Did This B-17 Tail Gunner Survive the Impossible? 

Will check out ground

Loo

Love your vids

@@chris.76256 Thanks for checking us out! Let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks for sharing TJ3! Happy to support your channel. For anyone interested, check out the link above and let us know if you have any questions.

Thanks to your father and His service my country(Hungary) did not become a nazi-like country because eventually Hitler was defeated. Also, these stories the most important because it is a reminder of humankinds best and worst times. Glad he survived and you were conceived because this way you can spread his stories. All hail to whoever fought, died and returned home victorious, every veteran has my topmost respect!

@@sunlightcrusader But, you fail to realise that the Germans were in fact the good guys... who would not be happier speaking German that living under this degenerate world of jewish tyranny we now find ourselves in???

It had armor plate because it was also the position that took the most fire

I had the privilege of flying on a B-17 a few years ago. While on the ground, I did a complete walk through; let me tell you, walking from the aft to the front, you only had very narrow metal corridor to pass over the bomb bay. I can't state enough how awkward movement was, and that was grounded. It must have been extremely cumbersome for an aircrew that had to bail out of a crippled plane.

Thank your dad for his service sir Ret. USN⚓️Chief Petty Officer 🇺🇸 Deleon Steven L.

Nice Germans

@@Redwhiteblue-gr5em The German doctors said he faced a long recovery so would be better off doing that at home instead of a POW camp infirmary.

@@Redwhiteblue-gr5em The Germans treated POWs far better than the Japanese did. I had a cousin who was a POW of the Germans.

just like Peggy hill

Lol. Enemies so impressed they just sent him home

I wanna thank you and your family for service!

@@cabriskus4700 Thank You sir for your support. We still believe in America and don't take it lightly. Sincerely Thomas.

I salute you, soldier. 🫡

I read his telling of that story, and as I recall he actually engaged at least one enemy fighter on the way down (an FW 190 I believe), and mentioned how he thought it strange when the enemy fighter didn't return fire, and simply flew away. He said when he landed it was nearby to a German anti-air emplacement, and the German officer wrote a note detailing his observation of that descent. However, I think the note was later confiscated in a POW camp.

I'm sure she sings a holy song now...God bless her and her family

A family friend flew 90 missions

So many of our fathers and grandfathers gave all.

This is the one I knew about.

OMG. Imagine the German pilots thoughts. Seeing that thing.

It was night, so they would see nothing @@jacobrzeszewski6527

​@@jacobrzeszewski6527Grandson: These videogames are so unrealistic! The gunners keep firing even after the plane breaks up! Veteran: Don't be so sure, sonny

F/Sgt Patrick J Cramer RAAF died later that same night at Five Hospital.

It was Nicholas Alkemade who fell 18,000 and survived. RAF Berlin raid 24th March 1944 Most of the crew perished.

@@normannokes9513 Was he the one whose parachute was burning so he jumped rather than burn to death?

Yes.So many other brave chaps would have chosen this course with a different outcome.@@dneill8493

@@dneill8493 yeh

@@normannokes9513 Busted up pretty good, but alive is alive. (Read the readers digest story years ago). 6000m in metric. The prison commandant had the proof and signed off on it, from memory.

When I spoke with Eugene Moran, before he passed away, he faithfully described the nose art that you see in the video.

@@gergodews9987 Very cool! Thanks for sharing that!

James fell like a meteor then would catch air and flutter in cycles. He hit the ground during a flutter. He was found by Greek monks, hidden, and rat lined out, retired a full Colonel, not bad for a private in the horse calvary

how?

@@HeyItsMeSebhe was wearing his light fall suit.

Yes this story is true she survived and eventually returned to work but unfortunately she actually died in another plane crash I do believe

Correction she actually died from natural causes in 2016@@jasonhughes-on7ui

This story is told quite differently, even here in the comments section there are multiple versions of it, happening in multiple different countries (the US, Yugoslavia...). Don't know if it's true, because mostly the details are quite rare. A story that's definitely true happened on December 24, 1971 over the Andes. LANSA Flight 508 broke apart mid-flight at 22,000 feet and the passengers got thrown out. 91 people sadly lost ther lives, one lived. A 17-year-old girl, Juliane Koepcke. She got thrown out of the plane still belted to her seat when the plane broke apart, lost consciousness and woke up 20 hours later, still in her seat, somewhere in the middle of the Peruvian jungle. She was in shock, severely injured and due to the thick jungle nobody knew where the crash had happened, and she didn't find the wreckage or other survivors. So she started walking. It took her 10 days to find other people, a lumberjack camp. She was then transported to a clinic where her injuries (some of which had become maggot-infested) were treated, and she made a full recovery. With her help the wreckage of the plane was found on January 5th or 6th, 1972, no other survivors were found, even though it's assumed that up to 14 other passengers had survived the crash, but were too heavily injured to look for help and had died before the wreckage was found.

I just did a search and it certainly warrants a video by TJ.

Incredible story. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mynarski

I hope you are kidding?

He’s not completely kidding. As that doctrine was proven laughably false, Drop tanks were used on P-47s but Mustangs had more range than Jugs.

@@ellisvener5337 people decided to put drop tanks on the P47s insultingly late in the war.

@@ellisvener5337 Not only were drop tanks also required on P51's for escort missions but like P47's with drop tanks P51's also had to use the relay system to escort bombers, because even with drop tanks they couldn't take off with the bombers and escort them all the way to the targets and back, people who think they did don't understand how bomber escort missions worked and don't understand that you can't simply Google the distance from an airfield in England to a target city in Germany then go to Wikipedia and look up the range of a fighter and compare the two, it's far more complicated than that the way escort missions worked. First and foremost I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that P51's were capable of escorting bombers without drop tanks but nothing could be further from the truth, chances are someone did exactly what I just said you can't do and then made the claim online that P51's used to escort bombers without drop tanks and every eager P51 fanboy believed it and started repeating it themselves leading to this common myth of late that they used to escort without drop tanks but they didn't. To start with the fighter's and bombers didn't take off from the same airstrips in England in the first place, they were at different bases and had to meet up in the sky on the way, but most importantly is that the altitudes and speeds that fighter's got their maximum range at was completely different from what the bombers were flying at, especially when the fighter's had drop tanks on them, when they flew with the bombers they were guzzling gas flying at their speed and altitude, also once enemy fighter's were encountered they had to drop their tanks no matter how much fuel was left in them, you can't fly in aerial combat with the severely reduced performance from having drop tanks strapped to a fighter, plus they consumed a tremendous amount more fuel during aerial combat, for those reasons the range listed in Wikipedia for any fighter doesn't do you any good when figuring out the actual range of fighter's on an escort mission, it's a lot different than just taking off and flying in a straight line at your optimal speed and altitude, so what they had to do was use the relay system, and this is how it worked. The first flight of fighter's would take off and meet up with the bombers usually somewhere over the English Channel, at the speed and altitude they'd be forced to fly that reduced their range they'd stay with the bombers until somewhere before the target, then a second flight of fighter's that took off after them that caught up flying at the speed and altitude that gave them their maximum range would relieve them, at that point the first group of fighter's who were starting to see their fuel supply getting low from the speed and altitude they were forced to fly at escorting the bombers would turn back and usually attack targets of opportunity on the way since at that point they'd still has enough fuel left to fly down and attack targets on the ground and then climb back up to altitude and still get back with a little fuel to spare, the second group of fighter's that relieved the first would escort the bombers to their target, if attacked by the enemy they'd have to drop their tanks, at this point they were the furthest they'd be from their base and are now on internal fuel only from having dropped their tanks and they'd be chewing up fuel in aerial combat at a highly increased rate, they only had enough fuel for 15 minutes of combat then they had to turn for home at the speed and altitude that gave them their maximum range, they couldn't escort the bombers after that because they'd have never had enough fuel to make it back given the amount burned up from being in combat, they also wouldn't have had enough fuel to attack targets of opportunity on the way back for the same reasons, at this point a third flight of fighter's that took off well after the second flight did would link up with the bombers at about the time they were coming off the target, if they had to drop their tanks and join in the fight then yet another flight of fighter's would have to take off to pick up the bombers at some place on the way back because of the third relay having to have dropped their tanks and participate in combat, by doing that they wouldn't have enough fuel to escort the bombers all the way back at the speed and altitude they had to fly at escorting them, if a fourth flight wasn't available that meant the bombers had to return a good bit of the way unescorted. Another factor which is why you can't look at straight line distances on a map is because the bombers never flew straight to their targets, that would have made their targets too obvious to anyone looking at a map, their missions would have several "dog legs" in them which would increase the distance and quite often at one point they'd split into two formations going after two different targets, so it took 3 or 4 relays of fighter's all taking off at different times to cover their leg of the mission for the bombers to be escorted no matter what kind of fighter's they were even P51's, the only real advantage there was with the P51's is since they did get better mileage that meant you could fly more of them with a given amount of fuel, but that was a mute point anyways since in Europe the US never had a shortage of fuel anyway since the U-Boats in the Atlantic had pretty much been neutralized and the shipping lanes were running uncontested. Also if bombers were late getting to a check point which happened a good bit of the time the fighter's couldn't fly around in circles forever waiting on them, at a certain point they'd have to turn for home which means the bombers had to fly that leg unescorted, the whole thing gives you a lot of respect for the mission planners who figured out the time schedules to tell the different fighter relays when they had to take off to meet up with the bombers and their escorts they were relieving, that took a tremendous amount of planning and math to schedule the different relays involved on an escort mission. But it was far more complicated than looking up the range of a fighter on it's Wikipedia page then looking at the distance from some airfield in eastern England to Berlin on a map and assuming that any fighter even the P51 could fly escort missions without drop tanks, there weren't so many variables and factors involved with everything it just wasn't that simple. So even if P51's had been there all along it wouldn't have changed anything since no fighter's were supplied with drop tanks early in because going into the war the powers that be thought that bombers wouldn't need escorts and any aluminum used to make drop tanks was aluminum wasted that could be used for building more planes, the P51's just happened to come online right when the powers that be realized that the bombers needed to be escorted, the powers that be started the false claim that before the P51 came along fighter's didn't have the range to escort bombers to cover their asses for not providing fighter's with drop tanks all along because of their screwed up strategy of thinking the bombers could do it on their own, they didn't want to get drug in front of a Congressional inquiry into the heavy losses over the early unescorted missions, that's the reality of what happened, the fact is after supplying the fighter's with drop tanks P47's and P38's were also escorting bombers deep into Germany. The P51 was a good fighter but it didn't change the course of the air war over Europe, that's an old myth based on a lie created to cover high ranking peoples asses.

@@dukecraig2402 agree 109%

He was a mid upper gunner with RCAF 419 Sqn . Awarded the VC posthumously

God bless.

Something equally remarkable happened on December 24, 1971 over Peru. LANSA Flight 508 broke apart mid-flight at 22,000 feet and the passengers got thrown out. 91 people sadly lost ther lives, one lived. A 17-year-old girl, Juliane Koepcke. She got thrown out of the plane still belted to her seat when the plane broke apart, lost conciousness and woke up 20 hours later, still in her seat, somewhere in the middle of the Peruvian jungle. She was in shock, severely injured and due to the thick jungle nobody knew where the crash had happened, and she didn't find the wreckage or other survivors. So she started walking. It took her 10 days to find other people, a jumberjack camp. She was then transported to a clinic where her injuries (some of which had become maggot-infested) were treated, and she made a full recovery. With her help the wreckage of the plane was found on January 5th or 6th, 1972, no other survivors were found, even though it's assumed that up to 14 other passengers had survived the crash, but were too heavily injured to look for help and had died before the wreckage was found.

Exactly!

TJ3 History are you going to address this? All crew had in-plane comms, they sure as hell couldn't hear each other very well over the engine and wind noise in an uninsulated/unpressurized plane with open side-gun ports...as was seen in the Memphis Belle film.

@@mailboxthirteentwentysix7673 Well, The crew had throat mikes (so that oxygen masks could be worn) Head phones over the ears cancelled out some of the noise that you mentioned.

jam- give me the scary details he wrote

Well hell.....now I wanna read it

​@@seanodwyer432216:57

Thank you!

Agree totally, he does a great job both finding these stories and with the visual narration

@@Maxtowers71 bro... its a game called warthunder

its a game called warthunder

@@AlexanderTheGood1 yes I know that, but still, he has to spend time on that platform to create the appropriate scenes, that's what I meant, sorry if I wasn't clear enough

What a badass

He had been hit in the chest twice by 20mm cannon shells. I believe he was almost immediately tended to by a civilian doctor upon landing, don’t think he made it

Totally impossible, the guns do not fire without electricity and the recoil would be too weak to propel the tail. Ever heard of a plane that escaped pursuit by firing its rear guns?

@@fafnir-fasolt look up The Broken Lancaster tail that flew and landed itself Uploaded by FlakAlley

@@fafnir-fasolt the turrets themselves were electrically operated, but guns themselves aren't also those turrets had manual drives too, you know how much it would suck to have your electric drive fail and have no back up.

The tail gunner in the Lancaster wouldn’t have been F/Sgt Jack Cannon of Melbourne Australia would it? He was mentioned in the book Flying into the Mouth of Hell by Laurie Woods DFC a crew member of an Australian Lancaster.

@@covenantor663 The Lancaster Gunner was Flt Sgt Nicholas Alkemade. The Pilot in WWi was Captain Louis Strange.

I was in that very restaurant a number of years ago and read that newspaper article. That account is completely different from any in this video. If I remember it correctly, the airman was a B 17 belly gunner, jumped out without his parachute because it had melted because the plane was on fire, fell 17,000 feet and landed in a pine tree covered in snow which broke his fall. He broke a leg and I think some other bones but was able to limp to a farm house. the farmer called the Gestapo who interrogated him and did not believe he jumped without a parachute but couldn't find it after searching for it. They took him to a hospital where he was treated for his broken bones then taken to a POW camp for the duration of the war.

If the restaurant was in Savannah, GA, the tailgunner in the article was probably Joe Frank Jones, Jr., who was from, or lived in Savannah. He is yet another survivor of a severed B-17 tail! In the US Military Dependents' School in Wiesbaden, Germany, I got to meet then Major Jones. He was apparently stationed in Wiesbaden or thereabouts, as his son was a friend of mine, and we attended school together there. On one occasion, his father came to our school and told the assembled class the story of the midair collision and the fall into the farmer's field. We were probably somewhere between 11- and 13-years-old, but I remember that event and that his story had just been written up in some book (the title of which I can no longer remember). That would have been about 1963-1965 - I don't remember the exact year, but that is in the middle of the time when my father was stationed in Wiesbaden and we were living in the Hainerberg Military Housing Area. If you look up MAJ Joe Frank Jones, Jr. on the internet, you'll find his story, and in at least one account, they mention that in 1961, he was able to visit with the farmers who rescued him from the wreckage.

@@dennisjones4156Thanks for the account but the one I read about was this one. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade why it was in a Savanna restaurant I have no idea!

​@Ben Jones Interesting! It is amazing how some of those guys survived! Thanks for the link. I never comment on things like this and was actually intending to reply to Susan Beth because the comment she made fit what I was aware of and her belief that one of the ladies there was a granddaughter of the guy in the article. If y'all were in the same restaurant, I wonder if they may have had different articles posted at different times...

​@@dennisjones4156 😮

I think it is a day of all time

@@ArloOdom Nuts story or what! I bet he had a few drinks at the next port.

Sound like a pinball lol.

@@hectorgrijalva1754 agree

Thanks Soo co0ol

"I hear you man, sI grew up an army brat myself; was even born over seas Camp Zama Japan U.S. Army Base😊

@@kemgreene8525 Awesome thx for sharing 😀

We must understand than they fall down only, ” if I can dare ”, at 890 km per hour, wich is the constant of gravity. The speed of plane is lost. Of course it’s a great impact but less than what we imagine, that is the proof. 😮

Indeed the ball turret was the most dangerous. I had to scroll too far to find this comment.

Thanks!

Very cool! Thanks!

I heard the story several years ago, and like you, I heard this from an individual who claimed to witness it from a nearby plane. I do not know the man's name, but I believe he was from Jackson county Alabama. This story was told to me by world war II veteran who knew the Jackson county veteran who claimed to have witnessed this happen and was a personal friend of Moran.

Nicholas Alkemade. 18000ft (6000m), without a chute. I read that one too. (The 50’s car accident article, was in the same book I think, and the truth about smoking🧐). Still got them, come to think of it (white hardcovers). Might come in handy again.

Glad you enjoyed it!

I read that story,or one like it, in Readers Digest magazine probably 50 years ago.

That's amazing.

Iirc Tj covered this already

holy shit.