Your Life as a German Pilot Hunting B-17s (Every Rank)

You’re 19, alone in a fighter plane, and in front of you is a wall of American bombers. Each one has about a dozen machine guns.
Climb every rank of a German fighter pilot from 1943 to 1945, from a trainee who can barely land to a general flying jets. Keep count of two numbers: your pay, which goes up, and the training the new pilots get, which goes down.

CHAPTERS
0:00 A wall of bombers
0:50 Level 1: Trainee
2:00 Level 2: Rookie wingman (August 17, 1943)
3:39 Level 3: Veteran sergeant
4:51 Level 4: Franz Stigler and “Ye Olde Pub”
6:34 Level 5: Big Week
7:57 Level 6: Storm groups
9:20 Level 7: Adolf Galland and the jet
10:31 Level 8: The squadron of aces
11:47 The score
12:10 What happened to Stigler and Brown

SOURCES / further reading
• Franz Stigler and Charlie Brown: Adam Makos, A Higher Call (2012); National Museum of the U.S. Air Force
• Adolf Galland, The First and the Last (1954)
• Pilot training hours, Germany vs. Allies: StrategyPage, “Attrition: Fighter Pilots Threatened On All Sides”
• Big Week (Operation Argument): Air University / Air Combat Command history
• Pay: Wehrsold war pay (TM-E 30-451, Handbook on German Military Forces), converted at the 1943 rate of 2.5 RM = $1, then U.S. CPI 1943→2026 (1 RM ≈ $7.75 today, rounded). Wehrsold came on top of free food, housing and uniform.

“You” in Levels 1–3 and 5–6 is an illustrative composite. Franz Stigler, Charlie Brown, Egon Mayer, Wilhelm-Ferdinand and Adolf Galland, and the events are historical.

AI DISCLOSURE: The narrator’s voice and the illustrations in this video are AI-generated. Research, script and editing were done by the channel.

#ww2 #b17 #history

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