- Welcome.

I'm Grover Silcox.

It's a pleasure to bring you this special program honoring our veterans.

Those who fought our wars often describe the unspeakable terrors on the battlefield, but imagine a battlefield 22,000 feet in the air.

Well, that's where the men of the Eighth Air Force fought in the skies over Europe in World War II.

It was a battlefield like no other.

And to help us understand the Mighty Eighth, the Eighth Air Force, I'm joined by author and historian Donald Miller, who wrote Masters of the Air about the Eighth Air Force in World War II.

Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg are just wrapping up production of a series based on the book for Apple TV.

My other guest, Yvonne Caputo, is an educator and psychotherapist who wrote Flying with Dad.

It's the story of how she came to understand her dad more fully through his harrowing wartime experiences as a navigator on a B-24 in the Mighty Eighth.

Welcome, Don and Yvonne.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- To the veterans.

- Yeah, absolutely.

It just so happens we all have dads who were in the US Army Air Force during World War II, my father in the Pacific, and of course, Yvonne, your book, Flying with Dad, is all about your relationship with your father and how you came to know him more fully after he sort of opened up and revealed some of the experiences that he had during World War II as a B-24 navigator.

And Don, I noticed that you also pay tribute to your dad, who was also in the US Army Air Force.

- He's a sergeant in the Air Force and a control tower operator.

He was in flight training.

He qualified as a navigator pilot.

But they had a shortage of control tower operators, so he was here and in Europe for a while as well.

- So I have to ask you, what led you to the Eighth Air Force?

- Well, like Yvonne, I'm a storyteller, and this is a hell of a story.

And, I mean, there is no Eighth Air Force after Pearl Harbor, and it's formed that January in Savannah with seven men and no planes.

And two and a half years later, it's the greatest striking force in the history of the world.

And so it grew out of nothing into something very consequential.

And there's been a lot of books.

There had been a lot of books on the Eighth.

I Googled it and there were over 900, but I couldn't find one that did what I was trying to do, give a holistic view of the air war.

In the air at 25-30,000 feet, dropping the bombs, being under the bombs in German cities, life on the bases in England.

The Eighth Air Force flew out of East Anglia in eastern England.

Almost all the bases were located there and just north of London.

So London's second home for them.

And...

So it's... And it deals with medical issues, it deals with combat issues, because I'm not really what you'd call a military historian.

I'm an historian of warfare.

And warfare is all-encompassing.

In any war, generally, two thirds to three quarters of the people who are killed are civilians, and so I try to weave that story in as well.

And that's what we're trying to bring to film in this Hanks and Spielberg series, which is not a documentary.

It's a dramatic series.

- Right.

Similar to Band of Brothers.

- Yeah, we like to consider a three-volume series.

It starts with Band of Brothers.

The Pacific is the second volume.

And then this is the third volume, the war from the air.

- Well, Don, you have a lot of personal stories and anecdotes in your book.

But, Yvonne, your book is your personal story with your dad.

Tell me how you learned about his experiences, because it didn't come until you were an adult.

- My father lived in Pennsylvania, western part of the state, and I live on the eastern part of the state, and it was normal for us to have a weekly phone conversation.

But once we got through medical tests and dialysis treatments and the kind of in-home care that we were providing for Dad, the conversation kind of stalled.

I never had the relationship with my father where that conversation would be extended to what I might think was important.

But in 2008, he opened up and told me this quirky, funny, off-the-wall story about having the third engine be out on his B-24, requesting an emergency landing in Free Belgium, and ending up being billeted above a bistro.

The bistro owner comes and says, "Do you have cigarettes that you're willing to part with?"

And Dad said, "Sure."

And so Dad commandeers a truck.

In the middle of the night, they go out, pull hay bales aside, dig in the earth and unearth cases of French champagne.

So the cigarettes were traded for the French champagne.

And the following morning, when the engine was repaired, they flew the champagne back to the base, Rackheath, England.

Dad went and got an MP and said, "Guard this plane with your life.

"It's got top secret information on it," and then went to distribute the champagne to both the noncoms and the officers, much to Colonel Schauer's, who was the base commander, chagrin because some of the guys weren't in really good shape the following morning.

So that was the story that started it.

So here's Dad talking to me about something that he's never talked about before.

So the following Sunday, I said, "If you're willing, Dad, start at the beginning."

And so he did.

And story after story after story started to roll out.

And finally in 2019, I found somebody to help me publish it.

And here we have, Flying with Dad.

We should say, his name is Mike Caputo.

- Mike Caputo.

- And the stories are always so singular, but yet there's a common thread through all of them.

- I found in the interviewing process, and I still interview these guys, I mean, nobody was a hero in their estimation.

I wasn't a hero.

The heroes are all, you know, over there in graves or over here in graves.

And so they're not promoting themselves.

They're promoting the effort, this collective effort to beat the Germans.

And there's a lot of self-effacing.

Sometimes you have to pull this stuff out of these guys.

They have these feats of incredible, hair-raising heroism, and... And a lot of times, they're buried, unless you can do like Yvonne did, just keep the questions going, you know?

And that's generally how my interviews went as well.

One story leads to another.

It usually starts in training.

Because training was so dramatic for these guys.

Most of them had never been anywhere else.

And all of a sudden, they're around a lot of guys from a lot of different areas... - And they've never been on planes.

- Absolutely.

Most of them hadn't.

Three quarters of the guys who flew with the Eighth had never been in an airplane.

And the rest of them had been at maybe an air show and they paid five bucks for an hour up, you know, in a two-winger or something like that.

But there was a romance about flying in the '30s, you know?

And there were a lot of great movies about flying, long before, of course, Twelve O'Clock High.

But so there was a pull there.

An emotional pull.

It's a new technology, you know?

You know, the Wright brothers, that's recent history!

Yeah.

Lindbergh, 1927.

You know, the first enclosed airplanes are developed in the '30s.

The first bombers are developed in 1935.

First, the B-17, then the B-24 right after it, you know?

So this is new stuff.

- So let's talk about the aircraft, and the two primary aircraft that the Eighth had, which was the B-17 and the B-24 Liberator, I think they called it, right?

- Yeah.

Well, they look large from the ground, you know?

But when you get inside, it's tight.

The quarters are very tight.

Our camera people for the Hanks-Spielberg film found that out, trying to film inside those claustrophobic, you know, cabins.

It's just an aluminum tube, both planes.

I mean, it's the skin that is very thin.

A strong man with a screwdriver can drive a hole right through, you know, the side of the fuselage of the plane.

So German flak, German artillery fire, could easily, you know, take out, you know, a quarter of the fuselage with one shot or maybe the entire plane.

- Right.

- And it's filled with gas!

You're flying with, you know... - Oh, yeah.

It's combustible!

- You know, over Germany... - With ammunition and bombs and all kinds of things to go up... - Yeah, and the B-24, there were more of them during the war.

They built more.

Most of them were built in Michigan.

They had what was called a Davis wing, which is a higher wing and a little unstable at high altitudes.

So sometimes they didn't go on the long distance missions that demanded a lot of height.

But the crews are equally heroic.

- Ten men to a crew?

Ten men, unless there was a radio operator on the plane.

Ten men to the crew and... And the thing that strikes you is, this wasn't impersonal warfare.

There's no foxholes in the sky.

There's no place to hide.

This got very personal.

You could see the eyes of German approaching pilots as they're coming in at closing speeds of 600mph.

You could see their faces.

Hardly any infantrymen, hardly any ground troops got that close to the Germans, so it's not just this push-button warfare.

And it's absolutely harrowing when you're hit or under fire inside the plane.

And you've got to remember, unlike, you know, when you fly commercially today, when you get above 11,000 feet, 10,000 feet, you're on oxygen.

There's no oxygen fed into the plane.

It's fed through your mask.

So you need instruments.

You need machines in order to fly.

You had a flight suit, you know, and you had a flak vest and heavy flak.

There was a helmet and things like that.

But the temperatures inside the planes in the wintertime over Germany could get up to 60 below zero.

And there's no heat in the plane.

- Right.

0 So if you pull your gloves off and your gun jams and you try to clear that jam with your bare hands, your hands will stick to the gun.

You pull it off, you pull about three layers of skin off.

Frostbite was a major problem because the plane is not enclosed.

The gunner is in the back of the plane, two of the wing gunners, standing back to back, shooting out these portals.

The portals were open to the air, so the wind is blasting in there, and tremendous scarring of the face, gruesome wounds and anoxia, oxygen deprivation, your mask.

Don't forget, guys could get flight sick.

People get flight sick on commercial planes.

You vomit into the masks, the vomit freezes.

You're not pulling oxygen.

You're not paying attention to the fury of combat.

And four minutes later, you pass out.

Eight minutes later, you could be dead.

- Wow!

And all this is happening while you're being attacked or you're in a flak field, where there's these puffs of black smoke... - And you couldn't take evasive action, you had to fly directly...

Initially, a lot of the guys tried to take evasive action.

A fellow by the name of Curtis LeMay, who was probably the leading air strategist of the Eighth Air Force, caricatured later on as Buck Turgidson in... - Dr Strangelove.

- Dr Strangelove.

But he was the best air commander in World War II.

And he told the men, he said, "If you're going to get to the target "and bomb it correctly, you've got to have the platform, "the bomber, straight and steady."

And that means you got to fly directly into the flak to give the bombardier and the navigator a chance to hit the target.

Otherwise, you've got to go back again and again and again.

Hard convincing, some of that, psychologically.

But imagine being in the nose with the navigator.

- It's a plexiglass... - Plexiglass.

It's not bombproof.

You know, it's not bulletproof.

And... You have German fighters approaching you, and they came at you, six and eight abreast, straight for the front of the plane.

That's where the engines were.

The gas tanks were in the wings.

Pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier, that's the guys they wanted out.

And they took the highest casualties.

Gruesomely, you know, a lot of the pilots were beheaded, you know, hit with heavy German cannon fire inside the cockpit.

If they had rockets, they'd aim at the wings.

But the guns were aimed straight at the cockpit, straight at the nose of the plane.

Knock the navigator out, the bomber can't get home.

- Right.

And Yvonne, your dad was a navigator, so he was what?

- He was right there.

- Under the pilot and co-pilot, in the plexiglass nose?

- His navigation table faced the co-pilot, was on the wall where the co-pilot sat.

- Right.

- And what you're saying are two of Dad's stories.

And one of them was... Later in the writing of the book, he told me about being at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and he's there with a buddy and he's really gung ho.

He's going to go see that B-24.

He walks along one side of the fuselage, around the tail.

Parked right next to it is a Messerschmitt 262.

He lost consciousness.

Boom!

Went to the floor.

When he came to... ..his friend said, "What happened, Mike?"

And my father said, "I don't know."

When he's telling me this on the phone, I said, "Dad, I can explain it to you, I'm a therapist, all right?"

That's a flashback.

So I gave him the idea of what happened to him.

I said, "So tell me about the Messerschmitt."

And he said, "Oh, honey, they were so fast.

"Our gunners couldn't trail them, we were flying in these solid formations.

"We couldn't move.

"We couldn't evade."

And he said, "They could come over us, "they could come under us and we were sitting ducks."

So I said to Dad, "The minute that you saw that, "whether you recognized it or not, "but a little part of your brain recognized it "and you did play dead.

Boom!

You went down."

- Right.

- So that's one piece.

The other piece is that on one of his first missions, they had dropped their bombs, they were heading back home and they experienced flak, and it was the first time Dad ever saw flak.

And so he's watching bombers go down all around him.

He peed himself.

He short-circuited his electric heat suit, so he got on the interphone to the pilot and said, "We're about to hit the English Channel.

"Get this baby down at an altitude "so that I don't freeze to death on the way home."

- It was particularly harrowing if you were in the ball turret, which is a plexiglass rotating gun turret below the plane, and you sat in there like the embryo in the egg, all curled up in there.

And there's no heat inside that system.

And you get dizzy as the gun spins.

and It was sometimes hard to get guys out of that thing.

- Right.

They couldn't wear their parachute in there.

- They couldn't wear their parachute in there.

Sometimes they'd sit on their parachute, but generally they couldn't get that in there.

The quarters are too tight.

And there are so many harrowing incidents.

Andy Rooney from CBS News, he covered the air war and he wrote a memorable story.

Well, he didn't write the story.

He witnessed it.

And he was so shaken, he couldn't write it.

They were trying to land a B-17 and they couldn't get the guy...

It had lost all control over the wheels.

So they were going to make a belly landing and they couldn't get the guy out of the turret, so they put a priest on the phone and they told the kid he was going to die and he knew he was going to die and...crash landed in there.

And Randall Jarrell, who was with the Eighth Air Force, a great poet, during and after the war, said, you know, when they cleaned the plane out, you know, they just hosed him out of that section and put the remains in a coffee can.

- And is it any wonder that you have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of course, they didn't call it that back then.

In fact, I think they called it battle fatigue and tried to write it off.

- Battle fatigue...

I had a guy.

He's still going and still going strong, but his plane was hit.

He was a tail gunner and the plane was severed.

The Germans, late in the war, flew kamikaze missions, semi-kamikaze missions where they would hit the bombers and try to crack them in two.

There was a place right in the middle of the plane where if you hit it direct on with your propellers moving, you could blast the plane into two, and then you bailed out, unlike the Japanese pilots.

It is not a suicide because you tried to bail out.

But he couldn't get out of the tail and he tried to punch his way out.

He had a parachute, but he couldn't get out.

So he dropped to Earth from 22,000 feet and he was unconscious when they pulled him out.

Four days later, they sent him up again.

And he could hear the rear stabilizer, the tail on the plane, kind of whipping in the wind, and that's all he remembers.

He passed out.

He said they took him off that plane like a frozen Wisconsin log.

- Wow!

- The next thing he remembers, three years later, he was in Don Carlos Medical Hospital in Florida.

He had just come out of a coma.

- Really?

- Yeah.

And it took him a long time to pull out of this thing.

- Yvonne, your dad, Mike, he had recurring nightmares.

Tell us a little bit about that.

- For three solid years when he came home, he would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, or he'd be screaming and Mom would wake him up.

And she would say, "Mike, what's going on?"

He said, "Never mind.

It's all right.

It's fine."

But his dream was that the plane was going down and that he needed to get to the bomb bay to drop out.

To do that, he had to crawl through a narrow passage.

And in his dream, the narrow passage was lined with stainless steel.

And he couldn't get purchase, he couldn't get anything to pull himself through.

The dreams lasted for three solid years, and he told me that he literally dug channels in the mattress, dig through the sheets and dig down in to the point where they had to get rid of that mattress.

And then he said, "For some strange reason... "..the dreams went away."

So here, again, here's my father, and I'm saying, "Dad, it makes me sad that they didn't know during the war "what those dreams are, what you were trying to do and how to make them go away."

I said, "But had you had some help, you could have "gotten out of them earlier than just three years."

And I said, "They're normal.

"Nightmares are normal when you witness traumatic things."

And I ended that particular conversation with sarcasm, because Dad and I were really good at that, by saying, "Sorry, pal, you're normal and your dreams were normal."

- Did he also have issues because, generally speaking, and I guess this stands for a lot of the bombers, the crew rarely saw the effects of the bombing.

But one time, they came down, or maybe more than once, and he saw villagers in a field and that's where they had to get rid of the load because they couldn't drop it where it was intended, because Patton's army had already gotten there or whatever.

Is that...?

- That's true.

At the briefing, they were told explicitly, you know, "We're not sure how far Patton has gotten.

"And so when you get over there, what you may have to do "is turn around and come home, "and you need to let those bombs go wherever they may."

And he said they were flying low at that point, and he could literally see the Germans in the fields, kneeling and praying.

And that was one of the things that haunted him.

It didn't haunt him that his bombs landed on the targets and destroyed oil refineries or whatever they were after.

That didn't haunt him.

But the fact that civilians were hurt because of the bombing, that really was something that haunted him.

And interestingly enough... ..Dad was an insurance salesman, and he stopped by a house one afternoon to collect insurance, collect the money.

That's the way it was done.

And he met this young woman and they talked for a while.

And the young woman said, "You're going to have to come back tonight "when my husband's here."

So Dad went back at night and everything was settled where the insurance was concerned, so Dad said, "It sounds like you have a German accent.

"Am I hearing that right?"

And she said, "Yes."

She said, "I was born in Unterschlauersbach, "but during the war, my parents sent me to somewhere safe "and my parents were killed in Unterschlauersbach."

And that was Dad's raid.

That was Dad's raid.

- Wow.

- Yeah.

So, yeah, he had some of those kinds of regrets, having flown in the war.

- Right.

And, Don, there were there was a lot of controversy amongst the Allies on the effects of the bombing.

- Well, one thing that didn't work was what the British called morale bombing.

And initially the idea was, actually going way back to early Air Force theory, was that you could knock out a city with 16 bombs.

You could take a city like New York and hit the Croton Reservoir, George Washington Bridge, etc, etc, and knock out the transportation, infrastructure, create panic, and the panic will spread and people will demand, you know, a truce and wars will end.

And you don't need the Army, the Navy, the Air Force will win at all.

And with that kind of hubris, the Air Force entered World War II and they're trying to bomb with precision, daylight precision bombing, dropping bombs from 21,000 feet, supposedly into a pickle barrel.

Well, daylight bombing's an oxymoron.

You know, when you go into war, you're not in the Utah desert in a training exercise.

You're flying under cloud cover over Germany, a lot of flak, fighter coverage, you know, over the major German cities, weather conditions.

The earth is spinning on its axis, the winds are changing, so it's very hard to do.

So what they did later on is they spread the bombs over a large area and they started to hit marshalling yards in the middle of a city.

I grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania.

We had a marshalling yard right in the middle of town, and we lived close to... - It's a railroad yard.

- It's a railroad yard, and so... And that's the way to knock out the German rail system, the way to beat the economy.

And they found that Achilles heel late in the war.

And why hit a coal mine, an airplane factory, etc, etc, when you can hit the train bringing all the parts to those spots?

But if you're going to bomb like that, you're going to have collateral damage and you're going to hit a lot of civilians, and that bothered a lot of guys, that center city type of bombing.

So by the end of the war, we're also experimenting at the end of the war with what LeMay did in the Pacific.

There's a lot of verbiage about the.

war... ..against Japanese cities and the burning of Japanese cities, 61 cities.

100,000 people killed in one raid in Tokyo, more than died at Nagasaki or Hiroshima in the first blast.

But we were prepared to use napalm and do a massive fire bombing over German cities.

We had erected in the Utah desert a perfect replica of a Japanese neighborhood and a perfect replica of a German neighborhood.

And don't forget, the atomic bomb was created for Europe, and so we were going to hit...

This was the primary target, and we're going to do firebombing and atomic bombing in that summer.

And so the atomic bomb story... ..is really a European story, first of all.

It's only later that it becomes a Japanese story.

when the German surrender.

- Dad was on one of the missions that dropped napalm.

And when he said that he did it, I didn't quite believe it till I did some research, and indeed, you know, he had.

- They did.

They used napalm at the very end of the war.

The costs on both sides were horrific.

About 600,000 Germans killed.

But Eighth Air Force lost 26,000 guys, killed.

That's more than the Marine Corps lost in the whole war in the Pacific, from Okinawa to the end.

That's just out of one air outfit, 26,000 dead.

- Wow.

Well, we honor them and all the veterans on this day, so I want to thank both of you for joining us.

Thank you for your insights and your books.

And I recommend everyone read them.

They're terrific.

That's our time.

We could do a week's worth of shows on the Eighth Air Force, the men who served in it and even the civilians, men and women, who supported it.

For a deeper dive, I highly recommend Yvonne's book, Flying with Dad, and Don's Masters of the Air, which will be dramatized and available on Apple TV very soon.

And I want to thank all of our veterans for your service.

I'm Grover Silcox for PBS39.

Good night.

We'll close with The Wall, written by veteran Tim Murphy and sung by Patrick Garvey.

♪ On a drizzly DC morning in the middle of July ♪ ♪ My brother brought me downtown to the Mall ♪ ♪ Past the watchful eyes of Lincoln ♪ ♪ 'Neath the weepin' summer sky ♪ ♪ Across the street to the little green ♪ ♪ And visited The Wall ♪ ♪ I remember I was nervous then ♪ ♪ I guess a little scared ♪ ♪ 'Cause I wasn't sure how I'd react at all ♪ ♪ To see the names of the servicemen ♪ ♪ Who'd been recorded there ♪ ♪ Who heard the final roll call and assembled at The Wall.

♪