Reverse itself. We are going to turn back a little bit to the beginning of the american participation in the war and take that right through dday. The next time we will do the dday invasion. There are the bases in east anglia. It is only about 60 miles from london but it might as well be six centuries away. As i say in the book, it is shaped like a giant hachette aimed at nazi, germany. Flying across from here this is the closest in england that you can run a bomber operation. The fighter boys were down here. The british raf pilots and Bomber Command was north near york. I have this map in your book. It is pretty good although it is not in color. You have the ranges of the fighter aircraft. How far they could get roundtrip from england. That tells you the course of the year were. Air war. In the beginning, the americans could only do shallow penetration missions. If youre trying to knock out uboats then, and that is featured in the great film, 12 00 high. They are mostly british spitfires. As you get further in the war, fighters with longerrange including thunderbolts and lightnings. They can take the german bombers all the way to the order. Border. Near the hanover area. This is the Industrial Area of germany. Then, these boys are on their own. They are going down a corridor, a bloody shoot all the way from here to the target and back. They go all the way down the spine of the pyrenees and land in north africa. Later, when you get the mustangs in december or january of 1943, the mustangs have long legs and they can go deep in germany. It can go all the way into portland near prague. That is a game changer. The appearance of the mustangs, no one expected it. The germans did not expect it. They made a huge mistake before the war by not getting it into production. They got it into production late but it did show up just in the nick of time. It allowed the dday invasion to occur. Those were the stages of air war. Any questions . Student with the initial bomb runnings with the limited fighters, 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. A lot of times they fly out with thunderbolt coverage to hanover and then the mustang would take off from england. They would overtake them. The thunderbolts would turn back in the mustangs would go all the way to the target. 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. It just determines, if it is a mustang it is going to pick them up. Right out of berlin. The thunderbolt is not going to pick them up until you get to the german border. Anyone else . Student for they have counted in for the missions they ran, like the fighters shooting at ground targets . Prof. Miller as part of the mission . With a leave extra room for another mission . Prof. Miller the mustang already has tremendous fuel efficiency. It is a nimble plane. It is powerful as well. It can go a long way. The extra weight hurts you in some ways if you run into opposition on the way back. Lets say the luftwaffe needs you on the way back and wants to engage in the air. You have to drop those tanks. The guys go out on the reserve tanks. Then they can drop them. Then the plane is nimble and can fight a dogfight. That is how they planned the operation. Once doolittle takes over, he says the bomber should come back unescorted. Your most Important Mission is to dive down and kill as many planes on the ground as you can. Youre killing them on the ground and in the air. 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. So, here you get a better sense of the targets. They are going to be initially right here. We just took a trip to normandy. To the dday museum and the World War Ii Museum. 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 alps and hit targets right here including dresden. This will be a air force territory here. Germany, by 1944 is getting it from both sides here and here. You get daylight bombing and the raf at night. There is 24hour bombing of germany by three air forces. Also from italy, they would mount to missions across here into romania because germany gets most of its natural oil from romania. It is important to knock out spots there. That is the job of the 15th. They are closer. This is where the africanamerican pilots flew. The Tuskegee Airmen. They flew out of italy and they escorted bombers on missions over eastern europe. Student did the russians, were 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 entirely on Strategic Air force, covering ground operations. They had to engine homers. Britain. Ow they bombed that is how they bond stalingrad. They dont have these babies that can go long distances. We are the only countries that have this sort of thing. Anybody else . Ok. That is the general strategic picture. There is the instrument of destruction. The b17. It looks big. It looks big on the ground. When you get inside, it is very claustrophobic. It is like the cabin of a submarine. You have a 10 or 11 person crew in here. You have a plexiglas nose. It is not bulletproof. On one of the First Missions, you may have read this. The only casualty was a copilot when a pigeon hit the plexiglass and got some splinters into their heads. That First Mission was a cake run. You have a navigator who is sitting at a desk here. He has to get you to the target. A lot of these guys are kids. I talked to a guy that was at university and he is a history major. He is about to go into his junior year. He has not even taken advanced geometry that he is drafted and six months later, he is navigating a bomber from maine to scotland with a crew of five. These guys are not well trained. They are rushed into this war. That explains a lot of the early casualties that take place. A lot of responsibility on the navigator. You have to get to the target to bomb the target. Then there is the bombardier who has a highly sophisticated system. A small computer. You aim at the target. Itd just to wind drift and whether and the height that you are at. Supposedly, on a clean, clear day, you could drop bombs into a circle about as big as this room. They exaggerated and called it pickled bombing. The idea was that this would be the great secret weapon of the war. When the aircrews landed, there were two guards who went out. They escorted the bombardier who carried the bomb site with him and it was put under lock and key at night. It did not matter that much at the time because the germans there were enough crashes and mistakes that the germans knew what was going on but they never implemented them during the war. That is the front of the plane. Then you step up in here into the cabin. Here are the pilots and copilots. Behind them, standing behind them is a guy called the engineer. He knows all the instruments in the plane. Anything goes wrong, he is watching all of the dials. If you are under attack, that is his gun right there. He just exists head into that thing. He stands up on a stoop. It rotates. These are all 50 millimeter browning machine guns. The best we have. There are 10 of them on the plane. That is the front of the plane. They are all officers. Captains and colonels. And you walk across a very precariously narrow catwalk. Sometimes, the bombay doors would open up after you drop your ordinance and then they could not get them closed. You have to go up on that catwalk with the wind blowing like hell, dr. Miles high, and somehow cranked down on this thing and close the bomb doors by hand or sometimes a bomb would stick. The bombs were in racks like this. Maybe the top one would not go down. You had to go up and unleash the bomb and drop it through. There are cases where the guys fell through the hatch to the ground. Then you move back into the back. This is where my father was trained originally as a radio operator. There is a thing called an interphone on the plane. Everyone is wired up. It is symbolic of the kind of organic bonds connecting these guys. They are all on the same wire. They are connected technologically and personally. Comrades in arms. They have an interphone. Everyone can hear the pilot. When they talk to one another on the plane, no one else can hear that. Unless he hooks up a general radio signal back here and he can talk to other planes or based. Generally, they are on silence. All the way to the target. There is not much direction from the home base in general. These kids are entirely on their own. I dont think there was a case in warfare that guys this young, the average age of a bomber group is about 22 years old. The old man on the plane is 26 years old. He would generally be the pilot. It is a lot of responsibility. You are entirely in the hands of your own navigator. Whether you destroy the target or not, whether you live or die, it is up to you. A terrific amount of pressure on these kids. Further back on the plane on each side there is a machine gun. A browning machine gun. The plane is so narrow that when one guy is operating, and another behind him, their backs touch. These things are open to the weather. The plane is not heated. There is a little bit of heat coming from the engine but the compartment is not heated. You could be over germany, in january, it is 55 below zero inside at 26,000 feet. That explains the predominant frostbite. The guys who are injured early on in the war, it is generally connected to frostbite. It can be a killer. Later on, they will close these and stick the guns through a hole. I dont know if you have ever heard the expression the whole nine yards. That is the length of the machine gun. The ammunition boxes were here. Nine yards from here to the guns. Here is the entrance door where the crew got in. You could also get in underneath here. All the way back here, sitting on a bicycle seat, all by himself is the current vendor. And finally, there is this guy. Who is sitting in a plexiglas bubble. Not bulletproof. He spins around. He tracks the plane. A tough position to be in. That is the b17. Yeah . Student how often do the guns jam . Professor miller they generally jammed for two reasons. Cold weather. Everything breaks down in cold weather. The other thing is overheating. The barrel can blow up in your face. You have to be careful of that as well. That happened. If there was a Prolonged Air battle, generally an air battle would not last more than 30 minutes. Unless you are going all the way to stuttgart. Then they keep coming at you from different airbases. The germans are flying over their homeland. They come up and get you, go back and refuel. A german pilot might land four times trying to nail a fleet of bombers going in and coming out. You could have guns clog up on you with conditions like that with constant, persistent fire. Student it said in the movie yesterday it was so cold, their hands would freeze to the gun. Was it difficult to on jam them . Professor miller you were to do below sets of gloves. A light racetrack driver style silk gloves. They were not weather resistant. Then you wore larger gloves over that. You took off the larger gloves and then put the silk glove on and hope that that did not stick. Sometimes guys, in the chaos of combat, your gun jams and you are in danger, you pull both gloves off accidentally to try to clear the jam. Youre not been told this before. Your hand could stick. It could happen if you are ice skating somewhere at zero degrees. That is what is going on here. The big thing is that no one they are fighting at four miles high. No one had even flown before this at four miles high. Everything is new. You get new kinds of problems. Everything. These guys are lab rats and guinea pigs. Everything is experimental. Student how quick were air commands to adapt . Prof. Miller prof. Miller very quick. I will tell you where they were slow. Preparing. All the thinking went into the technology of the plane. It is done, boeing makes it. They start producing these things in 1935. They get into production of prototypes. We start to massproduce them. The sophistication of the machine. No one thought about the guys. Ear problems. These guys are under tremendous pressure in unpressurized cabin. In her ear problems are a regular problem in addition to frostbite and no one had thought of that. No one had thought of giving these guys armor. They got the museum, the mets in new york city, which has all of these old medieval armor. They had met artists come over to design armor for these guys. When they went on the bomber, they put on helmets with holes in the ears because they had microphones. They put on a vest and it came down right below their crotch and that provided protection. If you got a flak burst. That is how thin the aluminum is. They took a lot of punishment but they had a good superstructure, good struts here and here. You could literally blow out the sides. Sometimes planes would fly sidebyside and this whole area of the plane would be exposed. They could see the gunners in there. Smith tried to put out a fire inside a plane. They are adapting all the time later on. This is a gun operated by the bombardier. That was not on the original b17. They start to put radar. If formal Guidance System on the plane. They are making modifications as they go along. Medically also. Student were any of the members on the plane trained as a medic . Prof. Miller no. You are a marine, your buddy goes down, you scream medic. The guy is right there to put some sulfur on the wound. They did not have penicillin in abundance until 1944. All you can do is try to stop an infection. A guy goes down here there is no medic. Everyone was given a medical kit. It had a vial of morphine. As soon as a guy went down, you could give him a shot of morphine. A couple of blankets. You hope he survives. I described one incident where a guy went down in the front of the plane and he was in this section here. It was in the middle of a chaotic air battle. The pilot is usually checking everyone. Sometimes, he passes on that responsibility to the navigator. He will ask if everything is ok back there. He checks on stuff. The guy doing the checking goes down. He is on the floor of the plane for a full hour on the freezing floor. When they got him back to england, they cut off his ears. They fell off with frostbite. So did his nose. His lips were gone. His eyeballs were frozen in his head and had to be removed. Frostbite. A killer. Most of these times, they would use the rushing cure. The doctor would simply wait until everything turned purple or black, and then fingers, digits, would start falling off and then you could treat the guy. Rough stuff. All of that was done on the basis where there is a doctor. There is a little hospital on every base and a General Hospital if you needed deep surgery, amputation, Something Like that. All the smaller stuff is done at the base. Anyone else . Student was there any prior Scientific Research over weather conditions or was it all trial and error . Prof. Miller 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. These guys are going up only 45 miles. They have to pay 400,000 to mount the major climb. These guys are getting three dollars a day and they are getting shot at. There is not a lot of thought about this. The crazy thing is when they are developing this plane they thought it was impervious. You had to be really strong to control a bomber. They were flying so close together that they could hear the wings bumping into the wing of another plane. 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 his instrument under control. Student how would dropping the bomb after that affect the handling . Prof. Miller a lot. 5000 pounds. The atomic bomb was 9000 pounds. He described as dropping the bomb, the plane just jumped because you lose that weight. You were jarred like that. That often happens. These things would spin sometimes upside down. I talked to a guy in savannah, i asked him anything special happen to you . Nothing . He flew 30 missions. It was a little guy at about 90 years old. He said well there was one mission where the plane flipped, the pilot and copilot were 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 . He did get back. Of course, the commander. The eighth air force, there is a lot of pressure on him early in the air war. A guy named carl spotts was head of the air force. He was sent to north africa in october 1942. Baker takes over. His mission is to prepare the eighth to fly and gain supremacy over northwestern europe and the channel in order to make the dday invasion possible. There is spotts who later comes back to england. He had been sent to north africa and he is brought back. He is responsible for all of the American Air Forces in the european theater. Then there is jimmy doolittle. He will change the nature of the air war. The war is is new to these guys as the common soldier. Doolittle was talking about arnold. It is not the american air force, it is the American Air Forces. In the eighth air force. He is in charge of all operations. He is under tremendous pressure throughout the war from roosevelt who is under pressure from churchill. Churchill said you guys cannot fly in daylight. Even with your combat boxes because you do not have escorts. You are getting hammered. You are getting hammered so hard, you cannot have your navigators get you to the target properly. Why dont you fold up the eighth air force, and commit to british bombers, learn to fly at night and fly with us. It is safer at night. We do not try to him specifically at this target or that target. We wipe out the whole city. Nighttime, not being able to see, does not matter. What matters to the pilot is that the luftwaffe cannot see either at night. Their casualties were also pretty staggering. These are just some of the characters i gave a talk earlier this month in savannah on the film we are making. These are our major characters. This is rosie rosenthal, a major character. 51 missions. A jewish kid from brooklyn. Allamerican athlete. A small, football, and a lawyer. Got a job with a big law firm the day after pearl harbor. He volunteers. He reupped for a couple of missions and went down three times. Interesting character. He comes back at the end of the war and he is transferred out. The war is over in may. In 1944. He signs up to go to the pacific. He wants to fly the b29s but the war is over before he gets his action. What he does as a lawyer is read about the nuremberg trials. He volunteers and they sent him to germany to prosecute german civilians who committed atrocities against downed airmen. Hanging them, shooting them, throwing them into burning buildings. He went after a lot of these guys. On the way over, he met a girl he liked named phyllis. They fell in love. She is a trial lawyer. Both begin trials at nuremberg. He helped prosecute all of the big ones. The top german generals. A really interesting character. What a lot of people do not talk about, because veterans do not 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 there any africanamericans flying fighter planes out of england. The only africanamericans flying are the Tuskegee Airmen flying out of italy. Arnold insisted it was impossible to maintain crew discipline if you have blacks and whites together. Especially southern whites with blacks in the same cabin in close proximity. It is one of the great marks against the eighth air force that they remained segregated. Although 10 of the air force personnel in england are black. Even though that country had less than half of 1 of people of color 1954. They are building airbases. In the afternoons and evenings, other guys are on tracking detail and they take the bombs to the air base. The tragic thing is that they would show up to deliver the bombs and ask to have a meal there and they were not even allowed in the mess hall. They would have to go eat a rations and sleep in their trucks. There were a number of racial riots in england during the war because english women would date black eyes. There were a number of racial incidents. Eisenhower suggested that there would be a colored night and a white night. The white kids like that until they wondered what their girlfriend was doing in town on a black night. Strangest warfront in history. Bucolic countryside, cows, sheep in the meadows. Crumbled churches in the background. That was the b 24 liberator that we talked about. There were more of those than the b17. It is a crazy battlefront. In a sense, it is like you go to work, you go to work in a machine full of gas. You come back and youre fighting for your life over berlin, you come back to base with clean sheets and good meals. You can get psychiatric or medical care. There are women. There is london. You can get 18 two day pass to go to london. You can be over berlin at 12 00 and be with a girl of your dreams in london at 10 00 p. M. At night. It is a very different war then was fought either the guy on the ground in combat. That has its disadvantages. Psychologically. Student there may not be a shock when they are flying. Professor miller the weather in england is capricious. If you were drunk the night before, you flew drunk. The easy way to get over a hangover is oxygen. I should not have said that. Student for the infantrymen, they become callous. They are on the front for a certain number of days. For the guys in the air, they can come home and relax. They have to face the problem of getting back in the plane and doing it over and over again. The stress of being relaxed and then throwing yourself back into a terrible situation which leads to combat fatigue. Professor miller there is an electric chair. You walk there. Or they give you an injection. You have seen it not work a couple of times. You go back to yourself. And you wait three days to die again. This is what these guys are doing. The pressure builds up your it is enough, inside the plane. But then to come back and start thinking about it all of the time. There were 12 other guys in the hut. There were empty bunks. It was so intermittent. It was horrible. Incessant combat like the marines fought in okinawa. Student it would be very psychologically taxing to be in a plane, similar situations and for people who are fighting by sea because you are stuck. You dont have a backup or an escape route. Prof. Miller thats right. Then the bicycle effect. You fall off your bike and your dad says to get back up again. If you sit for two weeks and dont ride the bike again, it is like trauma. Or if you have to make an emergency landing. If you are flying from abe to atlanta. And the plane experiences problems. Youre not going to want to fly again right away. If you have to make a play six weeks later, it is all youre thinking about. That is the phobia. Student it is kind of incredible, people have a fear of flying, fear of going into planes. Something like that today will stop people from flying. This is a more high stress situation. Prof. Miller it is. The air force did careful tests on these guys. Almost half of these guys had never been in a plane before. A lot of them did fear heights. They did not like to be up there. A lot of them got airsick, all of the time. We have a character we will feature in our hbo series named crosby who died just a couple of years ago. Every time he went up, he would throw up. If you throw up in the oxygen mask, 55 degrees below the zero, it freezes. And you do not know it sometimes. You do not know if you are pulling oxygen. You dont feel it filling up your lungs. Then three minutes later, you have oxygen deprivation. You blank out. No one picks it up. You worry about all of this sort of stuff. Student [indiscernible] that they are used to it now. They are worried because they might make it out. Prof. Miller the guys i talked to say, they will tell you the last missions were hell. I made it to 23, im going to get it on 25. So many guys did. There was a guy who had his girlfriend waiting for him. They were going to get married the next day. He was on his 25th mission. A shell came through the window and blew his head off. He had to land. [inaudible] student i just imagined one of the other big problems, there was a certain amount of monotony. Prof. Miller thats right. The sound of the engine. You would fall asleep. The plane is filled with cigarette smoke. They are not smoking while they are fighting but they are smoking until the time they reach 12,000 feet. Then they put the oxygen on. The plane smelled of smoke and dried blood. All of the smoke in the air they could listen to the radio for example before they got to germany. Popular songs. The bbc. Everything else will happen quickly. Just like that. When you meet the luftwaffe on the other side of the channel. Student what were the reactions of the men who have to stand there and watch their friends die . Prof. Miller they had to go to a flak farm, a country estate, it was volunteered to the government by and rural or a duke. The family may be moved to london. You had to abandon your estate. You had badminton or tennis. You are away from the war for about a week. Sometimes, it didnt do much good. All you thought about, you would try to get your mind off it. You are still thinking you have got to go back. That is the thing. That scene we watched last night with john houston, i kept thinking about what a difficult job being a combat surgeon was. Let us say you come to me and i am the combat surgeon. And you say that you cannot fly. If you are crazy, then you should be crazy because no one could fly if you are saying. That is the catch. Suppose you say you have shakes at night. Not traumatic night dreams but tossing and turning. And that you are edgy all of the time. And i tell you that youre are going to go under treatment. I want to cure you. I am successful if i do so. I send you right back to the situation that got you to me in the first place if i am successful. You wanted to send people back to the state but you could not because your job as the air surgeon was to get people into combat. A lot of people did not go to see the combat surgeon. They know that the cure will get them back into the war. They think i will just punch through and try to get to 25. People would make sure that youre not doing something that would injure the whole crew. I only need three more missions and your comrades would stick up for you. That means youre flying with nine fully able to technically clear to guys and that is dangerous. Guys would do it to help each other out. Student i was wondering when you said the surgeon would treat them and then send them back, how long would they usually have between being cured . Professor miller there is a drug that is a truth serum. That is why the guys were willing to talk. It puts you in a semi conscious state so you can walk and urinate if you have to and sometimes you can speak haltingly. What they usually do is they would lay you down in a dark room and go through the whole mission. Trauma, trauma. To release the trauma. It made some guys more crazy. That was the general, socalled cure. The ordinary cure was rest, shower, change of close, sodium penta fall, like therapy for two days. Relax you and then we would send you back unless you had a deep psychosis. They would send you to a medical establishment in england that would handle psychic cases. For the guys that had really gone off of the edge. Those guys were there longterm. If they were considered incapable of returning to combat, they were sent back to the states and put in a medical hospital in the states. I had a guy that i spoke to call chairman small. He went on some tough missions. I wondered how he had gone through. He said i pretended i was not chairman small. I was in a movie. The luftwaffe were actors. They were fake planes, it was hollywood. I am a character. It got me through the war. I asked him what happened with the movie stopped. He said he went nuts. He was there in a hospital for three years. The thing is that commanders on the base never recognized, never wanted to recognize these things the cut that is just taking men away from them. A lot of them distrusted psychoanalysis or psychiatry of any sort. These doctors are trying to cure these guys. All they need, the commanders are saying, is rest. They are ok. They will muscle through. As i said before, the british were really tough on it. They called it absence of moral fortitude. You just did not have it. No moral fiber. That was a mistake we made in training by letting you through. This is a guy who got through and did not have any mental fiber. Student when they were flying, are these bombers on a Skeleton Crew . How vital was it to have a full complement . Everyone . Prof. Miller you had to. If one of their guys was sick, but that he had asthma and he couldnt fly, and you put a replacement in, that broke up the karma. That is bad luck. These guys are superstitious. Special jacket here, rabbits foot in here, we are going to take off in five minutes, no we always go at six minutes after 10, not five minutes. All of these superstitions. The biggest was, because you did not work with the guy. It is putting a new infielder in your infield. Ok. That was a problem with replacement crews. It happened a lot. Individual guys are killed on these planes. There are a few cruise made it crews made it through intact. Where all 10 guys survived the war. You came back with a partial crew. Student what role in the plane did reporters play . What role did they play . Prof. Miller cronkite and rooney flew with two other reporters. One was shot down and killed. A New York Times reporter. They had to go through Gunner School and they had to be trained as gunners and get certified to be allowed on the plane. They had to perform some sort of function in the plane. On rooneys mission, if they had been attacked by the luftwaffe, if they were attacked he had to operate a machine gun inside the plane. That is what reporters generally did. Edward r. Murrow, he flew with the raf. So did Ernest Hemingway when he went over. In 1944. He flew a couple of raf missions. Those were the guys that came back and reported what it was like inside the plane. One report i read in the Stars Stripes magazine, the reporter said that it is in the eerie feeling when they closed the door. The propellers go. There is no way out. It is like if you do not want to go on the roller coaster and you are in and off. You are off to war. There is no stopping it. Anyone else . We not getting very far in this. This is good stuff. Flying from their, ok, intermittent flying. Bucolic. These are the boys youre up against, the German Air Force. Some crack outfits. They flew with no limits on their missions. They flew until they died. They were hit pretty heavily. This is adolph golland. He went toe to toe with hitler who accused them of an absence of bravery. That would drive adolph nuts. One time, he pulled off his nights cross and threw it on the desk of the furor. Hitler did not do anything. This guys here, curtis lemay, he is a guy who arrives in october of 1943 and he teaches the air force how to fly. He has a bombardment wing and then a whole air division. He will go on and fly, he was in charge of the raids against tokyo. He was in charge of the Strategic Air command in the 1950s. He was still around during the cuban missile crisis. He wanted to a atomic bomb cuba. He is satirized in dr. Strangelove. Cigar chomping. He is that guy. Right wing, left wing, middle politically, he was an ardent conservative. The guys loved him during the war because he cared about his men, he flew with his group. He taught them how to fly. They did not want to execute the strategy but he said look if you see flack in front of you, you cannot avoid it. Why not . You are in such a tight box. If you stretched out a little more, what else with this evasive action that is the big thing. The invasion would cause you to miss your target. He said if you miss the target, you have to go back again. You do not want to go back again so let us do it the right so let us do it right the first time. You see all of this flack in front of you. You have a plexiglas bubble in front of you protecting you. To keep a steady platform so that you can bomb like that. The other thing he figured out remember the navigator . There were a lot of bombardiers like that coming right out of college and rushed into training and into war. He said that he cannot train enough skilled bombardiers. Here is what im going to do. Lets say you had 60 people and the room and you are all navigators and bombardiers. We are going to have a lead bombardier and a lead navigator. That is just one of you guys. Adam, you are the lead guy. I am going to really train you. Youre the smartest guy in the group. When you drop your bomb, everyone drops their bomb at the same time. You drop a smoke bomb, and it is called dropping on the leader. You put a highly skilled bombardier and navigator and you are likely to get a lot less mishaps on missions with trained crews. With those two strategies, the bombing starts to get a little more effective against the uboats. What was the problem . Student they were bulletproof. Prof. Miller bulletproof. Bombproof. They are bunkers. They are not actually underground. Take a shoebox, turn the shoebox over, put a little entranceway on there. The submarines float in like that into the protection of the bunker. Reinforced concrete this thick. It is as big as me. Six feet tall made of concrete. Germans must go here and think how could we lose the war if we built bunkers like this. The bombs bounced off like pingpong balls. The problem is that the submarine is under protection. You know you cannot hit it. How do you send men out on missions like that . That is why that movie 12 00 high deals with that. Corporate trainings you do not go through this course because trainers say, here are situations. How do we keep morale up in this situation where everything is a loss . We are getting attritted. It never worked. That operation never worked. Uboats were finally killed at sea. They would send longrange bombers out there. Liberators. They had a lot of legs on them. You go out to see, they had big lights. Submarines had to be on the surface a lot of the time to recharge your battery. They would spot them and you would call into the task force, said the planes against it and machine gun it and try to catch the equipment and the codebook and the personnel if you could. These guys are flying as guinea pigs and against targets they cannot see well or hit. When they hit them by accident, they cannot hurt them. Complete futility. This is what churchill is saying at casablanca in early 1943 at holger air force. Typical mission. These guys would get out, check their guns. This is your bombardier. He controls machine guns appear. Scary position. Probably what is the scariest part about this . Student you should be looking down at the ground. Student you dont really have metal below you. If anything is going to happen, it will probably happen to the nose of the plane. It would look like all of the bullets are coming right at you. Prof. Like a spark, a flame coming out of the barrel of the gun. They had air to air rockets that were missiles. Everything seems to be coming in on you. What were you doing while this was happening . In this model you would probably be shooting back. Yes, until you get to the target. Then what do you have to do . You drop the bomb, what position are you in . You cannot look at what is coming at you. That is tough. That is another reason to keep the plane stable. Youre looking into this thing, hanging over the edge of the cliff. So you cant fire back. Youve got to do this. Its like caring the regiment flag in the civil war without a gun. A tough position in the plane. I like this shot, because look at the faces. Look how young they are. It reminds me of my Junior Varsity football team. Prepared for war. Look at these kids. Amazing. Thats another dread they had was going over the english channel. There was not much airsea rescue if you went down. Sometimes celebrities flew, like clark gable, star of gone with the wind. Carol lumbar was killed. She was selling war bonds. She kept telling him, clark, you got to get into the war. When she died, he was driven to boot camp and training. He came out as an air gunner. He went over to england and filled a beautiful film. Said he almost wants to die he has taken such crazy chances. Jimmy stewart was a commander in the war. Later in the Strategic Air command. Air force had a good publicity machine. This man is sitting like an embryo in the egg. How would you like to be in this position . Dont forget this is also unheeded. Eated. Eed they had an electrical suit they could wear. They are wired like oldfashioned christmas trees. I used to go nuts because if one light went out, all the lights went out. Then you are wrestling with your wife on the floor because youre trying to kill each other to get this thing up in time for santa claus. You dont know if it is going to work or not. Will was asking who is the most Vulnerable Person in the plane, you might think it would be this guy, but it is actually the pilot. These guys are all alone during combat. And in a very tough position because a lot of times they would try to get you from below as well as coming straight at you. There is the first group, one of the first groups to return intact after 25 missions. It took from october until may 1942, 1943. For two groups the hells angels and the Memphis Belle to complete the 25 missions. Flew in thatys who first period were casualties. In this class only three of us are healthy. Student when the crews completed 25 missions, what they thought have a couple of replacements in missions to go, but what about the planes . Where they retired . Prof. Miller they flew her back. The Memphis Belle. Morgan was engaged to a girl from memphis. That is why he named the plane that. The plane was kept in memphis. When he got back, his girlfriend broke up with him. He met somebody on a bond drive. But generally, the crew went home and the plane stayed. Sometimes you take the markings off the plane, but that was rare. Again, superstition. You had the number of bomb runs. Event any grateful or something or destroy the furher, Something Like that. The plane stayed duty. Student were there any superstitions on writings on the bombs . Prof. Miller no, they just sent little message messages to humor themselves. We saw that, like right here. A special easter egg for hitler. This was dangerous work. Liveimes the bombs were when you are loading them. So if it dropped base in thence on a 100th bomb group in england 17 people were vaporized. Ground crews gone, a huge explosion. It was tough work. Heres a classroom where everyone paid attention. Nobody went to sleep. I cant imagine going in there at 6 00 in the morning. They have that big wall map covered. Then they pull the curtain back, and you saw a long line from england. It was string. The longer the string, the tougher the mission. And then you knew. You got an inkling half an hour before. If you went to breakfast and they were serving real eggs, the it the last call supper. Especially if there was bacon with it, that means you are going to berlin. There were a few gasps. The room gets required. This Operations Officer in a halfhour explained everything about the mission. The target, the wind conditions, the weather over the target, the expected weather coming back. The expected nature of the opposition. Where they are coming from. You had to memorize all of that. You had to take notes. These are the officers. These are the guys in charge. This is what i mean about this command is responsibility. Then there is a special session for navigators, bombardiers, pilots, and copilots. Everyone was here for the special thing. Then youre off. The gunners would be out already greasing up the guns. The pilot, copilot, navigator, bombardier, engineer would run out on a jeep. If it was a real tough mission and you saw that long string, you got the priest or the protestant chaplain to bless the plane, bless the crew. One man was jewish, and had no rabbis. He said i go to the protestant guy, i go to the catholic guy, to cover all my bases. Then i say a prayer from the torah. That is not new or airport. Newark airport. Theyre not flying out every 12 minutes. They are flying out 45 seconds apart, one after the other. Notice how spread out it is. It would be magnified 1112 times what it is here all over the country. You dont want everything concentrated. One squad is a mile away. That is why they rode english bikes around the bases. When you took off one after the other. They shot a radar beam up about 20,000 feet. You turn your radio on, bended around like this. You circled up like this until you pop out of the clouds like a fish popping out of water. And it was all clear. All that overcast. It takes you an hour to get through the overcast going slowly. You cant see anything if you are in the clouds. If youre an explosion with fire and smoke all of the place, you know the plane in front of you is blowing up. A lot of these planes would run into each other taking off or landing. A tremendous number of accidents close to the bases in england. You pop out and there would be multicolored planes. It was like the regiment flag and mentioned before. You would rally around that plane. Off you go and you are joined by bombers from other bases. They would join and they would join and they would join. By 1944, they had air trains, as they call them, 6070 miles 1617 miles long. Sometimes longer. On some flights, the first plane would have its nose over amsterdam and the tail would still be over england. That is how big these things were. 1,000, 1200 fighter planes. And then the english were coming back with 400 or 500 at night. They said the ground was shaking all the time. These tremendous air currents. The noise. It was incessant. Carrier forircraft the war in england. There is the navigators sitting at his seat, oxygen mask on. There are the thick gloves i was talking about. He happened to have his parachute on, in this case. But that is a staged photograph. This is a radio gunner. He would fire a gun at the rear of the plane from an opening on the top. He would be open to the aiso he could stick his head. This is a waste gunner. Ist gunner. This is a staged shot as well. As in combat, before would be filled with these slippery cartridges as you fire. You would be slipping and sliding on these things, and the guy right behind you. This is the outfit, the flack vest that they wore. He doesnt have a helmet on. But hes really bundled up for the cold. If his gun would jam, he would take his glove off and do the operation. A lot of guys took cameras with them. You have got shots like this. This is on the bomb run. The bomb bay doors open up. This is where you had to keep it stable. Tragically, some guys were blown to smithereens in the air. This is a crash that takes place over in english base. Look at how thick that overcast is. This guy got a shot of that thing. Incredible. Here you waited for the guys to return. Out ande base came counted the planes as they came in. Did you read the section . Student in that picture with the explosion, is that overcast due to clouds or smoke from combat . Prof. Miller they are coming back from a long mission over england, looking for their base. They are looking through tremendous overcast, maybe a ceiling of 6000 feet. And you are coming in at 24. You cant see the airfield. East anglia is filled with over 40 of these things in a very small space. Its hard to recognize your field. A lot of guys landed at the wrong place. Or they ran out of gas and rent went to the wrong place. This is the caprice of the air war. This chance thing that hemingway talked about. You could have beautiful weather when you went out, for the targets you were bombing, but overcast sets in. A storm front pants hits. And in england, your base is clouded up. Ordinarily you dont fly in this weather. This weather grounds everything. But you have to landed it, or else you die. When he came to getting weather reports over germany, how is that usually done . They intercepted german radio signals. They picked up german weather reports. They are meteorologists england always gets continental weather. There are meteorologists are trained in picking up continental weather. You also had weather planes and observation planes over the target. Theyd fly on the day of the mission and try to assess the situation over the target. Leave atmbers would 8 30 in the morning, they would be flying over at daybreak. Nd they would report back and you flew. You never factored in home weather, the mission it just went forward. In these patients there was no turning back. In the infantry i go into a battle, and say im directing a tank battle. We are getting hammered on my right and i want reinforcements. I can change the nature of the battle by moving reinforcement around, or i can make a strategic retreat. Pull back. Get better cover. In an air battle you could not do that. They were ordered to go to the target, muscle through, bomb it, and come back. There were no diversions. You just go to the target. They flew almost 1000 and these rates and none of them were ever turned back. Not all them were successful but none were turned back. But the results were calamitous. The casualties were enormous because you cannot redirect the battle. A strange thing, too. Gettysburg. There is lee getting ready to charge on cemetery hill. It is a mile between them. Battlefield and say is lee crazy to do this . The wall in front of me is really low and we hurt them with artillery. In other words, i can play with the battle because you can go to the site. No one has ever been able to return to the air battle. Thats why they dont talk about it. Its a beautiful day, then and loffice sweeps uffewaffe sweeps in and theres carnage in the sky. One airman told me, you dump pillars, engines, men, into a giant ashtray. You dump you are seeing men dropping with parachutes, propellers going down. Planes going down. Its like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. And you will never be able to return to it. Normandy. Ck for these airman cant go back to anything but their old basis. That is what they will go back to. Not to the scenes of this. Its interesting. You rarely saw corpses. Ground guys would see corpses all the time. They ignored themselves so that. They get used to it. At the battle of the bulge, they got so hardened by warfare that they would sit on their comrades dead body and eat rations on top of them. That is how desensitized you could get in battle. This was a different kind of war, the air war. Very different. There were no bodies here. They were vaporized. I once saw in a book like a guy hitchhiking trying to get to a train and an ambulance stopped him. The set we will pick you up. Instead of getting in the cabin, he goes to the back of it. It is like a baker struck. Bakers truck. They are screaming, no he opens it up and sees six dead bodies on the stretchers. Fish white, dead. There is not a lot of closure. The other strange thing about it im standing here and breathing , air which is keeping me alive. I like sunshine. We dont have a lot of it now. Sunshine is great. But air is a killer. Above 12,000 feet, it is fatal. And the sunshine, its a bright day, a good day for hunting. For who, the germans. They can see us. In the summertime guys would pray for clouds. This scene here is something we saw briefly in the film the air war, but this is a real case where they couldnt retract the walter it into the plane. Turret into the plane. The whole plexiglas thing was shattered. The guy, well, you can imagine what happened to him. His remains were taken in a coffee can. These the guys that returned from the vision. They were not happy. Andy rooney said expected to be like a college campus. They are kids your age. Having fun, drinking, going to pubs, parties, glenn miller band. Yet, but most of the time it was depressing. One time he saw a volleyball game being played. The guys repenting and groaning but no one was playing the game. You could watch the game for an hour, no one was screaming. Just silence. Everybody is calm. Everybody is counting but the prisoner. You count your days until you get out. I asked why they were in the war. Im here and i find so i can go home. You fight tooth to go home. Student did they have ceremonies for bodies in the air . There were no bodies to dairy. Prof. Miller they would take trips to england. Pilots ande old raf they will take us to a pub in cambridge where the americans went to as well. On the cieling of a pub, some of these guys would smoke cigars and mark the guys initials with cigar ashes, or burn it in with lighters. That was a better way to do it. On the initials of the guy in the. Then you went to the bar. Lets say there were two guys that went down, five of us are sitting at the bar, you drink to full glasses of beer at the bar. And that was two full glasses. That was the symbol. As guys were trying to say you absolutely forget about it because you cant dwell on that. One of your friends dies today, you are in mourning for a long period of time. In the ward you cannot do it. Psychologically you cannot do it. You cannot function and you will die. Guys learned they couldnt do that in the war very quickly. That is generally how they did the sort of things. They handle death by avoiding it. When he came in there was a red cross drill. Girl on base. 3000 guys and two women. Coffee, doughnuts, a little camaraderie. Then some of the guys didnt make it back. This is a rare photograph given to me from an archivist of the savanna museum. The guy in the middle is an american airmen. That is this guys farmers father. They are belgian. They pick this guy up on the ground and are hauling him away. We do not know who took the picture. He was interrogated afterwards. They huffed him away to a barn and hit him and then briefed him. Were going to put you in charge of a woman will take you to spain or gibraltar. And dont act like an american. The big problem was you had to take your uniform off. The minute you take your uniform off, if youre captured, you are considered a spy. The gestapo could kill you. If youre captured in uniform you are a prisoner of war. They would put their dog tags, sew them into their arm so that if they were caught, theyd pull the dog tag out and say, army, air force. Maybe that would work. A lot of these women were caught by the gestapo. To a concentration camp for women. Some of them died in there under torture. A lot of guys thought about escape and evasion. They would think about dying and getting wounded but nobody thought about what would happen if i land and im ok and i try to get out. What happens when i become a prisoner. Any questions up until now . This is the moment when the air war changes. We get through the 12 00 high period. All that summer the 8th continues to fly unescorted missions into germany. They are getting pummeled. The twin strikes. The try to double bearing factories. Aircraft factories. Partially successful. They go back in october. Here is october. The entire war is in the balance. December, january, february, march, april, may five months. They have to achieve air superiority. 1943 theyint in late are losing and that is when panic sets in. Panic, in the sense that hap arnold from washington replaces him with doolittle. What saves them is not jimmy doolittle, but what we started talking about today. The mustang. When that arrived with his wing the nick of time moment when the whole course of the air war is reversed. Now when the luftwaffe comes up, they cant handle these guys. They are too fast, too quick, too nimble. The pilots are extremely welltrained. They had been trained in other airplanes. We have good pilots. Now the bombers are in a tough position, they are used as bait and they know it. They will pick targets. Doolittle will say bomb berlin. Question whenimes he was ordered a mission like that. Someone might say, we ought to be hitting the Oil Refineries rather than a big city. Oil is the blood of warfare. But now the game is to make sure you have air superiority for the invasion. That means destroying the luftwaffe. But only if they come up and fight. They will fight over berlin, but why is that . Student is the center of german culture and a camel to be bombed cannot let it be bombed over and over. Prof. Miller hitler cant allow Something Like that to happen. The price of nationalism kills him in this case. He has to defend. They had the best fighter defenses in the reich. Around berlin. It is an economic powerhouse, but still. Raids mount 1000 bomber on berlin and the population of berlin sees that the luftwaffe is not enough a dictatorship does depend somewhat unpopular opinion. Hitler had spies going to nazi meetings. They said there is a lot of bad morale. The bombing is eroding confidence. Confidence in hitler. About never what an allied bomb fall of berlin. They dropped a lot of ordinance on berlin. In some raids, 17,000 bombs. They are there. As one german told me, as a kid, i knew the first time they hit berlin. They hit the hell out of it. If they can do it once, they will do it again and again until almost until there is no berlin. That is exactly what happened. The russians finished it off with their artillery. It is a skeleton of the city at the end of the war. Bait em and kill em is the strategy. There is no plane that the luftwaffle has that can handle these mustangs. The only outside chance, the wildcare, is that hitler could have gotten jets. He had a jet wing. They didnt have proper fuel and they did make enough of them. And he did not make the decision to go to the early enough. If they had a jet aircraft going 700 miles an hour, they could have won the air war. It would have been decisive. But he did negatively plane up in enough numbers and enough time. If you bomb berlin, lets say the furher is on the radio screaming and pounding the table and saying he will get revenge on the british. You cant hit new york. They were working on a rocket called the new york rocket that could go all the way to new york. They had heisenberg working on nuclear warheads. If they had have the bomb before us, they had a rocket hit manhattan. Hitler puts most of his funding into vengeance weapons the v2 , rocket. It was not very discriminate about what it would hit but it caused a lot of damage in london. Instead of putting money into jets, he did this. This goes to your point about nazi mistakes. Student they should have won an award for helping us win the war. Prof. Miller exactly. One ever after another. R after another. This is oil city, pennsylvania. Another fighter pilot. He is flying a thunderbolt. They almost did as much damage as the mustang. Strafing, going in low. Hitting aircraft on the ground. We lost a lot of aces. Including this man and a lot of others because these missions were the most dangerous because the germans had heavy air cap cutting the grass, as they called it. 1011 feet off the ground. Those are dangerous missions. A lot of good flyers lost their lives on missions like that. Finally, this point. Here is the moral dilemma of the bomb war. It is summed up in these two slides. What is a bomb cap this takes us ahead to the period beyong dday. This is an oil refinery. Synthetic oil, which they made from coal. Brown coal, is called, soft coal. The South Africans make it like that today. Germany doesnt have a lot of natural coal. This is a gigantic oil refinery. If you are going to bomb that, there is no danger in the middle of nowhere. Its like being in the meadowlands without stadium. Giants stadium. There is nothing around it. There is nothing around it. You dont get bombs drifting off course. Or hitting here or getting their. We start to hit the target just before dday, then incessantly after the date. When we knocked the German Air Force out of the sky. We dont knock out their production facilities. I have heard historians say they were producing as many planes in late 1944 as they were in 1943. How can you say in your book luftwaffe . What we did was kill the pilots. , andnother Pilot Training other sending pilots with 12 hours experience. Thats nothing against these guys. They had 120150 hours in the air. It is a pilot killing campaign. It comes at a tremendous cost. 18,600 allied air casualties before dday, just in the period before february and june. 10,500 american airmen killed. How many people do you think were killed on dday . Anybody have a guess . Student 60,000 . Prof. Miller no. Student wasnt it like 5000 . Prof. Miller 10,000. For all five beaches. British to american. About 10,000. Killed on omaha beach, believe it or not, less than 2000. Fight but lesse , than 2000. My uncle fought their. There. They were transferred to england when a dday. They went through the forest in the battle of the bulge and went across the germany or he was captured. They saw everything. These guys took horrific casualties. My uncles outfit, rifle company. They started with 30 guys in there only two left at the end of the war. Consider this. They have a beautiful monument to michaels unit in normandy. The first division. A great we marvin movie. Spot er actually fought the big red one. I am thinking to myself why isnt there a monument on the speech to these guys, the 18,500 casualties who died making the invasion possible . Five times the number killed on omaha beach. That is what we showed you the film yesterday. It is a littleknown aspect of the war. But it makes the invasion absolutely possible. And him possible if it does not occur. It is a lastminute thing. To wrap this up this is no problem morally. Here is we get into moral problems. Ofe is what would you do get what would you do in a situation like this . We know where were going to land on dday. We know germans are going to rush reinforcements to the beach. They just dont know where they are going to land. How are the going to rush reinforcements . By rail. Tanks, troops, things like that. Heres a city in france. The trainyard where these trains are assembled, what is around it . Probably workers. The workers live very close to where they work. If you bomb the marshalling yard, you dont want to bomb the train when it leaves the marshaling yard. Why not . Student why dont you want to bomb the train . Prof. Miller yeah, the moving train. Student you can bomb the track and prevent them from moving further. Prof. Miller in the yard, they are assembling a lot of trains. Trains would bring around 700 troops. But you want to have 2800 trains congregating in an treasury to a larger train to take them towards normandy beach. That is the marshaling that takes place. So you want to hit this. It is like when they went after ball bearings and things like that. Coal. Why hit a coal mine . Why even bomb a factory . Why not bomb the train yard that that is loading the coal . Coal and oil become targets later on. But now you are in a moral dilemma. If your bomb drifts, you killing belgian civilians and french civilians. Churchill said you could kill up to 600,000 of them. If we bomb incessantly for two months. Eisenhower wanted to go with it, roosevelt wanted to go with it. Roosevelt will the call by the way. But churchill said it would kill a lot of frenchman, and destroy anglofrench relations for 100 years. If we do this. Thats when they brought in some of the french generals and said you have to do it. People have to die. Did they try to evacuate people around it . Even cutis lemay firebombed japanese and dropped leaflets. There is not much for leaflets in this evacuation. The cities have to be hit by surprise attack. They are dangerous missions. And the dday clock is running. That is what they go after. Student obviously the deaths are tragic, but if you look at it from another perspective a numbers perspective miller that is what we are looking at. Student dont you have to make these choices . Prof. Miller as emily said, they didnt set out to kill. Student and if they dont, more people die. Prof. Miller thats for sure. Thats the problem with a lot of moral arguments. For the atomic bomb, they made the argument that the war would have went on. Conventional bombing could have killed more people than atomic bombing. The war wasnt going to stop. I dont know. Cohead. Go ahead. When you said its a numbers game that struck me but obviously there children and that has a huge weight on the crew. Prof. Miller it took a toll on the pilots. Some of the commanders were very blunt and called these baby killing operations. Some even opposed them. They dont stubbornly refuse or they would be out of the air force. But later on we see this come up again. When the eighth air force starts going after more civilian centers. That is not how we started the work. War. We would surgically bomb from high up, not a lot of collateral damage. We were not like the british. We are not going to be like that. That is the question. Student if we had went through with operation downfall, that would have been awful not only for the japanese, but for the americans too. Either bomb these railways and save the guys on the beach or you can let them be slaughtered. Prof. Miller i like the way you are putting it. Even if i did not agree with your argument. What you have to do in these exh situations is not use post facto. You dont know what the consequences of the decision will be. We know there were 45,000 killed later. Actuate they thought lord be killed in the operation. Behind the ourselves eyes and in the heads of the people making these decisions. History flows like the narrative of life itself. You go through the course of things. You go one step at a time. For life is led like that front to back. That, to me, is good history, that is good storytelling. It also allows you to really see the dilemma that people face not knowing the consequences. You do start to think about numbers. We are going to send 152,000 guys onto the beaches. And if these trains get through and troops get through, maybe they are stopped. Maybe the whole invasion goes kaput. Then the whole war is oriented towards the day dday. This is a tough decision. Student the germans are necessarily fighting in a moral way. If the americans and british had to fight in a moral way, they may not have won the war. The germans were cheating. Prof. Miller is not really cheating. Its an excellent point. That is how a lot of the bomber pilots would argue back to me when i raise it as a question. I would say hitler really took the country to war. They would say hitler was supported by the whole country. The minute ild me supported the furher and he went to war in poland and i supported that war, i put my whole family in high jeopardy. If famous german writer went on the radio, didnt you expect reprisals for what you did . Didnt you expect consequences . And here they are. Saturation bombing by the british. Having bombing by the americans. This is what you expect. And women and children will die. Of the 600,000 german civilians killed, two thirds are women, children, and the elderly. Student would the average bomber have sentiments against german people . Yeah, i know we are killing babies and women and children, but they know what is going off on with the holocaust. Prof. Miller there was a lot of hate in their hearts. Unlike an infantrymen, they are not tangling with them face to face. There is a certain kind of in personality. I hate to call the air were personal because it is so close. You can see the faces of the fighters, the pilots. But it is a little more impersonal, pushing a button, can push ais if you button and send a rocket to iraq. Off. In cut somebody had stick a knife in somebody. That is personal killing. Student did that rationalization make it easier on the guys . Prof. Miller a lot of them did know about the camps. They did not know about the camps. But they knew about the s. S. As the germans were moving towards the beaches, they went to small towns. Where there were a lot of collaborators, frenchman. What they did would hang every man and boy above the age of 14. They would put people in churches and burn the churches to the ground. That is going on while this is happening. We know about it. We have ultra. We are picking up intelligence and we know what is going on in the ground. We know from the french, who are reporting this on the radio. It is like William Tecumseh sherman said. Once you go to war, everything changes. The war acquires a momentum all on its own. You cannot stop it. Wars dont wind down, they get worse and worse. Student what were the plans to yetg b29 into the Pacific Pacific . Prof. Miller the airfields would have been lengthened. We knew that we were close to winning by march. Its not until march that we get troops on german soil. The german homeland. The result in month and a half left in the whole war. Once that happens and the russians come cascading across poland, we have germany in a pincer moment. That is when you know it will be over. Then you know germany is defeated. Than the bombing stops. We call off the bombing. Germany didnt say uncle, its over, we just called off because it was extraneous. By now the bombing is done in support of troops. We knocked out 60 german cities, turned them to cinder and ash. Ironically, we knocked out 61 japanese cities. That is what happened at the end here. This is the moral dilemma, because we dont know if we are going to win. That is why dday is important. If we dont get on the continent, we may not win, but the war might be prolonged 2 years. That is the decision they had to go through. We have a thing at the museum in new orleans called what if. We have documentary footage and we have dilemmas like this documented. We have visitors in museum vote what they would want to do, bomb or not bomb. This is one that comes out about even. 5050. I think i mentioned another one, where soldiers used human shields, japanese soldiers used civilians pregnant women. Babies in front of them as they charge american positions. The you kill the limit with the babies to get to the japanese soldiers . We have not put that one of you at the museum. We showed it to a test group, and they thought it was too tough for young people to be faced with Something Like that. But that is what happened in warfare all the time. Especially as we sent marines house to house in falluja and places like that. Student they not only sought as necessary to get the initial target was to illuminate factories and railroads, but killing workers. Networker could go into a factory and make 250 bullet today. Five of those bullets find allied soldiers and kill them. Miller youre thinking like the best use was a the british put all kinds of euphemisms on a saturation bombing. Dont call it firebombing. Dehousing. He says, im not out to hit houses or factories, im out to kill german workers. For just the reason you described. That was Arthur Harriss idea. Lets wrap up on this idea of intention. Put yourself you are in a german city, any city munich. There is a dual raid that day americans at day, british at night. You are a housewife and have three kids. Your husband is fighting on the russian front, or is killed on the russian front. You go to the cellar of your house when you hear the fire alarm. Its the air raid signal. Down you go into the cellar. You are down there with a candle in your three kids. The americans are going to try to bomb accurately, but i cant. But they cant. The british are going to knock the whole city out. What do you prefer . Which raid would you prefer . Student id much prefer the american one because i have a higher chance of coming out on the other end. Prof. Miller you do. In. Like the guy coming the simple stick example of a guy coming in to kill everyone to get one guy in the bar. Intention can matter. That is with the air commanders argued. The argument about the barbarians. We didnt start it, they did, etc. They are running the holocaust, blah. The nature of the enemy calls for the barbers and semibarbaric tactics like saturation bombing, they thought. The big heroes in britain are the fighter boys. Those defending the homeland. These guys want to dresden, flew very tough missions. Half of them who flew died. They did not get a Campaign Medal for the war. If you are in north africa and ,ou serve their and your father they would get a Campaign Medal. Italy. They didnt get a medal for the bomber war. They would raise a statute to Arthur Harris in london. Not until Margaret Thatcher said put it up. Some peace groups drew blood all over the thing. The raf, and there is a number that still hang around in a bar across in the church at saint gains danes. They still feel undervalued. They still believe in the cause they were fighting for. Thats just from their perspective. They had to believe that. Student if youre a german citizen who lived near those train yards, if a bomb hits you, do you go to some one elses house . Do you know there is a target theire around the train yard or , would they not be told . Prof. Miller you knew. The french and belgian people knew at this point. There were evacuations from these areas. There was a lot of evacuation from a big cities. The whole Evacuation Program starts in london when they evacuate all the kids. They took them to the countryside with borders. Boarding houses. There was a lot of that that happened in germany. When a town gets wiped out like hamburg, where to the people go . 60,000 houses have been lost. They are sent all over germany. People have to take them in and it is some resentment on that. They have to go somewhere. Theyre in crazed conditions sometimes. I described one instance in the book where woman is sitting on a train. She has a vacant look in her eyes. But she doesnt have any soot or marks from the bombing on her, women who two other had been in the fire. They look over and say, at least you survived and got out with your luggage. She had a little suitcase. Shes not quite right and she opens her suitcase and pulls out what looks like a doll. And it was her vaporized child, once 52. Reduced by the fire to this. She was carrying it around in a suitcase. That was how off people would get. Imagine being in a city like cologne and getting hit 100 times. Like 100 9 11s. The ironic thing is that you talk about the chance thing. Take that family sitting there with a candle. Whether a bomb drops on you were they are just lucky if you survive and unlucky if you are dead. If they die, it is bad luck. They survive, its good luck. They could do nothing about it he cut they just had to go straight ahead. There are two victims in the bomber war. The one we always talk about. The one under the bombs and the ones that dropped the bombs. But our bombardier back at syracuse. Saidoked in the mirror and this is the first day of the second semester. Instead im flying to leipzig. And is not going to be friendly. Student what happened to these bombers after the war . Prof. Miller scrapped. Most of the 17th, there are only nine that bitter flyable. The air force museum in savanna just acquired one. We have one at the World War Ii Museum in new orleans. Was one in the ice in newfoundland. It crashed. The propellors were bent. The plane is embedded in the ice. If you cannot turn propellers, you do not have electricity. It was lucky they were saved. They had no heat but they got out. That plane sat on the ice until a couple of years ago when an entrepreneur from ohio rescued the plane of the ice, brought it back to a small airport in ohio, reconstructed the plane. The airport told him they would not rent to him anymore. So he gave his plane away to the World War Ii Museum. Now we have it hanging in the boeing center. But they were scrapped. Some people in midland, texas cut the nose off. Out. Someone went into a big gigantic junkyard and cut off the nose. They have that hanging like so many paintings. They have hundreds of them down there. That is kind of what happens to the thing. There is a film about airmen returning from the war. Infantry, too. The airman goes to a scrapyard and looks among the junk. That is what happens to them. Okay guys, thanks a lot. I appreciate it. I will see you next week. We will do dday. Good class. Tveach week American History brings you archival footage that helps tell the story of the 20th century. Living 29, scourge of japans home island. Mighty engines of destruction bringing on the lesson of pearl harbor. To the third and fifth fleet, japan came under the notable reign of ruin. Ally c forces moving it to the japanese home islands shall be almost without opposition. Might helpseys hammering the enemy to his knees. The unimaginably destructive atomic bomb. The First Mission was Industrial City of heroes shema. Hiroshima. Japan had a choice, complete surrender or complete ruin. They laytamp, even as the foundation for a stable european peace, they decided on common action against japan. As agreed at delta, russia joined the allies on the last or meaning axis enemy. Japan was attacked. Andemperor hero tito japanese militarism, the war was lost. They sued for peace. Secretary of war stanton and secretary of state byrnes hurried to the white house with secretary of the navy fo