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On a bombing run over Bremen, a B-17 named Rikki Tikki Tavi was hit so hard that the fuselage separated and the tail came off with 19-year-old Eugene Moran still strapped inside. Shot through both forearms, his parachute torn by cannon fire, Moran rode the tail down four miles through the air and survived the fall. What follows is one of the most astonishing World War II survival stories ever told, and only the beginning of what he endured after landing.
This military history story follows a young Wisconsin farm kid on his fifth mission as a B-17 crewman in the skies over Germany. The account captures the chaos of bomber combat, the violence of Luftwaffe fighters, and the impossible moment when a Fortress broke apart around him. It is a gripping wartime narration built for listeners who enjoy forgotten WW2 stories, air war history, and dramatic true stories from the Second World War.
The story also points to the silence that followed, as Moran said almost nothing about it for decades. That makes the survival itself even more haunting, and the aftermath even more important to remember.
For fans of WW2 stories, military aviation history, B-17 bomber tales, and narrated World War II documentaries, this is a powerful listen. It is ideal for anyone searching for historical war stories, bomber crew survival stories, and forgotten American hero stories from WWII.
This military history story follows a young Wisconsin farm kid on his fifth mission as a B-17 crewman in the skies over Germany. The account captures the chaos of bomber combat, the violence of Luftwaffe fighters, and the impossible moment when a Fortress broke apart around him. It is a gripping wartime narration built for listeners who enjoy forgotten WW2 stories, air war history, and dramatic true stories from the Second World War.
The story also points to the silence that followed, as Moran said almost nothing about it for decades. That makes the survival itself even more haunting, and the aftermath even more important to remember.
For fans of WW2 stories, military aviation history, B-17 bomber tales, and narrated World War II documentaries, this is a powerful listen. It is ideal for anyone searching for historical war stories, bomber crew survival stories, and forgotten American hero stories from WWII.
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LearningTranscript
00:00November 29th, 1943.
00:0328,000 feet above the German town of Syke, just south of Bremen,
00:08a 19-year-old from Wisconsin is sitting backwards in the smallest space on a flying fortress,
00:13watching the war come at him from behind.
00:16His name is Eugene Moran.
00:18His family calls him Gene.
00:20He is the tail gunner on a B-17 named Ricky Ticky Tavi,
00:25and this is the fifth time he has done this.
00:27The bombs are gone.
00:29That part is finished.
00:31What is not finished is the ride home,
00:33and Ricky Ticky Tavi is not where she is supposed to be.
00:37An American bomber formation is a machine built out of other airplanes,
00:42every fortress covering the one beside it,
00:44fields of fire overlapping into a moving box that a fighter pilot has to fly into
00:49if he wants to kill anything.
00:52Ricky Ticky Tavi has slipped out of the box.
00:55Gene is the one man on board who can see exactly what that means,
00:59because he is the only one facing the wrong way.
01:02He watches the formation pull ahead,
01:04he watches the gap open behind the low squadron,
01:08and he watches specks detach from the high sky and turn into that gap,
01:12because the German fighter pilots have been waiting all morning for precisely this,
01:18for one airplane that has stopped being part of the herd.
01:23He calls them out on the interphone.
01:25That is his job, and he has been doing it well for 20 minutes.
01:29Then the specks stop being specks,
01:32and the sky behind the tail fills with cannon flashes.
01:36The first hits take him in both forearms.
01:39Later, doctors will use the word shattered.
01:43In the moment, his hands simply stop belonging to him,
01:47and the gun grips are slick,
01:49and he cannot understand why the guns will not track the way he wants them to.
01:54Behind his shoulder, folded into its pack where it has ridden every mission,
01:59his parachute takes a burst straight through the canopy.
02:02He does not know this yet.
02:04It will matter in about 90 seconds.
02:07Then, something happens that has no procedure attached to it.
02:11Nothing in any checklist.
02:13Nothing anybody ever briefed.
02:16Somewhere forward of him, past the waste windows,
02:19the airplane stops being an airplane.
02:22The fuselage of a B-17 hit hard enough in the right place does not crumple.
02:28It separates.
02:30And the tail of rikki-tikki-tavi, with Gene Moran strapped inside it,
02:35comes off the rest of the bomber, four miles above Germany.
02:39Take a second to hit like and subscribe.
02:42It's how stories about American bomber crews find the people who want them.
02:46What happens next has no real parallel in the war.
02:49Back to Gene Moran.
02:52He is 19 years old.
02:54He grew up on a farm outside Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin.
02:57And he volunteered for the Army Air Forces at 18 because that is what the boys he knew were doing.
03:04He had been in England a matter of weeks.
03:07Four missions.
03:08And now a fifth.
03:10And I want you to hold on to that number.
03:12Five.
03:13Because it matters for the rest of this story.
03:16Gene Moran was not a hardened combat veteran with a year of missions behind him.
03:21He was a teenager who had been shot at four times before,
03:24who had watched other people's airplanes come apart in the sky,
03:28and had not yet worked out what he thought about it.
03:31The target that morning was Bremen,
03:33and the 8th Air Force had put up more than 300 bombers to reach it.
03:38Most of the day was weather.
03:40Crews climbed through overcast, formed up over cloud,
03:43flew to a city they never actually saw,
03:45and dropped through a solid white floor on a signal from a lead ship.
03:50You could fly the entire mission of your life over Germany,
03:53and see nothing of Germany at all.
03:56That is what makes the next part so strange.
03:59Because Gene Moran is about to see Germany more clearly,
04:02and for longer, than any man in that formation.
04:06Here is what he has in the seconds after the tale comes free.
04:10He has two arms that will not work.
04:13He has broken ribs.
04:14He has a parachute with bullet holes through it.
04:17And even if it were perfect,
04:18he could not pull a ripcord with hands that will not close.
04:22And even if he could pull it,
04:24he would have to climb out of a structure
04:25that is spinning through 28,000 feet of open air.
04:30And he has one more thing,
04:32which is the part that nobody can quite explain even now.
04:36He is completely conscious.
04:38Everything the army ever taught him about this situation
04:41ended at two words.
04:43Bail out.
04:45There was no training film for a man riding a piece of a bomber
04:49down through four miles of German sky.
04:52So the strangest thing about the next two and a half minutes
04:55is not that Eugene Moran lived through them.
04:58It's what he did with his hands on the way down.
05:01The first thing that changes is the noise.
05:03A B-17 in flight is a wall of sound.
05:07Four engines, slipstream, the hammering of your own guns.
05:11When the tail comes free, the engines go with it.
05:14The hammering stops.
05:16And what is left is wind,
05:19moving past a broken shape in a way he has never heard before.
05:23The second thing is the horizon.
05:25It swings up past the guns,
05:28then down,
05:29then up again.
05:30And it keeps doing that over and over for the whole way down.
05:34That swinging is the reason we are having this conversation at all.
05:38A man falling alone drops like a stone.
05:41The tail of a flying fortress is not a stone.
05:44It is a big, empty box with a fin on top
05:47and two flat stabilizers sticking out of the sides.
05:50And when it comes off an airplane,
05:52it does not plummet.
05:53It catches air,
05:55stalls,
05:56slides,
05:57catches again.
05:58It behaves less like a rock
06:00and more like a leaf coming off a tree in October.
06:03Nobody designed it to do that.
06:05It simply did.
06:08Now,
06:09the hands.
06:09Every account of that morning,
06:11including the one Gene himself gave 60 years later,
06:14says the same thing.
06:16The German fighters followed the tail down.
06:19They came in to look at it,
06:20the way pilots did.
06:22And the tail section still had two .50 caliber machine guns in it.
06:26And those guns still had a man behind them.
06:29With both forearms torn open by cannon fire,
06:33Gene Moran kept working his guns at the fighters that came to watch him die.
06:37Think about what that means for a second.
06:39He knows the parachute is useless.
06:42He knows how this ends.
06:44There is no tactical reason on earth to fire at anything.
06:48He does it anyway,
06:50because it is the only thing left that he knows how to do.
06:54And then,
06:55at some point in the descent,
06:57he stops.
06:58Here is how he described it,
07:00in his own words,
07:01when he finally talked about that morning.
07:04I was conscious all the way down.
07:06I just relaxed.
07:08I'm going to die.
07:09Why fight it?
07:11Four miles is a long time.
07:13Somewhere in those minutes,
07:15the front half of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi came apart
07:17over the northeastern edge of Syke
07:19and burned across the town.
07:21Eight men were in that half.
07:23Eight men died.
07:25One got out.
07:26The navigator.
07:27Second Lieutenant Jesse Orison,
07:30who found a way through a disintegrating airplane
07:32and got a canopy over his head.
07:35Gene knew none of this.
07:37As far as he was concerned,
07:39he was the last man alive from his airplane,
07:41and he was going to be alive for about another 90 seconds.
07:46I want to give you one number for scale
07:48before the ground arrives.
07:50In the entire war,
07:52the number of men who fell from bomber altitude
07:54without a working parachute and lived
07:57can be counted on one hand.
07:59When Gene Moran came down over Syke,
08:02there was exactly one other American it had happened to.
08:05A ball turret gunner named Alan McGee,
08:09who had gone through the roof of a French railway station
08:12eleven months earlier.
08:13Two men, out of a bomber offensive
08:15that put tens of thousands of Americans
08:17into the sky over Europe.
08:19The woods south of Syke came up out of the murk
08:21in the last seconds.
08:23Winter trees, bare, packed close.
08:26The tail section went into the tops of them,
08:28and they did to it what they were never meant to do.
08:31They took it apart slowly.
08:33Branches snapped.
08:34Each one stole a little of the speed.
08:37What finally hit the frozen ground
08:39was still moving hard enough
08:40to break almost everything in Gene Moran's body.
08:43Both forearms, shattered.
08:45Ribs, broken.
08:47His head had been driven into the steel control cables
08:50running through the tail above him,
08:51and a piece of his skull was gone.
08:53Gone, not cracked,
08:55with brain tissue open to the German winter.
08:58The impact knocked out his gold teeth.
09:01Blood filled his eyes.
09:02And he was awake.
09:04Lying in a wrecked tail section
09:06in a German forest,
09:08blind with his own blood,
09:09a 19-year-old farm kid
09:11from Crawford County, Wisconsin,
09:13worked out where he was
09:15and said the first words he spoke
09:16on European soil.
09:18Oh my God,
09:20I cheated death.
09:22He was right,
09:23and he was wrong.
09:24The fall was over.
09:26It had lasted about two and a half minutes.
09:29What it had actually bought him
09:30was 17 months.
09:33The footsteps coming through the trees
09:35did not belong to German soldiers.
09:37They belonged to other prisoners,
09:39men from an army that had lost its war
09:41three years earlier.
09:43Two of them were doctors.
09:45And the reason Gene Moran
09:47is still breathing a week from now
09:49has nothing to do with the Luftwaffe
09:51or the German medical service.
09:54It has to do with what those two men did next,
09:57with almost no instruments
09:59and almost no anesthetic.
10:01Gene Moran could not see,
10:03and he could not move his arms.
10:05So the first thing he knew
10:07about the people coming through the woods
10:08was their voices.
10:10They were not speaking German.
10:13Germany in 1943 ran on prisoners.
10:16Behind the front,
10:17there was a second country of men
10:19in worn-out uniforms,
10:20captured years earlier.
10:22Frenchmen, taken in 1940.
10:25Serbs, taken in the spring of 1941.
10:28Men whose war had ended
10:29long before Gene's began.
10:31A crowd of them had watched
10:33a burning American bomber
10:34break up over Syke,
10:36and some of them went into the trees
10:38to see what had come down.
10:40What they found did not look like a survivor.
10:43It looked like the tail of an airplane
10:45with a boy inside it.
10:46And the boy's head was open.
10:49German troops arrived and took him.
10:51That part was straightforward.
10:53He was an enemy airman,
10:55and there were rules for enemy airmen.
10:57He was carried out of the woods,
10:58and somewhere in the next hours,
11:00a German medical officer
11:01looked at Staff Sergeant Eugene Moran
11:03and made a judgment that was,
11:05on the evidence in front of him,
11:07entirely reasonable.
11:09This one is dying.
11:11Do not waste a surgeon on him.
11:14And so for days,
11:16days with an open head wound
11:18in a German winter,
11:20Gene Moran received
11:21no real treatment at all.
11:22I want you to understand
11:24what that means,
11:25because it is the hinge
11:26of this whole story.
11:28The fall had done its damage
11:29in an instant,
11:30and then it was finished.
11:32A wound like that is not finished.
11:34It is a clock.
11:36Every hour, the odds move,
11:38and they only move one way.
11:41In 1943, there was penicillin
11:43in the world, but not for him.
11:46What was killing Gene Moran now
11:48was not Germany.
11:49It was time.
11:51Which brings us to two men
11:53whose names most versions
11:54of this story
11:55never managed to give you.
11:57They were Serbian army doctors.
11:59They had been prisoners
12:00since the spring of 1941,
12:02when the German army
12:03took their country apart
12:04in 11 days.
12:06And they had spent
12:07the two and a half years since
12:08inside the German prisoner system.
12:10practicing medicine
12:11with whatever they were handed.
12:13They got to Gene Moran,
12:15and they did something
12:16that is difficult to explain
12:18in any language
12:19except the language of doctors.
12:21They decided that the American
12:23was not dying.
12:24He was untreated.
12:26And those are different words.
12:29The operation ran about seven hours.
12:32Consider what those seven hours contained.
12:35Two prisoners of war
12:36working on a third prisoner of war
12:38in a place that was not a hospital
12:40by any standard either of them
12:42would have recognized before the war.
12:45Almost nothing to put him under with.
12:47Instruments that were whatever
12:48the Germans allowed them to have.
12:50And in front of them,
12:51a skull with a piece missing.
12:54They cleaned it.
12:55They closed what could be closed.
12:57And over the hole
12:58where the bone used to be,
13:00they fixed a plate of metal.
13:02That plate went into Gene Moran's head
13:04in occupied Germany,
13:06put there by enemy prisoners
13:07with no anesthetic worth the name.
13:10And it stayed in his head
13:11for the next 70 years.
13:14He came out of it alive.
13:16He also came out of it helpless
13:18in a way that is hard to picture.
13:21Both arms were in casts
13:23from the shattered forearms.
13:24He could not feed himself.
13:26He could not hold a cup.
13:28A 19-year-old
13:29who had been flying combat missions
13:31two weeks earlier
13:32now needed another man
13:33to do everything for him.
13:35And the men doing it
13:36were Serbs and Frenchmen
13:39who had no reason on earth
13:40to care whether an American lived.
13:44Here is the sentence
13:45this whole story turns on.
13:47And it is worth saying plainly.
13:49The four-mile fall
13:51was survivable
13:52in about two and a half minutes
13:54because of trees and luck.
13:57Everything after it
13:58was survivable
13:59only because people kept deciding,
14:01one at a time,
14:03to keep a stranger alive.
14:05The Germans made one of those decisions
14:07and got it wrong.
14:08Two Serbs made the other one.
14:11Once he could stand,
14:13he stopped being a medical problem
14:15and became an administrative one.
14:17The Luftwaffe ran the camps
14:19for captured Allied airmen
14:20and captured Allied airmen
14:22went first to an interrogation center,
14:24alone,
14:25in a small room,
14:26for as long as it took.
14:28So by the turn of the year,
14:30Gene Moran was alive,
14:31patched,
14:32and filed.
14:33And in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin,
14:36his family knew none of it.
14:38What they had was a telegram
14:40that arrived just before Christmas 1943
14:42with the word
14:44missing in it.
14:46Nothing more.
14:47And the way the Morans
14:48finally learned
14:49that their son had come down
14:50four miles in the tail of a bomber
14:52and lived
14:53did not come from the Army
14:55or the Red Cross
14:56or the government
14:58of the United States.
14:59It came from strangers.
15:01Men sitting up at night
15:03in American houses
15:04with radio sets,
15:05listening to something
15:06the Germans were broadcasting
15:08on purpose.
15:09Hold that picture.
15:10Gene Moran
15:11in a German bed
15:12with his arms in casts.
15:14And come back across the Atlantic
15:16for a few minutes.
15:17Because the other half
15:19of this story
15:19was happening in a farmhouse
15:21in Crawford County, Wisconsin.
15:23The telegram came
15:25before Christmas.
15:26Everybody who lived
15:27through that war
15:28knows what the arrival
15:29of a telegram meant
15:30in a small town.
15:31That a car nobody recognized
15:33had stopped in front
15:34of a particular house,
15:35and that within an hour,
15:37the whole county
15:38would know which house it was.
15:40The Moran telegram
15:41did not say killed.
15:43It said missing in action.
15:45In some ways,
15:46that is worse,
15:47because missing
15:48is not information.
15:49Missing is a door
15:51that will not close.
15:53The Moran family
15:54had no way of knowing
15:55their son was not
15:56among the dead.
15:57As far as the United States
15:59Army Air Forces knew,
16:00in December of 1943,
16:02a bomber had gone down
16:04over Bremen,
16:04and its tail gunner
16:06had not come home.
16:07Then the letters
16:08started arriving.
16:09They came from people
16:10the Morans had never heard of,
16:12in towns they had
16:13no connection to.
16:14And they all said
16:16roughly the same thing.
16:18Your son is alive.
16:19He is a prisoner.
16:21I heard his name.
16:23Here is how that worked.
16:25And it is one of the strangest
16:26mechanisms of the war.
16:28German radio broadcast
16:29propaganda programs
16:31aimed at the United States.
16:32And folded into those programs
16:34were lists of captured
16:36American airmen.
16:38Names,
16:39ranks,
16:40hometowns,
16:41read out on the air.
16:43The idea was to demoralize.
16:45Look how many of your boys
16:46we hold.
16:48What actually happened
16:49was that ordinary Americans
16:50with shortwave sets
16:52sat up at night
16:53in kitchens
16:54and back bedrooms
16:55across the country,
16:56wrote the names down
16:57in pencil,
16:58looked up the families,
16:59and mailed them the news
17:01at their own expense.
17:03Germany paid for the transmitter.
17:05American strangers
17:06ran the delivery.
17:08And then,
17:09eventually,
17:10a postcard.
17:12Prisoner of war mail,
17:13the printed kind,
17:14a few lines and a signature
17:16his mother knew.
17:17That card had crossed
17:18a continent
17:19and an ocean
17:20to tell a family
17:21in Wisconsin
17:22something that was,
17:23on the face of it,
17:25impossible.
17:26Now back to Jean,
17:28because while those letters
17:29were crossing the Atlantic,
17:31he was being taught
17:32what the German system
17:33did with airmen
17:34who could walk.
17:35First came interrogation.
17:38Every captured Allied flyer
17:40passed through it.
17:41And the method
17:42was not what men expected.
17:44There was very little shouting.
17:46There was a courteous officer
17:47with a file.
17:48And there was
17:49solitary confinement.
17:51Jean Moran
17:52did his time
17:53in a cell alone.
17:54Think about the condition
17:56of the man
17:56they put in there.
17:58Arms that had been
17:59shot apart
17:59and set by prisoners.
18:01A metal plate
18:02holding his skull together,
18:03under a scalp
18:04that had barely closed.
18:06Headaches
18:07that would follow him
18:08for the rest of his life.
18:09And the standing order
18:11he had been given
18:12as a soldier.
18:13Name,
18:14rank,
18:15serial number.
18:16That was all they got.
18:18In February of 1944,
18:21the Luftwaffe
18:22began shipping
18:23American enlisted airmen
18:24to a camp called
18:25Stalag Luft VI
18:26and Jean Moran
18:28went with them.
18:29I want you to look
18:30at where it was
18:31because the location
18:32is the whole point.
18:35Heidekrug sat
18:35in the far northeast corner
18:37of East Prussia
18:38on the edge
18:39of the Memel country,
18:40the northernmost prisoner camp
18:42in the entire German Reich.
18:44Getting there from Bremen
18:46meant crossing
18:47the width of Germany
18:48and then continuing
18:49until the country ran out.
18:51The camp was built
18:52of brick barracks
18:53and wooden huts,
18:54on paper,
18:55room for a little
18:56over 6,000 men.
18:58By the summer of 1944,
19:00it held more than 10,000.
19:02Men slept in tents.
19:04And the food
19:05was the food
19:06of a country losing a war,
19:08a thin daily ration,
19:09and whatever came
19:10in the Red Cross parcels,
19:12which arrived
19:13when they arrived
19:13and stopped
19:14when they stopped.
19:16For Jean,
19:17this was,
19:17strange as it sounds,
19:19the good stretch.
19:19He was among Americans.
19:229,000 Allied airmen
19:24were behind that wire
19:25by July,
19:25and about 2,400 of them
19:27were American enlisted men.
19:29And a man with a plate
19:30in his head
19:31was not even the most remarkable thing
19:33in his own barracks.
19:35But look at the map again.
19:37That corner of East Prussia
19:39was the far end of Germany
19:40from England and France.
19:42It was not the far end
19:44from Russia.
19:45On the 22nd of June, 1944,
19:48the Red Army
19:49opened the offensive
19:50that destroyed
19:51the German center in the east,
19:52and it came west
19:54faster than anyone
19:55in Berlin believed possible.
19:57By the second week of July,
19:59the guns were close enough
20:00that the Commandant
20:01of Stalag Luft VI
20:02was given an order,
20:03and he passed it
20:05to 9,000 prisoners
20:06with a few hours' notice.
20:08The camp was moving,
20:10and the only practical way
20:11out of that corner of the Reich
20:13was not a road.
20:15It was the Baltic Sea,
20:17and the ships waiting at Memel
20:18were not built to carry men.
20:20July 14, 1944.
20:23The road from Heidekrug
20:25to the port of Memel
20:26in weather hot enough
20:27to make the dust hang.
20:29About a thousand Americans
20:31went out of the gates
20:32in the late afternoon,
20:33and more followed the next day.
20:35Each man carried what he had,
20:37which for most of them
20:38was almost nothing,
20:40plus two Red Cross parcels
20:42handed out on the way.
20:43The Germans were not feeding
20:44anybody on this trip,
20:46and everyone understood
20:47what that implied
20:48about the length of it.
20:49At the docks,
20:50there were two ships.
20:52One was a German coaster
20:53called the Insterberg.
20:55The other was a captured Russian vessel
20:57called the Mazurin.
20:59Both were coal carriers.
21:01Neither had ever been intended
21:02to move human beings,
21:04and that is not a figure of speech.
21:06A coal ship has holds,
21:08and holds are square pits
21:10with one way in
21:11and one way out.
21:13One of the men
21:14who went down into that hold
21:15described the entrance
21:16in a single sentence.
21:18There was a single ladder,
21:20he said,
21:20and we all had to climb down it
21:22and find a place.
21:23It was dark.
21:24The heat was unbearable.
21:27Now put a number on it.
21:28Somewhere between 900
21:30and 1,000 men
21:31went down that ladder
21:32into one hold.
21:34Another prisoner,
21:35Leonard Darren Lowe,
21:36put the arithmetic
21:37of the next three days
21:38into words
21:39that I have never
21:40been able to forget.
21:42There was now
21:43no more room,
21:44he wrote,
21:45as half of us
21:46were sitting
21:46while the other half
21:47were standing.
21:48We exchanged these positions
21:50for the next 72 hours.
21:52Half sit,
21:54half stand.
21:55Trade.
21:56For three days.
21:58There was no sanitation
21:59of any kind.
22:01There were buckets
22:02lowered down on ropes,
22:03and the same buckets
22:04that came down
22:05with drinking water
22:06went back up
22:06as latrines.
22:08The air went bad early
22:10and stayed bad.
22:11Men fouled themselves
22:13because there was
22:14no alternative.
22:15And above all of it,
22:17out of reach,
22:18was a square of daylight
22:19and a German guard.
22:22Find Gene Moran
22:23in that hold.
22:24He is 19,
22:26going on 20.
22:26He has a metal plate
22:27in his skull,
22:28seven months old,
22:30in the dark,
22:31in heat nobody could measure,
22:33with no clean water.
22:35He has forearms
22:36that were rebuilt
22:37by prisoners
22:38and never worked
22:39properly again.
22:41Whatever headaches
22:41he lived with
22:42in the barracks,
22:43they are worse now,
22:44and there is nowhere
22:46to lie down
22:46and nothing
22:47to lie down on.
22:50One prisoner
22:50on that voyage
22:51got out of the hold
22:52and made a run
22:53for the side of the ship
22:54and went over
22:54into the Baltic.
22:56The German soldiers
22:57on deck
22:57shot him in the water
22:58with a machine gun.
23:00Nobody who was down
23:01in that hold
23:02ever quite agreed
23:03on what he was trying
23:03to do.
23:04Escape?
23:05Or simply be somewhere
23:07else for 30 seconds?
23:09It did not change
23:10the outcome.
23:11And here is the detail
23:13that I think says
23:14the most
23:14about those three days.
23:16Outside the hull,
23:18the Baltic that summer
23:19was a shooting gallery.
23:21Soviet aircraft
23:22and Soviet submarines
23:23were working
23:24those waters,
23:25and no marking
23:26on Earth
23:26told anyone
23:27that the coal ships
23:28out of Memel
23:29were carrying
23:30Allied airmen.
23:31If a torpedo
23:31had found the Masurin,
23:33900 Americans
23:34would have gone down
23:35inside a locked
23:36steel box,
23:38killed by their own side,
23:40and the Germans
23:41would have counted it
23:42as shipping losses.
23:44They reached Sfinamunda
23:46on July 17th.
23:47The ladder
23:48went back down.
23:49Men who had not
23:50stood upright
23:51in three days
23:52climbed it into daylight.
23:54And what was waiting
23:55at the top
23:56was not relief.
23:57It was a train.
23:59Boxcars,
24:00up to 55 men
24:01in a car,
24:02guards at one end.
24:04And then the Germans
24:05did something
24:06that had not been done
24:07to these prisoners before.
24:09They took the men's shoes,
24:11and they shackled them
24:12at the ankles,
24:14chained,
24:15barefoot,
24:16in the dark,
24:17for about 24 hours.
24:20Ask yourself why.
24:22These were starved men
24:24who had just spent
24:25three days
24:25in a coal hold.
24:27None of them
24:28was running anywhere.
24:29Shackles were not
24:30a security measure.
24:31Shackles were a message,
24:32and the message
24:34was that the rules
24:35everyone had been
24:35operating under,
24:37the Luftwaffe camps,
24:38the parcels,
24:39the postcard's home,
24:41were being set aside
24:42for whatever came next.
24:44On the morning
24:45of July 18, 1944,
24:48the train stopped
24:49at a small station
24:50in Pomerania
24:50called Kiefheide.
24:52The new camp,
24:54Stalag Luft 4,
24:55was about three kilometers
24:57up the road.
24:58Two miles.
24:59After everything,
25:01two miles.
25:03The doors rolled open,
25:05and the prisoners
25:05looked out
25:06at the reception committee
25:07on the platform.
25:08And what they saw
25:09did not make sense.
25:11Luftwaffe men, yes,
25:13but also SS.
25:15Also young naval troops
25:17with fixed bayonets.
25:19Also dog handlers
25:20standing close,
25:21with the dogs already up.
25:24They were made to stand
25:25in the midday sun
25:26on that platform
25:27for the better part
25:28of an hour
25:28while the guards
25:29arranged themselves.
25:31Nobody needs bayonets
25:33and dogs
25:33to walk starved men
25:34two miles.
25:36Which means
25:37the two miles
25:38were not the point.
25:39What happened on that road
25:40has a name
25:41among the men
25:42who lived through it.
25:43They called it
25:44the Run Up the Road.
25:46And some of them
25:47called it
25:48the Haidakug Run.
25:50And 60 years later,
25:51you could still find men
25:52who would not
25:53talk about it.
25:55The column was formed up
25:56on the road
25:57out of Kiefheide.
25:58The prisoners
25:59were carrying
26:00their kit
26:00and what was left
26:01of their Red Cross parcels.
26:03For most of them,
26:04everything they owned
26:05on earth.
26:06The order came to move.
26:09Then the order came
26:10to move faster.
26:13Then the dogs
26:14were released
26:14down the flanks
26:15of the column
26:16and the bayonets
26:17went in.
26:18Two miles
26:19at a run
26:20in July heat
26:21at the point
26:23of a bayonet
26:23by men
26:25by men
26:25who had spent
26:25the last four days
26:26in a coal hold
26:27and the last 24 hours
26:30chained in a boxcar.
26:32Prisoners who fell
26:34were jabbed up.
26:35Prisoners who dropped
26:37their packs
26:37left them
26:38where they fell
26:39and the road
26:40behind the column
26:41filled with tins
26:42and blankets
26:43and photographs
26:44and everything else.
26:46Men were stabbed
26:47in the back
26:48and the legs.
26:49Men were bitten.
26:51The Americans
26:52who got through
26:52that gate
26:53arrived bleeding
26:54with nothing left
26:55but what was on them.
26:57Gene Moran
26:58came up that road
26:59with them.
27:00I would like to tell you
27:01exactly what he did
27:02in those two miles
27:03but he did not
27:04talk about it
27:05and I am not going
27:06to invent it for him.
27:08What we can say
27:09is arithmetic.
27:11Seven and a half
27:12months earlier
27:12a German doctor
27:13had written him off
27:14as a dying man.
27:16Now he was running
27:17two miles
27:18through Pomerania
27:18with a dog
27:19at his heels
27:20and a plate
27:21of metal
27:21in his head.
27:22The place
27:23at the end
27:24of the road
27:24was Stalag Luft IV
27:26near a village
27:27called Gross Tikau.
27:28It had opened
27:29that spring
27:30and it was not finished.
27:32Compounds
27:32without enough bunks
27:33so men slept
27:34on the floor
27:35on wood wool.
27:37Wire,
27:38sand,
27:38pine trees
27:39and eventually
27:40more than
27:4010,000
27:41Allied airmen
27:42inside it.
27:43By then
27:44Gene had been
27:45a prisoner
27:45for eight months
27:46and he was
27:47about to spend
27:47the next six
27:48in the same square
27:49of Pomeranian sand.
27:51And then
27:52for six months
27:53almost nothing happened.
27:55That is worth
27:56sitting with
27:57for a moment
27:57because it is the part
27:59no film ever shows.
28:01Captivity is not
28:02a sequence of incidents.
28:04It is a very long time
28:06in which the main events
28:07are hunger
28:08and weather.
28:09The German ration
28:11was bread,
28:12potatoes,
28:12and a soup
28:13that men described
28:14by what they could
28:15identify in it.
28:16It got smaller
28:17through the autumn.
28:19The Red Cross parcels,
28:20which were the actual
28:21difference between
28:22living and starving,
28:24came in less
28:25and less often
28:25because the Allied
28:27air forces
28:27had broken
28:28the German railways
28:29so thoroughly
28:30that nothing moved
28:31reliably anymore,
28:32including the food
28:33keeping Allied prisoners
28:35alive.
28:36That is a hard irony
28:37and there is no way
28:38around it.
28:40Gene's war
28:40in those months
28:41was small
28:42and specific.
28:44A head
28:44that ached
28:45in the cold
28:45and would ache
28:46for 70 years.
28:48Arms that would
28:49not fully straighten.
28:50A body
28:51losing weight
28:52it did not have
28:53to lose.
28:53And the thing
28:54every prisoner
28:55develops,
28:56which is an ear
28:57for rumors,
28:58because the other
28:59food in that camp
29:00was news.
29:01And by January,
29:02the news
29:03was extraordinary.
29:05You could hear
29:06artillery,
29:07not aircraft,
29:08artillery
29:09in the east
29:10getting closer.
29:12For any prisoner
29:13in Pomerania
29:14in January
29:14of 1945,
29:16that sound
29:17meant one
29:17of two things,
29:18and there was
29:19no third option.
29:20Either the Red Army
29:22would arrive
29:22and the war
29:23would be over
29:23for you,
29:24or the Germans
29:25would move you
29:26again before
29:27it got here.
29:28And these men
29:29had already learned
29:30exactly what the Germans
29:31meant by moving you.
29:33The order came
29:34on the 6th of February,
29:351945.
29:37Anyone judged
29:38fit to walk
29:39would walk,
29:40the sick
29:41and the worst
29:42of the wounded
29:42would be left behind
29:44or sent by rail.
29:45Gene Moran,
29:47plate in his head,
29:48ruined forearms,
29:4914 months a prisoner,
29:51was judged fit
29:52to walk.
29:54Now the weather.
29:56That winter
29:56was one of the coldest
29:58in living memory
29:58across northern Europe.
30:00Temperatures well below zero,
30:02snow on the ground
30:03for weeks at a time.
30:05Thousands of men
30:06walked out of the gates
30:07of Stalag Luft 4
30:09into that,
30:10in whatever they were wearing,
30:12carrying whatever
30:13they could hold.
30:14They were told
30:15they were being marched west,
30:17away from the Russians.
30:18That was true.
30:20What they were not told,
30:22because no German officer
30:23on that road
30:24knew it either,
30:25was where they were going.
30:27There was no destination.
30:28There was no plan.
30:31There were no depots
30:32stocked ahead of them,
30:33no barracks waiting,
30:35no rations organized,
30:37no route.
30:38The men of Stalag Luft 4
30:40would be walking
30:41for 86 days.
30:43And the first number
30:44that mattered
30:45was not the distance.
30:46It was the temperature
30:48on the first night
30:49and where they were
30:50expected to sleep.
30:51February 6, 1945.
30:54Somewhere on the road
30:55west of Gross-Tickhauf.
30:57The first night
30:58set the terms
30:59for everything that followed.
31:01The column stopped
31:02in open country
31:03and the men were told
31:04to sleep where they stood.
31:06There is a thing
31:07that happens to a body
31:08in deep cold
31:09when it has no fat left.
31:11It stops being able
31:12to warm itself at all.
31:14Men slept in pairs
31:16and threes
31:16for the heat,
31:17in snow,
31:19in the clothes
31:19they had been wearing
31:20for weeks.
31:22On the better nights
31:23there was a barn.
31:24A barn was a luxury item
31:26on that march
31:26and barns brought
31:28their own problem
31:29which was lice
31:30because when 300 men
31:32lie down together
31:32in straw
31:33everything one man
31:34is carrying
31:35becomes everyone's.
31:38And now I have to tell you
31:39about the thing
31:39that actually ran
31:40that march
31:41because if you take
31:42nothing else
31:43from this part
31:44take this.
31:45It was not the cold
31:47that broke the column.
31:48It was dysentery.
31:50The water came from
31:52ditches and snowmelt
31:53and farm troughs.
31:54Within two weeks
31:56most of the column
31:57had it.
31:58Dysentery
31:58and a man
31:59who is already starving
32:00does something specific.
32:02It takes away
32:03his ability
32:04to hold anything
32:04he eats long enough
32:05to use it.
32:07Men who were getting
32:08a few hundred calories
32:09a day
32:09were losing even that.
32:11They marched anyway
32:13because the alternative
32:14to marching
32:14was falling out
32:15and falling out
32:17on that road
32:17in February
32:18was not a medical decision.
32:20It was a final one.
32:23Food came
32:24from wherever
32:24it could be taken.
32:26A farmer's field
32:27with sugar beets
32:28still in the ground.
32:29Grain meant
32:30for livestock.
32:31A German civilian
32:32at a gate
32:33who would trade bread
32:34for soap
32:34or a few cigarettes.
32:36The allied medics
32:38in the column
32:38had almost nothing
32:39to work with.
32:40No drugs.
32:41No bandages
32:42worth the name.
32:43So they did
32:44the only medicine left
32:45which was to keep
32:46men on their feet
32:47by talking to them.
32:49There was one more danger
32:51and it is the cruelest detail
32:52in this entire story.
32:54The sky over Germany
32:56in the spring of 1945
32:57belonged completely
32:59to the allies.
33:00Fighters roamed at will
33:01looking for anything
33:02moving on a road.
33:04From 2,000 feet
33:05a column of ragged men
33:07walking west
33:08under guard
33:09looks exactly like
33:10a column of German troops.
33:12Prisoners on those marches
33:13were strafed
33:14by their own air forces
33:15and men who had survived
33:17being shot down
33:18survived capture
33:19survived the camps
33:20and the ships
33:22and the winter
33:23were killed
33:24in the last weeks
33:25by American
33:25and British pilots
33:26doing their job
33:28correctly.
33:29Think about what
33:30that sky meant
33:31to Gene Moran
33:32specifically.
33:33He had been a gunner.
33:35He knew those airplanes
33:36by their engine note
33:37before anyone else
33:38in the column did.
33:39The last time
33:40he had been anywhere
33:41near a fighter
33:42it was coming at his guns
33:44while he fell
33:44through four miles
33:45of sky.
33:47Now the fighters
33:48were his own
33:48and he had to get
33:49off the road
33:50when he heard them.
33:51The columns went west
33:53across Pomerania
33:54over the Oder
33:55into Mecklenburg
33:56and then some of them
33:58turned south.
33:59There was no map
34:00for the men walking.
34:02Days blurred.
34:03Some kept scratch calendars.
34:05Many stopped counting.
34:07The total distance
34:08when the Americans
34:10who lived through it
34:10worked it out afterwards
34:11was somewhere around
34:13600 miles.
34:15600 miles.
34:18Let me put that
34:19in terms that land.
34:20That is walking
34:21from New York City
34:22to Chicago
34:23in winter
34:25without food
34:26with dysentery
34:29under guard.
34:31The men who did it
34:32gave it two names.
34:33Some called it
34:34the shoe leather express
34:36which is the kind
34:37of joke soldiers make
34:38so they can keep
34:39talking about a thing.
34:40The other name
34:41has no joke
34:42in it at all.
34:43They called it
34:44the Black March.
34:46And here is where
34:47I want to bring
34:48the counter back
34:48because we have been
34:50carrying it
34:50since the first minute
34:51of this story.
34:53Gene Moran
34:54left Wisconsin
34:54as a healthy farm kid.
34:56When this march ended
34:58he weighed
34:58128 pounds.
35:01He had a plate
35:02in his head,
35:03arms that had been
35:04rebuilt by prisoners
35:05in 1943,
35:07dysentery,
35:08lice,
35:09and 15 months
35:10of German rations
35:11behind him.
35:13And he was still
35:14walking.
35:15That is not a figure
35:16of speech either.
35:17The men who could not walk
35:19did not finish.
35:21The march as a whole
35:22ran 86 days
35:23and ended
35:24in the first days of May.
35:26Gene Moran's own march
35:27ended sooner
35:28on a road
35:29in central Germany
35:29outside a town
35:30called Bitterfeld
35:31on the 26th of April,
35:331945.
35:35It ended in a way
35:36that not one man
35:37in that column
35:38had let himself picture
35:39out loud.
35:40Because after 17 months
35:41hope
35:42is a thing you ration
35:44more carefully
35:44than bread.
35:46And the first American
35:47who spoke to Gene Moran
35:48that day
35:49had no idea
35:50who he was talking to
35:51or what the man
35:52in front of him
35:53had done
35:53on the 29th of November,
35:551943.
35:56April 26th, 1945
35:59on a road
36:00near Bitterfeld
36:00in the middle
36:01of a Germany
36:02that had stopped functioning.
36:04American ground troops
36:05came up that road
36:06and the column
36:07of scarecrows
36:08walking toward them
36:09turned out
36:10to be their own.
36:1217 months.
36:14That is the number.
36:1617 months
36:17from the morning
36:17a German doctor
36:18decided he was not
36:20worth a surgeon
36:20to an American uniform
36:22on a road
36:23in Saxony.
36:24He came home
36:26to Wisconsin.
36:27He was discharged
36:28on the 1st of December,
36:291945
36:30as a staff sergeant
36:32with two Purple Hearts
36:33and an air medal.
36:35He married Margaret Finley
36:37everybody called her Peg
36:38and they raised
36:40nine children
36:41in Soldiers Grove.
36:43And then he did
36:44the most ordinary thing
36:45imaginable
36:46with the rest of it.
36:48He carried the mail.
36:4930 years
36:50on a rural route
36:52in Crawford County.
36:53He was a volunteer
36:55firefighter
36:55and then fire chief.
36:57He was a charter member
36:59of the 1st rescue squad
37:00in the area.
37:01He sat on the county board
37:03for 20 years.
37:04Notice what is not
37:06in that list.
37:07For more than 60 years,
37:10Gene Moran did not
37:11tell the story
37:12you have just heard.
37:13Not to his neighbors,
37:15not in the Legion Hall
37:16where he was a member
37:17for nearly 70 years,
37:19not in any full way
37:21to his nine children.
37:23The plate was still
37:24in his head.
37:25The headaches never left.
37:27He slept badly.
37:29He had come home
37:30in 1945
37:31to a country
37:32with no word
37:33for what was wrong
37:34with him.
37:35And so he did
37:36what that generation did,
37:37which was to get up
37:38in the morning
37:39and carry the mail.
37:41What finally opened it
37:42was a neighbor.
37:43John Armbruster
37:45taught high school history
37:46a few miles away
37:47and he started
37:48sitting down with Gene
37:49and he brought a recorder.
37:51It took 11 years
37:53and 28 recorded conversations.
37:56That is what it cost
37:57to get this story
37:58out of one man.
38:0011 years of Tuesdays.
38:02The book that came out
38:04of it is called
38:04Tailspin
38:05and it was published
38:06in 2022.
38:08Gene did not live
38:09to see it.
38:11He died on the 23rd
38:12of March, 2014
38:13at 89 years old
38:15in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin.
38:17Before we finish,
38:19the other nine men
38:20on Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
38:21because they have been
38:22in this story
38:22the whole time
38:23without being named.
38:25The pilot,
38:262nd Lieutenant
38:27Linwood Langley.
38:28The co-pilot,
38:29Lieutenant Burline Sipresso.
38:31The bombardier,
38:332nd Lieutenant Don Curtis.
38:35The engineer,
38:37Technical Sergeant
38:37Walt Reed.
38:39The radio operator,
38:41Technical Sergeant
38:42Sam Amatuli.
38:43The ball turret gunner,
38:46Staff Sergeant
38:46Wilbert Provost.
38:48The waste gunners,
38:50Staff Sergeant
38:50Anderson King
38:51and Staff Sergeant
38:53Edmund Suido.
38:55Eight men,
38:56all killed
38:57on the 29th of November,
38:591943.
39:00The 9th,
39:02the navigator,
39:032nd Lieutenant
39:04Jesse Orison,
39:05got his parachute open
39:06and spent the rest
39:07of the war
39:08a prisoner.
39:08And in Psyche,
39:09Germany,
39:10in 2018,
39:1175 years after
39:13a burning American bomber
39:14came apart
39:15over their town,
39:16local people
39:17put up a marker
39:18in a clearing
39:19along a walking trail
39:20near where the wreckage
39:21came down.
39:22It is written
39:23in two languages.
39:25In Remembrance of the Dead
39:27and Survivors,
39:28it says,
39:29as a symbol
39:30of the futility
39:31of armed conflict,
39:32as a commitment
39:33to a peaceful planet.
39:36The Germans built that,
39:38which,
39:39given how this story started,
39:40is worth a moment.
39:43One thing never got recovered.
39:45Nobody knows the names
39:47of the two Serbian doctors.
39:49They worked seven hours
39:50on a 19-year-old American
39:52they had no reason
39:53to care about,
39:54put a plate of metal
39:55in his skull,
39:56and then vanished
39:57back into the prisoner system
39:58that held them.
40:00Nine children
40:01were born in Wisconsin
40:02because of what
40:03those two men did
40:04in a room in Germany
40:05in December of 1943,
40:07and we cannot write
40:09their names on anything.
40:11So here is the answer
40:13to the question
40:13we started with,
40:14as simply as it can be put.
40:17The fall was the easy part.
40:19It took two and a half minutes
40:21and it was over,
40:22and trees did most of the work.
40:24What it cost Gene Moran
40:26to stay alive afterwards
40:27took 17 months,
40:29600 miles,
40:31and then 60 years
40:32of not talking about it
40:34in a small town
40:35in Wisconsin.
40:36He fell four miles
40:38and lived.
40:40Then he did the much harder thing,
40:42which was the rest of his life.
40:45Thank you for staying
40:46to the end of this one.
40:47If it held you,
40:48hit the like button.
40:49It helps this story
40:50reach other people
40:51who would want to hear it.
40:53Subscribe and turn on the bell
40:54if you want more of these.
40:56Are you watching
40:57from the United States?
40:58United Kingdom?
41:00Canada?
41:01Australia?
41:02Tell me in the comments
41:03where you're listening from.
41:04And if your father,
41:06grandfather,
41:06or uncle
41:07served in the Second World War,
41:09put his name
41:10and his unit below.
41:12I read them.
41:12It's how a man
41:14like Eugene Moran,
41:15who fell four miles
41:17into Germany
41:17and then said nothing
41:19for 60 years,
41:20doesn't disappear
41:21into silence.
41:22going in the middle of hisoustbes.
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