- 2 days ago
On November 29, 1943, a B-17 bomber called Rikki Tikki Tavi broke apart over Bremen. The tail section — twelve feet of aluminum with no wings and no engine — separated from the aircraft at 28,000 feet. Inside it, nineteen-year-old tail gunner Eugene Moran was still alive. His parachute was shredded. His escape hatch was jammed. He was falling four miles to the ground with no way out.
His story is extreme — but the position he occupied was brutal by design. The tail gunner sat on a bicycle seat, on his knees, in a space the size of a phone booth, completely cut off from the rest of the crew. At 25,000 feet, temperatures dropped to minus sixty degrees. Electrically heated suits failed so often that in 1943, seventy-five percent of frostbite cases were caused by equipment malfunction — not the cold itself.
German fighters targeted the tail first. The Luftwaffe calculated it took 20 hits from 20mm shells to bring a B-17 down from behind — but only 4 or 5 from the front. So they changed tactics. And the tail gunner became the first man in their crosshairs either way.
The 8th Air Force lost 4,754 B-17s during the war. A crew's chance of completing a 25-mission tour was roughly one in
His story is extreme — but the position he occupied was brutal by design. The tail gunner sat on a bicycle seat, on his knees, in a space the size of a phone booth, completely cut off from the rest of the crew. At 25,000 feet, temperatures dropped to minus sixty degrees. Electrically heated suits failed so often that in 1943, seventy-five percent of frostbite cases were caused by equipment malfunction — not the cold itself.
German fighters targeted the tail first. The Luftwaffe calculated it took 20 hits from 20mm shells to bring a B-17 down from behind — but only 4 or 5 from the front. So they changed tactics. And the tail gunner became the first man in their crosshairs either way.
The 8th Air Force lost 4,754 B-17s during the war. A crew's chance of completing a 25-mission tour was roughly one in
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LearningTranscript
00:00On November 29th, 1943, more than 300 B-17 flying fortresses crossed into German airspace heading for Bremen.
00:09One of them was a bomber called Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.
00:12Inside its tail, a 19-year-old staff sergeant named Eugene Moran sat on his knees behind twin .50-caliber
00:20machine guns.
00:21Get your cameras, boys. I'm gonna light it up like Christmas.
00:27I'm the pilot to bomb Deere. Your ship.
00:30Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was on its fourth mission.
00:32By the time the bombs were dropped, it was already falling behind the formation.
00:37Alone in the sky, it became the only target.
00:41German fighters came in waves.
00:43BF-100s fired rockets into the fuselage.
00:46Then, BF-19s and FW-19s closed in from every angle.
00:52Moran fired back from the tail.
00:54One by one, the voices on the intercom went silent.
00:57Eight of the ten crew members were dead.
01:00The navigator bailed out from the front.
01:03Moran was the only man left alive inside the aircraft.
01:06Then, a German flak round hit the fuselage and split the bomber in two.
01:12The front section, with the wings and engines, dropped away.
01:15The tail, a 12-foot piece of aluminum with no wings, no engine, and no controls, kept moving.
01:22And Moran was still inside it.
01:25He tried to open the escape hatch.
01:27Bent metal held it shut.
01:28His parachute was damaged.
01:30There was no way out.
01:32The tail section began to fall.
01:34Four miles below was the German countryside.
01:37Moran had no way to slow down.
01:39No way to steer.
01:40No way to jump.
01:42He was locked inside a piece of wreckage, dropping through 28,000 feet of open sky.
01:47And then, he did something that should not have been possible.
01:50But that comes later.
01:52To understand how a man ends up alone inside a falling piece of airplane, you have to understand
01:57the position he was assigned to.
01:59The tail gunner on a B-17 occupied a space that most people would not willingly enter on
02:05the ground, let alone at five miles above the earth, in minus 60 degrees, with German
02:10fighters behind him.
02:12It was the most isolated crew position on any allied bomber.
02:16The tail gunner could not see the rest of his crew.
02:18He could not reach them.
02:20He could not touch another human being for the entire mission.
02:24The only way in or out was a narrow crawl through the fuselage, past the waste guns, past the
02:30ball turret, over the bomb bay catwalk.
02:33Once inside, the gunner was sealed off from everything, except whatever was coming from
02:38behind.
02:39The tail gunner was the last crew member who could evacuate if the plane went down.
02:44Everyone else was closer to an exit.
02:46He had to crawl the full length of the fuselage just to reach a hatch.
02:50And in combat, that crawl was often the difference between getting out and going down with the
02:55aircraft.
02:56The position that killed them was about the size of a phone booth.
03:01To reach the tail of a B-17, a gunner had to crawl through the entire length of the aircraft.
03:07He started behind the cockpit, squeezed past the radio room, crossed a narrow catwalk over
03:13the open bomb bay, nine inches wide, with nothing below but the bay doors and a long
03:18drop, then pushed through the waste gun section, where two gunners stood at open windows, and
03:24finally ducked into a tunnel that led to the tail compartment.
03:27The space waiting for him was roughly four feet wide.
03:31There was no chair.
03:32Instead, the gunner knelt on the floor and leaned against a small bicycle seat that took part
03:37of his weight.
03:38His legs folded beneath him, his knees pressed against the metal.
03:42In front of his face sat two M2 Browning .50 caliber machine guns, each loaded with 565 rounds
03:49of ammunition.
03:50The guns weighed 64 pounds each.
03:53The barrels pointed backward through a small opening covered in plexiglass.
03:57That plexiglass was the only thing between the gunner and the sky behind the plane.
04:02It was not armor.
04:03A 20-millimeter cannon round would go through it without slowing down.
04:07The tail gunner had no room to stand.
04:10If he was over 5'10", his helmet scraped the ceiling.
04:14His shoulders brushed the sides.
04:16Every piece of equipment, oxygen hose, intercom cable, heated suit wiring, parachute harness,
04:22crowded the space further.
04:24The parachute itself was too bulky to wear.
04:27It was stored nearby, within arm's reach in theory, though in practice, reaching it under
04:32fire was another matter entirely.
04:34Once in position, the gunner was completely cut off.
04:37He could not see a single member of his crew.
04:39The nearest man, the closest waist gunner, was more than 20 feet forward, around a bend
04:45in the fuselage, invisible behind equipment and ammunition boxes.
04:50Communication existed through the intercom and nothing else.
04:52If the intercom failed, the tail gunner had no way of knowing what was happening to the
04:57rest of the aircraft.
04:59Ken Tucker, a tail gunner with the 15th Air Force, flew 35 missions in the B-17 Quichirbichin-2
05:06out of Forgia, Italy.
05:07To reach his position, he crawled through the same tunnel on every mission, eased himself
05:12down onto the bicycle seat and plugged in his oxygen mask and heated suit.
05:16Tucker described himself as a loner.
05:19The isolation did not bother him.
05:21He felt comfortable in the tail.
05:23His first combat mission was not with his own crew.
05:26Standard practice sent rookie gunners up with experienced crews for their first time over
05:30enemy territory.
05:31Tucker flew with strangers to Munich.
05:33He had never seen combat.
05:34He questioned whether he was ready.
05:36As the formation crossed the Alps and approached the target, the sky filled with flak bursts.
05:42Thousands of black puffs of shrapnel exploding at altitude, each one throwing hot metal in
05:47every direction.
05:47Tucker survived that mission.
05:50He would survive 34 more.
05:51But comfort in the tail was a relative term.
05:54The isolation that suited a loner also meant something else.
05:57If the aircraft was hit, if the oxygen line was cut, if the heating failed, the tail gunner
06:03dealt with it alone.
06:04No one was coming to help him.
06:06The rest of the crew was too far away, the fuselage too narrow, the equipment too dense.
06:11In an emergency, the tail gunner's first instinct could not be to call for assistance.
06:16It had to be to fix the problem himself with numb fingers in the dark at 25,000 feet.
06:22And at that altitude, the cold was not just discomfort.
06:25It was a weapon of its own.
06:28The B-17 was designed to fly at 25,000 to 30,000 feet.
06:32At that altitude, the outside air temperature dropped to minus 50 or minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
06:38The aircraft was not pressurized.
06:40It was not heated.
06:41The fuselage was an aluminum tube with open gun ports in the waste section, where wind blasted
06:46through at 180 miles per hour.
06:48In the tail, the plexiglass panel behind the guns offered some protection from the slipstream,
06:53but none from the cold.
06:55The temperature inside the tail compartment was essentially the same as outside.
06:59At minus 60, exposed skin freezes in under a minute.
07:02Metal becomes dangerous to touch.
07:04Bare flesh bonds to it instantly.
07:06A gunner who pulled off his glove to clear a jammed weapon had seconds before frostbite began.
07:11The .50 caliber Brownings jammed regularly.
07:15Clearing a jam required manipulating the charging handle, feeding the ammunition belt back into
07:19the receiver, and sometimes physically pulling a spent casing free.
07:23All of this demanded bare fingers or, at best, thin silk glove liners.
07:28Every jam was a race between the malfunction and the cold.
07:31The solution was the electrically heated flight suit, a one-piece coverall with thin wires sewn
07:36into the fabric connected to the aircraft's electrical system through a plug in the fuselage wall.
07:42General Electric had developed the technology.
07:44The engineering came from an unlikely source, electric blankets.
07:48Before the war, GE had built a device called the Copperman, a mannequin used to test heated
07:54bedding.
07:54The same wiring principles were adapted for flight suits, gloves, and boot insoles.
07:59In theory, the system kept a crew member warm enough to function at altitude.
08:04In practice, it was unreliable.
08:06The wires were fragile.
08:08Body movement bent and broke them.
08:09A single broken connection could shut down heating to an entire limb.
08:14Damaged wires did not just stop working.
08:16They could short-circuit and burn the wearer.
08:18The temperature controls were crude.
08:21Some men overheated until they were drenched in sweat, which then froze when the suit failed.
08:27Others felt nothing at all.
08:29In 1943, up to 75% of frostbite cases among bomber crews were caused by failures in the electric
08:37flight suits.
08:45Ken Tucker flew his missions out of foggia and described the cold at altitude as constant and inescapable.
08:52The heated suits improved over the course of the war.
08:55Later models had better wiring and adjustable temperature controls, but they never became fully reliable.
09:01On missions lasting 10 or 12 hours, a suit failure at the halfway point meant hours of exposure with no
09:08alternative.
09:09The tail gunner had it worse than most.
09:11The waist gunners at least had each other.
09:14If one man's suit failed, his partner could see it and help.
09:18The ball turret gunner was cramped, but enclosed.
09:21The pilot and co-pilot sat in the most insulated section of the aircraft.
09:25The tail gunner was alone.
09:27If his suit failed, no one knew.
09:30If his oxygen line iced over and the flow stopped,
09:34no one would notice until someone tried to call him on the intercom and got no answer.
09:39By then, at that altitude, he would already be unconscious.
09:43The cold could kill a man quietly, but German fighters were not quiet at all.
09:48And they had a very specific reason to aim for the tail first.
09:53The story of why German fighters targeted the tail first is also the story of how the tail gunner changed
09:59aerial combat over Europe.
10:01If you want to see how that played out, and what happened when the Luftwaffe found a way around it,
10:06hit subscribe and turn on notifications.
10:09Now, back to 1942.
10:12When American heavy bombers first appeared over occupied Europe, the Luftwaffe attacked them from behind.
10:18It was the logical approach.
10:20A fighter closing from the rear matched the bomber's direction of travel,
10:24which meant a low closing speed and more time to aim.
10:27The fighter pilot could line up his shot, hold steady, and fire sustained bursts into the fuselage.
10:33Against earlier B-17 models, this worked.
10:37The tail was weakly defended.
10:38Then the B-17E arrived.
10:41Boeing had added a tail gunner position, two .50 caliber Brownings covering the rear arc.
10:46The first German pilots who came in from behind the new model were met with concentrated fire they had not
10:52expected.
10:53Enemy pilots gained a healthy respect for the tail guns almost immediately.
10:57It was this position that forced the Luftwaffe to completely rethink how they attacked American bomber formations.
11:03One German pilot later said that attacking a B-17 formation from behind was like trying to embrace a porcupine
11:10that was on fire.
11:11The problem was not just the tail gunner.
11:14A formation of 36 B-17s flying in a combat box could bring roughly 700 defensive machine guns to bear
11:21on an attacking fighter.
11:23Approaching from the rear meant flying into the concentrated fire of dozens of tail gunners, waist gunners, and ball turret
11:30gunners simultaneously.
11:32A Luftwaffe analysis calculated that destroying a B-17 from behind required approximately 20 direct hits from 20mm cannon shells.
11:42At the average German pilot's accuracy rate of 2%, that translated to 1,000 rounds to bring down a single
11:49bomber from that angle.
11:50From the front, the math was completely different.
11:54The B-17's nose was its weakest point.
11:57Thinner armor, fewer guns covering the forward arc, and a head-on closing speed of over 500 mph that gave
12:05the bomber's gunners almost no time to react.
12:08From the front, 4 or 5 well-placed shells could destroy the aircraft.
12:13The Luftwaffe adapted.
12:14They developed a tactic the Americans called 12 o'clock high.
12:19Fighters attacking head-on from a slightly elevated angle, diving through the bomber formation at combined speeds approaching 600 miles
12:27per hour.
12:28The engagement window lasted barely two seconds.
12:31It required precision, nerve, and a willingness to fly directly into the formation.
12:37The best German pilots scored kills this way.
12:40Average pilots often missed entirely.
12:43But the tail was never safe.
12:45The Luftwaffe developed a specific attack pattern known as the tail gunner's headache.
12:50Fighters would position themselves on both sides of the formation, roughly 2,000 meters out,
12:56then take turns diving at the rear of the bombers approximately 10 seconds apart, rolling and splitting away after each
13:03pass.
13:03The attacks came in rapid sequence, each from a slightly different angle, designed to overwhelm the tail gunner with targets
13:11he could not track simultaneously.
13:13Later in the war, the Sturmböcke appeared.
13:16Focke-Wulf 190s fitted with additional cockpit armor and 30-millimeter cannons.
13:22These fighters pressed their attacks to within 150 meters of the bombers before firing.
13:28At that range, a single 30-millimeter round could destroy a control surface or kill a crew member instantly.
13:35The tail gunner was the priority target.
13:38German pilots knew that a stationary tail turret, guns that were not tracking, signaled a bomber that had already lost
13:45its rear defense.
13:46That bomber became the primary target for the entire formation attack.
13:50The contest between the tail gunner and the fighters behind him lasted the entire war.
13:56Tactics shifted, weapons evolved, formations tightened and loosened, but the underlying equation never changed.
14:04The tail gunner sat at the point of maximum exposure, facing whatever the enemy sent,
14:09with two guns and roughly 1,100 rounds between himself and everything behind the aircraft.
14:15The question was never whether the position was dangerous.
14:18The question was how long a man could survive in it, and the numbers were brutal.
14:25When a crew joined the 8th Air Force in England, they were told their combat tour was 25 missions.
14:31Complete all 25, and you went home.
14:34The numbers sounded manageable.
14:36It was not.
14:37In 1943, the statistical chance of completing a full tour was roughly one in four.
14:44Three out of every four crews would be shot down, killed, or captured before reaching Mission 25.
14:50The odds improved somewhat in 1944, after long-range P-51 Mustang escorts began accompanying the bombers deep into Germany.
14:58But even then, the numbers remained grim.
15:02The 8th Air Force suffered more casualties than any other command in the American military during the Second World War.
15:0926,000 men were killed in action.
15:12Another 28,000 became prisoners of war.
15:15In total, 4,754 B-17s were lost in combat.
15:2037% of the 12,731 ever built.
15:25One in three flying fortresses produced in American factories never came back.
15:30For the British, the toll was even worse.
15:33RAF Bomber Command flew primarily at night, which reduced fighter attacks, but did nothing against radar-guided flack.
15:40The statistics for every 100 men who joined Bomber Command tell the full story.
15:44Fifty-one were killed on operations.
15:47Nine more died in training accidents and crashes in England before they ever reached the enemy.
15:53Twelve became prisoners of war.
15:55Three were seriously injured.
15:57One managed to evade capture.
15:59Twenty-four survived unharmed.
16:02That meant three-quarters of everyone who joined Bomber Command was killed, captured, or wounded.
16:08Among those dead were approximately 20,000 rear gunners.
16:11The Yorkshire Air Museum documented that figure.
16:14Twenty-thousand men who died in the most isolated position on the aircraft.
16:19The average age across Bomber Command crews was 21.
16:23The tail gunner's odds were shaped by a simple mechanical fact.
16:27He was the last man who could get out.
16:29In an emergency, loss of control, fire, structural failure,
16:34the crew bailed out through hatches in the forward and middle sections of the aircraft.
16:39The pilot and co-pilot could exit through the cockpit windows or the forward hatch.
16:43The bombardier and navigator had a hatch beneath the nose.
16:47The waste gunners were steps from the main fuselage door.
16:51The ball turret gunner had to retract his turret and climb into the fuselage first,
16:56which was dangerous but at least possible with help from the waste gunners nearby.
16:59The tail gunner had none of that.
17:02To bail out, he had to disconnect his oxygen mask, unplug his heated suit, unbuckle his harness,
17:09grab his parachute from its storage position, clip it to his chest,
17:13then crawl forward through the narrow tunnel past the tail wheel assembly and into the waste section to reach the
17:18nearest exit.
17:19In a stable aircraft, this took time.
17:22In a spinning, burning, or breaking apart bomber, it was often impossible.
17:27The centrifugal force of a spinning aircraft could pin a man against the walls of the fuselage.
17:33Fire could block the crawlway.
17:35Structural damage could seal the tunnel shut.
17:38More than 2,800 airmen were killed during training alone,
17:42not in combat but in the routine practice of flying in tight formation.
17:46Wingtips collided.
17:48Aircraft stalled in turbulence.
17:50Crews died learning the skills they would need to survive missions they would never fly.
17:55The men who made it through training, survived their missions, and came home were statistical outliers.
18:02Completing a full tour required not just skill and courage, but an extraordinary amount of luck.
18:07The right weather, the right position in formation,
18:11the right moment when a flak burst exploded 10 feet to the left instead of 10 feet to the right.
18:16Some men had that luck.
18:18One of them was a 20-year-old from California who climbed into the tail of a B-17 called
18:24Full House
18:24and came out the other side 35 missions later.
18:30Larry Stevens was a sophomore at Alhambra High School in Southern California
18:34when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
18:36He was too young to enlist.
18:38He spent the next year as a volunteer air raid warden walking through his neighborhood after dark,
18:44knocking on doors, telling his neighbors to turn their lights off.
18:47By 1943, he was old enough.
18:50He joined the Army Air Forces and was sent to gunnery school at Fort Myers, Florida,
18:55where he shot skeet twice a day.
18:57It was pleasant duty.
18:58Then, a letter arrived from his mother.
19:01His older brother Ernie had been killed in action at Messina, Sicily.
19:05Stevens finished gunnery school.
19:07In December 1943, he was assigned to a 10-man B-17 crew and given the tail gunner position.
19:13He took to it immediately.
19:15Everyone else on the aircraft was close enough to at least one other crew member for conversation,
19:20even if only over the intercom through the engine noise.
19:23The tail gunner was alone.
19:25Stevens did not mind.
19:27He knelt on the floor, leaned against the bicycle seat,
19:30and watched the sky behind the plane.
19:32His aircraft was a B-17G, named Full House.
19:36Stevens flew in the worst spot in the formation,
19:39a position the crews called Tails' Ass Charlie, last plane in the wing,
19:43the farthest back, the most exposed, the first target a trailing fighter would see.
19:48If the formation came under attack from behind, Full House caught it first.
19:52On March 31, 1944, Stevens and his crew boarded the liner Queen Elizabeth
19:58and sailed for England on a zigzag course to avoid U-boats.
20:02By late April, they were flying combat.
20:04Their first mission drew light flak and no fighters.
20:07It would not stay that way.
20:09Over the next four months, Stevens flew over France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Austria,
20:16Czechoslovakia, and Romania.
20:17Full House bombed submarine pens, airfields, and V-1 and V-2 rocket factories.
20:24They dropped supplies to French resistance fighters.
20:27On June 6, 1944, they flew over Normandy as the invasion beaches burned below them.
20:34On one mission returning from Trzbynia, Poland,
20:38Stevens took off his oxygen mask at 10,000 feet and started to relax.
20:42Then he heard the pilot scream to the co-pilot to grab the controls.
20:46Full House veered out of formation and started to dive.
20:50Stevens looked forward through the fuselage and saw smoke filling the aircraft.
20:54Somewhere inside the plane, something was on fire.
20:58The waste gunner Gordon Langford grabbed a fire extinguisher
21:01and ran forward through the bomb bay to put it out.
21:04He was not wearing a parachute.
21:06He ran across the 9-inch catwalk over the open bomb bay doors
21:10with nothing on his back holding a fire extinguisher in his hands.
21:14He put the fire out.
21:16On August 25, 1944, Larry Stevens completed his 35th and final mission.
21:22He was 20 years old.
21:24In four months, he had flown from bases in England, Russia, and Italy.
21:29He had crossed occupied Europe dozens of times.
21:32He had sat in the tail of Full House for hundreds of hours,
21:35alone, watching the sky, waiting for whatever was coming.
21:39When Stevens arrived back in New York,
21:42a customs inspector glanced at the combat ribbons on his uniform
21:45and told him to go home and enjoy himself.
21:48Stevens did not go home.
21:50He volunteered to fly as a tail gunner on a B-25 Mitchell in the Pacific
21:54for the invasion of Japan.
21:56The war ended while he was still in training.
21:59He returned to Alhambra and joined the fire department.
22:02He served for 31 years.
22:03He wrote a book about his war called It Only Takes One.
22:08He had beaten the odds.
22:09But not every tail gunner had to beat them the same way.
22:13Some survived by doing something the odds said was impossible.
22:16The man who fell inside the tail over Bremen was one of them.
22:20And what he did on the way down was not an act of survival.
22:23It was an act of war.
22:27Eugene Moran was born on July 17, 1924, in Wisconsin.
22:31He grew up on his family's farm near Soldiers Grove,
22:34shoveling horse manure and working the fields.
22:37When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Moran was 17.
22:41He waited until October 1942, the month he turned 18,
22:45and enlisted in the Army Air Forces.
22:48After training, he was assigned to the 96th Bombardment Group,
22:52339th Bombardment Squadron, 8th Air Force.
22:55His station was RAF Snedderton Heath in England.
22:59His aircraft was a B-17F nicknamed Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,
23:03after the mongoose in Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book.
23:06His position was the tail.
23:09Moran and his crew flew three missions without incident.
23:12The fourth was Bremen.
23:13On November 29, 1943, more than 300 B-17s launched toward the city.
23:20Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was among them.
23:22The formation reached the target.
23:25Bombardier Donald Curtis dropped the payload over Bremen.
23:28Then, on the turn for home, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi began to fall behind.
23:32Something was wrong with the aircraft.
23:34It drifted out of formation and into open sky,
23:37alone and unprotected.
23:39The Germans saw it immediately.
23:41A schtafel of BF-100s came in first,
23:44armed with 21-centimeter mortar rockets,
23:47weapons designed to break up bomber formations from long range.
23:51Then, the single-engine fighters followed.
23:53BF-109s and FW-190s swarmed the lone bomber from every direction.
23:59Moran fired from the tail.
24:01The waist gunners fired from the sides.
24:03It was not enough.
24:05One by one, the crew stopped responding on the intercom.
24:09Eight men were killed.
24:10Only Moran in the tail and navigator Jesse Orison in the nose were still alive.
24:15Orison bailed out from the forward hatch.
24:17Moran could not.
24:19The tunnel leading out of the tail was blocked.
24:21His escape hatch was jammed shut by bent metal.
24:24His parachute had been shredded by gunfire.
24:27Then, a burst of flak tore through the fuselage and split the aircraft in two.
24:32The forward section.
24:33Cockpit, wings, engines.
24:35Fell away and crashed.
24:37The tail section.
24:38In the direction, 12 feet of aluminum with no flight surfaces that mattered, separated
24:42cleanly and began to drop.
24:45Moran was inside it, surrounded by ammunition, pinned between his guns and the walls of the
24:50compartment.
24:51What happened next was recorded by witnesses on the ground and confirmed after the war.
24:56As the tail section fell, spinning through the sky, German BF-109s continued to attack
25:02it.
25:02The pilots either did not realize it was wreckage or mistook it for some unknown type of allied
25:07aircraft.
25:08It appeared to be gliding under control.
25:10And Moran, trapped inside a piece of a destroyed bomber falling from 28,000 feet, fired back.
25:17He aimed his twin brownings at the fighters making passes at him and squeezed the triggers.
25:21German anti-aircraft batteries on the ground also opened fire on the falling tail section,
25:27adding flak to the chaos around him.
25:29He was shooting at German fighters while falling four miles without a parachute.
25:34The tail section hit a tree in a wooded area near the town of Syk, a few miles south of
25:39Bremen.
25:39The impact threw Moran's head against his machine guns.
25:43He was alive.
25:44His skull was cracked.
25:45Both forearms were broken.
25:47Several ribs were shattered.
25:49He was bleeding badly.
25:50Two Serbian prisoners of war who happened to be doctors saw the crash and ran to the
25:55wreckage.
25:56They pulled Moran out and treated his wounds.
25:58Later, at a prisoner of war camp, a Serbian surgeon placed a metal plate over the exposed
26:03section of Moran's skull.
26:05He spent the next 17 months in captivity.
26:07He was moved between camps in Germany, Poland, and Russia.
26:12Between February and April of 1945, as the war collapsed around the Third Reich, Moran
26:18was forced on a 600-mile march with other prisoners.
26:22On April 26, 1945, American troops reached Bitterfeld, Germany and liberated the camp.
26:29Moran weighed 128 pounds.
26:32He was not the only tail gunner who fell from the sky and lived.
26:35Three months before Moran's fall over Bremen, and three months after it, another man rode
26:42a severed tail section to the ground.
26:44He did not have a damaged parachute.
26:46He had no parachute at all.
26:50On January 11, 1944, 21 B-17s of the 15th Air Force took off from Italy and headed for
26:58Piraeus Harbor in Greece.
27:00Sergeant James Allen Raley was in the tail of a bomber called Skippy, leading the 2nd Squadron
27:05of the 301st Bomb Group.
27:07He had been in the Army since 1935 and had transferred to the Air Forces in 1943.
27:12He loved the tail gunner position.
27:15It suited him.
27:16The formation climbed through heavy cloud cover.
27:19Visibility dropped to almost nothing.
27:21Pilots could barely see past their own wingtips.
27:24The trailing squadrons followed procedure and flew off course for two minutes to create spacing.
27:29It was not enough.
27:30Two B-17s from the 97th Bomb Group flew nearly head-on into the 301st Formation.
27:37The collision triggered a chain reaction.
27:39Aircraft, debris, and men began falling through the overcast.
27:43Eight B-17s were destroyed in the span of minutes.
27:4764 airmen were killed.
27:4917 survived.
27:50It was not the enemy.
27:52It was the weather and the impossible geometry of flying blind in formation.
27:57Raley felt what he described as a hell of a jolt.
27:59The 12-foot tail section of Skippy was sheared clean off the rest of the aircraft at 19,000 feet.
28:06The cockpit, wings, and engines, everything forward of the tail, went one direction.
28:12Raley went another.
28:13He was crammed between his two machine guns and several hundred rounds of ammunition.
28:17There was no room to move.
28:19His parachute was nearby, but he could not create enough space to strap it on.
28:24The escape hatch nearest to him was damaged and pinned shut.
28:27There was nothing he could do.
28:29The tail section began to spiral.
28:31Raley watched flashes of blue, green, and brown cycle past as the wreckage rotated.
28:37He had no way to know if the rest of the aircraft was still attached.
28:41The spinning and the time it took to fall made him think the whole plane was intact and corkscrewing down.
28:47He estimated later that the fall lasted 10 to 15 minutes.
28:50At 19,000 feet, with the drag of the spinning tail section slowing the descent, that estimate was plausible.
28:58He prayed.
28:59He thought about his family.
29:01He had grown up on a farm in Kentucky, the eighth of nine children.
29:05He told himself that in another few minutes, he would be dead.
29:09The tail section struck a cluster of trees on a mountainside.
29:13The branches absorbed some of the impact.
29:15The wreckage stopped.
29:17Raley was alive.
29:19His chest was sore.
29:20He could move his arms and legs.
29:22He worked himself free from the ammunition surrounding him, found the bulkhead door.
29:27The escape hatch was still jammed, and crawled out through it.
29:31He stood on the mountainside and looked around.
29:33There was no plane.
29:35Just a piece of tail section wedged into the trees.
29:39Nothing else.
29:40He navigated from tree to tree down the steep slope until he reached a trail.
29:45It started to rain.
29:47After a few hours, he heard voices and called out.
29:50Greek civilians found him and took him to an orthodox monastery where priests were sheltering allied servicemen.
29:56Of the 17 men who survived the mid-air disaster that day,
30:00Raley was the only one who did it without a parachute.
30:03After recovering, Raley returned to duty.
30:06He went back to the tail.
30:08He flew more missions.
30:10When the war ended, he kept serving.
30:12Korea, then Vietnam.
30:14He retired as a lieutenant colonel.
30:17After the war, he visited the families of every crew member who had died aboard Skippy.
30:21He later married Lorraine Lineberry Sudol, the widow of Skippy's co-pilot, 2nd Lieutenant Henry Sudol.
30:29He wrote an autobiography called, I Fell 4 Miles and Lived.
30:33He died in 1999 at the age of 82 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
30:39Eugene Moran went home to Wisconsin.
30:42He married, had nine children, and returned to the life he had left behind on the farm.
30:48In 2008, the town of Soldiers Grove named a street after him.
30:52He died on March 23, 2014, at the age of 90.
30:57A friend named John Armbruster told his story in a book called Tailspin.
31:02Larry Stevens went home to Alhambra and never talked about the war.
31:06His neighbors knew him as a fire captain.
31:08It was not until decades later, when his granddaughter helped him write his memoir,
31:13that most people around him learned what he had done at 20 years old.
31:17The book carried a title that doubled as advice.
31:20It only takes one.
31:21Three Tail Gunners
31:23Three different wars inside the same war.
31:26One beat the odds by flying 35 missions and walking away.
31:30One fell four miles inside a broken airplane and kept fighting on the way down.
31:35One rode a severed tail through the clouds without a parachute and lived to serve in two more wars.
31:42None of them chose the tail because it was safe.
31:44They chose it, or it chose them, and they did the job.
31:4920,000 Rear Gunners Did Not Come Home
31:51If this video helped you understand what they went through, hit the like button and subscribe.
31:57Turn on the bell so you do not miss the next one.
32:00These stories deserve to be told, and every like and subscription helps more people find them.
32:05I want to ask you something.
32:06Of all the positions on a heavy bomber, tail, ball turret, waist, nose, which one would you have chosen?
32:14Or would you have chosen none of them?
32:16Tell me in the comments.
32:18And if you know the name of someone who served as a gunner in the war,
32:21a grandfather, an uncle, someone from your town, leave it below.
32:26Their names matter.
32:27They still do.