Inside the B-17 Flying Fortress

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I'm 77 years old now. My dad was a B-17 pilot in WW II and was shot down over Holtland, Germany on July 26, 1943. Five of the crew were killed and five survived. My dad spent the rest of the war in Stalag Luft III (the site of the Great Escape) and Stalag VII A where he was liberated in April 1945 by the advanced units of Patton's 3rd Army. He was wounded by shrapnel from a 20mm explosive shell from a German FW-190. He very rarely said anything about his experiences in WW II. Total time was perhaps a minute or two until he died. Everything I learned about him in WW II was by my own research of US and German documents in my later life, and it took many years to piece everything together. For example it tool a long time going through the German records to learn that it was Senior Lieutenant Karl Decker piloting an FW-190 who shot my dad down after my dad's B-17 had been hit by flak and fell behind the formation on the way back from a successful bombing run on the Hanover Rubber Works, Hanover, Germany. Oddly, one of the very few things my dad mentioned about his time in WW II was that a German patrol that was sent to take him prisoner saved him from angry farmers that wanted to kill him. It was hard as a kid and a young adult to imagine what war was really like. My dad said that the movie "Twelve O'Clock High" came close to what it was like and the novel "Maybe I'm Dead" was a realistic depiction of what POW life was like. Well, I got my chance to imagine what war was like. In 1967 I joined the Marine Corps to avoid being drafted into the Army. I graduated from OCS an was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant. Then after 6 months of officer training, I arrived in Vietnam on December 15, 1968 and took command of an infantry platoon. I came home in December 1969 and I can definitely say I know for a fact what war is like. It's extreme physical and mental stress, death, horrible wounds, chaos, destruction, and survival when it didn't seem possible. A special thanks to all of the Marines who served in my platoon including the magnificent Navy Corpsmen and all the Marines, Navy, and Air Force supporting operations that saved our butts more than a few times. There is so much I can say about combat. First, if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you are dead or wounded. Second, there were unimaginable tragedies and there were miracles on the battlefield. One day I had 34 Marines in my platoon (very much under strength) and when the sun set that day, only 4 of us were still alive and unwounded. That was the worst day of my life. On another day, we were in an intense firefight when were caught in the open by North Vietnamese soldiers. They had us dead to rights. I had to make a decision to try to fall back or to conduct an aggressive frontal attack. I only had a few seconds and I decided on an aggressive frontal attack. But I had no radio contact with my squad leaders and so I had to run up and down the line of assault shouting commands to coordinate the assault. If you've never been in a firefight, bullets travel faster than the speed of sound and so when they pass close by, you can hear a loud "snap" which is a small sonic boom. It's not an exaggeration that during that assault it soundly like a string of firecrackers going off around me. When my platoon reached the tree line, it was hand to hand for a very brief time with some of my Marines. It didn't last more than 30-60 seconds before the enemy quickly withdrew. After the battle, I asked my platoon sergeant to get a count of our dead and wounded. A few minutes later he returned and said, "Sir, you ain't gonna believe this, but we only have one Marine with minor wound to his hand from an enemy bayonet and he doesn't want to be evacuated." That was a miracle. And here is the really odd thing. I really can't describe this in a way you might understand, but I had this feeling while I was in Vietnam that there was something watching over me. I never had any fear in Vietnam except for two situations. It would take too long to describe them, but one was during a night ambush we established when I thought the enemy would discover us and they had way more soldiers than I did Marines. The other was when we were in a company defensive position in a valley at night and we were hit with our own 155 mm artillery after a Recon unit in the mountains above us mistook us for the enemy. If you have never been caught in barrage of artillery, it is the most terrifying experience you can comprehend. The shrapnel is mowing down saplings and small trees. There is the screams of the wounded but no one can get to them. Those were two moments where I didn't have the feeling anyone was watching over me. So what's my point? Well when I in my 60's I had a chance to pay for a ride on a B-17. I wanted to know kind of what my dad may have felt and saw. Obviously, there was no flak or German fighters, but I did have my experience of three years in combat. My first impression was just how small or really tiny the B-17 was and just how difficult it was to try to get from the rear to the front of it. And how hard it was to actually try to bail out when you may have only a few seconds or minutes while the plane began to spiral out of control causing centrifugal spin trapping the crew inside. Perhaps the worst position was the ball turret gunner who could not have a parachute. In order to exit the ball turret position, the turret had to be repositioned in order for the gunner to get out, and then he had to find a parachute to attach and then find a way to bail out. If the electrical systems were shot up, there was no way he could get out of the turret and bail out. I took two flights in the B-17 called the 909 in different years. Tragically, a year or two ago the 909 crashed during an emergency landing and was destroyed killing passengers and crew but with a couple of survivors. I'm glad I had the two experiences before maintenance problems caused a crash and deaths. RIP for the souls who perished. This video brought back so many memories of my dad and B-17's. I served 21 yeas in the Marines with two more years in combat. I shouldn't be alive today.

9:02 the bombardier reacting to the blast of flak and then rapidly blinking to lock in is CRAZY level of detail into your animation

Seeing this after having finished the Masters of Air is just awesome.

David I have no idea what it takes to make these but I’ve been a WW2 history buff for a long long time and these videos are truly one of a kind thank you so much for the effort to bring this side of the war to light.

Just realized that this is yarnhub’s other channel😭

19:15 Pilot: Good job Crosby ❤

About 25 years ago, I had to clean out the house of an unassuming old man with dementia/Alzheimer's. After the war he was a hardware store owner until he retired and sold it. Anyway, there were multiple Army Air core manuals on gunnery for the 17 that he had in his basement, since he was a gunnery instructor after the war. I still have his crew jacket that he wore. I would donate it to a museum, but the unit no longer exists. I know the group, squadron, and tail number. His name is Paul A. Perkins . He owned the hardware store in Bonner Springs, Kansas. I even have pictures of the crew in front of the plane. I have 21 years service in the USMC and ARMY, he had a lot more balls than me.

It must take a staggering amount of effort to create one of these vids. Thank you it is greatly appreciated by many.

Engine model shows a seven-cylinder pattern instead of the actual nine. Voiceover refers to guns both as "fifty cal" and "point five zero"- these are the same thing, viewers might be confused. Kudos for pointing out that waist gunner positions were staggered on the next model (G). Mentioning that head-on attacks were preferred by the Luftwaffe could lead into mentioning the addition of a chin turret on the next model as well.

Awesome video! The animations are top notch. I love how you transition between a clean aircraft in the void, explaining it's inner workings. And a dramatic reenactment of the crew flying on a mission. Seriously, the mission segments alone could be it's own short film. Amazing job.

When I was younger back in the early 2000s I remember playing a Nintendo DS game called B-17 Flying Fortress that let you play as all the gunner positions. Listening to the background callouts of “Bandits! 6 0-clock High!” and “Fighters coming around fast!” I knew it was the audio used in that game. Really takes me back to my childhood.

I love these kind of videos. You learn so much about these WW2 machines you didn't know about yet in such a nicely animated way. Keep it up.

One of the most Indepth videos that I've ever seen on a Flying Fortres - Nice!!!

Its amazing how modern weapons evolved from a 4 engine 10 crew plane carrying 8000 pounds of ordnance to a twin engine jet plane with 1/2 crews carrying the same ordnance weight with much more self protection capabilities

Fantastic series and effort. Obviously, the possibilities for this kind of presentation are almost endless. The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is literally true here. Just wonderful.👍

I love these videos so much. I wish you guys had the chance of releasing more of them, but I also understand that the quality of the videos takes time for your research. Thank you for everything you do.

I'll be honest. Just watching how thin the wing skin is has totally blown me away!

Magnificent work! Thanks a lot. I appreciate metric units, which let me watching with no pause for recalc.

My great grandpa was a tail gunner on a B-17 from 1942 to the end of the war and even had a couple encounters with some 262s during the war i still have his mission logs and medals and i was lucky enough to meet a very nice man who was a waist gunner and talk to him for a bit so this kind of stuff is very very interesting to me