Transcript of Battle for the Skies New

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In 1942 and into 1943, hundreds of thousands of Americans descend on the east of England to live, fight, and maybe die in the joint effort to defeat Nazi Germany from the air. Combat at 25,000 feet and 300 miles per hour has never been attempted before. The physical, mental, and emotional challenges will be unique. Victory in World War II will be largely determined by who controls the skies: the German Luftwaffe or the Allied air forces. This is World War II with Tom Hanks, Episode 12: Battle for the Skies.

1942.

The Third Reich is building elaborate coastal defenses in Europe. As they continue to battle the Soviets in the East, the Germans know that it's only a matter of time before Britain and America attack from the West. From the English Channel to the plains of Russia, Germany controls most of Europe.

Hitler has turned Europe into an apparently impregnable fortress. Impregnable fortress. But as people said at the time, yes, but he forgot to put a roof over it, and the Allied bombers are going to take advantage of that.

In the First World War, both sides bombed each other to little effect. But as aviation evolves, a new concept of warfare develops in the 1920s and '30s—strategic bombing. Its proponents are a group of officers from the US Air Corps Tactical School. They come to be known as the Bomber Barons.

The theory is, we'll use this novel weapon in a novel way, not to attack the enemy's armies, to attack the enemy's homeland, his factories, his infrastructure, destroying his economy and thus making it impossible for the enemy to make war. These airpower advocates say this is a better way to fight war. No need for that horrible trench deadlock of World War I. That's the old way. The new way is strategic bombing.

East Anglia is the England of little churches, hedges, fields. Medieval buildings, and it's turned into one gigantic aircraft carrier.

In the spring of 1942, the US Eighth Air Force begins construction on dozens of air bases, transforming a quiet corner of East England into one of the most vital fronts of the entire Second World War.

It's flat, it's perfect for airfields. So you get this massive, massive influx of American bombers carrying the most destructive weapons ever produced. And just as strikingly, young American airmen.

They all had grown up dreaming of flying above the clouds at over 300 miles per hour, something their parents and grandparents could never imagine. And all of a sudden, here's this opportunity.

The English used to complain, "They're oversexed, they're overpaid, and they're over here." The Royal Air Force has been striking the German homeland for 2 years.

Take off, off you go, off you go, over! Prime Minister Winston Churchill understands how important such raids are for British morale. But the RAF pays a grievous cost.

In these early months of the war, there were raids with hardly any aircraft coming back.

And the most important lesson they took away from it is that daytime bombing was a very hazardous thing to undertake.

Arthur Harris is the man put in charge of Britain's Bomber Command, and it's his idea to switch to night bombing. To use night as a cloak to protect these bomber forces so they can drop their bombs and they have a better chance of making it home.

So what they're doing is merely area bombing. They're flying over German cities at night and letting loose their bomb loads, and that means civilian casualties.

There's a lot of retribution in this British strategy. The Blitz had smashed British cities and factories in the winter of 1940-41. And the Brits plan to smash German society so badly that it knocks them out of the war.

They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. Meeting in Casablanca, President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill, and their staffs strategize how to continue the Allied assault on the Third Reich.

One of the major outcomes of the Casablanca Conference is the Allies declared unconditional surrender as their war aim. But something else happens at Casablanca as well: an argument on air strategy between the British and Americans.

The US Army Air Force particularly its commander, General Henry "Hap" Arnold, insists that daylight precision bombing on critical wartime industries will be more effective.

And as so often in World War II, American expectations come up against British experience.

Churchill is going to go to FDR and tell him that, look, your daylight precision stuff, it's not going to work. We tried it. It didn't work. That's why we are doing bombing operations at night, and that is the way forward. Well, Hap Arnold gets wind of this.

Arnold's a pioneer in aviation, taught by the Wright brothers how to fly, and he is a believer in strategic air power. And when the British say, hey, you guys should bomb at night just like we do, and he says, no, no, air power could be used in a better way.

The American plan rests on a cutting-edge device, the Norden bombsight.

The Norton bombsight is an analog computer. You punch in various data— wind speed, altitude, wind direction, air pressure— and it correlates all those things together and tells you exactly when to drop the bomb. According to the advertising slogans, it can drop a bomb in a pickle barrel at 18,000 feet.

Americans claim the Norden bombsight, which requires daylight and clear weather, promises greater precision and therefore fewer civilian casualties.

So Henry Arnold and his advisors come up with this plan, the Combined Bomber Offensive, which means the British bombing at night and the Americans bombing precision targets during the day. The Americans are going to sell it as this around-the-clock bombing. And this utterly appeals to Churchill with the idea that his adversary will never catch a break.

Attacking an enemy from 25,000 feet presents unique challenges. Temperatures dip below -50°F. If an airman's supply of oxygen is cut off for more than 60 seconds, he will die.

You look out the window as a crewman on a B-17 and you begin to see black puffs, and they might not look too dangerous until one actually makes contact.

The most infamous German weapon of them all was the Flak 88mm gun. It's capable of sending 29-pound explosive projectiles to altitudes approaching 30,000 feet.

The dilemma with flak is you can't maneuver to avoid it, so the best you can do is sit tight and grit your teeth.

Once the flak stops, there's silence. It's a deathly silence. Because they know what's coming.

There's 4 of them, 1 o'clock high. They're coming around. German fighter pilots are seasoned combat veterans. Many of them have hundreds of kills because they've been engaged in this war since 1939.

The best way to kill a German fighter is to send Allied fighters to shoot them down. But when the United States starts to bomb Germany proper, Their fighters don't have the range to be able to escort bombers all the way to a target.

So the B-17 is bristling with machine guns around the fuselage of the aircraft.

3 planes, 9 o'clock, coming around.

2 fighters, 6 o'clock up, coming in. There really is a flying fortress.

Bomber crews were these interdependent societies.

In which every person was dependent upon the person sitting next to them and the person sitting behind them.

They're breaking at 11, breaking at 11. I got 'em.

B-17 out of control at 3 o'clock. Come on, you guys, get out of that plane.

Bail out.

Come on, get out of there.

A few miles from the actual target, the bomber will start what's called the bomb run. It's all done visually. You have to hold altitude, hold airspeed, and hold heading so the bombardier can dial in on the Norden bombsight. 'Cause if you don't hit the target, you gotta come back again.

War sometimes breaks down to individual moments of terror. You're watching other planes being literally blown out of the sky, and you have to drop the bombs with precision. And then make it out again on the way home.

Bombs away! In combat conditions, the accuracy of the Norden bombsight is not as precise as the Air Force predicted. The casualties are greater than they feared.

These missions would come back with 10, 20% losses. Of course, the pilots are highly trained, highly technical people that are very difficult to replace.

No one in history has ever tried strategic bombing on this scale before. As generals and strategists and air marshals are working out the future of air war, these men are guinea pigs.

Mission by mission, the Eighth Air Force slowly develops the methods needed to damage their intended targets. But Adolf Hitler's attention remains fixed on his battle with the Soviets.

He had seen the German losses back in 1940 when the Luftwaffe was attacking England, and to him it looked like strategic air power doesn't win wars. Win wars. Ground forces win wars. So Hitler's viewpoint about an air force is that it exists to support the ground troops.

With the loss at Stalingrad, including the capture of his entire 6th Army, Hitler is focused on the Eastern Front. But the Allied raids do alarm Luftwaffe Air Marshal Erich Ludendorff. Hermann Göring.

Göring is hearing from his local and regional Luftwaffe commanders that they really need more fighter aircraft. But in a sense, Göring's trapped. If he detaches air power from the Eastern Front, a situation that is already critical is soon going to turn mortal.

The Germans now are going to streamline procedures. And make things more efficient, they start producing more aircraft, more armaments in the middle of the Combined Bomber Offensive. So from 1943 on, there's an exponential increase in German industrial output.

With German fighter production on the upswing, the Allied governments are becoming increasingly concerned And they're getting a little tired of hearing their airmen say, "We can bring Germany to its knees," when they don't see any evidence that that's true.

In May, Churchill and Roosevelt meet to finalize plans in the Mediterranean. They also commit to a cross-channel invasion of France.

Since America came into the war, they've had a strategy. To land a gigantic force somewhere in northwestern France and then driving straight into the heart of Germany.

Codenamed Operation Overlord, the attack is scheduled for spring of the next year. Achieving air supremacy over occupied Europe is crucial to the success of the invasion.

At this point, everybody recognizes amphibious operations can't happen unless you control the seas, and have control of the air.

So the top commanders all agree that the number one priority is destroying the Luftwaffe, and that means the bomber force is given the job of smashing the infrastructure of the Luftwaffe on the ground so that when the Allies land on D-Day and in the ground fighting that follows, there'll be no German aircraft interfering.

The RAF and the Eighth Air Force join efforts for what they term Blitz Week—attacks on various cities across Germany. Their first joint target is a busy port with dockyards, submarine pens, and manufacturing. It's also home to over a million people.

Hamburg is a real center of aircraft production, so for the Americans, there's lots of specific military-industrial targets they can attack. But the Brits look at the types of housing there and they think they're very vulnerable to fire, so they're going to burn neighborhoods. They're going to dehouse German people, and that means workers are going to be killed, factories will grind to a halt, supply chains will break down.

It's codenamed Operation Gomorrah, after the Old Testament city that was destroyed by fire from above.

This is going to be 8 days and 7 nights of pounding the city of Hamburg.

It's very carefully planned. First, there are high explosives to blow out windows, to blow out roofs, to knock down buildings.

And they'll drop incendiaries, smaller bombs that just burn like firecrackers. And with these roof tiles gone, the, the wooden structure of the roofs is exposed, and these little incendiaries will land in those roofs and just set fires.

The British want revenge on Hamburg for the Blitz. The Americans have been singing the strategic bombing song for years, and now they can show the destructive nature of the combined bomber offensive to wipe a city off the map.

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In the summer of 1943, Allied air forces launch Blitz Week, the largest series of raids on Germany to date.

The British and American air forces have supposedly been working together, the British bombing by night, the US by day, but they haven't been bombing the same target cities. That changes in the summer of 1943.

The Allies' first joint target is the city of Hamburg. On the night of July 24th, the raids begin. The RAF drops incendiary bombs. But in the following days, American B-17s are unable to hit their targets.

The Americans intended to bomb aircraft factories, but the use of incendiaries created so much smoke that the Norden bombsights were essentially blinded.

They can't actually see their targets, so they're almost reduced to doing area bombing, not unlike the British.

On July 27th, a heat wave sends temperatures soaring. As the RAF returns for a 4th night of strikes.

It's very hot, it's very dry, and the meteorological conditions are ripe for firestorm. This time, the fires burn so hot, the oxygen that these fires demand causes a windstorm.

Winds are over 150 miles an hour. The firestorm works a little bit like a blast furnace. It's a localized weather system that will see that fire spread at the speed of a galloping horse.

A gigantic updraft results that robs people cowering in their shelters of oxygen and leads to death by asphyxiation.

Temperatures go up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. It's the most devastating firestorm that's ever been created.

The stories are of people trying to run out of shelters with children near them burning, with their hands and feet stuck in melting asphalt, with the buildings falling down on top of them.

The city of Hamburg is devastated.

Operation Gomorrah kills over 40,000 civilians. Almost two-thirds of the city's houses are burned to the ground, leaving a million residents homeless.

Churchill is worried about the human cost of what they're doing. He's worried about how history will look at it.

There's a line from Churchill supposedly where he looks at some of the movies of Hamburg and goes, "Are we beasts?" The striking thing about air power is it makes all of us combatants. It's not just about the battlefield. The battlefield is actually civilian population.

The destruction stuns Nazi high command. One of Hitler's ministers tells him that Hamburg put the fear of God enemy. But Hitler refuses to visit the city or receive a delegation of civilians who had saved lives during the fire.

Hamburg is a shock to the entire German war effort. Göring has told Hitler repeatedly that he had this bomber problem under control, and now here lies the second largest city in Germany in ashes.

Accounts of the bombing of Hamburg spread throughout Germany. Hitler begins to transfer German fighter planes from the Eastern Front and the Mediterranean to the Fatherland.

In addition, the Germans ring their major cities with these gigantic monumental flak towers, 150 feet tall, 11-foot-thick concrete walls bristling with guns, Not only are they highly effective against incoming bombers, their guns barking, the sound and fury remind the people that Hitler is looking out for them.

Back in Britain, there was big disagreement at the time with how the raid on Hamburg goes. From Harris's point of view, this is a war-winning strategy. That if you hit people hard enough, you can cause a breakdown of their will to fight.

But for Arnold, Hamburg was not a success. It proved the inefficiency of area bombing. He wants to strike precise targets, the factories that are keeping the Luftwaffe in the air.

Henry Arnold thinks strategic bombing can work. We just need to do it harder.

The combined American-British raid on Hamburg levels a city, but does little to destroy the Luftwaffe before the invasion of Europe. By August of 1943, the Eighth Air Force is receiving enough planes and personnel to launch the large formations required to decimate German aircraft production. Bomber bases are built in the UK and Canada. Theory is about to be put into practice.

What is keeping the Luftwaffe in the air are the factories behind it. That's what Arnold wants to strike, and he thinks the way to do that is to double down on daylight precision bombing. More planes, more raids, more attacks on the same target until the Germans break.

Arnold now demands maximum effort from the Eighth Air Force.

Normally there are planes that are being worked on or repaired or aircrew that are resting, so that every now and then they get a day off. But now when you go maximum effort, it means you put everything in the air every time.

Previously, around 90 B-17s would fly each mission, but that number will soon double and triple.

The Americans are obsessed with this view of the German economy as a series of interconnected pubs and spokes.

So if they hit the right domino, they'll all come down.

These are called bottleneck industries, industries where just a few plants and locations control all the production.

Bombing bottleneck targets seems to be a more efficient use of your air force. One big raid, one factory destroyed, a crucial sector of the German war economy crippled.

Probably the most consequential bottleneck industry with regards to the Luftwaffe was ball bearings. Anything that moves needs a ball bearing. Anything that turns needs a ball bearing, including German aircraft engines, propellers turning, landing wheels, and also all the machines and machinery that build those products.

So it's a twofer. On August 17th, one year to the day from their first attack on occupied Europe, the Eighth Air Force The Eighth Air Force launches a dual raid. The first strike on Regensburg is meant to draw off German fighters so that the rest of the force can hit the primary target, Germany's largest ball-bearing factory in Schweinfurt. 3 weeks later, the Eighth strikes another plant in Stuttgart. In these raids alone, the Eighth loses nearly 100 planes. And 1,000 crew killed or captured. Bulberring production is interrupted, but only temporarily.

The Allies are always surprised at how rapidly the Germans rebuild their cities and factories. But they do so with this almost inexhaustible supply of slave labor. Prisoners of war in the hundreds of thousands. They're barely fed. When one dies, they can be simply discarded and another one put in their place.

Forced laborers from occupied countries are ordered by the Nazis to reconstruct German factories.

They also dispersed the German aircraft industry. So that it can't be taken out in any one strike because it's not all in one place. And they put it underground. They use old salt mines. They use old quarries. Now you can't hit it.

Now you can't bomb it. There is nothing you can do because you can't bomb a facility when it's underground.

This ultimately means German aircraft production will continue to increase By the fall of 1943, the Eighth Air Force is bombing targets deep inside the Reich and returning to ones they've already hit. In early October, they fly a series of maximum effort raids, including a second strike on the plant at Schweinfurt, all in a single week.

There is a limit to how much the human psyche can take, and on many occasions, bomber crews reached that limit. You're 5 miles up and you're braving death every second. Fighters, flak, fighters, flak. An adrenaline rush overloading your nervous system. And then you land and it's quiet. You're back at a base in East Anglia. You have a hot meal. You sleep in a comfortable bed. And then maybe you do it again tomorrow. More fighters, more flak. You think you were going to die 10 times in the course of this a bomb raid, and that night you'd be drinking scotch with a couple of friends at the commissary. It was almost impossible to reconcile.

The longer you did it, you would become more and more aware of how vulnerable you were.

By the end of the month, the Eighth Air Force has endured horrific losses. The men call it Black October.

If you're an American airman, you have a 20% chance of being killed on any mission you undertake. One in five. That is forbidding math. Adding to that, they don't appear to be having an appreciable impact on the German war effort, leading to an incipient collapse of airmen morale.

Morale. They start to see the losses around them and go, we're just going to fly until we're dead.

The series of American raids in Black October shows the cost of daytime precision bombing.

The loss rates, the limitations of the Norden bombsight, the weather, all these things play in a factor how ineffective the bombing campaign is in 1943. You could easily say that the Luftwaffe still owned the skies over Germany.

In the late fall, bad weather forces the Eighth Air Force to suspend missions, giving ground crews the winter to patch battered planes. But the RAF launches its largest campaign yet. A sustained assault on Berlin.

These are going to be massive raids, 16 of them in the heart of Germany.

The British goal over Berlin is to destroy German morale. That's the way to beat Germany, not to destroy individual factories. Harris thinks these Berlin raids will cost 400 to 500 bombers, but they'll cost Germany the war.

The RAF winter raids to Berlin pushed the limit and stamina of British air crews with modest results.

Paris is pression—ly accurate. They lose 400 to 500 aircraft and almost 5,000 airmen.

The Berlin bombing campaign is an epic effort, but unfortunately an epic failure. Both air forces are finding their plans are not corresponding with reality. They're having almost no impact on the Luftwaffe at all. They're simply getting more of their planes shot down and more of their crewmen killed or captured.

After months of heavy losses, the Eighth Air Force is at a crossroads.

Arnold realizes the bombers can't do it alone. If he wants these bombers to make a difference in this war, he's got to send fighters to the target with them.

The Allied air forces have the P-38 Lightning and the P-47 Thunderbolt. Zwillinge. Two absolutely excellent fighter aircraft capable of dogfighting just about as well as anything else in the sky. They only had one limitation, and that was range.

At the time, aeronautical engineers believed having an aircraft that could fly almost 1,000 miles into Germany and back with enough firepower enough maneuverability, uh, enough engine power is an engineering impossibility.

But a new fighter is already being produced by the United States for the British, the P-51 Mustang.

And the Brits test fly it, and they go, "Thanks, it's okay." Below 15,000 feet, It's fine, but we're looking for something higher altitude. Then we get the idea of putting a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine in this thing. So you have a British-made engine, an American airframe, mated together, and it's gangbusters.

That's when it turns into this magical machine. It's fast, It flies high. It's so efficient that it can escort a bomber all the way to downtown Berlin and back. It's the equivalent or better than anything the Germans have.

The Americans and British are allies, but in many ways they've been working at cross purposes, especially in the air campaign. But now the US and British war efforts come together to produce an aircraft that is greater than the sum of its parts. It's the embodiment of the Anglo-American coalition in World War II.

The P-51 is a game changer, but it requires, mind you, an entire rethink of American aerial doctrine.

Allied planners realized that if they threaten targets that are essential to the German war efforts and they force the Germans to send up fighters to protect those targets, The P-51s can pounce and shoot them down.

The Allies have started out thinking B-17s will destroy the German Air Force on the ground. By early 1944, they realize the P-51 is going to destroy the German Air Force in the air.

Knowing the command of the air is crucial to the upcoming cross-channel invasion, Allied air forces launch Operation Argument, a 5-day series of bombing raids over major German cities.

This is the critical hour for the Combined Bomber Offensive because the Allies now know that they're approaching the time for the D-Day landings. They need to draw up the Luftwaffe so that the P-51 can destroy it in the skies. The plan is to send thousands of bombers bombers, knowing that the Luftwaffe will have no choice but to send everything it has up in the skies to defend the homeland. So in a way, the bombers are the bait.

Fitted with extra fuel tanks, the P-51 Mustangs are capable of penetrating deep into Germany. Their primary mission has been protecting the bombers. Now they're ordered to actively pursue German fighters even if it leaves the formations vulnerable.

The mission of the American fighters is to be aggressive and go after the Luftwaffe in the air to kill them in any way, shape, or form.

Operation Argument, known as Big Week, begins a battle of attrition between the Allied air forces and the Luftwaffe. The success of the upcoming invasion hangs in the balance.

The United States is gonna lose about a quarter of the Eighth Air Force in that fight. The Germans are gonna lose about a third of their fighter force and 18% of their fighter pilots. This is something the Allies can sustain, the Germans cannot.

From the US perspective, this is a war economy that is churning out hundreds and hundreds of heavy bombers every day of the year. Young men are signing up in droves. And so the cold-blooded calculation is that no matter how heavy US losses are, America America can replace its planes and pilots.

In the month after Big Week, American fighters down more German planes over Europe than in the previous 2 years. The Luftwaffe is being destroyed in the air and on the ground.

It's really this symbiosis. Mustangs, they're killing German fighters which means the bombers can now be more accurate, which means they're doing a better job of attacking the German aircraft industry. It's a cycle that's destroying the Luftwaffe.

By June 1944, there are few experienced Luftwaffe pilots left alive.

By the time D-Day comes, the Allies own the air. That's why you see very few Luftwaffe fighters over the beaches of Normandy on June 6th, 1944.

Control of the air is decisively established. The Luftwaffe will be incapable of opposing the upcoming Allied invasion. But again, the cost is high. Fewer than a quarter of British and American bomber crews survive the campaign.

The tragedy of the air war is that the bomber crews were essentially testing out an unproven theory.

Anytime you're talking about high technology and cutting-edge weaponry, there is an element of experimentation involved, and some of the ways, unfortunately, that you learn The only way to learn in war is by dying. Sometimes in wartime, there's no other way to learn.

When both the British and American air forces work together, bombers and fighters together, they proved to be the most effective aerial instrument of war in history.

The battle in the air over Europe isn't won by B-17s or P-51s. It's won by the men who fight in those planes and the men and women who support them on the ground. What they accomplish, the destruction of the German Luftwaffe, will make possible the greatest land and sea invasion in history. World War II with Tom Hanks is produced by A&E Factual Studios Nutopia Limited, Playtone Productions, and Back Pocket Studios, in association with Motion Entertainment for the History Channel. This episode was narrated by Tom Hanks and mixed by John Lloyd. Additional voicing provided by me, Jeremy Reagan. From the History Channel, our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fidler. For Playtone, executive producers are Tom Hanks and Gary Getzman. For Back Pocket Studio. Our executive producer is Ben Dickstein.