a long time. So they were like, we're going to get on it too. And they started performing daylight bombing. And it was the first time they had done that since I think they'd really got into the war.

And they had the P50 ones with them as well. Correct. Okay. So, yeah, they were having just as much success. Yes. And I think that that's probably one of the big kickers is like, oh, you guys are maybe hitting your targets a little bit more and you're being protected. Okay, we're going to get it on this too.

We want some of that. So September 18th, this is just kind of funny. So apparently before this, Stalin wasn't really letting the Bomber Command or the United States Air Force really use of using any of their airfields. I think they could maybe go land there if it was an emergency. But there was something that for some reason he wasn't allowing that. So on September 18th he was finally like comrades, you can start using our airfields. Well, what this meant is that missions could fly over Germany and then just keep flying straight and not have to turn around or anything like that. And then what they could do is they could then bomb something on the return mission.

That's perfectly stolen to wait. You're in an ally ship, I think alliance with these other two world powers that are fighting the exact same goal. And Stalin's like, no, man. This is a red airfield. This isn't you. Well, and what's weird about that is the whole reason that there was such an aggressive bombing campaign is the entire time Stalin is just pushing, hey, you got to put more pressure on them on the West because they're focusing all their attention on the East. And everyone's fucking dying over here. And so he was telling them they got to start upping their fucking game in the West to try to at least draw some of Hitler's eye over that direction.

and any time they bombed or blew up any of the resources, they had to pool more resources back over to the western side. So it was working. I'm just surprised he didn't let us land there as soon as we started doing it. Yeah. There was probably something to the thought of more of those planes and more of those bombers being on red airfields would be more subject to... And more of a presence.

Like, if you land on our airfields, are you going to start wanting like an airfield of your own and start wanting to establish a presence here? What's that going to mean for after the war? You're going to start asking questions. about the skull canteens that we're carrying around. You and Poland and like fucking those Eastern European countries that get absorbed.

You don't want anything between you and them. Yeah, that's our territory. That's red territory here. So, 1945, we come to the last year of the war. January 1st, we talked about it during the Battle of the Bulge Operation Bowden Plate, where the Nazis tried to launch that huge air offensive to try to knock out a bunch of our stuff in

France. So that was the one, you had mentioned something earlier about how they would be back at the bar and drinking. Wasn't that the raid where they told all of the pilots, even though it was New Year's that they weren't allowed to drink anything, they had to stay sober just in case anything happened in the morning. I'm assuming that was probably especially at this point in the war when stuff was, especially six months after when the Allied line is trying to push and break out in France, I would

assume there was probably some lockdowns on stuff. Had we? February 3rd, the United States Air Force largest rate on Berlin occurs. And kind of in a weird poetic way, Robert R. Rosenthal, who had lost all but one of those planes in that one raid. Rosie. Rosie, he actually gets to lead this huge insane raid on Berlin. And of course, they have a shit ton of fighter cover and everything. But just like looking at pictures and images of people taking pictures from the ground when you have all of these criss-crossing con trails of all the fighters moving back and forth.

And there's one scene, I'm not sure how accurate it is, but I don't know how it could be anything but this. it shows when the fighter formation is all bunched up flying over Berlin and all of the P-51s are fighting against the Luftwaffe fighters. You're flying in and out of these bomber formations and you're turning and you're looking at the target in front of you and there's stuff flying all around you. It just looks like a swarm of bees just moving in and out like there had to have been so many mid-air collisions. There were in fact one of the pictures I sent you of the B-17 where it looks like it had been cut like back through the tail. Yeah, that was the one that you sent me where I was like, how does that fly?

There's no way that you're... That got hit by a German fighter. And the German fighter cut through that and then end up breaking off, but that thing flew all the way back. So February 18th through the 19th, 200 targets were selected to be bombed by over 20,000 bombers.

We're sent out to bomb these 200 targets. So not all at once and everything, but over these 200 targets, 20,000 total bombers were sent out to do this. the 13th through the 15th of that month apparently we just been like 45's it for us we're ending this shit now because stuff gets dicey the 13th through the 15th is when the firebombing of dresden happens and the firebombing ends up killing in like around like 25,000 people and that's literally just full on torching that fucking city and i'm not saying you know ethically i can't really make a call

on it because I wasn't there trying to make that decision. I wasn't looking at the allied losses. I wasn't, you know, writing letters home to people. It's easy for me to sit here and be like, well, they shouldn't have done that or to say they should have done it. I don't know. It's just, it's a lot of loss of civilian life. Yeah. If you have to put a, if you have to say it that way, it's kind of clear that it's a morally shaky thing, but again, you're not the one that's sitting there counting the crosses going home. Yeah. So there was a mission that occurred in March. I think it was like mission 894.

I'm not sure how they designated them. But it was a mission in which they kind of engaged the German jet fighters, like a bomber group and like its fighters and everything. At this point, I don't know if it was just that they didn't have enough of them or the pilots were just subpar. but there were 1,300 plus bombers on this mission and 733 fighters. They only lost 6 bombs or sorry, they only lost 13 bombers and 6 fighters during this mission. So the longer it goes, the less the losses for the Allies are, you know, they're just reducing. And the more the losses for the Germans are increasing. The Germans just must have been up there flying for funzies and not trying to six is.

Such a small number. If, you know, the planes they're trying to get up probably aren't being piloted by people who have been in this position, they don't know where the weak points were to avoid on these bombers. You get someone that's like, well, I was trying to take on a bomber from the rear because that's where I thought I'd be safe. And it's like, no, because the rear gunner is like directly lined up. You can't just stay right behind him. Turns out there's just weapons on this thing everywhere. Yeah, it's, I think they called it like the porcupine or something. I think the Germans might have called it the porcupine because it had so many guns just pointing out every which direction.

we come to April 22nd, which was the last raid on Bremen, and then was pretty much the last raid that the United States conducted, big raid that they conducted over the war. And then for the RAF, it was three days later when they sent a bunch of landcasters to actually bomb the Eagles nest. Hitler's little retreat, everything, in the over Salzburg. Yes. So, yeah, so they sent them down to do that.

That's pretty deep. At that point, they were, I think that was more of like a token, like a final, fuck you. Like, look, we can get all the way to your. vacation home. Well, they probably weren't launching from Britain at that point. They had the foothold on the... I mean, you still had people that were protecting that.

And because that was Hitler's vacation, I mean, he's had all the anti-aircraft gun and all the soldiers. It was probably manned by a lot of SS, I would imagine. But the RAF isn't launching from Britain to go hit the Eagles nest. Oh, no, no, no. You're launching from somewhere in France at that point, I would imagine. And because it was so far, you could also be launching from probably like Italy. So, I mean, you could probably be hitting it from a couple of

couple different areas. But I mean, that was kind of the last operation for the war because at that point, you know, the Allies had already landed. They had been on the ground for a little less than a year. And by then the Red Army had pretty much had its eyes set on Berlin. All in all, I mean, the losses that they took, especially for never having really stepped foot on the ground there. I think the RAF over the course of the bombing campaign lost. 55,573, just out of the bomber crews and the bomber command, 8,403 wounded, and 9,300, oh, sorry, 9,838 prisoners of war. The average age of death for the British was 23 years old. And that's the thing. The pilots might have been a little bit older, and when I say older, 26, 27, but these people that were manning the turrets, the gunners and everything, like that, 18, 19, 20-year-old kids. The 8th Air Force between May, 1942, when they arrived to July

1945, 20,000 killed in action, which was more than the entire Marine Corps lost over the course of the Pacific War. Nuh. Yeah. The Marine Corps was a larger force, and it lost less people than the 8th Air Force over in Europe. And they were on the fucking islands fighting the Japanese.

That's fucking insane. And the United States also had 23,000 prisoners of war, guys that were taken. That's it. These numbers just never really cease to amaze. No, but like, fuck, like, that, just that amount of people, 10, 10 going down every time one of those planes goes down.

And if you're lucky enough to get out, I mean, I think the British actually armed their guys with like a form of like escape kit. So if they made it to the ground, it had some German money in it. It had a map. And it had a few other things that they could use to try to escape and get to like the resistance or friendly lines. And as they marched further and further toward Germany, more resistances start

popping up and becoming a little bit more active because the Nazis weren't able to pay close enough attention to them. And they started to create like area or, uh, like lines. in which they were able to go and get pilots back to Britain, if you escaped, or if you, you know, escaped as a POW, or if you bailed out and you were able to avoid capture and get back to Britain, you were done. You didn't have to fly back anymore because if you flew back and got captured,

you might be able to give information about the people that smuggled you out, and then that would ruin it for any of the other pilots that were landing and able to be snuck out. That's very important, but I feel like you should be. taken care of if you had to go through all that to get back. Yeah, I'm not saying that you should load that guy back up and get him the... No, no, no. That guy needs to get the fuck out of there.

He's already been through enough. God, can you imagine that happening on your first mission, though? You get shot down, you end up making it back, and they're like, I guess you're done? Yeah. You're probably pretty pumped, but at the same time, you've seen enough. And I mean, the real victims of this whole thing, when it all boils down, the loss of life for the air crews and, you know, everyone, it is tragic enough, but then when you factor in the people that weren't really fighting the war that bore the brunt of the casualties,

the civilians, over 15 million casualties or killed just in the West alone. So just in that area that the Brits and Americans were bombing, 15 million killed. That's a... Just, I mean, and I'm not saying that those... It's bigger than most states. Yeah, and I'm not saying those weren't factory workers or anything like that, and they weren't contributing. But there were a lot of them that were just working their normal jobs that they were working before the fucking Nazis took power. Or they were people that were like in France in areas where the Nazis had like buildups of like their military strength.

And then they just got bombed because they happened to have been in that area. It's just it's crazy that, you know, as much as like the loss of life on the Eastern Front and, you know, the Holocaust. and all that other shit, these guys just were like getting just shot down out of the air. Yeah, that, that what you just said before is something that I still think is underrated. And we probably talk about it enough, but I don't think everybody else talks about it enough.

Just because you're at war doesn't mean you can just not show up to your job. Yeah. Like, you, even though you're at war, there still has to be public works, there still has to be electricians, there still has to be people that are going through the day job. Yeah.

You might not agree with it. You might just be trying to work your job. You might be a fucking baker that just happens to work. You could work a half a mile away from the fucking ballbearing factory, but you still end up getting blown the fuck up because you're in the vicinity

or in the same city. Well, they don't suspend rent during a war. They don't suspend your mortgage. They're not just handing food away free at the market. And then that just goes to also show you how little fucking Hitler cared about his people. Oh, yeah. Because he's seeing all of this happen. And at no point is he just like, okay, enough.

Like, I'm doing, too many of my people are dying. He's just like, nope, I mean, keep at it. Are they going to run out of bombs eventually? Yeah. Yeah, they can't keep this pace up for this long. But again, the mind of a man. on methamphetamine is a hard, it's a tricky thing to try to understand. Yeah, it's just, it's impossible.

All right, did I bore you? No, that was fantastic. These are the things that I would never think of, but they're the niche episodes that make World War II special. World War II as a whole is so super fascinating, but it's the little things like going into the bombing campaigns and just talking about how you can break down. literally every facet of the war because it was so well planned out that there's so much information that you can get out of them that I just never see coming but it's just it's

endless world war two could go on forever and I'll just end it with this just to kind of because we've talked about him a couple times but they had the 25 mission limit then it got bumped up to 30 so uh Rosie's crew had ended up reaching that 20 mission, you know, that mark. So they were getting ready to go home. It was a huge, you know, morale booster that someone, you know, those guys in that bomber group saw that it was possible to actually do that. I mean, imagine if you never saw anyone to get to that.

It would seem like it was impossible and like how do you even have hope after that? So he ends up completing these 25 missions and instead of going home, he has this mentality that the war isn't over, he's lost friends, he's leaving people over there, and the people that are left over there, like the POWs,

the best thing that he can do is try to continue to contribute to the war and get those guys out as quickly as possible. And he felt that by leaving, he was just kind of leaving them to their own devices, I think. Not only did he fly his 25,

he re-uped after that and ended up flying a total of 52 combat missions as a bomber pilot in the war. And you had British pilots that flew even more than that. So he could have been sent away twice. He could have been sent away twice. He just kept coming back. Well, not if he had to fly the 30 missions the second time. Oh, yeah, 30 seconds. But, I mean, he, that's just one example of, you know, the type of people that were doing this.

And again, it's just one of those, like you said, it's one of those topics. that doesn't get a lot of shine, but when you look into it, you realize how much of an impact it would have had or it did have on the war and kind of what it would have looked like without that. Yeah, just how much is there. How much meat is on that bone is pretty cool. All right, guys. Well, you got anything else?

No, that was great. It was, they're all good World War II episodes. That one's sweet. I think it's the planes. planes are always fun. I showed you some sexy planes. Yeah. All right, guys, well, hopefully you enjoyed it too.

Thanks for letting me fucking geek out on this World War II shit. And we'll catch on the next one. Peace. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us. If you didn't like what you heard, still hit that anyway, because we'll probably cover something in the future that you do like.

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