This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way.
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And we tell stories about everything here on this show and our favorite subject: American history. And by the way, all of our American history stories are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College. Go to hillsdale.edu to sign up for their terrific and free online courses. Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians. And at the core of his success was his belief that history was biography.
History was about people. Ambrose passed in the year 2002, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here at Our American Stories thanks to those who run his estates. Here is Stephen Ambrose to tell us the short story from the Wild Blue, the men and boys who flew the B-24s. and he told this story to a riveted audience. Here's Stephen Ambrose.
The B24. Yeah. was built like a 1930s Mac truck. except that it had an aluminum skin that could be cut with a knife. It could carry a heavy load far and fast.
that it had no refinements. Steering the four-engine airplane was difficult and exhausting, as Intel. Late 1944, there was no power except the pilot's muscles. It had no windshield wipers.
So the pilot had his head out the side window. to see during a rain. Breathing was possible only by wearing an oxygen mask above 10,000 feet in altitude. They were cold and clammy, smelling of rubber and sweat. There was no heat.
Despite temperatures that at 20,000 feet and higher got as low as 40 or even 50 degrees below zero. The wind blew through the airplane like fury, especially from the waste gunner's windows. and whenever the Bombay doors were open. The oxygen mask often froze to the wearer's face. If the men at the waist touched their machine guns with bare hands, the skin froze to the metal.
There were no bathrooms. To urinate, there were two small relief tubes, one forward and one aft. Which were almost impossible to use without spilling because of the heavy layers of clothing the men wore. Plus which the tubes were often clogged with frozen urine. Defecating could be done only in a receptacle lined with a wax paper bag.
A man had to be desperate to use it. because of the difficulty of removing enough clothing and exposing bare skin to the Arctic pole. Hmm. The bags were dropped out the waste windows or through the open bomb bay doors, and often men would write on them. Take that word.
There were no kitchen facilities. No way to warm up food or coffee, but anyway there was no food. unless improvement bread packed in a sandwich. with no pressurization. pockets of gas in a man's intestinal tract.
could swell like balloons and cause him to double over in pain. There was no aisle to walk down. Only the eight inch wide catwalk. running beside the bombs and over the bombay doors. That's what you use to move forward and aft.
It had to be done with care. As the aluminum doors, which rolled up into the fuselage instead of swinging out on hinges, Had only a 100-pound capacity.
So if you slipped on that catwalk and fell You are gone. The seats were not padded. Could not be reclined. and we're cramped into so small a space The demand had almost no chance to stretch and none whatsoever to relax. Absolutely nothing was done to make it comfortable for the pilot, the co-pilot, or the eight other men in the crew, even though most flights lasted for eight hours, sometimes ten.
very occasionally more than ten. Never less than six. The plane existed. And it was cloned for one purpose only. To carry 500 or 1,000-pound bombs and drop them accurately over enemy targets.
It was called a liberator. Consolidated along with the Ford Motor Company, Douglas Aircraft Company, and North American Aviation, together with the Liberator production pool. made more than eighteen thousand three hundred liberators. That was 5,000 more than the total number of B17s. The Liberator was not operational before World War II.
and was not operational after the war. All those B-24s were squished up by bulldozers because America needed the aluminum and we were going over to jet airplanes in any event. There's one still flying today. The number of people involved in making it In servicing it. And in flying the B-24, outnumbered those involved with any other airplane in any country.
at any time. There were more B-24s than any other American airplane ever built. It would be an exaggeration to say that the B-24 won the war for the Allies. But don't ask how they could have won it without it. The pilots and crews of the B-24s.
came from every state and territory in America. They were young? Fit. Eagle. There were sons of workers, doctors, lawyers, farmers, businessmen, educators.
A few were married, most were not.
Some had an excellent education. Others were barely, if at all, out of high school. They were all volunteers. The U.S. Army Air Corps, after 1942, the U.S.
Army Air Force. did not force anyone to fly. They made the choice. Most of them were between the ages of 2 and 10 in 1927. when Charles Lindbergh flew the Spear of Saint Louis from Long Island to Paris.
For many boys, this was the first outside the family event to influence them. It fired their imagination. Like Lindbergh, they wanted to fly. Oh my goodness, what a story. When we come back, more of Stephen Ambrose's story of the B-24s and the men who flew them here on Our American Stories.
Lee Habib here, and I'm inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country's 250th birthday, only a short time away. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here to millions for years to come, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Any amount helps.
Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. When Kohler, the global design leader in luxurious kitchen and bath products, came to me and said, Martha, we need an ambassador for our timeless, elegant, durable cast-iron products.
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Now let me see the factory. Weeks later I was suited up in coveralls and work boots, walking through their Kohler, Wisconsin cast iron foundry. I stood next to the molten iron furnace. saw the hand applying enamel. and touched the gorgeous finished products waiting to be sent out into the world.
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As the Kohler Cast Iron Ambassador, I say, long live cast iron. Amazon Health AI presents painful thoughts. I um. I can't stop scratching my downtown. Mm-hmm.
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Mm-hmm. Hello, hello, this is Malcolm Glabel from Smart Talks with IBM. Today we're diving into a fascinating conversation with Stefano Pallard, head of fan development for Scuderia Ferrari HP. Your pronunciation is strongly American. It's more Scuderia Ferrari.
I'm still working on rolling my R's. But what I was able to learn from Stefano was the importance of engaging the tefosi. The Ferrari super fans in the digital age. Ferrari fans and Super fans want to be part of something, want to belong to something.
So they want to be part of a community and ultimately they want to be part of a winning team. You've got Ferrari, which is a long. history, design history. And now you're interacting in a kind of digital space. I'm curious how you balance those two.
Traditions. When it comes to fan engagement, it's really digital technology and digital channels are enabled to create a deeper connection with our fans. To learn more about how Ferrari and IBM are using technology to build deeper connections with fans, visit ibm.com slash Ferrari. And we continue with Stephen Ambrose and the story of the boys who flew. America's B-24s.
Let's continue where we last left off with Stephen Ambrose. In their teenage years, they drove Model T Fords, or perhaps Model A's, if they drove at all. Many of them were farm boys. They plowed behind mules or horses. They walked to school one, two, sometimes even more miles.
Most of them, including the city kids, were poor. If they were lucky enough to have jobs, they earned a dollar a day, sometimes less. They seldom traveled. Many had never been out of their home counties. Even most of the more fortunate had never been out of their home states.
Of those who were best off, Only a handful had ever been out of the country. Almost none of them had ever been up in an airplane. A surprising number had never seen an airplane. But they all wanted to fly. Their patriotism was beyond question.
They wanted to be a part of smashing Hitler. Toggio, Mussolini, and their thugs. But they wanted to choose how they did it. They want her to get off the ground, be like a bird. See the country from up high.
travel faster than anyone could do while attached to the earth. More than electric lights. More than steam engines, more than telephones, more than automobiles, more even than the printing press. The airplane separated past from future. It had freed mankind from the earth and opened the skies.
They were astonishingly young. Many joined the Army Air Forces as teens.
Some never got to be 20 years old before the war ended. Anyone over 25 was considered to be and was called an old man. In the 21st century, adults would hardly give such youngsters the key to the family car. But in the first half of the 1940s, the adults sent them out to play a critical role in saving the world. Most wanted to be fighter pilots.
But only a relatively few attained that goal. Many became pilots or co-pilots on two or four engine bombers. The majority became crew members. serving as gunners or radio men or bombardiers or flight engineers or navigators. Never mind.
They all wanted to fly. And they did. On the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day, I was with Joe Heller. who is a bombardier with the 12th Air Force. flying out of Italy.
And Heller said to me in the course of the conversation, I never had a bad officer. Astonished, I said, Kill. You're the man who created Major, Major, Major, Colonel Cathcart. General Dredel, Lieutenant Minderbender, and so many others. Everybody in the world knows these people.
How can you tell me you never had a bad officer? They were all invention, he replied. Every single officer, from when I went into the service to going over to Italy, to flying the missions, to when I got discharged, every one of them was good. In the course of interviewing George McGovern for this book, I told him what Heller had said to me. McGovern agreed immediately.
That's my experience, he said. I was impressed by the pilots, the bombardiers, the navigators right across the board and with the operations officers and our group commander. I thought they were a superior bunch of men and I can honestly say I don't recall a bad officer. All through combat, I had confidence that our officers were doing the very best they knew how. If they made mistakes, they weren't foolish mistakes.
Our officers were superb. Obviously there were some weak.
Some poor, some inefficient or ignorant, and some absolutely terrible officers. in the U.S. Armed Services in World War II. But if such men ever got into combat positions, The AAF, the Army, the Navy, or the Marines got them out. At once.
Men's lives depended on them after all. The combat officers knew it. and acted accordingly. Asked the Germans who opposed them. How good they were.
or the Japanese. The American authors were superb. And that is the way it was in the 741st Squadron, 455th Bomb Group in Scharagnola, Italy.
Now when Men arrived in Sherrick Knowle in September of 1944. They saw it tacked up in the Breathing roll. Words to the Song As Time Goes By written by Anonymous.
Now I'm not a singer. But I can't resist this one. You must remember this. The flack can't always miss.
Somebody's gotta die. The odds are always too damned high. As flak goes by.
Okay, so It's still the same old story. The eighth gets all the glory.
Well, we're the ones who die. The odds are always too damned high as flack goes by. Yeah. I want to talk for just a minute about the strategic bombing campaign. Critics have said that all of that productive power.
that went into it. 18,300 of those planes. all of the AAF's teaching. Yeah, maybe. Effort.
Would have been much better spent if they'd have trained these guys as infantrymen or as sailors. that we could have won the war sooner. because they never hit what they were what they were dropping at. Ever And it was just a waste. That's not true.
They did hit what they were aiming at. far more often than not. And they paralyzed the German army. Hitting rail yards, marshalling yards, railroad bridges brought the German train traffic to a halt. bombing the refineries, Ploesti and the others.
was so successful that in April 1944, when the Germans had all the gasoline they needed. 100%. Less than a year later, The late winter of 1944-45, they were down to 1%. That meant they couldn't train tank crews. They couldn't even drive tanks on the battlefield.
They had to dig their tanks in. make them into fixed field fortifications. This is curious. The home of Mercedes. And so many other.
Manufacturers of automobiles and trucks. They had no gasoline. They were reduced to being a horse drawn army. trying to fight a 20th century war. and that was thanks to the strategic bombing campaign.
At the end of my Interview with McGovern. that had lasted for weeks. Um I asked him to sum up his war experience. With his answer, he spoke for every airman. Every GI Every sayer.
Every Marine. Every Coast Guard man of World War II Piloting a B-24 in combat. With nine other guys, took every ounce of physical energy I had. Every bit of mental abilities I had, and literally every shred of spiritual resource that I had. I can't recall any other stage of my life unless it was the closing days of the 72 presidential campaign that so demanded everything I had.
I gave that World War II effort everything. Except my life itself. And I was ready to give my life. It literally exhausted every resource of mind and body and spirit. that I had.
I replied. Thanks for what you did to help win the victory and thus save the world. I always say something like that at the end of every interview with a veteran of the war. Because it is the truth. And a special thanks to Stephen Ambrose's estate, and a special thanks to Hillsdale College.
Where you can go to study all the things that are beautiful in life, all the things that matter in life. Go to hillsdale.edu to sign up for their free and terrific online courses. Stephen Ambrose telling it like no one else can. Here. on our American stories.
Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage.
Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q. Ever wonder how to make hosting look effortless? Here's a secret.
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