- 3 days ago
German aces mocked the P-47 Thunderbolt as useless, but one month in the skies over Germany turned that verdict into a disaster for the Luftwaffe. This military history narration follows Colonel Hubert Zemke and the 56th Fighter Group as they learn to fight with a heavy fighter that could not climb or turn like a Spitfire, yet could dive, roll, and survive punishment better than the Germans expected.
From the first failed combat missions to the 39-to-1 kill ratio in October 1943, the story traces the tactics, the long-range escort problem, the rocket-armed Me 110s, and the brutal reality of bomber escort over occupied Europe. It is a World War 2 air combat story about discipline, doctrine, and the moment a “useless” fighter became a weapon.
Ideal for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military aviation history, narrated history, fighter pilot stories, and documentary-style war storytelling. If you search for P-47 Thunderbolt history, Eighth Air Force, Luftwaffe, bomber escort missions, or calm historical narration, this one brings all of that together in a single gripping account.
From the first failed combat missions to the 39-to-1 kill ratio in October 1943, the story traces the tactics, the long-range escort problem, the rocket-armed Me 110s, and the brutal reality of bomber escort over occupied Europe. It is a World War 2 air combat story about discipline, doctrine, and the moment a “useless” fighter became a weapon.
Ideal for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military aviation history, narrated history, fighter pilot stories, and documentary-style war storytelling. If you search for P-47 Thunderbolt history, Eighth Air Force, Luftwaffe, bomber escort missions, or calm historical narration, this one brings all of that together in a single gripping account.
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00October 4th, 1943. A little after two in the afternoon, 29,000 feet above western Germany,
00:07in air cold enough to freeze the moisture of a man's breath onto his oxygen mask.
00:12Captain Walker Mahurin, everyone in the squadron called him Bud, was looking down through the side
00:18of his canopy at something he could not immediately make sense of. 4,000 feet below,
00:24German twin-engine fighters were forming up. Not four or five of them. He started counting,
00:31lost the count, started again. Somewhere between 40 and 60 Messerschmitt 110s, sliding into a long,
00:39ragged line, turning onto the same heading as the American bombers ahead. They were not there to
00:45dogfight. Those aircraft carried rocket tubes under their wings. Their job was to sit behind the B-17s,
00:53outside the reach of the bombers' guns, and fire into the formation until it came apart.
00:58Then the single-engine fighters would work the gaps. Mahurin had four other Thunderbolts with him.
01:04Five aircraft, against something between 40 and 60. Hold that picture, because you need to understand
01:11what the man in that cockpit was flying, and what almost everybody had already decided about it.
01:16The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt weighed close to seven tons empty, the heaviest single-engine fighter any
01:23air force had sent to war. American pilots who came to it from Spitfires said that if a Thunderbolt
01:29pilot were attacked, he could evade by running around the cockpit. When Don Blakeslee killed a
01:35German fighter in a dive and was told that proved the aeroplane was good, he answered that it ought to
01:41dive. It certainly wouldn't climb. The German verdict was harder. Through the spring of 1943,
01:49German fighter pilots met the Thunderbolt over Holland and Belgium and worked out very quickly
01:54what it could not do. It could not climb with them. It could not turn with them. It came in
02:00small
02:00numbers, hung about for a few minutes, then turned for England because it was out of fuel. Men with 80
02:07and
02:07100 victories learned to treat it as weather. So here is the number this story turns on, and I want
02:14you to hold on to it, because everything we do from here is an attempt to explain it. In the
02:1931 days of
02:20October 1943, one American fighter group flying that useless aeroplane shot down 39 German aircraft. In those
02:30same 31 days, the group lost one pilot. One. 39 to 1. Nobody in the 8th Air Force had seen
02:40a ratio like it,
02:41and the men who produced it were doing something their own manuals told them not to do.
02:47If these stories are worth your time, a like helps this one reach the people who still remember the
02:52names. Subscribing brings you the next one. That is all. No bell, no fuss. Back to Mahirin, 4,000 feet
03:01above those Messerschmitts. He did not circle. He did not climb for position. He rolled onto his back
03:08and pulled the nose straight down into them, and the 7-ton aeroplane did the one thing it did better
03:14than anything the Germans owned. It went downhill like a falling anvil. 400 miles an hour. 430.
03:24The 110 carried a rear gunner. At that closing speed, the gunner had perhaps two seconds of useful
03:30tracking, and by the time he found the Thunderbolt in his sight, eight .50 caliber guns had already opened
03:36on the aircraft in front of him. Mahirin's first target came apart at the wing route. He did not stay
03:43to watch it fall. He kept the dive going, took a second 110 out of the line, and then did
03:49what
03:49would have got a fighter pilot laughed out of the mess in 1918. He used every ounce of that speed
03:56to
03:57climb away from the fight. He caught one more later, a straggler running for home, emptied what was left
04:04in his ammunition boxes into it, and watched the German pilot go over the side. Three enemy aircraft in
04:10one mission. That afternoon made him an ace. And before the year was out, he would be the first
04:16American in Europe to double it. When the group landed in England, and the intelligence officers
04:22finished with the claim forms, the total for the day was 15 German aircraft destroyed. Fifteen from one
04:29group in one mission. In the aeroplane, the Germans flew around. And here is what makes it strange. The man
04:38responsible for the way those pilots fought that afternoon was not in England on October 4th. Not in
04:44the air. Not in the operations hut. Not on the same continent. He had left days earlier, and he would
04:51be gone
04:51for the whole of the month that made his name. What he left behind was an order. Short, blunt, and
04:58deeply
04:59unpopular. An order his own pilots had argued with him about for six months, because it told them to stop
05:05fighting the way fighter pilots had been taught to fight since the first war. To understand that order,
05:10you have to go back six months, to the first time the American pilots of the 56th fighter group met
05:16the
05:16enemy, and to how badly it went. April 13, 1943. The group flew its first combat mission, a sweep over
05:26Saint-Omer in occupied France, and came home having seen precisely nothing. No German aircraft. No contact.
05:35A great deal of noise over an empty sky. The second time was worse. Later that month, over occupied
05:43Holland, the Germans came up to have a look at the new American fighter. Hub Zemka was not in the
05:50air that
05:50day. He was on the ground with a headset on, listening. And what came through it was the sound of
05:56an air
05:56battle going wrong. Voices overlapping. Men calling breaks that nobody could act on. Radio discipline
06:03gone in the first 15 seconds. No German aircraft were shot down. Two of his pilots did not come back.
06:12Zemka called it, in plain words, an ignominious combat debut. He wrote nothing else in his own defense,
06:19because there was nothing to write. He was 29 years old. Born in Missoula, Montana,
06:25to German immigrant parents, he had started out studying forestry and switched to aeroplanes.
06:32In 1940, he went to England as an observer to watch the RAF and the Luftwaffe fight each other.
06:39And in 1941, he was in the Soviet Union, teaching Russian pilots to fly the P-40.
06:46So he had watched more air fighting than almost any American officer alive. And he had watched it from the
06:53outside.
06:55That turns out to matter, because he was not in love with the way it was done.
07:01Here is what had actually happened over Holland. And I want you to see it from inside a cockpit,
07:06rather than from a report. An American pilot sees a Focke-Wulf. He does what every fighter pilot since
07:141916 has been taught to do. He hauls the aeroplane round to get behind it. In a Spitfire, that works.
07:23In seven tons of Thunderbolt at 15,000 feet, the turn bleeds off speed he cannot get back,
07:29because the machine climbs and accelerates like a loaded truck.
07:34Ten seconds later, he is slow, low, and alone. And there is a second Focke-Wulf behind him.
07:41That is how the group lost pilots in the spring of 1943. Not to bad luck. To doing the correct
07:48thing.
07:49The machine punished them in other ways, too. And this part is worth knowing.
07:55Radios failed at altitude, because the ignition system threw out so much interference that men
08:00shouted into dead microphones. Engines lost power high up, as spark plugs fouled.
08:08Zemka himself aborted one sweep when his oxygen quit. And on the group's first bomber escort,
08:14his radio died and left him leading a formation he could not talk to.
08:19Pick any one of those things and you have a bad day.
08:22Put them together, and you have an outfit that has begun, quietly, to believe it was handed the wrong
08:29aeroplane. What Zemka did with that belief is the reason you are watching this. He did not ask for
08:35Spitfires. He took the list of everything the Thunderbolt could not do, turned the page over,
08:41and wrote down the two things it could. It could dive faster than anything the Germans flew. And it
08:48could roll, flip from one bank to the other, quicker than a 109. So the order was this.
08:55You will not turn with them. You will not follow them down. You will stay high,
09:01you will come down on them fast, you will fire, and you will use your speed to climb straight back
09:07out
09:07of the fight. Notice what that order really is. It is not a tactic. It is a piece of arithmetic.
09:15A commander deciding that the machine, not the man's pride, sets the terms of every fight it enters.
09:23Read it again as a 22-year-old fighter pilot would have read it in 1943. It tells him not
09:29to fight. It
09:30tells him that at the exact moment a fight becomes a fight, he leaves. They hated it. Some of them
09:38said
09:39so to his face. A fighter pilot's whole idea of himself is built on being willing to stay and mix
09:44it up. And for 60 days, the order produced nothing at all. Not one German aircraft shot down. Mission
09:53after mission, empty claim forms. The first victory came on June 12th, when Captain Walter Cook caught a
10:01Fockewulf near Blankenberg on the Belgian coast and put it into the sea. One. Two months of war for one
10:09aeroplane. Hold on to that date. June 12th. The distance between it and October is the whole of this story.
10:18One victory proves nothing. And Zemke knew it. What changed everything came two weeks later.
10:25And it did not come from a claim form. It came from a thunderbolt that landed in England with more
10:31than 200 holes in it. And from what the German pilot who made those holes did, in the air, once
10:38he had
10:38run out of ammunition and the American was still flying. June 26th, 1943. 27,000 feet over occupied France
10:46on a bomber escort that was about to go very wrong. Lieutenant Robert Johnson was 23 years old,
10:53from Lawton, Oklahoma, and he was flying at the back of the formation, the worst place in the sky,
10:59and the place they give to new men. The Fockewulfs came down out of the sun behind him.
11:0521 20mm cannon shells went into his thunderbolt. They tore open the hydraulic system, sprayed fluid through
11:13the cockpit, wrecked the canopy, put shrapnel through his leg, and a bullet across the tip of his nose.
11:20The aeroplane caught fire and fell out of the sky in a spin.
11:25Johnson got it out of the spin. The fire went out on its own. Then he found the thing that
11:30turned
11:30a bad day into a nightmare. The smashed canopy would not slide. He could not get out. Whatever happened next,
11:39he was staying with the aircraft. So he pointed the nose at England, peering through a windscreen
11:44filmed with his own hydraulic fluid, and began the longest flight of his life.
11:50And somewhere over the French coast, a single Fockewulf slid into position behind him.
11:56What followed was not a dogfight. Johnson could barely control the aeroplane.
12:01The German had all the speed and all the position. And he used them the way an instructor uses a
12:08blackboard.
12:08He came in from behind, fired, pulled off, came round, fired again. Pass after pass, at his leisure.
12:18Picture that from Johnson's seat. You cannot maneuver. You cannot bail out. There is a man behind you doing
12:26target practice. And all you can do is hold the nose towards England and listen to the hits going
12:33into the metal around you. The German kept firing until his guns went quiet. He had put everything
12:40he carried into one American fighter at close range. And the American fighter was still flying.
12:47So he did something else. He brought the Fockewulf up alongside the Thunderbolt,
12:52close enough that the two pilots could look at each other across a few yards of air.
12:57He held there a moment. Then he rocked his wings and turned back for France.
13:03Think about what that gesture actually is. It is not sportsmanship, whatever else it might be.
13:10It is a professional acknowledging that he has run out of answers.
13:14Johnson got the aeroplane down at Manston. The ground crew went over it and counted.
13:1821 cannon strikes. More than 200 machine gun holes. And the pilot walked away from it.
13:27Put that in scale for a moment. German gunnery calculations reckoned it took roughly 20 20-millimeter
13:34hits to bring down a four-engine bomber. Johnson absorbed 21 in a single-engine fighter and taxied in.
13:43This is the moment I want you to file away, because it is the first half of the answer to
13:48our question.
13:49Everything the Germans believed about the Thunderbolt was true. It was slow to climb. It was clumsy in a turn.
13:57It was short of fuel. What they had never bothered to test was what it took to kill one.
14:03Their verdict had been formed against a fighter that ran away. It had never been formed against
14:09a fighter that could not run away and would not die. But absorbing punishment is not the same as
14:15handing it out, and Zemke knew that better than anyone. His order still had to prove it could produce
14:21results, not just survivors. And here is the thing about that order which nobody in the group had quite
14:28noticed yet. It did not only tell a pilot how to attack. It told him how to leave. Leaving is
14:35what
14:36kept the claim board filling and the casualty board empty. It began to show on August 17th.
14:42That was the day the 8th Air Force sent its bombers to Regensburg and Schweinfurt, deep into Germany.
14:49The 56th pushed 15 miles past the German border, further than it had ever been, and broke up the
14:55head-on attacks coming at the bomber formations. One of the Focke-Wulfs that went down that day was
15:00flown by Major Wilhelm Galland, commander of the 2nd Group of Fighter Wing 26, 55 victories to his name,
15:08and the younger brother of the man who commanded the entire German fighter force.
15:14He was almost certainly shot down by Bud Meherrin, the same pilot you met at the beginning of this,
15:19in the same aeroplane, obeying the same order. An expert with 55 kills, killed by a pilot who
15:27had barely started, flying the machine the Germans had written off. That is what one order was worth
15:34by the middle of August. And that is exactly when the Germans stopped arguing about whether the
15:40Thunderbolt was any good, and started building an answer to it. Not a better fighter. A piece of
15:46arithmetic, because everything over Germany was decided by one number, how far from the English
15:52coast an American escort could reach before it had to turn for home. That summer, even with the new
15:59tanks bolted under the belly, that number was about 250 miles. Schweinfurt was 400. Everything the Luftwaffe
16:09built for the autumn of 1943 was built in the gap between those two numbers. Now let me show you
16:14the
16:14German answer, because it was one of the cleverest pieces of thinking anybody did in that war,
16:19and it very nearly worked. By the late summer of 1943, the Luftwaffe had measured the American
16:26escort precisely. The fighters crossed the Dutch coast with the bombers, stayed a set number of minutes,
16:33and turned back. Everything beyond that line belonged to Germany. So the Germans built a weapon for the far
16:40side of the line. Not a dogfighter, something closer to airborne artillery. They took the Messerschmitt 110,
16:48a twin-engine machine long since proved too slow to survive against single-seat fighters,
16:53and hung mortar tubes under its wings. Each tube threw a 21-centimeter rocket,
17:00near enough the size of an artillery shell, fired from about a kilometer behind a bomber formation,
17:05well outside the reach of the gunner's 50s. The rocket was not accurate, and did not need to be.
17:12It was fused to burst inside the box of bombers. One good burst shoved the formation apart,
17:19and a bomber out of the box alone was finished. Behind the rocket carriers came the single-engine fighters,
17:26and the stragglers were their work. You can see the logic. Now see the flaw, because the flaw decides October.
17:35A 110 hauling rocket tubes was slow, heavy, and half-blind behind. Against B-17s, it was a killer.
17:44Against one American fighter, it was a target, and the crews knew it. The entire system depended on the
17:50escort not being there. Which brings us back to a number, and to a man who had decided the number
17:56was going to change. Remember that the official American position was that the escort was a nicety.
18:03The doctrine on which the whole daylight campaign had been built said a tight formation of heavy
18:08bombers carried enough guns to defend itself. Fighter range was somebody else's problem. Zemke did not
18:14agree, and neither did the men flying the fighters, and through the summer of 1943, they went looking
18:20for range wherever they could find it. What they found, in the first week of September, was a monstrosity.
18:28A 200-gallon tank made of pressed paper, built for ferrying aircraft across empty sky, and never
18:36intended to go near a fight. Bolted under a thunderbolt, it looked like a bathtub. On a grass airfield,
18:44it cleared the ground by inches. It also did not work properly. The tank was unpressurized. Above
18:52roughly 20,000 feet, the fuel would not feed reliably, which meant a pilot, climbing to fighting
18:58height, might find his engine going quiet at the worst possible moment. Think about what that asks of
19:05a 23-year-old. Take off with a paper tub of petrol scraping the grass. Fly to Germany on fuel
19:13that may
19:13stop feeding when you climb. Be ready to fight when you arrive. They did it anyway.
19:22In the first week of September, the group went out with those tanks under their bellies and reached
19:27further into Europe than American fighters had gone before. And the moment they did, the arithmetic the
19:33Germans had built their ottoman began to come apart. Not everywhere, not all at once, but on certain days,
19:41at certain points along the route, the escort was suddenly where it was not supposed to be.
19:47Put the two systems side by side now, because in October, they run straight into each other. On one side,
19:55slow, rocket-carrying, twin-engine machines that must be left undisturbed to work. On the other,
20:02seven-ton fighters that arrive with height, dive through, and refuse to stay and fight.
20:08That collision was coming, whatever anybody did. What nobody expected was who would be missing when it
20:14arrived. On October 2nd, the 56th escorted bombers to Emden and claimed three German aircraft.
20:22Hoob Zemka flew that mission. It was the last one he would fly for three months,
20:28because the army had decided that the commander of the most successful fighter group in England
20:32was worth more at home than over Germany. He was ordered back to the United States for a war bond
20:38and presentation tour. Speeches, factory floors, photographs with the people who built the
20:44aeroplane he had been told was useless. Command of the group in the air passed to Dave Schilling.
20:51The order stayed exactly where Zemka had left it, written into the way every pilot in the group
20:57flew. Two days after Zemka's transport lifted out of England, the 56th put 15 German aircraft on the
21:05claim board in a single afternoon. The day you watched at the start of this. And that was the
21:12quiet part of the month. Six days later, the group would fly into the worst single massacre the 8th Air
21:18Force had suffered up to that point, arrive far too late to stop it, and still come home,
21:24having shot down 10. October 8, 1943. Bremen.
21:29The bombers went for the U-boat yards, and the 56th went with them as far as the fuel allowed.
21:35The group claimed five German aircraft that day, and for the only time in the entire month,
21:40a thunderbolt did not come home. Lieutenant Fleming, of the 63rd Fighter Squadron.
21:47He is the one. When you hear 39 to 1, he is the one. The whole of the group's cost
21:54for October 1943,
21:55contained in a single name. I want to be careful here, because it is very easy to let a ratio
22:02like
22:02that turn into sporting arithmetic. Somewhere in England there was an empty bed in a Nissen hut
22:08that night, and a squadron adjutant sitting down to write a letter. That is what one means. Hold on to
22:15it, because we are about to spend a good deal of time on much larger numbers.
22:20Two days later, on October 10, the 8th Air Force went to Munster. What happened there is the reason
22:27this is not a story about a wonderful aeroplane. The target was the rail yards in the middle of the
22:31city,
22:32and the timing was deliberate, the middle of a Sunday. The bombers of the 3rd Division flew it. Among
22:39them was the 100th Bomb Group, which put up 13 B-17s. The escort plan came apart. Weather over
22:47England broke up the rendezvous. One fighter group arrived late, and when the Thunderbolts did get
22:52there, they had minutes of fuel left and had to turn for home. The Germans had been waiting for
22:58exactly this for months, and they had built exactly the machine for it. Near Munster, the destroyers came
23:05in from behind in a mass. Messerschmitt 110s of destroyer wing 26 under Karl Boehm Tettelbach,
23:13with ME 410s alongside them. Rockets fired into the boxes from beyond gun range, then the single
23:20engine fighters into the holes. Understand what that does to a formation. The 110s fired from behind and
23:28below at about a kilometer, and the rockets went in and burst inside the box. A B-17 that took
23:34a burst near
23:35the wing route did not catch fire and glide down. It came apart. The 100th Bomb Group was hit hardest
23:42of
23:42all. Of the 13 B-17s it sent to Munster, 12 were shot down. 12 out of 13. In one
23:51afternoon, from one group.
23:54There is no kinder way to put it. The German plan, the one built around the American escort's fuel gauge,
24:01worked precisely as designed. One aircraft came back. It was flown by a young lawyer from Brooklyn
24:08named Robert Rosenthal, and it came home shot to pieces with wounded men aboard. Of the crews that
24:15took off with that group, he brought home his own. Now, where were the Thunderbolts while this was
24:21happening? They were on their way. They were too late. That is the whole of October in one sentence.
24:29The 56th picked up what was left of the bomber stream at the Dutch border on the way out,
24:34with the German fighters still tearing at the formations, and went straight into them. The group
24:39claimed 10 that afternoon. Two men got their fifth victory apiece and became aces on the same day.
24:45Bob Johnson, the pilot who had come home with 200 holes in his airplane in June, and Jerry Johnson,
24:52no relation to him at all. Dave Schilling was leading the group now. Schilling had flown 52
24:58missions without a single victory, broken the drought that same week, and immediately started
25:03scoring in threes. On one of those October missions, his radio failed before the group even reached the
25:09Dutch coast. He did not turn back. He kept the lead and took his squadron into the attack without
25:16being able to hear a word. 10 German aircraft destroyed at the Dutch border, for nothing lost.
25:23By any measure you like, the American fighter pilots won their fight that day. And it did not save one
25:30of
25:30those 12 crews. Because the fight the Thunderbolts won was happening 150 miles from the fight that mattered.
25:37This is the layer I promised you. The order worked. The tactics worked. The aeroplane worked. What did not
25:46work was geography. Every German aircraft the 56 shot down that month, it shot down in a narrow band along
25:53the coast and the near border. Because that was as far as it could go. Which means the 39 were
25:59entirely
25:59real. And also, in the coldest possible sense, beside the point. The Germans could read a map. So could the
26:08men planning the bombing. And four days after Munster, on October 14th, the 8th Air Force went back to
26:14Schweinfurt. 400 miles in. 150 miles beyond anywhere a Thunderbolt could reach. That day the 56th claimed three.
26:25The bombers lost 60. October 14th, 1943. A Thursday. 291 B-17s crossed the channel for Schweinfurt.
26:36And the Thunderbolts went with them the way they always did. Out ahead and above, weaving.
26:42The escort held on as far as Ockham, just inside the German border. Then the fuel gauges said what they
26:49always said. And the fighters turned. I want you to sit inside that turn for a moment. Because it
26:55happened on every deep mission that autumn. And nobody who did it ever described it as anything
27:01but the worst part of the job. You are at 28,000 feet. Below you and ahead of you are
27:08291 bombers.
27:1010 men in each. And they are going on for another 200 miles. You have fuel for the journey home
27:16and
27:17nothing more. So you turn round and you watch them get smaller. The bombers had been escorted for the first
27:24200 miles. The remaining 200 they flew alone. At about one o'clock in the afternoon, minutes after the
27:30last Thunderbolt turned away, the Luftwaffe came up in force. They had timed it exactly. This was not
27:38luck. And it was not improvisation. The entire German day was built around the American fuel gauge.
27:44And on the 14th of October, that gauge told them precisely when to take off.
27:50What followed lasted about four hours. Fighter wings 1 and 11 put standoff rockets into the combat boxes,
27:58from beyond the reach of the gunners. The single-engine fighters came head-on through the formations.
28:04The whole apparatus the Germans had spent a year assembling, working without a single American
28:10fighter to interfere with it. The 305th bomb group had the worst of it. It lost 13 aircraft,
28:17more than any other group that day, and 130 men. 87% of the men it put into the air
28:24did not come home.
28:26The accounting for the day? 60 B-17s shot down. 17 more damaged so badly they were scrapped. 121
28:36damaged. Out of 291. Roughly 600 American airmen were gone in an afternoon. And the 56 fighter group,
28:46the outfit that had been taking the Luftwaffe apart all month, claimed three German aircraft that day.
28:53Three. Not because the order failed. Not because the aeroplane failed. Because the fight was 400 miles
29:01inland. And they could reach 250. The rest of October was quiet. One claim over Duren on the 18th.
29:11Two over Duren on the 20th. A mission on the 22nd recalled before it got anywhere. On the 24th, the
29:19group
29:19escorted medium bombers into France and saw nothing at all. So add it up with me. Three at Emden. 15
29:28at
29:28Frankfurt. Five at Bremen. 10 at Münster. Three at Schweinfurt. One and then two over Duren. 39.
29:39Against one Thunderbolt and one Pilot. That is the number in the title, and now you know exactly how it
29:46was built. But you also know something the number cannot say by itself. And this is what I have been
29:52building towards from the beginning. The 39 proved two things at the same time. It proved Zemke right.
29:59That a heavy fighter, forbidden to dogfight, flown by disciplined men, would out kill the best fighter
30:06force in the world by nearly 40 to 1. And it proved the American bomber doctrine wrong. Because the very
30:13same month that produced 39 to 1 also produced Schweinfurt. After the 14th of October, the 8th
30:22Air Force stopped sending unescorted bombers deep into Germany. Not as the outcome of a policy debate.
30:28As a matter of arithmetic that nobody could argue with any longer. The argument Zemke had been having
30:35something about fighter range was over. He had won it. And he had won it in his absence, from the
30:41far side
30:42of the Atlantic. He spent that October in America. Speeches, factory floors, reading the numbers his
30:49group was posting in cables that reached him days late. He was 5,000 miles from the only place that
30:55mattered
30:55to him. He came back to England in January and took the group again. And over the next seven months,
31:01he would
31:02build the tactic that broke German fighter defense over the Reich. And then, in August of 1944,
31:09he did the one thing nobody who knew him expected. He gave up the Thunderbolt. It cost him everything
31:17he had left to lose. And the bill came due almost exactly one year after the month that proved him
31:23right. January 1944. Zemke came back to England, walked into the group he had left in October, and found
31:30that everything had changed while he was giving speeches. The Mustangs had arrived. The P-51 could do
31:38the thing that October had proved was necessary. Fly to Berlin, fight there, and come home again. And one
31:44group after another in the 8th began trading in its Thunderbolts. The 56th did not. It was the only fighter
31:52group in the 8th Air Force that flew the P-47 from its first mission to its last. Which left
31:59Zemke holding
32:00the airplane everybody had stopped believing in, in a war where the escort could finally reach the whole
32:05of Germany. So he changed the question. He stopped asking how to protect bombers and started asking how to
32:14destroy an air force. On the 12th of May 1944, he tried something that broke every rule of escort work.
32:23Instead of holding station above the bombers, the group would fly to a landmark ahead of the bomber
32:28stream, split into squadrons, and spread out across the sky in a half-circle 40 miles wide. Not guarding.
32:38Hunting. It was called the Zemke fan, and within weeks it was being flown across the 8th Air Force.
32:45Picture it from the German side. You take off to intercept a bomber stream, you climb to altitude,
32:51and you find the sky ahead of the bombers already occupied. Not by an escort tied to its charges,
32:57but by squadrons strung out over 40 miles, looking for you. Holding the height and the fuel to come
33:05down whenever they choose. Notice what he did there, because it is the same move as the order in 1943.
33:14Both times he took the rule everyone obeyed, asked what it was actually for, and threw away the part
33:21that was only tradition. And notice the other thing. In October, his men had been forbidden to go hunting.
33:3018 months later, hunting was the entire mission. The rule had never been about caution. It was about the machine.
33:39By that summer, the 56th had passed 500 German aircraft destroyed. Nobody in the 8th Air Force ever caught it.
33:47It finished the war with more aerial victories than any other American fighter group in Europe,
33:52flying the airplane nobody had wanted. The group paid for those months. On the 27th of March,
34:01Bud Mahiran, the man from the beginning of this story, was shot down over France. He came out through
34:07the resistance and got home. The same day, Jerry Johnson went down to ground fire and into a prison camp.
34:13Bob Johnson had already gone home in May with 27 victories and the memory of an airplane that could
34:20not be killed underneath him. On the 20th of July, Gabi Gabreski, 28 victories, the top American ace in
34:29Europe, went down to strafe an airfield, flew a foot too low, and touched his propeller on the ground.
34:36He spent the rest of the war behind wire. One by one, the men who made October 1943 were taken
34:43off the
34:44board. And then, in August, Zemke took himself off it. On the 12th of August 1944, he left the 56th.
34:54The 479th Fighter Group had lost its commander two days earlier, shot down, and needed someone.
35:02Dave Schilling had been offered the job and refused it. Zemke took it. It was a demotion in everything
35:10except rank. He was walking away from the most successful fighter group in the 8th Air Force,
35:16an outfit that ran on his own doctrine, to take over a novice group that had just lost its leader.
35:23And the 479th flew Lightnings, and was about to convert to Mustangs.
35:30So read this carefully.
35:32Hub Zemke, the man who spent two years insisting that the aeroplane everybody laughed at was the
35:38right aeroplane, who built a doctrine out of its weaknesses and made it produce 39 to 1,
35:45climbed out of the Thunderbolt in August of 1944, and into a P-51.
35:51He was not being sentimental, and he was not wrong.
35:54The Mustang was the better instrument for the war that autumn. He understood that better than anybody
36:00alive because October 1943 had taught him exactly why. He flew it for 11 weeks. And on the 30th of
36:09October 1944, one year and 28 days after the Emden mission, the last one he flew before the month that
36:17proved him right, Hub Zemke took a Mustang into a weather front over Germany and found out what a
36:24P-51 does that a Thunderbolt does not.
36:27October 30, 1944
36:30Colonel Hubert Zemke was leading the 479th Fighter Group over Germany when the weather ahead of them
36:36turned into something no forecast had mentioned. He ordered the group to turn back. It was the right
36:42call, and he made it in time. He simply did not get to make it for himself. The Mustang went
36:49into the
36:49cloud and began to buck. Zemke tried to turn it out. The nose dropped. The aeroplane went over into a
36:56spin,
36:57and as he hauled back to pull it out, the starboard wing buckled, slammed against the side of the fuselage,
37:03and tore away. The wing came in hard enough to leave his right arm and leg badly bruised.
37:09He got out. The parachute worked. He came down in a country that had spent two years learning his
37:16group's name. Injured. Alone. On a bad arm and a bad leg. After a while, needing a doctor more than
37:24he
37:25needed his freedom, he gave himself up. Read the cause of loss again. No German fighter. No flak battery. No
37:34expert
37:34with a hundred victories and a lucky deflection shot. Hube Zemke, who had built an entire war out
37:41of understanding precisely what a machine could and could not take, was brought down by turbulence
37:46inside a cloud. I told you at the start there was a price for being right. That is the price.
37:53Not defeat,
37:54and not a better pilot. Weather, in the aeroplane he had moved to. It took six weeks of interrogations
38:02and transfers before the Germans put him where he would stay. On the 16th of December 1944, he walked
38:10into Stalag Luft 1 at Barth on the Baltic coast. He was the senior Allied officer there, which meant
38:17that in a prison camp inside a collapsing country, he was responsible for close to 9,000 men. He
38:24organized them, argued with the German commandant, and got them through the winter. At the end of April,
38:30with the Russians closing in, the garrison was ordered to march the camp west. Zemke refused to
38:36move it. The guards left in the night. The prisoners held the camp themselves until the Red Army arrived,
38:42and then American bombers flew in and lifted 9,000 men out. The man who spent October 1943 being
38:50photographed on factory floors finished his war as the reason 9,000 people came home. Think back to that
38:58Focke-Wulf pilot over the French coast in June, sliding up alongside Bob Johnson's wrecked thunderbolt
39:04with his ammunition gone. He had done everything correctly, and it had not been enough. And he could
39:10not explain why. Nobody on his side could explain it either. Until October. So here is the answer to the
39:18question we started with, as plainly as I can put it. 39 German aircraft in a month, for one pilot
39:25lost,
39:26had very little to do with the P-47 being a good aeroplane. By the standards of 1943,
39:33it was not a good aeroplane. It happened because one commander looked at a machine that could not climb
39:39and could not turn, refused to pretend otherwise, and wrote an order telling his pilots to stop fighting
39:45the way they wanted to fight, and start fighting the way the machine could win. The Germans were not wrong
39:52about the thunderbolt. They were wrong about who would be flying it, and about what he would be
39:57permitted to do. And the men who did it were pilots in their early 20s, ordered day after day to
40:03break
40:04off fights they believed they could win. And who did it anyway, because they had been told the arithmetic
40:10would come out right in the end. In October 1943, the arithmetic came out 39 to 1. Zemka stayed in
40:19uniform. He led fighter groups during the Berlin airlift, later ran the wing that flew the U-2,
40:25and retired as a colonel in 1966. He died in 1994. And the one, Lieutenant Fleming of the 63rd Fighter
40:35Squadron lost over Bremen on the 8th of October 1943. 39 on one side of the ledger. On the other
40:44side of it,
40:45him.
40:47Thank you for staying to the end of this one. If it held you, a like genuinely helps. It puts
40:52the story
40:53in front of people who would otherwise never see it, and a great many of them are the children and
40:57grandchildren of the men who were there. Subscribe and turn on the bell if you want the next one.
41:03And tell me where you are watching from. The United States? The United Kingdom? Canada? Australia?
41:10If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle served in the Second World War,
41:15put his name and his unit in the comments. Names belong in writing. That is the entire reason for
41:21doing this. So that Hub Zemke and the pilots who flew his order and Lieutenant Fleming do not disappear
41:28into silence.
41:29Let's hear you, I got to hear you, you got to hear me.
41:29But I got to hear you a lot of comments please.
Comments