October 7, 2022 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, historian extraordinaire Stephen Ambrose tells us a very unlikely World War II story about George McGovern, the liberal, antiwar Democratic presidential candidate from South Dakota who was soundly defeated by President Nixon in the 1972 election. This story is from The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
This is Leigh Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show
and our favorite subject American history. And by the way,
all of our American history stories are brought to us
by the great folks at Hillsdale College. Go to Hillsdale
dot eedu to sign up for their terrific and free
online courses. Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers
(00:36):
and historians, and at the core of his success was
his belief that history was biography, history was about people.
Ambrose passed in the year two thousand and two, but
his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here in
our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estates.
Here's Stephen Ambrose to tell us the short story from
(00:59):
the Wild Blue the men and boys who flew the
B twenty fours. And he told this story to a
riveted audience. Here Stephen Ambrose. The B twenty four was
built like a nineteen thirties mac truck, except that it
had an aluminum skin that could be cut with a knife.
(01:21):
They could carry a heavy load far and fast, that
it had no refinements. Steering the four engineer plane was
difficult and exhausting. Is until late nineteen forty four, there
was no power except the pilot's muscles. It had no
windfield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his head
(01:45):
out the side window to see. During a rain, breathing
was possible only by wearing an oxygen mask. Above ten
thousand feet in the altitude, they were cold and clammy,
smelling of rubber and sweat. There was no heat despite
temperature is that at twenty thousand feet and higher got
(02:07):
as low as forty or even fifty degrees below zero.
The wind blew through the airplane like fury, especially from
the waist gunner's windows, and whenever the bombay doors were open,
the oxygen mask often froze to the wearer's face. If
the minute the waist touched their machine guns would bare hands,
(02:30):
the skin froze to the metal. There were no bathrooms
to YearIn eight. There were two small relief coops, one
forward and one aft, which were almost impossible to use
without spilling because of the heavy layers and clothing the
men wore, plus which the tubes were often clogged with
frozen yuriner. Deificating could be done only in a receptacle
(02:55):
lined with a wax paper bag. A man had to
be desperate to use it because of the difficulty of
removing enough clothing and exposing bare skin to the arctic cold.
The bags were dropped out the waist windows or through
the open bombay doors, and often men would ride on them.
Take that. There were no kitchen facilities, no way to
(03:24):
warm up food or coffee, but anyway, there was no
food unless improvement b had packed in a sandwich with
no pressurization, pockets of gas, and a man's intestinal tract
could swell like balloons and cause him to double over
in pain. There was no aisle to walk down, only
(03:44):
the eight EN's wide catwalk running beside the bombs and
over the bombay doors. That's what you used to move
forward and aft. They had to be done with care,
as the aluminum doors would rolled up into the fuselage
instead of swinging out on hinges had only a one
(04:05):
hundred pound capacity, so if you slipped on that catlock
and fell, you were gone. The seats were not padded,
could not be reclined, and were cramped into so small
a space that the man had almost no chance to stretch,
and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was done to
(04:28):
make it comfortable for the pilot, the copilot or the
eight other men and the crew. Even though most flights
lasted for eight hours, sometimes ten, very occasionally more than ten,
never less than six, the plane existed, and it was
flowned for one purpose only to carry five hundred or
(04:49):
one thousand pound bombs and dropped them accurately over enemy targets.
It was called a Liberator. Solidator along with the Ford
Motor Company Douglas Aircraft Company in North American aviation, together
the Liberator production pool made more than eighteen thousand, three
(05:10):
hundred Liberators. That was five thousand more than the total
number of B seventeens. The Liberator was not operational before
World War Two and was not operational after the war.
All those B twenty fours were squished up by bulldozers
because America needed the aluminum and we were going over
(05:32):
to jet airplanes. In any event, there's one still flying today.
The number of people involved in making it, in servicing it,
and in flying the B twenty four out numbered those
involved with any other airplane in any country at any time.
(05:53):
There were more B twenty fours than any other American
airplane ever built. It would be an exaggeration to say
that the V twenty four won the war for the Allies.
That don't ask how they could have won it without
the pilots and cruised with. The V twenty fours came
(06:15):
from every state and territory in America. They were young, fit, eager.
There were sons of workers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, businessmen, educators.
A few were married, most were not. Some had an
excellent education, others were barely, if at all, out of
high school. They were all volunteers the US Army Air Corps.
(06:41):
After nineteen forty two of the US Army Air Force
did not force anyone to fly. They made the choice.
Most of them were between the ages of two and
ten and nineteen twenty seven, when Charles Lindberg flew to
the Spirit of Saint Louis from Long Island to purse.
(07:01):
For many boys, this was the first outside the family
event to influence them. It fired their imagination, Black Lendbergh.
They wanted to fly, and my goodness, what a story
when we come back more of Steven Ambrose's story of
the B twenty fours and the men who flew them.
(07:22):
Here on our American stories. Here are our American Stories.
We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith,
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told that we can't do it without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
(07:44):
free to make. If you love our stories in America
like we do, please go to our American Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:09):
Stephen Ambrose and the story of the Boys who flew
America's B twenty fours. Let's continue where we last left
off with Stephen Ambrose. In their teenage years, they drove
Model T forwards or perhaps Model as if they drove
it all. Many of them were farm boys. They plowed
behind mules or horses. They walked to school one, two,
(08:33):
sometimes even more miles. Most of them, including the city kids,
were poor. If they were lucky enough to have jobs,
they earned a dollar a day, sometimes less. They seldom traveled.
Many had never been out of their home counties. Even
most of them more fortunate had never been out of
(08:55):
their home stakes. Of those who were best off, a
handful had ever been out of the country. Almost none
of them had ever been up at an airplane. A
surprising number had never seen an airplane. But they all
wanted to fly their patriotis who was beyond question. They
(09:16):
wanted to be a part of smashing Hitler Tojo Mussolini
and their thugs. But they wanted to choose how they
did it. They wanted to get off the ground, be
like a bird, see the country from up high, travel
faster than anyone could do well. Attached to the earth.
More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones,
(09:39):
more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the
airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from
the earth and opened the skies. They were astonishingly young.
Many joined the Army Air Forces as teams. Never got
(10:00):
to be twenty years old. Before the war ended. Anyone
over twenty five was considered to be and was called
an old man. In the twenty first century, adults would
hardly give sech youngsters the key to the family car,
but in the first half of the nineteen forties, the
adults sent them out to play a critical role in
(10:22):
saving the world. Most wanted to be fire pilots, but
only a relatively few attained that goal. Many became pilots
or copilots on two or four engine bombers. The majority
became crew members, serving as gunners or radio men, or
bombardiers or flight engineers or navigators. Never mind, they all
(10:46):
wanted to fly, and they did. On the fiftieth anniversary
of V Day, I was with Joe Heller, who was
a bombardier with the twelfth Are Force flying out of Italy,
and Heller said to me in the cars of the conversation,
I never had a bad officer. Astonished, I said, kil
(11:11):
you're the man who created Major Major, Major Colonel Cathcart,
General Dridler, Lieutenant minder Bender, and so many others. Everybody
in the world knows these people. How can you tell
me you never had a bad officer. They were all invention,
he replied, every single losser, from when I went into
(11:31):
the service, to going over to ITLA, to flying the
missions to when I got this charge, every one of
them was good. In the course of the interviewing Jordan
mc government for this book, I told him what Hellar
had said to me. MC governor agreed immediately. That's my experience.
He said, I was impressed by the pilots of the bombardiers,
(11:53):
the navigators right across the board, and with the operations
officers and our group commander. I thought they were a
superior are a budget of men, and I can honestly
say I'd only call a bad officer all through combat.
I had confidence that our officers were doing the very
best they knew. How if they made mistakes, they weren't
foolish mistakes. Our officers were superb. Obviously, there were some weak,
(12:20):
some poor, some inefficient or ignorant, and some absolutely terrible
officers in the US arm services in World War Two.
But a segment ever got into combat positions. The AAF,
the Army, the Navy, or the Marines got them at once.
(12:42):
Men's lives depended on them. After all, the combat officers
knew it and acted accordingly. Asked the Germans who opposed
them how good they were, or the Japanese. The American
officers were superb. And that is the way it was
in the seven forty first Squadron, four fifty fifth bomb
(13:04):
Group and shared Nola, Italy. Now, when men arrived and
shared Nolan September of nineteen forty four, they saw attacked
up in the briefing room words to the song as
Time Goes By, written by ananas Now. I'm not a singer,
(13:28):
but I can't resist this one. You must remember this.
The flack can't always miss. Somebody's got to die. The
odds are always too damned high. As Flack goes by
is still the same old story. The eighth gets all
(13:52):
the glory while we're the ones who die. The odds
are always too damned high. As Flack goes by. I
want to talk for just a minute about the strategic
bombing campaign. Critics have said that all of that productive
(14:14):
power that went into an eighteen thousand and three hundred
of those planes, all of the AFS tking effort, would
have been much better span if they had trained these
guys as infantry munners. Say this, and we could have
won the war sooner because they never hit what they
(14:35):
were what they were dropping at, ever, and it was
just a waste. That's not true. They did hit what
they were aiming at far more often than not, and
they paralyzed the German army, hitting rail yard, marshaling yards,
(15:01):
railroad bridges, brought the German train traffic to a halt.
Bombing the refineries, Pesti and the others was so successful
that in April nineteen forty four, when the Germans had
all the gasoline they needed one less than a year later,
(15:22):
the late winner of nineteen forty four forty five, they
were down to one percent. That meant they couldn't train
tank crews. They couldn't even drive tanks on the battlefield.
They had to dig their tanks in make them into
fixed field fortifications. This is Germans, the home of Mercedes
(15:46):
and so many other manufacturers of automobiles and trucks. They
had no gasoline. They were reduced to being a horse
drawn army trying to fight a twentieth century war, and
that was thanks to the strategic bombing campaign. At the
(16:11):
end of my interview with McGovern that had lasted four weeks,
and I asked him to sop his war experience With
his answer, he spoke for every every gi every sailor,
(16:32):
every marine, every coast guard man of World War two.
Piloting a B twenty four in combat with nine other
guys took every ounce of physical energy I had, every
bit of minial abilities I had, and literally every shred
of spiritual resource that I had. I can't recall any
(16:55):
other stage in my life unless it was the closing
days of the seventy two presidential camp. Hey, and it's
so demanded everything I had. I gave that World War
two effort, everything except my life itself, and I was
ready to give my life. It literally exhausted every resource
of mind and body and spirit that I had. I replied,
(17:23):
thanks for what you did to help win the victory
and thus save the world. I always say something like
that at the end of every interview with the veteran
of the war, because it is the truth. And a
special thanks to Stephen Ambrose is a state and a
special thanks to Hillsdale College where you can go to
study all the things that are beautiful in life, all
the things that matter in life. Go to Hillsdale dot
(17:45):
du to sign up for their free and terrific online courses.
Stephen Ambrose telling it like no one else can here
on our American Stories
This is Leigh Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show
and our favorite subject American history. And by the way,
all of our American history stories are brought to us
by the great folks at Hillsdale College. Go to Hillsdale
dot eedu to sign up for their terrific and free
online courses. Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers
(00:36):
and historians, and at the core of his success was
his belief that history was biography, history was about people.
Ambrose passed in the year two thousand and two, but
his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here in
our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estates.
Here's Stephen Ambrose to tell us the short story from
(00:59):
the Wild Blue the men and boys who flew the
B twenty fours. And he told this story to a
riveted audience. Here Stephen Ambrose. The B twenty four was
built like a nineteen thirties mac truck, except that it
had an aluminum skin that could be cut with a knife.
(01:21):
They could carry a heavy load far and fast, that
it had no refinements. Steering the four engineer plane was
difficult and exhausting. Is until late nineteen forty four, there
was no power except the pilot's muscles. It had no
windfield wipers, so the pilot had to stick his head
(01:45):
out the side window to see. During a rain, breathing
was possible only by wearing an oxygen mask. Above ten
thousand feet in the altitude, they were cold and clammy,
smelling of rubber and sweat. There was no heat despite
temperature is that at twenty thousand feet and higher got
(02:07):
as low as forty or even fifty degrees below zero.
The wind blew through the airplane like fury, especially from
the waist gunner's windows, and whenever the bombay doors were open,
the oxygen mask often froze to the wearer's face. If
the minute the waist touched their machine guns would bare hands,
(02:30):
the skin froze to the metal. There were no bathrooms
to YearIn eight. There were two small relief coops, one
forward and one aft, which were almost impossible to use
without spilling because of the heavy layers and clothing the
men wore, plus which the tubes were often clogged with
frozen yuriner. Deificating could be done only in a receptacle
(02:55):
lined with a wax paper bag. A man had to
be desperate to use it because of the difficulty of
removing enough clothing and exposing bare skin to the arctic cold.
The bags were dropped out the waist windows or through
the open bombay doors, and often men would ride on them.
Take that. There were no kitchen facilities, no way to
(03:24):
warm up food or coffee, but anyway, there was no
food unless improvement b had packed in a sandwich with
no pressurization, pockets of gas, and a man's intestinal tract
could swell like balloons and cause him to double over
in pain. There was no aisle to walk down, only
(03:44):
the eight EN's wide catwalk running beside the bombs and
over the bombay doors. That's what you used to move
forward and aft. They had to be done with care,
as the aluminum doors would rolled up into the fuselage
instead of swinging out on hinges had only a one
(04:05):
hundred pound capacity, so if you slipped on that catlock
and fell, you were gone. The seats were not padded,
could not be reclined, and were cramped into so small
a space that the man had almost no chance to stretch,
and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was done to
(04:28):
make it comfortable for the pilot, the copilot or the
eight other men and the crew. Even though most flights
lasted for eight hours, sometimes ten, very occasionally more than ten,
never less than six, the plane existed, and it was
flowned for one purpose only to carry five hundred or
(04:49):
one thousand pound bombs and dropped them accurately over enemy targets.
It was called a Liberator. Solidator along with the Ford
Motor Company Douglas Aircraft Company in North American aviation, together
the Liberator production pool made more than eighteen thousand, three
(05:10):
hundred Liberators. That was five thousand more than the total
number of B seventeens. The Liberator was not operational before
World War Two and was not operational after the war.
All those B twenty fours were squished up by bulldozers
because America needed the aluminum and we were going over
(05:32):
to jet airplanes. In any event, there's one still flying today.
The number of people involved in making it, in servicing it,
and in flying the B twenty four out numbered those
involved with any other airplane in any country at any time.
(05:53):
There were more B twenty fours than any other American
airplane ever built. It would be an exaggeration to say
that the V twenty four won the war for the Allies.
That don't ask how they could have won it without
the pilots and cruised with. The V twenty fours came
(06:15):
from every state and territory in America. They were young, fit, eager.
There were sons of workers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, businessmen, educators.
A few were married, most were not. Some had an
excellent education, others were barely, if at all, out of
high school. They were all volunteers the US Army Air Corps.
(06:41):
After nineteen forty two of the US Army Air Force
did not force anyone to fly. They made the choice.
Most of them were between the ages of two and
ten and nineteen twenty seven, when Charles Lindberg flew to
the Spirit of Saint Louis from Long Island to purse.
(07:01):
For many boys, this was the first outside the family
event to influence them. It fired their imagination, Black Lendbergh.
They wanted to fly, and my goodness, what a story
when we come back more of Steven Ambrose's story of
the B twenty fours and the men who flew them.
(07:22):
Here on our American stories. Here are our American Stories.
We bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith,
and love. Stories from a great and beautiful country that
need to be told that we can't do it without you.
Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not
(07:44):
free to make. If you love our stories in America
like we do, please go to our American Stories dot
com and click the donate button. Give a little, give
a lot, help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:09):
Stephen Ambrose and the story of the Boys who flew
America's B twenty fours. Let's continue where we last left
off with Stephen Ambrose. In their teenage years, they drove
Model T forwards or perhaps Model as if they drove
it all. Many of them were farm boys. They plowed
behind mules or horses. They walked to school one, two,
(08:33):
sometimes even more miles. Most of them, including the city kids,
were poor. If they were lucky enough to have jobs,
they earned a dollar a day, sometimes less. They seldom traveled.
Many had never been out of their home counties. Even
most of them more fortunate had never been out of
(08:55):
their home stakes. Of those who were best off, a
handful had ever been out of the country. Almost none
of them had ever been up at an airplane. A
surprising number had never seen an airplane. But they all
wanted to fly their patriotis who was beyond question. They
(09:16):
wanted to be a part of smashing Hitler Tojo Mussolini
and their thugs. But they wanted to choose how they
did it. They wanted to get off the ground, be
like a bird, see the country from up high, travel
faster than anyone could do well. Attached to the earth.
More than electric lights, more than steam engines, more than telephones,
(09:39):
more than automobiles, more even than the printing press, the
airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from
the earth and opened the skies. They were astonishingly young.
Many joined the Army Air Forces as teams. Never got
(10:00):
to be twenty years old. Before the war ended. Anyone
over twenty five was considered to be and was called
an old man. In the twenty first century, adults would
hardly give sech youngsters the key to the family car,
but in the first half of the nineteen forties, the
adults sent them out to play a critical role in
(10:22):
saving the world. Most wanted to be fire pilots, but
only a relatively few attained that goal. Many became pilots
or copilots on two or four engine bombers. The majority
became crew members, serving as gunners or radio men, or
bombardiers or flight engineers or navigators. Never mind, they all
(10:46):
wanted to fly, and they did. On the fiftieth anniversary
of V Day, I was with Joe Heller, who was
a bombardier with the twelfth Are Force flying out of Italy,
and Heller said to me in the cars of the conversation,
I never had a bad officer. Astonished, I said, kil
(11:11):
you're the man who created Major Major, Major Colonel Cathcart,
General Dridler, Lieutenant minder Bender, and so many others. Everybody
in the world knows these people. How can you tell
me you never had a bad officer. They were all invention,
he replied, every single losser, from when I went into
(11:31):
the service, to going over to ITLA, to flying the
missions to when I got this charge, every one of
them was good. In the course of the interviewing Jordan
mc government for this book, I told him what Hellar
had said to me. MC governor agreed immediately. That's my experience.
He said, I was impressed by the pilots of the bombardiers,
(11:53):
the navigators right across the board, and with the operations
officers and our group commander. I thought they were a
superior are a budget of men, and I can honestly
say I'd only call a bad officer all through combat.
I had confidence that our officers were doing the very
best they knew. How if they made mistakes, they weren't
foolish mistakes. Our officers were superb. Obviously, there were some weak,
(12:20):
some poor, some inefficient or ignorant, and some absolutely terrible
officers in the US arm services in World War Two.
But a segment ever got into combat positions. The AAF,
the Army, the Navy, or the Marines got them at once.
(12:42):
Men's lives depended on them. After all, the combat officers
knew it and acted accordingly. Asked the Germans who opposed
them how good they were, or the Japanese. The American
officers were superb. And that is the way it was
in the seven forty first Squadron, four fifty fifth bomb
(13:04):
Group and shared Nola, Italy. Now, when men arrived and
shared Nolan September of nineteen forty four, they saw attacked
up in the briefing room words to the song as
Time Goes By, written by ananas Now. I'm not a singer,
(13:28):
but I can't resist this one. You must remember this.
The flack can't always miss. Somebody's got to die. The
odds are always too damned high. As Flack goes by
is still the same old story. The eighth gets all
(13:52):
the glory while we're the ones who die. The odds
are always too damned high. As Flack goes by. I
want to talk for just a minute about the strategic
bombing campaign. Critics have said that all of that productive
(14:14):
power that went into an eighteen thousand and three hundred
of those planes, all of the AFS tking effort, would
have been much better span if they had trained these
guys as infantry munners. Say this, and we could have
won the war sooner because they never hit what they
(14:35):
were what they were dropping at, ever, and it was
just a waste. That's not true. They did hit what
they were aiming at far more often than not, and
they paralyzed the German army, hitting rail yard, marshaling yards,
(15:01):
railroad bridges, brought the German train traffic to a halt.
Bombing the refineries, Pesti and the others was so successful
that in April nineteen forty four, when the Germans had
all the gasoline they needed one less than a year later,
(15:22):
the late winner of nineteen forty four forty five, they
were down to one percent. That meant they couldn't train
tank crews. They couldn't even drive tanks on the battlefield.
They had to dig their tanks in make them into
fixed field fortifications. This is Germans, the home of Mercedes
(15:46):
and so many other manufacturers of automobiles and trucks. They
had no gasoline. They were reduced to being a horse
drawn army trying to fight a twentieth century war, and
that was thanks to the strategic bombing campaign. At the
(16:11):
end of my interview with McGovern that had lasted four weeks,
and I asked him to sop his war experience With
his answer, he spoke for every every gi every sailor,
(16:32):
every marine, every coast guard man of World War two.
Piloting a B twenty four in combat with nine other
guys took every ounce of physical energy I had, every
bit of minial abilities I had, and literally every shred
of spiritual resource that I had. I can't recall any
(16:55):
other stage in my life unless it was the closing
days of the seventy two presidential camp. Hey, and it's
so demanded everything I had. I gave that World War
two effort, everything except my life itself, and I was
ready to give my life. It literally exhausted every resource
of mind and body and spirit that I had. I replied,
(17:23):
thanks for what you did to help win the victory
and thus save the world. I always say something like
that at the end of every interview with the veteran
of the war, because it is the truth. And a
special thanks to Stephen Ambrose is a state and a
special thanks to Hillsdale College where you can go to
study all the things that are beautiful in life, all
the things that matter in life. Go to Hillsdale dot
(17:45):
du to sign up for their free and terrific online courses.
Stephen Ambrose telling it like no one else can here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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