Each week, American History tv sits in on a lecture. You can watch classes here at 8 00 and midnight eastern. Next, Donald Miller talks about what daily life was like for british and american airmen during world war ii and how their experiences differed from infantrymen. Hours. Ass is two prof. Miller im going to show you some slides. T is not a pro forma lecture ,f you have questions observations, let me know. Where we are at the 1943. We have invaded sicily, we have invaded italy. We are beginning to win the title of the atlantic. An enormous russian victory at stalingrad. Hurting, now the war is beginning to reverse itself. We are going to turn back a little bit to the beginning of the american participation and take that through dday. Next up we will do the dday invasion. Ok. There is the basis, east anglia. I have been there a lot. Englandbackward area of , only 60 miles from london but it might as well be six centuries away. As i say, it is shaped like a giant hachette aimed at no azi, germany. This is the closest space you can get. The fighter boys were further south, down here. The british pilots and Bomber Command was north near york. You have this in your book. You dont have it in color. You have the ranges of the fighter aircraft, how far they could get. That tells you the course of the air war. In the beginning we can only do this in the shallow penetration missions. If youre trying to knock them featured in the great film 12 00 high, they are mostly british. You get further into the war, fighters with longer range. Thunderbolts and lightning. They can take the german bombers. This is the war of the Industrial Area of germany. Then these boys are on their own. ,hese missions you read about they are going down a corridor, a bloody shoot all the way from here to the target and back. They go to regensburg, all the way to italy, to north africa. When you get the people 51 mustang, the mustang has long legs and it can go deep in germany. It can go all the way into nd to prompt prague. Hemingway says the dominant feature of warfare is chance. Even our commanders didnt expect it. They were pressing for the planes. They get into production late but it shows up just in the neck of time. Those are the stages of the air war. Any questions on the . That . Student with the initial bomb runnings, when the bombers would be turned with the flight that carried them out, would they be waiting for them . Prof. Miller not necessarily. They went in waves. Even when they had the mustang. They fly out with thunderbolt coverage to hanover and then the mustang would take off from england. They would overtake them. Then there will be another Fighter Group waiting for them while they returned. Once they got to the target they were on their own and they start back. They are picked up. , if it is armines mustang it is going to pick them up. The thunderbolt is not going to pick them up until you get to the german border. They depend on those guys all the way. Student for they have counted ,n for the missions they ran like the fighters shooting at ground targets . Prof. Miller as part of the mission . Student when they cant have our they are going out, with elite extra room to run the mission prof. Miller . What do little started to do, the mustang already has tremendous fuel efficiency, it is a nimble plane, it is powerful. It can go a long way. Weight hurts you in some ways if you run into opposition. Lets say the luftwaffe means you. You have to drop those tanks. The guys go out on the reserve tanks. Then the plane is nimble and can fight a dogfight. That is how they planned the operation. Doolittle takes over. Your most Important Mission is to dive and kill as many planes on the ground. Them on theng ground as well. Fighter boys love that stuff. That is not the best film footage. They had those cameras on the guns. You get that kind of footage. Anybody else . Ok. Sensere you get a better of the targets. They are going to be initially right here. Normandy. Ok a trip to we stopped here. Immense submarine fortification. Then you see some of the other key spots. When they finally put an air force in italy through the south here, that is the 15th air force. They will fly over the outs and , dresden, evene berlin. Germany has almost no match for oil. This will be a air force territory here. Germany is getting it from both sides here and here. You get daylight bombing, and the raf at night. From italy they would mount missions across here into romania because romania germany gets most natural oil from romania. It is important to knock out spots there. This is where the africanamerican pilots flew, the Tuskegee Airmen, out of italy. They escorted to eastern europe. Russians, where they able to mount the aerial campaign . Prof. Miller good point. No. There is only two countries in the world that have these four engined bombers, britain and the United States. Germany tried to put one into production and ran into problems even with their crack engineers. The russians concentrated. Ntirely on Strategic Air force they had to engine bombers. Hat is how they bombed britain they dont have these babies that can go long distances. We are the only countries that have this sort of thing. Anybody else question . There is the picture. There is the instrument of destruction. A b17. It looks big. T looks big on the ground it looks like the cabin on the submarine. Crew ina 1011 person here. You get a plexiglass nose. Youof the First Missions, might have read this. Was a page whoty had the glass on the front. It knocked the splinters into their heads. 26,000 deaths later. That First Mission was a cake run. You have a navigator sitting at a desk, he is the boy. He has to get you the target. , he is ato a guy history major. He is about to go into his junior year. Drafted, six months later he is navigating a bomber to scotland with a crew of five. The gunners in the back of the plane went to his ship. These guys are not well trained. They are rushed into this war. That explains the early casualties. A lot of responsibility on a navigator. This highlyer has sophisticated instrument called a norton bomb sign. You aim at the target. Whether, the wind, height your app. Day,ould on a clear, clean desert conditions, you could drop bombs into a circle as big as this room. The idea was this was going to be a great secret weapon of the war. , theree cruise landed were two guards that went out. They escorted the bomb sign with them. Matter thateally much after retired because the germans, there were enough crashes and these instruments were saints of the germans knew what was going on but they never implemented one. That is the front of the plane. You step up in here into the , and pilots. Behind this, standing behind them is a guy called the engineer. He knows all the instruments. Anything goes wrong, he is watching all the dials. Attack, he just sticks his head into that thing. Powerful machine guns. The best we have. You have 10 of them on the plane. That is the front of the plane. They are all opposites. Veryill across a precariously narrow catwalk. You could not get them closed. Somehow cranked down on this thing and throw the close the bomb doors by hand or a bomb would stick. In racks. Were you had to unleash this bomb and drop it through. Here are cases of guys falling then you move back into the back. This is where my father was trained. Everybody is wired up. It is symbolic of the organic bombs. And the symbol, they are all on the same wire. They are connected technologically and personally. Have an interphone. When they talk to each other on the plane nobody else can hear that. Unless he hooks of a general generallynal, they are on silence. All the way to the target. There is not much direction from the home base. These kids are entirely on their own. I dont think there has been a case where a guide this young, the average age is 22 years old, the old man is 26 years old. He would generally be the pilot. So, it is a lot of responsibility. Entirely in the hands of the own navigator, and whether you destroy the target or not, it is up to you. Terrific amount of pressure on these kids. On each side there is a machine gun. Narrow, when one guy is narrowed, the back is touched. These things are open to the weather. If there is a little heat from the engine, the compartment isnt heated. , inwould be over germany january, five below zero inside the plane. 26,000 feet. That explains the proper predominantthe frostbite. Frostbite can be a killer. And stickclose these the gunther a whole. Heardt know if you ever the expression the whole nine yards. For going all the way. That was the length of a machine gun. Ammunition boxes for here. It was nine yards from here to these guns. You could get underneath here if there was a pilot. Himself is the gunner. We track into the plane when they take off and land. A tough position to bn. That is the b17. How often do the guns jammed . Good question. They generally jammed for two reasons. Cold weather. Everything breaks down in cold weather. The other thing is over healing. Overheating. Up in yourcan blow face. You have to be careful of that. That happened. In a Prolonged Air battle. Generally it would not last more than 30 minutes. Unless you are going to stuttgart. The germans are flying over their homeland. They can go up and get you, refuel, get you again. They may land four times trying to get a fleet of bombers. Up could have guns clog conditions like that with persistent fire. Anybody else . Student it said in the movie yesterday it was so cold, their hands would freeze to the gun. Was it difficult to and jammed them . Prof. Miller you were two sets of gloves. A light racetrack driver soaked silk gloves. Hey were not weather resistant they wore gloves over that. You took off the larger glove and then put the silk glove on and hope that did not stick. Sometimes guys, in the chaos of combat, your gun jams and you are in danger, you pull both gloves off and try to clear the gym. You have not been told this before. Maybe it is your First Mission. Your hand would stick their. At that temperature. You would stick to it. That is what is going on here. Nobody, they are fighting at four miles high. No one had flown before this. The big thing is, everything is new. You get new kinds of problems, new kinds of medicine, everything. These guys are lab rats. Everything is experimental. Student how quick were air commands to adapt . Prof. Miller very quick. I will tell you where they were slow. All the idea thinking went into the technology of the plane. Boeing makes it. They start producing these things in 1935. They get into production of prototypes. We start to massproduce them. Everything is sophisticated. Nobody thought about the guys. Your problems. If you go up in a commercial plane you start to have your ears pop. These guys are under permission pressure and unpressurized cabins. Your problems are a regular problem in addition to frostbite. Nobody had thought of that. Nobody thought of giving these guys armor. , the met in Museum New York city, which has all these old medieval armor. They had met artists to design armor for these guys. When they went on the bomber they put helmets on with holes in the ears to listen with earphones pretty put on a vast, est that was candace on the outside and steel on the inside. That provided protection. If you got a flak burst, a piece of shrapnel that blew through the aluminum of the plane, it is very thin. That is why it is so cold. You can go with a screwdriver and go like that and drive a screwdriver through the plane. That is how thin the aluminum is. They took a lot of punishment but they had a good superstructure here, here, across that. You could literally blow out the sides. Sometimes the whole area of the plane would be exposed. They could see the gunners in there. They are exacting all the time later on. It could this thing on. This is a gun operated by the bombardier. , a form ofthe radar Guidance System on the plane. The making modifications as they go along. Were any of the members on the plane trained as a medic . Prof. Miller no. You are a moraine, your buddy goes down, medic. But some sulfur on the wound. Untilont have penicillin 1944. All you can do is stop an infection. A guy goes down here with nomadic. Medic. File, a vial of morphine. As soon as a guy went down you take him out of his misery and you give a shot of morphine. A couple of blankets may be. You hope he survives. I described one incident where a guy went down in the front of the plane, and he was in the section here, in the middle of a chaotic air battle. The pilot is usually checking everybody. Sometimes he passes on that responsibility to the navigator. Everything ok back there . Reading oxygen . A lot of the time their masks would clog up. The guy doing the checking goes down. Planen the floor of the for an hour. When they got him back to england they cut off his ears, they fell off. His nose fell off. His lips were gone. His eyeballs frozen his head and had to be removed. Frostbite. A killer. Most of these times they would use the russian cure. They would wait until everything turned purple, turned black, and then they would start falling off. Then you could treat the guy. Rough stuff. It was done on the base. Where there is a doctor. Onres a little hospital every base, and a General Hospital if you needed surgery, amputation, all the smaller stuff is done at the base. Anyone else . On the plane itself . Was there any prior Scientific Research over weather conditions were i was a trial and error . Trial and error. Now we had a lot of research on mountain climbers. People go up here. I was in colorado when the book came out. I saw the airport they have these books about mountain climbing in the himalayas and places like that. Up only 45re going miles. Amountve to pay 400,000 in major climb. They are getting paid 3000 a day and are getting shot at. This. Isnt a lot of there is not a lot of thought. The crazy thing is when they are developing this plane they thought it was impervious. These machine guns, if you fly these things in combat fall wass, so close, halted telling me you would have to be strong to control a bomber because we were flying so close i could hear my wing bumping into the wing of the plane next to me. It is like driving a gigantic truck in the sky, rocking and rolling in the sky. A lot of wind currents in the sky as well. It is tremendously difficult to keep this instrument under control. Would dropping the bomb after that affect the handling . Prof. Miller a lot. 5000 pounds. The atomic bomb was 9000 pounds. Dropping theas bomb, the plane just jumped because you lose that weight. You were jarred like that. Happens. N these things would spin sometimes upside down. H,talked to a guy in savanna he was telling me, he was telling me anything special happened to you . Nothing . A little guide it was 90 years old. He said well, there was one mission where the plane flipped, and the pilot was killed, and the copilot was killed, and the navigator was killed, and i was the radio gunner. We flipped upside down and i started to float in the air. I said, Nothing Happened . [laughter]. E got back, obviously anybody else . Course the commander. The eighth air force, a lot of pressure is going to be on him. A guy named carl spotts was head of the air force. But then baker takes over. His mission is to prepare them to fly, to gain air supremacy over northwestern europe to make the dday invasion possible. Is spotts, who was sent to north africa, he is brought back and has all the American Air Forces in the european theater. Then it is jimmy doolittle. He will change the nature of the air war. War is as new to these guys as the common soldier. They have all the American Air Forces. Not the america air force, it is the American Air Forces. He is under tremendous pressure throughout the war from roosevelt, who is under pressure from churchill. These guys cannot fly in daylight. You dont have escorts. You are getting hammered. Youre getting hammered so hard your not able to have navigators get to the target properly. Why dont you fold up the air force and commented bombers, learn to fly a knife and fly with us . It is safer at night. We dont try to aim specifically at this target or that target. City. E out nighttime, not being able to see doesnt matter. What matters is the luftwaffe. Their casualties are staggering. , i gavee the characters onalk earlier in savannah the film we are making. These are major characters. This is rosie rosenthal. 51 missions, a jewish kid from ,rooklyn, allamerican athlete baseball, football, lawyer. Got a job with a law firm the day after pearl harbor he volunteers. He kept his bow as long as hitler lived he would fly. He react for a couple of missions and went down three times. Interesting character. Comes back of the end of the war and he is transferred out. The war is over in may. He signs up to go to the pacific. He wants to fly the 29th but the war is over. What he does, he is a lawyer. He reads about the nuremberg trials. They sent him to trial to prosecute german civilians who committed atrocities against downed airmen, hanging them, shooting them, throwing them into burning buildings. He went after these guys. He met a girl he liked named phyllis. They fell in love. She is a trial lawyer. They beginning they got married at nurnberg during the trial. They came home, closure for him. Oneslped prosecute the big. Really interesting character what a lot of people dont talk about, because veterans dont even like to talk about it when i bring it up, segregation. This is a relentlessly segregated area. There are no africanamericans ever in the bombers. Nor are the africanamericans flying fighter planes out of england. The only africanamericans flying our the Tuskegee Airmen flying out of italy. He insisted it was impossible to maintain crew discipline if you have blacks and whites together, southern whites especially with blacks in the same cabin in close proximity. Its one of the great marks against the eighth air force. Personnel air force in england are black. Of peopleless than 1 of color in 1954. They are doing with these guys did, building airbases. Detail and trucking take the bombs to the air base. They would show up, deliver the bombs, and asked have a meal. They were not even allowed in the mess hall. They would have to go eat rations and sleeping trucks. Ofre were a number racial riots. The english girls would date black guys. A colored night and a night. Night the white kids like that until they wondered what is my girlfriend doing on t