They dropped supplies to French resistance fighters.

On June 6th, 1944, they flew over Normandy as the invasion beaches burned below them.

On one mission returning from Tresba, Poland, Stevens took off his oxygen mask at 10,000 ft and started to relax.

Then he heard the pilot scream to the co-pilot to grab the controls.

Full House veered out of formation and started to dive.

Stevens looked forward through the fuselage and saw smoke filling the aircraft.

Somewhere inside the plane, something was on fire.

The waist gunner, Gordon Langford, grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran forward through the bomb bay to put it out.

He was not wearing a parachute.

He ran across the 9-in catwalk over the open bomb bay doors with nothing on his back, holding a fire extinguisher in his hands.

He put the fire out.

On August 25th, 1944, Larry Stevens completed his 35th and final mission.

He was 20 years old.

In four months, he had flown from bases in England, Russia, and Italy.

He had crossed occupied Europe dozens of times.

He had sat in the tale of Full House for hundreds of hours alone, watching the sky, waiting for whatever was coming.

When Stevens arrived back in New York, a customs inspector glanced at the combat ribbons on his uniform and told him to go home and enjoy himself.

Stevens did not go home.

He volunteered to fly as a tail gunner on a B-25 Mitchell in the Pacific for the invasion of Japan.

The war ended while he was still in training.

[music] He returned to Alhhamra and joined the fire department.

He served for 31 years.

He wrote a book about his war called It Only Takes One.

He had beaten the [music] odds.

But not every tail gunner had to beat them the same way.

Some survived by doing something the odds said was impossible.

The man who fell inside the tail over Brimman was one of them.

And what he did on the way down was not an act of survival.

It was an act of war.

Eugene Moran was born on July 17th, 1924 in Wisconsin.

[music] He grew up on his family’s farm near Soldiers Grove, shoveling horse manure and working the fields.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Moran was 17.

He waited until October 1942, the month he turned 18, and enlisted in the Army Air Forces.

After training, he was assigned to the 96th Bombardment Group, 339th Bombardment Squadron, 8th Air Force.

His station was RAF Snderton Heath in England.

His aircraft was a B17F, nicknamed Ricky Tickavi, after the Mongoose in Ruddyard Kiplings Jungle Book.

His position was the tail.

Moran and his crew flew three missions without incident.

The fourth was Bremen.

On November 29th, 1943, more [music] than 300 B7s launched toward the city.

Ricky Tickavi was among them.

The formation reached the target.

Bombadier Donald Curtis dropped the payload over Brimman.

Then on the turn for home, Ricky Tickavi began to fall behind.

Something was wrong with the aircraft.

>> [music] >> It drifted out of formation and into open sky, alone and unprotected.

The Germans saw it immediately.

A stafle of BF-100s came in first, armed with 21 cm mortar rockets, weapons designed to break up bomber formations from long range.

Then the single engine fighters followed.

BF109s and FW190’s swarm the lone bomber from every direction.

Moran fired from the tail.

The waste gunners fired from the sides.

It was not enough.

One by one, the crew stopped responding on the intercom.

Eight men were killed.

Only Moran in the tail and navigator Jesse Orrison in the nose were still alive.

Orrison bailed out from the forward hatch.

Moran could not.

The tunnel leading out of the tail was blocked.

His escape hatch was jammed shut by bent metal.

His parachute had been shredded by gunfire.

Then a burst of flack tore through the fuselage and split the aircraft in two.

The forward section, cockpit, wings, engines, fell away and crashed.

The tail section, 12 ft of aluminum with no flight surfaces that mattered, separated cleanly and began to drop.

Moran was inside it, surrounded by ammunition, pinned between his guns and the walls of the compartment.

What happened next was recorded by witnesses on the ground and confirmed after the war.

As the tail section fell, spinning through the sky, German BF 109s continued to attack it.

The pilots either did not realize it was wreckage or mistook it for some unknown type of Allied aircraft.

It [music] appeared to be gliding under control, and Moran, trapped inside a piece of a destroyed bomber falling from 28,000 ft, fired back.

He [music] aimed his twin Brownings at the fighters, making passes at him, and squeezed the triggers.

German anti-aircraft batteries on the ground also opened fire on the falling tail section, adding [music] flack to the chaos around him.

He was shooting at German fighters while falling four miles without a parachute.

The tail section hit a tree in a wooded area near the town of Psych, a few miles south of Bremen.

The impact threw Moran’s head against his machine guns.

He [music] was alive.

His skull was cracked.

Both forearms were broken.

Several ribs were shattered.

He was bleeding badly.

Two Serbian prisoners of war who happened to be doctors saw the crash and ran to the wreckage.

They pulled Moran out and treated his wounds.

Later, at a prisoner of war camp, a Serbian surgeon placed a metal plate over the exposed section of Moran’s skull.

He spent the next 17 months in captivity.

He was moved between camps in Germany, Poland, and Russia.

Between February and April of 1945, as the war collapsed around the Third Reich, Moran was forced on a 600-mile march with other prisoners.

On April 26th, 1945, American troops reached Bitterfell, Germany, and liberated the camp.

Moran weighed 128 lb.

He was not the only tail gunner who fell from the sky and lived.

Three months before Moran’s fall over Bremen and three months after it, another man rode a severed tail section to the ground.

He did not have a damaged parachute.

He had no parachute at all.

On January 11th, 1944, 21 B17s of the 15th Air Force took off from Italy and headed for Pereas Harbor in Greece.

Sergeant James Allenley was in the tale of a bomber called Skippy, leading the second squadron of the 3001st Bomb Group.

He had been in the army since 1935 and had transferred to the air forces in 43.

He loved the tail gunner position.

It suited him.

The formation climbed through heavy cloud cover.

Visibility dropped to almost nothing.

Pilots could barely see past their own wing tips.

The trailing squadrons followed procedure and flew off course for 2 minutes to create spacing.

It was not enough.

Two B7s from the 97th Bomb Group flew nearly head-on into the 3001st formation.

The collision triggered a chain reaction.

Aircraft, debris, and men began falling through the overcast.

Eight B7s were destroyed in the span of minutes.

64 airmen were killed.

17 survived.

It was not the enemy.

It was the weather and the impossible geometry of flying blind in formation.

[snorts] felt what he described as a hell of a jolt.

The 12-oot tail section of Skippy was sheared clean off the rest of the aircraft at 19,000 ft.

The cockpit, wings, and engines, everything forward of the tail, went one direction.

Went another.

He was crammed between his two machine guns and several hundred rounds of ammunition.

There was no room to move.

His parachute was nearby, but he could not create enough space to strap it on.

The escape hatch nearest to him was damaged and pinned [music] shut.

There was nothing he could do.

The tail section began to spiral.

Watched flashes of blue, green, and brown cycle past as the wreckage rotated.

He had no way to know if the rest of the aircraft was still attached.

The spinning and the time it took to fall made him think the whole plane was intact and corkcrewing down.

He estimated later that the fall lasted 10 to 15 minutes.

At 19,000 ft with the drag of the spinning tail section slowing the descent, that estimate was plausible.

He prayed.

He thought about his family.

He had grown up on a farm in Kentucky, the eighth of nine children.

He told himself that in another few minutes, he would be dead.

The tail [snorts] section struck a cluster of trees on a mountain side.

The branches absorbed some of the impact.

The wreckage stopped.

Was alive.

His chest was sore.

He could move his arms and legs.

He worked himself free from the ammunition surrounding him, found the bulkhead door, the escape hatch was still jammed, and crawled out through it.

He stood on the mountain side and looked around.

There was no plane, just a piece of tail section wedged into the trees.

Nothing else.

He navigated from tree to tree down the steep slope until he reached a trail.

It started to rain.

After a few hours, he heard voices and called out.

Greek civilians found him and took him to an Orthodox monastery where priests were sheltering Allied servicemen.

Of the 17 men who survived the mid-air disaster that day, was the only one who did it without a parachute.

After recovering, returned to duty.

He went back to the tale.

He flew more missions.

When the war ended, he kept serving Korea, then Vietnam.

He retired as a lieutenant colonel.

After the war, he visited the families of every crew member who had died aboard Skippy.

He later married Lorraine Linberry Sadal, the widow of Skippy’s [music] co-pilot, Second Lieutenant Henry Sudal.

He wrote an autobiography called I Fell 4 miles and lived.

He died in 1999 at the age of 82 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

Eugene Moran went home to Wisconsin.

He married, had nine children, and returned to the life he had left behind on the farm.

In 2008, the town of Soldiers Grove named a street after him.

He died on March 23rd, 2014 at the age of 90.

A friend named John Armrewster told his story in a book called Tailspin.

Larry Stevens went home to Alhhamra and never talked about the war.

His neighbors knew him as a fire captain.

It was not until decades later when his granddaughter helped him write his memoir that most people around him learned what he had done at 20 years old.

The book carried a title that doubled as advice.

It only takes one.

Three tail gunners.

Three different wars inside the same war.

One beat the odds by flying 35 missions and walking away.

One fell four miles inside a broken airplane and kept fighting on the way down.

One rode a severed tail through the clouds without a parachute and lived to serve in two more wars.

None of them chose the tail because it was safe.

They chose it or it chose them and they did the job.

20,000 rear gunners did not come home.

If this video helped you understand what they went through, hit the like button and subscribe.

Turn on the bell so you do not miss the next one.

These stories deserve to be told, and every like and subscription helps more people find them.

I want to ask you something.

Of all the positions on a heavy bomber, tail, ball [music] turret, waist, nose, which one would you have chosen? Or would you have chosen none of them? Tell me in the comments.

And if you know the name of someone who served as a gunner in the war, a grandfather, an uncle, someone from your town, leave it below.

Their names matter.

They still do.

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The richest man in New Mexico territory stood in the darkness, his hand gripping a rusted iron wheel that controlled thousands of gallons of water.

Water that could save a dying woman’s land or expose the lie he’d been living for months.

Behind him lay the finest ranch house in three counties.

Ahead, a collapsing shack where a widow who owned nothing had given him everything.

One turn of this valve would flood her fields with life.

It would also destroy the only honest love he’d ever known because the woman who’d fed him her last bread had no idea she’d been sharing it with a millionaire.

If you’re curious whether love can survive a lie this big, stay until the end and drop a comment with your city so I can see how far this story travels.

The New Mexico son didn’t forgive weakness.

It hammered down on the territorial road with the kind of heat that turned men mean and land to dust.

Caleb Whitaker had known that truth his entire life.

Yet on this particular morning in late summer, he welcomed the brutal warmth against his face as he rode away from everything he’d built.

Behind him, invisible beyond the rolling hills and scattered juniper, sat the Whitaker ranch, 18,000 acres of prime grazing land, 3,000 head of cattle, a main house with real glass windows, and a bunk house that slept 20 men.

His foremen would be waking those men right now, wondering where the boss had gone before dawn without a word to anyone.

Caleb didn’t look back.

He kept his eyes on the narrow trail ahead, on the worn leather of his saddle, on anything except the empire he was deliberately leaving behind.

The horse beneath him wasn’t his prize quarter horse, or even one of the decent working mounts.

It was an aging mare he’d bought off a struggling homesteader 3 years ago, the kind of horse a drifter might own if he was lucky.

Everything about him had been carefully chosen to erase Caleb Whitaker from existence.

His boots were scuffed beyond repair, the kind with holes in the soles that let in dust and rain.

His hat had lost its shape years ago, crushed and reformed so many times the brim hung crooked.

The shirt on his back was patched at both elbows, faded from black to something closer to gray.

His pants were held up with a rope instead of a belt.

He’d left his money behind, all of it.

The only thing in his pockets was a small brass key and three cents.

Not enough to buy a decent meal.

For the first time in 15 years, Caleb Whitaker looked like what he’d been before the cattle boom.

Nobody.

The transformation had taken planning.

He’d started months ago, setting aside the clothes piece by piece, telling his foremen he was thinking about checking on some of the territo’s smaller settlements, maybe investing in a few businesses.

Nobody questioned it.

Rich men did strange things, and Caleb Whitaker was the richest man most of them had ever met.

But this wasn’t about business.

This was about a hunger that had been eating at him for longer than he cared to admit.

A hunger that had nothing to do with food or money or land.

He was 34 years old.

He owned more than he could spend in three lifetimes.

And he had never once been certain that a single person on this earth cared about him rather than what he could buy them.

Women smiled at his wealth.

Men respected his power.

Friends appeared whenever he opened his wallet.

But strip all that away, Caleb wondered.

And what was left? Who would look at him twice if he was just another broke cowboy trying to survive? The question had haunted him through too many lonely nights in that big house.

So he decided to find out.

By midm morning, the landscape had changed.

The rolling grasslands gave way to harder country, rocky soil, stubborn brush, land that didn’t yield easily to farming or ranching.

This was the kind of territory people ended up in when they’d run out of choices.

When the good land was already claimed, and all that remained was hope and desperation.

Caleb had heard about bitter water from one of his ranch hands.

A man who’d passed through on his way to better prospects.

Nothing there but dust and disappointment, the man had said.

Folks barely scraping by.

Drought hit him hard three years running.

Perfect, Caleb had thought.

He found the town just before noon.

Bitter water wasn’t much to look at.

A single main street, rutdded and dry.

Maybe 15 buildings total, a general store, a saloon, a livery, a church with peeling paint, and a scattering of houses that looked like strong wind might carry them off.

At the far edge of town, Caleb could see a few small farms spreading out into the scrubland, their fields brown and struggling.

He rode in slowly, keeping his head down, letting the mayor set her own tired pace.

A few people glanced his way.

A woman sweeping the porch of the general store paused long enough to take in his ragged appearance before returning to her work.

Two men loading a wagon outside the livery gave him the kind of look men give drifters everywhere, weary, slightly contemptuous, ready to watch him ride right back out.

Caleb tied the mayor outside the general store and went inside.

The interior was dim and close, shelves half empty.

A middle-aged man stood behind the counter, his arms crossed, his expression unwelcoming.

“Help you?” The words weren’t friendly.

“Need some work,” Caleb said.

“Anything available around here? Ranch hand, repair jobs, whatever’s going.

” The storekeeper looked him up and down with undisguised skepticism.

“You got references? Worked cattle up north.

Didn’t end well.

I’ll bet.

” The man’s lip curled slightly.

Most of the ranches around here are barely keeping their own men fed.

Don’t know anyone looking to hire drifters.

You might try asking at the Broken Spur, the saloon, but don’t get your hopes up.

Caleb nodded and turned to leave.

And don’t cause trouble, the storekeeper added.

We’ve got enough problems without adding saddle tramps to the list.

Outside, the sun seemed even hotter.

Caleb stood on the warped boardwalk, studying the town with fresh eyes.

This was the reality for most people.

This was what life looked like when you didn’t have 18,000 acres protecting you from hardship.

He was about to head toward the saloon when he noticed a small group gathered near the church.

Three women, well-dressed by bitterwater standards, stood talking in low voices.

Their eyes kept drifting toward something or someone at the edge of town.

Caleb followed their gazes.

Past the last building, maybe 200 yds out, stood a small wooden house.

Calling it a house was generous.

The structure leaned slightly to one side, its roof patched with mismatched boards.

The front porch sagged in the middle.

What might have once been a garden was now mostly bare earth, though Caleb could see someone had tried to coax life from it.

A few struggling plants carefully tended, fighting against the drought.

And standing in that garden, a bucket in her hands, was a woman.

Even from this distance, Caleb could see she was thin, too thin.

Her dress hung loose on her frame, faded from washing and sun.

Dark hair pulled back in a simple braid.

She was watering the plants with careful precision, tilting the bucket slightly to let the water trickle out slowly, making every drop count.

“That’s the Harper woman,” one of the well-dressed women was saying, her voice carrying across the street.

“Still pretending that pathetic garden will amount to anything.

” “I heard she gave away food again last week,” another woman replied.

to those Peterson children.

Can you imagine? She can barely feed herself.

Pride, the third woman said with a sniff.

If she had any sense, she’d accept help from the church fund.

But no, she insists on giving to others when she’s the one who needs charity.

The first woman laughed, sharp and unkind.

Did you see what she wore to service last Sunday? Same dress she’s been wearing for 2 years.

Absolutely mortifying.

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