My father flew P-38s out of Africa into Italy. On August 25, 1943, he was in a mission that helped to secure the Foggia airfield complex in southern Italy. In one of his letters home (many of which I was able to find and save in his biography, Wings Forever) he wrote, "After dive-bombing, we would stay down and strafe the convoys from end to end, setting trucks on fire and trying to put them all out of commission…. We also shot up a lot of trains. I enjoyed that." He was shot down on his 40th mission on August 31, 1943, so he was a POW when the raids in this video took place.
I just read the narrative about your father’s book on Barnes and Noble. Looks like a fascinating story. I’ll have to buy that very soon. That’s how I got into aviation myself was from being around World War II aircraft that had been restored and riding along when I was a child. Thank you for that information.
Looking at these gun camera films you don’t get the full impact of the concentrated firepower of the PaPa three eight! My uncle Leo was a 38 pilot in the Pacific. He was the main reason that I became a Marine Corps fighter pilot during the Vietnam war in the mid sixties. He had eleven kills in WWII making him a double ace. He explained to me how easy it was to decimate a target with a 38. All other fighter aircraft had wing mounted internal .50 cal machine guns. They were aimed to converge on a target at approximately 600 feet in front of the aircraft. So that was your sweet spot. The PaPa 38 on the other hand had (4) .50 caliber machine guns pointed straight ahead AND for an added kicker, in the middle of all that firepower was a 20 mm cannon to add some ass kicking to the conflagration. My uncle told me at about a thousand feet aft of his target he’d fire a short burst to see where the rounds were going but only using the 50’s. Then at about 800 feet or so he’d lead his target a bit and open fire with a moderate burst from all four fifties AND the twenty! The target would literally be ripped in half. And another Jap flag painted on his bird!
Art: My Dad was Chief Armorer in a European theater P-38 squadron. I have a pic of him with a belt of 20mm rounds draped like bandolier over his shoulders. The firepower of 38s on ground targets was devastating...
Don Davis , My uncle Leo told me the same thing. P-47’s, P-51’s and Spitfires all had wing guns set to focus fire at 600 feet in front of the aircraft. P-38’s on the other hand, had their quad .50’s were aimed to infinity and with the central 20mm in the center at 1,000 feet you led the target and walked your fire into the target and when you started hitting the target you added fire from the central 20mm the target disappears!
Sounds like what I’d do flying the P38 in Aces Of The Pacific a looooong time ago. Get a few hits with the .50s, select MGs and cannon, hold down the trigger long enough to hear THUMP THUMP THUMP from the cannon, and down goes the Japanese plane trailing smoke or on fire. Plus it rolled and turned very well.
Jack Tangles well, it’s about 14 seconds of shooting, and a few hits is all it’d take to knock most fighters out of the sky. Call it a 2 second burst to allow for walking fire onto target.
My uncle(dadside) flew the P38 in the South Pacific. Shot down several times . My dad fought in the same theater . Both are gone now . They both had great stories from memories. They left me their photographs. I was fortunate to know them both .
Had a Uncle who flew a B-26...His other brother was a Medic, served in North Africa, Italy..the 3rd Brother was a 'Special Operator', went behind Enemy Lines, took out German Officers, sabotage Rail Road Lines,.The youngest Brother, (my Dear Pop) dropped out of High School @ 17 and joined the Navy. Nearly died from Malaria. They all came home and had productive lives. God Bless all our Vets :)
Cool stories Jeff, thanks for sharing them with me . They had another brother between them that didnt come home . They were all in the Pacific theater but not together. That whole generation were tough as nails . Thanks again and make sure you repeat their stories to your extended family members . All are definition of heros .
Barfing Coyote Today soldier and other military personnel have great respect to this, as one High ranking officer coin those WW2 veterans, we ride on the backs of this giant’s because of what they did and endure during the conflict of WW2 this guys are larger than life. 👍
Yes you were fortunate to know them, I had the opposite experience with a WW-II B-17 tail gunner father, and there is definitely a hole there. 👍👍 For your good fortune. The other day I told my 33 year old daughter and she replied "I didn't know, that really sucks."
In a plane infamous for loss of rudder authority in a dive. These guys were master technicians of their craft. They did all this stuff while minding a set of instruments and keeping track of navigation and fuel endurance by doing math in their heads.
Hamlet. This footage is from March '45. So these are probably late J or L models with automatic dive brakes and power controls that made the Lightning a much more potent and controllable warplane. It's just too bad most were scrapped right after the war.
@@Alitheia777 - Yeah, but it sounds more dramatic my way. It's the internet. I think the main thing is that these machines weren't the perfected end product of a long mechanical evolution. They were steps in that evolution, and every new innovation or improvement had its share of "Never though of what would happen if you did that to it" moments. The pilots had to know, allow for, and plan around the peculiarities, weaknesses, and strengths of their particular machine while maintaining situational awareness and monitoring mechanical functions, and then they had to perform ground attack missions with a fighter. That's some next-level human performance right there.
How the Germans were able to keep putting up any resistance at all, much less, occasionally punish the allies, while enduring the weight of fire power they faced is astonishing.
Many of their military/ industrial facilities were hidden underground and/or protected by tons of steel and concrete. Nazi Occupied Europe was a big place and there were only so many Allied bombers and fighters to go around. The Germans also used slave labor to build and repair their infrastructure. These poor workers were very "expendable".
Definitely. They couldn't and didn't. Allied air strafing, with almost no interception by enemy fighters (who were decimated by Allied fighter contest) in the form of Thunderbolts, Lightnings, and Curtiss Warhawk-Tomahawks wrecked everything and anything military that moved or was seen.
No matter where the MGs were located (wing, nose, pods) they were all set up to have rounds converge on point at a given set distance. 200m, 400m, etc.
The F7F Tigercat had pretty concentrated firepower as well, 4 .50s in the nose and 2 20mm cannon in each wing root, they couldn’t have been more than 3 feet off the aircraft centerline. And the P61 Black Widow had 4 ventral 20mm that could really clobber a target.
Jack Tangles other than the P38 the US didn’t have any twin-engine fighters until late in the war, and you can only put so many guns & their ammo supply around an engine. The P38’s first flight was in 1939, so maybe the Brits learned it from us 😉
With all of its guns mounted on the nose of the plane, made the P-38 a great gun platform for strafing enemy ground targets. And another thing the P-38 has a great complement of guns on board consist of four 50-cal and one 20mm canon, for deadly accurate strafing.
Jack Tangles You do realize the size difference of the nose of the P-38 as compared to Mosquito or the Whirlwind, I mean the four browning 50- cal along already takes up much space, and with the 20-mm in the middle of the cluster of machine guns shoved right in between them, has barely enough space for the ammunition compartment to feed both types of gun, and beside the US been favoring the 50-cal for its accuracy and devastating destruction when it hits a target.
Jack Tangles Don’t tell me about ammunition’s as a former us army and a veteran I been around ammunition’s of all kind the fact that the 50-cal is more frequently used ammunition’s all over the world, it just shows you the kinda versatility of 50-cal and I know that the 20mm is a powerful round than the 50-cal, but it’s a heavy round befitting of the canon size rounds as for the 50 is more of a large caliber rifle round, and mind you the 50-cal just like the 20 mm it also come with different flavors but in a small package, and in mass quantity.
The trains were carrying hundreds of tons of war material to the western battle areas, meant to do one thing only: to kill Allied soldiers on the ground. The Allied Air supply-interdiction Campaign to stop Hitler's wehrmacht meant that America kept up to 14 THOUSAND of these Lightning aircraft destroying everything military that moved or dared to show itself. It continued to go into missions all the way to the end of WW2 as a ground-attack aircraft.
Something I think gets overlooked, the enemy shoots back. Strafing runs mean you're flying low, in a straight line, and as slow as you dare to in order to put out as much hurt as possible per run. That makes you an excellent target for anti-aircraft fire. These young pilots had balls of steel.
That's the only reason I can think why you never, ever, see them following the tracks. It would seem like the way to inflict the most damage, but there were 88s under canvas mounted on flatbed cars.
Yes, according to the pilot debriefings, it was extremely dangerous. The wehrmacht had all kinds of lethal AA guns, often self-propelled, and in twin or quadruple gun mounts. It was not a walk in the park. The AA guns they were getting shot at by were typically cannon caliber. 20 to 40mm cannon.
This guy did all this with NO AUTORELOAD checked. Look at the lag he had to deal with. right after attach run, bam, frame skip and you are lined up again. Rinse, repeat. Ok got that out of the way. These guys were almost all under 21 flying these missions. Can not imagine.... We don't have that many left anymore. If you see a vet, tell him thanks. I bet they went through more than you think.
This aircraft is recorded to have demolished entire aerodromes on one long pass. If it came back for another pass, the whole place would be burning twisted metal and wreckage. It only took two of these aircraft in tandem on a strafing run to demolish everything in front of it.
Actually, when the multiple tubes which carry combustion exhaust from the fire box through the boiler are ruptured, they provide a ready escape path for live steam, with the final path out being concentrated at the smokestack. Steam escaping through individual bullet holes in the boiler jacket are less obvious because all those bullet holes don't lead the steam to a single outlet the way the heating tubes do. When engineers vent steam intentionally, it normally shoots out sideways in front of the cab, and they simply can NOT vent it so fast that it shoots out hundreds of feet as is the case when a fully-pressurized boiler is shot. What you are seeing in many of those cases IS an explosion, with the super-heated water in the boiler turning to steam as a result of rapidly dropping pressure. In fact, with the super-heated water ready to instantly turn to steam as rapidly as any drop in pressure will allow, and with the potential volume of the steam being many orders of magnitute greater than the volume of the water, there wouldn't be any way to "vent the boiler" to a safe pressure in a short time, because the pressure would not be substantially reduced until all of the water had turned to steam and escaped, and that would take quite a long time in any situation that wasn't an actual explosion.
@@NH2112 I couldn't tell you the ratio without looking it up somewhere, but the ratio would be enormous, and yes, that's exactly the point I was making. Anyone who thinks you can vent a boiler to relieve the pressure in a short time just hasn't tried thinking it through, or they simply don't know what they don't know (Dunning Kruger, eh?)
When you see a Locomotive plume from the stack this is not from the attack it is the engineer releasing pressure in the engine to prevent and explosion. The rest of the steam you see is from direct hits.
Without checking to see if you're correct, I've seen quite a few strafing videos on trains where that steam flies up and I have a hard time believing that an engineer is going to stay in a locomotive while it's getting strafed, those engineers knew that the locomotives where always a priority for strafing fighters. Also, that shot of steam always seems to occur when a particularly heavy concentration of bullets hits the engine area like it's a reaction to incoming damage.
Strafing is satisfying but extremely dangerous. Many, many US pilots were lost attacking ground targets. These videos show how dangerously low they went.
It was extremely dangerous landscape-hugging flying. Imagine they're going FOUR TIMES 100mph. Once single error and they're into the ground. No days ahead in life, it's over. They were shot at, too.
@Jack Tangles There are scores of hundreds of combat strafing missions these Pilots did where they made more than one pass in the same ground attack sortie, destroying things. These Pilots were not all getting shot down. On the contrary, not many were actually shot down, despite being shot at by AA. It is exampled by all the gun cameras returning with footage reel (like the archived one shown here in this youtube posting).
Im no pilot or Veteran. I just curious as I watch the gun camera footage why the pilots didn't swing around and go along as the track went instead of a few shots at the side once the trains were seen and hit?
@@redgreen6795 Makes sense but in time of war seems there will always be civi or innocents die. Merry Christmas Red Green, had old Heil won we may not be able to say that and I am afraid ,,not in my lifetime but sooner,,than later China will flex big time...?
Some of the best pilots would come at the train from a 45 degree angle and push the rudder peddle as they were firing, causing the bullets to sweep along the length of the train. You will notice this in a few scenes.
Yes, it's gun configuration made it so all the firepower squirted straight ahead without the need to converge the guns. This made for quite a precise hammer punch that was devastating.
I wonder how much the "end of the war is close" made the pilots more cautious. None of these shots are attacking the trains directly head on or from behind. My guess is that kind of attack, though an easier shot, was more susceptible to AA ground fire.
"P-38 guns seem to be much more accurate than the P-51 strafing video's i've seen." My thoughts exactly. Everybody here is saying the same thing. The difference is noticeable.
I wonder if P-51's which were tasked with ground-attack missions had their machine guns aligned directly forward? Obviously that wasn't an issue with the P-38 which mounted all its guns in the nose -- they would always be aligned directly forward. But fighters with wing-mounted guns like the P-51 has their guns aligned slightly inward so that the aiming point from both wings would converge at an optimal range for air-to-air combat. I would think though that this would make ground attack accuracy a little more difficult because the bullets aren't all going directly forward. Assuming the ground target was farther away than the optimal air-to-air range the bullets would actually already have crossed paths and would be diverging.
@@arkwill14 I agree. For ground attack the P-51 guns would need very little inward angle since the P-51 isn't that wide to begin with. Even if they were pointed straight ahead the P-51 could hit anything that was about as wide as itself. That would include most military targets. Trucks, tanks, etc.
@@rael5469 Yeah, I've learned a little about "Gun Harmonization" since I wrote that. Apparently it was up to pilots, or more often squadron commanders, to decide how much angle they wanted their plane's guns adjusted to. Some planes used no adjustment at all, even for air-to-air and just fired straight ahead. I would imagine that if you knew you were going hunting for ground targets you probably would want no adjustment either. I agree with you - if you're going after equipment like that you probably just want to spray an area as large as the plane itself.
This looks like the funnest job on the planet. Flying all over with a powerful engine on each side of you divebombing and shooting railcars to shit. I'm so jealous.
@Ryke Haven It is so sad you KKK / White Nationalist always has something ugly about the Israelites.... I truly hop you have children and live all 1,000 years of thje Black Christ Reign.
There’s a reason the Nazi’s feared the P-38 Lightning. Heroes like Lt. Little bringing the pain in a great plane! I have the upmost respect for all veterans, especially for the ones in WW2.
john fellows sadder still to realize any steam released suddenly from the smokestack is most likely the engineer operating the manual pressure release safety valve attempting to blow off enough pressure to avoid being popped like a balloon.
After the war all the beautiful steam locomotives were thrown on the scrap pile because the diesel locomotives were so much more efficient and didn't need so many folks to maintain or operate. god it must have been fun to see the locomotives blow up. if people cared there were plenty left after the war to preserve. I wish i had been a pilot, that would be so much fun.
The really sad part is what the evil, mass-raping communist Red Army did to the innocent German and Austrian girls and women. The USA was allied to Lucifer in ww2.
Strafing was dangerous in WW2. A lot of good fighter aces were KIA or POW strafing German air fields. Gabby Gabreski was a Pow because of his strafing an air field
I've read that there were somewhere in the neighborhood of over 10,000 German steam locomotives destroyed during the war. We destroyed that many without a war on! :-(
No they didn't. The train drivers released the steam manually when being fired upon. That's why there's so much white fog, because they did not pop. -_-
@@Leon_der_Luftige Where on locomotives was a manual pressure relief? I suspect the ones with the sudden geyser of steam out the smokestacks when hit by machine gun fire were probably exploding due to being hit.
@@Leon_der_Luftige I also saw videos of mountains of bodies pushed into pits, mounds of hair and lampshades made out of human skin....those trains are carrying ammo, fuel and supplies to psychos.
@@dad5650 Quite a generalized statement. The Germans fought for fascism, the Soviets for communism, the US and Britain to maintain their positions as world leaders... And everyone fought pretty damn fanatically for their ideas otherwise they would have stopped after the first bloodbath and went "yo, this is getting out of hand. Let's slow down a bit and talk this through again." But no, everyone seemed pretty happy with their gloves off: - So much so the US was actively participating despite not being officially in the war yet. - Britain was offered peace by Germany but declined (seems quite fanatic to neglect the idea of peace und any circumstances if you ask me) - Do we even need to clarify the Soviets and Japanese were nuts? - France could have avoided the entire WW2 if they hadn't been so fanatically petty and cruel in the peace treaty of Versailles... Now, wouldn't you agree that no one of the protagonists in this story is worth supporting if you are truly objective? And even if you think so, "loving it" seeing people getting slaughtered really should make you think what a sicko you might be yourself no matter the ideology.
Still far better than gun cam footage from the Korean war. That film is so bad it makes the aftermath footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake look like ultra hi-def.
This aircraft was even more potent, if one can even imagine, than the terrifying eight .50 heavy machine gun armed Thunderbolt. The arsenal was clustered, very close in the nose cone, with four .50 heavy machine guns surrounding a cannon. The 20mm cannon combined with the all the four .50 shells all converged into a space the size of a dinner platter could shatter heavy tank armor. It would obliterate an aircraft with a single 1-second trigger finger pull (in the Lightning this was a single thumb depress on the yoke). A 3-second trigger would demolish a heavy train Engine car, which was massive steel. This arsenal would saw a large building in half. This, coming out of a 415mph aircraft.
All of sudden your like, why are they strafing a neighborhood. Then you see a huge explosion... That’s Why!! Don’t hide explosives in your barn or garage...
In those days people tended to live close to their work. So if you lived close to any "military target" you had a good chance of becoming "collateral damage" by strafing or bombing, or both. WWII did not have "smart bombs" like today. Most of them were deadly "dumb bombs".
The sad part of these straffing runs is the pilots tended to pull up before they stop firing and they ended up hitting homes near by. Collateral damage no diubt😏
Mike, Yes it’s repairable ,maybe if you could get the parts or fix the holes . To have to do the repairs on it at the site it was hit would be a nightmare .
Look up Operation Clarion to see the scale of destruction done by Allied air power against rail targets. Absolutely shut Germany down from that operation - thousands of planes used - thousands of trains and train cars destroyed. It was extremely rare to see a steam engine get repaired due to how they tended to explode sending huge chunks of metal all over the place - but a very small amount did get repaired and put back into use.
A couple of British engines operated into the 1960's but there's very little information about how German trains did - they certainly had an active recovery system in place as at the time it was common for trains to derail and break down. The cranes they used to lift cars and engines off the track were one of the highest value targets of WW2 on both sides.
A lot of US fighter pilots must have felt sooo disappointed when the war was over... Many witness accounts confirm how much those young guys enjoyed strafing just about anything they could shoot at ! Now we have video games for that. At least it's less expensive to the taxpayers...
@sledge hammer Wars and times change but the "trigger happy" gene is always there as proved in the many years in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak, Syria... Just shoot at anything that move. There will always be a McNamara, Rumsfeld/Cheney or some neocons to cover up your ass !
Many US pilots based here in England lost their lives helping us defeat fascism. Show respect, they were very young and had their lives taken so that we can live as free people.
The singular impacts you see each split second are actually the combined cone of all the projectiles converging into the point of impact. A single flash seen in the combat reel meant multiple scores of the (simultaneous) four .50 shells and the cannon shell altogether making instantaneous impact.
Two things I like best about World War II One is, honoring the men and women that won it. Two is, watching a steam locomotive get hit from strafing and blow its steam out.
You forget how much fun it was shooting farmers and their families and helpers in the fields. They oftentimes turned around 3-4 times to make shure that granny has been hit too. True heroes.
My father flew P-38s out of Africa into Italy. On August 25, 1943, he was in a mission that helped to secure the Foggia airfield complex in southern Italy. In one of his letters home (many of which I was able to find and save in his biography, Wings Forever) he wrote, "After dive-bombing, we would stay down and strafe the convoys from end to end, setting trucks on fire and trying to put them all out of commission…. We also shot up a lot of trains. I enjoyed that." He was shot down on his 40th mission on August 31, 1943, so he was a POW when the raids in this video took place.
I just read the narrative about your father’s book on Barnes and Noble. Looks like a fascinating story. I’ll have to buy that very soon. That’s how I got into aviation myself was from being around World War II aircraft that had been restored and riding along when I was a child. Thank you for that information.
Awesome.
Looking at these gun camera films you don’t get the full impact of the concentrated firepower of the PaPa three eight! My uncle Leo was a 38 pilot in the Pacific. He was the main reason that I became a Marine Corps fighter pilot during the Vietnam war in the mid sixties. He had eleven kills in WWII making him a double ace. He explained to me how easy it was to decimate a target with a 38. All other fighter aircraft had wing mounted internal .50 cal machine guns. They were aimed to converge on a target at approximately 600 feet in front of the aircraft. So that was your sweet spot. The PaPa 38 on the other hand had (4) .50 caliber machine guns pointed straight ahead AND for an added kicker, in the middle of all that firepower was a 20 mm cannon to add some ass kicking to the conflagration. My uncle told me at about a thousand feet aft of his target he’d fire a short burst to see where the rounds were going but only using the 50’s. Then at about 800 feet or so he’d lead his target a bit and open fire with a moderate burst from all four fifties AND the twenty! The target would literally be ripped in half. And another Jap flag painted on his bird!
Art: My Dad was Chief Armorer in a European theater P-38 squadron. I have a pic of him with a belt of 20mm rounds draped like bandolier over his shoulders. The firepower of 38s on ground targets was devastating...
Don Davis , My uncle Leo told me the same thing. P-47’s, P-51’s and Spitfires all had wing guns set to focus fire at 600 feet in front of the aircraft. P-38’s on the other hand, had their quad .50’s were aimed to infinity and with the central 20mm in the center at 1,000 feet you led the target and walked your fire into the target and when you started hitting the target you added fire from the central 20mm the target disappears!
Sounds like what I’d do flying the P38 in Aces Of The Pacific a looooong time ago. Get a few hits with the .50s, select MGs and cannon, hold down the trigger long enough to hear THUMP THUMP THUMP from the cannon, and down goes the Japanese plane trailing smoke or on fire. Plus it rolled and turned very well.
Jack Tangles well, it’s about 14 seconds of shooting, and a few hits is all it’d take to knock most fighters out of the sky. Call it a 2 second burst to allow for walking fire onto target.
@@NH2112 I thought the belts of ammo were 27 feet long , thus the expression , gave it the whole nine yards .
Life expectancy for train engineers in the later stages of the war had to be pretty short.
My Grandfather flew out of Foggia, he was shot down and was a POW for a year and one week. He was the tail gunner on B17
My dad was a B-17 tail gunner, 384th BG Grafton Underwood - glad you posted
@@cowboybob7093 I'll find the bomb group info. I have it somewhere.
And it is amazing when you realize that between two tracers there are five bullets never seen
Sustained concentrated stream
2 to 3 seconds into the impact spot.
Aircraft tended to load nothing but tracers
My uncle(dadside) flew the P38 in the South Pacific. Shot down several times . My dad fought in the same theater . Both are gone now . They both had great stories from memories. They left me their photographs.
I was fortunate to know them both .
Had a Uncle who flew a B-26...His other brother was a Medic, served in North Africa, Italy..the 3rd Brother was a 'Special Operator', went behind Enemy Lines, took out German Officers, sabotage Rail Road Lines,.The youngest Brother, (my Dear Pop) dropped out of High School @ 17 and joined the Navy. Nearly died from Malaria. They all came home and had productive lives. God Bless all our Vets :)
Cool stories Jeff, thanks for sharing them with me . They had another brother between them that didnt come home . They were all in the Pacific theater but not together. That whole generation were tough as nails . Thanks again and make sure you repeat their stories to your extended family members . All are definition of heros .
Barfing Coyote Couldn’t get my grandfathers when he was in the Wehrmacht...that’s the only thing I wanted from him.
Barfing Coyote
Today soldier and other military personnel have great respect to this, as one High ranking officer coin those WW2 veterans, we ride on the backs of this giant’s because of what they did and endure during the conflict of WW2 this guys are larger than life. 👍
Yes you were fortunate to know them, I had the opposite experience with a WW-II B-17 tail gunner father, and there is definitely a hole there. 👍👍 For your good fortune.
The other day I told my 33 year old daughter and she replied "I didn't know, that really sucks."
Holy cow, the accuracy of the P-38 seems to be much better than other ground attack videos.
Its has nose mounted guns, p-47 and p-51 had wing mounted guns
These pilots were incredibly skilled. They guided the bullet stream with their planes while diving.
In a plane infamous for loss of rudder authority in a dive. These guys were master technicians of their craft. They did all this stuff while minding a set of instruments and keeping track of navigation and fuel endurance by doing math in their heads.
Hamlet. This footage is from March '45. So these are probably late J or L models with automatic dive brakes and power controls that made the Lightning a much more potent and controllable warplane. It's just too bad most were scrapped right after the war.
@@Alitheia777 - Yeah, but it sounds more dramatic my way. It's the internet. I think the main thing is that these machines weren't the perfected end product of a long mechanical evolution. They were steps in that evolution, and every new innovation or improvement had its share of "Never though of what would happen if you did that to it" moments. The pilots had to know, allow for, and plan around the peculiarities, weaknesses, and strengths of their particular machine while maintaining situational awareness and monitoring mechanical functions, and then they had to perform ground attack missions with a fighter. That's some next-level human performance right there.
How the Germans were able to keep putting up any resistance at all, much less, occasionally punish the allies, while enduring the weight of fire power they faced is astonishing.
Many of their military/ industrial facilities were hidden underground and/or protected by tons of steel and concrete. Nazi Occupied Europe was a big place and there were only so many Allied bombers and fighters to go around. The Germans also used slave labor to build and repair their infrastructure. These poor workers were very "expendable".
@@Frank-mm2yp
Ya still gotta go outside sometime.
Definitely.
They couldn't and didn't.
Allied air strafing, with almost no interception by enemy fighters (who were decimated by Allied fighter contest) in the form of Thunderbolts, Lightnings, and Curtiss Warhawk-Tomahawks wrecked everything and anything military that moved or was seen.
Interesting how much more effective the nose mounted MG's and cannons were, no convergence issues, just lots of projectiles on the targets.
These guns were like straddling a motor cycle engine, seat, steering, wheels!
No matter where the MGs were located (wing, nose, pods) they were all set up to have rounds converge on point at a given set distance. 200m, 400m, etc.
@@dunemetal67 Not true.
@@niccadoodles What is not true? Who?
Definitely. If you put rounds on target it was going to be trouble for the target.
Wow! You look at that concentrated non-converging firepower of 4 50's and 1 20mm in about a 30 in diameter and that is devastating!
I noticed
The F7F Tigercat had pretty concentrated firepower as well, 4 .50s in the nose and 2 20mm cannon in each wing root, they couldn’t have been more than 3 feet off the aircraft centerline. And the P61 Black Widow had 4 ventral 20mm that could really clobber a target.
Jack Tangles other than the P38 the US didn’t have any twin-engine fighters until late in the war, and you can only put so many guns & their ammo supply around an engine.
The P38’s first flight was in 1939, so maybe the Brits learned it from us 😉
@@madisntit6547 blam! pow! plewie!
"Pardon me, boy, is that the Berchtasgaden Choo Choo?"
"Ja, Ja, der Fuhrer line!"
"Boy, give my P-38 a shine."
*Thomas never recovered mentally from seeing his friends blown to bits that day*
Its amazing how devastating the concentrated fire is from having all the guns in the nose.
The concentration of fire from those nose mounted guns is like a lead laser:)
With all of its guns mounted on the nose of the plane, made the P-38 a great gun platform for strafing enemy ground targets.
And another thing the P-38 has a great complement of guns on board consist of four 50-cal and one 20mm canon, for deadly accurate strafing.
Jack Tangles
You do realize the size difference of the nose of the P-38 as compared to Mosquito or the Whirlwind, I mean the four browning 50- cal along already takes up much space, and with the 20-mm in the middle of the cluster of machine guns shoved right in between them, has barely enough space for the ammunition compartment to feed both types of gun, and beside the US been favoring the 50-cal for its accuracy and devastating destruction when it hits a target.
Jack Tangles
Don’t tell me about ammunition’s as a former us army and a veteran I been around ammunition’s of all kind the fact that the 50-cal is more frequently used ammunition’s all over the world, it just shows you the kinda versatility of 50-cal and I know that the 20mm is a powerful round than the 50-cal, but it’s a heavy round befitting of the canon size rounds as for the 50 is more of a large caliber rifle round, and mind you the 50-cal just like the 20 mm it also come with different flavors but in a small package, and in mass quantity.
The P-38 is my favorite fighter of WW2, absolute beast of a fighter.
These guys are dealing out death and destruction...war is hell
And the Germans are screaming "Those damn Fork Tailed Devils"
Ww2 Pilots really disliked those trains
Parabellum 1988 and so did the soldiers that fought the resupplied enemy
@@mikek4610 The reinforcement troops of the resupplied enemy wasn't very fond of those trains either.
No supplies, no Army. That's why some of the first factories to be bombed were ball-bearing factories. Without ball bearings nothing moves.
The trains were carrying hundreds of tons of war material to the western battle areas, meant to do one thing only: to kill Allied soldiers on the ground.
The Allied Air supply-interdiction Campaign to stop Hitler's wehrmacht meant that America kept up to 14 THOUSAND of these Lightning aircraft destroying everything military that moved or dared to show itself.
It continued to go into missions all the way to the end of WW2 as a ground-attack aircraft.
I feel like the p38 was the a10 before the a10, the amount of fire power it posses with just the guns are insane
Oh no doubt, that aircraft was a beast. The P-47 was no slouch either with 8 .50's. I wouldn't want be on the business end of either one!
The predecessor.
Something I think gets overlooked, the enemy shoots back. Strafing runs mean you're flying low, in a straight line, and as slow as you dare to in order to put out as much hurt as possible per run. That makes you an excellent target for anti-aircraft fire. These young pilots had balls of steel.
That's the only reason I can think why you never, ever, see them following the tracks. It would seem like the way to inflict the most damage, but there were 88s under canvas mounted on flatbed cars.
Yes, according to the pilot debriefings, it was extremely dangerous.
The wehrmacht had all kinds of lethal AA guns, often self-propelled, and in twin or quadruple gun mounts.
It was not a walk in the park. The AA guns they were getting shot at by were typically cannon caliber.
20 to 40mm cannon.
LT. Bach deserves an immediate promotion.
2 planes 1 pilot
This guy did all this with NO AUTORELOAD checked. Look at the lag he had to deal with. right after attach run, bam, frame skip and you are lined up again. Rinse, repeat. Ok got that out of the way. These guys were almost all under 21 flying these missions. Can not imagine.... We don't have that many left anymore. If you see a vet, tell him thanks. I bet they went through more than you think.
Tight impacts, clustered guns...devastating
This aircraft is recorded to have demolished entire aerodromes on one long pass.
If it came back for another pass, the whole place would be burning twisted metal and wreckage.
It only took two of these aircraft in tandem on a strafing run to demolish everything in front of it.
Too bad we didn't have better video back then. Thanks!
The steam blasting out of the engine is done by the train engineer to release pressure to prevent a steam explosion if the pressure tank of ruptured.
Actually, when the multiple tubes which carry combustion exhaust from the fire box through the boiler are ruptured, they provide a ready escape path for live steam, with the final path out being concentrated at the smokestack. Steam escaping through individual bullet holes in the boiler jacket are less obvious because all those bullet holes don't lead the steam to a single outlet the way the heating tubes do. When engineers vent steam intentionally, it normally shoots out sideways in front of the cab, and they simply can NOT vent it so fast that it shoots out hundreds of feet as is the case when a fully-pressurized boiler is shot. What you are seeing in many of those cases IS an explosion, with the super-heated water in the boiler turning to steam as a result of rapidly dropping pressure. In fact, with the super-heated water ready to instantly turn to steam as rapidly as any drop in pressure will allow, and with the potential volume of the steam being many orders of magnitute greater than the volume of the water, there wouldn't be any way to "vent the boiler" to a safe pressure in a short time, because the pressure would not be substantially reduced until all of the water had turned to steam and escaped, and that would take quite a long time in any situation that wasn't an actual explosion.
Wrong. Engineers were NOT scanning the sky waiting, expecting, air attack you incomparable moron.
Eric L isn’t the expansion ratio in a typical pressurized boiler something like 1700:1? That’s a big bang!
@@NH2112 I couldn't tell you the ratio without looking it up somewhere, but the ratio would be enormous, and yes, that's exactly the point I was making. Anyone who thinks you can vent a boiler to relieve the pressure in a short time just hasn't tried thinking it through, or they simply don't know what they don't know (Dunning Kruger, eh?)
@@lurking0death do you feel better calling someone names? Jeez, most of us left that in the playground. I’m sure your parents are proud of you.
Nothing can stop a train....except a P38
I'm going to laugh now every time I see their commercials on tv. "Nothing can stop a...." Ohhhhhh I know one thing, mr salesman....
There are few people in history who can say they flew around Italy and shot up a lot of expensive railroad equipment with impunity.
These guys are part of a nation who mobilized like never before in history, otherwise we’d be speaking German today.
The Germans called the P-38 the forked tailed devil.
really or is that just another urban myth?
Yes, search for "Gabelschwanzteufel"
When you see a Locomotive plume from the stack this is not from the attack it is the engineer releasing pressure in the engine to prevent and explosion. The rest of the steam you see is from direct hits.
Without checking to see if you're correct, I've seen quite a few strafing videos on trains where that steam flies up and I have a hard time believing that an engineer is going to stay in a locomotive while it's getting strafed, those engineers knew that the locomotives where always a priority for strafing fighters. Also, that shot of steam always seems to occur when a particularly heavy concentration of bullets hits the engine area like it's a reaction to incoming damage.
Uncle flew B-17s from Kimbolton England with the 379th Bomb Group. 31 as command pilot and 6 as a copilot
Can never see that much from these sadly
I noticed that some guys were right down on the deck and others tried strafing from 2,000 feet.
I've been working on the railroad
All the live long day
I've been working on the railroad
Just to pass the time away
Strafing is satisfying but extremely dangerous. Many, many US pilots were lost attacking ground targets. These videos show how dangerously low they went.
Paul Martos as well as flying through flying debri and their own richocets
Like 1Lt. Augustus F. Reese from Shallowwater Texas. I served on Reese AFB in Lubbock. He was strafing a train in a P-38 that they had put AA guns on😵
It was extremely dangerous landscape-hugging flying.
Imagine they're going FOUR TIMES 100mph.
Once single error and they're into the ground.
No days ahead in life, it's over.
They were shot at, too.
@Jack Tangles
There are scores of hundreds of combat strafing missions these Pilots did where they made more than one pass in the same ground attack sortie, destroying things.
These Pilots were not all getting shot down.
On the contrary, not many were actually shot down, despite being shot at by AA.
It is exampled by all the gun cameras returning with footage reel (like the archived one shown here in this youtube posting).
Target fixation is still a killer. Even with bitching Betty saying pull up pull up
"I've been workin on the railroad, all the ding dong day!"
You can really see the difference between the 20mm Cannon and the 50 cal here 😳
Yes, we’re going to need you to be the train engineer for today...😲
Imagine what an A10 wort hog could do with these opportunities.
Im no pilot or Veteran. I just curious as I watch the gun camera footage why the pilots didn't swing around and go along as the track went instead of a few shots at the side once the trains were seen and hit?
Sometimes there were POWs or civilians in the cars and the pilots were trying to avoid them.
@@redgreen6795 Makes sense but in time of war seems there will always be civi or innocents die. Merry Christmas Red Green, had old Heil won we may not be able to say that and I am afraid ,,not in my lifetime but sooner,,than later China will flex big time...?
Some of the best pilots would come at the train from a 45 degree angle and push the rudder peddle as they were firing, causing the bullets to sweep along the length of the train. You will notice this in a few scenes.
Some of those trains had light AA on each end. Coming in from the side ruined the chances of hitting the aircraft.
didnt we take Foggia almost a year before some of these vids was taken.?
black 57 , film..
Yes, Foggia was taken by the Allies in the late fall of 1943. My dad flew B-17's out of Foggia in mid-1944.
Thank you gentlemen for doing your part to assure I was not forcibly taught Der Fürher's approved German.
How were there any operational locomotives left by the end of the war? So many depicted being destroyed in many of these guncam videos.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed... but the P-38 seems much more accurate/precise
Yes, it's gun configuration made it so all the firepower squirted straight ahead without the need to converge the guns. This made for quite a precise hammer punch that was devastating.
Some mighty fine shooting there Lou, pc wiggim
@1littleaction78. How did you go about getting this film? Do you know someone in this film?
Austin Carter
This are film documents archives from war departments, and are preserved at the Smithsonian museum.
What is that black thing that appears in the upper left corner after every shot. That’s in every one of these old videos here on youtube?
Indicators on the gun cameras. The cameras were designed to follow the tracks of the guns.
I wonder how much the "end of the war is close" made the pilots more cautious. None of these shots are attacking the trains directly head on or from behind. My guess is that kind of attack, though an easier shot, was more susceptible to AA ground fire.
P-38 guns seem to be much more accurate than the P-51 strafing video's i've seen.
"P-38 guns seem to be much more accurate than the P-51 strafing video's i've seen."
My thoughts exactly. Everybody here is saying the same thing. The difference is noticeable.
Really accurate statement.
The arsenal was clustered and the impact of the projectiles concentrated.
I wonder if P-51's which were tasked with ground-attack missions had their machine guns aligned directly forward? Obviously that wasn't an issue with the P-38 which mounted all its guns in the nose -- they would always be aligned directly forward. But fighters with wing-mounted guns like the P-51 has their guns aligned slightly inward so that the aiming point from both wings would converge at an optimal range for air-to-air combat. I would think though that this would make ground attack accuracy a little more difficult because the bullets aren't all going directly forward. Assuming the ground target was farther away than the optimal air-to-air range the bullets would actually already have crossed paths and would be diverging.
@@arkwill14 I agree. For ground attack the P-51 guns would need very little inward angle since the P-51 isn't that wide to begin with. Even if they were pointed straight ahead the P-51 could hit anything that was about as wide as itself. That would include most military targets. Trucks, tanks, etc.
@@rael5469 Yeah, I've learned a little about "Gun Harmonization" since I wrote that. Apparently it was up to pilots, or more often squadron commanders, to decide how much angle they wanted their plane's guns adjusted to. Some planes used no adjustment at all, even for air-to-air and just fired straight ahead. I would imagine that if you knew you were going hunting for ground targets you probably would want no adjustment either. I agree with you - if you're going after equipment like that you probably just want to spray an area as large as the plane itself.
Some of those pilots were almost in the tree tops. Gotta get close to make these count. Get em guys.
Definitely going down close to the deck.
This looks like the funnest job on the planet. Flying all over with a powerful engine on each side of you divebombing and shooting railcars to shit. I'm so jealous.
anyone got any footage of a p-38 straffing ships
When the Red Tail (Tuskegee Airmen) received the new P-51 Mustangs, they added to the destruction of the German Air Forces.
@Ryke Haven It is so sad you KKK / White Nationalist always has something ugly about the Israelites.... I truly hop you have children and live all 1,000 years of thje Black Christ Reign.
Trying to get in omg the act before it's all over. By this time most pilots knew their time was about up.
There’s a reason the Nazi’s feared the P-38 Lightning. Heroes like Lt. Little bringing the pain in a great plane! I have the upmost respect for all veterans, especially for the ones in WW2.
Thank GOD for these brave and deadly accurate flyers!!!
So granddad, did you shoot anything down in WW2? Yes son: a bunch og trains, someone had to do the hard work😉
Now that's how you take some steam out......
I know it had to be done, but it still saddens me seeing these beautiful steam locomotives shot to shit !
john fellows sadder still to realize any steam released suddenly from the smokestack is most likely the engineer operating the manual pressure release safety valve attempting to blow off enough pressure to avoid being popped like a balloon.
F P scary business.
After the war all the beautiful steam locomotives were thrown on the scrap pile because the diesel locomotives were so much more efficient and didn't need so many folks to maintain or operate. god it must have been fun to see the locomotives blow up. if people cared there were plenty left after the war to preserve. I wish i had been a pilot, that would be so much fun.
The really sad part is what the evil, mass-raping communist Red Army did to the innocent German and Austrian girls and women. The USA was allied to Lucifer in ww2.
Strafing was dangerous in WW2. A lot of good fighter aces were KIA or POW strafing German air fields. Gabby Gabreski was a Pow because of his strafing an air field
Lt. Colonel Chitty, is this where Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came from?🤔
it would be great if this type of footage was cleaned up like they do with other vintage film.
God bless these guys. Thank God we won that war. Boy, it would have sucked to be a train though..
Wonder what rounds were going into targets, 50 cal ?
Yes...loaded 2-2-&-1. Two armor piercing, two incendiary and one tracer.
4x50's and 1 x 20 millimeter cannon
No convergence or felt engine torque issues
I've read that there were somewhere in the neighborhood of over 10,000 German steam locomotives destroyed during the war. We destroyed that many without a war on! :-(
Those locomotives really “pop”.
No they didn't. The train drivers released the steam manually when being fired upon. That's why there's so much white fog, because they did not pop. -_-
@@Leon_der_Luftige
Where on locomotives was a manual pressure relief? I suspect the ones with the sudden geyser of steam out the smokestacks when hit by machine gun fire were probably exploding due to being hit.
imagine all those POW's getting shredded by 50 cal in those box cars , like fish in da barrel
German train driver looks like it was the most dangerous job post 6th June 1944
I'd bet 1 locomotive going down mid route would be a huge headache. Now imagine 90% in an 500km range in one day....not an easy recovery
Looking at the dates on the titles, Hitler had less than a month to live...
Not a good time to be a locomotive engineer.
I wonder why they attacked across the train instead of along the train
Everyone of these attacks would be international news as an environmental disaster today. We sank oil tankers by the hundreds back then.
Bacteria eat oil slicks. The warmer the water the faster.
It turned out it was the straws, the plastic ones
Those guys were great pilots..pulling out of the run right at treetop level. Would have sucked to be the train engineer.
Imagine sitting in one of those trains and getting lit up like that. 😬
Boy the Germans musta hated you guys! They just loaded that train! Now they have to reload it onto another train and not get caught! Lol!
😆
Gotta love it when they hit that boiler.
You just watched people possibly getting gruesomely shot out of nowhere and said, you "loved it".
@@Leon_der_Luftige I also saw videos of mountains of bodies pushed into pits, mounds of hair and lampshades made out of human skin....those trains are carrying ammo, fuel and supplies to psychos.
@@dad5650 Quite a generalized statement.
The Germans fought for fascism, the Soviets for communism, the US and Britain to maintain their positions as world leaders... And everyone fought pretty damn fanatically for their ideas otherwise they would have stopped after the first bloodbath and went "yo, this is getting out of hand. Let's slow down a bit and talk this through again."
But no, everyone seemed pretty happy with their gloves off:
- So much so the US was actively participating despite not being officially in the war yet.
- Britain was offered peace by Germany but declined (seems quite fanatic to neglect the idea of peace und any circumstances if you ask me)
- Do we even need to clarify the Soviets and Japanese were nuts?
- France could have avoided the entire WW2 if they hadn't been so fanatically petty and cruel in the peace treaty of Versailles...
Now, wouldn't you agree that no one of the protagonists in this story is worth supporting if you are truly objective?
And even if you think so, "loving it" seeing people getting slaughtered really should make you think what a sicko you might be yourself no matter the ideology.
@10:26 whats he shooting at?
No volume
Most of the train attacks are from the side, why didn't they approach head-on and walk down the cars?
Anti aircraft guns were on special railcars. Would burn you on a straight on attack.
Sadly most of the film quality on this video is of poor quality
Well WW2 is very fucking sorry for not being able to supply 2019 quality actual battle footage.. Get over it snowflake!!
Still far better than gun cam footage from the Korean war. That film is so bad it makes the aftermath footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake look like ultra hi-def.
This aircraft was even more potent, if one can even imagine, than the terrifying eight
.50 heavy machine gun armed Thunderbolt.
The arsenal was clustered, very close in the nose cone, with four
.50 heavy machine guns surrounding a cannon.
The 20mm cannon combined with the all the four .50 shells all converged into a space the size of a dinner platter could shatter heavy tank armor. It would obliterate an aircraft with a single 1-second trigger finger pull (in the Lightning this was a single thumb depress on the yoke). A 3-second trigger would demolish a heavy train Engine car, which was massive steel. This arsenal would saw a large building in half.
This, coming out of a 415mph aircraft.
All of sudden your like, why are they strafing a neighborhood. Then you see a huge explosion... That’s Why!! Don’t hide explosives in your barn or garage...
In those days people tended to live close to their work. So if you lived close to any "military target" you had a good chance of becoming "collateral damage" by strafing or bombing, or both. WWII did not have "smart bombs" like today. Most of them were deadly "dumb bombs".
Todays auto aim systems aint got shit on these boys abilities
Chuck jeager could see the contrails of his own bullets.
The sad part of these straffing runs is the pilots tended to pull up before they stop firing and they ended up hitting homes near by. Collateral damage no diubt😏
Holing a boiler- repairable. Shooting holes in wood is, technically, damage to a boxcar.
Mike, Yes it’s repairable ,maybe if you could get the parts or fix the holes . To have to do the repairs on it at the site it was hit would be a nightmare .
Look up Operation Clarion to see the scale of destruction done by Allied air power against rail targets.
Absolutely shut Germany down from that operation - thousands of planes used - thousands of trains and train cars destroyed.
It was extremely rare to see a steam engine get repaired due to how they tended to explode sending huge chunks of metal all over the place - but a very small amount did get repaired and put back into use.
A couple of British engines operated into the 1960's but there's very little information about how German trains did - they certainly had an active recovery system in place as at the time it was common for trains to derail and break down. The cranes they used to lift cars and engines off the track were one of the highest value targets of WW2 on both sides.
A lot of US fighter pilots must have felt sooo disappointed when the war was over...
Many witness accounts confirm how much those young guys enjoyed strafing just about anything they could shoot at ! Now we have video games for that. At least it's less expensive to the taxpayers...
@sledge hammer Wars and times change but the "trigger happy" gene is always there as proved in the many years in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak, Syria... Just shoot at anything that move. There will always be a McNamara, Rumsfeld/Cheney or some neocons to cover up your ass !
Many US pilots based here in England lost their lives helping us defeat fascism. Show respect, they were very young and had their lives taken so that we can live as free people.
@@Eructation1 Hail Sadiq! (assuming you're a Londoner)
I would like to see any pilot trying to put concentrated fire into a cone. All films of that war show bullets and shells going all over the place
The singular impacts you see each split second are actually the combined cone of all the projectiles converging into the point of impact.
A single flash seen in the combat reel meant multiple scores of the (simultaneous) four .50 shells and the cannon shell altogether making instantaneous impact.
Zooming in does not make this 16:9.
Not bad grouping!
P38 Lightening in the air, move rail cargo at your own peril.
That footage badly needs restoration.
Wie einfach ....ohne Gegner
No way to tell how many krauts were killed ?
brave men g bless mark r Pa
Two things I like best about World War II
One is, honoring the men and women that won it.
Two is, watching a steam locomotive get hit from strafing and blow its steam out.
You forget how much fun it was shooting farmers and their families and helpers in the fields. They oftentimes turned around 3-4 times to make shure that granny has been hit too. True heroes.
I wonder what the life expectancy of a train engineer in occupied Europe was?