- 19 hours ago
German aces mocked the P-47 Thunderbolt as useless — then one disciplined fighter group turned that heavy fighter into a killer and scored 39 victories in a single month. This military history narration follows the 56th Fighter Group, Hub Zemper, and the pilots who learned to stop dogfighting like Spitfire men and start fighting to the Thunderbolt’s strengths: high speed dives, hard hits, and fast escapes.
From early failures over occupied France and Holland to brutal escort missions deep into Germany, the story tracks the shift from frustration to dominance. You’ll hear about Robert Johnson surviving 21 cannon strikes, Bud Mahuran’s attacks on rocket-armed Messerschmitt 110s, and the dangerous reality of bomber escort work during the air war over Europe. It’s a WWII story about tactics, range, survival, and the hard arithmetic of air combat.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 stories, World War 2 history, military aviation, fighter pilot stories, and narrated war documentaries. Also a strong fit for history listening, calm narration, and long-form military history content about the P-47 Thunderbolt, Eighth Air Force, and the air war over Germany.
From early failures over occupied France and Holland to brutal escort missions deep into Germany, the story tracks the shift from frustration to dominance. You’ll hear about Robert Johnson surviving 21 cannon strikes, Bud Mahuran’s attacks on rocket-armed Messerschmitt 110s, and the dangerous reality of bomber escort work during the air war over Europe. It’s a WWII story about tactics, range, survival, and the hard arithmetic of air combat.
Created for listeners searching for WW2 stories, World War 2 history, military aviation, fighter pilot stories, and narrated war documentaries. Also a strong fit for history listening, calm narration, and long-form military history content about the P-47 Thunderbolt, Eighth Air Force, and the air war over Germany.
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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.
41:29Alex.