Taking the War to the Skies: Stephen Ambrose on Allied Air Power
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2025
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, long before D-Day, another battle was already being fought high above Europe. The late, great Stephen Ambrose brings us into that world, where bomber crews crossed the Channel in formation and hoped to see England again by nightfall. Through his eyes, we see the exhaustion of the men who flew, the calculations of the commanders who sent them, and the gradual rise of an air strategy that helped turn the tide of the war.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi. |
| 0:08.5 | Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? |
| 0:15.1 | Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. |
| 0:18.5 | From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. |
| 0:23.6 | What difference at this point does it make? |
| 0:26.6 | Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:33.6 | ...or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. |
| 0:53.2 | Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians. |
| 0:57.8 | Ambrose passed in 2002, but his epic storytelling accounts can now be heard here at Our American |
| 1:04.9 | Stories thanks to those who run his estate. Our next story is about the fundamental importance |
| 1:10.5 | of air superiority in World War II. |
| 1:13.6 | Here's Stephen Ambrose. |
| 1:15.6 | The bombers in the Second World War were very much bigger than anything that the first World War had seen. |
| 1:22.6 | Going up to the really big ones like the B-17, the B-17, the most famous of all, |
| 1:28.3 | a four-engine bomber called the Flying Fortress. |
| 1:31.3 | They all had in common these things, they carried a lot of armament so that they could self-defend. |
| 1:38.3 | That is, there'd be a gunner in the nose, a gunner in the tail, a gunner in the belly, a gunner in the turret above. These men the tail a gunner in the belly a gunner in the turret above |
| 1:45.0 | These men were all there for defensive purposes to drive off enemy fighters and at the expense of speed and maneuverability |
| 1:52.0 | Because they were all very heavy people in the air ministry in Britain worked it out that statistically your chances in a bomber were going to be very much higher |
| 2:01.9 | over Berlin or Bremen or Hamburg or wherever the target was. |
| 2:06.4 | Your chances were going to be a lot higher if you got rid of all those gunners, got rid of all |
... |
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