November 1943. A Republic P-47 Thunderbolt comes down intact near Caen, in Normandy, and the Luftwaffe sends its test pilot for captured enemy aircraft, Hans-Werner Lerche, to bring it to the test centre at Rechlin. On his first flight he cannot find the speed the Thunderbolt was famous for, at least not near the ground. Then he takes it high.
Near the ground, he found it “rather lame and sluggish.” At altitude, he was astonished. On one high-altitude flight his oxygen failed, and he came round thousands of feet lower with a cold engine. His verdict: “The strength of the Thunderbolt in dive was particularly impressive, and to this I probably owe my life.”
This film follows both sides: Adolf Galland warning Hitler about American escort fighters while Göring called the idea out of the question; Alexander Kartveli designing a fighter around its turbo-supercharger ducting; Sanford Moss and General Electric’s turbines; the factories at Farmingdale and Evansville; and the German test pilot’s own conclusion that Germany lacked the heat-resisting materials such turbines needed.
Every quotation is taken from the documents. The German test pilot in this film is real; no dialogue has been invented. Lerche’s words come from his memoir, written from his log books; no wartime Rechlin report on this aircraft is among our sources.
Sources:
Memoirs and interrogation: Hans-Werner Lerche, Luftwaffe Test Pilot: Flying Captured Allied Aircraft of World War 2 (Jane’s, 1980; German edition 1977); Adolf Galland, The First and the Last; interrogation of Hermann Göring, Augsburg, 10 May 1945 (Air & Space Forces Magazine, 2015).
Official and institutional: Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vols. II, III and VI (HyperWar); Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, P-47D Thunderbolt; National Museum of the U.S. Air Force fact sheets (Republic P-47; Lt. Lloyd “Scotty” Hathcock); Virginia P. Dawson, Engines and Innovation (NASA SP-4306); General Electric, history of Sanford Moss; Indiana Historical Bureau, P-47 Thunderbolt Factory marker review; American Air Museum in Britain. Thumbnail: illustration.
If someone in your family flew the Thunderbolt, built it at Farmingdale or Evansville, or worked on the turbo-superchargers at General Electric, tell us their name and unit in the comments, so these people are not forgotten.
CHAPTERS
0:00 — Caen, November 1943
2:54 — Part 1. The Escort That Could Not Come
3:26 — Göring: Out of the Question
5:06 — The Escort Line Moves East
5:56 — Galland’s Brother Wilhelm
6:13 — Part 2. The Fighter Built Around a Pipe
6:51 — Hundreds of Feet of Ducting
7:41 — A New Airplane, Engine and Supercharger
8:30 — The Cockpit Puzzle
9:13 — The Ace’s Flight to Cormeilles
10:20 — Part 3. The Engine Behind the Engine
10:49 — Lerche Takes It High
11:46 — “Temporarily Dead to the World”
12:24 — Sanford Moss on Pikes Peak
13:35 — Hastelloy and Vitallium
14:31 — 15,683 Thunderbolts
14:56 — Part 4. The Sentence About Metal
16:00 — A Second Thunderbolt at Littorio
16:52 — The Rosarius Circus
17:40 — Not as Good as Feared
18:23 — What the Testing Was For
19:17 — Part 5. The Verdict
20:33 — Göring’s Answer, May 1945
21:29 — Lloyd Hathcock, Tuskegee Airman
21:57 — Remember Alexander Kartveli
MEDIA SOURCES
All footage and photographs are public domain or licensed for reuse.
Attributed materials:
• Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives) — CC BY-SA 3.0 DE: photographers Doelfs, Heinrich Hoffmann, Keiner, Kestner, Ketelhohn, Lechleitner, Schröder, and other and unknown photographers
Licence:
Public-domain sources: National Archives (NARA) · Internet Archive (Prelinger / Periscope / Universal / United News) · Wikimedia Commons · Imperial War Museum (IWM, Crown copyright expired) · NASA Glenn Research Center · San Diego Air & Space Museum · Digital Public Library of America.
Staff maps drawn from NOAA NCEI ETOPO 2022 public-domain relief data.
Archival film: 18 newsreel(s) and films via archive.org (US home-market newsreels and USAAF/government films; per-reel provenance in the appendix).
Archival photographs and footage in this video are public domain or Creative-Commons licensed. Maps, data cards, on-screen titles and explanatory animations are original motion graphics drawn from public-domain data; the backdrop of one production data card is an AI-assisted illustration. The aircraft on the staff maps are scale-model illustrations (3D models with AI-assisted texturing), shown only as map pieces. No AI-generated image is presented as a real wartime photograph or film.
#WW2 #P47 #Luftwaffe
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In my view the Thunderbolt was a genuine "war winner" because of it's versatility in being one of the best ground attack aircraft of the war(particularly crucial in the pivotal weeks after D-Day). No, it wasn't the best pure dog fighter, especially down low but once it got the injection and a wider "paddle" prop it was formidable with it's 8 heavy machine guns and ability to take a ridiculous amount of punishment/damage and still keep flying.
The P-51 as an excellent, long range pure dog fighter tends to get the lion's share of the credit for the US effort but in my opinion it was the Thunderbolt that did the majority of the really tough, dirty work not just as an escort/fighter but as an outstanding ground attack(very dangerous missions) platform that stopped a massive amount of German Army reinforcements, armor and supplies from getting to the front during crucial periods. One of the P-47 pilots in later years of his life left an outstanding, heartfelt memoir of his part in the war – his name: Quentin Aanenson and his narrated(to his photos) memoir aired many years back, "A Fighter Pilot's Story".
Also – P47 Thunderbolt reborn as the A-10 Thunderbolt 2.
Daimler-Benz DB 601/DB601N (N2O/Methyl alcohol injected) fuel injected, inverted V12 used a variable speed supercharger @ the time.
The British Merlin copy, the Junker Jumo 210/211 V12 also had a Supercharger.
The Germans not knowing about forced induction is a bit of a misnomer, as the Junker Jumo 004 Jet engine and the above listed motors possessed such, although late war steel alloying agents became scarce with northern Scandinavian ores of chromium, nickel and molybdenum getting largely cut off from German line of supply.
@3:30 Amazing when our 'leaders' can't accept facts that are inconvenient to their ideology/belief system.
Thank god this ended in 1945 ;)…..NOT!!!!
My Uncles flew P-47’s in Europe and in China. The later trained Chinese Nationals to fly and fight in Kunming, China. I have a family photo of one of the planes landing at, what is now Pittsburgh International Airport post war in ANG markings.
It's odd how the P-47 looks better with a Luftwaffe paint job, haha
At 0:19, "It belongs to the Luftwaffe" WHAT? This is AI slop that thinks the Allies air force was called the 'luftwaffe'. DOWNVOTED. REPORTED. YouTube, PLEASE filter out this AI SLOP
You left out two important attributes of the Jugs…they were difficult to shoot down because of the armor behind and in front of the pilots….and they were best used as ground pounders with their eight 50 cal. machine guns and rocket pods: oops 😮.
Republic Airport still in Farmingdale, I live about 10 miles from there, now known for St Charles Cemetery and strip malls along route 110.
Lerche did not understand the turbine i.e. the exhaust gas turbocharger? Really? The decisive patent fo this arrangement is from 1912 or so. Experiments with aero engines had been made since somewhat like 1920. Exhaust gas turbochargers were already widely used in marine Diesel engines, though not as a standard yet. Of course he knew, what an exhaust gas turbocharger was!
I agree, Zelenski is 100 times the leader that Rump is
No family in that kind of setting.
But…
The first images of aircraft blowing up trains in Italy and France I had seen on TV in the fifties were depicted as Thunderbolts and the image in my head has stuck with me. I always thought very highly of that weapon.
the designer said it was a dinosaur and it became the T REX of the skys
I wonder what he would have thought about the P47 after the paddle prop was installed?
Les Cox WW2 P47 pilot (my uncle)
GE's work on turbo-superchargers is why they were the choice to build America's first jet engines due to the similarities in those technologies.
Beautiful aircraft loved by it's Pilots for its endurance and an ability to take a beating and continue the fight…
The Thunderbolt, the 'Flying bathtub'. judged 'Impressive' by German pilots? You have made this up …
Personally I think you researched your topics well and you presented your findings in a proper order and with good descript: Don't give up your quest!
Subscribed! Robert
Awful map when do you get the Netherlands right?
So, it is acceptable to name the Black pilot who mistakenly landed near Rome and speculatively unacceptable to name the White pilot who ran out of fuel near Caen. I had no idea AI was racially biased.