The Schweinfurt-Regensburg Mission of the Eighth Air Force - Animated 

Me too

same here

Ditto

Same

I wonder if Second Schweinfurt (Black Thursday) will have an episode.

i havnt heard whether they had post bombing recon immediately following the raids ? To get any info ? Or even early marker raids are used . I know I would have

The Mosquitoes referred to as the target of the "new Luftwaffe unit" were heavily used for post-raid reconnaissance, as well as camera-equipped Mustangs, Spitfires, Lightnings, and various others. Battle damage assessments were absolutely a thing. Amusingly, it wasn't always done right: After the failure of the Blitz and the pivot eastward, the Luftwaffe didn't do significant aerial reconnaissance over Britain until they started launching V-1s and V-2s. Obviously, they wanted to know what kinds of damage these weapons were inflicting on London, and the very dangerous sorties flown returned with images of a city heavily damaged. The German authorities took this to indicate success, but their failure to have flown reconnaissance in the interim left them unable to realize that the damage they were seeing was entirely unrepaired remains of attacks from the Blitz, years before.

Issac James Tea Especially when you consider that no fighter could "stay with the bombers all the way to their targets and back", it's a misnomer that late war model planes could, NO fighter could escort bombers all the way there and back, because of the different altitudes and speeds that fighters get their longest range then bombers do it had to be done in "relays", figure out the math involved in calculating when different relays had to take off in order to catch up to and relieve the fighters in the relay before them, it's just mind boggling.

@Babushka Novaya Yea, because everyone should live in a society that has the Gestapo for a police force.

@Call Me Ishmael Actually it wasn't any gas, but a liquid fuel rather ;-) I know - language, American English ;-)

The "big" bomb last year was kind of interesting

It is normal in every big german city. My sister works in engineering. She says it is normal for construction projects in bigger cities to have a budget for bomb disposal.

"Bei Bauarbeiten in Prüfening wurde eine Fliegerbombe aus dem zweiten Weltkrieg gefunden" - Ach neee, unglaublich!

I mean I bet you guys have great bomb experts

Das meiste liegt noch im Osten.. Also beim ehemaligen Ostbahnhof. Laut meinen Großvater haben sie die Trichter nach den Angriff wieder zugefüllt.

There are so much more, the last i know was found on July 23, 2020. It´s so crazy, 77 years ago and still dangerous.

I remember hearing about that! Not too many people remember that incident.

Unlike Regensburg, Schweinfurt wasn't easy, ball bearing factories in residential areas meant civilian homes for hit in the process, not to mention heavy fighter attacks ripped apart the bombers on the way in and partway out, what the shutstafflen or SS did to the Jews was unacceptable and devilish, I met a holocaust survivor myself in highschool who survived Auschwitz berkinau death camp when the Russians came, Eva schloss of Holland, she knew of Anne frank and was the same age as her

Unexploded ordinance is still found everywhere. War is hell.

My grandfather was in Bavaria once! 1945.

Yeah did you enjoy it?

@@TheOperationsRoom absolutely. Both this and the show. The only thing I can think of to compare the show to is 12 o'clock high the old ww2 movie with Gregory Peck. Especially this past episode. The episode delt with this mission specifically. The show follows the 100th bomb group. The bloody 100th you called it

​@@anthonyanderson5302yeah, they gave a shoutout to 12 oclock noon in the episode. (Enemy at 12 high or sth)

@@peaboss wasn't just a reference. 12 o'clock high is an actually military phrase

@@peaboss That's how you make callouts. You use the face of a clock for direction and then you say "high, level or low" for their altitude. So 12 o'clock high means in front and above. 3 o'clock low means from your right and below you. It's why you always hear the phrase "watch your 6!". It means someone is on your tail.

My dad was on that raid..

I don’t think they were considered expendable but this was a war to the bitter end and everyone, including them, knew there would be a heavy price.

It's crazy to think how many men my age were sent to be killed in such a terrifying war.

Looking at the numbers, 10% of all American casualties in WW II were with the 8th AAF.

LostInPA expendable might not be the right word but it was assumed there would be heavy losses over 50k American and 50k British lost their lives serving in bomber command

I am here

Every side, in every battle, in every war. It's a part of human nature. For this battle, though, it's completely understandable - how many machine guns were trained on the same plane as it was shot down? I bet every gunner claimed that same plane as his kill.

In the bombers it is more understandable. When you have multiple gunners shooting at the same target each one is going to claim the kill.

On top of that despite holywood/video games it’s actually very hard to critically damage a plane with only 50. Cals. Airplanes are tin cans and bullets simply pass through unless you hit absolute needed component to keep the engine going or the pilot flying. The Germans realized this and that’s why the 30mm/rockets was used. Basically blowing a big hole into a pane disregards self sealing gas tanks, engines, and flight controls...

@@Howie262 the Germans were shooting big targets. Big wings, big controls, two pilots. The Allied were shooting small planes, small wings, small controlls, one pilot. Smaller calliber also means more bullets in the air, more chance to hit that smaller, faster target

Also don't forget that this is in a time where the only way of estimating whether or not an aircraft was shot down was by eyesight or combat footage (and that was generally very restrictive).

The worst thing is if you don’t believe in what you’re fighting for just to save the lifes of you family members

Ur words is nice to read at.. Thx for teaching me english..

Scary orders. “If you can’t get the factory’s bomb the city center and get the workers”

Occasionally? more like nearly at every nee construction site

I live in Regensburg and my parents (born 1935/36) are from about 20 miles southeast of Schweinfurt. In Regensburg there are regularly evacuations due to neutralizing bombs. Regensburg is 2000 years old, founded by the Romans. The USAF did a great job in precise bombing the 109-factory in the west und the railway station.

This is the case for every larger city in Germany.

Yea. That’s worrying

England started WW1

movie stuff

Wow. Great stuff.

@charlieharper4975 what plane/bomb squadron was he on ? My Dad also flew this mission and all the other ones depicted in the series so far. He was on the Piccadilly Lily of the 351st SQ/ 100BG. He was a waist gunner. He kept a diary and his entry for AUG17, '43 is heart wrenching when he list the names of his buddies that did not make it to N. Africa.

The name of his aircraft was "Spirit of Billy Mitchell". I have a photo of he and his crew in front of their B-17. I can recognize him squating down in the front row. He flew in Triangle A squadron. This was painted on the tail. They flew out of Bassingbourn in England. Lost over Kassel April 19, 1944. Shot down by Me109s. 401st bomb squadron, 91st BG. The truly amazing thing is I have a movie prop from RKO studios of the squadron patch that was sewn onto their leather jackets. I guess RKO at one time made a movie in which the squadron was a part. His aircraft 6 POW, 4 KIA when it went down.@@stevedavis9466​

Oh shit! Thats suprisingly good, provided the city got bombed.

On the 3rd Schwienfurt raid almost aircraft bombed, only 22 bombs hit the target and less than 200 bombs fell within 3 miles of the target.

They took pride in it

They completely destroyed most of the other cities in germany tho.

@@MicroageHD Correct, by area bombing not precision bombing.

Smart ass!

How you like dem apples

I mean... i wouldn't exactly call that a 'fun' fact...

@@JG-ib7xk It's a figure of speech

I wish they still made Bf109's & Fw190's

The second raid was confined to Schweinfurt, I believe.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Bmc9NFfhx74.html

Ein SW'ler :) Grüße aus NDW ;)

Auch Grüße aus sw

Grüße auch aus schweinfurt

Grüße aus sw meine edlen Mitbürger

You won’t learn much from that.

Amazing effort OP...I just came on board with your Pan Z production.....Top Tier.

Thanks for your perseverance

You have 11 times that number now , well done. Onwards to two mill

from 100k to a million, you've come far. Great work man

Yea. I have seen some photos of B-17s and B-24s colliding in mid-air while forming up. Horrifying stuff these brave airmen had to go through

You are the man! A real hero! Thank you for your service!

@@biglebowski5737 LOL!!!

Guessin' you stop listening at some point. LeMay lead this raid which yielded poor results.

@@MadNotAngry The raid LeMay lead was actually the successful one that had a significant impact on 109 production. Might wanna try listening yourself.

When George Wallace ran for president in 1968, Curtis LeMay was his running mate.

My grandfather's story is very similar. He was shot down on his 12th mission and was held captive by the villagers. These men were so brave!

Your grandfather is a living definition of “ tough “

Their bravery cannot be overstated. Your uncle was a hero.

Thanks for keeping it going on. From Germany. Salute

My grandfather operated the Flak back in 1943 44. He was so proud everytime they downed one of thoese pesky B-17 ;)

Indeed. I think only 10% of bombs landed within 5 miles of the target. Absolutely sickening to think of the losses these guys took for such poor results.

Yes, very right! At least until the middle/end of the year 43, when the Allies had radar systems that were small enough to be installed in aircraft on a massive scale. Another important invention was a more accurate aiming system for bombs from the USA. Only then were the destructive attacks on German cities 44 and 45 possible.

By 1944, RAF technological and strategic developments had improved bomb accuracy of the Lancaster such that it was reliably able to hit targets within 25 yards at 15,000 feet.

@@gw7624 Absolutely right - I lived in two not too big cities that were attacked in late 1944 and where the entire inner city was destroyed and never rebuilt in the same way.

My father tells a story, he did his part of his national service in an RAF base defending Libya from the Egyptians at the end of the 50's. He was a radio operator and one of the jobs there was to report on a bombing range out in the desert. this range was a circle of posts a mile across that was the same distance from bomber bases in the UK as Moscow was. Vulcans and other V bombers would fly out fly upwards and loft a bomb from over the coast and try to land it as close to the centre of the target 30 odd miles inland. now to report on the success or failure there was an observation post five miles from the target area which was five miles from the air base where all the transmitters for the radio system was based and when the bombers had dropped their bombs and were screaming back north at low level the range would transmit their success back to them and it was apparently relatively rare to miss the circle. now having a bombing range in the desert was a relative luxury and they had a request from the US airforce for a wing of level bombers to come over and use the range. The day came and the formation came over and dropped the bombs and managed to land them half way between the range hut and the airfield, so having missed the target by 7 1/2 miles. The base commander apparently got on the radio and told them to "F*ck off and never come back"

Do you know where exactly he was hidden? I'm from Schweinfurt and interested.

My grandfather flew p-47s and had the same fate 2 times. Those resistance fighters were heros among heros.

@ B Dubz That would never have happened over Germany. He may have come down in the Netherlands or Belgium.

​@Such Doge4242 That is really difficult, to believe - once maybe, but twice, no.

Den hätte man verurteilen müssen!

Thank him for his service please.

His generation knew how to deal with Nazis properly

May he rest in peace. He earned it several times over.

RIP a hero to me.

Douglas Jenkins.....101. Wow!

May he rest in peace.

A real hero. I met B17 maint crew member and B24 command pilot. Heard the well remembered stories. The pilot was with 44th BG at Polesti. They were in Vets Home in Spokane, Wa. Talk with all WW2 vets that are still with us.

I understand your fascination, but thank God nobody has to. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had to look at it before they got bombed to the ground.

The sound alone must have been terrifying. I've seen just one B-17 in flight and you could feel the thing coming from miles away from the sound it was making. I can't imagine what the the sound of over 200 of them in the air at the same time must have sounded like. Then add in the sounds of the flak guns and bomb blasts all going off while those formations flew over head.

I'm peddling as fast as I can up here :)

My mom repaired heavy and medium bombers that were sent back to the States for major upgrades/repairs. She told of many times finding body parts, bone fragments when the outer skin of the planes was removed. One of my uncles was a crew chief on B17s and later the B29s. He served in the Pacific where my stepdad served as a Marine. My dad built air field runways. Every adult in my family, aunts and uncles, my dad, and my mother all served in the war effort. We were the United States 🇺🇸 during the War years.

@@TheOperationsRoom ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Bmc9NFfhx74.html

Why was SHE on the plane? ;-D

Why was your dad inside the farmer's daughter???????????????

Salute to your dad!

Fighting for freedom and the clap of the farmers daughters cheeks

Its just incredible how far things have moved on in 75 years. I heard once that when the Lancasters amoung others undertook night raids, their accuracy was considered Good if the bombs landed within '5 miles' of their targets. Which for the time isn't too bad considering the afformentioned flying at night, only navigating via charts, bearings and speeds etc. But you compare that to todays standards! A modern LGB could get a specific window of a specific building. But yea, its a moot point, that was the best tech they had at the time and thats all they had to fight with. It sounds absolutely horrific by todays standards, but thats just how things were back them. War is a cruel beast.

That was the first raid

Except the first thing a fighter pilot would do when they met the enemy is drop their tanks, so if they attacked before you emptied them you could wind up stuck. ETA: Plus, it's over 500 miles just from Dover to Regensburg, and the airfields were all further away than that.

This is straight from Greg's Airplanes and Automobiles. Unfortunately, Greg has built his case not on finding the truth but on trying to vindicate 'my favourite plane'. Drop tanks could not have made much - if any - difference to the Schweinfurt raid. But Greg doesn't talk about this because he doesn't really understand the history of the raid. He's too focussed on building a support case for 'my favourite plane'. Schweinfurt was a foul up not because of drop tanks - or lack of them - but because of the weather. There is plenty of information about this. Furthermore, American bombing raids up until then had not shown unacceptable losses. Hell, with a bit of luck, they might even have pulled it off. Nobody had a crystal ball. Greg's 20/20 hindsight view is pretty unhelpful.

@@jdotoz That was a Luftwaffe strategy, agreed upon by Galland and Beppo Schmitt - who had become a good officer since his embarrassing performance in the Battle of Britain - from early 1944.

By the way, Greg’s claims are based mostly on calculations. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he is using assumptions involving optimum altitude and throttle settings. A theoretical range of 400 miles is meaningless in an escort scenario and it would have been more appropriate to talk about _endurance._ That the P-51 enabled escorted deep penetration missions into Germany is not seriously contested by anyone who has read enough about it. The idea of rewriting history to make the P-47 look better than it was is counter factual. Before the P-51 arrived there could be no escorted raids on cities like Berlin or Munich. Once the P-51 arrived, the USAAF strategic bombing campaign could be prosecuted anywhere in Germany with low losses. I can find no examples of P-47s flying to Berlin and back. None. They may have flown as part of the relay but they could only have covered all of Germany from either liberated Europe or Italy. The problem could not be solved with drop tanks and anyone who knows anything about flying or aerodynamics knows this. It could only be solved by increasing internal fuel capacity. When the government requested manufacturers increase the internal capacity of US fighters at least a year before Schweinfurt, the only manufacturer who did not respond appropriately was Republic. Everyone else: North American, Lockheed, Curtiss, Bell, Grumman, etc. all improved their internal capacity. Gen. George Kenney was known to have been furious with Kartvelli for failing to address the problem. The 200 gallon tank Greg calculates for was a ferry tank and not combat capable. I don’t think it could even be jettisoned. Bomber mafia problem? Nope.

Greg’s claims are the stuff of cheap conspiracy. He has read next to no history so he never comments with operational examples. Everything he presents is spec sheets and conjecture. He doesn’t have any serious knowledge of the operational considerations of the Schweinfurt - Regensburg raids. I’m staggered that so many people have been sucked in.

And we all miss you guys. You made schweinfurt better . And even now is everyone talking about how you guys made schweinfurt better

Do you mean Martin Caidin?

@@danwilliams4051 No, he means Martin Middlebrook, one of the finest writers of military history who ever lived. Martin Caidin is a clown in comparison. His books are full of nonsense and are of no use to anyone who's seriously interested in learning about the WW 2 air war.

@@danwilliams4051LOL!! No, he’s talking about a serious historian. However, I completely understand your mistake. Caidin did write a book about ‘Black Thursday’, which was the second Schweinfurt raid.

@thethirdman225 Interesting I never heard these takes on Caidin before. The only 2 books I read completely of his are Thunderbolt! and Samurai, but the bulk of those books are written by the pilots (Johnson and Sakai). I found both books to be fairly accurate and informative. I'd like to hear more about your opinions on Caidin though.

@@danwilliams4051 I have read three of Caidin’s books. He wrote one on the Bf-109 which was just a broad brush history and to be fair, didn’t pretend to be anything it wasn’t. I read ‘Thunderbolt!’ as an impressionable teenager and I think that’s probably the market is best suited to. I also still have his book about Saburo Sakai, upon which much doubt has been cast. ‘Thunderbolt!’ is, from memory, pretty fast and loose with the truth. I suspect - as many others do - that Johnson was a bit of a BS artist. For example, he claimed a FW-190D in April but that type did not go into service until October. I’m not by any means saying that he didn’t shoot down 27 aircraft. But the existence of the -D9 was not known when Johnson went back home in May. There are other examples but that's for another post. There has been much doubt expressed about his book on Sakai too, especially in relation to the number of claims he made. Caidin’s job was - if he had any morality - a perplexing one. Either he let these guys tell their stories and just run with that or try to keep it as factual as possible. I’ll be honest: that’s not the kind of dilemma I’d have wanted to be in. I know of one historian who wrote a book about someone who openly threatened him. That was Jeff Watson and his book on Australian ace Clive Caldwell. Watson’s book is arguably a much better picture of Caldwell than Caidin’s book. He presents his subject warts and all. Caidin doesn’t do that and his books are the poorer for it.

Bill is that a Winnipeg ''Black Devils'' badge?

Agreed. Unfortunately Martin Middlebrook passed away on 24 January, 2024, aged 91.

Black Thursday was the 2nd Regensburg - Schweinfurt mission. A very bad day for the 8th Air Force

Read it! Great book

Caiden was an excellent historical Aviation writer....very prolific

Martin Caidin is considered to be a clown by serious aviation historians and writers. Don't waste your money on his stuff. If anyone is interested in reading something worthwhile about the raid, try "The Schweinfurt-Regensburg Mission" by Martin Middlebrook.

@@hertzair1186 I don't agree. Caidin seems to have laced a lot of his stories with all kinds of unfounded rumours and rose-tinted optimism. I wouldn't recommend him. The only reason I can think of for reading it is that I can’t find anything else on the second raid.

With the accuracy, seriousness and unbiasness of a British historian !

Same here

Thankyou sir, have a great Christmas

Did he know Col Lee Fiegel of 93rd BG?

@@ronmcdon992000 - Unlikely - he was with the 486th at Sudbury-Suffolk.

My dad was a co-pilot flying his 16th mission in one of the Schweinfurt B-17s. They made it to the target but were shot down on their way back. Dad bailed out over Holland but was later captured and spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft III where the Great Escape happened.

Much respect to yours and the other guys' fathers.

my family is from there. grandmothers house was bombed. she lived in the countryside after that till the end.

Get a life!

Operation Room is a small team.

I was erlangen and I lived in a nazi barracks for 4 years 88 to 91 you can still see the germans rifle racks

Not to sound uppity, twelve o'clock high was based on the early days of the 306th bomb group (movie: 918th bg). If you look up the pictures of commanding officers and aircraft of the 306th, I came across a notation referring to just that. Dan hughes

So very true...the USAAF's own report indicated that the only targets that the bombers went after that REALLY hurt the German war effort were oil, electricity, and transportation targets.