Martin bombers in quantity production at Middle River, Maryland.

As the Lend Lease Bill becomes law, the stable war supplies that it authorizes begins to flow.

Ready to fly in the climax of the Battle for Britain.

This Martin B-26 bomber is at its final duty station in Ohio.

It is featured at the MAPS Air Museum next to the Akron Canton airport.

On this side of the plane it features the name Susie Q.

That's in honor of it's one and only combat sortie over the battle of Midway.

After the flight it was so badly damaged that it was pushed into the graveyard of the sea.

It represents all the men and planes who flew during the Pacific Theatre of Operations.

This side of the plane tells a different story.

It tells of the men and planes who served in the Mediterranean and European Theater of Operations.

Bombing runs in the Mediterranean sea, airfields in Sardinia, railways in Italy, supply depots in France and bridges in Germany.

Thirty years ago, the B-26 Historical Society, videotaped the Marauder's air and ground crews.

While the audio and video quality isn't in high definition like today, the historical society's foresight preserves a rich archive of stories of what these men went through during World War Two.

Using actual combat footage to illustrate their triumphs and tragedies.

We will hear the Marauder Men in their own words speak of their trusted machine of war.

During World War Two, the Marauder first saw action in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands and in the Pacific.

The Marauder Men and their B-26s would also spend 29 months in the Mediterranean and 36 months in the European Theatres of Operation.

No matter which theater of operation they were in, the Marauder crews were just 18, 19,and 20 year old boys until they flew their first mission.

They soon learned that they weren't as impervious to bodily harm as they thought.

I'll never forget, they gave us half a flak suit.

Just hanging on our neck and you can just barely keep your neck up.

And they said, for a flak down, use your GI helmet.

Well, with earphones, you put that on, it just didn't fit.

So we put it in behind the seat.

First mission, first flak came up and it was pretty just like the 4th of July just busting up there, and pretty soon, they hit an airplane not very far in front of us and it burst in the flames And I don't think it was but a few seconds, and the co-pilot and I both had that helmet on.

It felt real good had that flack suit around our neck.

In the Mediterranean theater of operation, the B26 flew in North Africa in support of Operation Torch.

This is where the United States troops and aircrews were fighting their first battles against the German Reich.

Hitting German and Italian supplies and forces in Sicily and in southern Italy, hitting convoys as they're coming across the Mediterranean hitting the ports, and hitting the supplies and ships before they could make it to North Africa.

The B-26 and its flight crews were praised for the accuracy of their bombing missions.

In tactical support of the troops, they were known as the bridge busters for being able to knock out bridges, which disrupted the supply lines of opposing armies.

Where our proficiency improved to the point where they were giving us an air medal for every perfect mission where if your element dropped every bomb within a hundred yard radius of the aiming point, that was a perfect mission.

And they started out giving us an air medal for every perfect mission and quickly decided that that was too many air medals.

And so they went to an air medal for every two perfect missions.

And we still managed to get quite a few air medals.

Most beautiful job of bombing, I think was in Florence.

And that was against the marshaling yard in Florence.

And they probably, the reason that we were so proud of what we did there, Florence has so many national treasures.

And to my knowledge, we stayed pretty close within what we were supposed to hit.

On the mission of bombing the marshaling yard next to the Vatican.

he come out in the runway, he jumped up in the airplane and says, "If you hit the Vatican and miss your target," he says, "Don't bother to come back.

Drop yourself in the ocean."

We hit the target As the B-26 moved into England and in the European theater of operations, the plane's role ultimately differed from what many expected.

They were trained to fly extremely low and fast to accomplish a surprise attack on the enemy.

Its first two missions were low level strike missions in targets in Holland.

Those first two missions were utter disasters.

There we had trained all this time at low level and we was going to go so low and so fast that they wasn't going even know it, couldn't even see us coming.

We expected a lot out of the airplane.

We didn't know a damn thing about how good the Germans were going to be.

And when they came back a few hours later, boy, every airplane was damaged.

Almost every crew man was wounded, and they lost one airplane.

Two days later, they were sent on a second raid to the same target.

The suspense of any mission was felt by those left on the ground.

The KPs who prepared their breakfast, the men who bombed up the planes and ordinance men who fused the bombs.

Intelligence and operations men who helped prepare the mission right through to the supply men who issued them their clothes.

It was gut-wrenching waiting for the planes to return to see just how many survived.

We sat out there on a bunker all day long waiting for them to come back.

Well, I guess we must have sat two hours out there before when they couldn't have had any fuel to get back, and of course, took it a while for it the sink in if they wasn't coming back.

Some of their planes collided over the target and the Fokker 190s jumped them and the live flack chewed them up.

Ten airplanes didn't return.

More importantly, that's 60 crew members, 60 friends, 60 members of families back home that didn't return.

Thirty four of the 60 men on the mission perished.

Two survivors were rescued at sea, but German forces captured the remainder, a stark reminder that flying any airplane in combat could be deadly.

A tough introduction for the B-26 and its crew members.

We talked to anybody and everybody that had combat experience that could tell us, give us some ideas to how we could use this airplane.

We got some ideas from the British fighter boys and they said we had a lot of firepower and if we flew close formations, we'd be a formidable adversary to the German pilots.

And then we spent quite a bit of time with the British anti- aircraft people.

And that sort of boiled down to the fact that they showed us that it took 17 seconds to track in an airplane and to set up the guns and loaded and for the shell to reach 12,000 feet.

So 17 seconds gave you a little bit of time to maneuver, say, every 15 seconds, and which we did all the time when we were flying, and that proved to be very successful.

For many times, you'd start a turn and after a straight and level flight and you just start your turn and go, the flak could come up right in front of you where you would've been.

At that point, the B26 was shifted to the ninth Air Force, which moved to England with the main job of being part of a vast tactical air force, bombing more the supply lines and the troops themselves and the lines of communication.

So B-26s would start striking bridges, marshaling yards or rail yards or rail siding, troop concentrations, armored concentrations, ammo depot, fuel depots, air fields, things of that nature.

This new mission required some on-the-job training, especially for the bombardiers using the Norton bomb site.

Using the 17-second rule to dodge flak bursts added a new dimension to a bombing run.

The Norden bomb site had little indices and you had various knobs.

You moved your vertical crosshair and the other moved the horizontal.

And the idea was of course, to get them set on the target.

And then you'd have to get a little evasive of action to get away from flak and get back on.

And maybe your horizontal may have drifted a little or you'd just correct that, push it back on target.

And these indices every time you move that, they would separate or get closer together and when those indices met, that was bombs away.

In Bombardier school, you could make your approach and you'd sit there and have all the time in the world to grind in whatever you needed for your course speed and the rate.

And when you got overseas, it didn't work that way.

The Germans were quite accurate with their anti-aircraft.

If you did it the school way you sit and grind it in for a minute or two, you'd be blown out of the sky.

Dodging flak was essential to survival.

The Marauder could take quite a beating, but even it had its limits.

Sometimes even its 300,000 rivets couldn't hold the plane together.

A Marauder got a anti-aircraft shell right between the lasalle and the body and the wing came off.

And the thing was startling to me at that time, as I never saw anything fall so fast.

You normally think of something gliding down or fluttering like a leaf.

This thing dropped like a rock.

In training, flying in close formation was scary.

In combat, it became essential for survival.

The pilot soon learned the closer together they got, the more they could protect each other.

Generally, in a cruise formation, we would have it where the wing tips would be out here that you could wingtip to wingtip.

But later on when we got good, we would put an engine right into the trailing edge of the guy over here.

We did this at night.

We put up boxes of 72 airplanes at night.

And you talk about something that's very interesting is to fly a formation, especially if you're down low, at nighttime.

I'm so thankful that we didn't have to go through what y'all went through.

I think I'd have resigned from the Air Corps.

The close formations made it difficult for enemy fighters to attack.

It sounds like a cat and mouse game, but the men soon learned to accept warfare for what it was, a contest in which the side with the least amount of bleeding came out the victor.

We were on the bombing run and we received a direct hit in the left engine and we had to fall out of formation, and we were immediately attacked by enemy fighters.

I saw the waist gunner was badly wounded.

I applied a tourniquet and gave him a shot of morphine.

I seen two fighters coming for the waist, so I grabbed the waist guns and started firing, scoring good hits on them.

and I noticed two fighters coming in, Focke-Wulf 190s.

The first one came in, I got good hits in the cowling.

He caught fire and he pulled up above our airplane and the pilot and co-pilot saw him bail out.

Well, we were on single engine.

We made it back to England and we crashed landed at Mansion by the Sea.

And we were all taken to the hospital and checked out and went back to view the airplane where we counted over 350 bullet holes from 20 millimeter flak and enemy fighters.

I had met Adolf Galland, the general of the Luftwaffe Air Force, and he told me later how he hated to fly against B-26s due to their tight formations and their guns.

The mission in Europe was a twofold program of gaining air superiority and isolating the area around what Hitler called the Atlantic wall.

Destruction of the rail system in Western France diverted German forces from constructing and defending the D-Day invasion beaches.

Nearly 30,000 enemy troops left the coastal defenses to attempt rail system repairs.

Finally, two years after the first B26s arrived in England, it was time for the assault on Fortress Europe.

Group commander came into our huddle along about 7:00 the night before D-Day and said, "Go to bed."

I said, "What?"

And he says, "I'm not telling you anything except go to bed."

If I recall correctly, we were rousted out of bed about 2:00 When they pulled back where we could see the maps, we saw it was just right on the coast of France.

Our target, which was right behind Omaha Beach, and everybody was wondering, well, why are we getting such a shallow penetration, and then someone got up and said, "Today is the day, boys."

Takeoff was scheduled for shortly after 0400 hours.

The early morning briefing revealed that weather would likely preclude their procedure of medium altitude bombing.

They were informed that they would bomb visually from below the clouds.

As low as 500 feet above the coast if necessary.

I was on the first mission on invasion morning.

And that was one of the things that I look back and I said, it was probably the greatest sight a person will ever see.

All of the ships and all of the airplanes and all of the men, and we could watch and look over the side and we could see them getting out of their landing craft and hitting the beaches.

And made that pass, and you could see where the parachuters had been the night before, and it was real interesting though.

You could close your eyes and open them and all you could see was fighter allied airplane from the British heavies to R17s and 24s and all the fighter planes because all of them had the black and white stripes on them.

If you didn't see that, you shot it down, but I don't think there was a German fighter plane in any parts of the area that day.

We never did see any, we didn't hear any.

It was really something.

It looked like you could walk across the channel without getting your feet wet on the boats And they must have been cruisers in the channel and you could see the shells at the apogee.

You could actually see the shells when they slowed down before they started going down again.

But we flew three raids out of Braintree, England that day, briefed for the fourth one and then got lost in the weather.

And we'd come back and we hit the ground.

They briefed us on the run, you might say.

We come back and they fed us, get us something to eat, and then they would give us right to the briefing tents, our briefing halls, and then we'd go from there into another raid.

The trucks would be out there waiting to take us to the planes.

The ground crews was working double time, and I mean they were working double time to bomb those planes up again.

On D-Day, we worked around the clock loading bombs in the airplanes.

At one time, we were loading so fast and the planes taking off so fast that we were fusing and arming the bombs while the planes were taxing down the taxi strip to the runways getting ready to take off, and we jumped out of the planes at the last minute before they took off.

The B-26 attacks on transportation systems contributed to German mobility problems.

In effect, they isolated the battlefield.

The Germans were denied the ability to bring up reinforcements.

This meant the allies could build up the forces in Normandy faster than the German defenders.Shortly after D-Day, an entry into the war diary of the German 7th Army noted, "Troop movement and all supply traffic by rail to the army and within the army sector must be considered as completely shut off."

Soon, the allies broke out from the beach heads and the front lines were beyond the range of the Marauder.

As a result, the B26s were moved forward to air bases in France.

In their attacks behind enemy lines to disrupt German supplies and reinforcements, it could be said the B-26s were leading the way across France.

Then came the Battle of the Bulge.

When German forces attacked on December 16th, the sky was overcast and the air forces on both sides were grounded.

Among the fighting machines stockpiled for the attack were German fighters, which had not been a factor for several months.

When the sky cleared on December 23rd, the American bombers were surprised by up to a hundred fighters at a time.

It was to be a very deadly day for the Marauder men.

But the aircraft could not get off the ground.

So the guys were really nervous.

They didn't sleep well and they were wake almost every morning to 3:00 in the morning to have a briefing, and some of the outfits I understood, like the 397th, they had aircraft standing out on the end of the line, end of the runway running.

The aircraft were running with their bomb loads on the just remote chance that these aircraft would get off and fly a mission to try to help those poor guys in the line.

Well, what my theory of it is that those guys were so mad on December 23rd when they got airborne that they were just fighting mad, and when they got up and saw that they were going to go, they went regardless, and a couple of the outfits went in without fighter cover.

December 23rd of the 44 in the Battle of the Bulge.

And we were in the second box, and boy, the first box was catching holy ned with fighters and flak together, which is not normal combination.

But I saw Charlie's plane get hit right in the guts and just disintegrate and I was just amazed that no other planes were down from that, and thankfully, I don't know how, we did drop our bombs and we did successfully hit that Mayen railroad bridge and we got off target.

I heard tail gunner, oh, number six is gone or number five is gone, and the fighters were just getting us right and left.

The 23rd of December and we lost three in the Pathfinders, 39 total in all the wings.

It was a tough day.

Hours after a mission, a man's torso from just above the pelvis to clear up, including his stomach, would begin getting sore as hell.

His guts had been in a knot because he had just seen his buddy's plane go down in a ball of fire.

When a plane finally succumbs to flak or fighters, it is time to bail out.

That maneuver sounds simple, but could become quite complicated in the surreal world of a burning, spiraling aircraft.

Men who joined the exclusive Caterpillar Club, so named because of the use of their silk parachutes, could recall every detail even 50 years later.

We got shot down on my ninth mission in the Battle of the Bulge.

My squadron lost 10 planes.

Just as we got this one plane, I didn't see him go down anymore.

I watched tracers go up into his cockpit and then we got hit.

I gave the bailout order.

And then I went to bailout.

Jerked the rip card.

I was fairly low.

I could see the I could see the Germans running to meet me.

Germans didn't shoot at me.

I remember I looked up one time at that parachute and that thing looked like it wasn't 10 feet across.

It was the smallest looking chute you ever saw.

But I hit in the German Reserve Company had me.

In the final three months of the war, the Marauder men faced a new threat to their survival.

The German Air Force started using jet aircraft in a last ditch effort to bring down the bombers.

One pilot under attack either had an amazing sense of humor or was loopy due to a loss of blood.

But all of a sudden, we heard on intercom, everybody chattering fighters, and I knew we were in trouble.

And sure enough, the jets started coming through.

The fourth one that came through somehow got a lucky shot into my plane, evidently somewhere from below because came up apparently through the floor because it caught me in the right ankle immediately blowing off that leg.

The jets came at us then from all directions there.

I could look out to the left and see the jet pilot as clear as looking someone across the room here, and I thumbed my nose at him while I was holding a turnkey with my right hand.

The second one came through immediately and I did the same thing with him.

At war's end, some of the Marauder men got a close look at the havoc their bombs had caused to the German landscape.

There's certain things that I remember about Vernouillet.

One was the opportunity and we'd get Jeeps and go over to Mönchengladbach and up to Dusseldorf.

It gave us a chance to see Germany.

It was the devastation that our bombs did to Dusseldorf and Mönchengladbach.

Really made you understand what the heck these bombs do, and I remember whole block after block, you wouldn't see a single roof on a house.

And I'll never forget that one lady, here was rubble on either side of the street and we could just barely drive through it, and she was out scrubbing the sidewalk between the rubble.

They were all living in the basement, and it gave you an inside what those people were going through.

The Martin B26 Marauder had served its purpose, having flown 110,000 sorties and dropping 150,000 tons of bombs.

So at the end of the war, B-26s were scrapped on site in Germany.

They started to bring all of the B-26s from throughout what was left, I guess in North Africa and Italy and Corsica, Sardinia, wherever they were stationed, they flew all those aircraft into Landsberg, Germany, just close to the border of Switzerland.

They would just put a piece of dynamite in the aircraft to break it in half so that no one could reuse it, and then just allowed the locals to use the scrap metal.

The B-26 was not the only aircraft that was destroyed on site.

So was all the fighter aircraft or the majority of the fighter aircraft, and so was the A-20s and other medium bombers because they didn't have the range that the heavies did.

All the heavies flew home because they could take back 20 guys loaded inside that aircraft if they wanted to, bringing home airmen and soldiers at the end of World War Two.

The B-26 didn't have that ability, so there really was no reason for them to spend the money, time, and effort to bring the aircraft back home, hence why they were destroyed on site in Germany.

One of the planes was spared destruction and shipped back to the United States.

Flak Bait flew 207 missions over Europe more than any other aircraft in the war.

It has resided in pieces at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, but is currently being put back together so it looks exactly like it did on its final flight in 1945.

The B-26 is remembered by the Marauder men for its flexibility.

It shifted from one campaign objective to another quickly and decisively.

It could move from a pre-planned mission to support an unanticipated need for close air support of ground troops, and more importantly to the Marauder men, it could bring them home safely.

I was very proud to have been flown in that B-26.

I thought it was a heck of an airplane.

The B-26, I understand had the best combat record of any airplane in World War 2 as far as losses versus tonnage drop.

The carcasses of the B-26 Marauders are gone, but what is more important to remember is the bravery and the service to their country of the Marauder men.

Most of all, I remember the people that were involved with that airplane.

Probably the greatest pilots in the world, most certainly the guttiest flight crews in the world, and we had some of the best ground crews in existence.

A lot of times, sitting waiting for the mission was the hardest part because you never knew and you'd have to be in your airplane for immediate takeoff.

And you'd sit there and that's when this Jeep might come by and give you two pieces of bread with a piece of Spam, but we'd always season it with cold water first and that would be your lunch.

And that was from daylight to dark, and that might be 14 hours.

and the days got a little bit long.

I went to have my driver's license renewed.

and the Highway Department of Motor Vehicle said you cannot drive a car in California without your mother's consent.

You can fly a plane all over Europe, but you can't drive a car in California because you're not 21 years old yet.