WWII's Very Best Fighter Planes | Classic Fighter | Timeline

[Music] at its peak in 1944 the US Air Force had 10,000 aeroplanes and half a million personnel stationed in Britain in terms of men and machines they were the largest combat air force in history 50,000 of them died or were missing in action 70,000 RAF personnel also died or were missing in action this film is dedicated to all the men and women of the 8th US effluence the 9th US Air Force and the Royal Air Force who lost their lives in the second [Music] [Music] you [Music] in January 1933 became Chancellor of Germany and within the space of a few short weeks but withdrawn from both the League of Nations and the disarmament conference meanwhile in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty he was rearming before long he would announce the rebirth of the Luftwaffe and the creation of an army more than half a million strong but while Western politicians tried to prevent a repetition of the events of two decades earlier the transformation of the Royal Air Force had already begun in 1931 Brittany had won the Schneider trophy with a course speed of 340 miles per hour a few days later the world speed record have risen to four hundred and seven miles per the days of the biplane fighter had gone for good clearly a completely new type of fighter aircraft would be needed and with it a new type of armament with a rate of fire limited by unreliable machine guns mounted on the nose and firing through the propeller the old system of armament would have little effect against an aircraft traveling at over 300 miles an hour for Britain the breakthrough came in 1934 from a combination of air ministry specification F 534 and the work of a handful of dedicated men came the first of the 8th gun fighters the Hawker hurricane and the immortal Supermarine Spitfire these two vital machines were to form the mainstay of the RAF Fighter Command hookers were first with the mark 1 hurricane making its maiden flight on November the 6th 1935 four months later on March the 5th 1936 the prototype Spitfire took to the air for the first time they had a lot in common both were powered by what was to become the most famous aero engine of all time the rolls-royce Merlin and although the layouts differed both were equipped with 8.30 3 browning machine guns mounted in the wings Georgia mwyn was to become the RAF highest-scoring NCO in the Battle of Britain the Spitfire was was had a better chance I suppose of hitting a rapidly moving target because of the spread of the he ain't gun is over there but on the other hand he wasn't as effective as the concentration of the Hurricanes eight times between two close knit fours and that's what made it such a good good aircraft for shooting down bombers it was a very good aircraft for that and he could take an awful lot of punishment of course it really could it's very solid very slow in the Battle of Britain hurricanes outnumbered Spitfires by a ratio of 5 to 3 but it was the elegant thoroughbred Spitfire that became the symbol of a nation it was a winner right from the start with the performance that staggered everyone who saw it first to equip with the new fighter were 19 squadron based at Duxford two pilots already familiar with sedate biplane fighters like the bluster gauntlet the first flight in a mark 1 Spitfire came as quite a surprise it really was but it was a lot of fun we're terrified of them to start with of course because there were no such things as pilots notes which there are today some very sick volumes but all we had was a little bit of paper on which it had the gliding speed the stalling speed the cruising speed and that was all or maximum free for putting the flaps down and the under 30 that's all your head and off he went Johnny Johnson the highest-scoring British and Commonwealth fighter pilot of the entire war found the Spitfire impressive but his first flight every bit as nerve-wracking impressive it was longer and leaner than anything I'd ever seen before it was almost lack of sort of racing car I suppose compared to the ordinary family car there was no dual Spitfires I mean he would just shown the controls got him and took it off and certainly for the first flight of two of these the Spitfire was in charge and oh my my I am at the time was to get it down in one piece but gradually after a few flights things we got to get a little better six weeks after the first prototype hurricane had flown came the maiden flight of what was to become Germany's most famous frontline fighter the measure Schmitt bf 109 over 33,000 were built making the 109 the most numerous fighter of the Second World War and the chief adversary of the Spitfire and hurricane with a mixed armament of cannons and machine guns and a fuel-injected daimler-benz engine the 109 was a formidable opponent soon after the evacuation of the British Army from Dunkirk as a prelude to invasion the Luftwaffe attempted to deal Britain the knockout blow the destruction of Fighter Command for 116 days during the long summer of 1940 the Battle of Britain was fought with 700 Spitfires and hurricanes facing nearly four times as many German fighters made bombs in the skies over southern England was an everyday sight normally you got into a fight you you shot at somebody then you had to break off because someone might be coming at you and you very seldom did you finish up with the one you started with and unless you you've got a got a direct hit on him to start with education in the case of a Messerschmitt he would burst into flames immediately because the poor chap sat on his petrol tank but whilst the 109 was superior to the hurricane in almost every respect wherever possible the Hurricanes would attack the Bombers while the Spitfires took on the German fighter escort so at the start of a dogfight the Spitfires were usually at a height disadvantage to the 109s above them but they had to come down and if they're going to defend their their bombers which they were supposed to they had to come down so much they got down to our right then we had the advantage in our maneuverability 109 pilots would try to evade the more agile Spitfires by going into a steep dive the fuel injection of the Dame the bends gave them the advantage over the gravity [Music] but apart from that there is no way in any other kind of feature that the one who 109 was better and they knew it they knew it I really did they're they once they got on their tail they had for their stuff the nose down I went for him they really did but it wasn't always as simple flying an early Spitfire p95 46 george Unwin was shot down by a Dornier bomber i've been ashamed of it ever since but I called this lone donia one over Essex and it was busy shooting him down at least I thought I was when suddenly he a hole appeared in my windscreen the bit I was looking through a clean hole and when my engine in smoke well I I couldn't quite decide whether I was dead her toe up in the hole was right in front of my face but the bullet had actually hit the bulletproof glass with the Spitfire carrier in the front and had fallen at my feet even so George managed to force land in a field near North Weald and was promptly challenged by British troops brandishing fixed Benenson on another occasion flying at 20,000 feet and spotting a raid coming in below him he was too busy watching and waiting hoping to catch a stray bomber they had an escort and I flew smack into me into the middle of the escort watching watching these people down there I went in next minute there a Messerschmitt whizzing around me all over the place well I did what anybody else would do I just went into a steep turn and hope for the best every time one flash buyer III fired at him and I hit - strangely enough and then I went vertically down and headed for home and I thought very grateful to you know make it but that was my own fault I should have been I shouldn't have done that as the battle developed so too did the controversy over tactics with Fighter Command divided geographically into four groups it was on eleven group in the south that the heaviest Luftwaffe attacks fell reliant on the newly developed radar system to provide enough time to scramble fighters air vice-marshal Keith Park of eleven group preferred to send small numbers of machines to intercept in single squadron strength they could be airborne very quickly but were almost always heavily outnumbered by the bomber escort further north in 12 group Douglas barda of 242 squadron and his group commander Li Mallory both favored the big wing with up to five squadrons or 60 fighters flying together as the Duxford wing the odds would be reduced the great tragedy really of those days was that Lee Mallory in 12 group and Park done in 11 group didn't get on with each other and we're not really on speaking terms and purpose would seem to me was almost loathed to use the big wings either from duxford or Wittering or from even from 10 group where there was squadrons and his he always said that he didn't have the time because the short radar warning and the distance across the channel in the part of Kerry he didn't have the time to for me squadrons into big wings but he did have the time to bring the tops of wing down all the whispering wing all the 10 group wing and I think he was very slow not to take advantage of that of those wings so the answer really was there was the there was scope for both the big wings and the little flexible formations and park didn't take advantage of the big wings in September the duxford wing with five squadrons caught up with a formation of dawnia's escorted by a mere ten twin-engined messersmith one one knows father went off with the three Huracan squadrons and this is the only time I think since Dunkirk that fight a command attack number one as it was called free wool where you formations attack formations without any interference took place and he just went in and we was sitting up in the grandstand watching these Puritans going in in three three threes knocking down these ankles George and the other Spitfires watched until there were only a few bombers left before they too joined in and attacked the one one Oh escort twenty-four Spitfires against ten women hose it was just not on I mean we shot a lot down on that was heaven a bit too outnumber the Germans that was the only time I ever could see our EF outnumbering the swiftness sixty was against no more than forty of them and thirty of them were bombers but it really was if you do doll being like that it would have been heaven but the big wing wasn't the only cause of controversy the standard pre-war tactics of the RAF called for fighters to fly in close formations in so freely used for real in 1940 it was vastly inferior to the battle-proven Luftwaffe tactic of loose formations of four rather like the things we were outstretched hand two and two flying and a loose sort of flexible formation with these to God and the other two perhaps 400 yards apart and they were and they were far superior to us and our tights Vic formations which was thought up by some non flying fellow in the a minister somewhere who reckoned that if you had three Spitfires that was twenty four guns and you could peep them in the tightest of formation attack a bomber force then you'd have twenty four guns aiming at that particular month and so on but it was a lot of monsters surely and the people who thought up those tactics of responsible for a lot of young pilots who were lost in 1940 on the night of the 24th of August German bombs fell on London for the first time since 1918 the following night RAF Bomber Command retaliated with a raid on Berlin as a result on September the 7th the Luftwaffe attacked with renewed vigor but this time its sole objective was London with the pressure taken off its airfields Fighter Command was given a breathing space and within a few weeks it had defeated and so demoralized the Luftwaffe that in the 48 hours following the 15th of September Hitler had postponed the invasion of Britain indefinitely in 1941 with the threat of invasion removed the RAF moved to the offensive introducing a new form of attack known as the beehive with a force of bummers acting as bait fight a command hoped to draw the Luftwaffe into the jaws of a massive British fighters on a beehive raid over France in August 1941 Johnny Johnson was flying as wingman in a finger form with cocky Dundas Jeff West and Douglas Bardot in the ensuing dogfight Johnson destroyed a 109 but it was to be the last of many flights with the already legendary Barda many of the younger pilots had learned the skills of combat under the instinctive leadership of Barda Johnny Johnson he was as I say quite fearless and he didn't like Germans and he thought you know the more we could shoot there and the better a war was for everybody and you also had the tremendous ability to see the big picture in a dogfight and to hold the chaps together and to reform them after a dogfight and get on with whatever we started off to do but Douglas sort of inspired people he was a great fighter leader Douglas baddha had bailed out of his Spitfire near Sand Ouma without the use of his tin legs he promptly became a prisoner of war and was eventually moved to the high-security camp Stalag Luft 3 as the war years seemed to stretch ahead to infinity so the benefit of advances in fighter technology swung from one side to the other in 1940 the 109 II was slightly superior to the Spitfire 1 and in 1941 the Spitfire 5 1941 to the Spitfire 5 and the 109f were almost on equal terms and then the focke-wulf 190 came along which was far superior to the Spitfire 5 and then the Spitfire 9 came along in 1943 which was superior to the anything the Germans had said fluctuated you know from yet here amid of course the Germans produced the jet 262 in 1944 when we had nine to compare that at all introduced in nineteen the best variant of the redoubtable measures mitt was reckoned to be the 109 G that Gustav with an uprated Dame Levin 605 engine it became the most widely produced at the mall but the astounding development potential of the rival Spitfire enabled it to become the only Allied fighter to remain in continuous production throughout the whole of the Second World War with over 20 different variants and with engine power doubling from first to last it was hardly surprising that its pilots should have their favorites I've flown most immersive Spitfires and right over the 24 but the two was the perfect flying machine he wasn't the best fighter because of its power and so on but as a flying machine it was undoubtedly the best it really was it was the perfect relationship between power and weight it's a beautiful airplane and it was mean I fluid throughout the war of one mile or another and then we finished up with the mark 14 with Griffon engine and but the nine was the best and I think it was almost a love affair it was it was such a beautiful airplane if handled properly and it would always turn inside would all turn inside any German airplane and when we had the Spitfire nine it was faster and higher than any German airplane she was a lady of nine like the Gustave the mark nine had entered service in 1942 transformed by the two-stage supercharged Merlin it became the most widely used variant representing nearly a third of all the Merlin engines Spitfires produced apart from a slightly longer nose it looked exactly the same as the vastly inferior Mach 5 and any focke-wulf 190 pilot confusing the two paid a very heavy price MH 434 is a completely original Mark 9 and the only remaining Spitfire never to have been rebuilt a true veteran of the war she's credited with a total of five kills three of which were focke-wulf 190s nearly fifty years after she left the castle bromwich works mark hammer remembers his first flight in MH 43 for once the gear was up and I got myself sorted out honestly truly and it's not a cliche or just a story I felt what a wonderful fantastic flying airplane you do hear this about Spitfires and it's absolutely true of course part of it is Lee is the history surrounding Spitfires but it's absolutely true it is a sensational performing and handling airplane but in 1942 Britain was no longer fighting alone by May the friendly invasion had begun the Americans were arriving in force within a year the number of us Airmen in Britain was over a hundred thousand by d-day it had risen to almost half a million two american air forces were involved the 8th and the 9th at their peak in 1945 they occupied 180 airfields in the UK with most of them cited in East Anglia their numbers had grown steadily until the 8th Air Force alone was able to dispatch 3,000 aircraft on a single day's operation it became known as the mighty 8th with the 9th Air Force responsible for the support of ground forces the primary role of the 8th was the strategic daylight bombardment of german-occupied Europe operating alongside the nighttime bombing campaign of RAF Bomber Command the mighty 8th had three air divisions each one an Air Force within an Air Force at full strength they amounted to 15 fighter groups providing an escort to 41 groups of America's leading heavy bombers the b-24 Liberator and the Boeing b-17 Flying Fortress although the more recently designed b-24 had a greater range and a bigger it was the older b-17 provided the backbone of the bomber force the toughness of the heavily armed fortress inspired enormous confidence among its 10 man crews Oh perfect dream it was stable air worthy combat worthy it could receive the most terrible punishment and still you had the confidence that you could bring it back oh it was beautiful airplane maybe take punishment like it you wouldn't believe that the day we got shot down in Germany we got three direct hits with 105 millimeter gun right inboard engine was blown completely on the mound well left hand board was pulling about half power full power and left outboard about half power on the right outboard that was it one burst hit in the waist in one of the tail and took care of most of people back there we flew that thing for 450 miles [Applause] as the intensity of the b-17s daylight campaign increased so too did the night operations flown by the RAF s heavy bombers most successful of all the British heavies was the famous Avro Lancaster derived from the disastrous twin engined Manchester it came into being almost as an afterthought hearing that a healthy supply of merlin engines was available Andros chief designer and had longer wings to the Manchester and on them he mounted for Merlin the first production Lancaster made its maiden flight on October the 31st 1941 it's performance was outstanding with a maximum speed close to 300 miles per hour and with the largest bomb carrying capacity of any Second World War aircraft the Lancaster was the only bomber capable of carrying the gigantic 22,000 pound grand slam bomb by the time the last Lancaster rolled off the production line nearly seven-and-a-half thousand of them had been built in the early days of the American bombing campaign the combined firepower of a formation of b-17s was thought to be enough to defend them against the drift of affairs fighters but as the campaign got underway the strength of the German opposition caused heavy losses although RAF Spitfires would often escort the fortresses the bulk of escort work fell to the p-47 Thunderbolts and p-38 lightning zuv the eight fairmont Duxford handed over to the Thunderbolts of the eighth Air Force 78 fighter group in 1943 is now home to the fighter collection Steven gray describes the qualities of the p-47 airplanes very very competent very very light in pitch very very light in roll and effectively a very agile fighter was very aggressive at low level very very well-armed but its main role was at high altitude with its are 2800 pratt & whitney double wasp engine the Thunderbolt was the first American 2,000 horsepower fighter and proved to be extraordinarily reliable like the b-17 it was capable of absorbing very heavy punishment but as the biggest and heaviest single engined piston fighter ever built it made a somewhat daunting first impression my first visit with 47 was when I was still in cadets in advanced training and two or three of them flew into the field and landed and they said this is a p-47 and of course with my size I looked at that sucker and I said I'm never getting that thing and I don't want anything to do with anything that big and clumsy I want something like a 51 or a P 63 P 39 even a p38 would look better than that so I went down to Baton Rouge and they said you are assigned before he said that's the end but idea I came to love the airplane it's such a that really was such a tremendous airplane beautiful and inside outside I guess it looks you know kind of raunchy but inside it's beautiful alongside the Thunderbolts of the mighty 8th was the unique Lockheed p-38 lightning the first production military aircraft to come from the California manufacturer the p38 incorporated a number of technical firsts with a US Army design specification of 360 miles per hour it was the first single-seat fighter to have twin engines the first all-metal aeroplane and the first fighter with a tricycle undercarriage and twin boom configuration in January 1939 the prototype had smashed the u.s. transcontinental record silencing the criticism of the army experts who saw the layout as being far too vulnerable for a fighter had a lot of teasing wasn't very well liked by the RAF and never put into service there's a long story behind that I think but in fact proved itself to be a very competent fighter in the European Mediterranean and Pacific Theaters we've been flying ours only the season and my experience tells me that it's a it's a pretty competent death plane and of course it has a unique advantage that if you lost an engine you could still fly home with a single Hispano cannon and four browning machine guns mounted in the nose a p38 shot down a focke-wulf 200 only minutes after America entered the war the Germans were to call it the fork-tailed devil the first lightning Ace was the intrepid Jack LLL free happy Jack with a final score of eight enemy aircraft destroyed in the air jack completed two full tools with a total of 528 combat hours in 142 missions in a dogfight over Berlin in May 1944 he was credited with to Messersmith 109 even though one of them had collided with his p38 tearing a four and a half foot section off the right wing Jack was still able to return to England out of a total of 10,000 p-38s built the fighter collections machine painted in Jack's colours is the oldest of only six lightnings still flying today on his first tour Jack had taken part in the invasion of North Africa where another American aircraft wrought havoc among Rommels desert armies the Curtiss p-40 Kitty Hawk last of a line of Curtiss fighters to be used by the RAF the Kitty Hawk was highly underrated by historians in fact the only reason for that in my opinion was that had a single-stage supercharged engine rather like the earliest cook fires and this one had been obliged to fight this airplane never changed its engine apart from on one occasion with him they called it s model and put a Merlin if they put a single-stage supercharged murder had been put something like the engine they put in the Mustang or in the Mach 9 Spitfire this would have been and unsurpassable airplane it has superb Eiland extremely good combat performance it's very well armed was a very advanced design for any simple very robust construction and of course was extremely effective and very popular amongst people who fought in North Africa which were some of the roughest conditions around in the pacific war against the Japanese the Americans were equipped with a progression rape fleet fighters ranging from the grumman f6f hellcat to the mighty transport crosser great size and strength made the f6f an excellent gun platform and protected by armor plating the aircraft could absorb far more punishment it's a Japanese market by the summer of 1943 the Hellcat had begun to turn the tables on Japan's most numerous fighter the seemingly invincible zero as the first American aircraft to exceed 400 miles per hour the f4u Corsair was faster than the help mark Canha compares it with the zero zero you have an ultra ultra lightweight wonderfully maneuverable almost light aerobatic airplane low powered about a thousand horsepower engine highly maneuverable but low on speed with the corsair you have a very powerful engine and at the time the biggest propeller ever put on a single-engine aircraft you have armor plate lots of petrol a very high speed aircraft but not so maneuverable so you can imagine that in a dogfight between those two aircraft the Corsairs would have to be very strict about not getting into turning maneuvering fight with the zeros and that's exactly what they did not do they would stay at high speed they would choose to fight these heroes on their own terms they were the height into speed and then speed back into height again and they make slashing attacks on the zeroes who with their low air speeds were unable to do very much about that in a pure fighter versus fighter combat they could simply turn head on towards the crosshairs if they saw them coming and the other thing of course they have to do would be you could break off the engagement and go home but will and I have to say when you fly a Corsair you feel immensely powerful and you're aware that you're in a very very potent fly airplane but it was the thundermans that was to become the most numerous American fighter ever built like the Spitfire there were several variants and each pilot had his favor Fred Kristensen flying p-47s with the 56th Fighter Group a master score of 22 confirmed kills I like it I'll turn just about any German fighter because I had a d-10 which was a excellent airplane I liked it much better than do 25 which was heavier I had more automatic things on activity I didn't think that the pilot needed but for every pound of weight that you put on one of these things you need 200 horsepower to compensate the sheer ruggedness of the huge thunderbolt made it the ideal aircraft for ground attack missions then there was another one I was flying shillings wings we went into a little airfield Gelson house and the group really performed an act on that one we we did a terrible thing there we just really beat that air groom up I think I destroyed for that day on the ground and damaged a bunch of others that sort of thing and then after we got through with the rest of guys in our flight and our flight came in and shot and we jumped up at the top the next flight drop down when we got through with that air drum there was just about nothing left there was a big black cloud coming around smoke coming off of it and saw what was left we chewed it all the pieces but I remember that that was a good day with most German airfields being heavily defended by anti-aircraft guns the golden rule for pilots was never to turn and make a second pass in an attack on sent Trond airfield to the east of Brussels Charles was flying next to his Co Bob Campbell we made a pass on that air go right down the runway shooting everything we could we could hit we got down to the end of the of this pass and he turned around to come back well that is an absolute no-no I don't have no idea if I can look at that but he did he turned around and came back so I'm flying this wing and we went right back down the runway again and he got hit and hit the runway and blew up right in front of me so I flew right through him you know when I came off the other end of the runway I pulled up and I looked down and it was a church and a graveyard um when I came in there remember saying that you know but that was it and of course I pulled up and joined up with the rest oh that was a real bad day by the end of hostilities 56th Fighter Group would be the highest-scoring American unit in Europe with over a thousand enemy aircraft destroyed Fred Kristensen was meticulous checking every round that went into his guns himself after five kills he obtained special permission to pinpoint the 850 caliber guns at 300 yards flying any closer to the target was a dangerous business it just makes sense that if you get too close and if pieces start flying off the airplane hits your propeller you can put it out of balance and you shoot yourself down Gabreski mr. Clinton you see the pieces flying back and I told him one time I said you trying to kill yourself but friend himself held an eighth Air Force record for shooting down six enemy aircraft in less than two minutes well we've been escorting the Bombers just before we get to Berlin and we left them and I looked down I'm always looking for something to do I never come back with my guns on fire and I spot a DJ 52 is going into her and it would put 50 miles from Berlin and I kept half my squadron as top cover and I took Florida plants down and out of the 12 airplane we got enemy on another mission Fred decided to attack a large force of 48 focke-wulf with just four Thunderbirds my age you think back in the things I didn't say how stupid you were but I exploded one and you've probably seen it in every documentary it's a Farkle just absolutely disintegrates and I flew right through all that garbage and the white star and the right when you couldn't even see it there was so much certain oil on it but by the end of the battle the American fighters had shot down six of the German machines without any loss to themselves as the American daylight campaign progressed the Bombers of the mighty eighth were continually sent to targets deep within industrial Germany traditionally the squadron commander would try to sing their crews new crews on what would be called the milk run and my first mission drawn from that purpose and perspective of durbin a synthetic oil refinery about 60 miles south west of Berlin while nine of the group's 36 fortresses were being shot down raised b-17 was attacked by a determined 109 setting fire to the radio room on this his first and last mission the right waist gunner lost his arm and with two more of the crew seriously wounded the b-17 staggered back to its Framlingham base and the armourers and the people who patched up holes in their scan report to me the next day that they had patched 480 holes in the side and the skin of the airplane then in the autumn of 1943 came the disastrous Regensburg and Schweinfurt raids well beyond the range of the American fighters the unasur t bummers had to face the full fury of the Luftwaffe for two hours each way sixty b-17s were lost on the first raid on August the 17th almost a month later another sixty bombers failed to return from the second crippling raid the names Regensburg and Schweinfurt became notorious they came back from Schweinfurt this ragged majestic formations for the fighting its way back when I would burn in fortresses on the ground parachutes and so on and so forth and I think they lost 20% of that mission unless courted the American heavies were at the mercy of swarms of focke-wulf sand measure Smith's the losses in men and machines were Grievous then at last towards the end of 1943 came the airplane that was to reverse the situation completely the North American Mustang p-51 bee [Music] powered by the rolls-royce Merlin 61 engine it was superior in speed to the 109 G at any height above 28,000 feet it could outpace an FW 190 by nearly seventy miles per hour it could out dive the focke-wulf and the measure Schmitt out turn both of them and outrun the 109 with ease but most important of all it could do all of this over the German capital itself the Mustang could fly all the way to Berlin and back intense relief greeted the arrival of the p-51 and as it entered service in ever-increasing numbers the losses among heavy bombers fell dramatically with a top speed of 442 miles per hour the tactics of the Mustang pilots became highly effective against the slower German fighters mark Hammond really did they get into hard turning fights of Messerschmitts it was normally the Messerschmitts and fought wolves trying to get through to the Bombers and the Mustangs just riding down onto their backs basically and occasionally you get into hard turning fights but very infrequently it was normally a bit like the coursers it was slashing high-speed attacks and then you convert your speed back up into height and start again before long the Mustang had won the battle for air superiority over Germany almost single-handed with reduced fighter opposition the scale of the bombing increased to gargantuan proportions sometimes the entire 8th US bomber force would assemble together yes several occasions anything entire 8th Air Force went on the same mission and I'm informed and I believe that I'm correct and saying that when all three air divisions were on the same mission the bow of the bomber stream of aircraft from nose to tail 75 miles long from wingtip to wingtip was 25 miles in width but as the threat from the Luftwaffe fighters diminished they remained the ever-present danger of flak Jim Gilliam was shot down four times by anti-aircraft fire you got on your your bomber on your final run when you're locked in no place else to go and they would just fire up and make it more like I stood at carpet I would think curtain and just make a curtain and funny than you had to fly through it that was always said probably about the scariest part of a mission because it was out there as long as it was black was no problem when you saw red Jim Cole was ball turret gunner in the three ninetieths b-17 bad egg over Dusseldorf they lost eight planes from a single squadron well yeah maybe four or five groups have gone over the same area and maybe in slightly different levels and and Germans used to have a system of once they found out or determined the bomb release point from one or two groups although they may be coming from different directions they had an idea so they they had a system that was actually a box and they just kept filling it in and and so if you you know it was a shake of the dice if you get through there without while they were busy filling in the other end while you'd make it bent right after we dropped the bombs on this particular mission a ship blew up next to us we had a lot of fight that ship between the flag and that ship took the rest of us out the thing that pier Klosterman says about it is it's totally unpredictable you can fight another airplane and you can assess within 20 seconds what he is like as a pilot and whether you're gonna beat him or not but flak what one minute you're sitting in your secure safe airplane and everything's working perfectly and then the next thing from probably out of nowhere you've got a major emergency on your hands as the Luftwaffe became increasingly reluctant to take on the heavily escorted fortresses the American airmen were left in no doubt about the destruction they had wrought on the ground Fred had escorted many raids on German cities including schweinfurt Bremen and Cologne I tell you I was here in 1935 I went all through Europe and I saw Europe as its aesthetic height and it just killed me to see a beautiful town like Cologne in ruins on d-day 1/4 for Canadian wing under the command of Johnny Johnson flew for missions covering the landing beaches in Normandy 48 hours later at sang krassimir they made history as the first Spitfire wing to land back in France ml for 1/7 the fighter collection Spitfire mark 9 was with them in an orchard near the village the French people greeted the pilots with gifts of flowers fruit and wine within a few weeks the German Seventh Army had been drawn into a trap so deadly that no one who had witnessed the ensuing destruction would ever forget it Americans broke out in August on the western side of the of the battle area and the German Seventh Army was trapped at fillets and it was then that the tactical air player came into its own the slit fires and the typhoon from decimated an army and the Battle of Normandy was really won by the tactical air forces not the army it was won by the tactical air forces just as Desert Storm was won by the Tecla air force's life tackle wrapper and not the army for the Germans what became known as the Falaise gap had been a catastrophe 60,000 men were either killed or taken prisoner over 2,000 tanks and guns were lost since d-day the total German losses on all fronts were of epic proportions over 600,000 men between d-day and the end of August the Allied air forces had flown nearly half a million sorties allowing over 2 million troops to land in Europe with Paris liberated on the 25th of August the Allies began the long advance to the Rhine but on the 17th of September came the disastrous airborne assault at Arnhem for the 56th Fighter Group it was the worst day of the war given the job of flak busting 16 of the group's 39 Thunder boats were shot down eight pilots came down in allied held territory Charles rustler was one of them Todd a lot of holes big holes in the wings and big holes in the flaps and then the fuselage and everything but they just got the one crucial cylinder the one on the bottom blue the then completely off and my engine just froze up and we lost on a particular day our group about 16 airplane airplanes and I guess five or six people that didn't come back we got shot up real bad those those days they were pretty gross but for the fighter pilots and the bomber crews the war had it's lighter moments one of our favorite gags was to pick up a bomber that was flying along at about ten twelve thousand feet near the clouds clouds you know flat on the bottom quite often and pick up one of those guys that was just cruising maybe from one base to another or something and just duck up into a cloud you know to hide from him and then get on the drop down again and line him up you know and get a get ready to make a pass on him and then pull back up into the clouds and then just come down real fast right on his tail and pull up in front of him say well they're given such a shot of propwash they'd knock everybody out of their seats I'm flying alongside one one day and these guys are shaking her fist at me they started throwing oranges at me we've always had the old story of a little friend and big friend fight her a drop her doing over lip whatever and say the big brother can use big player and friend can you do that because they know we reach or cut an engine let's say the little friend can you do that no fighters were we're great loved him before long the Allies had gained control of the skies over occupied Europe and the defeat of Nazi Germany was inevitable as they continued on their eight-month advance to Berlin many more Allied fighter pilots would become casualties but it was a great experience trekking through Europe Buccaneer and nomadic sort of life and your tanks marvelous chaps with you all your own ground crew all together one big team and finishing the trouble marvelous experience yes marvelous experience I've ever had so with the war over and half a century elapsed the days of the piston-engined fighter have long gone why then should a small band of men put so much effort into keeping alive the very few survivors what drives me personally is a desire to own and fly and just be involved with these wonderful old fighter airplanes it's as simple as that really it's just an obsessional thing for me and for my father and repeating myself a little bit I the only way that we can increase our collection and continue to fly the airplanes as much as we do which is actually rather a lot we do about 50 hours a year with each airplane is by flying them for work in air shows films and any other type of event that we can get one tends to think that in in collecting World War two aeroplanes one was glorifying war in some way and in fact they are probably the last gladiatorial steeds where you went out and actually looked into the opposition's eyes as opposed to being over the horizon someplace and throwing a missile that is one of the attractions I think but the principal attraction for me is the fact that there the end of a particular technology and and very pointed at that I just like to say this in closing that the unsung heroes of this war were the enlisted men that crude these airplanes without whom people like me that flew him wouldn't even be able to exist and let's give him the credit that they deserve many of himself and he stood water place called cellar in Germany with Belsen next door and we didn't know what Bell some mustard smelt it three miles away from the place called cellar and we smelt it and the doctors then came in and said you know they're trying all these people and all the Jews and concentration camp to me we must get all the medical supplies then we saw the Nazi Germany at first and what it meant so we were bloody pleased we'd taken part in to defeat him that evil empire that was in 18 yeah it seemed like a long long time ago you you know you you you forget the bad things you remember all the good good times and good things that happen the squadron's thundered off the ground tirelessly off they pelted those glorious radiant boys we were with them in sound and spirit but that feeling of lead in the stomach when they failed to return was all too familiar there were so many and all of them was so young and such a wicked wicked waste I mourned them then and forever [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 830,189

Rating: 4.8075891 out of 5

Keywords: Documentary, History, Documentary Movies - Topic, joseph stalin, world war, adolf hitler, 2017 documentary, united states, Channel 4 documentary, Full length Documentaries, documentary history, history of wars, Full Documentary, the second world war, benito mussolini, battle of britain, history documentary, world war 2, TV Shows - Topic, real, BBC documentary, stories, Documentaries, winston churchill, world war ii

Id: 8LAc_-ENRKw

Length: 58min 2sec (3482 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018