Historian Stephen E. Ambrose

DATE August 15, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Stephen Ambrose discusses his new book, "The Wild
Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany"

NEAL CONAN, host:

This is FRESH AIR. Terry Gross is on vacation. I'm Neal Conan.

During the Second World War, the US Army Air Force and consolidated aircraft
called their B-24 bomber the Liberator. Air crew tended to call it the Spam
Can In The Sky, the Old Agony Wagon or the Flying Brick. The B-24 was
ungainly and difficult to fly, but it was arguably the best bomber in Europe
with more speed, a bigger payload and greater range than its more famous
cousin, the B-17. The men who flew these planes endured temperatures of 40
and 50 degrees below zero. Most had incredibly cramped and uncomfortable
places to work, except for the waist gunners, who stood in the open doorways
in the wind. The plane wasn't pressurized, so the men wore oxygen masks for
most of their eight- to 10-hour missions, masks that often froze to their
faces.

And all of that was before they encountered German fighters and anti-aircraft
guns. The prolific historian Stephen Ambrose tells the story of those men in
a new book called "The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over
Germany." Stephen Ambrose joins us from New York City.

Welcome to FRESH AIR.

Mr. STEPHEN AMBROSE (Historian, Author): Thank you, Neal. It's very nice to
be with you.

CONAN: After Pearl Harbor, the Army suddenly needed thousands of pilots and
tens of thousands of crew members to fly these B-24s. They had to go find
them and train them and supply them; this in a country where only a tiny
minority of the population ever was a passenger in an airplane, much less a
pilot or a mechanic. Where did these men come from?

Mr. AMBROSE: From all over America, from every possible profession. Most of
them were just out of high school or freshmen or sophomores in college. Most
of them were teen-agers, but they came from everywhere. These guys had been
kids when Charles Lindbergh in 1927 flew over the Atlantic, and they all
wanted to fly. Many of them had never even seen an airplane, much less ridden
in one. But they wanted to fly. And they flocked into the Army Air Forces,
which jumped from 20,000 total in 1941 to 2.5 million by 1945. The Army Air
Forces had to train all of these guys. They wanted to be fighter pilots, but
the preferences that they had counted for naught with the Army Air Forces.
Many of them washed out of pilot training because their eyesight wasn't good
enough or their depth perception or they weren't coordinated enough or
whatever. They still wanted to fly, and these are the men who became the
radio operators, navigators, the tail gunner, the ball turret gunner, the
waist gunners, everything, just so they could fly. And they did.

The Army Air Forces, in the Second World War, were then and are still today
the world's biggest educational institution. And it's an amazing thing to
think about. How do you go from 10,000 to 2.5 million in a couple of years,
and how do you train all of these guys? Well, Army Air Forces did it.

CONAN: You tell this story mostly through the experiences of one pilot and
his crew, and the pilot is George McGovern--I guess I should say Ambassador
McGovern, the former US senator, the Democratic Party's presidential candidate
in 1972. Why did you pick George McGovern?

Mr. AMBROSE: I had been with McGovern in Austria at Innsbruck in 1988 when
he was asked to participate in a television documentary that the Austrians
were producing because he had been a bomber pilot, and he was reluctant, but
he accepted finally and went to do the interview. And it was a woman who was
sitting at the desk, and she said, `Now, Senator McGovern, you're world famous
for your opposition to war and especially to the bombing in Vietnam. Yet, you
were a bomber pilot in World War II. You destroyed our beautiful city. You
killed our women and children. Don't you regret that?' And George said, `No,
I don't regret it at all. I wanted to liberate your country, Austria, and
Europe from Hitler, and I wanted to do my part, and so I was a bomber pilot.
No, I don't regret it at all.'

Well, she was very distressed to hear that and disappointed, and McGovern then
added, `There is one bomb that I do think about quite a lot and I regret a
lot,' and she--`What was that?' She said, `What was that?' Well, he was
flying back from a mission over Vietnam, back to his base in Italy, and the
crew called up, `Skipper, we've got a bomb, the last bomb, stuck in the bomb
bay door,' half in and half out of this airplane.

CONAN: This is a 500-pound bomb.

Mr. AMBROSE: Five hundred pound bomb, and George immediately said, `Well, we
can't land with a bomb sticking out of the bomb bay. You've got to either get
that thing out of there, drop it or we're going to all have to bail out when
we get over Italy.'

CONAN: And nobody wanted to bail out.

Mr. AMBROSE: Nobody wanted to bail out. So a couple--the navigator and the
radio man went to work on that bomb, and they finally got it free and dropped.
Now by this time, McGovern was down about 10,000 feet above the ground and it
was a clear day, and they could watch the bomb go. It hit a farm and just
blew it to smithereens, the house and the barn, big fire and so on. And
George looked at his watch. It was high noon. And he said, `Oh, oh.' He
came from South Dakota. He knows what time farmers eat lunch. And he
thought, `Oh, Lordy, this is a peaceful little farm. It's not bothering
anybody and I've just killed some people,' and oh, he just felt terrible. And
he thought about that a lot over the years between the war--and this happened
in 1945--and 1988 when he was on the Austrian TV.

Cut. And then a couple weeks or months later, whenever, they showed it on the
television in Austria, and the station got a call from a farmer who said, `It
was my farm. I know exactly when it happened. I know it was a single bomber
up there, and I want you to tell Senator McGovern nobody got killed. We saw
that bomb and we got into the air raid shelter,' he and his wife and his two
daughters, `and nobody got killed. So please tell Senator McGovern that.'
`OK. We will.' And then he said, `But one other thing I want you to tell
him. I don't care what other Austrians say today, I hated Hitler. And my
thought as I watched my farm go up in smoke was, if this shortens the war by
one minute, it's worth it.' Well, the station called George and gave him that
message, and as George says today, it just wiped the slate clean.

Well, that story has always stuck with me, and then a couple years ago, I was
having dinner with George, and he said that a reporter had been interviewing
him and wanted to do a book on his career in the Second World War; 35 missions
he flew, got a Distinguished Flying Cross. And I said, `Great, tell the
reporter to start with that story of that bomb stuck in the bomb bay door.'
And George looked at me and said, `I wish you were writing it.' And I said,
`Well, George, I would love to do that, but this other guy's already gotten
started.' George said, `I'll talk to him.' And he did and I got the
assignment, and so I did this book.

CONAN: Now that's a great story. In a lot of war memoirs, and I guess a fair
number of histories, too, the training and the industrial element--you know,
the design, the manufacture--those sorts of issues are almost brushed aside a
little like, you know, the way a Hall of Fame baseball player writes off his
time in the minor leagues. This makes up about half of your book, though.
Why did you focus so much on that part of it?

Mr. AMBROSE: Well, because it is so important. You can't send guys out to
fight who haven't been trained, and you can't send them out to fight if they
don't have the weapons to fight with. So I wanted to account for the
training, what it was, how it happened, for George and for the other pilots,
and how that bomber was made. They made 18,300 B-24s. That was 5,000 more
than there were B-17s. One of the interviewees told me--he said, `We came out
of a cloud, we looked around, and we were forming up and there were B-24s all
over the sky, and I thought to myself, "Rosie the Riveter's doing a great
job."'

The B-17 is far more famous than the B-24. Almost nobody remembers the B-24,
unless they happened to be a pilot or a crew. The B-17 got great coverage
because--the Flying Fortress, it was called--it flew out of England, and all
the top reporters--Walter Cronkite was one, Andy Rooney was another--and they
wanted to be in London. They didn't want to be stuck at some little village
in Italy. And so the 8th Air Force got all the glory. The 15th Air Force
suffered the highest losses. The B-24s first came into existence, the first
model was flown, in 1939. In 1945, they all came home to be--they were made
out of aluminum--to be squashed by bulldozers because the United States needed
aluminum. As a result, there is only one B-24 still in existence today.

CONAN: And you got to fly it.

Mr. AMBROSE: And I got to fly it, yeah. That's not really correct to say. I
was a co-pilot, and I had the controls for a while, but it was a calm day over
Pennsylvania, few clouds, nobody was shooting at the plane; there wasn't any
flak. And so I didn't really fly it, but I did have the controls for a while.

CONAN: Did it make you appreciate what those pilots had to do a little bit
more, though?

Mr. AMBROSE: Oh, very much so. Because there's no hydraulics in the thing,
and everything has to be done by muscle power. And the seat is so cramped.
There's no room to stretch. And you're sitting there--they were--for six,
seven, eight, nine, 10 hours. There was no place to relieve yourself, and
flying that plane is very, very slow to respond to any kind of raise or lower
flaps or turn it a bit, and it's very slow to respond and takes a--it's like
it used to be--people my age and older remember this--it's like driving a big
old truck in the 1940s before power steering, before air conditioning in the
vehicle. And that's what flying a B-24 was like.

CONAN: All of this training that McGovern and his cohort went through, did it
prepare them for combat?

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes. More than 300 hours in the air before they went into
combat. As compared to the Germans, they were lucky if they had three hours
in the air. The Brits had about 30 hours in the air. The Japanese--the Zero
and the Betty pilots for the Japanese had two, three hours in the air.

CONAN: This was toward the end of the war.

Mr. AMBROSE: Towards the end of the war. But McGovern and his fellow pilots
of the 741st bombing squadron, 300 to 350 hours of training in the air;
plus, all the training on the ground that they went through. And it made them
proficient.

CONAN: So they started out in small planes, two-seaters, and then
graduated...

Mr. AMBROSE: That's right, single-engine, two-seaters and no canopy.
That's...

CONAN: And then graduated...

Mr. AMBROSE: And they graduated to flying four-engine bombers.

CONAN: And each one of those steps is, `You know, I couldn't believe how hard
it was.'

Mr. AMBROSE: Yeah. Oh, sure. Of course. Yeah, very much so. But it was a
mark of how good their instructors were. The instructors initially were
civilian pilots, but very quickly, the Army Air Forces started moving its own
men into those positions, and by the time McGovern was into his training in
'43 and '44, they were coming back from Europe. They had done their 25
missions and they were veterans. That was a way in which the Americans did so
much better than the Germans. When the Germans had a good pilot--and they
did, and initially in the war, they had the best pilots in the world--but the
Germans always kept their Aces up in the air, and they stayed up there. They
weren't pulled out to become instructors. They stayed up in the air until
they were shot down. And by the end of the war, they were just all gone. And
meanwhile, what few pilots the Germans were able to train had been trained by
men that didn't know what the hell they were talking about. And they had
maybe three or four hours in the air.

CONAN: My guest is historian Stephen Ambrose. We'll be back after a short
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: We're speaking with Stephen Ambrose. His new book is "The Wild Blue,"
a history of the men and boys that flew the B-24s over Germany. George
McGovern and his crew arrive in Italy in the fall of 1944 to join the 15th Air
Force, which is flying from bases in southern Italy. Is it fair to say that
the veteran crews they met when they landed were confused or dispirited about
the purpose of a strategic bombing campaign that didn't seem to be having much
of an effect and was taking this terrible toll on them and their friends?

Mr. AMBROSE: They weren't dispirited, but they were exhausted and terribly
shaken by flying through that flak and seeing their buddies go down and taking
hits on their own plane. And they did wonder not so much what's the purpose
of all this. They were told in the briefing every morning, `The reason we're
hitting Munich today is we're going to go after the oil refineries or we're
going after a factory system or we're going after the railroad marshaling
yards because the Germans are moving troops from the Eastern Front to the
Western Front and they're going through Munich,' or whatever the target
was, they were told why they were doing it. And then in the debriefing, they
were told what the results were, how many of the bombs fell within the target
area, and so they were kept up with details on why they were doing what they
were doing and what the results of it were. But they were so exhausted and
they were so badly battered by the German anti-aircraft flak at that time.
And they were, `Is this war ever going to have an end?'

They did have the hope of going home while the war was on. This was very
unlike the infantry where they knew in the infantry, `We're here until the
Germans surrender, period.'

CONAN: For the duration.

Mr. AMBROSE: For the duration. The airmen--at first, it was 25 missions and
you can go home. And then that was raised to 35 missions, which was the
figure that McGovern and his fellow pilots and crews operated under. Oh, boy,
when they got up to that 34th mission and into the 35th mission, and, OK, it's
like dying on the last day of the war. And that shook them a lot. But at
least there was an end in view if you were in the Army Air Forces. And that
helped to keep these guys going. And, of course, they knew that the Germans
are being pressed on the East and the Russians are now into Eastern Germany,
and the Americans are into Western Germany, and France has been liberated and
so on. They knew all of that. But they were still getting shot badly on the
raids over Munich or Linz or Vienna or Berlin or wherever. Because the
Germans were pulling all of their artillery back, not to use it on the front
lines but to defend their cities. They wanted to make the price so high that
the Americans would call off the bombing raids. Well, they came close, but
they never did achieve that.

CONAN: Joseph Heller later based his great book "Catch-22" on his experiences
as a bomber pilot. He flew with the 12th Air Force out of North Africa that
was later transferred and became part of the 15th Air Force. But I wonder, do
you think he caught the spirit of that period right in his book, the
fundamental idea that, well, you had to be crazy to fly on these missions, but
if you went and told the flight surgeon, the doctor that, well, you were crazy
and you can't fly, that meant you were sane and, of course, that meant that
you had to fly? Catch-22.

Mr. AMBROSE: Well, there's a story about that. I was with Joe on the 50th
anniversary of V-E Day. And he looked at me, and he said, `You know, I never
had a bad officer.' I was astonished. I said, `Joe, how can you say that?
You're the man who invented Major Major Major Major, Colonel Cathcart, General
Dreedle...'

CONAN: Or Milo M...

Mr. AMBROSE: `...Milo Minderbinder.'

CONAN: That's right.

Mr. AMBROSE: `You're the man who created all these people.' He said,
`They're all inventions, every one of them.' On the `You've got to be crazy
to fly these missions but if you ask to be relieved, then you're not crazy
anymore,' actually, the Army Air Forces never made a man fly, with no
questions asked. If you said after the briefing, `I'm not going to go on this
one,' you didn't go. That applied to the pilots, the co-pilots, to gunners,
to the radio man, to the navigators. Everybody could just opt out by just
saying, `I'm not going to do that.' They never did. I don't know of one
instance in which a man did that in the Second World War.

CONAN: Like all rookies, though, I wonder that that McGovern crew--you
describe them sort of looking at the thousand-yard stares of the veterans and
wondering, you know, these guys who are the same age they are, these are young
men, as you point out, you know, kids that you'd think twice about handing the
car keys to in the 21st century...

Mr. AMBROSE: Yep. Yep.

CONAN: ...and all of a sudden, they look like old men after 10 missions, you
say.

Mr. AMBROSE: Oh, yes, very much so, haggard and that thousand-yard stare and
the weight of their responsibilities. Whatever it was that they were doing in
that plane, they had big responsibilities, and it aged them or it matured them
or both is what happened. And they developed a closeness in those planes.
The engineer and the navigator and the radio man and the two pilots were all
officers. The gunners were all sergeants. And in the infantry, officers and
enlisted men were told, `Don't ever, ever get close to one another.' Well,
some of them did, of course, but `Don't ever drink together or go out
together.' In the Army Air Forces, it was entirely different. This was not
George S. Patton's, Martin--that kind of approach to how to make war.

CONAN: No spit and polish.

Mr. AMBROSE: In the Army Air Forces--yeah, spit and polish. The Army Air
Forces, those guys were hanging around in sweatshirts. One of them, a man
named Higgins(ph), wore cowboy boots on missions. And they did a lot of
socializing together. They developed a comradeship, a friendship that is, for
those of us who have never been in combat, just incomprehensible. And we have
never been able to achieve it, and I don't know how we ever will, because when
you are up in that plane, your life depended on the pilot knowing what he was
doing, the co-pilot knowing, the navigator knowing, the radio man knowing, the
gunners at their guns. Your life was in their hands. And their lives were in
your hands. And that really does develop a closeness.

CONAN: We'll continue our conversation with historian Stephen Ambrose in the
second half of our show. His new book is "The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys
Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany" in World War II. I'm Neal Conan. This is
FRESH AIR.

(Credits)

CONAN: Coming up, we continue our conversation with Stephen Ambrose. His new
book, "The Wild Blue," is about the men and boys who endured cold wind, flak
and fighters to fly B-24 bombers over Germany in World War II.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: Let's continue our conversation with Stephen Ambrose. His new book,
"The Wild Blue," tells the story of B-24s and the men and boys who flew these
heavy bombers in the Second World War. It focuses on the experiences of one
crew and its pilot, George McGovern, who was later elected to the United
States Senate and ran for president in 1972.

McGovern's crew got its first taste of real combat on their second mission,
and it's something you describe in your book. And I was wondering if you
could read us an excerpt. It's about their second mission together as a crew
and they're flying to a target in Austria called Linz.

Mr. AMBROSE: Hitler's birthplace. `It was at lengths on this their second
mission that McGovern said, "We got introduced to combat." The flak was
heavy. Up to that point, McGovern had thought exploding flak looked like
firecrackers and rockets going off. He learned better when a big slug of flak
came right through the windshield high into my right. It hit just above my
right shoulder into the right of my head and then fell down on to the floor
between Rounds and me.'

`McGovern and Rounds looked down at it. Rounds looked over at McGovern and
just shook his head. McGovern did the same. "The shrapnel was," McGovern
later said, "the angriest looking piece of metal, just jagged on every edge
and big enough to tear your head off if it hit a few inches to the left or
maybe a few more inches on Bill Rounds' side." It was freezing at 25,000
feet, 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, and the cold rush of wind, despite all
the sheep-skinned lined jackets and pants they had on and despite their
electrically heated suits, it was just ferocious, that cold rush of wind.'
McGovern managed to keep his plane in formation but barely. "All I could do
was just sit there and do my job," he said.'

CONAN: There must have been an awful feeling of lack of control when you're
up there being fired at by cannon 88s, those famous German guns from the
ground. There's no way to dodge. There's nowhere to hide.

Mr. AMBROSE: The Germans developed a system in which they would shoot up to
the altitude the planes were coming in on, 20,000, 22,000, whatever. And they
would shoot up and create a box of exploding shells, all of them sending out
shrapnel that could kill as much as 50 feet or even more away. And they would
have a box that would be 2,000 feet or more wide, 2,000 or more feet deep, and
this is the words of the pilots, `It just looked like hell up there.' And the
idea of flying into that terrified everybody, but if you were going to drop
your bombs where you were supposed to, you had to fly into that flak. And
they did. And many of them got shot down. And damn near all of them got shot
up to some extent or another.

McGovern once brought back a B-24 that had 150 holes in it caused by shrapnel.
He told me when I was interviewing him on this book that, `I don't know yet to
this day how that plane managed to stay up in the air.'

CONAN: As you pointed out, by that time, the flak, the anti-aircraft fire was
much more of a threat. The German air force was pretty much grounded partly
because it was so low on fuel, due to the efforts of the 15th Air Force in no
small part, and partly because the American bombers were well defended. There
was one mission in particular towards the end of the war, though, where I want
you to describe it. It was when the Germans introduced their jet fighters,
the Me 262, that posed such a threat.

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes, it did, indeed. It was the best plane of the Second World
War. Thank God there weren't very many of them, and thank goodness they
didn't have any gasoline to run them with. It could have turned the war, but
it didn't. The Tuskegee Airmen--these were African-American pilots. Many of
them were Tuskegee graduates, and they flew P-51s as cover for the B-24s or
the B-17s. And they stayed up above the bombers, so they're really up there
at 30,000, 32,000, 35,000 feet, but they could come down. You could pick up
speed awfully fast when you're going down in a P-51. That P-51 was a
long-range fighter, and when it was introduced in late 1944, it made a
tremendous difference and was a great airplane. One of the Tuskegee Airmen
told me in an interview, he said, `Listen, that plane was such a sweetheart,
if it'd been a girl, I would have married it.'

Well, McGovern looked behind and here comes a couple of German jets. And,
`Where the hell are those black guys? Where the hell are they? God
Almighty,' and so...

CONAN: Excuse me. Did the pilots use the word `black guys'?

Mr. AMBROSE: Oh, they used a word that we're not allowed to use on the radio
anymore. And one of the Tuskegee Airmen called down to George on the radio.
He said, `Could you white boys just shut up? We're going to get you home.'
And they came down and they drove those German Me 262s away from the formation
and so they did get to make it back to base all right; McGovern and his crew
and the others in the squadron. I've always love that, `Will you white boys
just shut up? We're going to get you home.'

CONAN: Stephen Ambrose, a lot of people must wonder--you never served in the
US military yourself.

Mr. AMBROSE: No, I did not. There's an explanation. I was born in January
of 1936. Now every man alive from the beginning of time always has a question
on his mind: Am I a coward? And the only way you're ever going to find out
is to go into combat, but most men are born at a time that they're never going
to see combat. I was too young for World War II. I graduated high school in
1952, and I was going to join the Marines but Eisenhower shut down the Korean
War, so I went to college instead. And by the time Vietnam, I had five kids
and I was much too old. That's the experience of most men.

That is if you were born in 1920 almost for certain you were going to be in
the Second World War whether you were Japanese or German or Russian or
American or whatever. If you were born in the year 1900, you were for certain
in Europe going to be in the First World War. But if you were born after the
Vietnam War or if your 10th birthday was 1973, almost for certain you are
never going to find the answer to that quintessential question: Am I a
coward? I don't know if I'm a coward or not. I've never been confronted with
it. I never was in combat, right.

CONAN: Why did you get so interested in writing about it? You've
written--I'm not going to tote them up, but, you know, many of the best books
about World War II.

Mr. AMBROSE: I got into it because I was a historian trained at the
University of Wisconsin. And it seemed to me then and does now that war is
always decisive. We live today in the richest and freest country that ever
was. How did that happen? Well, I'll tell you why. Because we defeated the
totalitarians. We put Hitler in the ash can of history, where he belongs,
also Tojo, also Mussolini, also the Soviet Union's leaders. The triumph of
democracy means everything to all of us around the world.

And this was decided not because there was a popular vote and the majority of
the world's people said, `We go for democracy, not to totalitarianism,' it
happened because we won the wars. And what I want to know, and have devoted
the largest part of my career to is to find how did we do that? How did we
create the Army air forces of the Second World War. How did we create that
vast Navy?

At the beginning of World War II, for example, our armed forced ranked 16th in
the world, right behind Romania. By 1945 we had the biggest and best navy
ever, the biggest and best air force ever, an army that was smaller in size to
the Russian army, but an Army that had more firepower than any other in the
world. And then we had the men that would go out and do what had to be done.
Now, how was that accomplished? That's my question, and that's what I've
devoted my life to try and answer.

CONAN: My guest is historian Stephen Ambrose. We'll be back after a short
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: Let's continue now with historian Stephen Ambrose, his new book is
"The Wild Blue."

You started as an historian--one of your great early projects was a--you
started, actually, writing about Dwight D. Einsenhower as a soldier, and then
went on to continue the biography in his years as president.

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes. And that got me into political history, which I wouldn't
have done otherwise. But it's Eisenhower's fault; he's the one who ran for
president and I wanted to write his full biography. So, I spent a lot of time
doing that. Then when I had finished I did a book called "Pegasus Bridge" on
a British airborne company...

CONAN: And I remember I interviewed you after that book...

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes, I remember very well.

CONAN: I remember one of the things that you told me was how much fun it was,
and what a relief it was, in a way, after this enormous research project, all
living these many years on the life of one man, to come down and do a small
unit, single battle.

Mr. AMBROSE: Absolutely. It was. And I then did Dick Nixon. I spent a
decade of my life writing three volumes about Richard Nixon with an awful lot
of research and interviews and so on. And then I...

CONAN: Why?

Mr. AMBROSE: My editor, Alice Mayhew called and said, `Steve, we want you to
do Nixon next.' And I said, `Alice, I never even liked the guy. I don't want
to spend the time that a biographer has to spend with his subject with a man
that I don't even like.' She caught me by saying, `Where else could you find
a greater challenge?' and that hooked me. And there went 10 years of my life.

Well, anyway, I completed the Nixon book and then I did another airborne
company, Company E, of the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment 101st Airborne, an
American unit, of course, and followed them through from their organization
they all volunteered for, their training, over to England, then their
experiences on D day, and then in the campaign that followed, Carentan, and
then on to the drop into Holland, and then the Battle of the Bulge, and then
crossing the Rhine. And they ended up--they were the outfit that took
Hitler's Eagle's Nest.

CONAN: And that book, "Band of Brothers," is now being made into an HBO
miniseries that I think starts this fall.

Mr. AMBROSE: That's right. Starts in September.

CONAN: You've written other books about other periods in history, and I think
a lot of people remember "Undaunted Courage," the story of the Lewis and Clark
expedition. But I wanted to ask you--there was a couple of years ago where
you had rather a bad accident and for awhile it was touch and go.

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes, that's right. I fainted and fell on a marble floor and
cracked my head badly. For almost half a year, maybe even a little more than
that, I couldn't see out of my left eye. I couldn't remember a damn thing. I
couldn't remember my address. I couldn't remember my telephone
number--nothing. But I did find I could remember what happened to me when I
was a kid. So--and I figured the way out of this--my brain wasn't functioning
all that well, but anyway, my thought was, `My way out of this--I'm going to
write a book on friendship.' And I started off with my brothers and then
talked about the guys that I went to high school with, and then my friends
from college, and then my friends from my first teaching job. And all that
came back to me without any problem whatsoever, and very gradually I began to
learn my phone number, and remember my address, and I--the recovery was total.
So...

CONAN: After total recovery, I wondered, did you sit down and say, `Look,
I've been granted some extra time here, what do I want to do?'

Mr. AMBROSE: No. I always knew what I wanted to do. What I wanted to do
was write. And I wanted to write about things that interested me. The thing
that drives me as a writer is curiosity. I want to know, how did Dwight
Eisenhower rise from a man that, had he died in 1941, when he was 51 years
old, nobody would've ever heard his name? How did he rise from that to be the
supreme commander and our leader in war and in peace? Or how did the men who
jumped out of airplanes--you talk about crazy. These guys jump out of
perfectly good airplanes. How did they do that and with what effect? I'm now
working on a book on the Marines in the Pacific. And it's the same curiosity
that drives me--how in God's name did they do that--Iwo Jima, Guadal Canal,
Okinawa, and the others.

So, my curiosity drives me and I never have considered doing anything else
than satisfying that curiosity and that means--the only way I can really
find--I did a book on the building of the transcontinental railroad, for
example, and my question there was the same: How did they do that? How, from
between 1863 and 1869, in that short space of time, did they do something that
had never been done before: build a railroad across a continent?

Well, I can only find the answer to that question by writing about it. The
research is what I learn from and then also the writing. And I'll think,
`Geez, what does the reader need to know next to be able to follow this
story?' Or, `I'm doing a little repetition here, I've got to cut that out,'
or whatever. But I learn from the act of writing, and it's what I've always
wanted to do, is learn.

CONAN: We're speaking with Stephen Ambrose. His new book is "The Wild Blue,"
a history of the men and boys who flew the B-24s over Germany. And I wanted
to emphasize that one point that you mentioned, it's not the men who flew the
B-24s, it's the men and the boys. And you also point out that toward the end
of the war, when the crew you write mostly about--George McGovern and his
men--were flying over Austria and Germany, the men were fighting against them.
Well, they weren't men either, they were boys, too.

Mr. AMBROSE: That's right. One of them was Manfred Rommel, the field
marshall's son. He was 14 years old. He was a gunner with an 88, shooting at
these American planes. And Manford and I had become friends and I often--he's
mayor of Stuttgart--he's not anymore, but he was for a very long time. And I
would take veterans to meet--everybody wants to be meant Rommel's son, of
course...

CONAN: Sure.

Mr. AMBROSE: ...and I would take veterans to meet him, and he would--if they
were Army Air Force veterans, Rommel would tell him--he said, `Listen, I shot
at you guys, but I want to assure you I always missed.' Well, he didn't
always miss, but it was a good thing for him to say.

CONAN: Historian Stephen Ambrose, author of "The Wild Blue." We'll have more
of our conversation after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: More now with Stephen Ambrose, the author of "The Wild Blue: The Men
and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany in World War II."

There were so many controversies associated with the strategic bombing
campaign against Germany and Austria, and you raised them in your book, and
this is something that has to be addressed. In retrospect, some historians
say, given the amount of resources, material, all of these men who had to be
trained, all of these planes that had to be built, maybe, in the overall
scheme of things, maybe it wasn't worth it. And particularly given the fact
that some 300,000, at least, German civilians were killed.

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes, that's right. So there's both a moral question and then
the very practical one: Could that effort had been made more meaningful had
it gone into more artillery for the Army or bigger divisions for the Army or
whatever? My own attitude has become, after doing an awful lot of reading on
the subject, that that's just bull. Without the bombers I don't know how we
ever would have ever won the war. And what they did was they just paralyzed
Germany. The marshalling yards for the railroads, the bridges, were kaput by
the end of the winter of 1944-'45, beginning of spring--just gone. And the
oil was down to--because of the concentration of the oil refineries, was down
to 1 percent to what it had been on April 1944...

CONAN: And you can...

Mr. AMBROSE: ...and that's in January of '45. So that what the Air Force
strategic bombing campaign did was to paralyze the German army to the point
that--even beginning in 1944, but especially in 1945, the Germans had no
trucks. They had no gasoline for their tanks. They didn't even have gasoline
for the Mercedes for Hitler, or Goebbels, or Goering, or the other big shots.
They were reduced to using horses. So that by 1945, thanks to the strategic
bombing campaign, the German army was trying to fight a war in the 20th
century with 19th century material, all of it drawn by horses. Now that's an
awful big pay off.

CONAN: The price, though, was very, very high.

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes, it was. The Army air forces suffered losses that
sometimes, on one raid, over Ploiesti, for example, in Romania--a great big
oil refinery--the losses were as high as 40 percent. Even when it was 25
missions and you could go home, your chances of getting there--that is of
successfully completing 25 mission--were less than 50 percent. You almost
were on a suicide roll in flying in the B-17s or the B-24s. You were not
going to be able, in most cases--a the majority of the cases, to complete 25
missions. So the price was terribly high.

CONAN: And even if you did, you did so only in the course of watching your
friends die.

Mr. AMBROSE: That's very much the case. That's right. And it wasn't just
in combat. These are young men with great big machines, what's going to
happen? You're going to have accidents. And there were a lot of accidents in
training; the figures on the numbers of men lost in training are very high for
the Army air forces because you got 19-year-old pilots. McGovern was 20 years
old flying this great big four-engine bomber with a crew of 10, and accidents
happen.

They flew in a formation to ward off enemy fighters and to make certain that
they dropped their bombs together, so that they all hit on the target. They
flew in a diamond formation--a squadron had seven planes in it--wing tip to
wing tip. Now, I'm not talking about doing that once in an air show; I'm
talking about doing that all the way from Italy up into Romania, or up into
Munich, or up even into Berlin, and so on--wing tip to wing tip. So you were
constantly tense, watching on both sides of you.

When I say wing tip to wing tip, they wanted to make certain that they were so
close that no fighter could ever, ever go between the two planes. McGovern
says that, `If you had gave me a choice between flak and bad weather, I'd
always choose the flak.' He said that when you're going up into the clouds,
with a plane on your left, and a plane on your right, and a plane up ahead of
you, and a plane behind you, and all of you are damn near touching, and you
can't see anything--he said that was the worst.

CONAN: There was one moment where that formation went into a cloud. He was
flying, I think, number two, and the guy next to him was number three, and
they came out of the cloud, and somehow those guys had reversed positions.

Mr. AMBROSE: Yes, that's right. That's right. There are instances, and
this happened with the 7/41st as well as with other squadrons, where a plane
would be over another one and it would drop its bomb, and who would it hit?
It would hit the plane right below it. That happened. So--and very often
when a plane got shot up and an engine shot out of it and a big part of the
wing shot off, and it would wheel to the left and start down, it would hit the
plane beside it. So there were a lot of accidents.

CONAN: At the end of it all, you spent a long time speaking with George
McGovern and making him remember things I'm sure he hadn't recalled for some
years. At the end of it all, what does he make of the experience? What does
he thing it did for him?

Mr. AMBROSE: I want to--you ask about George, and I want to read it. `I
asked George to sum up his war experience, with his answer he spoke for every
airman, every GI, every sailor, Marine, every Coast Guard man in World War II,
quote, "Piloting a B-24 in combat with eight other guys--sometimes 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 in 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."' That's what the war was for George and for, as I say--for all
the others.

CONAN: Steven Ambrose, thank you very much.

Mr. AMBROSE: Thank you, Neal. It was a great pleasure to talk to you.

CONAN: Historian Steven Ambrose. His new book is "The Wild Blue: The Men
and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany in World War II."

(Credits)

CONAN: On tomorrow's show we feature an interview with blue's artist Otis
Taylor. We'll close the show with this song from his new CD, "White
African."

For Terry Gross, I'm Neal Conan.

(Soundbite of "White African")

Mr. OTIS TAYLOR: Where'd I lost my horse. Where'd I lost my mind. I've
been drinkin' all the time. Where'd I lost my house. Where'd I lost my mind.
I've been drinkin' all the time. Well, my mama was a Navajo. Well, my daddy
was a runaway slave. I've been thinkin' all the days where'd I lost my horse,
baby, where'd I lost my mind. I've been drinkin', girl, yeah, you know. Ha,
ha, I've been drinkin' all the time. Where'd I lost my horse. Baby, where'd
I lost my mind. I've been drinkin', girl, you know, all the time. All
the, all the time. I've been drinkin', girl, ha, yeah, yeah, all the time,
all the time. That's right. Mm-hmm, hmm-hmm.
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