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A captured P-47 Thunderbolt gave German pilots the rare chance to test the American fighter they had faced over Europe—and their findings revealed both a real weakness and a formidable strength. This World War II aviation documentary follows test pilot Hans Werner Lerche as he evaluates the Thunderbolt, from its sluggish performance at low altitude to its remarkable speed, high-altitude power, and strength in a dive.
Through the experiences of Robert Johnson, William Roach, Günther Rall, and the pilots of the 56th Fighter Group, the story explores how American tactics, range, and endurance shaped the air war. A detailed military history story for anyone interested in WW2 aircraft, Luftwaffe pilots, P-47 performance, and the fighter escort campaign over Europe. Ideal for aviation history listening, historical storytelling, or background listening for fans of narrated World War II documentaries.
Through the experiences of Robert Johnson, William Roach, Günther Rall, and the pilots of the 56th Fighter Group, the story explores how American tactics, range, and endurance shaped the air war. A detailed military history story for anyone interested in WW2 aircraft, Luftwaffe pilots, P-47 performance, and the fighter escort campaign over Europe. Ideal for aviation history listening, historical storytelling, or background listening for fans of narrated World War II documentaries.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the afternoon of November 10th, 1943, on an airfield outside Caen in occupied Normandy,
00:06a German test pilot climbed onto the wing of an American fighter and looked down into its cockpit.
00:12He had flown a long list of enemy aircraft. He had never looked into one like this.
00:18His name was Hans-Werner Lerke, a Hauptmann from the Luftwaffe's test center at Rechlin.
00:24His job was simple to describe and dangerous to do. Fly whatever the enemy left behind,
00:31find out what it could really do, and tell Germany's fighter pilots the truth.
00:37And the machine under his boots was the one every German fighter pilot in the West had been arguing
00:42about since spring. A Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. Not a wreck in a field, a complete airplane,
00:51standing on its own wheels. The first thing that hit him was the size. Lerke later wrote that the
00:59Thunderbolt's fuselage was bigger in cross-section than a pre-war Heinkel high-speed passenger plane.
01:06A fighter, fatter than an airliner. The second thing was the cockpit. And notice what a German
01:13professional chose to put in print. The P-47 cockpit, he wrote, could baffle even an experienced pilot.
01:21Switches he didn't recognize. Hydraulic flaps. A warning lamp for a turbine spinning in the exhaust,
01:28something no German fighter in service carried. And on the instruments, small painted arcs of red
01:35and green, marking where every needle was supposed to sit. Lerke guessed they were there for pilots who
01:41couldn't read English well. Whatever the reason, they told him something. This airplane had been
01:47built for a man who would sit in it for hours, with a great deal to watch and very little
01:52time
01:52to think. Then he noticed the room. After years in the narrow cockpit of a Messerschmitt,
01:59he found the Thunderbolt's cockpit pleasantly surprising and comfortable. He could move his
02:05shoulders. The canopy slid back smoothly. Everyone at Vechlin, Lerke wrote, was eager to see whether
02:11this fighter's performance was really so legendary as it was reported to be. Hold on to that word,
02:18legendary. Because over the following days, Lerke would find two things in this airplane.
02:24One was a weakness, exactly the kind German pilots were hoping for. The other very nearly killed him.
02:32And months later, one of the highest-scoring fighter pilots who ever lived would fly the same type
02:38and come away with a verdict he repeated for the rest of his life. That is what this story is
02:44about.
02:44Not what the Americans said about the Thunderbolt. What the Germans admitted, once they had flown it
02:50themselves. But first, the obvious question. How does an intact American fighter end up parked on a
02:57German airfield in Normandy? Three days earlier, on November 7th, 2nd Lieutenant William E. Roach had
03:04taken off from England with the 358th Fighter Squadron of the 355th Fighter Group. The group
03:11was new to combat. By one account, it was only his third mission. The job was escort over northern
03:17France. On the way home, the weather turned. One record puts the headwinds at more than 100 miles an
03:23hour. And a Thunderbolt, fighting that kind of wind, drinks fuel. Roach lost his bearings in the
03:30murk. The fuel gauge kept dropping. He watched his squadron leader go down in a crash landing.
03:37Then, through the clouds, an airfield. Roach put the big fighter down. A vehicle came out to guide him,
03:45and he followed it to a parking spot and shut down the engine. Only then, as the propeller wound to
03:52a
03:52stop and men gathered around his wing, did he understand. They were German.
03:58Roach would spend the rest of the war behind barbed wire at Stalag Luft 1 on the Baltic coast.
04:05His Thunderbolt, serial number 42-22-490, was given German crosses. And with it, the Luftwaffe got its
04:17first real chance to answer a question it had been fighting over for seven months. If you value the
04:23history of the American airmen who flew the Thunderbolt over Europe, take a second to like
04:28this video and subscribe. It helps keep the story of the U.S. Army Air Forces in front of the
04:33people
04:34who should hear it. So why did the Germans care so much? Because by November 1943, German fighter pilots
04:42had been meeting the Thunderbolt for months. And the picture they had of it didn't add up.
04:47Some called it a flying barrel. Big, heavy, slow to climb. A target. Others had poured a burst into
04:56one that should have finished it, and watched it keep flying. And a few had tried the oldest escape in
05:02the fighter pilot's book. When a German pilot got into trouble against a Spitfire, the standard answer
05:08was to roll over and dive. The Focke-Wulf and the Messerschmitt were fast going downhill. Point the
05:15nose at the ground, open the throttle, and you were gone. On April 15th, 1943, near Ostend on the Belgian
05:23coast, a Focke-Wulf pilot did exactly that with a Thunderbolt behind him. The American was Don Blakesley,
05:30a veteran of the Eagle squadrons, now with the 4th Fighter Group. Blakesley didn't think much of the P-47.
05:36He'd compared it to a truck. He followed the German down anyway. The Focke-Wulf went into the ground
05:43near Ostend, the first enemy fighter ever shot down by a Thunderbolt. Back at base, a fellow pilot
05:50reminded Blakesley he'd been told the Jug could out-dive them. Blakesley gave him one grudging line.
05:56Well, it damn well ought to be able to dive. The German pilot never got to report what he'd learned.
06:02Others would. And what they learned that summer is exactly what Lerke, sitting in that cockpit at Caen,
06:09would now have to test with his own hands. To understand what Lerke was really testing,
06:14you have to go back four and a half months, to a single Thunderbolt and a single German pilot,
06:20who spent an entire flight trying to answer the same question.
06:24June 26, 1943. 48 Thunderbolts of the 56th Fighter Group were escorting B-17s home from a raid on
06:34Villa Kublai Airfield near Paris. In one of them sat 2nd Lieutenant Robert S. Johnson, 23, from Lawton,
06:43Oklahoma. He was the son of an auto mechanic and had once worked as a part-time firefighter.
06:49He had soloed at 12, after less than six hours of instruction. Near Forge-les-aux, 16 Focke-Wulfs
06:58of the 2nd Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 26 came down on the formation from above and behind.
07:04The first pass scattered the Thunderbolts. Listen to what happened to Johnson's
07:09airplane in those few seconds, because every detail is going to matter.
07:1521 20mm cannon shells hit his fighter. The hydraulic lines ruptured. The canopy shattered.
07:22Shrapnel went into his leg and a machine gun round grazed his nose. Hydraulic fluid caught fire in the
07:29cockpit and burned his face, half-blinding him. The Thunderbolt went into a spin. He kicked rudder,
07:37pulled the stick back, and got it level. The fire went out by itself. He tried to bail out. The
07:44canopy
07:45would slide back about six inches and no further. A cannon shell had exploded right behind his headrest
07:51and jammed the frame. He pushed. He hammered. He braced his feet. Six inches. His parachute snagged.
08:01So Johnson did the only thing left. He turned his wrecked airplane toward England and flew.
08:08Near the Channel Coast, a lone Focke-Wulf found him.
08:13Now put yourself in that German pilot's seat for a moment. Below you is an enemy fighter, trailing oil,
08:19its canopy smashed, flying straight and slow. A kill that any pilot in your Stoffel would take without
08:27thinking twice. You line up behind it and fire. It keeps flying. The German came around again.
08:35Johnson skidded the airplane with his rudder to throw off his aim, and once the Focke-Wulf overshot
08:40so badly that Johnson got off a burst of his own. The German circled back. Pass after pass.
08:48At one point, he pulled up alongside, close enough for the two men to see each other.
08:53Then he dropped back and sprayed the thunderbolt from one wingtip to the other. It kept flying.
09:00When the German's guns finally ran dry, he slid up next to Johnson one last time.
09:06He rocked his wings. Then he turned for France and went home.
09:11Some historians have suggested the pilot may have been Egon Mayer,
09:15one of the Luftwaffe's leading aces on the Channel Coast. Nobody has proven it. But the name hardly
09:22matters. What matters is what that man did. He emptied his guns into an American fighter that
09:29couldn't fight back. He looked at it from a few yards away. And then he saluted it. That salute is
09:37the
09:37first German admission in this story. And notice, it wasn't written down anywhere. It was flown.
09:45Johnson brought the thunderbolt down at Manston on the Kent coast. Standing beside it, without even
09:51walking around the airplane, he started counting bullet holes. He passed 200 and stopped counting.
09:58Five days later, he was flying again. Now here is the problem. The same day Johnson's airplane refused
10:06to die, the 56th fighter group lost four pilots killed. Two thunderbolts were written off, and at
10:13least five more were badly damaged. The Germans had come from above, picked their moment, and done real
10:20harm. So the German pilots who fought the thunderbolt that summer came home with two lessons that didn't
10:26fit together. Lesson one. The thing was almost impossible to kill, and you could not dive away
10:32from it. Blakeslee had proven that over Ostend. Lesson two. Catch it slow, catch it low, and catch it
10:41climbing. And it was in trouble. Even the Americans said so. Hub Zemke, who commanded the 56th, admitted the
10:50early thunderbolt accelerated poorly and climbed not too much better from a slow airspeed.
10:56He would spend months building tactics around that problem. Remember Zemke's name. He'll come back
11:02with an answer. So which picture was true? A flying tank that couldn't be killed and couldn't be escaped?
11:09Or a heavy, sluggish target that a well-flown Focke-Wulf could chew up from above?
11:14A fighter pilot in combat can't answer that. He sees a few seconds of a fight, through gun sight glass,
11:20at 400 miles an hour. To answer it, Germany needed a man who could fly the thunderbolt the way its
11:26own
11:27pilots flew it. Climb it, dive it, measure it, and write down the numbers. That man was now standing on
11:34a wing at Caen.
11:36Lerke made his first flight in Roche's Thunderbolt on the afternoon of November 10th.
11:41Then the Normandy weather closed in, and for two days, nothing flew. On the third day, the plan was to
11:47move the thunderbolt east, first to the fighter base at Cormais near Paris, then on into Germany in
11:53Recklin. For the first leg, Lerke didn't fly the American fighter himself. A German fighter ace from
12:00Cormais climbed into the cockpit. Lerke flew escort beside him in a Messerschmitt.
12:05Think about who that pilot was. A man who had spent the year fighting Thunderbolts. A man who knew,
12:12better than any engineer at Recklin, what that airplane looked like in front of his guns.
12:17And on that short hop to Cormais, he came very close to wrecking it. Not because of the weather.
12:24Not because of the engine. Because of something about the American airplane he simply never thought
12:30to check. Lerke was flying a few hundred yards off the Thunderbolt's wing when the two of them
12:34reached Cormais. Below, the airfield. Ahead, the big American fighter turning onto its final approach.
12:42Slowing down. Flaps extended. And its wheels still tucked up inside the wings. On the ground,
12:50the controllers saw it too. They began firing red flares into the sky.
12:55The German pilots had a nickname for them. Radishes. The man in the cockpit was, in Lerke's words,
13:03a highly decorated fighter pilot stationed at Cormais. One of the Luftwaffe's best on the Channel
13:09coast. A man who had spent the year shooting at Thunderbolts. And he was about to belly land the
13:16only intact one Germany owned in front of his own squadron. Lerke pushed his throttle forward,
13:23pulled his Messerschmitt alongside, and lowered his own undercarriage. Then he raised it. And lowered
13:29it again. Look at me. Look at my wheels. The ace understood at once. The Thunderbolt's gear came down.
13:39Both airplanes went around the field one more time and landed without a scratch. Lerke, ever the diplomat,
13:46later suggested the pilot had only wanted to show his comrades how the American fighter handled in slow
13:51flight. Maybe. But remember what Lerke himself had written a few days before about that cockpit.
13:59It could baffle even an experienced pilot. Here was the proof. The most experienced enemy of the
14:06Thunderbolt in the area, inside one for the first time, and the most basic check on approach had slipped
14:12past him. There's a lesson in that small moment, and it runs through this whole story. Knowing an
14:19airplane from behind your gun sight, and knowing it from inside its cockpit, are two completely different
14:25kinds of knowledge. From Cormier, Lerke took over. He flew the Thunderbolt low under poor weather to
14:33Deelen in Holland, where the night fighter crews came out and, as he put it, admired the machine.
14:39He left Deelen around three in the afternoon and reached Rechlin at almost half past four,
14:44circling with his recognition lights on as the mist thickened over the field. And then the measuring
14:50began. Here is the first thing Rechlin wrote down, and I want you to hear it carefully, because every
14:57German fighter pilot who later read it would have felt something close to relief. I could discover
15:03nothing of the speed for which the Thunderbolt was renowned, Lerke wrote, at least not near the ground
15:09level. Down low, he found the American fighter rather lame and sluggish. Rechlin's measurements put
15:17its top speed near the ground at scarcely over 500 kilometers an hour. Call it a bit over 300 miles
15:23an hour.
15:24For a fighter with 2,000 horsepower in its nose, that was a remarkably ordinary number.
15:31The airplane had other habits, too. If you forgot to lock the tailwheel, the big fighter wanted to
15:37swing on the runway. Lerke forgot once, and only just avoided a ground loop on landing.
15:43So, there it was. The weakness the frontline pilots had sensed, now measured by Germany's own test center.
15:52Down low, the legend was just a very large, very heavy airplane. That is admission number one.
16:00And it pointed to an obvious conclusion. If the Thunderbolt is weak near the ground,
16:05then get it near the ground. Fight it low. Fight it slow. There was just one problem with that
16:13conclusion. The Americans had reached it first. Go back to the spring of 1943, to an airfield in
16:21England, and a man named Hub Zemka. Zemka was 28 when he took command of the 56th Fighter Group.
16:29He had been a combat observer in Britain, and had even spent time in Moscow teaching Soviet pilots to
16:34fly American fighters. He came to the Thunderbolt with no illusions. He called the airplane, frankly,
16:41a big disappointment. It needed almost half a mile of runway to get 50 feet into the air.
16:47His group's first fights proved him right. In April, over the Dutch coast, the 56th tangled with
16:53the Germans, scored nothing, and lost two pilots. Zemka didn't ask for a different airplane. He asked a
17:01different question. Not, how do we make this fighter good where it's weak? But, how do we make sure we
17:08never fight where it's weak? The answer became the Wolfpack's whole way of war. Squadrons stacked at
17:17different heights. A low one, a middle one, and a high reserve above them both. Height was everything.
17:24Find the enemy below you. Dive on him with all that weight and speed. Shoot. Then don't stay in turn
17:32with
17:32him. Use the speed from the dive to zoom straight back up to where he couldn't follow. On June 12th,
17:391943,
17:40near Ypres, the group finally scored. The next day, Zemka led the 61st squadron to two more.
17:48Now put the two pieces side by side. In November, a German test pilot measured, carefully and honestly,
17:56exactly where the thunderbolt was weak. And for six months already, the Americans had been building
18:01a way of fighting designed so that the thunderbolt would almost never be there. The German finding was
18:08true. It just described a fight the Americans were refusing to have. That leaves the obvious question.
18:16If the thunderbolt wasn't meant to live low, then where was it meant to live?
18:21Leiche could only answer that one way. He had to take Roche's airplane up to where Zemka's pilots actually fought.
18:29Up past 25,000 feet. Up past 30. He did. And his own account of that flight ends with a
18:38sentence
18:39no German test pilot ever expected to write about an enemy fighter. That the American airplane he was testing
18:46had probably saved his life. Somewhere above 20,000 feet, the airplane that had felt so heavy
18:52near the ground began to change. Leiche noticed it first in the climb. The needle kept winding up,
18:59and the thunderbolt kept going, with none of the struggle he expected from seven tons of fighter.
19:05Remember that warning lamp in the cockpit? The one for a turbine spinning in the exhaust?
19:10This was what it was for. Most fighters of the day, German ones included, carried a supercharger,
19:17driven by the engine itself, and the higher they climbed, the more that thin air strangled them.
19:22The thunderbolt had a second stage. Hot exhaust gas, which other airplanes simply threw away,
19:29spun a turbine in the rear fuselage and rammed thick air back into the engine.
19:34I was astonished, Lerke wrote, to note how lively the thunderbolt became at higher altitudes.
19:41Astonished. That's a German test pilot's word. Chosen in print, about an enemy fighter.
19:48Then he gave the numbers. Thanks to what he called its excellent exhaust-driven turbo supercharger,
19:54the thunderbolt climbed to 11,000 meters, about 36,000 feet, with ease. At around 29,500 feet,
20:03its top speed came out at roughly 400 miles an hour. Now set that against what he'd measured down low.
20:10A bit over 300 miles an hour near the ground. Close to 400 near 30,000 feet. The same airplane,
20:18nearly 100 miles an hour faster in the place where the American bombers actually flew.
20:24Up there, the lame and sluggish machine from the ground tests didn't exist.
20:30And it was up there, somewhere between 9 and 11,000 meters, that something went wrong.
20:36Lerke never fully knew what. His best guess was that the oxygen supply simply wasn't enough.
20:42What he did know is how it felt, and his description is chilling.
20:47Altitude sickness, he wrote, works like an intoxication. You feel so well that you don't
20:52notice yourself slowly growing drowsier. Then, nothing.
20:58In his words, he was temporarily dead to the world.
21:02Picture that airplane. A captured American fighter, high over northern Germany, with an
21:08unconscious German at the controls. Engine still running. Nobody flying it.
21:14When Lerke came to, the altimeter read about 4,000 meters, roughly 13,000 feet. The thunderbolt had
21:22come down something like 20,000 feet, with no one at the controls. The engine was throttled back and
21:28had cooled so much that it wouldn't pick up power. Carefully, he closed the cowling gills to let the
21:34engine warm, then eased the throttle forward a little at a time, until the big radial caught and ran.
21:41He found his way back to Recklen and landed. He couldn't remember the descent. He could only
21:47reason it out afterward. And here is the sentence he wrote. The strength of the thunderbolt in dive
21:53was particularly impressive, and to this I probably owe my life. Stop and think about what that means.
22:00In June, a German pilot had emptied his guns into Bob Johnson's thunderbolt,
22:05and watched it carry its pilot home with more than 200 holes in it.
22:10In April, a Focke-Wulf had tried to dive away from one and never pulled out. And now, in the
22:17winter,
22:17the German testing it had gone down the whole way, unconscious, and the airframe simply held
22:23together and gave him back his life. Same airplane. Three Germans. The only one who survived his long
22:31ride down in it was the one sitting inside. That's admission number two, and it's bigger than the
22:37first. Laerke put his conclusion plainly. The thunderbolt's strong points, he wrote, did not lie in
22:44dogfighting or at heights under five or six thousand meters. It was excellent at high altitude, in diving
22:51attacks, and at maximum boost. Read that sentence again with Hube Zemke in mind. High altitude, diving
22:59attacks, don't dogfight. Germany's own test center had just written down, almost word for word, the way
23:07wolfpack had been fighting since the spring. And Laerke went one step further. In escort work at high
23:14altitude, he wrote, the thunderbolts were always the decisive factor. He knew exactly what that meant,
23:20because the proof had already happened. On September 27th, 1943, six weeks before Roach landed at Kong,
23:30eight fighter command sent 262 thunderbolts from six fighter groups to cover American bombers
23:36attacking the port of Emden on German soil. That day, the thunderbolts flew with a new drop tank slung
23:43under the belly. A 108-gallon tank made of pressed paper, built to be thrown away. One of the six
23:51groups was the 355th. Roach's group. Pressed paper, compressed air spun by waste exhaust, and a cockpit
24:00roomy enough for a man to sit in for hours. None of it looked like a secret weapon. Together, it
24:06put
24:06American fighters over Germany, high, with fuel to spare. So by the end of 1943, the German picture
24:13was finally clear, and it was honest. Up high, the thunderbolt was the master. Down low, it was
24:22ordinary. In a dive, nothing could touch it. Which left German fighter pilots exactly one escape that
24:29still worked. Not diving. Climbing. If a thunderbolt was on your tail, pull up, hard and steep, and let
24:39that heavy machine fall behind. Zemke knew it. His pilots knew it. And over that winter, mechanics in
24:46England made two changes to the thunderbolt. One was a new propeller. The other, Lerke himself would
24:53later wave away in a single sentence, as nothing fundamentally new. German pilots in the air over
25:01Germany would not find it so easy to wave away. January 1944. Headquarters of 8th Fighter Command
25:08outside London. The 8th Air Force had a new commander, Major General Jimmy Doolittle,
25:14the man who had led the raid on Tokyo. He was visiting his fighter chief, Major General William
25:20Kepner, when he noticed a sign on the office wall. It read,
25:25The first duty of 8th Air Force fighters is to bring the bombers back alive.
25:31Doolittle asked who had put it up. Kepner said it had been there when he arrived.
25:36Doolittle told him to take it down. It was wrong. A new sign went up in its place.
25:42The first duty of 8th Air Force fighters is to destroy German fighters.
25:48Hear what changed in those few words.
25:51Until then, American escorts had been told to stay with the bombers.
25:55Weave above them, slow down to their pace, chase an attacker off, and come right back.
26:01A German pilot could dive away from a thunderbolt knowing it probably wouldn't follow him far.
26:06That was the rule. Now the rule was gone. The fighters could range out ahead of the bombers,
26:13hunt, and follow the enemy wherever he went.
26:16Doolittle later called it the most important and far-reaching military decision he made during the war.
26:22But a fighter pilot freed to hunt still needs an airplane that can catch what it hunts.
26:28And remember the one escape the Germans still had against the thunderbolt?
26:32Not diving. Climbing.
26:36That winter, the Americans went after it.
26:39The first change was easy to miss on a flight line. A new propeller with much broader blades,
26:45wide as canoe paddles. Pilots called them paddle blades. A propeller is really a wing that spins,
26:52and these wider blades could bite far more air, which mattered most in exactly the place the old
26:59thunderbolt was weakest, the climb at lower speed. Accounts differ on the exact figures,
27:05but the gain ran to hundreds of feet a minute. Thunderbolts in England were being refitted with
27:11them in the early months of 1944. The second change was water. A system that sprayed a mix of water
27:19and
27:19alcohol into the engine, cooling the charge so it could take far more boost without destroying itself.
27:25And here we have a German witness. Lerke, at Recklen, measured exactly what it did.
27:32With water injection, he wrote, the thunderbolt's power went from 2,000 horsepower to 2,300.
27:39300 extra horsepower, on demand, when a pilot needed it most.
27:44So follow the moves on the board. The Germans learned not to dive away from a thunderbolt.
27:49They learned to climb away instead. The Americans answered with a new propeller,
27:54and an extra 300 horsepower, and a new rule that said, chase him.
28:01Now come back to a man we've met. Bob Johnson, the Oklahoman whose airplane carried him home from
28:07France with more than 200 holes in it, was still flying with the 56th. And in the first months of
28:131944,
28:14something happened to his score. Between January 5th and May 8th, he was credited with 17 German aircraft.
28:2217 in four months. On May 8th, he passed Eddie Rickenbacker's first World War record and became,
28:30for a time, the top-scoring American ace in Europe. 27 victories, every one of them in a thunderbolt.
28:39Same pilot as in June. Same type of airplane, more or less. What changed was what the airplane could now
28:46do, and what the rules now let him do with it. He wasn't alone in that squadron. Flying in the
28:5361st
28:54alongside him was another Oklahoman, Joe Powers, from Tulsa. Born June 8th, 1920. He'd been a student at the
29:02University of Oklahoma when Pearl Harbor was bombed. His combat reports from that winter are pure working
29:09pilot. On one mission, near Minden in Germany, he wrote that his engine began to detonate and he
29:15could get no closer. He still claimed his Fock Wolf, and he nursed his thunderbolt home. Remember Joe
29:23Powers. In a few months, his name will turn up in the memory of one of the most famous German
29:28fighter
29:29pilots of the entire war. Not in a combat report. In that German's own account of the worst day of
29:36his career. Meanwhile, the numbers on the German side were becoming impossible. Historians of the
29:42campaign calculate that the Luftwaffe in the West wrote off about a third of its fighter strength in
29:47January 1944. In February, more than half. Doolittle summed it up later. Germany was losing pilots faster
29:56than it could replace them. Now step back and look at what Lerke's test report had really told the Luftwaffe.
30:03The Thunderbolt is a master at height, ordinary down low, and unbeatable in a dive. In other words,
30:10don't fight it high, don't try to out dive it, and if you're in trouble, climb. By the spring of
30:171944,
30:18the Americans had taken away the climb. And with Doolittle's new rule, they'd started taking away the
30:24low ground, too. Chasing German fighters down toward the deck. Toward their own airfields. The German
30:31finding hadn't been wrong. It had just become out of date. And that brings us to the most revealing
30:38sentence in Lerke's entire chapter. He wrote it after he got his hands on a second Thunderbolt,
30:44a newer one, with the water injection fitted. That airplane wasn't waiting at a quiet airfield in
30:51France. It was in Italy, near Rome, in the spring of 1944, with the American 5th Army closing in on
31:00the
31:00city. To bring it back, Lerke had to cross Italy by road, under skies that now belonged to the Allies.
31:09And the trip very nearly ended before he ever reached the cockpit. The call came at the end of May,
31:171944. An American lieutenant, flying a brand new Thunderbolt, had landed at Rome's Littorio
31:23airfield. In Lerke's words, he had probably lost his way. The Germans in Rome had already ordered fuel
31:31for the airplane, and had the wingtips and nose painted yellow, the American markings covered with
31:37German crosses. Lerke flew a Junkers 88 to Munich that same evening. At 16 minutes past 5 the next morning,
31:46he took off again, and was in Bologna by half-past 6. From there, the only way to Rome was
31:53by road.
31:54It took until midday just to find a car and a driver, borrowed from a flak unit. At lunch,
32:01a German general gave him a piece of advice. Make sure, he said, that our own flak doesn't shoot you
32:08down on the way home. Then they drove south. They avoided the coast road, the Via Aurelia,
32:16because enemy fighters were hunting along it. The mountain roads were no better because of partisans,
32:21so they took the old Via Cassia, through heavy traffic, crawling. Around midday the next day,
32:28an ammunition truck ahead of them had been hit and the road was blocked. The driver turned onto a side
32:33road, and on a dry Italian side road, a car throws up dust. Four Mustangs saw it. They came down
32:42in the
32:42dive. The driver slammed on the brakes, and both men threw themselves flat against the slope as the
32:47fighters made their run. Lerke, pressed into the dirt, shouted up at them, your shooting is terrible.
32:54It was. They hit nothing. But think about where that leaves us. The Luftwaffe's own test pilot,
33:01on a mission to collect an American fighter, lying face down in a ditch because American fighters
33:07owned the road. He reached Littorio in the afternoon. A handful of men were left.
33:13The guard told him that one narrow strip of the airfield had not yet been mined,
33:17and gave him two lanterns and a tent for the night. The Americans, everyone said, would be in the city
33:23within two days. Lerke spent his last evening in Rome with old friends and drank to the flight home.
33:29The thunderbolt itself was in fine shape. The engine, he found, ran perfectly.
33:35At ten minutes to five on the morning of June 3rd, in the half dark, he took off from that
33:40narrow,
33:41unmined lane. No escort. He'd ruled out the coast and the mountain routes and flew north alone,
33:47low, following the Via Cassia and navigating by lakes. Siena and Florence passed under him around
33:54half past five. He swung wide of Bologna and picked up the river Po and then the Adige.
34:01Now listen to how he approached Vicenza, a German airfield, in his own country's airspace.
34:08Undercarriage down. Flaps down. Firing identification flares.
34:14He called it a humble attitude. A German pilot, coming home, so afraid of being mistaken for the
34:21enemy that he flew the whole approach like a man with his hands up. He landed before half past six.
34:28Then air raid alarms kept him on the ground all day. He couldn't leave until twenty-five minutes to
34:33six that evening, tucked behind the Junkers in cloud over the Alps. Near the Tegensee, he rocked his wings,
34:40broke away, and landed at Munich. The next day, in bad weather, he reached Rechlin at eleven twenty-three.
34:49The day Lerche reached Rechlin, American troops of the Fifth Army entered Rome. Two days after that,
34:56Allied armies landed in Normandy. Now we come to the sentence.
35:01After all that, Lerche examined the new Thunderbolt and wrote his verdict.
35:06Except for the extra 300 horsepower from water injection, he wrote,
35:11this new P47D variant did not feature any fundamental innovations.
35:17Was he wrong? Technically, no. It was still the same big airframe, the same engine, the same turbo.
35:25A test pilot looks for new ideas. And there weren't any.
35:29But look at what the man had just lived through to write that sentence.
35:33He'd had to fly into Italy at dawn and cross it by car. He'd been dived on by four Mustangs
35:40on a back
35:40road. He'd taken off before sunrise from a strip between minefields, flown low and alone so nothing
35:47would see him, and landed at his own airfield with his hands up. Then he'd sat out a whole day
35:54of air
35:55air raid alarms before he dared cross the Alps. The innovation was not in the airplane. It was all
36:01around the airplane. It was the sky. And Lerche, honest man that he was, put that in his chapter too.
36:10The Thunderbolts' strengths, he wrote, made it ideal as an escort fighter. And numbers helped.
36:17Then the line we've already heard. The Thunderbolts were always the decisive factor as escort fighters
36:24for bomber attacks at high altitudes. That's admission number three, and it's the hardest
36:30one for a German to make. The problem was never one airplane. It was how many of them there were,
36:36how far they could reach, and what the Americans were now free to do with them.
36:41But Lerche was a test pilot. He flew the Thunderbolt over an empty German sky. He never had to face
36:48it
36:48in a fight. Three weeks before his dawn takeoff from Rome, another German had faced it. One of the
36:56highest-scoring fighter pilots in history, a man who would later fly the Thunderbolt himself. On May 12,
37:031944, he led his group down into a formation of P-47s. When he came home from that fight,
37:11he was missing his left thumb. And the name of the American he believed had done it would stay with
37:17him for the rest of his life. May 12, 1944. Over central Germany, more than 800 American bombers were
37:25heading for the synthetic oil plants that kept the Luftwaffe in the air. Major Gunther Rahl had been
37:31commanding the second Kruppe of Jagdgeschwader 11 for only a few weeks. He'd come from the Eastern
37:37Front with more than 270 victories. Few men alive knew more about killing an enemy fighter.
37:45His plan was standard German home defense. The Fockewulfs would go for the bombers. Rahl's Messerschmitts
37:52would stay high and tie up the escorts. He brought his formation down from above 30,000 feet and ran
37:59straight into Thunderbolts. They belonged to the 56th Fighter Group, Hubzemke's Wolfpack.
38:07Rahl did what he did best. He shot down two of them. Then more Thunderbolts arrived. One of them got
38:15behind his Messerschmitt and fired. .50 caliber rounds tore into the engine, the cooler, the cockpit,
38:21and his left hand. Rahl went over the side and came down by parachute into a field. His left thumb
38:28was
38:28gone. Infection set in and it kept him out of a cockpit for months. Years later, he put it in
38:35one
38:35plain sentence. A P-47 Thunderbolt shot my left thumb off. Twelve fighters and 46 bombers didn't come home
38:44to England that day. But the oil plants burned. Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, later
38:52said that on that day, the fate of Germany's technical war was decided. And here is what
38:58happened next to Rahl, because it closes the circle of this story. While his hand healed, he was put in
39:04charge of the Luftwaffe's school for fighter leaders. And at that school, Germany's frontline fighter
39:10commanders got what Lerke had at Recklen. Captured American airplanes. Lightnings. Mustangs. Thunderbolts.
39:20Rahl said he was eager to learn and evaluate them. He and his pilots flew them for about 300 hours.
39:27So now, we finally have the thing the title promised. Not a test pilot over an empty sky. A frontline
39:35ace,
39:35who had shot Thunderbolts down and been shot down by one, climbing into the cockpit of the airplane
39:41that had taken his thumb. What did he admit? First, the respect.
39:48The P-47, which, as you know, shot me down, we knew right away, he said. He remembered its
39:55tremendous diving speed and set it against his own Messerschmitt. He also said the P-47's structure
40:02was much stronger. Remember Johnson's 200 holes. Remember Lerke coming down 20,000 feet unconscious.
40:11Rahl was saying the same thing, as a man who had tried to break one.
40:15But then he said something that goes deeper, and it takes us right back to the first minute of this
40:20story. To Lerke, standing on a wing at Kong, surprised by how much room there was in the cockpit.
40:28The cockpits of all of these enemy aircraft, Rahl said, were much more comfortable. And then he
40:35explained why that mattered. You could not fly the BF-109 for seven hours. The cockpit was too tight,
40:41too narrow. Talking about the American escorts, he put the whole war into one line. They flew for seven
40:49hours. And we flew for one hour and 20 minutes. Now let's put every admission side by side. Because
40:57together, they answer the question. Lerke admitted that low down, the Thunderbolt was lame and sluggish.
41:04That was the weakness Germany hoped for. Lerke admitted that high up, it was lively, it climbed with
41:11ease, and in a dive, nothing could touch it. And that it was the decisive factor as a bomber escort.
41:18Lerke, flying out of Rome at dawn with his hands up, admitted, without meaning to, that the airplane
41:24itself held no secrets. No fundamental innovations. What was different was everything around it.
41:31And Rahl, sitting in it after it had cost him his thumb, admitted the rest. It was stronger. It was
41:38faster downhill. And it was built for a man to sit in for seven hours. So here is what German
41:44pilots
41:45discovered when they finally flew the Thunderbolt. They were looking for its weakness, and they found
41:51one. It was real. But it only mattered in a fight the Germans got to choose. A fight down low,
41:58close to home, short, on German terms. And the American air war had been built, piece by piece,
42:06so the Germans wouldn't get to choose. Zemke chose the altitude. The paper drop tank
42:14chose the distance. The roomy cockpit and the turbo let a young man from Oklahoma sit at 30,000 feet
42:21over Germany for hours and still be sharp when the fight came. The paddle blades and the water
42:28took away the climb. Doolittle's sign took away the rest. Chase them. Down to the ground if you have to.
42:37The weakness was in the airplane. The answer was in the men and the system that flew it.
42:45That's why the most honest German verdicts read the way they do. Not, it was a better fighter than ours,
42:51but they flew for seven hours and we flew for one hour and 20 minutes. A German ace measuring the
42:59war
42:59in the size of a cockpit. As for the American who fired the burst on May 12th, Rahl said he
43:06knew
43:07exactly who it was. After the war, he became close friends with Hub Zemke, met the men of the Wolfpack,
43:13and told an interviewer, it was Joseph Powers. Joe Powers, the Tulsa kid from the 61st Squadron,
43:22whose engine had been detonating over Minden. Rahl would live to be 90. He would lead the West
43:29German Air Force and sit beside his old enemies at NATO. Joe Powers would not get that long. And to
43:36see
43:36why, we have to follow him and Bob Johnson and William Roach past the end of this war and into
43:44the next one. William Roach never flew in combat again. The young lieutenant who had followed a
43:50vehicle to a parking spot at Cannes spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft 1 on the Baltic
43:55coast.
43:57On June 12th, 1945, the army records him as,
44:01returned to military control. 19 months after his landing. Long enough to hear, through the prison
44:09camp grapevine, what the 8th Air Force had done to the Luftwaffe in the meantime. He never knew a
44:15German test pilot had written about his airplane. That the cockpit had baffled him. That its roominess
44:21had surprised him. That in a dive, it had probably saved his life. Roach's mistake in the fog over
44:29Normandy had given Germany the best look it would ever get at the Thunderbolt. And everything Germany
44:35learned from that look, in the end, came back to the same place. It wasn't enough. At least one
44:43captured Thunderbolt in German markings was still around at the very end. According to the photographic
44:48record, one coded T9 plus LK was retaken by American forces at Göttingen in May 1945. The airplane that had
45:00been studied, flown, and admired by the men trying to beat it was back in American hands. Bob Johnson
45:08went home to Oklahoma with 27 victories. And then he did something almost poetic. He went to work for
45:15Republic Aviation, the company that built the Thunderbolt, as its chief test pilot. The man
45:22whose P-47 had carried him home from France with more than 200 holes in it, spent the next years
45:28testing
45:29the airplanes that came after it. He stayed in the Air Force Reserve, retired as a lieutenant colonel,
45:35and wrote his story in a book he simply called Thunderbolt. The airport terminal in his hometown of
45:43Lawton carries his name. He died on December 27, 1998, in Tulsa. He was 78. Gunter Rahl recovered. He led
45:54the
45:54West German Air Force in the 1970s and sat beside his old enemies at NATO. In 1977 he met American
46:02fighter
46:02pilots and learned for certain that the Thunderbolts that had beaten him on May 12 belonged to Zemke's
46:10Wolfpack. He became Zemke's friend. In May 1996 he spoke at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.
46:20Today the museum holds his flying glove. You can still see the damage the bullets did. He died in 2009.
46:30The flying glove of a German ace. In a museum in Washington, holed by an American .50 caliber round.
46:40In its own way, that's the last German admission in this story.
46:46And Joe Powers. He stayed in uniform. He finished the Second World War with 14 and a half victories, half
46:54a kill
46:55short of triple ace, with a silver star and five distinguished flying crosses. When the Korean War
47:03came, he went again with the 67th Fighter Bomber Squadron of the 18th Fighter Bomber Group.
47:10On January 18, 1951, Captain Joseph H. Powers was shot down over Korea. His remains were never recovered.
47:19He was 30. Think about the shape of those two lives. The German, who lost his thumb to Joe Powers,
47:27lived 91 and told the world by name who had beaten him. The American from Tulsa never got to hear
47:35him
47:35say it. So let's go back where we started. November 10, 1943. Caen. A German test pilot standing on the
47:46wing of William Roach's fighter, looking into a cockpit bigger than anything he'd ever flown.
47:52Everyone at Recklin, he wrote, wanted to know whether this fighter was really as legendary as reported.
47:58The Germans who flew it gave an honest answer. Low and slow, it was ordinary. High, fast, and in a
48:07dive,
48:07it was everything they feared. And the Americans made sure it was almost always high, fast, and diving.
48:15The Thunderbolt didn't win because the Germans couldn't find its weakness. It won because the
48:21Americans who flew it never let them use it. The legend was never just the airplane. It was a farm
48:27and small-town generation of American pilots, from Lawton and Tulsa and a thousand towns like them,
48:34who climbed into that roomy cockpit for seven hours at a time, flew it where it was strongest,
48:39and kept coming back. Some of them, like Joe Powers, came back right up until the day they didn't.
48:47Thank you for watching this one all the way to the end. If this story of the American airman who
48:52flew the Thunderbolt meant something to you, please give the video a like. It genuinely helps the story
48:57reach people who'd never otherwise hear names like Bob Johnson and Joe Powers. Subscribe, and turn on the
49:04bell so you don't miss the next one. And tell us in the comments where you're watching from. If your
49:09father,
49:10grandfather, or uncle served in the Second World War, we'd be honored if you'd share his name and the
49:16unit he served with. Every name you write down keeps one more of them from being forgotten.