- 2 days ago
Why did German train drivers jump from moving locomotives at the sound of an American fighter? This wartime history story traces how low-flying P-47 Thunderbolts turned railway crews, freight trains, and passenger lines into moving targets across Belgium, France, and Germany.
Using mission reports, Luftwaffe interrogations, and German railway records, the narration follows the shift from bomber escort to rail attack, the rule that passenger trains could be hit only at the locomotive, and the desperate countermeasures that followed: armored cabs, flak guns on flatcars, night running, and stop-and-jump drills. It also shows why those defenses worked sometimes, failed often, and still could not stop the rail war.
This is military history and WW2 documentary narration built around one sharp question: how a single sound changed railway behavior on the Western Front. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy World War 2 stories, aircraft versus trains, battlefield logistics, and detailed historical analysis.
SEO: WW2 stories, military history narration, World War 2 documentary, German railway history, P-47 Thunderbolt attacks, rail war in Europe, Luftwaffe records, and historical storytelling for listeners who enjoy battlefield logistics, aviation history, and calm long-form history content.
Using mission reports, Luftwaffe interrogations, and German railway records, the narration follows the shift from bomber escort to rail attack, the rule that passenger trains could be hit only at the locomotive, and the desperate countermeasures that followed: armored cabs, flak guns on flatcars, night running, and stop-and-jump drills. It also shows why those defenses worked sometimes, failed often, and still could not stop the rail war.
This is military history and WW2 documentary narration built around one sharp question: how a single sound changed railway behavior on the Western Front. It is ideal for listeners who enjoy World War 2 stories, aircraft versus trains, battlefield logistics, and detailed historical analysis.
SEO: WW2 stories, military history narration, World War 2 documentary, German railway history, P-47 Thunderbolt attacks, rail war in Europe, Luftwaffe records, and historical storytelling for listeners who enjoy battlefield logistics, aviation history, and calm long-form history content.
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LearningTranscript
00:00May 21, 1944. Around noon, six miles southwest of Malmody, in the hills of eastern Belgium,
00:081st Lieutenant Raymond Walsh is holding a seven-ton P-47 Thunderbolt under a gray ceiling
00:142,000 feet above the ground, and below him, on one stretch of track, are two freight trains.
00:20He has never been ordered to do this before. None of them have. For most of a year, American
00:27fighter pilots flying out of England have had one job. Stay high. Stay beside the bombers. Keep
00:33the German fighters off them. This morning, the order is different. Go down. Find anything that
00:40moves on rails. Stop it. Walsh picks the lead locomotive of the first train and pushes the
00:47nose over. Now think about the two men on that engine. A driver and a fireman, standing on an
00:54open footplate behind a boiler full of steam. They can't steer. They can't leave the track.
01:00They can't stop in less than several hundred yards. And over the noise of their own machine,
01:05they can barely hear anything at all. Until the one thing they can hear is already on top of them.
01:12Walsh opens fire with eight heavy machine guns. His squadron's intelligence officer wrote down
01:17what happened next in one flat line. Strikes were seen entering the boiler, and the locomotive blew
01:24up. Behind him, Lt. James Hoskins takes the engine pushing at the rear of the same train.
01:30The report's word for that one is disintegrated. Lt. Willie Whitman, on Hoskins' wing, takes the
01:37locomotive of the second train. One flight of four aircraft. Three locomotives. And nobody on the
01:44ground fires back with anything heavier than a rifle. Here is why that matters. Those four
01:50thunderbolts were a tiny piece of more than 1,200 Allied fighters turned loose over France, Belgium,
01:57and Germany on that single day. And within a few months, German railwaymen would have a drill for
02:03the moment an American fighter came down at them. Throw the brake. Jump. Skilled men, proud of their trade,
02:10abandoning a moving locomotive on a sound alone. How a sound came to mean that is the question for
02:16the next hour. And the answer isn't simply fear. If you want the full account of what American fighter
02:23pilots did to the German railways, and what it costs them, a like and a subscription help this
02:28channel keep digging for it. So why that day? Because the plan was failing. For weeks, Allied heavy
02:36bombers had been pounding the rail yards of France to seal off Normandy before the invasion.
02:41On May 20th, Eisenhower's own intelligence staff reported that the bombing was not yet producing
02:47the effect everyone had counted on. Yards were wrecked. Trains still ran. And the landings were 16 days
02:54away. That same day, the Allied air commander, Lee Mallory, approved something the air staffs had been
03:01uneasy about. Fighters, at low level, against moving trains. The pilots gave it a name off a Glenn Miller
03:09record. Chattanooga Choo Choo. There was one rule in the briefing, and I want you to hold on to it,
03:16because it comes back. A freight train could be shot up from end to end. On a passenger train,
03:22the pilot could hit one thing only. The locomotive. We know that rule was real, and we know it from
03:29an unusual
03:30source. German interrogators questioned American pilots shot down during these sweeps, and on May 30th,
03:38the Luftwaffe sent the result by teleprinter to Goering's headquarters. Freight trains. All of it.
03:44Passenger trains. The engine only. Think about what that rule does. It takes a campaign against a railway,
03:52and narrows it to the one place where two men are standing. Now the bill. And these are the German
03:59numbers, not the American ones. Over Germany that day, American pilots came home claiming 91
04:05locomotives destroyed. The Luftwaffe's own situation report admitted 70 destroyed and 33 damaged.
04:13103 engines out of service between 11 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon. And a German railway report
04:20for the same day, quoted after the war by a German flak historian, gives the figure that matters most
04:27for our question. Sixteen railway men killed. Eighty wounded. In four hours. A locomotive carries two
04:36men. Do that arithmetic the way a driver in a depot canteen would have done it that evening.
04:42But the Germans were not helpless, and on that first day they proved it. Go back to Belgium.
04:48Five miles north of Walsh, the squadron's operations officer, Captain Henry Sheralds,
04:54a Mississippian with the drawl to match, had found something no fighter pilot expected to see.
05:00Five trains inside a ten-mile circle. He went after all five locomotives, at least two passes each.
05:08The first train, nothing. The second, nothing. On the third, one of the cars was not carrying freight.
05:16It was carrying a gun and a crew, and a single burst went into the engine of Sheralds' thunderbolt.
05:22He was deep in Belgium, with a damaged engine and the English Channel still ahead of him.
05:27And he had company. The 8th Air Force lost 27 fighters over Germany that day,
05:33nearly all of them to guns on the ground. So before any German engine driver learned to jump,
05:39the German railway tried something else. It tried to make the hunters pay.
05:44Whether Henry Sheralds got home is the first part of that story.
05:48The second part is what that car on the third train turned into over the following weeks,
05:53and why, in the end, the men on the footplate decided their best defense
05:57was not the gun riding behind them. It was their own ears.
06:01Henry Sheralds did the only thing he could.
06:04He pointed the thunderbolt west and started trading height for distance.
06:09The engine was failing, not dead. For the better part of 200 miles, the three pilots of his flight,
06:15Lieutenants Ellis, Cobb, and Gray, stayed with him and talked him along on the radio.
06:20He reached the French coast, south of Boulogne, and there, with the channel in front of him,
06:26the engine quit. He glided out over the water, as far as the aircraft would carry him,
06:32about four miles, and went over the side. His flight circled the spot and gave Air Sea Rescue
06:39a fix. Thirty minutes later, he was pulled out of the channel. Within the hour, he was ashore
06:46in England, and he was back at his own field not long after the first aircraft of the mission had
06:52landed. The group's history preserves what he told his commanding officer, drawl and all.
06:59I thought I'd drown, sir. The squadron told that story for a long time, but look at what it
07:06actually contains. One gun, on one railway car, firing one burst, had destroyed a seven-ton fighter
07:14and very nearly killed the man flying it. On the first day of the campaign, both sides had been
07:20handed a lesson. The Germans had learned that a train could bite. The Americans had learned that
07:26every train had to be treated as if it would. Neither side stopped. Four days later, on May 25th,
07:34more than 600 8th Air Force fighters went after trains in France and Belgium. On May 29th, 571 of
07:43them ranged as far as eastern Germany and Poland. Then June 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, over France again.
07:52Here is the count the American official history gives for the two weeks after the order was signed.
07:59About 475 locomotives damaged, and the lines cut in 150 places. Now I need to correct a picture you
08:07may have in your head. In France, in May of 1944, most of the men standing on those footplates were
08:14not German. They were French railwaymen, civilians, working their own railway under occupation,
08:21hauling whatever the occupier ordered them to haul. And the American pilots had found a new method.
08:28When a train stopped, a fighter would drop its external fuel tank onto the cars, come back around,
08:34and set the fuel alight with its guns. The official history says it plainly. French train crews deserted
08:42in large numbers, especially after that began. Anyone who has spent 30 seconds imagining that
08:48footplate will understand why. And some of the same railwaymen were doing something else with what they
08:54saw. Reports of the damage were reaching Allied intelligence through the resistance. So the German
09:01command had trains, track, and nobody willing to drive. Its answer was the obvious one. On the most dangerous
09:09runs, it put Germans on the engines. Mark that moment, because it is where our question really
09:16begins. From late May of 1944, the man on the footplate in northern France, straining to hear
09:23something over his own boiler, is more and more often a German railwayman. He did not volunteer for a
09:30front line. The front line came to him at 300 miles an hour. His superiors gave him a second answer,
09:37and for a while it looked like a good one. The dark. After May 26th, daylight running on the French
09:45railways was sharply reduced. And this is the detail I'd ask you to stop on. It was reduced even where
09:52the lines were unbroken. Picture it. The track is intact. The engine is in steam. The cargo is urgent.
10:00The front is waiting for it. And the train sits in a siding. Because the sun is up. No fighter
10:08fired a
10:09shot at that train. It didn't have to. The Allies measured the result with an index, with the traffic
10:16of January and February set at 100. On May 19th, after weeks of heavy bombing, the figure stood at 69.
10:25On June 9th, it was 38. By the middle of July, 23. The cost went beyond trains. Field Marshal von
10:35Rundstedt pulled 18,000 laborers off the construction of the Atlantic Wall and sent them to repair
10:40railways. In May, he pulled 10,000 more. Those were men who had been pouring concrete on the invasion
10:48coast. Then the invasion came, and the German army had to move toward it on a railway that ran in
10:54the
10:54dark or not at all. The 2nd Panzer Division had 160 miles to cover. It arrived on June 13th, a
11:03week
11:03after the landings. The 2nd SS Panzer Division arrived on June 26th. On the day those tanks were needed,
11:11they were somewhere behind the front, waiting for nightfall. So here is where the contest stands in
11:17the summer of 1944. The American fighter owns the day. The German railway has retreated into the night
11:25and is surviving there. And notice what has not happened yet. Nobody is jumping. A crew that runs
11:33only in darkness doesn't need a drill for a daylight attack. The night worked for one reason. Distance.
11:40The fighters were coming from England, and a June night in northern France is short, but it was long
11:46enough. In August, that distance collapsed. The front broke open, and the American fighter groups moved
11:53onto French fields, then Belgian ones. By the middle of September, American troops stood on the German
12:00border in front of Aachen. The hunters were no longer in hours flying away from the German railway. They
12:06were minutes away, and the railway they were now hunting was the Reichsbahn itself, on its own soil,
12:12which could not live on night trains alone. In Aachen that autumn, the head of a locomotive maintenance
12:19office, a man named Bernhard Pollock, sat down to report what American fighters were doing to his engines.
12:27One sentence in that report is the most candid judgment any German official wrote about this
12:32whole campaign, and it explains why the dark stopped being enough. Before we open that report,
12:37there is one piece of unfinished business from the first day.
12:42August 19, 1944. Ten miles northwest of Paris. Henry Scherlds is a major now, with the distinguished
12:50flying cross and an air medal with 12 oak leaf clusters. His squadron is coming home from a strike
12:57on barges in the Seine at Mont Gassicourt, low on fuel and low on ammunition, when a formation of Messerschmitt
13:05109s comes down on his flight. The group's history records the rest in six words. Major Scherlds went down in
13:14flames.
13:16Three months earlier, the channel had given him back. The group remembered August 19 as one of its most
13:22sorrowful days, and there is a marker to him today in the forest at Werner-sur-Seine. I put that
13:28here for
13:29a reason. From this point on, we will be looking at the campaign largely through German paperwork,
13:34because that is where the answer to our question is written down. Keep in mind who was on the other
13:40end
13:41of it. The fighter in the sky over those trains was not a machine. It was a man like Scherlds.
13:46And the
13:47low-level war used those men up. Now, Aachen. By the second week of September, the American front had
13:55reached the German border, and the fighter groups that had started the summer in England were flying
13:59from fields in France and Belgium. From August on, German railway records describe a new pattern in the
14:06hill country behind Aachen, the Eiffel. Small flights of American fighters, a handful of aircraft at a
14:13time, ranging along the lines in full daylight and hunting one thing above all others, the locomotive.
14:21Bernhard Polak ran the locomotive maintenance office at Aachen. Every engine those flights caught
14:27came back to him, towed, if it came back at all. That autumn, he wrote up what he had seen,
14:32and here is the sentence. I'm giving it to you in translation, as close to his wording as I can.
14:38In itself, the strafing attack is the most effective and cheapest means of largely shutting down a
14:43railway. Read that again as what it is. That is not a soldier complaining about the enemy. That is a
14:50railway engineer giving a professional opinion, and the opinion is that the Americans had found the
14:55right tool. Why cheapest? Polak's own figures explain it. A locomotive caught by a fighter's guns,
15:03he noted, could come in with 200 to 300 hits in it. 200 holes do not make a wreck. The
15:11frame is sound,
15:12the wheels turn. But the engine cannot make steam, so it cannot move itself, and it is standing on the
15:18main line with a train behind it. That was the real damage, and Polak said so. The problem was less
15:26any one engine than the number of them knocked out at once, because a dead locomotive is also a cork
15:32in the track. Nothing passes until another engine arrives to drag it clear, and that engine has to
15:38come out in daylight, under the same sky. On the line the Germans called the Wendbahn, which ran along the
15:44border south of Aachen, 10 locomotives were lost to these attacks in a single day. Compare the two
15:51sides of that exchange. To close a railway with bombers, you send hundreds of aircraft and thousands
15:57of tons against a marshalling yard, and repair gangs have it running again in days. To close it Polak's way,
16:05you send four fighters and a few thousand rounds of machine gun ammunition. That was what he meant by cheap.
16:12So the Reichsbahn went looking for answers, and by now it had three. The first you have already met on
16:19the third train near Malmady. Guns. Light anti-aircraft pieces mounted on flat wagons and coupled into
16:28important trains. 20mm and 37mm. Singly or in fours. The second was armor of a kind. Many of the engines
16:38working the Eiffel were old Prussian machines brought back from the Eastern Front, and they
16:44arrived with improvised shielding fitted around their cabs. The third tells you how seriously the
16:50railway took the first lesson of the campaign. Trains were made up with two empty wagons directly
16:56behind the locomotive. Spacers. The planners had accepted that the engine would be the target,
17:03and they were moving the cargo and the passengers back from the place where the bullets would arrive.
17:09Stop on that for a second. Remember the rule from the American briefing in May,
17:14the one I asked you to hold on to? Passenger trains. The locomotive only.
17:21Four months later, the German railway is building its trains around that rule. It has understood exactly
17:27where the American pilot is going to aim, and it has cleared a space around the spot. But it has
17:33left
17:34two men standing on it. Guns, plate, and a gap. That was the protection a German driver had in September
17:43of 1944, and around September 8, it was tested on the Wendbahn itself. A passenger train, number 2674,
17:52was climbing the grade between Wötchen and Lammersdorf when fighters came down on it. The crew stayed with
17:58the engine. The driver was killed at his controls. What happened next is recorded in one line, and it
18:05deserves more than that. The fireman, alone on the footplate with his driver dead beside him, brought the
18:12train on by himself to St. Vite. The line was open again in about two hours. You can call that
18:19courage,
18:20and it was. You can also see what it taught every crew that heard about it. Staying with the engine
18:27had
18:27saved the train and cost the driver. The very next morning, 25 miles to the east, a senior driver named
18:34Josef Schmitz was called out of a shelter at Euskirchen and handed a train nobody wanted. More than 100 axles,
18:42loaded with ammunition. He was told to take it to a village called Odendorf. What Schmitz did when he got
18:49there, and what he was watching for as he came in, is the first time we can see the other
18:54answer in
18:55action. September 9, 1944. Euskirchen, about 20 miles behind the German border.
19:02The train had been standing in the station since early morning, and it frightened everyone who knew
19:07what was in it. More than 100 axles of ammunition parked among the houses of a town that was now
19:13being
19:13attacked from the air almost daily. If one bomb found it, the railwaymen reckoned, hundreds of homes
19:20would go with it. By seven o'clock, no order had come from the army about where to send it.
19:27At eight,
19:28the dispatch office said to get it ready. Around half past eight, the order arrived. Odendorf,
19:35a village up the line, where two other ammunition trains were already sitting on sidings well away
19:41from the houses. The engine dispatcher went into the shelter and picked a crew. The driver was Josef
19:48Schmitz, a senior man from the village of Derkum. His fireman was Hubert Fuchs, from Euskirchen itself.
19:55There was no conductor to be had, so a traffic supervisor named Josef Meinin volunteered to ride
20:01along. The train had no guards van. Meinin climbed into a small brakeman's cabin on one of the ammunition
20:09wagons. They pulled out at about nine. The run was quiet until Odendorf came into view. Now here's the
20:17detail I want you to notice, because it changes how you should read our title. Schmitz did not hear
20:23anything. On a working steam engine, there is very little a driver can hear. What he did was look at
20:30the station ahead of him. The people standing on it had their faces turned up to the sky.
20:36Then they ran, all at once, off the platform and into the fields. That was his warning. Other people's
20:43ears. He threw on the emergency brake. Fuchs went over the side first, landed badly, broke his foot,
20:51and lay beside the track, unable to get up. Schmitz jumped a moment later and came down unhurt.
20:57Then a bomb struck a wagon in the middle of the train. Schmitz flattened himself and was buried in
21:02earth and wreckage. When there was a few seconds' pause between explosions, he crawled, then waited,
21:09then crawled again. About an hour later, he walked into Euskirchen station on his own feet,
21:15in shock. The men there had already written off all three of them. Fuchs had fallen behind an
21:21overturned wagon. Each explosion lifted him off the ground and dropped him back. When it finally
21:28stopped, he shouted until some women passing by found him and got him to a military hospital.
21:33He lived. He never worked on the railway again. Josef Meinen, in his cabin on the train, had no way
21:41to
21:42jump. He was almost certainly killed by the first wagon that went up. The railway men of Euskirchen
21:48kept his memory for decades. One caution about the source. This account was set down in a Cologne
21:55newspaper eleven years later by a local journalist, Hermann Witt, and it calls the aircraft only low-flying
22:01attackers. It does not say whose they were. I can tell you that this was the sector in front
22:07of the American First Army, in the same week and the same hills as the attacks Pollock was reporting
22:12from Aachen. I can't tell you the squadron, and I won't guess. But look at the arithmetic of that
22:18morning. The two men who jumped lived. The man who couldn't jump died. The day before, on the Venbon,
22:26a crew had stayed with the engine and the driver was killed where he stood. By that autumn, it was
22:32no longer left to a driver's instinct. German railway accounts of the Eiffel describe the
22:37instruction crews were given. If a low-level attack threatens, make an emergency stop and jump clear.
22:44And there was a second half. If the locomotive can still run afterward and the train cannot,
22:50uncouple and take the engine away alone. So there is the drill, written down. You might think we have
22:58our answer. We don't. We have a harder question. Think about who issued that instruction. The Reichsbahn,
23:06in the autumn of 1944, was short of locomotives, short of wagons, short of everything. And it has just
23:14told its crews, in effect, to stop the train in the open and walk away from it. A railway does
23:21not give
23:21that order lightly. To see what it was giving up, you have to go back up into the cockpit.
23:28October 22nd, 1944, near Hagenau. A flight from the 406th Fighter Group, the same group Walsh and
23:37Sheralds had flown with over Malmedie, is on armed reconnaissance when it finds two trains, each 50
23:43cars or longer, loaded with half-tracks and trucks. A train at speed is a hard target. A train that
23:52has
23:52stopped is not. The pilots made several bombing runs. Then they strafed. Then, the squadron history says,
24:01they made eight more passes over what it calls the crazy quilt disorder of railroad cars, to be sure.
24:09The photographs afterwards showed a mass of twisted steel under a column of smoke.
24:14That is the other side of the drill. Every time a crew braked and jumped, the two men lived,
24:19and the American pilot was handed a stationary train and all the time he wanted. And there were more and
24:26more American pilots. In October alone, the 9th Air Force flew over 16,000 fighter and fighter-bomber
24:34sorties, against fewer than 2,000 by its bombers. So the German railway had made a trade, and made it
24:41deliberately. It was paying in trains to keep something else. What that something was is the heart of this
24:48story, and we are not there yet. Because in the last weeks of that autumn, Germany needed its railway for
24:54one more enormous job, on those same Eiffel lines, under that same sky. And the men planning it,
25:02believed they had finally found a way to make the sound go away.
25:06November 30th, 1944. Over the German town of Reit, west of the Rhine, an American reconnaissance pilot,
25:14flying low under a broken sky, counts 25 railway flat cars standing in the open. Every one of them is
25:22carrying a tank. On the same day, another pilot reports 20 more on the branch line south of
25:29Oiskirchen, the town Josef Schmitz had walked back into 11 weeks earlier. Those 20 are loaded with tigers.
25:38Three days later, the count between Cologne and Limburg is 170 flat cars.
25:44The pilots are reporting exactly what they see. What none of them can see is the size of the thing
25:51they are looking at. The edge of. Because for every train an American pilot counted that month,
25:57there were dozens he never saw. And that was not luck. It was the most careful piece of work the
26:04German railway did in the entire war. It had started in September, when Hitler's transport chief,
26:09General Rudolf Gerke, was let into the small circle of men who knew that Germany was going to attack in
26:16the Ardennes. Gerke's problem was simple to state. He had to carry an army group into the Eiffel,
26:22over the very lines where Polak was counting holes in his engines, without the Americans noticing,
26:28and without the fighters getting at it. Look at how he went about it, because every measure is a lesson
26:34the Weissbahn had learned from American fighter pilots since May. First, a line was drawn on the
26:41map from Bremen through Kassel to Ulm, 150 to 200 miles behind the front. West of that line, no train
26:50moved while Allied aircraft could see it. Only in darkness. Or in weather. Second, and this is the
26:58detail I find most telling, small country stations were connected directly to the German Weather Service,
27:04a station master in the Eiffel could be told that fog was settling in his valley for the next three
27:09hours and release a train into it. Third, trains were timed to run forward to the unloading point,
27:17empty out, and be back on the far side of the Rhine before first light. Where they couldn't make it,
27:24they were pushed into tunnels and under the forest. And fourth, the American official history of the
27:32battle records it in a single sentence. Locomotive cabs were fitted with light armor, after strafing had
27:39killed crews, and every train carried a light flax section. So everything we have watched the Germans
27:46try is now in one plan. The dark, the plate, the gun. And it worked. Between September 9th and December
27:5715th,
27:591,502 troop trains ran into the concentration area, and about 500 supply trains behind them.
28:07The equivalent of 66 divisions moved by rail. Now compare that with what the air attacks of October
28:15and November destroyed out of all those supplies. 15 carloads. On December 13th, every American
28:23reconnaissance aircraft on that front was grounded by weather. Three days later, the offensive opened
28:29into the fog. If you stopped the story there, you would have to say the railway won. It had found
28:37the
28:37one condition under which the sound never came, and it had built a timetable around it. But think
28:44about what that timetable admits. A national railway, the one its own historians called the best prepared
28:51in the world for a job like this, has organized itself entirely around the hours when a single-seat
28:58American fighter cannot fly. It moves when the stationmaster's telephone says the valley is
29:05blind. The fighter is setting the schedule without leaving the ground. And a schedule like that has
29:11one weakness. It has no answer for a clear day. December 23rd. The weather over the Ardennes broke,
29:20and for five days the sky was open. By then, the Eiffel lines were so choked that reserve divisions
29:27were being unloaded back on the west bank of the Rhine and sent forward on foot. The trains feeding
29:33the offensive now had to run, whether the valley was blind or not. The dark was no longer a choice.
29:41Here is what came down on them. In the nine days from December 23rd to the 31st, the 9th Air
29:49Force
29:49flew 10,305 sorties. Its fighter bomber pilots claimed 620 railway cars and 45 locomotives.
30:00In January, with the weather bad on nearly half the days, the three tactical air commands claimed over
30:063,000 railway cars, 101 locomotives, and 556 cuts in the track. And here is what it cost, because the
30:17flak sections were on every train now, just as Gurkha had ordered. Photographs taken from American
30:23aircraft in late December show the tracer coming up from the wagons, 37mm, in strings.
30:29In those same nine days, the 9th Air Force lost 158 aircraft. In January, one tactical air command noted
30:38that, outside of air combat, nearly all its losses were to guns on the ground. So set that beside the
30:45footplate. The armor on the cab was light. It had been fitted, in the official history's words,
30:51after strafing killed crews. And no source I have found claims it stopped the killing.
30:57The flak car drew the fighters' attention and their fire. And a driver in the last week of
31:02December had no fog to hide in. For the first time since the summer, the daylight drill was the
31:08only thing left to him. Break and jump. Captured German officers told American
31:15interrogators that winter that they still had freedom of movement at night because the Americans
31:20had so few night fighters. That was true, and it was the last piece of shelter the railway had.
31:26In January, the American and British air commanders sat down with a plan to take the rest away.
31:32Every aircraft they had, over every corner of Germany, on a single day, against stations in
31:39small towns that had never heard a bomb. And one of the questions they expected that day to settle is
31:45the one this whole story has been circling. The French crews had walked away in May. Would the German
31:51crews finally do the same? January 1st, 1945. Before we get to the plan itself, you should know that the
31:59hardest words written about it came from an American general. Ira Eaker commanded the Allied air forces
32:06in the Mediterranean, and he had been asked for his view. He put it in a letter to General Spatz.
32:12Sending the bombers against railway stations in small German towns, he argued, would kill civilians
32:18in places with no other military value, and he did not want the record of this war to show American
32:24airmen
32:24doing that. The British chief of air staff had a colder objection. He thought it simply wouldn't
32:31work, and that every bomb would be better spent on oil. They were outvoted. The plan was called Clarion,
32:39and the idea behind it was the one we have been following since Malmody, enlarged to the size of a
32:45country. Bombing the big rail centers had been tried. Hunting trains with fighters had been tried. And
32:52Polack in Aachen had called it the cheapest way there was to close a railway. Clarion would do both,
32:58everywhere, at the same hour. February 22nd, 1945. Close to 9,000 Allied aircraft took off from England,
33:09France, Belgium, Holland, and Italy. The 8th Air Force sent its heavy bombers in at around 10,000 feet,
33:17less than half their usual height, broken into small formations against several dozen towns in central
33:23Germany. From Italy, the 15th sent more than 700 heavies across an area 300 miles long. The 9th Air
33:32Force's medium bombers went for 46 railway bridges, 12 marshalling yards, and 11 stations. And beneath all of
33:41it, more than a thousand fighters of the three tactical air commands spread out along the lines
33:47to do what Walsh had done over Belgium nine months earlier. For thousands of German railwaymen that
33:54morning, in districts the war in the air had passed over, the sound arrived for the first time. The next
34:01day, it was done again. When the claims were added up, they came to 150 marshalling yards damaged, about 500
34:09breaks in the track, and roughly 300 locomotives destroyed. In many parts of the Reich, railway traffic
34:17simply stopped. For about three days.
34:21And now the verdict. And I'd ask you to listen closely to the wording, because this is the American official
34:28history speaking about its own operation. When the intelligence staffs studied the results, they found no
34:35general breakdown. They found no sign that the repair organization had been overwhelmed. And they found
34:42no evidence, in its words, that train crews were deserting in significant numbers.
34:49There is the answer to the question the planners had asked. The French crews had walked away in May.
34:55The German crews, after nine months of this, with 300 engines shot out from under them in two days,
35:02went back to work. Somebody at a headquarters press conference afterward summed up the whole effort
35:07as trying to injure the morale of a people who had no morale. It's a sharp line. It is also,
35:14I think,
35:15wrong about the railwaymen. And the evidence that it's wrong is that they kept turning up.
35:20So we have a real puzzle now. And it is sharper than the one we started with.
35:25These are men who abandon a moving locomotive at the sound of an aircraft engine.
35:30And they are also men who cannot be driven off the railway by the largest air operation ever aimed at
35:36it.
35:37Both things are true of the same people in the same month. Any explanation has to cover both.
35:45Before I give you mine, one more scene, because it shows you what the contest looked like at the very
35:51end from the seat the Americans were sitting in. March 12, 1945, over Western Germany.
35:59Colonel Leo Moon commands the 404th Fighter Group. And that day he is leading from the front in a
36:05thunderbolt carrying rockets. He finds a train and puts four rockets into it. The locomotive is damaged and
36:12two tank cars begin to burn. Then he notices smoke, a little way off, rising beside a short tunnel.
36:20A second train is standing in that tunnel with its tail sticking out of the far end.
36:26You'll recognize the trick. It is Gekka's instruction from the autumn, a train tucked
36:31under a hillside to wait out the daylight. Moon takes the smoke for the engine and he dives and
36:37fires at the base of it. And then he understands what he is looking at. The smoke is not coming
36:43from a
36:43locomotive. It is gun smoke, from a flak car in the middle of the train. And the gun is firing
36:51at him.
36:52He described the next seconds afterward. The flak, he said, sounded like hail on a tin roof as it hit
37:00his plane. 20mm shells went through his left wing. One shot out a brake. Another carried away the tube
37:08that feeds his airspeed indicator and left a hole where it had been. Moon banked around, strafed the
37:13cars anyway and pulled up into the overcast. His ground crew had the aircraft flying again within
37:18a few days. Put that scene next to the first one. Over Malmedy, in May, nobody had fired at Raymond
37:26Walsh with anything bigger than a rifle. Ten months later, a group commander attacks a train that is
37:33hiding in a tunnel behind an armored cab with a gun crew riding in the middle. And he gets his
37:38aircraft
37:39shot full of holes for it. The Germans had answered everything. And the trains were still burning.
37:46Because that same month, the fighter bombers were turned loose on the railways around the Ruhr,
37:51in the official histories phrase, as they had been in northern France ten months before.
37:57By the third week of March, 14 of the 18 bridges on the list were down, and 20 of the
38:0325 main yards
38:04had stopped working. So the dark had failed them, the plate had failed them, and the gun had failed them.
38:11One German answer was still in use on the last day of the war. And it was the one that
38:16looks,
38:16at first glance, like surrender. It wasn't. It was the only move the Reichsbahn made in this entire
38:24contest that actually protected the thing it could not afford to lose. Start with the thing the German
38:30railway could not afford to lose. It was not the locomotive. Go back to the very first day, May 21st,
38:38and the German figures. 103 engines destroyed or damaged over Germany. 16 railwaymen dead, and 80 wounded.
38:48A German historian who studied that day, Helmut Schnatz, worked out the rate. Roughly one railway man
38:56killed for every seven trains attacked. One wounded for every two. Now set that against what Polak told us.
39:04An engine could come back to his shops with two or three hundred holes in it. And his worry was
39:10the
39:11blocked line, not the engine. Boilers can be patched. And for most of the war, as the American official
39:18history notes, the Reichsbahn had made good its losses in rolling stock by taking what it needed from the
39:24occupied countries. It could not requisition engine drivers. A senior driver like Josef Schmitz was the
39:32product of many years on the footplate. And the Reichsbahn had already watched, at close range,
39:37what happens to a railway when those men go. It had happened in France in May. The track was there.
39:45The engines were there. The crews were gone. And the Germans had to bring in their own men to move
39:51anything at all. So look at the drill again with that in mind. Emergency stop. Jump clear. Afterward,
40:00if the engine still runs, uncouple it and bring it away. Every line of that instruction is ranking what
40:08matters. The cargo is last. The locomotive is second. The two men are first. That was the trade I told
40:18you
40:18about. The railway was paying in trains to keep its crews. But a drill only makes sense if it works.
40:27Why would a man be any safer in a ditch 30 yards from the track than behind steel plate on
40:32the footplate?
40:34Here is where the rule I asked you to hold on to in the first few minutes finally comes back.
40:39The American pilot was aiming at the locomotive. On a passenger train. By order. At nothing else.
40:47On any train. The engine first. And that order was not left to conscience alone. The Luftwaffe's
40:54interrogation report on the pilots captured in May noted how the Americans policed their own claims.
41:00The built-in camera, it said, is the incorruptible witness. Every burst was filmed.
41:08According to that same report, a pilot who had raked a passenger train from end to end,
41:13against orders, was fined and taken off flying for a week.
41:19Think about what that discipline meant on the ground. The fire from an American fighter did not
41:25fall at random along a quarter mile of train. It arrived, hundreds of rounds of it, on one object
41:32about 60 feet long. Anyone standing on that object was in the worst place in Germany.
41:40Anyone who had left it was beside the target and no longer part of it.
41:46There was a recollection from the village of Borktan in Bavaria that shows it. The driver pulled the
41:52emergency brake. He and his firemen went out of the cab and got down under the engine itself. The
41:58fighters came in and shot up the locomotive above them. That is the answer to the question in our title,
42:04or the first half of it. The German driver jumped at that sound because the men making it had been
42:11ordered, and could be trusted, to shoot at the machine. I'll be careful here. No American briefing
42:18said, spare the crews, and plenty of crews died. The pilots were told to kill locomotives.
42:26But a rule that narrows the fire to one spot also tells a man exactly which spot to leave.
42:33German railwaymen learn to read the American rulebook from underneath, and they bet their
42:38lives on it thousands of times. And it explains the second half of the puzzle,
42:44the one Clarion left us with. Why did these men keep coming back when the French crews had not?
42:51Part of it is plain. The French were civilians hauling an occupier's freight, and owed him nothing.
42:57But I think there is something else, and I'll mark it as my reading of the evidence, not a document.
43:04In France in May, there was no drill. A crew that stayed on the engine took the fire,
43:09and a crew that left was deserting. There was nothing in between.
43:14By autumn, the German railwayman had been given something in between.
43:17He could abandon the train and still be doing his duty. A man can go back to that the next
43:23morning.
43:24And they did. Right through Clarion. Right to the end.
43:28So was the drill a German success? For the crews, yes. For Germany, look at what it cost.
43:35A railway whose standing instruction is to stop wherever it happens to be, whenever an American
43:41fighter is heard, has handed its timetable to the enemy. We watched it happen. First,
43:47the daylight went. Then, every movement west of a line 200 miles behind the front was tied to a
43:53weather report. Then, every stopped train became a target for eight more passes. And the freight
43:59stopped arriving. Between September and November of 1944, German factories built 2,199 tanks. Fewer than
44:09half reached the army. The railway's own coal reserve, the fuel for its own engines, stood at 18 days in
44:16October. By February, it was about four. By March, in parts of southern Germany, it was less than one,
44:25and locomotives stood cold, with their crews alive and well beside them.
44:32That is what Bernhard Pollock meant by the cheapest means of shutting down a railway.
44:37The American fighter pilot did not have to destroy the Reichsbahn. He had to be audible.
44:43It was cheap in aircraft, compared with a bomber offensive. It was never cheap for the pilots. 27
44:50fighters on the first day. 158 aircraft in nine days of December. Every one of those was a man who
44:59had gone
44:59down to 50 feet, into the guns, to put his fire on a target 60 feet long and nowhere else.
45:07Which brings me back to four thunderbolts under a gray ceiling near Malmody, and to what became of the
45:13men who were in them. The mission of May 21, 1944, did not end over Malmody. It ended, for six
45:21of the
45:21pilots, somewhere over the English Channel, with no land in sight. Major Gordon Fowler had led two
45:28flights down into the same hills that morning, and found nothing left to shoot at. On the way home,
45:34his formation lost its radio bearing. For about 15 minutes, six thunderbolts flew on a compass heading
45:41over open water, low on fuel, until a ground station with the call sign, Coach Ride, gave them a new
45:47course, and brought them into an airfield on the Sussex coast. An hour and a half later, they were
45:54back at their own base. An intelligence officer, First Lieutenant John Wass, sat them down, wrote out
46:01what each man had seen, and signed it. That report is the reason we know any of this. So here
46:09is what
46:09became of the names in it. Raymond Walsh, of Fort Myers, Florida, who put the first burst into the
46:16first boiler, was a captain within weeks. In June, he was on the BBC, describing how he had shot down
46:22a flying bomb off Brighton on his way home from a mission, the first American pilot credited with one.
46:28On June 23, over Normandy, he strafed a German ammunition truck at low level, and it exploded
46:35directly in front of him. A camera caught his thunderbolt in silhouette against the blast.
46:41He flew through it and returned to his base. The photograph is in the National Archives today.
46:48Henry Sheralds, whom the channel gave back in May, was killed on August 19, 10 miles from Paris.
46:55He has his marker in the forest at Verne-sur-Seine. Gordon Fowler stayed with the squadron through the
47:02autumn and the winter. He earned the Silver Star for taking 12 Thunderbolts into more than 30 German
47:08fighters. He was killed in action in the spring of 1945. His Distinguished Service Cross is from March
47:1524, the day the Allied armies crossed the Rhine, and it was awarded after his death.
47:21Of James Hoskins and Willie Whitman, who took the second and third engines that morning,
47:26I have the report and nothing I can put in front of you as fact beyond it. I would sooner
47:31leave it at
47:31that than fill it in. On the other side of the story, Joseph Schmitz, who read the warning in the
47:37faces of the people on the Odendorf platform, went back to driving within a short time. His fireman,
47:44Hubert Fuchs, never worked on a locomotive again, and the railwaymen of Juskirchen went on remembering
47:50Joseph Meinen, who volunteered for a train nobody wanted and rode it in a cabin he could not get out
47:56of. Three men on one train, and the whole of our subject is in what happened to them. The two
48:03who
48:04could jump did. The one who couldn't is the reason the others had been told to. There is one more
48:10pair
48:10I can't name. A driver and a fireman on the lead engine of a freight train six miles southwest of
48:17Malmedy on an open footplate at around noon. The American report gives them no line, and no German
48:23record of them has come to me. We met them in the first two minutes of this story, with nothing
48:28to
48:28protect them and no warning they could act on. Everything the German railway did afterward—the
48:34dark, the plate, the gun, the empty wagons behind the engine, the telephone line to the weather office,
48:41and finally the plain instruction to brake and get off—was built for the men who would
48:46stand where those two stood. And none of it was built until an American pilot came down under the
48:53cloud and showed that it was needed. So let me give you the answer as simply as I can.
48:59German engine drivers jumped at that sound because jumping worked. And it worked because the men in
49:05the cockpits put their fire where they had been told to put it. The Reichsbahn kept its crews that way,
49:11to the last week of the war. What it gave up to keep them was the railway, one-stopped train
49:17at a time.
49:18That is the measure of what the American fighter pilots did. They were not handed an easy target.
49:24They went down to treetop height, day after day, against trains that hid from them,
49:30armored themselves against them, and shot back. They lost 27 aircraft on the first day, and they kept going
49:37down. And inside ten months, the sound of their engines alone was enough to halt a train in open
49:44country, with not a round fired. Bernhard Polack, counting holes in Aachen, called it the cheapest
49:51way to close a railway. He was looking at it from the ground. From the cockpit, it was paid for
49:58in full.
49:59Thank you for staying with this one to the end. If it was worth your time, a like is the
50:05simplest way to
50:05help it reach other people who care about this history. And it does make a difference.
50:10If you'd like more accounts built from the mission reports and the records,
50:14subscribe and turn on the bell so the next one finds you. Tell me in the comments where you're
50:18watching from. And if your father, your grandfather, or an uncle served with the Allied forces in the
50:24Second World War, in the air, or on the ground, write down his name and his unit.
50:30The American fighter pilots in this story are remembered because somebody wrote their
50:35names in a report. I read every one of yours.