Original subtitles

I still get the same reaction when I see a B-17.

But isn't that a beautiful aircraft?

It's like a piece of sculpture.

And it's lovely in the air when your wheels are up.

When you flew in formation...

sometimes with a thousand aircraft...

it was a very beautiful and dramatic sight.

In the cold, blue skies over Europe,

a new kind of combat was fought

in an environment that had never been experienced before.

It was a singular event in the history of warfare.

Unprecedented and never to be repeated.

Airmen from 40 American bomber groups

bled and died in staggering numbers in air combat.

One of these groups, hyperaggressive and undisciplined,

suffered so many casualties in such a short period of time

it became known as the Bloody Hundredth.

Germany has invaded Poland.

In a big attack, about nine o'clock, Warsaw itself was bombed.

The German army invaded Holland and Belgium early this morning

by land and from parachutes

You ask, what is our policy?

It is to wage war by sea, land and air.

To wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed

in the dark and lamentable catalog of human crime.

If Great Britain goes down,

the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe and Asia

and Africa, and they will be in a position

to bring enormous military and naval resources against this hemisphere.

We have witnessed this morning

severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes.

It is no joke.

It is a real war.

I ask that the Congress declare

that since the unprovoked

and dastardly attack by Japan,

a state of war.

At this point in the war,

Hitler's Germany controlled continental Europe.

Great Britain stood alone and vulnerable,

the last surviving European democracy at war with the Nazis.

And the question became how to hit back at the enemy.

Britain's bomber command had been striking Germany incessantly

but ineffectively since 1940,

taking huge losses in night raids that often missed their targets by miles.

There was a clear and present danger to global democracy

because of the Nazis.

So, patriotism was something that the Greatest Generation,

my father's generation, took very, very seriously.

Now, it isn't as if it was a chore for me to talk to you

because I wanna speak on my favorite subject, the Army Air Forces.

I can't speak from long experience.

I've only been in the service a year,

but I've learned a lot about what the air forces have to offer.

That's what I wanna talk to you about.

The Army Air Forces need 15,000 captains,

40,000 lieutenants, 35,000 flying sergeants.

Young men of America, your future's in the sky.

Your wings are waiting.

I was in the middle of my sophomore year in college

and didn't have a lot on my mind but chasing girls and drinking whiskey.

Meantime, Pearl Harbor happens, and then,

along with my other fraternity brothers, were recruited as aviation cadets.

Attention!

At that time, there was a great deal of anti-Semitism.

And Hitler, with his talk of superiority of the Aryan nation,

I had a sense of frustration that I couldn't do anything about it.

Suddenly, that frustration disappeared.

I'd felt now that I could do something.

I thought the most effective way to serve would be as a pilot.

I went down the next day and volunteered to be an air force cadet.

Before enlisting, thousands of American flyers had never set foot

in an airplane or fired a shot at anything more threatening than a squirrel.

The crews were made up of men from every part of America

and nearly every station in life.

There were Harvard history majors and West Virginia coal miners.

Wall Street lawyers and Oklahoma cowpunchers.

Hollywood idols and football heroes.

The cadets have passed their test.

And now, they'll get their flying lessons.

Each instructor had four students.

The other three students had previous flight training, I had none.

I had never been inside of an airplane.

After about ten hours, we'd have solo.

When those wheels leave the ground, there's no one to help you.

You're on your own.

I became a navigator because I was a flop as a pilot.

I got washed out.

I'll never forget the guy that washed me out was Lieutenant Maytag,

proper name for washing out a prospective flying student.

I had a military instructor, and he was about to wash me out,

and he said, "You're gonna kill yourself anyway,

but I'll tell you what, I'm gonna go over and sit under that tree.

If you can take this up three times and around the pattern and land it, you're in.

If not, you're out."

We flew from eight o'clock in the morning to eight o'clock at night.

I did various maneuvers of chandelles and lazy S's.

And on a rare day off, we would dogfight.

I never enjoyed anything more than I did at that time.

Forty of my classmates, just graduated from flying school,

along with me,

were all assigned to fly the B-17.

We'd never been in a B-17 before.

The Boeing Flying Fortress, manned by ten men,

this new bomber has a speed of nearly 300 miles an hour.

The bulges on its fuselage are turrets for machine guns.

With 4,000 horsepower engines,

it can cruise for 3,000 miles without landing to refuel.

B-17 was the first both offensive and defensive aircraft ever designed.

Offensively, it dropped very heavy payloads for its day.

And it was called the Flying Fortress because it had so many 50-caliber guns.

The feel of the B-17 was wonderful.

The plane responded so beautifully that I immediately related to it.

I was very happy to be on B-17s.

We had about five or six months of practice training

and getting ready for an overseas assignment.

In May of 1943 we were sent to England

to become a part of the Eighth Air Force.

We were told before we went overseas,

"You look on your left and your right,

and only one of you is gonna come back."

We were going overseas to die.

Just as the crews of the 100th began arriving at their new base

in rural eastern England, the European war entered a new phase.

It was the official beginning of Pointblank,

an around-the-clock bombing campaign,

with the Americans bombing by day and the British by night.

Its purpose, to achieve air supremacy over northern Europe

by the D-Day invasion the following spring.

Without air supremacy, the Allies could not invade the European continent.

We'd just got there and getting to know one another,

and King, the pilot, asked me, "What had you done before?"

I said, "Well, recently I did the work of a cowboy."

And he said, "Well, fine, you'll be Cowboy from now on."

The 100th is a young outfit,

and it had some pretty reckless young commanders.

A guy named Gale Cleven, who was a squadron commander

and an air executive named John Egan.

Egan and Cleven didn't have to fly as squadron leaders, but always did.

And that's one of the reasons the men admired them.

Buck Cleven, along with Bucky Egan, they wore scarves

and their hats cocked on one side of their heads,

and they were pretty cocky.

They'd be at the officers' club, and they would say,

"Lieutenant, taxi over here, I wanna talk to you."

John Egan, Gale Cleven,

their life's ambition was to fly an airplane.

And here they are, flying an airplane.

Doing something that they love for a country that they love

on a mission that they believe in.

Cleven and Egan would help lead the 100th

against the most formidable air force in the world, the German Luftwaffe,

whose veteran pilots had seen action over Spain, Norway, Poland,

France, Russia, Greece, North Africa and England.

They will understand the enormity of their miscalculation

that the Nazis would always have the advantage of superior air power.

That superiority has gone forever.

We believe that the Nazis and the fascists have asked for it,

and they're going to get it.

Captain Kirk, Captain Thompson, Lieutenant Bushka,

Iverson, Holloway and Hawkers scheduled to fly.

Snap it up.

The commanding officer, he'd come in, he'd come up the front,

he'd pull back a curtain,

and there'd be a red ribbon from Thorpe Abbotts all the way to the target.

This group of buildings here is your target.

This building will be the aiming point.

If your bomb pattern is concentrated in this area,

it should very effectively knock out the factory.

After getting off the jeep and getting some of the stuff stowed,

then climbed aboard, got settled in, and fired up.

Flying in a self-defending formation

they called a combat box,

with accumulative firepower of as many as 13 guns on each plane,

they could muscle their way to the target through waves of enemy planes.

At the fighter fields, Thunderbolts are ready.

They set out to meet the bombers.

The two groups make rendezvous over the English Channel,

and with the fighters patrolling the skies around the bomber formation,

the air armada moves into enemy territory.

The bombers received limited protection from the smaller,

more nimble fighter planes, like the P-47 Thunderbolt,

whose limited fuel capacity forced it to leave the bombers

once they crossed deep into Germany.

The crewmen were in an alien world

to where they physically could not survive without specialized clothing,

without specialized equipment,

without breathing oxygen that was being pumped to them.

As soon as we got to altitude, we had to go on oxygen,

so we had an oxygen mask clasped on our face.

And the stark cold.

The frigid temperatures.

We were operating in 50 or 60 degrees below zero.

The fighter escort did not have the range

to escort the B-17s all the way to the targets inside of Germany,

so the Allied fighters turned around and went back to England.

I remember that when we first crossed over the English Channel,

I remember looking down and realizing that we were over enemy territory,

and I had a lump in my throat.

I was nervous.

There are the black smudges of the flak

that come up from the antiaircraft guns below.

A flak gun is a German 88 gun,

and it could fire a shell up to 40,000 feet.

The shell would explode in the air, and it would throw shards of shrapnel.

The skin of the plane is not steel, it's aluminum.

So, that meant flak just blew holes in the plane.

That was my first time to be exposed to very heavy antiaircraft fire,

and it was frightening.

We were being confronted by very experienced

and very well equipped and very well trained opposition.

They were pros, and we were rank amateurs.

When the formation neared its target,

the bombardiers entered variables such as airspeed and wind drift

into their Norden bombsights,

top-secret aiming devices designed to guide the planes

to the optimal release point for dropping their payloads.

The Norden bombsight, it's supposed to be so accurate

that you can bomb from 20,000 feet and drop your bombs into a pickle barrel.

When we dropped our bombs,

I could see bombs from the planes ahead of us dropping

but also I could lean out in the plexiglass nose

and see the bombs falling directly down from us.

And then, when they exploded, we could actually see the explosions.

The first bombers have been over,

and the target's already partially obscured by the fires they've started.

Hits were scored on a power plant, submarines under construction,

and at least one U-boat in the water.

We dropped our bombs,

a couple of fighter attacks, nobody got hurt.

And I thought, "Well, this isn't so bad."

The early missions for the 100th were mostly coastal targets,

like submarine pens and industrial sites in France and Norway.

The air force was trying to destroy

the war machine of Nazi Germany.

The factories that made planes, that made tanks.

The factories that produced ball bearings.

At the British landing fields,

word on the sky battle was out.

Many of the fortresses themselves were crippled.

A few came in with feathered props or with knocked-out landing gear.

The B-17 had the reputation of being trustworthy and safe

and getting people back.

You could lose three engines and get home.

You could lose half of your vertical stabilizer on the tail

and get home.

It would bring you home on two engines,

and I've seen 'em come in with only one.

Everything was about to change for the Eighth

with the largest raid they would undertake up to now.

A double strike against ball bearing plants in Schweinfurt

and Messerschmitt factories in Regensburg,

massively defended targets deep inside Germany.

The 100th was assigned to the Regensburg Force.

When they pulled the curtain away from the map,

and you saw that red line going all across Germany,

you know, we thought, "Holy cow."

The plan as designed is really brilliant when you look at it.

So, you've got

Curtis LeMay's Third Bombardment Division is going to fly

and attack the Messerschmitt factories at Regensburg and then head for Africa.

And ten minutes behind them is gonna be the First Bombardment Division,

and they're gonna attack the ball bearing plants at Schweinfurt

and then go back to England.

So, the Germans are gonna have to decide which of these groups to hit.

The problem is-- surprise, it's August, and there's fog in Great Britain.

We went out that morning.

I had took lanterns and flashlights and lead the airplanes out.

I got assembled about ten minutes late, but we got off.

Curtis LeMay has trained his bombardment division

to take off in English fog.

The other bombardment division hadn't.

So, all of a sudden, LeMay gets his guys up and gets them all formed,

and the other bombardment division hasn't even taken off yet.

So, it ends up, instead of a ten-minute gap, a two-hour gap.

This captured German film shows how quickly their 109s

and Focke-Wulf 190s got into action after a warning.

They had plenty of time to amass their fighters at a chosen point of attack

and to outnumber our escort at anything from 2-to-1 to 10-to-1.

Flew across the channel. It was a beautiful day out there.

They hit the Dutch coast,

and all of a sudden the whole world exploded.

Kept up for the next two hours.

The training we'd had previously gave us the idea

that we could outrun German fighters.

Of course, we learned that that was not true.

There was flak, there were fighters, more flak, more fighters.

And I could hear the top turret chattering away with machine-gun fire.

Cleven's plane took six hits.

They knocked out the hydraulic system. They knocked out one of the engines.

The cockpit is on fire.

Cleven turns around, and he looks at the radio gunner,

and the radio gunner doesn't have any legs.

They'd been sheared off.

And I still remember one plane,

fire was coming out of every opening in that hull.

I dreamed about that one for a long time.

Every single member of that flight crew

was fighting so democracy and freedom could reign.

But when you're in combat, you know who you're fighting for?

The guy to your left and the guy to your right.

The guy just ahead of you and the guy just behind you.

That's the pod you're fighting for.

Cleven is sitting in the cockpit, and his copilot said, in so many words,

"We gotta get out of here. Let's hit the bail out bell."

Cleven said, "We gotta get to the target.

We're gonna complete the bomb run."

Five minutes before we got to the target, everything stopped.

No fighters, no flak, no nothing.

We succeeded in dropping our bombs.

Perilously low on fuel,

the Regensburg group fought its way over the Alps down to North Africa,

while the Schweinfurt group flew straight into the full brunt of the Luftwaffe.

So that means for the Germans, they get up and ravage LeMay's guys,

then they get to land and have a schnapps and rearm and refuel too.

And then they get to hit the Schweinfurt guys.

The whole Luftwaffe jumped on the Schweinfurt group and just shattered them.

Having made it to North Africa by day's end,

the crews of the 100th Bomb Group were battle-worn and weary,

but feeling lucky to be alive.

Any commander that had to commit forces to combat

when they were outnumbered

and with equipment which was not suitable

and with a minimum of training, faced very tough decisions.

It's like sentencing men to death.

I had landed in England in the summer of 1943,

and I was sent to the 100th Bomb Group.

Rosie Rosenthal arrived at the group

as a replacement crew for crews that were lost.

Egan had gotten word that this kid, Rosie, was a pretty good flyer.

And so, Egan took him out and ran him through the struts

and said, "I want you in my squadron."

I happened to be in the bar.

And I was having my usual Scotch and felt this tap on my shoulder

and turned around, and here was the squadron commander.

He said, "Lucky, you better go home and get some sleep.

You're flying tomorrow."

When the weather over Germany cleared on October 8th,

the Americans launched a succession of maximum-effort missions

to take out aircraft manufacturing plants.

The airmen would eventually call it Black Week.

On October 8th, 855 planes left Great Britain

for a raid on Bremen and Vegesack.

They were loaded with two and a half million pounds of bombs.

Two and three-quarter million rounds of ammunition.

As we came off the target, out of the corner of my eye,

I saw this flight of two Fw 190s aiming directly for us.

He shot down the ship directly in front of me,

and it blew them out of the formation, and they exploded.

The group was decimated.

We were shot clear out of the formation. Our number three engine was on fire.

Cleven tried to move up

and take over the group when he was shot down.

Cleven, he got hit.

There's a lot of chaos in the plane.

The cockpit caught fire. They gotta bail.

Gale Cleven is shot down.

This is a huge hole left in the 100th Bomb Group at this time.

And for all intents and purposes, everybody thinks he's dead.

That was the first time that I doubted that I really was gonna get back.

My plane, Rosie's Riveters, was badly damaged,

and a couple of engines were out.

After we dropped our bombs,

I brought what was left of the formation home,

which was only six airplanes.

I mean, imagine the morale, to lose all those crews in one day.

What they would try to do is clean out the barracks.

As soon as a plane went down, they'd clean it out.

So, you'd walk into an empty barracks.

Egan was in London on leave,

and he got word that Cleven had been shot down.

Egan was so incensed that he immediately canceled his leave

and returned to the base, and said, "I'm leading the next mission."

The Münster raid was a city-busting operation,

a new thing for the Eighth Air Force.

The target was a strategically essential rail yard in the city center

and also a neighborhood of workers' housing that abutted it.

In the fight against Nazi tyranny, human flesh and bone became a target,

an essential part of the Reich's war machine.

There was tension in the room.

A lot of the airmen, for the first time ever,

questioned the mission.

Egan makes a speech.

They were gonna fly this one for Cleven, and this is a revenge raid.

Because we had high losses, our group was pretty well banged up,

and we could only put 13 planes in the air.

When it came to German fighter attacks,

if your formations were loose, if you had 13 aircraft as opposed to 18,

the Germans are gonna attack the lesser target.

We were immediately attacked by over 200 German fighter aircraft.

Two Me 109s came in behind us and killed our tail gunner.

I was sprayed with shrapnel flak from an exploding cannon shell

and knocked to the floor.

It was clear that the airplane was out of control,

and we were going to go down.

I remember we were about 21-- 22,000 feet.

The ground looked a million miles away, but I had no choice.

I had to go out, and so I did.

We went down the flight line, and we kept waiting around.

Finally, one of ours came in.

Only one airplane of the 100th had returned.

Rosenthal was the man that was flying that airplane.

So, he had seen his share of rough times.

We returned to the officers' club.

There was an eerie silence there.

There were a few people who hadn't flown the mission,

and nobody seemed to approach us.

We were sort of left by ourselves.

It was a very strange feeling.

We certainly felt the loss of the people that had been shot down.

I especially lost my very best friend on the Münster mission.

When Bucky Egan and Cleven were shot down,

it was really a tremendous morale factor

because everybody just assumed they were invincible.

The Münster mission was the greatest air battle up to that time.

Not just a raid, but a titanic struggle

between two large and murderous air armies.

The 100th had arrived in England four months before Münster

with 140 flying officers.

After Münster, only three of them were still able to fly and fight.

This kind of record got around,

and people became worried about us.

They called us the Bloody Hundredth.

When you're an airman, and you go out,

you have four hours of pure terror.

All of a sudden, you get on your bicycle, go to the local pub,

drink a beer, go out with a local girl, go back to base,

sit nice and peaceful.

Then, the next day, you're up, and you're back into the terror again.

This had the ultimate result, in some cases, of causing people to crack.

After Black Week,

morale in the Eighth plummeted to a new low,

and commanders worried about crew revolts.

There were distressing reports from flight surgeons

and air force psychiatrists of abnormal behavior among crewmen

as combat insidiously shook the moorings of airmen's self-control.

I have seen instances

where they weren't in control enough to just walk out of the airplane.

Those were individuals that were on the verge

of what we called victims of combat fatigue.

We have learned that many of these men with neurotic reactions

can recover quickly

when the battle situation has been left behind temporarily.

Fundamentally, we must depend for this recovery

on the patient's own recuperative powers.

But these powers can best be exercised away from a hospital atmosphere.

We would try to get them out of the wartime environment

for a few days and sent to the rest home.

We called it the Flak House.

Oftentimes, it was effective. Sometimes it was not.

This was a problem that all commanders had to deal with

because there are some people whose chemical and mental makeup

is such that they just can't stand this sort of thing.

We had to immediately remove those people

from the crew and from the base

because that sort of attitude was contagious,

and we couldn't afford to have it affect the morale of the rest of the people

that were going out every day and continuing to perform their duties.

You can argue not only has the Allied air forces

don't have any sense of air superiority over Germany and Europe,

you could argue they're losing the air war.

You know, we did not drop into a pickle barrel all the time.

We would scatter bombs even on good, clear days,

several miles from the intended target.

They couldn't hit their targets,

and they were much more, themselves, a target

for German fighter defense. So the force was being slaughtered.

Every few cubic feet of this pile contains a plane,

22,000 hours of American labor.

Every yard of it means ten American boys dead or captured.

Probably the most dreadful thing that one could expect was to be shot down.

We always knew it was possible.

Being young and thinking that we were immortal,

we always figured that they might get everybody else,

but they wouldn't get us.

I knew how much my mother worried about me,

and I knew that she would be getting

a missing-in-action telegram from the War Department,

and she would not know what happened to me.

Airmen were given parachutes but not trained how to use them,

and they were given only scant training in escape and evasion tactics.

Nor were they properly warned when civilians in bombed-out towns

began to attack downed airmen in increasing numbers.

Cleven, he goes down,

and he can see that farmers are gathering all around.

The next thing he remembers,

a farmer has a pitchfork a ninth of an inch in his chest

and wants to press down on it.

Some local Luftwaffe police show up.

I was taken to a German Air Force airfield

that was a collection point

for all of the American flyers who had been captured that day.

I got interviewed by this guy,

and he congratulated me on my promotion.

I had just gotten first lieutenant about three days before.

That sort of took me by surprise.

And he hands me a 3-by-5 card,

and there's my name and birth date, my parents' name, and my address.

The Germans had spies in the United States

send them their hometown newspaper.

So, they relax you

to get this sense that you're having a conversation,

and they know everything about you.

This cagey interrogation technique

was sometimes effective in persuading unsuspecting airmen

to give up information they considered inconsequential,

but which master interrogators prized.

The next morning, they put us in a boxcar.

There were 30 or 40 of us in the boxcar.

None of us knew what was gonna happen.

I can remember walking through the gate,

and there were big, wooden stakes there,

and there was barbed wire all over the place,

and there were guard towers at all the corners.

And there was about a 10- or 12-foot space between the big fence,

and then there was a smaller fence.

We were told not to go over the small fence, or we'd be shot.

The American POWs who were there,

many of whom were members of the 100th Bomb Group

who had been shot down before I was shot down.

The minute they saw us come in, well, they--

Some of them laughed and said, "Well, we've been expecting you.

You're finally here."

Cleven and Egan arrived at Stalag Luft III within days of each other.

Cleven was immediately wisecracking with the injured Egan,

and soon, the two were roommates again

and quickly assumed leadership roles inside the camp.

We lived together, cooked together,

washed our clothes together, showered together.

Showers were once a week, maybe, if you were lucky.

Life inside the Stalag Luft camps

was very, very regimented.

Everything was done in a military way to keep their minds busy,

to keep discipline, and basically to keep everybody alive.

At a secret meeting at the Tehran Conference

in late November 1943,

Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed to a second front against Nazi Germany

to be planned and executed principally by the Americans and the British.

There was to be a massive amphibious assault,

the greatest in history,

across five beaches in Normandy, France, code-named "Overlord."

It was scheduled for May 1944, just six months away.

General Eisenhower has been brought to London.

He said that we can't launch the fleet until you knock out the Luftwaffe.

That is our mission now.

We were aware that no land invasion can occur

unless air superiority has been achieved.

The ultimate goal was to shoot down so many fighters

that the Germans could no longer put up a fighter defense.

We had been having very high losses due to fighter action.

And so, a rush program at home began to get us more and more fighters.

Late 1943, a fighter aircraft arrived in England,

and it was the fighter plane that the Eighth Air Force had been waiting for.

It was the P-51 Mustang.

The Mustang. The P-51.

The longest-range fighter in the world.

Speed, fast climb, quick dive, tight turn.

When P-51s came over,

they had the range to accompany us to the target and back.

And they also fixed up the 47s

and put wing tanks on them so that they could accompany us.

When we went to Emden, and I saw all those gorgeous P-51s,

I thought, maybe for the first time, "I'm gonna get through."

The primary mission

is not to protect the bombers and get 'em home safely.

It'll be to go after the Luftwaffe in the air and on the ground.

Sunday morning 20 February,

we prepared for the heaviest assault

in the history of the American Strategic Air Forces up to that time.

This was the prelude to invasion.

They planned a succession of continuous raids one day after the other.

This is gonna decide the whole war.

Day after day, month after month,

Mustang, Thunderbolt against the Me 109s and the Fw 190s.

Our fighters attack, attack, attack.

Our victory column soared at the rate of 4-to-1.

The casualty rate for German pilots on the western front

between January and May 1944 was 99%.

I mean, they just get butchered.

It wasn't until the Mustang really got involved in the war

that America and England gained air superiority over Germany.

If you want to go to the heart of the enemy

and be sure the Luftwaffe will be pulled into the sky, you go to Berlin.

When they had the briefing, and they pulled the curtain back,

and the tape went all the way to Berlin,

first it was just stunned silence and then just a shout.

You can't hear what's going on down there

five miles below you,

but marshaling yards and chemical tanks, ships and warehouses,

spare engines, and ball bearing factories are disintegrating in molten chaos.

This would be the American's first foray into bombing Berlin.

It would be the toughest target the Eighth ever attacked,

but it had to be done.

I can say that if I had been in Germany

and witnessed, everyday, hordes of bombers coming over and dropping bombs,

it would have had a very adverse effect on my morale.

It must have had an adverse effect morale on the civilians and military alike.

One of the worst things about being a prisoner of war

is that you don't know how long you're gonna be held captive.

It's not as if you've been given a fixed sentence.

You're going to be there until you either escape or it's all over.

I did start a tunnel.

They had an old toilet that had a tile floor

and I figured, well, let's see if we can do something here.

And my object was to have these removable tiles

and we could start digging.

The guards caught that almost immediately.

Some 76 British prisoners tunneled out of the compound

immediately adjacent to us through a tunnel that they dug.

It was known as the Great Escape.

All but two were recaptured, and 50 were executed by the Germans.

What little decent relations we had with the Germans

evaporated completely after that.

One day I received a telephone call and they said,

"General LeMay would like to speak to you."

He said, "Jeffrey, I need a group commander

at the 95th Bomb Group and the 100th Bomb Group.

You can take your choice."

The 95th could essentially do no wrong.

They lost the minimum number of airplanes.

Their bombing record was good, and I figured that I could do more

for the 100th than I could for the 95th.

So, I called him back and I told him with his permission,

I would accept the 100th Bomb Group.

And I asked him, "When do you want me to report?"

And he said, "This afternoon."

My first action was to ask General LeMay if he would take the 100th

off of operations for two days and he granted that.

And so, over the next two days,

four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon,

we flew every airplane in the 100th Bomb Group in formation.

Tom Jeffrey, he was dynamic, charismatic and knowledgeable,

not only about the aircraft, but about combat flying.

I had people in the lead airplane

photographing the formation

so that we could identify who was flying good and who wasn't.

And then I took an old airplane and circled around the formation,

back and forth, and tried to herd 'em into position.

The commanding officers were just blue in the face

about us keeping our formations tight.

You think you're tight and they say tighten 'em up more.

At the end of two days,

the 100th was flying the best formation that I have ever seen.

It was not until Jeffrey came did we become a superb group.

I think the best group in the air force.

An Eighth Air Force bomber crew had a tour of duty of 25 missions.

Once you completed your 25 missions,

you were rotated back home to the United States.

Upon completion, I was told that I could either remain

and accept command of a squadron or rotate back to the States.

I concluded that I had been extremely fortunate

and lucky to have survived and that I shouldn't push it any further.

So, I elected to return.

Rosie Rosenthal completes his 25 missions

on March 8th, 1944, on a raid over Berlin.

The crew urged me to buzz the field when we returned.

I was a very conservative pilot and I said, "I don't think so."

But on the way back, I said, "What the heck."

And headed right for the tower and everybody hit the deck there

and I buzzed the field three or four times and then came in.

And then somebody approached me and said,

"Rosie, did you know that General Huglin was there?

And he hit the deck and he-- his clothes are all messed up."

And there coming into the debriefing room was General Huglin.

He came over and grabbed my hand

and he said, "One hell of a buzz job, Rosie."

Everyone knew that D-Day was on the horizon

and finishing off the Reich was a big objective for Rosie.

To leave here is to leave the center of the universe.

And that's when I decided to continue flying,

and ultimately, I was assigned to be a squadron commander.

On this day, 650 American flying fortresses

inflicted severe damage on German defenses along the coast.

I had flown over to France to drop some bombs on some target.

And when I returned, I was met at the airplane

and told that I was to report to General LeMay's headquarters that evening.

General LeMay marched in and announced to us that the Allied Forces

would land on the beaches of Normandy the next morning.

But he said in order for you to thoroughly understand

the importance of this occasion,

that the Eighth Air Force will expend every airplane that it has

in its inventory to be sure that these people got ashore.

I remember coming to the briefing

and when they moved the curtain from the map and there were cheers.

I had never heard this kind of thing from the crews.

Finally, D-Day had arrived.

Soldiers, sailors and airmen

of the Allied Expeditionary Force,

you are about to embark upon the Great Crusade

toward which we have striven these many months.

The eyes of the world are upon you.

Your task will not be an easy one.

Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened.

He will fight savagely.

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.

We will accept nothing less than full victory.

As we flew over the channel,

we looked down and saw thousands of ships in an armada down there.

It was so thrilling one of the crew started to pray, and we all joined in.

This is Robert St. John in the NBC newsroom in New York.

This is a momentous hour in world history.

The men of General Dwight Eisenhower are leaving their landing barges,

fighting their way up the beaches into the fortress of Nazi Europe.

They are moving in from the sea

to attack the enemy under a mammoth cloud of fighter planes.

The fury from the air went on and on.

Our airmen in tactical support of the ground forces took no rest that day.

Back from one sortie, they gassed up, loaded their bombs and ammunition belts

and grimly went out again and again.

There was hardly any air intervention by the Luftwaffe

when we invaded Normandy.

The Air Force really paved the way

for the invasion across the English Channel.

Germany now had to fight on two fronts,

against the Anglo-American allies in the west and the Russians in the east.

In August 1944, the Red Army discovered Majdanek,

an abandoned Nazi concentration and extermination camp near Lublin, Poland,

indisputable evidence of Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

Our invasion forces are on the offensive

against Nazi troops who have been ordered to die rather than retreat.

However, die or retreat they must, for this attack is being made

with all the strength the Allied Command can throw into battle.

The army camp had these clandestine radios

and we knew just about everything the BBC knew.

When the invasion started in June of '44,

we knew that we weren't gonna be there forever.

Downed airmen were still streaming into Stalag Luft III.

Among them, a number of Black pilots

including Second Lieutenants, Alexander Jefferson and Richard Macon,

who were with the renowned 332nd fighter group, the Red Tails.

The Tuskegee pilots painted a deep red on the tails of their planes.

Even when people didn't know that these were Black pilots flying the planes

they recognized that they were Red Tails.

We didn't have any concern about running into the enemy

because we knew that we were better flyers than they were,

and I would "Ready, aim, fire."

These courageous Black flyers had been waiting

to contribute to the war effort, and they distinguished themselves brilliantly.

Within the Air Force, and especially among the bomber crews

that are making those long dangerous runs, say that they appreciated the Red Tails

more than any of the other squadrons that they flew with in the war.

Macon and Jefferson had been racially segregated

on Air Force bases in America and Italy,

and were shocked to discover

that the barracks at Stalag Luft III were integrated.

There were approximately 150 men

who had come in to this camp, and we were lined up.

Finally, down the line came a long, tall Kentucky hillbilly

and he walked back and says, "By cracky, I think I'll take this boy."

Colonel walked across and said, "Lieutenant, you go with him."

"Yes, sir."

The Germans took me into the room

and showed me where I was going to be, on the third bed up.

I didn't realize how badly I had been injured.

I was paralyzed from my waist down.

So, once they saw that I couldn't move,

the Germans tried to tell them

who will give up his bottom bunk for this man.

Nobody moved.

And finally, the guy from Texas said, "He can have my bunk, I'll go up there."

He and I became the best of friends.

These men had to come together to survive the prisoner camp.

They let whatever racial attitudes, racial animosities go or at least lessen

because they had to work together to keep up each other's spirits

to survive that experience.

One of the last Air Force operations was to starve the Reich of fuel

by bombing German synthetic oil plants.

The Allies also would need to hit transportation and storage facilities

for the coal that powered jet production plants.

This air blockade would cripple the Reich's war machine

and leave the German army without adequate air cover

in the culminating battles of the war.

We were in the officers' club until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m.

Suddenly we heard the announcement:

"Be prepared for a mission in the morning."

We put up 2,000 heavy bombers.

All you could see was four-engined bombers to the horizon.

To knock out one plant in World War II,

a place called Leuna near Merseburg,

it took 6,000 bombers flying about 40 missions to knock that plant out.

Our group led one of the biggest raids on Berlin.

It was a very beautiful day.

The sun was shining, not a cloud in sight.

As we approached the target, the plane was hit,

but we continued and bombed the target,

knowing that we couldn't return to our base.

There was smoke and fire in the plane, and I knew I had to get out.

And when I got out, I thought I was in heaven.

And suddenly, I hit the ground and I looked up,

and I saw three soldiers coming at me with guns.

One of the soldiers raised his gun and was about to strike me,

and I noticed that he had, on his hat, the Red Army symbol.

And I yelled, Amerikanski, Roosevelt,

Stalin, Churchill, Pepsi-Cola,

Coca-Cola, Lucky Strike.

The Berlin raid was Rosie's 52nd and final mission.

The most raids flown by a pilot in the 100th.

After recuperating in a Russian hospital,

Rosie made his way back to Thorpe Abbotts,

where he had flown his first mission a year and a half earlier.

The Russians were knocking on the door.

We could hear artillery

and other sounds of combat in the distance.

Hitler debated back and forth:

should we march the prisoners out of the camp or kill them?

That was a real possibility.

And suddenly, one night,

our American senior officer was told by the Germans

that we were going to be evacuated immediately,

and we would be leaving the camp within an hour to march out on foot.

They just said, we're moving you for your safety.

That was what they said, but we all knew better.

The airmen had no idea where they're going.

They feared Hitler was going to take American airmen

and use them as human shields.

And it's the worst European winter in 100 years.

It was bitterly cold.

The snow was about knee-deep,

and they walked us all that night until late the next afternoon

with just brief stops.

At Spremberg, they put us on a train.

We were locked inside of these boxcars.

They jammed in 60 to 70 men.

Didn't have room enough to sit down.

It was hell.

That one, we were packed in tighter than heck.

Anybody falling down would get stomped on.

When the train pulled in,

men were banging on the door to get out of the cars.

The guards finally opened the doors.

It's as bad as you can imagine.

It was a camp that apparently had been designed

to hold 8,000 or 10,000 people max.

There was over 100,000 there.

Camp Hell would be a good word for it.

There were no barracks, people camped outside.

The conditions were horrible.

No one knew what was gonna happen to them.

One day, we were walking around in the camp.

Somebody says, "There's a tank. There's a Sherman tank."

And then we looked and, surely enough,

there was a Sherman tank on the horizon.

Patton's Third Army came through.

I saw Patton on a tank when he came through the main gate of Stalag VII-A.

We'd been liberated.

The men went to the flagpole and rung down the swastika

while they opened up Old Glory and raised it, and we came to attention.

We weren't in uniforms. Tattered clothes and all that stuff.

And I guess that was the greatest salute I ever gave.

It was very emotional.

We were finally going to be freed

after all those months and years of having been held as POWs.

In many ways, it was hard to believe that we were finally gonna be able to go home.

This is London Calling.

Here is a news flash.

The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.

On May 1st, 1945, the day the world learned of Hitler's suicide,

the 100th flew one final mission,

part of what was called Operation Chowhound.

The crews would be dropping, by parachute, food, not bombs.

Relief for nearly five million starving people in the Netherlands,

still occupied by die-hard Nazis.

As the bombers reached the outskirts of Amsterdam,

they passed over fields of brilliantly colored tulips.

In one of them, the heads of the flowers

had been clipped to say, "Many thanks, Yanks."

The war in Europe was over.

The crews of the 100th packed up their duffels,

and the local folk from the villages around Thorpe Abbotts,

dressed in their Sunday finest,

gathered to see them off for their long journey home.

When I got to Atlanta, I went to the public telephone

and called my mother and told 'em I was home.

Course, she immediately broke down,

and they came out--

They drove out to Fort McPherson, and they picked me up and I got home.

We got back to California.

My dad and mother were there.

There was a big reunion, of course, and I was halfway to the moon.

And then I saw my wife-to-be, Barbara.

And three weeks later, we were married.

The men of the Bloody Hundredth were finally home,

reunited with their families

and their wives

and their sweethearts.

Some for the first time since leaving for war.

When I left the service, I was exhausted.

I'd been through these trying experiences,

and I wanted to put that behind me and I wanted to resume civilian life.

I went back to work at the same firm that I had been with,

and I was not ready, really, to go back to work.

And finally, after being there for six months,

I heard about an opportunity to go to Nuremberg as a prosecutor.

On the ship over there, I met this beautiful woman

who was also a lawyer and was going over as a prosecutor.

And within 10 days, we were engaged to marry,

and we were married over in Nuremberg.

I saw these defendants there who were powerless now,

sitting abjectly and being tried and being convicted.

And when I saw that, that, in fact, ended the war for me.

World War II was the most devastating event in human history.

More costly in lives than any war ever fought.

In it, the Eighth Air Force suffered the highest casualty rate

of any of the American Armed Forces.

Now that I've survived it

and can look back on it for all these intervening years,

it was a life changer for me.

If, in this time,

there's a feeling of excitement and romance and mythology, it's there.

My friends that I made then saved my life any number of times.

They were the friends of all friends.

The people we served with, they were dedicated,

they sacrificed, they had great courage.

We shared heartbreak and hilarity.

We saw our comrades go down and being killed,

being wounded, become prisoners of war.

And we developed a tremendous respect for each other and we shared a victory.

And I think this was the experience of all of our people.

Miraculously, people came together.

You have to give all the credit to the men and the women

that sacrificed their lives and basically saved the world from fascism.

The freedoms that we enjoy did not come about by accident.

They were bought and paid for by my generation

and the generations that preceded us.

And for that reason,

I think the World War II generation deserves to be remembered.