Let’s start with what it was really like to be a Flying Fortress crew member, and we’ll move progressively more disturbing from there, saving the absolute worst for the end.

So, for you to become a B17 air crew member, you’d logically have to go through the training first, which brings us to the first very disturbing fact.

The 9-month training program for pilots was compressed into roughly 9 to 10 weeks at the peak of the war when crews were getting lost at an alarming rate.

Same thing for gunners, navigators, and bombarders.

So, it’s no surprise that around 25,000 US airmen during the war died in accidents in training without any enemy action.

Not all of them were B7 crews, but a majority of them were, as the flying fortress was the workhorse bomber, especially in the European theater before the B-24 Liberator and B29 Superfortresses arrived.

A big reason for accidents was tight formation practice.

When the B7s were decimated by German fighter interceptors early in the war, they had to fly in very tight formations where the wings of bombers were tucked in under and above one another.

This was done to create overlapping fields of fire for the machine guns they carried.

This made it more dangerous for Luftwafa for fighter attacks.

But flying like this for long hours, and remaining in information under attack or flack fire wasn’t an easy thing to do, not to mention learning it in the first place.

Bomber crews actually said that the hardest part of the mission was to take off and form up in formation in horrible England foggy and cloudy weather.

All bombers had to take off from base runways as close together as possible, lifting off in intervals of just 30 to 45 seconds.

As the first bomber was near the end of a runway and still wasn’t yet airborne, the next one had already started behind him.

Then in the skies, they had to gather together in formation.

And they even had weird looking B17s, older models called assembly [music] ships painted with different markings for better visibility to guide them into formation.

So, as you can imagine, there were a horrific number of mid-air collisions, and it’s not a great thing to do in a bomber overloaded with fuel and bombs.

Now, if you manage to survive the training, you then had to survive the conditions of flying on a flying fortress, which is harder than it sounds.

During the time it was developed, pressurized cabins were still at the experimental stage and the flying fortress flew unpressurized.

So what this means is that there was no system inside the aircraft to keep the air pressure stable as it climbed higher.

The higher you go, the thinner the air becomes and with that the pressure drops fast.

Instead of breathing normally like in a modern airplane, the crew inside the B7 were exposed to the same air pressure as outside the aircraft.

At 20 or 30,000 ft, that’s barely a third of what it is at sea level, meaning there wasn’t enough oxygen for the body to function properly.

Breathing felt like sucking air through a straw.

And after a few minutes without oxygen, you’d start to feel dizzy and confused before passing out completely.

Combine that with the freezing cold and roaring wind drafts leaking through every gunport, and you can imagine the kind of environment they had to fight in.

[music] The crews were basically like driving 200 mph on a highway in an [music] open top convertible, except that this highway was 30,000 ft in the air where the temperatures were around -60° F.

This means that the first two biggest dangers to the crew before ever reaching the enemy were hypoxia and frostbite.

So, the Flying Fortress crews had to carry masks and heating suits.

The only problem with that is besides both systems being notoriously unreliable, you were flying through very hostile enemy airspace where Germans tried everything they could to stop you from bombing their homeland.

So if anything hot and sparky moving at high speed, like one of millions of flax shells fired or determined Luftwaffer fighter interceptors, cannon and machine gun fire came through the soft aluminum skin of your bomber and hit the system, you were basically cooked.

Besides the main oxygen system operating on low pressure deliberately so that if it was hit, it would not violently explode, crews also had so-called walkaround oxygen bottles for emergencies or to move through the bomber where needed.

They gave them a couple of minutes of air for emergencies, otherwise they had to either get to a lower altitude where there was more oxygen or bail out.

Veterans said that if anything went wrong with the system, the man would just fall asleep and if no one got to him within 5 minutes, he was gone.

Then we have temperature.

Flying several miles up for a long time turned the unpressurized cabin into a freezing wind tunnel.

Crews had to wear so-called blue bunny suits, which were electrically heated to keep them alive.

But the same as with the oxygen system, there was much that could go wrong with them and either make you too hot or worse, shut off and make you suffer frostbite or even die from hypothermia.

Frostbite was common and touching machine guns without gloves, you can lose skin or fingers quite easily.

It was so cold that the blood would freeze upon exiting the body when someone was hit.

And I’m not making this up.

It was said by the veterans.

We just can’t imagine how uncomfortable and dangerous it was just to fly in a B7 in those bulky suits and a parachute on your back all while manning your cramped position, staring your eyes out to see if the enemy fighters would appear.

This brings us to besides their own bomber, the next two biggest dangers to B7 crews once they entered hostile airspace.

German’s main anti-aircraft system was their high velocity cannons, famously [music] known as flack.

Around 1 million German crews served tens of thousands of these guns that were organized in belts of defenses around the most important cities and industrial complexes that B17s would of course target.

There wasn’t much you could do other than pray the shell wouldn’t explode too close to your bomber.

Those 88 mm flack [music] shells were guided by German radars and for the time ingenious fire control systems to guide tens of cannons at once, and they could fire up a lot of shells in a short time.

Each shell weighed some 10 kg and had 1 kg of explosives inside.

When it exploded, it created a deadly radius of shrapnel that easily went through your Duralumin bomber’s skin and well, everything behind it like flesh.

Those were the black puffs of smoke you’ve seen in World War II footage.

And those clouds were so thick sometimes that crew said it seemed like you could get out and walk on them.

Getting hit by the flack was described horribly for what it could do to a human body.

Airmen that survived suffered from psychological trauma of seeing their comrades decapitated or cut in half by the flack.

Crews carried flack vests, but they didn’t help with getting hit in the neck and face by shrapnel.

While a direct hit by a flack shell, especially if the bomber hadn’t yet dropped its bombs, was beyond description.

Although we have to mention that the Flying Fortress continued to shock everyone throughout the war and returned from missions with entire sections of the plane missing.

Some even survived direct hits with the flax shell exploding inside, then coming home without the cockpit or barely flying on one or two out of four engines, although it seemed impossible.

The same goes for the fire from German fighters.

As the bombing missions intensified, Germans deployed their elite Luftwaffer pilots from the Eastern Front, specifically to intercept and down bombers.

Fighters like the Messmitt BF 109, Fauler Wolf 190, or the most feared ME262 jet later in the war carried 20 and 30mm autoc cannons and heavy machine guns.

Even early experimental aerial rockets to fire into bomber formations, and one wellplaced burst could do carnage inside a bomber.

Early models of the B7 that the British first tried out didn’t have a tail gunner and had only a few machine guns, most of them 30 caliber.

Well, this didn’t go quite well with fighter attacks.

So eventually the Flying Fortress Model G had 1350 caliber machine guns in several turrets and double configurations.

Germans then deployed a very daring tactic, especially when a B7 didn’t have a forward-firing turret to attack it head-on and fire a long burst into the cockpit, shredding the pilots and controls.

This proved extremely deadly for flying fortresses, and they quickly installed forward-firing machine guns because of this.

The main problem at first was that formation simply wasn’t enough to protect them from fighter interceptors, and horribly many of them got shot down.

Because of the weight, they carried ammo for their 50 caliber machine guns for only about 1 minute worth of total firing time.

So when attacked by swarms of German fighters, they were pretty soon out of ammo and completely unprotected.

Out of 5,548 American heavy bombers lost in combat.

Roughly 2,400 were credited to flack and another 2,400 to fighters while the rest approximately 700 bombers went down for various other reasons like accidents and mechanical failures.

There were several missions where B7 suffered just catastrophic losses and the biggest reason for this was enemy fighters.

It was at first believed that a lot of machine guns and tight formations would be enough.

But in horrible missions like Yubot pen attacks where almost 20% of B7s were shot down, [music] this was proved catastrophically wrong.

Then the Allied fighters like P47 Thunderbolts, P38 Lightnings, and Spitfires would go together with the bombers.

And when German fighter interceptors arrived, they would engage in dog fights to protect the bombers.

But the problem with this was that fighters had a much much shorter range than the [music] bombers, as they were never envisioned to go far deep in enemy territory, but to operate close to their bases.

So they’d escort the bombers for as long as the fuel allowed.

And when they hit the limit of having just enough fuel to go back to base, they had to turn around and leave the bombers to continue on their own.

And because the Allies wanted to attack very important factories producing parts for German fighter aircraft, bombers had to go the rest and [music] the most vulnerable part of the journey on their own.

Because of this happened the two darkest days for B17 crews two black Thursdays.

The first one was the Regensburg and Schweinffort raid on August 17th 1943 [music] when in a daring move a two-pronged attack on aircraft factories deep in Germany was launched.

The idea was to confuse the German fighters by attacking in two streams so they could focus only on one.

And then after bombing, one group would go to bases in North Africa, the other back to England.

However, bad weather caused the two streams of bombers to go hours apart instead of simultaneously, so Germans could attack first one, then the other.

After their escort had to return, bombers continued on their own and soon got swarmed by waves of German fighters that constantly attacked them, going back only to rearm and refuel and then back to action.

[music] The outcome of the mission was damage on factories that was repaired within weeks.

And out of 376 B17s, 60 were shot down, 90 damaged beyond repair, and about 600 airmen killed or missing, with many more captured.

Then, because this didn’t go as the Allied commanders hoped, they tried again.

This time, determined to not make the same mistakes.

So, then came the second Black Thursday in a second raid on the same targets on October 14th, 1943.

Bombers were picked up by radar and over 300 Luftwaffer fighters scrambled to intercept them.

This time out of 291 B17s launched, 77 were shot down and 120 more damaged.

Again, about 600 airmen were killed, [music] missing, and captured.

And finally, such deep raids were temporarily suspended.

The longrange escort with the drop tanks then solved this problem, especially when the P-51 Mustang arrived and could follow the bombers all the way to Berlin and back.

But the risk was always high.

It was lower against the fighters now, but the flack was always there till the very end of the war.

As you see, the losses were so high at several points during the bombing campaign that the Allies were very close to canceling it completely.

But sadly, at the expense of thousands of bomber crews and hundreds of thousands of civilians, they pressed on regardless.

It is said that the bombing campaign shortened the war by one year, but perhaps it brought horrible destruction and civilian deaths much more than necessary.

In 1943, average losses per mission were about 8% with this number going up to 30% on the worst days.

Now, mathematically at such attrition, only about a third of crews could expect to finish their 25 mission tour, which was later raised first to 30, then 35.

Some 38% of crews completed their tours, while everyone else was killed, captured, or wounded.

Some 26,000 air crews of the 8th Air Force were killed and more than 28,000 taken prisoner.

Which brings us to the next very disturbing fact.

Prisoners of war, at least those who survived to become one.

When it was obvious that the bomber wasn’t coming back home, the pilot would hit the alarm to signal bailout.

He tried to hold the bomber steady on autopilot if he could, while the crew could push themselves out of narrow hatches with their flight suits and bulky parachutes.

In many cases, the bomber was spiraling out of control while the crew fought against G forces and tried to get out of a probably already burning bomber.

On average, only about 50% of them managed to bail out.

Then, if lucky enough to not get hit by the bomber while jumping out, and then for the parachute to not be ripped by the flack or burning and to deploy properly, they faced a new set of challenges.

First, to survive the journey to the ground, floating under their parachute helplessly.

[music] German fighters sometimes like to strafe crews in parachutes, and because of this, parachutes were actually modified and made smaller so they’d fall faster, giving German fighters less time to shoot them.

Although that also meant hitting the ground quite hard, roughly like jumping from a second floor window.

And when they hit the ground, they were welcomed by the very people whose families those bombs were killing and whose houses they were destroying.

Some were taken into captivity without much trouble and lived as prisoners of war until the wars end.

But others had a much darker fate.

It’s understandable that people on the ground whose family members might be killed by one of thousands of bombs that you and your friends dropped weren’t really happy to see you.

Nazi propaganda depicted the Allies as terror flyers, which if you look at it realistically, they were.

There is data that around 1,000 Allied airmen were lynched by angry mobs before the German regular forces could capture them.

There is an example of this, the Russellheim massacre, where a mob killed six of eight airmen with rocks, and many other instances where the truth surfaced only years after the war.

There were actually trials of soldiers and civilians who executed flying fortress crewmen held after the war, but only a small number of them were sentenced because it was hard to prove it.

If you reached the P camp, a long, boring, and uncomfortable time was ahead of you, even worse if you were heavily injured during bailout.

Food was scarce, and conditions not always the best, and around 1,300 captured crewmen died in captivity for various reasons.

Many survivors saw the end of the war weighing 80 lbs in horrible health condition.

The B7 delivered about 640,000 out of a total of 1.

6 million bombs dropped by the Allied air forces during the war.

What these bombs did on the ground was also nothing short of horror.

The bombing strategy that at first prioritized industrial and military targets quickly turned to bombing everything that was German.

Tactics turned to massive raids and so-called pattern [music] bombing.

Hundreds of B7s on some missions up to a thousand bombers would go over German cities and just level them.

They dropped combined payloads of high explosive and incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that engulfed whole cities in fire.

German civilian deaths are estimated between half a million and 800,000 with more than 120 cities virtually turned into rubble.

You’ve probably heard of examples of this, such as Dresden that was completely without any strategic importance, yet was bombed continuously for over 3 days with 4,000 tons of bombs dropped that almost removed the city from the map.

About 25,000 people were killed just here in this raid like nothing.

There was also the Hamburg raid where 40,000 civilians died in a 10-day continuous raid.

And now, after hearing all those disturbing things, let’s talk about the unbelievable ones.

The things that actually did happen to everyone’s shock.

On February 1st, 1943, a formation of B17s took off from Biscre, Algeria, headed for the German occupied seapports of Tunisia.

And among them was a bomber the crew called All-American.

They dropped their bombs and turned for the 300-mile trip back when two Messes fighters came straight at them in a head-on pass.

The gunners fired back and the first fighter went down in flames.

However, as the second began to break away, its pilot was hit and lost control.

The German fighter missed the waist gunner by inches and its wing cut through the all-American’s tail, almost completely severing it from the fuselage.

The tail gunner and his position were connected to the rest of the bomber only by a few strips of aluminum on the right side and pieces of the floor.

From another B17, Lieutenant Charles Cutforth took a photograph that became one of the most striking images of the air war.

A flying fortress with its tail hanging by a thread and somehow still in the air.

With nearly every control wire to the tail gone and half of the parts necessary for flying missing, by any aviation rule, it shouldn’t be airborne at all.

Yet, the autopilot happened to be engaged at the moment of impact.

And because it used electrical wiring and servo motors instead of the now severed mechanical cables, the pilots could still work with what was left and hold the bomber somewhat steady while the tail twisted and swayed.

The formation slowed to shield their wounded fortress and the all-American against all odds made it back and landed safely with no serious injuries to the crew.

It was even repaired and kept flying missions until the end of the war.

Now if that sounds weird, take a look at this.

On January 3rd, 1943 over San Nazair, France, ball turret gunner Alan Maji rode in the B17 named Snap, Crackle Pop during a large raid on the Yubot pens.

He was 20 years old with six missions behind him.

But number seven would be the mission he remembered for the rest of his life.

As they neared the target, the sky filled with flack.

A blast knocked out an engine and then a direct hit shattered the right wing.

With the aircraft fatally wounded and spiraling out of control, Alan tried to get out of the turret.

Since the turret was barely 4 ft wide inside, his parachute could not fit with him, so it was kept in the fuselage.

If anything went wrong, he had to rotate the turret to align with the opening, open the hatch, climb inside, grab the parachute, strap in, and jump.

All while the bomber might be on fire or breaking apart, which is what was happening now.

He made it into the fuselage only to find his parachute shredded by flack.

As the B7 broke apart at about 20,000 ft, another flack shell hit it, and the blast threw Allen out without a parachute.

Free falling from roughly 4 mi up, he blacked out from lack of oxygen and the [music] extreme cold.

After a short time, his unconscious body went through the glass roof of the Sanair train station.

However, the angled pain slowed him just enough before he hit the floor to not die on impact.

German soldiers found him alive with [music] a broken right arm and leg, injuries to his nose and an eye, and 28 shrapnel wounds barely clinging to life.

They were so startled to see him breathing that they gave him immediate medical care.

After treatment, he actually survived and then spent 18 months as a prisoner of war until Allied forces liberated his camp in 1945.

He later lived to the age of 84.

Even to himself, it wasn’t clear how he survived.

But what’s even more fascinating is that Allan was not the only one.

Staff Sergeant Eugene Moran manned the tail guns of a B7 named Ricky Tick Taravi during a raid over Germany.

The Luftwaffer fighters hit his bomber hard.

He was shot in both arms.

An explosion broke his ribs.

And to make matters even worse, his parachute had been shot to pieces.

A catastrophic hit then severed the entire tail from the fuselage, and in an instant, Moran found himself inside a detached tail section, spinning down from about 20,000 ft.

Tumbling at around 100 ft per second, he stopped struggling, accepted what looked like certain death, and tried to relax.

The falling tail hit a tall pine tree, which slowed the impact just enough to keep him alive when it reached the ground.

German soldiers who arrived at the crash site were stunned to find him breathing.

His injuries were severe, including a crushed skull.

However, he was treated and a Serbian prisoner of war doctor cared for him with the scant supplies he had and somehow kept him alive.

Moran endured 18 months in German P camps and survived to see liberation.

In January 1944, tail gunner James in a B7 called Skippy went through something similar near Athens when his bomber collided with another fortress in Cloud.

Like Moran, he fell toward the ground inside a detached tail.

And while he was falling, he didn’t even realize that he was separated from the rest of the bomber.

After a couple of minutes of free fall that felt like an eternity, his tail section hit trees that broke his [music] fall and saved him.

He climbed out of the tail and only then realized that he was alone.

James was later rescued by Greek [music] Orthodox monks.

If you think surviving a fall from 20,000 ft without a parachute or flying without a tail were the limits of bomber luck, consider what happened to the lovely Julie over Cologne on October 15th, [music] 1944 when a direct flack hit tore the entire front off the bomber.

First Lieutenant Lawrence Delansancy had just watched his bombardier release their bombs when a shell exploded in the nose compartment.

The blast killed Staff Sergeant George Abbott instantly, but his body absorbed most of the shrapnel that would have hit the rest of the crew.

The entire nose disappeared.

The plexiglass and aluminum skin were gone and the entire front was wide open.

The instrument panel was shredded.

There was no airspeed indicator, no altimeter, no compass, and the oxygen system was gone.

Looking at the only option that offered a chance, Delansancy dropped to a lower altitude so [music] they could breathe.

Although that left them within range of every German gun between Cologne and the channel.

Navigator Raymond Leoo had lost his maps and equipment in the blast, so he had to guide them home through enemy territory without them.

while the freezing wind blew at their faces and the bomber could give out at any moment.

Even so, they crossed the channel in this semi-airworthy state and reached England.

With no working flaps or brakes, Delansancy somehow put the wounded fortress on the runway without killing them all, and he received the Silver Star for it.