Original subtitles

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I want to convey

to the people of both Afghanistan and Pakistan

that we will work very hard

to avoid the loss of innocent civilian life.

MAN: The better the strategic air effort that's carried out,

the shorter will be the war and the fewer of our boys will die.

MAN: Once we crossed the moral divide in Berlin,

it made everything else, including the atomic bomb,

a little bit easier.

That moral threshold is,

"We will not deliberately bomb civilians."

BARACK OBAMA: On this day,

we gather because we have chosen hope over fear.

(gunfire)

MAN: Bullets were just kicking up all over the place.

The devastation down there already is just unbelievable.

CROWD: Equal rights!

When do we want it? Now!

THE CHAMBERS BROTHERS: ♪ Time has come today ♪

♪ Time ♪

(song's tempo slows gradually)

♪ Time ♪

(beat slows considerably)

♪ Time! ♪

(fighter plane engines roaring)

(bombs whistling)

NARRATOR: On September 1, 1939, the first day of the war in Europe,

President Franklin Roosevelt issued an urgent appeal.

He called on all combatants to:

By the time Hitler was finally defeated, six years later,

Allied bombs had killed thousands of civilians,

and both enemy cities and America's lofty ideals

were in ruins.

The United States Eighth Air Force arrived in England

with confidence high.

The Americans believed that airpower

had revolutionized modern warfare

and that their new heavy bomber fleet,

flown by well-trained American pilots and crews,

would prove decisive against the thus-far unstoppable Nazis.

On August 17, 1942, in their first action of the war,

a small fleet of American bombers set out to bomb

a railroad yard 200 miles away in occupied France.

(engines roaring)

It would be the first combat test

of the American bombing strategy:

precisely targeting military and industrial objectives

and avoiding civilian populations.

The specially-designed bombers-- B-17 flying fortresses--

bristled with machine guns,

fending off German fighters along the way.

The Americans flew in daylight, despite the risks,

to enable the bombardiers,

with state-of-the-art bombsights,

to aim with unprecedented precision.

(explosions)

The rail yard was severely damaged.

All of the B-17s returned safely,

and the Americans deemed their first mission

an unqualified success.

MAN: Today is the first time

American heavy bombers have been in action in this theater

manned by American crews and American squadrons.

NARRATOR: General Carl Spaatz, a flier since World War I,

was commander of all American Air Forces in Britain.

Between the wars he had helped develop the theory

of precision bombing.

SPAATZ: General Eaker,

commanding the bomber command, led this flight.

NARRATOR: General Ira Eaker was charged

with putting the theory into practice,

convinced that his bombing campaign

would bring a belligerent Germany to its knees.

WOMAN: The Americans had developed a theory in the 1930s

that was all about finding specific cogs,

specific nodes in the enemy war economy

and taking those out, eliminating those,

and thereby dismantling the entire enemy war economy.

Precision bombing doctrine was fervently believed

by most leaders and most airmen.

They really thought what they were doing was the...

was the best way to go about fighting a war.

NARRATOR: After the first U.S. mission,

American reporters attending General Eaker's briefing

trumpeted a great success.

But their British allies did not think much

of the American bombers or the American strategy.

The British are looking at this with a rather jaded eye

because they're thinking,

"First of all, this is a tiny effort.

"Second of all, you're doing things that we tried

"and couldn't do.

You're going to make a lot of the same mistakes we made."

NARRATOR: Like Roosevelt,

England's Prime Minister Winston Churchill had once regarded

civilian targets off limits and advocated precision bombing.

MAN: Churchill was on record repeatedly

between the wars as saying that he believed

that the air force which concentrated strictly

on attacking military objectives

and did not attack civilians would be the side

that not only deserved to prevail

but would prevail when war came.

NARRATOR: On the very first day of war,

the Germans bombed civilians in Warsaw...

(explosions)

and later in Rotterdam...

then, in 1940, they hit England.

BIDDLE: When some German bombers fly off course at night

in late August of 1940

and attack a portion of London,

Churchill takes this as an opportunity to respond in kind

against Berlin.

Hitler is so upset by that

that he then responds by attacking London.

(explosions)

It moves the war into a new phase.

It moves the war into bombing of cities, attacks on cities,

attacks on civilians.

(yelling)

MAN: The strategic intention of the attack on London

was to destroy military installations and their harbor,

but if you read the commentaries which Joseph Goebbels wrote

into his diary, he didn't write,

"(bleep), the bombs went astray into the civilians! No!"

No. He's rejoicing.

Hitler says, "Take the harbors, then the bomb takes the city."

And Goebbels says...

"Fine. We make a hell out of it!"

So, the bomb teaches the bomber what to do.

NARRATOR: Commander Arthur Harris,

who took over as head of the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command

in 1942, had learned the bomb's lessons well.

He had studied the Nazi attacks on England,

meticulously analyzing the damage inflicted

by explosive bombs and incendiaries.

The deadly work, he concluded, could be done better still.

MAN: The Nazis entered this war

under the rather childish delusion that they were

going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them.

At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places,

they put that rather naïve theory into operation.

They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

NARRATOR: The RAF had initially tried bombing

German military targets by day,

until unsustainable losses and poor results

compelled them to change.

The way to inflict maximum harm on the enemy,

Harris now insisted, was to bomb hard-to-miss German cities

under cover of darkness.

The Americans emphatically disagreed.

CRANE: There was a fervent sense among most Air Force leaders

that this was not the way to go.

It was... bombing cities was inefficient.

It was the wrong use of your air assets.

We felt we had better weapons than the Brits.

We felt our-- the B-17, the B-24--

they were better bombers than the British had;

we had better bombsights; we had better training.

We could do this-- even though they couldn't, we could.

NARRATOR: Allied leaders, meeting in January 1943,

opted to combine the American and British strategies.

Harris and Eaker were ordered to coordinate

a "round-the-clock" bomber offensive.

To undermine "the morale of the German people to a point

where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened,"

the British would focus on bombing cities at night.

The Americans would do their best to achieve

"the progressive destruction of the German military,

industrial and economic system," bombing by day.

Both air forces took aim at Hamburg,

a ship-building center on the Elbe River.

BIDDLE: The Americans were interested in it

because they wanted to attack the elements

of the German war economy that were located in Hamburg.

The British were interested in it because they wanted

to take it down as a city.

MAN: There was another reason why they chose Hamburg.

It was because it was close.

It was just a short hop across the North Sea.

So, not only was it a very important target,

it was also a very convenient one.

(man singing in German)

NARRATOR: Hamburg was the largest port in Germany

and the country's second largest city

with over one-and-a-half million people.

Among them, ten-year-old Ralph Giordano.

(man speaking German)

(translated): Hamburg was my nest, my home.

I had a wonderful and carefree childhood

and a deep feeling of belonging to the city

until I was ten and Hitler came to power.

Hitler was very successful in winning over the masses,

including the working people.

I remember our neighbors who hung the hammer-and-sickle flag

and were Communists.

Then, suddenly after 1933,

a swastika was hanging out in front of their house.

(applause)

I remember Hitler coming to Hamburg

for the launching of a battleship

in the Blohm & Voss shipyards.

I wasn't standing in the front row,

but I clearly remember the cheering people.

(crowd singing in German)

NARRATOR: The same shipyard was turning out the submarines

that were wreaking havoc on Allied shipping in the Atlantic.

And close by were important manufacturing centers

for the German aircraft industry.

Hamburg was exceptionally well defended.

Air raid shelters, some in massively armored

concrete towers,

provided protection for nearly a quarter million people.

With heavy flak guns on top,

they could fire shells four miles into the air.

Outside the city,

interceptor bases were scattered along the North Sea,

with 1,500 Messerschmitt 109s on constant alert.

The challenge for the Allies

was to evade those formidable defenses,

controlled by a string of early warning radar stations.

On Saturday, July 24,

792 RAF bombers readied for a night attack on Hamburg,

each loaded with tons of high explosives and incendiary bombs.

It was the first of a series of attacks

that would continue for an entire week,

code-named Operation Gomorrah.

LOWE: It was a hugely complicated operation

getting all these 700 or 800 bombers into the sky

without causing any collisions.

(engine roaring)

They would take off one by one from each of the airfields

which lined the coast of Britain.

Gradually they would assemble over the North Sea

into a very long bomber stream.

Tonight, for the first time,

they were using a brand new secret weapon.

The flight engineer would shovel out these silver foil strips.

Each would show up on the German radar as a single blip.

And the German defenses were completely negated.

NARRATOR: Between 1:00 and 2:00 a.m.,

more than 2,000 tons of high explosive bombs

and over 350,000 incendiaries

were dropped on the west side of the city.

(explosions)

Ralph Giordano and his mother were in a shelter below.

GIORDANO (translated): The people seemed paralyzed.

Nothing moved.

Everyone thought it was lights out for him or her

in a matter of seconds.

The bombs howled down, and there was a gruesome noise.

If you heard the noise,

that meant the bomb was hitting someone else;

the bombs that hit you were the ones you didn't hear

ahead of time.

NARRATOR: Then, that afternoon, came the Americans.

123 B-17s, flying in broad daylight.

Once airborne,

the fleet assembled into box formations to defend themselves

against enemy fighters.

Harry Crosby, just out of college in Iowa,

was a lead navigator.

CROSBY: The hardest part was

to get them all in order,

because we... when we flew, we all followed the lead crew,

which would be me.

And if I didn't find that target,

the work of a million Americans was wasted.

The Americans had a much more difficult job to do

than the British did.

Firstly they weren't bombing under cover of darkness

and they didn't have the benefits

of this new radar-jamming device.

So as soon as they approached German air space...

(gunfire)

the German fighters were on them in a trice.

(gunfire)

NARRATOR: The Nazi fighters did their share of damage,

then peeled off as the bombers approached the city.

Now the Americans faced an even more fearsome obstacle:

the giant flak guns firing at them from below.

CROSBY: When people were shooting at you,

you should be able to dodge, but you couldn't do it.

You just had to go right straight on in.

(gunfire)

LOWE: When they arrived over Hamburg,

the entire city was completely smothered in smoke.

They couldn't see anything, let alone their targets.

Then, almost by a miracle, a gap appeared

and there they could see the Blohm & Voss shipyards.

(bombs whistling downward)

GIORDANO (translated): Midday on the 25th of July, the Americans came

and pelted the harbor.

NARRATOR: Hamburg's key shipyard was badly damaged,

along with an airplane engine factory and a power station--

military targe rendered all but useless

by American precision bombing.

On the fourth night, the RAF returned with more incendiaries.

One of the pilots was 22-year-old Bill McCrea.

McCREA: This was the big raid, the firestorm raid.

We could see the fires an hour's flying from Hamburg,

but when we got nearer we could see this tower,

this pillar of smoke which was rising over 20,000 feet.

It was just like an active volcano.

The bombers went across dropping their bombs in there,

which kept erupting and shooting up these sparks and flame.

GIORDANO (translated): Everything was crackling-- the fire crackled.

Within a short time the smell of burning was so strong

that one had to leave the basement.

It was burning all around,

an inferno like no human imagination could picture.

Everything was ablaze, and constantly the bombs came down.

I saw countless dead, burned people...

people who had been burned and baked together

like a piece of bread.

NARRATOR: When Operation Gomorrah finally ended,

there had been four British attacks on the city

and two American raids on the port.

The toll was 45,000 people killed,

60% of the city utterly destroyed.

I wasn't thinking about the people on the ground.

I was just thinking about myself and my crew.

I'd been ordered to do a job.

I'd been ordered to put these bombs in the air

and drop them on Hamburg

and get back home so you could go again tomorrow night

or the night after.

There would be a bridge to hit

or there would be a factory to hit,

or there would be a gun emplacement to hit.

And you never thought about any human beings there.

LOWE: In the aftermath of the firestorm,

almost a million refugees fled Hamburg

and took with them stories of the most terrible horror

that they had witnessed.

This caused a panic across Germany, which was unlike

anything that they'd ever experienced before.

NARRATOR: The panic extended to the highest reaches

of the Third Reich.

Hitler refused even to visit the devastated city,

sending Luftwaffe head Herman Goering in his stead.

His minister in charge of armaments warned

that a series of similar Allied attacks

would bring German war production to a complete halt.

And there were many who truly believed that the Germans

would be forced to capitulate.

The British establishment certainly thought

that this might be the case,

and there was a flurry of memos suggesting

that perhaps the war might even be over by Christmas.

NARRATOR: The war would not be over by Christmas; far from it.

Allied airmen would still be sent on missions

from which many would not return.

They would still confront a determined enemy

that fought on despite relentless punishment.

And the Americans would still insist

pinpoint daylight bombing would win the war.

In the aftermath of the Hamburg attacks,

the American and British commanders remained committed

to their sharply divergent strategies.

Eaker continued to press precision attacks

on industrial targets.

Harris championed the bombing of cities.

And the city he was focused on

was the center and the symbol of Nazi power...

(cheering)

Berlin.

(singing)

HASTINGS: Berlin was almost Harris's nemesis.

He allowed himself to become obsessed with it.

He convinced himself that if he got

4,000 Lancaster sorties to Berlin,

he could bring Germany to defeat, to surrender,

by April the 1st, 1944.

He gave an explicit date.

He said in another memorandum that attacking Berlin

might cost bomber command 400 or 500 aircraft,

but it would cost Germany the war.

NARRATOR: Over six months, the head of bomber command

sent his planes on 19 mass attacks on the Nazi capital.

As many as 800 bombers on a single mission--

nearly 11,000 bombing sorties.

In the city below, over 10,000 civilians were killed,

nearly half a million made homeless;

all this pain inflicted on Berlin in the hope

that the Germans would rise up against Hitler.

That's the method of terror.

You cannot torture 80 million Germans,

but if you torture successfully seven millions in Berlin,

the rest of Germany would come to their senses.

So, you need the theater of pains.

All German cities should witness the Hamburgization of Berlin,

the great Sodom of modern ages.

And then, afterwards, all the sinners would say,

"Not me," and overthrow Hitler.

DON MILLER: But, in a police state,

withdrawing support from the government means death.

You're not going to have a mass uprising.

So, yes, morale was lowered, but it didn't matter.

People still showed up for work,

and they went about their lives--

crushed, not believing in victory, but persisting.

Civilian populations have a special war aim,

which is completely different from their leaders' war aims.

It is a very simple one.

The war aim of the civilian population is to survive.

NARRATOR: Despite the incessant bombing,

the Nazis' hold on Berlin remained firm.

But the RAF took tremendous punishment--

more than 600 planes downed...

nearly 2,700 fliers killed,

all with no discernible impact on German morale

or productivity.

(clamoring)

In the midst of Harris's city bombing campaign,

the American airmen had been preparing for an important test

of their own strategy.

On the morning of August 17, 1943,

General Eaker's fliers were briefed on their mission.

Their primary target: ball bearing factories

in the southern German city of Schweinfurt.

Schweinfurt kind of crystallizes the entire American theory.

Here are ball bearings, which are essential

in virtually all industries,

in the working of a modern industrial economy.

MILLER: You need ball bearings for everything.

This is one of these choke point targets,

that if you knock that out, without ball bearings,

industry starts to break down.

BIDDLE: They were flying deep into Germany without fighter escort.

And because they were having to fly across enemy territory

for a very long time, they could be tracked and intercepted.

NARRATOR: Hundreds of Luftwaffe fighters took dead aim

at the unescorted B-17s.

MILLER: These air battles are absolutely ferocious.

They're going in there naked, as it were.

The plane is not pressurized,

so the mask is on and its freezing,

as low as 60 degrees below zero because the rear windows

are actually gun portals and they're open to the air.

So, you're fighting the weather, you're fighting the Luftwaffe.

And the Germans, you see, flying over their homeland,

can land, re-arm, re-fuel, and up again.

(gunfire)

They're just pulverizing them all the way in.

NARRATOR: The crews that made it through the fighters

were still at great risk.

To bomb with precision, they had to approach the target

flying straight and level through dense flak.

They could not take evasive action

until their payload was dropped.

(bombs whistling through air)

Even after the bombs were away,

the American crews returning from Schweinfurt

found themselves under withering fire from enemy fighters.

(gunfire, engines roaring)

(explosion)

MILLER: And it's a catastrophe.

One of the guys in the planes

said that he looked down on the ground, and he said,

"My God, there's haystacks burning all along the ground."

Well, they were B-17s.

They lose 60 bombers.

That's 600 men.

It's the largest number of Americans lost

on a single mission up to this point in the war.

Staggering blow for the Eighth Air Force.

NARRATOR: Despite the losses,

Eaker sent his men on the same dangerous mission

two months later.

BIDDLE: They went back to Schweinfurt

in October of 1943.

And in that raid the losses were truly devastating.

Another 60 bombers shot down, 138 damaged.

You can't sustain that kind of loss levels

over any period of time and continue to have an offensive.

MILLER: 77% of the guys who flew in the first months

are casualties.

You have a one-in-four chance of surviving.

You'd go out and come back,

and part of your crew would be missing,

part of your plane would be missing.

It was pretty hard on the young kids.

MAN: I was afraid, you know. (laughs)

But I just had to do it.

And, of course, the worst part was getting up the next day

and doing it again.

BIDDLE: Crews were coming home and looking at empty bunks

where their friends and their buddies were the night before.

They're no longer there.

Maybe they're alive in a prison camp somewhere,

or maybe they're dead, but they're not there any longer.

MILLER: The guys start to feel they're guinea pigs

in an experiment that's not working.

No air force can survive 20% casualties

in every mission.

There's a growing sense of gloom and doom

that they're not going to be able to win the war

with this air weapon;

that it's just becoming too costly and too dangerous.

NARRATOR: Eaker remained undeterred, his strategy unchanged.

Precision bombing, he insisted, conducted by unescorted B-17s,

could do the job.

MILLER: He's terrifically stubborn.

And he never, ever gets it out of his mind--

out of his belief system, I should say--

that this thing won't work;

that unescorted bombers can go into the heart of the Reich,

do heavy damage, and not take unsustainable losses.

And he kept that belief stubbornly,

to the point where he was relieved of his command.

(marching band plays)

NARRATOR: In December 1943, Spaatz replaced Eaker

with a legendary airman, General Jimmy Doolittle.

(applause)

General Spaatz, distinguished guests,

the strategic effort must go on

and the better the strategic air effort is carried out,

the shorter will be the war

and the fewer of our boys will die.

CRANE: Jimmy Doolittle is the charismatic combat leader,

the first guy to bomb Tokyo, the first guy...

he bombs Rome, he bombs Berlin.

I mean, he has his own fighter plane he flies around

in the skies over the Eighth Air Force.

He's a larger-than-life figure.

NARRATOR: Doolittle's arsenal included an agile, new, long-range fighter,

the P-51 Mustang.

Now, for the first time,

the bombers could be protected deep into Germany and back.

The Mustangs would prove crucial

as Doolittle's forces prepared the skies

for the anticipated Allied land invasion, scheduled for spring:

D-Day.

The foremost concern of the Allied commanders

in advance of D-Day was to ensure that they possessed

absolute air superiority over northwest France.

And in order to achieve that,

they set out to attack Germany's aircraft factories,

for the first time escorted by the Mustang long-range fighter.

The Eighth fighter command will give fighter cover to targets

and back from the targets.

It's desirable that we peel off as many fighters as possible

to come down and strafe ground targets.

The strategy now is draw up the Luftwaffe

by hitting things like aircraft factories

that Hitler has to defend.

He sends his force up and the Mustangs massacre them.

(explosions)

In addition, when you return from missions,

you can drop off and fly low and strafe German airfields,

destroying German aircraft on the ground.

NARRATOR: For the Americans,

the result was a dramatic change from the disasters

at Schweinfurt.

The Eighth Air Force destroyed twice as many enemy planes

in March 1944

than had been downed in the previous two years.

Three months later, on the shores of Normandy,

the Air Force's achievements paid off.

The D-Day landing proceeded without interference

from the air.

The Luftwaffe was nowhere to be seen.

MILLER: It's the first great accomplishment

of strategic bombing.

We were destroying air frame factories, yes.

We destroyed some ball bearing factories.

But when you think of this, this is a world-turning event, D-Day.

This is what turned the tide of the entire northern...

war in northern Europe.

And it isn't possible... wasn't possible

without what the Eighth Air Force had done.

NARRATOR: For Allied commanders, it was a crucial time.

With the right strategy,

the end of the war in Europe could be within reach.

There was a lot of excitement about the fact

that Germany might be at the precipice;

Germany might be on the brink of collapse.

And so ideas were developed for a major attack

on the city of Berlin to shock the Germans into surrender.

NARRATOR: In the late summer of 1944,

the British proposed "Operation Thunderclap"--

the total devastation of the center of Berlin.

Thunderclap looks distasteful

to a number of the American air commanders

because it looks like terror bombing.

It looks like bombing for shock effect.

NARRATOR: In a letter to the Allied Supreme Commander,

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Spaatz expressed his objections.

"The U.S. bombing policy, as you know,

"has been directed against precision military objectives,

"and not morale.

I am opposed to this operation... as now planned."

That fall, the plan was tabled,

the disagreement between the Allies rendered moot.

But Eisenhower made it clear that the American Air Force

should still be "prepared to take part in anything

that gives real promise of ending the war quickly."

In the fall of 1944, American planners sought to hasten

Germany's collapse by bombing targets identified

by Allied intelligence as most critical

at this stage of the war.

To deprive the Nazi war machine of its lifeblood,

American bombers zeroed in on the synthetic oil facilities

spread across the countryside.

(explosions)

To disrupt the struggling Nazi economy,

they targeted key railroad marshalling yards.

MILLER: The Germans have to assemble these gigantic trains

with thousands of cars at places called marshalling yards.

So, there you have this tremendous massing

of economic power in these marshalling yards,

these central marshalling yards.

Hit them.

But they're inside or close to cities.

NARRATOR: The marshalling yards were often located near workers' housing.

When visibility was poor

and the Americans had to rely on their primitive radar,

known as H2X, civilian casualties were unavoidable.

BIDDLE: H2X could not allow

for precision targeting.

It could allow for finding an area and bombing an area,

but that's about it.

You only have a hunch as to where the target is.

And you bomb or you don't bomb.

Well, they bombed.

There was never a question about stopping the bombing.

It becomes a moral issue

because if you continue to bomb like that,

you are hitting an awful lot of civilian targets-- homes--

and there's a lot of collateral damage.

So you're nudging closer to the British concept of area bombing.

NARRATOR: Even as Allied bombing took its relentless toll,

the Germans refused to give up.

By the winter of 1944, hopes for a quick end to the war

had been replaced by smoldering frustration.

Nazi resistance had kept Allied troops

from crossing into Germany.

The Russians remained mired in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Even a badly depleted German Army remained a formidable foe.

(artillery fire)

FRIEDRICH: The Deutsche Wehrmacht was

the most terrible, most ruthless,

most spirited fighting force

which was ever seen on any battleground.

I don't say it with any pride.

It was a terrible, aggressive machine,

but with military capacity beyond any comparison.

NARRATOR: The Wehrmacht had launched a massive

and unexpected counter-offensive:

the Battle of the Bulge...

which cost the Americans more lives

than any other battle of the war.

They had launched their own aerial terror weapons,

the V-1 and V-2 rockets, raining destruction down on London.

They had shocked the Allied air forces

with the sudden appearance of the world's first jet fighter,

the Messerschmitt 262.

Now there were fears that Hitler might have one more surprise,

perhaps big enough to turn the tide of the war.

BIDDLE: There's a great deal of pessimism

that starts to enter in to Allied high command.

And they start to think that the war may drag on

well into the summer and into the autumn of 1945.

And this is a very frightening scenario.

The focus has to be Japan.

We've got to finish off the Germans.

There's this idea of an enemy they can't understand,

an enemy that is beaten but won't surrender.

NARRATOR: There was intense pressure coming from the highest levels

of command to bring the war in Europe to an end.

Even Roosevelt, who had long decried

the bombing of civilians,

was now prepared to accept massive aerial bombardment.

And so what Allied planners do at this moment in time,

this crucial moment in December and January 1944, 1945,

is to look around and say, "What instruments do we have

to end this thing, to get this over with?"

And they recognized that if the war's going to end,

the Soviet winter offensive has got to make progress.

NARRATOR: That January, with the backing of Eisenhower,

Spaatz revived Operation Thunderclap,

the all-out assault on German morale

he had once vehemently opposed.

This time it would include attacks on transportation hubs

in Leipzig and Dresden

to put pressure on German defenses on the Russian front.

But the centerpiece of the operation,

reversing years of American strategic policy,

would be a massive air assault on Berlin.

BIDDLE: Doolittle is told that he will bomb the city of Berlin.

This is different language.

He's very uncomfortable with it.

He's not comfortable with designating an entire city

as a target.

He protests to Spaatz and he says, "This is not what we do.

"We attack specific locations within cities.

"We may attack cities, but we're looking for marshalling yards,

"we're looking for factories,

we're looking for specific sites within those."

And Spaatz says,

"No, for this raid, we have to bomb the...

"we're bombing the center of the city.

This is an attack on the center of Berlin."

NARRATOR: Doolittle sent a hard-edged memo to his commanding officer.

The Berlin attack, he wrote Spaatz,

would "violate the basic American principle

"of precision bombing of targets

of strictly military significance..."

Spaatz was unmoved.

Operation Thunderclap, the all-out attack on Berlin,

would proceed as planned.

CRANE: The Thunderclap raid is important

in that it can clearly identify where the American Air Force

says, "Yeah, we're going to destroy a city."

And that's one of the things that made Doolittle

so disturbed about it, because he says,

"We're really moving completely away from everything

"that makes us different, makes us unique,

makes us more humane."

But he did it.

He followed his orders and he did it.

And you can argue that once the...

once you've done that once, it makes it easier to do again.

NARRATOR: On February 3, 1945, 1,003 bomber crews were briefed

for the largest American air mission of the war:

an attack on Berlin, a city of nearly four million people.

Sam Halpert was a navigator with the 91st bomber group.

HALPERT: We were briefed to go to Berlin.

The map of northern Europe was up there,

and there was a ribbon going across, which was our route.

NARRATOR: Although the target designated by Spaatz

was the city of Berlin,

Doolittle did his best to give the crews aiming points

with clear military value: train stations, marshalling yards

and Goering's Air Ministry,

just 500 meters from Hitler's fortified bunker.

The bombers and their escorts headed east.

HALPERT: By then, the Luftwaffe had been pretty well beat up,

but they still had quite a bit of planes in force.

As a matter of fact, they started sending up

jet planes against us.

NARRATOR: After four hours flying time,

the squadrons approached their target.

(sirens blaring)

NARRATOR: Horst Sinske,

a 15-year-old apprentice in an aircraft parts factory,

studied the skies above.

(man speaking German)

(translated): We saw the first lines of attack and thought,

"This will have no end."

(sirens wailing)

You could look over the roofs and see the flak tower

of Friedrichshain.

When the guns were pointed up,

you knew that an attack was only 30 or 40 minutes away.

(flak fire)

HALPERT: When we approached the target,

we'd start seeing the flak bursts come out.

The closer you got, the more flak there was.

And the pilots just had to ignore that

and head right into it,

when everything in their body was telling them,

"Turn that plane around and get the heck out of there."

I don't know what the geese feel like

when the hunters are shooting at geese, you know,

as they're flying over a pond.

What I kept in mind, one thing,

was that a lot of geese get shot

but most of the geese get through.

SINSKE (translated): I heard the flak guns and decided to run.

I knew that once a direct attack really got going,

the doors to the air raid shelter would no longer be open.

I knew that.

And when I reached it, indeed, the doors were shut.

I ran to a house nearby and they let me in.

HALPERT: When we got over Berlin, sure enough,

the lead ship was hit right in the middle

maybe about five to ten yards beyond our wing.

I could see bodies coming out.

That's what I remember.

I didn't see any parachutes.

I was pretty well shook up by that.

NARRATOR: That day, 21 B-17s were shot down over Berlin,

but it was only a small fraction of the massive American fleet

raining down devastation from above.

SINSKE (translated): A high explosive bomb hit directly outside.

The room was buried under a meter of rubble.

(voice breaking)

On top was a child's change purse

and a little piece of cloth.

And we thought that someone must have been buried.

But we found no one.

It was very still in the city after these attacks.

The concentration camp inmates took the dead way.

These people brought the corpses out quickly

and they threw them on the ruins.

And the mountain got higher and higher.

In the end it was two meters high.

They were just thrown onto it.

NARRATOR: The February 3 raid killed approximately 3,000 civilians.

120,000 Germans lost their homes.

But this attack on Berlin would have significance

far beyond casualty numbers.

MILLER: With this raid, the Eighth Air Force crosses a moral threshold.

And that moral threshold is

we will not deliberately bomb civilians.

Usually the moral divide for historians is the Tokyo raid,

which took place the next month,

where we incinerate the city and kill almost 100,000 people.

And... but I think

once we crossed the moral divide in Berlin,

it made everything else, including the atomic bomb,

a little bit easier.

(explosions, gunfire)

NARRATOR: The war in Germany raged for three more brutal months,

months that saw the city of Dresden destroyed

in a firestorm just weeks before American bombers burned Tokyo...

(explosion)

months that saw 200,000 Russian soldiers killed

in the final assault on Berlin,

an assault made possible, in no small part, by Allied bombing.

In the end, the Nazi surrender that had seemed so close

for months finally came in May.

The American air strategists could now devote

their full attention

to the urgent task of defeating Imperial Japan.

The war had brought utter destruction to Germany,

the nation that began it,

and death to more than a hundred thousand

British and American airmen.

Half a million German civilians were killed by Allied bombing,

adding to the more than 20 million civilian deaths

in Europe as a result of this war.

BIDDLE: When democracies go to war

and they find themselves in total wars,

they have to work through a set of moral choices

that are sometimes extremely difficult and extremely painful.

Fighting Nazi Germany, in the end, meant fighting all out,

meant utilizing every resource that we had.

But in order to defeat this enemy,

we had to make some choices that were in some ways regrettable.

MILLER: Wars are uncontrollable.

And no one knows how and why they get out of control,

but they do.

Witness Roosevelt's first statement about fighting

a clean war and not wanting anybody to bomb children

or innocents or anything like that.

Wars just fly out of control.

CRANE: I see this idea of just killing civilians

and targeting civilians as being unethical.

Though the most unethical act in World War II for the Allies

would have been allowing themselves to lose.

There' ♪ Time has come today... ♪

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