Original subtitles

[music]

[Narrator] In an age of aluminum and steel,

it's a plane made out of wood.

The RAF said, "Yeah, that's a silly idea.

We don't need it."

[Narrator] Laughed at as the "Balsa Wood Bomber",

its performance soon silences the critics.

Right from the start, the Mosquito was associated with

daring special operations missions.

The attack on the German State Broadcasting Company

is one of the greatest propaganda coups

for the Mosquito and for the Royal Air Force.

[Narrator] Mosquito crews fly the riskiest missions

over the heart of Berlin.

Put the parachutes on, opened the trap door

and looked down to the darkness and said,

"Well, on second thought, let's not do this!"

We were all flying at over 300 miles an hour.

[Narrator] World War II veterans

remember missions like they were yesterday.

[George] The speed.

The height. The maneuverability.

It just felt beautiful to fly.

It was speed that was the requirement

because our job was to bomb and get out.

[theme music]

[Narrator] December 15, 1944, England.

Five years into World War II,

flight crews of the RAF's 608 squadron

are anxious to know where they're bombing tonight.

Among them is 23-year-old pilot Colin Bell.

The target would be revealed when a curtain was pulled.

And if it was Berlin, a groan used to go up in the room

because if you're going to be shot down,

it was more likely to occur over Berlin than anywhere else.

[Narrator] Unfortunately for Bell,

tonight's target is Berlin.

The most heavily defended of all German cities,

Berlin boasts three huge concrete flak towers,

each bristling with anti-aircraft guns.

The German air defenses were very sophisticated.

German searchlights and German antiaircraft

take a devastating toll on RAF Bomber Command.

You were always picked up by ground radar.

You would see searchlights everywhere .

And as you got closer to Berlin,

you would be engaged by anti-aircraft fire.

If you weren't frightened,

there was something wrong with you.

[Narrator] Medium and heavy British bombers,

like Wellingtons and Lancasters,

take ten hours to fly to Berlin and back.

Losses mount.

Nearly half their aircrews die.

The solution? A plane like no other.

Lighter, wooden framed, and capable of 400 miles per hour,

the De Havilland Mosquito can do the bomb run

in far less time,

and it outruns the German night fighters.

[Colin] The German propeller-driven aircraft

couldn't keep up with us.

If we saw them coming, we could avoid them.

And by the time they had made a pass,

it was too late for them to turn around

and catch us up again.

[Narrator] The lightweight Mosquito

has two winning design features.

It's almost all wood.

Just a few components,

like engines and wheels, are made of metal.

Even its crew is lightweight.

Just a pilot with his navigator sitting alongside,

but slightly behind him.

Its second design masterpiece?

Not one, but two Rolls Royce Merlin engines--

a power to weight ratio guaranteeing superb performance.

As those engines power Colin Bell's Mosquito

on tonight's mission to Berlin,

there's another reason he ought to be scared.

His Mosquito bomber doesn't have a single gun to defend itself.

But who needs weapons when you outpace

almost everything else in the air?

[Colin] If we'd had guns,

it would have slowed up the aircraft.

It was speed that was the requirement,

because our job was to bomb and get out.

[Will] The Mosquito can fly at very high altitudes,

22, 24, 26,000 feet,

which means it can stay out of range of all

but the biggest of the German anti-aircraft guns.

[Narrator] Nearing Berlin, Bell must hope

the flak can't reach up to him,

as he searches for his target in the darkness below

and releases his bombload.

[whistling]

[blasts]

[Narrator] But tonight, the Germans scramble a plane

they hope will swat the Mosquitos.

It's a fast and fearsome new fighter.

And Colin Bell's now outgunned, out-paced,

and in deadly danger.

[Will] There was only really one aircraft that the Germans had

that was able to outrun the Mosquito,

and that was a jet aircraft called the Me 262.

[Victoria] The Me 262's capabilities

really are frightening.

The Mosquitos have been used to actually having free reign

over the Third Reich.

But now the Me 262 is closing in on it.

[Narrator]] The Messerschmitt is the world's first

jet-propelled fighter

with a top speed of 540 miles per hour.

That's over 100 miles per hour faster than the Mosquito.

Bell's unarmed wooden prop plane

is suddenly looking very vulnerable.

[Colin] If he got a visual on you, you were dead ,

because the firepower of the Me 262 was so great,

it would turn you into confetti at the first blast.

[Narrator] The Me 262 doesn't only have

overwhelming firepower,

it's also got new radar mounted on the nose cone--

perfect for targeting Mosquitos.

To fight that, Bell has just a little white warning light.

We had a device on the back.

If you had a white light come up,

it meant that there was a German fighter

using his air-to-air radar to pick you up.

And that was very bad news.

[Narrator] Bell's white light is on.

In a split second,

he's transformed from hunter to hunted.

[Victoria] To have a jet fighter coming towards you

when you've been raised on piston engines

and on radial engines must have been absolutely terrifying.

[Mike] The Me 262 is an incredibly powerful weapon,

especially at high altitude, where the jet engines thrive

rather than drink all the--all the fuel.

[Narrator] Bell and his Mosquito have seconds to act.

[Colin] I put the aircraft over on one side

and drop down 10,000 feet.

That would take me right away from the night fighter's radar.

[Narrator] The white light goes out.

[Colin] But after a while, on came the white light again.

And I then did other actions, like going up 10,000 feet,

turning off at 90 degrees.

And eventually I went down very low over Berlin.

[Narrator] It's Bell's last throw of the dice,

and he knows it's a huge gamble.

Flying low over the most heavily defended city in Germany

takes Bell out of the frying pan

and into the fire.

In desperation, Bell hurtles downwards,

right into the sights of every anti-aircraft gun in Berlin.

It seems crazy, but Bell knows what he's doing.

[Colin] I knew that when you went down low,

jet fighters use up an enormous amount of fuel.

And I knew this guy had only got 45 minutes

from the time that he took off to the time he got back to base.

And after I'd done a bit of whizzing around down low,

the white light went out, never to return.

[Narrator] Bell's quick thinking

and the Mosquito's speed and maneuverability saves his life.

He heads home.

[Victoria] Any pilot, experienced or otherwise,

would have easily panicked in that situation.

And the fact that he has the wherewithal to remember

how much fuel is consumed by jet fighters at lower altitudes

is incredibly important in that moment.

[Narrator] In the skilled hands of pilots like Colin Bell,

the Mosquito proves its worth in combat.

But it's an aircraft that almost failed

to ever get off the ground,

a design first dismissed by those preparing the RAF for war.

September 1936.

Britain faces the threat of war with Germany,

but lacks bombers which could reach the enemy's cities.

Britain needs a new aircraft,

capable of carrying a 3,000-pound bomb load

at 270 miles per hour

for 3,000 miles

at 15,000 feet.

Most manufacturers put forward heavy bomber designs

bristling with guns.

But air warriors aren't always pilots.

They're sometimes the designers.

One suggests a radical solution.

Geoffrey de Havilland already has a stable of aircraft

to draw ideas from.

Including the Comet Racer

The Mosquito was so different from other fighter bombers

because its heritage came from the Comet Racer.

This was De Havilland's successful plane

that had broken the speed record

flying from England to Australia in 1934.

They're really good at racing airplanes,

especially twin-engine racing airplanes like the DH 88.

When they approach the Air Ministry and said,

"Hey, we've got a great idea for a brand new airplane.

It's gonna be made entirely of wood",

the RAF said, "Yeah, that's a silly idea.

We don't need it."

The Air Ministry laughed at him.

What, a wooden aircraft? You must be joking!

[Narrator] But De Havilland is deadly serious.

He's not giving up his dream.

And he's about to gamble his own fortune and his reputation

on the "Wooden Wonder" plane.

[Narrator] The British Air Ministry

is desperate for a new bomber,

and British designer Geoffrey De Havilland

thinks way out of the box.

[Rebecca] De Havilland was really thinking

two steps ahead of everyone else.

He knew that the bigger, heavier bombers

had to be armed to the teeth to defend themselves.

Big and slow was a losing idea .

Speed was the answer.

[Jeff] The hidden fight during World War II

was the fight for strategic materials.

Any new aircraft took away steel and aluminum

from other aircraft.

[Rebecca] De Havilland knew that strategic metals like aluminum

were in short supply .

So he resolved to use something else--wood.

[Narrator] But by early September 3, 1939,

Great Britain is no longer preparing for war.

It is at war.

No time now for fancy ideas.

Defense chiefs want proven designs,

not wooden experiments.

They give De Havilland an order--

stop work on the Mosquito immediately.

But he ignores the doubters.

Using his own money, De Havilland

presses on with his plans

at a tiny factory outside London,

developing new techniques of wooden construction.

The Mosquito was nicknamed the "Balsa Bomber",

but it was nothing like the biplanes of World War I.

The wood construction technique is actually much closer to

our modern techniques of composite construction.

And by pressing together layers

of specially selected spruce and glue,

De Havilland ended up with a surprisingly strong,

yet light and fast aircraft.

[Narrator] De Havilland works in secret, and with speed.

In less than a year, his design work's complete.

His Mosquito is ready to take to the air.

Although getting it airborne is a bit of a problem.

[Rebecca] His aircraft factory

didn't even have a runway adjacent to it.

They had to take the prototype Mosquito out to a field nearby

for its first flight.

[Jeff] De Havilland stuck to his guns,

and after the first prototype flew,

there was no question

this is an airplane that needed to be in the hands of the RAF.

It was only Geoffrey de Havilland's persistence

that the Mosquito was ever made.

[Rebecca] Seeing the Mosquito fly,

and fly much faster than everything else,

they realized their mistake,

and they quickly got the Mosquito into mass production.

[Narrator] Mosquito production reveals a new side

to De Havilland's genius idea.

Britain's huge aircraft factories

are targeted by the Luftwaffe.

But skilled carpenters build Mosquitos

in small furniture factories

spread out across Southern England.

There's no single Mosquito factory for the Germans to bomb.

[Victoria] Geoffrey de Havilland really pushes this idea

of a wooden aircraft because of the fact that

it's going to be tapping into industries

that actually can't really be used in the general war effort.

It was a concept that nobody,

apart from Geoffrey de Havilland,

had even thought of.

[Narrator] The Mosquito's birth

seems almost too good to be true.

But De Havilland's design theories

have yet to be tested in combat.

It looks good on paper and on the workshop floor.

But the Mosquito and De Havilland

still have a lot to prove.

The Mosquito gets the chance to show its worth

on August 17, 1943,

as eight of the bombers head for Germany.

Lead navigator on the flight is 26-year-old Ulric Cross.

Ulric Cross is one of the standout figures

from the Second World War, in my opinion.

Of all the people from the war I think I would like to meet,

it would be Ulric Cross, because he is truly inspiring.

[Will] Ulric Cross is born in 1917, in Trinidad.

He and his friends are aware of what Hitler's up to.

They're aware of what's going on in Europe.

He says later, "We had Hitler down cold.

We'd read Mein Kampf ".

[Narrator] Cross even helps attract other recruits

from across the British Empire.

And now I'm going to ask flying officer Ulric Cross

to speak for West Indians in the services.

Ulric is a navigator in one our own bomber squadrons.

Well, it's a job to know where to start.

There are so many of us doing so many different things,

in the army, the navy, the air force,

in air sea rescue, and the marines.

Even before World War II had started,

there was this understanding that they were global citizens.

They just believed that Hitler had to be stopped.

And his part was getting here and, and playing his role.

For me, it's a question of did the RAF attract

these remarkable men,

or did they become remarkable once they got here?

I think it's a bit of both.

They were obviously choosing a certain type of man,

and he was one of those men.

[Narrator] Today's mission for Ulric Cross

and his fellow aircrew

is to fool the Germans with an elaborate deception plan.

It's a diversionary raid.

The British call it a spoof.

[Colin] We had made attacks on spoof targets.

We would mark a target,

which was not the real target,

and this led the German night fighters

to come hurtling after us in the belief

they had located where the activity was

for that particular night.

[Narrator] Ulric Cross's mission is taking just eight Mosquitos

and somehow making them look like 1,000 bombers

heading for Berlin.

Meanwhile, the "real" RAF bomber force

can bomb another target

with less risk of meeting enemy fighters.

We used to hurl out these metallic strips,

which were known as window,

and they created the impression of a large attacking force.

[George] It was designed to confuse.

I mean, all these aluminium strips

floating around in the air

completely disorganized

the German radar defenses.

It was an excellent decoy.

[Narrator] Cross and his colleagues

do drop a few bombs on Berlin

and succeed in making themselves a target

for the German fighters.

They're poking a hornet's nest

and putting themselves in mortal danger

from enemy fighters and flak.

[blasts]

He and his pilot, Roy Crampton, are flying over Berlin,

and they drop their bombs.

And then all of a sudden, there's a huge crash,

a bright light, and they've been hit by anti-aircraft fire.

And they have to fight to control.

They have to fight so hard to keep the aircraft in the air.

[Narrator] Ulric Cross describes to his daughter

how the crew almost bail out that night.

And I think Roy said, put, you know, "Put the parachutes on."

And Ulric said, "Yes, of course",

and did so, and opened the trap door,

and looked down to the darkness

where possibly there were searchlights and lots of noise,

and I don't know who else after them,

and said, "Well, on second thought, let's not do this!"

[Narrator] Meanwhile, as the enemy is distracted

by the fleeing Mosquitos,

a larger force of Allied bombers is already on it's way.

The real bombing target tonight is a secret laboratory

developing Germany's V2 rockets.

A terrifying threat to London.

Has Cross's spoof Mosquito mission drawn off enough heat

to let that vital raid succeed?

[Narrator] The pilot of Ulric Cross's damaged Mosquito

fights for control

as they distract German fighters

in a spoof raid over Berlin.

The real bomber formation

targets Germany's top-secret rocket base at Peenemunde.

The Nazis deadly new weapons

could change the course of the war.

Now, poorly defended, thanks to the Mosquitos,

the rocket sites must be destroyed,

whatever the cost.

Operation Hydra, the attack on Peenemunde,

is a very consequential raid within the Second World War.

At the outset, Bomber Command make it clear to their crews

that they were going again and again

to this research establishment until they finally destroy it.

It's considered to be that important

to the German war effort.

[Narrator] As Ulric Cross's eight Mosquito crews risk death

distracting night fighters over Berlin,

600 heavy bombers head for Peenemunde,

100 miles away.

And that first wave is able to attack very effectively,

and without suffering high losses to night fighters.

[Narrator] But the deception over Berlin can't last for long.

Realizing they've been tricked, Germans fighters regroup

and attack the second wave of bombers heading for Peenemunde.

[music]

Operation Hydra doesn't come cheap for the RAF.

288 airmen are killed

and 40 bombers end up shot down.

However, saying that, if it wasn't for the Mosquitos

and the feint and the spoof raid that they carry out,

the Luftwaffe reckons that it would have shot down

another 200 British aircraft.

And we have to remember, there were only eight Mosquitos

on that spoof raid over Berlin.

[Narrator] But one of them is in trouble.

Limping home, Ulric Cross and his pilot.

[Harry] They lose one of their engines,

and they have to fly back to base on just one engine.

And so they're progressively losing height

as they're trying to reach back into Britain.

But they make it. They get to an airfield.

They're about to land, and the second engine cuts out,

and the Mosquito crashes.

[Narrator] They overshoot the runway, end up in a quarry,

yet miraculously survive.

All that was left standing

were the two metal seats of the Mosquito.

Everything else was just in splinters.

And so that's when he realized

how close to death they had come.

[Narrator] Despite crashing after his Berlin spoof raid

Cross demands to keep flying,

even after completing his normal 35-mission tour of duty.

[Nicola] They were supposed to go on leave

after the number of sorties that they've done.

And they both said, "No, we're not going on leave.

We absolutely don't want to".

Their commanding officer got fed up and said,

"You know what?

If you two want to kill themselves, go ahead".

And the next flight,

his friend didn't come back, and he did.

[Narrator] It is only years later,

at a veterans' event in Trinidad,

that Ulric Cross's daughter

learns how brave her father truly is.

[Nicola] And this guy came up and he said to me,

"Is that the Ulric Cross?"

And I was like, "Well, it depends

which one you're talking about. I mean, which one?"

So he said, "Ulric Cross, who flew 80 sorties".

And I said, "Yes".

And the look on the face explained to me

what 80 sorties meant.

Like, I couldn't even fathom, but it was...

Yeah, it was an important thing.

[Narrator] Ulric Cross gets the Distinguished Flying Cross

for his gallantry

and goes on to be a High Court Judge

before dying at the age of 96.

The Mosquito's exceeding all expectations.

Now, it's evolving for new roles.

In the course of World War II, the Mosquito changes

from reconnaissance and bomber variants

carrying four 500-pound bombs

into a fighter/bomber,

with four 303 machine guns

and four 20-millimeter cannons,

ideal for low-level precision missions.

Early on, the Mosquito proved its versatility,

and so air commanders started to call on it

to take on missions that no other airplane can carry out.

[Paul] In the Mosquito, you have

an amazingly versatile weapons system.

You have a stable aircraft

that can carry just enough explosives,

go in onto the target, destroy the target,

and get out again.

[Narrator] Though the Luftwaffe is well aware of the Mosquito,

it's still a secret to the general public.

But in September 1942,

Mosquitos make a daring hit-and-run raid,

bombing Nazi collaborators in occupied Norway.

[music]

[Narrator] The next day, the British media

reports the mission's success.

[Rebecca] This was the first time

the existence of the Mosquito was revealed to the public.

So right from the start, the Mosquito

was associated with daring special operations missions.

[Narrator] By the beginning of 1943,

the Mosquitos are regularly bombing Germany,

infuriating the Nazi High Command.

Although they never admit it in public

and strive to keep up their nation's morale.

The Germans are planning to celebrate the anniversary

of the Nazi seizure of power.

[Narrator] They plan a radio broadcast

of Nazi anniversary speeches to the German people.

The RAF has its own ideas about that.

They're going to put the Germans off the air,

and they're going to embarrass Hitler at the very worst time.

[Narrator] 11:00 AM, January 30, 1943.

German radio listeners hear Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering,

chief of the Luftwaffe,

take to the stage.

Goering is famous for promising that no enemy bomber

will ever fly over the Nazi Reich.

A strange sound is heard over the radio

in almost every home in Germany.

[Goering speaks in German] [plane engines]

[Narrator] The distinctive and soon to be famous sound

of the Mosquito's Merlin engines,

and bombs exploding.

The Germans pull the plug on the broadcast

as the bombs hit Berlin's radio station headquarters.

The attack on the German State Broadcasting Company

is one of the greatest propaganda coups

for the Mosquito and for the Royal Air Force.

It's a crushing blow to the status of Goering

within the popular perception of the German people.

[Narrator] Rubbing salt into the Nazis' wounds,

the Mosquito crews parade in front of British news cameras

and make fun of their exploits.

We approached Berlin above cloud.

We unloaded our contributions to the festivities.

[Rebecca] When the Mosquitos bomb Berlin,

it was a moment of abject humiliation

for the Nazi leadership

and for the Luftwaffe.

[Narrator] The Mosquito is proving its worth.

But greater challenges lie ahead.

With D-Day now looming,

the Mosquito takes on low-level missions

which test the accuracy of its bombing

and the skills of its pilots as never before.

[Narrator] February 1944.

Plans for the D-Day invasion of France are under threat.

The Allies are relying on the French Resistance

sabotaging vital German targets.

But key resistance leaders are under arrest,

locked in the cells of Amiens Prison

just north of Paris.

[Robert] When the request came from

the Secret Intelligence Service

to break down the walls of Amiens Prison,

where a number of members of the French Resistance,

were, uh, being held in February 1944,

this is an ideal target.

The aptly named Operation Jericho

must break down prison walls,

but try not to kill the prisoners.

The only solution is dropping bombs precisely

on one single room.

It's a level of accuracy never attempted before.

To reduce the risk to prisoners,

the Mosquito bombers and their Typhoon fighter escort

time their attack to catch the German guards having lunch

in a separate dining hall.

[Man on radio] Our ETA will under five minutes.

There it is, dead ahead.

[Narrator] The first waves bomb the outer prison walls

giving the next waves a clearer shot.

[blasts]

[Narrator] The following waves breach the north wall,

demolish the guards' dining hall,

and then hit the main prison building

to spring the prisoners.

So you've produced a hole in the wall.

You've hit the cellblock to open up the cells.

And you've killed the guards.

And whilst a number of prisoners are killed during the raid,

in terms of the skill with which this raid is conducted,

it's just outstanding.

[Robert] They demonstrated, actually,

with no practice runs on the target

that the Mosquito was the ideal precision fighter/bomber

for strategic targets.

The wall was broken,

and members of the French Resistance

did manage to escape.

[Narrator] It works so well,

that the Allies plot other raids to help the resistance.

But each has its own dangers.

March 21, 1945.

20 Mosquitos fly from England

on a top secret and high-stakes mission.

In the first of three waves of Mosquitos

is 28-year-old wing commander Peter Kleboe.

All these years later,

nobody knows him better than his niece.

He was very young, very brave, very talented.

Exceptional flyer. He used to train pilots to fly.

He was a very special pilot. He'd done everything.

[Narrator] Kleboe and his squadron

have a double mission,

to free Danish Resistance fighters

and strike at the heart of the Gestapo in Copenhagen.

Its codename? Operation Carthage.

The Gestapo has basically uprooted

pretty much the entire resistance movement

around Copenhagen.

They had prisoners there,

but also significant information archives

about the resistance networks in Denmark.

[Narrator] Danish Resistance will collapse

unless Gestapo intelligence records are destroyed.

But the imprisoned resistance fighters

and the Gestapo Headquarters

are in the same building, the Shell House.

In the grim calculus of war,

surviving resistance leaders demand the mission goes ahead,

even though it may kill their own imprisoned comrades.

These prisoners are being kept as a human shield

for the Gestapo Headquarters.

They know that any attack

is likely to produce heavy casualties.

[Pamela] The prisoners were on the top floor,

so they had to sort of try and save those.

Bomb the bottom, but leave the top so they could escape.

[Narrator] It seems an impossible task,

but Kleboe has a plan.

The key is surprise,

staying under the radar by flying fast and low

for the whole 500 miles from Britain to Copenhagen.

The Mosquito should be the perfect match for this mission,

fast and lightweight, and able to perform superbly

at low level, skimming the North Sea waves.

But it's got one fault that nobody recognizes before today--

the pilot's windshield wipers are unable to cope

with the salty spray deposits building up over the sea.

So having flown at very low altitude of the North Sea,

a lot of pilots who are on the raid report back

salt builds up in their windscreen.

And that may have obscured visibility.

[Narrator] But this mission is time critical.

Now over Copenhagen,

Kleboe weaves between apartment blocks,

buildings the British know as flats.

Doing 300 and odd mile an hour through flats, tall buildings,

he had to go sideways

and very fast.

[Narrator] His windshield is caked with a salty crust.

And Kleboe's eyes aren't perfect after an earlier accident.

He could've stood down,

but I think a lot of the pilots

who were involved in those squadrons,

particularly at this point of the war,

still feel able to contribute,

and they're not prepared to step aside

and put somebody else at risk

when they think they're the best person to do that job.

[Narrator] High-speed, low-level flying is fraught with danger,

and the last thing Kleboe's brother says

before the mission is, "Remember to keep your tail up."

With vision obscured, he screams over Copenhagen.

[Narrator] A squadron of 20 Mosquitos,

including wing commander Peter Kleboe,

heads for Gestapo Headquarters in Copenhagen.

The target's surrounded by tall buildings.

Plane suddenly goes sideways to go past high flats.

[Narrator] But at high speed,

with a salt-encrusted windshield,

Kleboe doesn't see a 40-foot-high light post

in a railyard,

and his tail strikes it.

[music]

And then his wing touched a block of flats.

And then he wasn't able to steer the plane anymore.

So he's trying to make it to Fredericksburg Park,

but he didn't make it.

[blast]

[Narrator] The plane crashes in flames into a garage complex

just beyond a school.

Pilot Kleboe dies in the inferno.

[Pamela] So sad, and he was so young.

He was a very brave man.

[Narrator] T ragedy now piles on top of tragedy.

Next to the crash site is the Jeanne D'Arc Catholic School

with 500 terrified children, nuns, and teachers

now running to bomb shelters in their cellar.

Smoke from the blazing wreckage of Kleboe's plane

confuses some pilots in the following waves of Mosquitos.

Some of the crews of other aircraft coming in

mistakenly took the school for the target

and dropped the bombs on there.

[blast]

[Narrator] It's the single largest loss of civilian life

during the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

Among those killed are 86 schoolchildren,

14 nuns and teachers.

[Ole] The sorrow and sadness and shock over the loss of the--

of the many young children was devastating.

[Narrator] For decades, the full details of the disaster

are lost to the fog of war.

Kleboe's family mistakenly believes

he has bombed the children.

But many years later, the true facts emerge.

My grandma always thought he bombed the school,

which he didn't.

So she thought he'd killed all those children all her life.

She didn't know any different.

She died before we knew all the details.

[Ole] I don't think there's any significant blame attributed

to the air force pilots.

They took very high risks themselves.

[Narrator] In the moral distortion of total war,

the mission is considered a success.

Many resistance fighters escape

to continue fighting the German occupiers of their country.

Even so, it's a sad moment in the Mosquito's history,

although, over the past 18 months,

the plane has been steadily evolving.

A new weapon for a vital task against an enemy

under the seas.

March 25, 1944.

A Mosquito heads across the English Channel

towards Saint-Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast.

Its prey, German U-boats.

Diving down on the water to attack

is a dangerous game for its crew...

including navigator 23-year-old Des Curtis.

If you're at 25,000 feet and you're hit,

you have time to think how you're gonna get out.

If you're at 200 feet above the sea and you're hit,

the sea is very unforgiving.

[Narrator] The Mosquito has been

an unmatched low-level precision bomber.

And now it gets a new, immensely powerful gun.

The "Wooden Wonder," dismissed as the "Balsa Bomber",

is now a flying field gun.

[Narrator] Named after a deadly fly found in Africa,

the Tsetse Mosquito packs a powerful bite.

It's got a 6-pounder anti-tank gun

developed for use on the battlefield.

For the aircraft, it gets a loading system

which feeds 21 rounds rapidly into the barrel.

The whole mechanism squeezes into the Mosquito's bomb bay.

There's only one thing giving away

the Tsetse's bite--

a gun barrel sticking out of its nose.

This gun was about 12 feet long.

The first time we fired it, the noise level was the thing

that got us, first of all, uh, feeling

that maybe we'd damaged the aircraft.

[Rebecca] When the Mosquito crew fires that anti-tank gun,

the recoil makes it feel like

the plane has stopped in the sky.

[Narrator] As Des Curtis approaches the French coast

in his Tsetse Mosquito,

and spots a German U-boat on the surface.

The German U-boat commander is Raimund Tiesler.

He's an experience officer,

but he's now in a dangerous situation.

Because they were moving in shallow water,

the U-boat had to be on surface

while it made that transit journey.

[Narrator] But on the surface, the U-boat's radio chatter

is intercepted and decoded.

The RAF know that U-976 will be off Saint-Nazaire that day,

rendezvousing with its escort,

which is precisely where Des Curtis finds it.

Doug called up, "Target ahead, breakaway, breakaway, go."

[Narrator] While their fighter escort

attacks the U-boat's support ships,

Curtis and his pilot climb before diving in for the kill.

Okay, setup completed.

There it is, dead ahead.

[Des] In that short distance between 1,500, 2,200 feet,

Doug managed to fire five rounds.

[Narrator] The bulk of the U-boat

is hidden below the waves.

To sink it, they need a deflection shot.

[Des] We did not aim for the U-boat itself.

We aimed for the water.

When the shell hit the water, its passage transferred

to a parallel movement under the sea.

So it would penetrate through the ballast tanks

into the hull proper.

Brown water appeared on the surface,

and we realized that it was spilling diesel fuel.

We didn't stay long enough around, uh,

to see the result.

[Narrator] The result is a sunken U-boat,

although there are survivors.

Curtis never imagines he would one day meet

one of those survivors,

U-boat commander, Raimund Tiesler.

Years later, when I had the opportunity

to make the acquaintance of the commandant of U-976,

that began a relationship which was extraordinarily good.

[Narrator] In May 1995,

the two men from different sides of a bitter war join together

to lay a wreath over the wreck of U-976.

Raimund Tieseler said, "We were bombed by your aircraft."

And I said, "No, you can ask the diver who was down there."

The diver said there were five holes

just below the turret, enough for it to break its back.

And they had only been made by a shell, not a bomb.

[Narrator] But the two men reunited in peace

find that the sinking of U-976

is not their only shared experience of war.

[Des] One occasion when we were sitting,

everybody was chatting away,

and I said to him,

"Can you remember the most horrible thing

that happened to you when you were a U-boat captain?"

And he said, "When we're in the Gulf of Mexico,

we set a tanker on fire.

And I can remember seeing sailors

jumping into the blazing water

from the tanker. What was yours?"

And I said, "We were off the Spanish coast.

We set fire to a tanker.

And I can remember seeing those sailors jumping."

We had exactly the same worst memory.

He said to me that same evening,

"Why did I have to wait so long to find a younger brother?"

It typified the futility of war.

[Narrator] Former Mosquito pilots believe

that their versatile and unmatched aircraft

is one factor shortening that futility of war.

[Colin] I mean, I loved the Mosquito.

I still love the Mosquito.

We attacked and destroyed all their cities

producing armaments.

Yeah, I think we did a good job.