The P-51: Cadillac of the Skies Decisive Weapons

Europe, 1943.

The Allies gamble all on daylight bombing of Germany by the US 8th Air Force.

It's a gamble they are losing.

'Wave after wave of enemy fighters attack the unescorted bombers.'

In mid-1943 the 8th Air Force was basically being shot out of the sky.

While the RAF bomb at night,

the Americans are certain they can achieve better accuracy in daylight.

But the lumbering bombers are easy prey for German fighters.

The Americans had believed their B17 Flying Fortresses to be impregnable.

They were wrong.

We found out, to our dismay, that the vaunted firepower of the B17...

was still not enough to protect us

from a concentrated attack of German fighters.

The daylight bombing campaign is threatened with failure,

and with it, the most effective way of taking the war to Germany.

The Americans need a fighter to match the bomber's 1,400 mile range,

match its altitude of 35,000 feet,

and THEN take on the Luftwaffe.

Only one fighter has the capacity to save the daylight bombing campaign.

The story of the Allied victory in the air over Germany is the story of the P51 Mustang.

If you wanna go to Berlin and mix it up with the enemy,

keep him off the bomber-stream, engage the Luftwaffe,

it WAS the P51.

I felt I had the best weapon available. State of the art.

Everything that makes a good fighter was right at our fingertips.

NEW SPEAKER: It was truly the sport car of its era. At the time...

I felt like the luckiest pilot in the Air Force,

to be able to fly the Mustang. It was the greatest!

The Mustang, the saviour of the American air war, began life in 1940.

Ironically, the British inspired it.

A huge RAF order had led to North American Aviation's brand new fighter design.

Combining the latest design methods and technology, it was named the P51.

We were trying to be an isolationist nation.

We weren't gonna go to war in Europe.

So had it not been for the British buy of these airplanes,

the US probably never would have had the P51.

Typical of the British flair for naming, they named it the Mustang.

'The P51 Mustang, with its killing potential

'has brought new hope to a besieged Britain.'

NEW SPEAKER: The RAF, when they got this aircraft late in 1941,

used it as army support, a tactical fighter,

shooting the enemy on the ground, low-level reconnaissance.

It was a beautifully streamlined, aerodynamic airframe, but it had this Allison engine.

It was a damn good engine at low altitude, but it had no supercharging.

Above 15,000 feet, power fell off.

It was no match for any German interceptor.

The Mustang needed but one addition to make it a true thoroughbred.

That addition came courtesy of the British.

Fortunately, a few people influential in British production...

managed to fly the airplane.

One of them, Ronnie Harker from Rolls-Royce, said, "Let's put a Merlin on this thing."

The British-made Merlin engine, produced by Rolls-Royce, had a peerless reputation for performance.

It was the one used in the Spitfire.

The supercharged Merlin doubled the P51's altitude.

It could now fly as high as the American bombers, at 40,000 feet,

six miles up in the sky.

NEW SPEAKER: It was a quantum improvement,

the introduction of the Rolls-Royce Merlin. And...does anything SOUND better?

That dude just hums!

It's just a LOVELY engine to listen to.

Doesn't sound too bad inside the cockpit either!

The Mustang cockpit is extremely well-organised.

A pilot can just reach blindly and get the controls fairly quickly.

This is the throttle, one of the finest-feeling in any airplane.

Everyone loves this great handful of throttle.

The stick. Up here, the machine guns,

OR bombs. It has a trigger on the front, and a button on the top.

You can use one for guns, one for bombs. Here's the fuel management.

The flying instruments are well-organised.

Altitude, air speed, compass.

Turn and bank, propeller, mixture control.

At the left are the flaps. All the trims, elevator, aileron, rudder.

I've covered most of what a pilot does, THAT quickly. It's THAT manageable.

The airplane's also simple OUTSIDE.

The tail, straightforward and simple, with a mass-balanced elevator.

Any WWII airplane is going to require a large rudder.

Since the torque on the propeller's so intense, he needs a lot of this.

This flap is massive.

It's to slow the plane enough to land(!)

50-calibre guns went up in here. Excellent firepower in six of them.

Nice, thin laminar-flow wing.

I can get my hand around the cord of this wing! The thinner, the faster.

An enormous four-bladed Hamilton standard propeller in front.

Eleven foot two in diameter.

A massive gyroscope, controlled only by hand and feet, throttle and rudder.

The great Merlin engine makes the airplane what it was in WWII.

A high-altitude engine developed by the British,

built by the Packard Motor Car Co in the US.

It made the Mustang the high- altitude fighter that it was.

I was 22. And at 22...

one likes the good lines of...machinery,

and young ladies...

But the P51 simply had a class all of its own.

It was a beauty to behold.

In 1942, despite the high performance of the Mustang,

America's air commanders put THEIR faith in the 8th Air Force bombers,

principally the B17 Flying Fortress.

It was aptly named, with its nine gun positions, powered gun-turrets,

and twin 50-calibre machine guns.

Believing in the B17's firepower,

they saw no need for fighter escort even in daylight.

The Luftwaffe would quickly teach them a lesson.

SHEPPARD: The bomber losses were tremendous,

remembering that each bomber had ten or eleven men on it.

We were losing up to 50 bombers per mission.

..This was a horrendous figure to absorb in your daily life.

It's 500 or 600 men being wiped out.

500 or 600 FAMILIES were being bereft.

This is something that is very difficult to take.

One goes to breakfast with his crewmates and squadron mates,

one comes to dinner that evening,

and...maybe a quarter of them aren't there any longer.

What they needed was a long-range fighter to escort the bombers.

The Spitfire had the performance, but a tiny fuel capacity.

The Americans turned to the P47 Thunderbolt, a powerful and rugged fighter.

But despite its large fuel tank, it just didn't have the bombers' full range.

FIRST PILOT: After the P47 had to turn and go home, and we were out there all alone, all we could do...

was "tuck it in", fly the closest formation we could,

to concentrate the defensive fire,

because any stragglers or strays were an easy kill for the German fighters.

SHEWFELT: Their Ground Control knew almost to the mile

where the American escort would have to turn and go back,

and within five minutes the bombers could count on being hit...

by the German fighters...

and mauled...mercilessly,

from then till the target, and back.

They really knew our tactics, our capabilities and limitations.

After a particularly disastrous raid on Schweinfurt in October 1943,

American bombers had to restrict their targets to the range of the escorts.

The Luftwaffe ruled the skies over Germany.

Some think that by 1943, with America in the war,

it was all but over. But far from it.

If anything, the Luftwaffe was actually getting the better of the bomber forces.

The solution that saved American daylight bombing was deceptively simple.

Disposable fuel tanks made of a laminated paper compound.

It doubled a fighter's fuel load.

The fighters most used in 1943 were the Spitfire and the Thunderbolt,

but only the Mustang could carry the fuel.

With over 200 gallons more fuel, the Mustang could fly ANYWHERE in occupied Europe.

When we got the 108 gallon laminated paper fuel tanks,

it let the Mustang go all over Germany with the bombers,

have loitering time...

In fact it was truly the turning point of the air war in Europe.

GERMAN ACCENT: As long as you had

no enemy fighters, it was easier to approach a bomber formation

than...one with fighter escort.

The moment the Americans or the British came with fighter escort, it was bad.

The US Air Force now had a fighter with the range, altitude and performance to protect its bombers.

All they needed was enough of them.

America could, better than anyone, mass-produce.

We just took the automobile industry

and turned it into one large production engine.

The US built almost 300,000 airplanes in World War Two.

That's almost the same number as everyone else put together.

It's a phenomenal amount.

With a fighter to protect bombers AND take on the Luftwaffe,

now American pilots had to prove the Mustang in combat.

Men like fighter ace Don Blakeslee.

Blakeslee was the single man responsible for standing up and saying, "Let me have this airplane."

HE integrated the Mustang into the theatre, with the 354th Group.

He helped them prepare for combat, then asked for the plane.

I felt it from the first time I saw the airplane, first flew it.

The way it handled... And when I knew I could go ANYPLACE...

I mean this sincerely - there wasn't a PLACE I couldn't go in enemy territory - that was IT.

Suddenly he had an airplane, as he said, had seven-league boots. It could go to Berlin! He wanted that,

to get WAY out there, and never have to turn away from the bombers. To go ALL the way.

Only when the bombers turned around, HE would. This airplane did it.

In '51 we were actually SEEKING the enemy,

because we knew that - and proved it -

numbers didn't mean anything,

range didn't mean anything,

go get 'em!

On March 4th 1944, he got his wish to go all the way with the bombers to Berlin,

the heart of the Third Reich, a target never before tried in daylight.

So in this mission we're going to Berlin. Everyone's making a fuss.

The media... "Oh, god, here we go(!)"

The hard part of the thing was, the weather wasn't particularly good.

The journey to Berlin and back was 1,300 miles, a seven hour flight.

Bad weather made half the force turn back.

Blakeslee pushed on, determined to tackle the Luftwaffe over the Nazi capital.

I got on to one,

and I got on his tail,

close, close, close. I had him...

cold turkey.

And the GUNS didn't fire.

You can imagine what I thought.

I flew up beside him...

and there's been STORIES,

saying that I waved, and he waved...

He wasn't ABOUT to wave. If he'd have waved, I woulda RAMMED him!

Blakeslee's guns had iced over in the high-altitude cold.

Teething troubles were inevitable in these early long-range missions.

The March 4th mission had been little more than a dry run.

On March 6th, the 8th Air Force returned to Berlin

with one of the largest air armadas ever assembled.

800 bombers stretched over 30 miles of sky, and with them, their Mustang escorts.

The March 6th mission to Berlin was something of a turning point.

It proved that the escort fighters could not only go all the way,

they could protect bombers well, and destroy enemy fighters.

They had to fight HARD. The enemy, as it was his capital under attack,

put up his total air force, everything that he could muster.

In the battle, a bomber section was separated from its fighter escort.

Swarming into the gap, Luftwaffe fighters shot down 42 bombers.

But where the Mustangs were present, the Luftwaffe got shot from the sky.

87 German planes were lost, a fifth of the counter-attack force.

Huge damage was inflicted on the German capital, and national morale.

Hermann Goering, who led the German Luftwaffe, looked up on March 6th

and saw red-nosed Mustangs - they'd have been Blakeslee's - over Berlin,

and said, "The war is lost."

A story, but that must've been the feeling of many Luftwaffe commanders who now saw...

enemy one-man fighters over Berlin,

something that was thought impossible a couple of years earlier.

HAGENAH: The sky was full of enemies,

and we had to fight them.

The Mustang was better in every respect. In every respect.

Manoeuvrability, higher cruising speed, acceleration.

We had NO chance against the Mustang.

The Mustang rode high in German skies.

A new generation of aces emerged.

Blakeslee, by now a legend, was decorated by Eisenhower himself.

But while some were glorified,

other Americans, ignored by the media, were also making their mark in Mustangs.

Especially the "Red Tails" squadron,

the Tuskegee Airmen.

The Tuskegee Airmen evolved...

after much effort and controversy in the military.

The military traditionally believed

that negroes, or blacks, were not to be given any technical roles,

merely menial work.

With the pressures exerted on Congress and the military,

they opened up the Air Corps for admission to the blacks.

And this experiment was expected to fail.

Unfortunately, they provided so many obstacles

that they didn't get anything but the cream of the crop(!) THEY were not about to give in

to the expectations of the bigotry that existed.

50 missions was the tour of duty when we arrived in Naples, Italy.

I flew 107 missions during a four-month period.

As there were no black replacements,

we continued to fly, as we knew it was an experiment. We had NOT planned for failure.

Our record, to my knowledge, has never been equalled or surpassed...

in ANY war. We never lost a bomber to enemy air action.

I heard some were reluctant to have us, early on,

but later said they better get a Red Tails escort.

The Mustang was a powerful weapon in our hands also.

It gave us the chance to prove ourselves

as...a many-roled fighter outfit.

The 332nd shot down or damaged 409 German aircraft.

Not bad for an outfit that the Army Air Corps said couldn't learn to fly,

and if they DID learn to fly, didn't have the courage to fight in combat.

Convinced by the Mustang's extraordinary performance,

the USAF now found new ways to exploit their war-winning machine.

The American bombing depended on visual sighting on a target five miles below.

How many days do you get "visual conditions" in north-west Europe? Very few.

But it helped to send out scouting Mustangs way ahead of the bombers,

who could report back by radio

on the actual conditions over the target.

We were eyes for the bomber commander,

before the bombers, 45 minutes before anybody,

to report back on the weather, target conditions,

where enemy aircraft were forming, how the flak was.

If the primary target was covered up with smoke-screens or weather,

we'd divert the bombers to a secondary target.

Brooks saw this kind of mission was necessary. The Mustang was the only plane for it.

It was manoeuvrable, had firepower,

it had range. So it was ideal for the mission.

Our little scout force got a few victories. Not many - it wasn't our job.

What my scouting force is famous for - I just had one wing-man...

He and I had done our job and were on the way back,

and a gaggle of Germans were heading towards the bombers.

I called it 75, the bombers said 125. We compromised at 100 enemy...

And my wing-man and I shot five of them at that time.

One of the fighter squadrons I called on the radio came up,

and got 34 kills out of the remaining airplanes in the air.

The older I get, the braver I was(!)

In keeping the German fighters away from the American bomber formations,

they gradually achieved something never thought possible,

air superiority over the enemy homeland.

That in itself was a war-winning feat.

It let Eisenhower say, on the morning of D-Day...

"If you see any aircraft over the beaches, they're ours." They WERE.

We dominated the air over there,

the P51, and gradually beat the Luftwaffe to its knees

through damage to their production facilities for their combat aircraft,

damage to their oil production, so they couldn't supply the training

of new pilots.

So their typical pilot near the end of the war was...quite inexperienced.

and rather easy prey for our, by then, HIGHLY experienced P51 pilots.

BLAKESLEE: The boys didn't even wanna take leave. They wanted to fly.

I think they felt "Well, hell, this is a turkey-shoot.

"And we're not the turkey."

Destruction in the air was not now enough.

While the bombers headed home, the Mustangs loitered, wreaking havoc.

General Hap Arnold told pilots "Get them in the air, get them on the ground, just GET them."

We would fly escort with them until we reached back about the Dutch border,

and we'd go back looking for targets of opportunity. Airfields, transport,

what-have-you, and go down to strafe.

We looked at trains,

or barges on the river, or...

any enemy installations such as airfields.

Wherever we found a suitable target, we'd turn loose. That was playtime.

It was a thrill to hit an airfield and blow the planes up,

or to hit a transportation target,

or to hit a locomotive

and see the steam blow.

BLAKESLEE: We'd go down...and if it moves,

you KILL it!

You have the ammunition. You PAID to bring it. Don't bring it home! We got more.

Ground strafing was not without hazard.

Anti-aircraft fire shot down more Mustangs than the Luftwaffe.

In fact, that's the nastiest job in the whole business.

We lost more people on ground work than aerial work.

But the point is, as someone said...

"That's how you earn your hazard pay!"

Whether 100 feet off the ground or six miles up in the sky,

the Mustang was turning the course of the war.

The number of victories increased

to a point where the Luftwaffe was hard-put to put up a formation

to engage the American bombers. Some days they just didn't try.

Once it had been the hunter of the American bombers.

Now it was hunted by their fighters.

I just KNEW if we kept on doing what we were doing,

that they were BOUND to know...

that you don't fool around with P51s.

And I think they learned that.

It was our salvation,

and all of us will...

Bomber pilots will bow down and take off our hats

to the pilots who were trained to fly that airplane,

and to fight with it in the superb way that they did.

50 years after the war it helped to win,

the allure of the P51, the Cadillac of the skies, remains as strong as ever.

MARCH: People who were not even born

when the Mustang was designed and put into service,

probably are attracted to this particular airplane

by the very aesthetics of its lines,

and the beautiful hum...

of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine,

and its gracefulness in flight.

It is a lovely airplane to watch in flight.

# Saddle your blues to a wild mustang

# Gallop your troubles away, a-way, away, a-way

# Those ornery mavericks need a strong, steady hand

# Yip 'em up, round 'em up, trip 'em up, tie 'em up, use your brain

# Saddle your blues to a wild mustang... #

Subtitles by E Kane BBC Scotland - 1996

MUSIC: Wonderwall by Oasis